The Conservative Party

The Conservative Party has won fourteen of the twenty-three general elections since the introduction of the mass franchise in 1918, either with an overall majority or as the largest party in the House of Commons. Its perennial quest for power has produced an election machine that has been the source of curiosity, admiration and envy for political parties across the Western world. From persuading the retainers to go out to vote to projecting a nationwide media campaign, the Conservatives have often been in the vanguard of political campaigning. In this final chapter, we look at the world of the Tory election campaign, tracing the rise and fall of a formidable electoral machine through all its many parts.

Tory candidates were left very much to their own devices during general election campaigns after 1832. They were personally responsible for the costs of holding an election, from the salaries of the returning officers to the transportation of electors to and from the polling station; they even had to pay for the polling booths. Although the first Reform Act had swept away rotten boroughs and the most overt forms of corruption, candidates would still have to lavish huge sums of money on their campaigns in an effort to win over the independent voter. In the 1830s and 1840s, an individual candidate’s election expenses could run to thousands of pounds. Disraeli’s successful campaign in Maidstone in 1837, for example, cost over £40,000, an enormous sum and one which was loyally met by his wife, Mary Ann. Hustings and public meetings in the mid-nineteenth century were often a major spectacle, as rival candidates accompanied their speeches with bands, parades, buntings and lavish refreshments. Election leaflets and posters, on the other hand, were often plain and uninspiring. Newspapers like The Times and the Morning Chronicle would publish speeches often in full by party leaders, but there was no other outlet in which to publicise a coordinated national campaign. Peel’s Tamworth Manifesto in 1835 was, however, a new departure in electioneering. It was not only the first attempt of any party leader to print and distribute a manifesto to his electors; it was also widely used by Conservative candidates across the country as providing a uniform Tory message for their own campaigns.

Voter registration was another area in which the party led the field in its search for votes. Local Conservative candidates and agents were much quicker off the mark than their Whig and Liberal counterparts in setting up Registration Societies to encourage eligible voters to add their names to the electoral register, which had been introduced by the 1832 Reform Act. Until 1918 much of the responsibility of registration was left to local parties and candidates. As we saw in Chapter 6, Peel and the party’s first chief agent, Francis Bonham, were pioneers in fostering the development of local Conservative Registration Societies from the party’s first headquarters in the Carlton Club. By the 1841 general election, the party had succeeded in registering thousands of electors and managed to field nearly 500 candidates. It was a triumph for a party which only nine years earlier rejected any attempt to enlarge the electorate and reform the old system of patronage and corruption.

After the party split over the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, Bonham deserted the party along with his leader, taking with him the party’s central funds and files, while local registration societies bore the brunt of the split, many of them ceasing to exist altogether. The Whigs and Liberals, strengthened by their new alliance with the Peelites, began to make the running in election campaigns in the 1850s, mobilising a more united and purposeful body of candidates, agents and party workers than anything the Conservative Party could muster under Derby’s lacklustre leadership. In 1859, Whigs, Peelites and radical Liberals joined forces under Lord Palmerston to form the Liberal Party, producing two successive general election victories in which they polled 65 per cent of the vote. The Liberals made impressive advances in their campaigning, as well as inspiring making innovative use of party caucuses in towns and cities across the country. Not until after the Second Reform Act in 1867 were the Tories able to match the sophistication of the Liberal election machine.

The party leadership, particularly under Derby, showed little interest in cultivating what was to become a major element of political life and campaigning in mid-Victorian Britain – the press. The split of 1845–6 led many metropolitan papers, including The Times, Morning Chronicle and Morning Post, to align with the Liberal–Peelite coalition. Edward Stanley, son of Lord Derby, lamented in 1851 that ‘the party in general seemed to regard the newspaper interest as their natural enemy, and any attempt to turn it into a friend as a mere waste of time’. Disraeli founded The Press in 1853 to counter the loss of support within the ‘fourth estate’, but its circulation of 3,000 scarcely dented the Liberal–Peelite dominance of the national newspaper press which, as Bruce Coleman points out, was divided two to one against the Conservatives by the early 1850s. The party thus missed the opportunity fully to connect with the largely urban and bourgeois readership of the mid-nineteenth century. The party moreover compounded its error by neglecting to forge good relations with the burgeoning number of provincial newspapers, many of which had fallen into the Liberal fold by the early 1860s.

