A Little Less Conversation: Food, Drink and Fun

6 May

 

• The Conservatives’ polling shows them consistently ahead of Labour, and proves more accurate.

 

• David Cameron may have fewer troops fighting his ground war – but they appear more mobile.

 

• Much of the Conservative campaign exists ‘beneath the radar’.

 

• Jeremy Corbyn will have to look at the more sophisticated techniques of his party’s opponents.

 

 

THE CONSERVATIVES were having trouble getting people to canvass for the Prime Minister. That was Ed Miliband’s constant refrain at his rallies and public meetings. ‘I am not surprised’, he would joke, ‘I wouldn’t want to knock on doors for David Cameron either’. But with an ageing Conservative membership, and one which party insiders have told me is smaller than their published figures, Labour really did feel they were winning the ground war.

The trouble is that unlike an ‘air war’ – on television and radio – a ground campaign is carried out under the radar. Conservative sources say Labour under-estimated the scale of their operation and that left them with a ‘blind spot’ in seats where they were vulnerable. Certainly, there had been clues to the Conservatives’ capability. Less than a year before the general election, the Conservative Patrick Mercer resigned as MP for Newark, due to a BBC Panorama investigation in to his role in setting up an All Party Parliamentary Group apparently for a paying client. UKIP’s tails had been up, having gained the largest number of UK seats in the European Parliament. The Conservatives were desperate not to lose the constituency to a defector from their ranks, now the UKIP MEP for the area, Roger Helmer. So the seat was used as a test bed for techniques developed by the then party chairman Grant Shapps. Team 2015 consisted of highly motivated volunteers who flooded the constituency on a daily basis, disseminating messages to target voters. The Conservatives retained the seat. Their candidate Robert Jenrick won with a majority of nearly 7,500 on a turnout of a little more than 50 per cent.

Both Labour and sections of the Conservative hierarchy agreed on one thing – they both doubted that an operation could be mounted on the same scale at the general election. It had never been attempted before. A decision had been taken to fight the constituency targeted by Nigel Farage – South Thanet – like a byelection but as the Conservatives were trying officially to gain 40 seats and defend 40 that were vulnerable – though I am told that privately this was in fact a 50/50 strategy – it was felt resources might be stretched.

But the party chairman was confident and deliberately never responded to Labour barbs about how difficult it would be to mount a campaign. Grant Shapps had been working on the idea since 2012. A ministerial source recalled the reaction when Shapps presented his plans to a ‘political cabinet’ of top-table Conservatives:

We had never done this before and to be frank, we were sceptical. If you had a safe constituency the idea of mutual assistance was to put five or six people in a car and send them to a nearby marginal. When Grant Shapps said he had 1,000 volunteers we said wow, that’s really strong. But in the end the party had 100,000.

In the party chairman’s office there were two whiteboards – with the 50 target seats and 50 that were being defended and well before the formal campaign there would ‘superSatudays’ and ‘superSundays’ declared when certain constituencies would be inundated with volunteers. Their Team 2015 volunteers could only sign up via head office and were surveyed on their interests. 21 separate steps to make people turn up were deployed – and a ‘chivvying, team’ some of whom were drawn from a big accountancy house, would ring people up days in advance to get them to go along to these marginal seats.

People would be told that food drink and rewards would be available, there would always be a social element to the day and campaigning would be made to sound like fun. But the chivviers would also appeal to a sense of purpose and patriotism – what the volunteers were doing was in the country’s interest, they would be told. And the chivviers would try to extract commitments from the volunteers. As one insider put it ‘when we got them to commit to a specific train, we knew we had them.’

In the last two weeks the Conservatives narrowed the seats targeted down to just the 24 that they saw as crucial and sent their buses of volunteers there. Some people had signed up to spend one or two weeks in the campaign, staying in hotels around the country and being bussed to wherever they were needed. Party insiders were delighted and a little surprised to be attracting a lot of women and people from ethnic minority backgrounds that hadn’t signed up for party membership.

The difference between being in a target seat and one outside, Conservative insiders say, was worth millions of pounds. Before the campaign got under way for the first time every single seat was polled. This would have counted against election expense limits once the formal campaign started so groups of seats were then surveyed and Conservative strategists had access to daily tracking polls. This helped to put resources in the right places. By contrast Labour could only muster three tracking polls during the whole of the ‘short’ campaign.

