The heroes of Crowd Surfing are not the activists who have wrestled power away from the mighty corporations and political parties. Much has already been written and celebrated about these highly influential individuals. Crowd Surfing is more about the smart people, such as Steve Clayton at Microsoft or Rob Spencer at Pfizer, who have shaped their organisations to deal with what the crowd says and what it does – these are our crowd surfers.
One of our more unlikely crowd surfing heroes is John Major – the political leader forever remembered for a grey Spitting image puppet and the disaster of the Conservative’s Back to Basics initiative in the 1990s. This video clip from Andrew Marr’s brilliant History of Modern Britain illustrates how Major used one of the oldest crowd surfing techniques in the book – the political soapbox – to engage the crowd during the 1992 election campaign. In the eyes of the political journalists following the campaign, it may have looked like a desperate move, but it connected with the man in the street far more effectively than Labour’s highly stage-managed conferences.
Had the Internet been a factor in the 1992 election you can be sure that Major would have taken his soapbox online.