“Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought.”
— John Rawls in A Theory of Justice (1971)
This article examines a communication strategy used across political traditions, and its implications for public trust and the integrity of democratic institutions.
The multi-headed hydra of late capitalist messaging
Modern British politics increasingly resembles a hall of mirrors at a fairground. The media asks questions, hungry for a soundbite and clickbait and the answer depends entirely on which reflection is scheduled to step forward that day. One week, a party leader warns the UK has become “an island of strangers” (Keir Starmer, 2024).
In the same week, a senior frontbencher condemns racism in the NHS as “structural, persistent and unacceptable” (Wes Streeting, 2024 & 2025). Another colleague proposes harsher asylum conditions (Shabana Mahmood, November 2025). Then, the leader returns to assert the UK must “root out racism everywhere” (Starmer, November 2025). All these statements may be individually defensible, but they cannot coexist as a coherent moral position. They belong to the same leadership team, working from the same building, attending the same strategy meetings. The contradiction is not accidental; it is allocated. And here the corporate analogy is instructive: large companies regularly send different executives to deliver messages tailored to specific audiences: the Chief Executive reassuring investors, the HR Director emphasising inclusivity, the Head of Operations promising ruthless efficiency. Each voice speaks to a different constituency, and the public is expected to reconcile the contradictions on the company’s behalf.
What looks like oscillation is, in fact, choreography. This is rotational political ambiguity: the deliberate dispersal of contradictory messages across multiple spokespeople to prevent any single interpretation from settling long enough to be scrutinised. The effect is twofold. First, the party cannot be cleanly criticised: any attack is countered with a contradictory statement from within its own ranks. Second, the public begins to internalise a message of democratic futility: “They’ll say anything. They never tell the truth. Who knows what they stand for? Why vote at all?”
Where classical strategic ambiguity gives you one smudged line, rotational ambiguity gives you a dozen conflicting ones, a moral kaleidoscope designed not to illuminate but to disorient. It derails attempts to pursue truth, fragments communities trying to organise around shared facts, and reduces political journalism to a scavenger hunt for clips rather than a pursuit of coherence.
Engineered plurality
In communications theory, strategic ambiguity is the intentional use of vagueness to appeal, distrust and disengage. A classic example can be found looking at former PM Tony Blair in 2004 arguing that immigration is both economically beneficial and a challenge requiring strict asylum management and about fairness. Rotational ambiguity is its evolved form: not one politician being vague, but a political party deploying multiple politicians, each stating confident, incompatible positions, in close temporal proximity. This creates a spectrum the public can project onto like a political mood board. It can also create a space to disengage and giving up on being able to closely scrutinise leadership in democracies. And why is that important? Because it creates space to possibly erode rights, build personal capital, contradict policy, fuse the state with capital interests or even render foundational democratic systems obsolete. So we have narrative evasion under former PM David Cameron: one message promised the “tens of thousands” migration target (2010–2015). While others reassured businesses the UK was open to “the brightest and the best.” This made the government simultaneously tough and liberal and fully accountable for neither. We also have sentiment testing under former PM Tony Blair using dual tracks: praising multicultural Britain and the economic value of migration (e.g., speeches in 2002–2004). While simultaneously tightening asylum laws (2002 Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act). Contradiction became a mechanism to test which narrative resonated. We had electoral hedging under former PM Margaret Thatcher, used in the late 1970s: on one hand, warning Britain risked being “swamped by people with a different culture” (1978 World in Action interview). On the other, asserting the Conservatives were “deeply committed to racial equality.” This allowed appeal to both anxiously conservative and moderate voters. The current PM Keir Starmer simply executes this strategy faster, with more visible rotation, in a media landscape where clips collide within minutes.
Moral ambiguity
Historically, democratic leadership requires answerability: someone must be accountable for the consequences of policy and rhetoric. But with rotational ambiguity: if a tough asylum stance attracts criticism, the party can point to its anti-racism wing and if accused of being soft, it can point to its “crackdown” wing and if accused of inconsistency, it can blame “internal diversity of views.” This creates a responsibility vacuum. No single moral centre. No one to hold to account.
Undermining fair participation
The political theorist John Rawls argued that justice in a democracy requires citizens to have: equal political liberties, and fair value of those liberties i.e., meaningful participation. Meaningful participation is impossible when parties fragment their moral position into millions of pieces. A voter cannot evaluate a party’s principles if those principles shape-shift and morph depending on which spokesperson holds the microphone. But it also means that if all political parties are using the same strategy, then there are few discernible differences between them, morally at the very least. Rotational ambiguity therefore violates the Rawlsian moral architecture of democracy: it withholds clarity and thus withholds fairness.
Foucault: disperson as a technology of power
The philosopher Michel Foucault theorised extensively about how power is exercised not only through institutions but through discursive dispersal. Essentially the scattering of authority so that no single actor can be located as the source of control. Rotational ambiguity fits neatly into this model: power is decentralised rhetorically, but centralised operationally; the population encounters a plurality of statements, none clearly attributable to the decision-making core; contradiction itself becomes a method of governance and people cannot resist or challenge what they cannot clearly name. Foucault called this a “regime of truth”: not truth as factual accuracy, but truth as the sum of authorised statements, however contradictory. Rotational ambiguity manufactures exactly such a regime.