So from the start of the year, two seats that hadn’t been targeted came in to play – both of them held by the Lib Dems. Vince Cable’s Twickenham and David Laws’ Yeovil looked possible and the Conservative campaigns there were scaled up. In the end a dozen extra Lib Dem seats were added to the Conservative target list this year. Yet the extent of the Lib Dem collapse seemed to catch Labour and the Liberal Democrats themselves by surprise.

The Conservatives’ tracker polls were discussed at senior management team meetings attended by strategist Lynton Crosby, co-chairman Andrew Feldman and campaign manager Stephen Gilbert and these were pointing to around 300 Conservative seats for much of the campaign. There was some evidence of a late swing, though from a higher base than many public polls were suggesting. In the last week the polling suggested the party could gain 324 seats and an overall majority was possible, with a near-wipeout of Labour in the south and east.

Grant Shapps offers his own theory on why Labour apparently had more conversations with voters but gained fewer votes. He points out that in Lord Ashcroft’s polling, consistently more voters said they had heard from Labour than the Conservatives. But he puts that down to poor intelligence.

Labour couldn’t win my seat of Welwyn Hatfield yet they still spent money sending eight pieces of generic direct mail – not about the candidate – into my constituency. We would not have wasted money like this. It was very old fashioned campaigning, spraying the message round everywhere. So Labour loved those Ashcroft polls that told them their contact rate was great but it didn’t win them seats.

A Labour insider agreed:

Our operation was tiny by comparison – the Tories knew more than us on how to target individuals, and then they had the organisational capacity to link that knowledge to specific communications with voters. Labour’s approach was different, with millions spent on direct mail that focussed heavily on national messaging. It was filling gaps in the ‘air war’. If we weren’t saying much about immigration on the airwaves, then it would be covered on a leaflet. But it gives you no connection locally, compared to the stuff the Tories were doing.

Shadow Minister, Jonathan Ashworth paints a similar picture:

We did Royal Mail postal drops which sometimes obliterated whole constituencies or postcodes with leaflets. The ground war was only a means of delivering a national message and the Conservatives’ message motivated more people than ours.

And as Labour’s pollster James Morris told me:

The most fundamental thing is if you have a problem of brand identity – on immigration, the deficit, whatever – you cannot solve it just by sending everyone the political equivalent of a pizza flyer, no matter how well written it is.

In some areas, candidates went ‘off message’ but had to pay for the literature themselves, or from local fundraising. Internal critics say Labour spent too much of its targeting effort – such as it was – using Experian’s ‘Mosaic’ Group classifications. These place people into 15 different groups, often based on tenure or household, and then further differentiates them in to 67 different ‘types’. For example, the ‘foot on the (housing) ladderers’, the ‘settled ex-tenants’, the ‘brownfield pioneers’. It’s a sophisticated and successful marketing tool, and many companies use the system to decide, say, where to locate a new store but as one strategist bemoaned: ‘unfortunately for politicians, the type of house you live in correlates only very weakly to what you really care about.’

Labour and the Conservatives – and indeed the SNP for that matter – all used the same, powerful NationBuilder database. As with all systems, the old adage ‘rubbish in, rubbish out’ holds true. The Conservatives managed to exploit its full potential by carrying out vast surveys, sometimes sent by professional staff by post where they simply didn’t have the volunteers on the ground to deliver them. The detailed information which came back was used to better target their messages. So far fewer voters would have received the very general mailshots that Shapps got in the post from Labour. By contrast, Labour tended to use the database to direct volunteers to where they were most needed, and to connect those who had been in touch with the national party with local campaigns. The first priority of the incoming general secretary Iain McNicol had been to pay down Labour’s large debts – so money for the database wasn’t available until 2013, and the Conservatives had a considerable head start.

Jonathan Ashworth believes the party should have invested in the database sooner – ‘we had the capacity to do better targeting, with very talented data analysts just like the Tories. But we hadn’t put in the money early on, and we had made a strategic decision to do what the Tories couldn’t – and flood individual constituencies with volunteers.’

Incidentally, in one parliamentary term, Labour cut their own debts by £12 million and are on course to be debt-free by mid-2016. Perhaps they should have made more of their financial rectitude during the campaign.