The Second Reform Act of 1867 created the opportunity for the party to construct a powerful election machine to rival the Liberals. Under the direction of Disraeli and his new Principal Agent, John Gorst, the party began to revive. Gorst purchased a press agency to circulate copies of speeches, reports of meetings and favourable parliamentary sketches to supportive papers in the provinces. Strenuous efforts were also made to win back the national press, successfully with the Morning Post and also the London Evening Standard, which became one of the most reliable Tory papers for decades to come. The Conservative victory of 1874 was facilitated by the party’s new friends in the press and through the adoption of simple but highly effective national campaign themes – patriotism, national unity and social reform.

Following the redistribution of constituencies and a third extension of the franchise in 1884–5, the party strove hard to take full advantage of the changing electoral scene. The Corrupt Practices Act transformed electioneering by severely restricting the amount of money any single candidate could spend on his campaign – including the bribery of voters. Before 1883, agents were personally employed by the candidate to assist with registration, but the party now realised their potential as efficient campaign organisers, and encouraged local associations themselves to employ agents on a professional basis. A special magazine, The Tory, was published specifically for agents, offering advice on how to watch out for electoral pitfalls and corrupt practices among their opponents. By the turn of the century, agents were an indispensable feature of the Tory election machine, taking their lead from the indefatigable Captain Middleton, the Principal Agent in Central Office.

National campaigning developed apace in the later nineteenth century. Both Disraeli and Salisbury recognised the benefits of addressing large audiences during general elections. Party leaders and senior politicians increasingly began to travel up and down the country utilising the ever-expanding and ever-speedier Victorian railway system. Local hustings between rival candidates were complemented by large public meetings, both indoors and outdoors, where the party’s top brass could seek to inspire the voters, many recently enfranchised, with their rhetoric. Thousands and sometimes tens of thousands of people flocked to see and hear politicians, about whom they knew little until the growth of the cheap popular press in the 1880s and 1890s. Lord Salisbury, although as a member of the Lords never standing as a candidate himself, relished the opportunity to address the masses, often for several hours. The landslide victories of 1895 and 1900 were testament to the advances the party had made in the realm of local and national campaigning.

Radical threats have always galvanised Conservatives to mobilise support through the best means available at the time. The great reforming Liberal administrations of Asquith and Lloyd George after 1906, provided one such challenge, with the defeated Conservative Party entering one of its most fratricidal periods in opposition, the new ‘legion of leagues’ spared no time in spreading their message to the electorate through a concerted campaign of leafleting and billboard posters. The Budget Protest League thus waged a fierce war of words against Lloyd George’s far-reaching 1909 budget, as well as launching a series of often witty cartoon posters.

During the 1910 general election campaigns, the party began to emulate the pioneering publicity of the leagues, distributing some forty million leaflets in both elections. Central Office worked hard to cultivate relations with the national newspapers, appointing Sir Malcolm Fraser as its first press adviser, while gramophone records with election messages were produced and sold across the country. The party in 1910 regained some 116 of the seats lost in the landslide of 1906, an achievement that had much to do with the effectiveness of its nationwide propaganda campaign. Arthur Steel-Maitland’s reorganisation of the party placed an even greater emphasis on good press relations, including the setting up of an effective press bureau in Central Office in 1911. Much of the money raised in the years preceding the First World War was channelled towards the employment of district agents who could intervene to bolster campaigns in marginal seats.

