War of Jennifer's Ear

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The War of Jennifer's Ear is the humorous name given to a 1992 skirmish in United Kingdom politics, between the opposition Labour Party and the incumbent Conservative Party. The name is an allusion to the War of Jenkins' Ear, an actual armed conflict of the 18th century.

During the general election campaign that year, Labour highlighted what it saw as the mismanagement and underfunding of the National Health Service (NHS) under Conservative rule. Labour leader Neil Kinnock employed the slogan If you want to vote Conservative, don't fall ill.

On Tuesday 24th March, Labour ran a Party Election Broadcast about a five year old girl with glue ear, who waited a year for the simple operation to cure it. The story of the broadcast was described as based on an actual case. Under British election regulations, such broadcasts are rationed equally among main parties, and terrestrial broadcasters are obliged to run them on set days, in peaktime schedules. Each broadcast therefore has more impact on political debate than in unregulated systems.

Unfortunately for the Labour Party, the girl in question was the granddaughter of a Conservative Party member, who gave the Conservatives advance warning of the claims to be made in the broadcast. The Conservatives were able to tip off sympathetic newspapers, eg The Daily Express, giving them details to investigate such as the name of the surgeon involved in the case. Conflicting accounts of the details of the case quickly surfaced. The mass circulation tabloid, The Sun, ran the story: If Kinnock will tell lies about a sick little girl, will he ever tell the truth about anything?.

Labour's point was immediately sunk in a storm of editorializing and outrage over the ethics of involving the young girl in national politics, and disputes over which side made her precise identity public (Her first name, Jennifer, was let slip by the Labour press secretary Julie Hall on the 26th March). The War of Jennifer's Ear did no good - and probably some damage - to Labour on the one issue in which it had a lead over the Conservative Party.

The Conservative Party went on to win the 1992 election with the largest number of votes any party has won in a British General Election. Labour leader Neil Kinnock resigned three days afterwards. Jennifer's father, John Bennett, went on to become a critic of the health provision achieved by Tony Blair's Labour government, 1997 - ??.

The War of Jennifer's Ear now serves as the type specimen in British political discussions, for political rhetoric that leans on specific cases, as opposed to broad statistics, particularly in the context of debates over healthcare. Such foundations are acknowledged to be hazardous for politicians to employ in any decisive argument. The tactic has nonetheless been repeated on several occasions, at each of which headline writers attempt to formulate a new version of the 'war of' label:

• Mavis Skeet 2000 - A cancer patient died in Leeds after four times having surgery postponed by a lack of available intensive care beds. The scandal was raised by a newspaper, and resulted in significant government reviews [1].
• Rose Addis 2002 - Conservative leader Iain Duncan Smith criticised the government's record using the case of a 94-year old woman who he claimed had been neglected in a hospital. The Labour Party's story- that Addis had refused care from staff because they were black - was not widely believed when it emerged that several of her regular carers were black.
• Anonymous 2004 - Conservative leader Michael Howard complained that a Folkestone constituent of his was told to wait 20 months for vital radiotherapy. The issue cooled off after he discovered that a clerical error had occurred - the wait was in fact scheduled to be 20 weeks.
• Margaret Dixon 2005 - Conservative leader Michael Howard attempted to show, in the run-up to the United Kingdom general election, 2005, that the incumbent Labour Party was failing the NHS. Mrs Dixon of Warrington was cited to illustrate the increase in cancelled operations, a statistic Labour quickly dismissed as the consequence of increases in overall operations performed.