Standards for political public figures (UK)
The UK’s Nolan Principles of Public Life require: integrity; honesty; openness; accountability; leadership. Rotational ambiguity is structurally incompatible with these. With regard to integrity, a party cannot credibly claim integrity while deliberately operating multiple incompatible ethical positions. Honesty requires clarity; multiplicity of tailored messages is the opposite of transparent truth. Furthermore, there is no openness in maintaining several official-but-not-quite-official lines. The most profoundly violated principle is accountability: rotational ambiguity dilutes responsibility across speakers until it evaporates. Finally, leadership demands choosing a path, not all paths simultaneously. By Nolan Standards, rotational ambiguity is not just a political problem; it is an ethical breach in public office.
Race issues are the favoured terrain
Race sits at the crossroads of moral responsibility, public anxiety (manufactured or otherwise), electoral volatility, media distortion (planned or otherwise), and shifting economic narratives. It is the perfect storm location: morally charged, politically combustible, and endlessly malleable in the hands of strategists who understand that fear and virtue can be instrumentalised in equal measure.
Historically, major UK political parties have deployed dual messaging here, long before the contemporary examples we now observe. In the 1960s–1980s, governments passed Race Relations Acts proclaiming equality while simultaneously tightening immigration laws that disproportionately affected Commonwealth citizens. In the 1990s and early 2000s, New Labour’s rhetoric of “celebrating diversity” ran alongside its “firm but fair” asylum regime which was a formulation that suggested moral warmth while expanding detention, dispersal, and restrictive assessment processes. Under former PMs David Cameron and Theresa May, the so-called “hostile environment” was constructed in tandem with pro-business invitations to the “brightest and the best,” allowing the state to appear economically open while intensifying everyday border surveillance for others.
The present moment simply perfects this long-standing pattern. Anti-racism rhetoric is paired with exceptionally tough asylum proposals, including measures that echo fringe, historically far-right administrative impulses such as policies permitting the confiscation of personal belongings from those seeking asylum, including jewellery and other intimate effects, ostensibly to offset costs. The symbolic message is unmistakable: moral virtue for the cameras, bureaucratic severity for those without a platform.
Race, then, becomes the ideal testing ground for rotational ambiguity. It allows governments to project ethical principle and electoral toughness simultaneously, each message delivered by a different face, each designed for a different audience, each shielding the other from scrutiny. And because every angle has been pre-covered, compassion, security, fiscal prudence, anti-racism, deterrence, accountability dissolves. There is always another statement, another minister, another tone to hide behind.
Ethical democratic leadership
What could it look like? Parties should begin by stating: one clear moral commitment and several policy mechanisms derived from that commitment. For example a moral anchor of “All people deserve dignity and fairness under the law” with policies including make legal migration routes workable, invest in integration, ensure fair asylum procedures that adhere to international conventions and maintain public order and border systems that respect human rights principles. The moral principle does not contradict itself; the policy options allow nuance. Transparent acknowledgement of internal disagreement could be used. Parties can say:“We have differing views internally”; “Here are the positions”; “Here is how we will resolve them.” Disagreement becomes a feature of democracy, not a disguised contradiction. Consistency points could be located in narrative rather than individuals. A party should define: a shared moral boundary; a unified tone; a single description of the problem; a clear decision-making logic. Internal plurality is fine. External incoherence is not. Rotational contradiction could be replaced with deliberative pluralism by publishing dissenting opinions, the rationale behind each one, different working group options. Pluralism is democratic. Rotational ambiguity is evasive.
Edward Bernays, propaganda and the future of democratic truth
Edward Bernays, the “father of public relations”, argued in Propaganda (1928) that modern democracies rely on invisible governance: the careful shaping of public opinion by elites who understand psychological influence. Rotational ambiguity is tailor-made for Bernays’ world.
Where Bernays used: emotional framing; selective disclosure; invisible persuasion, modern political parties use: contradictory spokespeople; mood-targeted messages; plausible deniability as a marketing device. It is persuasion by diffusion, propaganda by multiplicity.
Bernays believed such techniques were inevitable. But democracy rests on a different moral ideal:
leaders should be intelligible, accountable, and principled. Rotational ambiguity may win news cycles. It may soothe focus groups. It may protect parties from criticism. But it hollows the centre of democratic life.
To lead is not to broadcast every possible opinion
and hope the public picks the one they like.
To lead is to choose a truth, stand by it, explain it, and own its consequences.If our politics loses that, we lose not only clarity, we also lose the moral universe that makes democracy possible.
“The worth of a state, in the long run, is the worth of the individuals composing it.”
— John Stuart Mill in On Liberty (1859)
King Advisory 
Leave a comment