The First World War and the Reform Act of 1918 ushered in yet another electioneering strategy. The task of registration was transferred from election agents to the state, removing from the local campaign machine an important means of communication and influence with the electorate. Many Conservatives were convinced of the necessity for ‘political education’ to combat what they perceived as the overwhelming threat of ‘Bolshevism’ in Europe and the rising tide of socialism at home – both of which might seduce an ill-educated electorate. In the years that followed the First World War, a pioneering publicity operation was assembled within Conservative Central Office, which drew on the expertise of men who had been at the forefront of the country’s wartime propaganda campaign. J.C.C. Davidson, who had served in the Colonial Office during the war, recalled in his memoirs that his first task as Party Chairman was ‘to apply the lessons of the Great War to the organisation of political warfare’. He was joined by a group of individuals who had made their name as propagandists and intelligence officers in Whitehall during the war. Driven by an unbending determination to defeat ‘Bolshevist subversion’, their aim was to equip the Conservative Party of the 1920s with the propaganda weapons that would outwit socialism and ensure its own electoral hegemony for the good of the nation.

SIR JOSEPH BALL: THE MASTER OF SPIN

One of J.C.C. Davidson’s most successful appointments as chairman was Joseph Ball. After rising through the ranks of MI5 during the First World War, Ball was recruited by Davidson to become the party’s first full-time Director of Publicity in 1927. Davidson recalled in his memoirs that Ball possessed an impressive combination of ‘firmness of character, highly trained mind and infinite industry’ as well as ‘experience . . . in the seamy side of life and the handling of crooks’. It was the latter skills Davidson encouraged Ball to deploy, utilising the same techniques to penetrate the Labour Party as he had as an intelligence officer for MI5 in infiltrating the British Communist Party. Ball’s clandestine efforts involved sending agents into the Labour Party’s headquarters as well as into its printing firm, Odham’s Press. Ball thus managed to secure both confidential Labour reports on the political mood in the country but also advance ‘pulls’ of their leaflets and pamphlets. This enabled the Publicity Department in Central Office to respond instantaneously to their opponent’s propaganda (an early forms of ‘instant rebuttal’ championed by Labour as its own in the 1990s). Although Ball’s intelligence-gathering activities could often verge on the unscrupulous, his skills gave the party a significant campaigning advantage. He loyally advised both Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain on matters of political intelligence both inside and outside the party, and in the latter’s case he even tapped the telephones of Tory MPs who opposed the Prime Minister’s appeasement policy.

Ball’s presence was felt in the three main areas of political communication – advertising, the press and film. He made the most of his press contacts throughout his time at Central Office, along with Davidson, who was particularly adept in cultivating friendships with influential proprietors, such as the Berry Brothers who owned the Daily Telegraph and The Sunday Times. Some of Ball’s attempts to influence the newspaper industry crossed a hidden frontier. He took the step of secretly purchasing a paper called Truth, hoping that the acquisition would act as a bulwark of support for Neville Chamberlain. Instead, it became a source of embarrassment, with its columnists regularly espousing extremist views that could be pro-German and anti-Semitic in tone. Ball soon severed his links with Truth, but he continued to manage the press on behalf of Chamberlain after May 1937 when he entered Downing Street. Rather like Alastair Campbell some sixty years later, Ball was an unusually adroit operator of the Lobby and a master of spin. He often gave very partisan briefings in Number 10 on behalf of Chamberlain and the government as a whole. Ball was knighted in 1936 for his services to the Conservative Party. As Robert Blake has written, Ball was the ‘quintessential eminence grise’ of the interwar period, tirelessly working behind the scenes to project a modern image for the party using all the weapons at his disposal. One of his lasting achievements, however, was not in the area of spin and propaganda, but in policy work as the first director of the Conservative Research Department, where he laid some of the foundations for the party’s future success.

Davidson and Ball invested much time in improving the party’s relationship with the press. By the late 1920s the Central Office Press Bureau was expanded to offer several services for correspondents who were increasingly thirsty for political news. The Lobby Press Service, run from the bureau, supplied the ‘party press’ (230 weekly and daily provincial papers) with a wide range of leading articles and accompanying notes for editors – all free of charge. On the back of this activity, Baldwin encouraged the setting up of a General Press Service to meet the demands of the national newspapers. Eager to ensure that the party received the best possible coverage beyond the loyal Tory press, it was also decided that a front organisation, known as the Industrial Press Service (IPS), would circulate paragraphs and articles to non-Conservative papers. The IPS was ostensibly independent, but was used by the party with great effect to plant anti-socialist stories. Special articles regularly appeared under the byline of ‘Christopher Straight’, the nom de plume of two sympathetic journalists, G.W. Gough and E.T. Good. In addition to such covert forms of news dissemination, the Central Office Press Bureau published a selection of popular magazines, such as Man in The Street, Home and Politics and The Elector, all of which sold surprisingly well.

One of the areas in which the party led the way in the interwar years was in political advertising. Its success was built on employing advertising agencies on a professional basis to design and formulate slogans, leaflets and posters. The most successful relationship the party forged in this period was with the agency J.H. Benson’s, who were renowned for their Guinness advertisements in the 1920s and 1930s. Although Benson’s was responsible for devising the uninspiring ‘Safety First’ slogan in the 1929 general election campaign, the majority of its posters were extremely striking and imaginative in their use of colour and imagery. Positive campaign posters such as ‘The Conservative Sun-Ray Treatment’ and ‘The Escalator to Prosperity’ proved particularly effective, while Benson’s idea to place a picture of Baldwin on cigarette cards became an instant marketing success. The party invested over half of its budget for the 1929 campaign in publicity, which went towards the distribution of 500,000 posters across the country. Despite losing the 1929 election, the party continued its contract with Benson’s, whose posters and leaflets were an important feature in both the 1931 and 1935 election campaigns.

The party was also innovative in using the new medium of film. No other party utilised it so effectively in the interwar years. Many in Central Office were wary of using the BBC (founded in 1926) to present positive propaganda, believing it to be biased against the party – a view that has echoed down the years. One Central Office official was so alarmed by the BBC’s radio broadcasts that he asked party workers to ‘listen in every night and take down in shorthand anything that savours of tendentious socialist propaganda’. Complaints were regularly sent from Central Office to the BBC’s Director-General and Chairman.

Davidson and Ball also set their sights on the private film industry. By the late 1920s, cinemas were enormously popular, reaching an audience of over 20 million a week. Newsreels, which preceded the main film, became the perfect medium with which to present the party in a favourable light. Davidson recruited Patrick Gower, another career civil servant who had served several prime ministers, in 1929 to succeed Ball as the party’s Chief Publicity Officer. He established the Conservative and Unionist Films Association as a separate department within Central Office. Together with Albert Clavering, the department’s ‘Honorary Organising Director’, he was as well the owner of a cinema chain. Gower forged close contacts with leading figures in the film business, who were instrumental in preparing Baldwin for his performances before the cameras, as he did with radio listeners. By the 1935 election, Baldwin was fully at home with the most modern broadcasting techniques, becoming the first premier to make use of the ‘sound bite’.

Gower and his team set about developing mobile cinema vans which would bring party propaganda films even closer to the electorate – especially in the rural areas where film was still a novelty. Purpose-built with a hooded viewing screen and projector, the vans became an instant success after their introduction in 1925. By the time of the 1929 election, the party had ten cinema vans touring the country, as well as thirteen vans equipped with indoor projection equipment for village and town halls. They proved spectacularly popular: during the 1935 election campaign an estimated 1.5 million people saw the party’s films, which were both entertaining and educational, and produced to a high technical standard. By the mid-1930s, the Conservative election machine was several steps ahead of both the Labour Party and the diminishing Liberal Party. Under the direction of the National Publicity Bureau, formed specifically to fight the 1935 election, the party unleashed a barrage of propaganda on the electorate, who responded by electing an impressive tally of 387 Conservatives to lead the National Government.

The Second World War took its toll on all aspects of party life, not least in its capacity to fight an election. Within a decade, however, the party had rediscovered its campaigning zeal, exploiting the new medium of television to particular effect. A new generation of talented advisers, publicists and advertising consultants came to the service of a revived and forward-looking Conservative Party. The likes of Geoffrey Tucker, Gordon Reece and the Saatchi brothers brought the highest levels of professionalism to the party’s election campaigns, exceeding anything the Labour Party could afford to produce. This advantage would again be lost in the last decade of the century.

EMBRACING THE TELEVISION AGE

In the aftermath of defeat in 1945, Lord Woolton acted swiftly to ensure that new forms of communication with the electorate were fully explored by the party. Woolton and his new Chief Publicity Officer, Mark Chapman-Walker, were convinced very early on that television opened ‘an enormous new field of political activity’. Although Churchill did not share their enthusiasm for the new medium, shunning the cameras as much as he could, party officials in Central Office meticulously groomed other leading Tory politicians for their first televised appearances. Under the guidance of Chapman-Walker and John Profumo, who was appointed the party’s first Head of Broadcasting, Eden and Macmillan became the party’s first accomplished performers. Eden recorded the party’s first election broadcast in the 1951 campaign, while Macmillan took part in the first broadcast outside an election in 1953 – ably assisted by a sympathetic Bill Deedes, from the interviewer’s chair. The broadcasts took the form of formalised question-and-answer sessions, which had been carefully rehearsed, but they were at least an advance on the newsreels in the 1930s, when politicians simply read a script to camera. Macmillan in particular would go on to master the art of television. No other Labour leader until Harold Wilson could match Macmillan’s polished, beguilingly relaxed performances in front of the camera.

Woolton would not settle for only the leading lights to equip themselves with the skills for the small screen; he actively encouraged local associations and aspiring parliamentary candidates to ‘excel in broadcasting technique’. In 1952, the Publicity Department installed a mock television studio at Central Office for this express purpose. Winifred Crum-Ewing ran the studio throughout the 1950s, writing many of the scripts and arranging one-day courses in broadcast technique. One of the candidates to receive training from Crum-Ewing in February 1956 was a young Margaret Thatcher. As tele vision audiences continued to grow in the late 1950s and early 1960s, new formats for presenting politicians were explored. The party invited independent broadcasters, such as Kenneth Harris and Robin Day, to conduct unrehearsed interviews with senior party figures. Meanwhile, the party made use of its army of cinema vans Lord Hailsham, dissolved the Conservative and Unionist Film Association in 1959.

From the late 1960s, the party concentrated on television as the most effective medium to reach a mass audience. Under the supervision of Geoffrey Tucker, the publicity supremo who devised the party’s election-winning 1970 campaign, party political broadcasts (PPBs) enjoyed a new lease of life. As we shall see in Chapter 10, Tucker employed the best TV producers and directors in the business – outside the confines of the BBC – to film a string of innovative PPBs. Although their attempts to present the warm and convivial side of Edward Heath never fully succeeded, Tucker’s team rammed home the 1970 campaign theme of ‘rising prices’. One broadcast interspersed an interview with an ‘ordinary housewife’ with short clips showing a pound note being cut in two.

The contribution of the advertising industry to the party’s publicity campaigns grew enormously during the 1950s and 1960s. The party hired Colman, Prentis and Varley in 1950 to bring its image up to date; so successful were they in achieving this that they worked for the party in every general election until 1964. Their posters displayed pictures of ‘ordinary’ people and used uncomplicated language, in contrast to the traditional portrait of the party leader and an old-fashioned slogan. The 1959 poster ‘Life’s Better with the Conservatives . . . Don’t let Labour Ruin it’ was one of the most effective campaigns launched by the party in the postwar period. Colman, Prentis and Varley also employed the latest marketing and research techniques to identify target groups in the electorate, such as skilled manual workers (the group that later became known as the C2s).

Following a stagnant period in the mid-1960s, the party embarked on a new phase of professional campaigning. Geoffrey Tucker had been the brains behind the famous 1959 campaign at Colman, Prentis and Varley. He had struck up an excellent professional relationship with the party’s key lieutenants in Central Office, notably Lord Hailsham, the chairman, and Michael Fraser, the influential éminence grise and also Director of the Conservative Research Department. In 1968 Tucker was brought directly into the party’s employment to plan the attack against Harold Wilson’s Labour government for the coming general election. Before he took up the reins as the Chief Publicity Officer, Tucker had worked on the successful launch of Ariel, the biological soap powder, in Italy. Transferring the market research techniques pioneered in such advertising campaigns to the Publicity Department in Central Office, he revolutionised the party’s approach to campaigning. He was influenced in particular by Richard Nixon’s successful 1968 Republican presidential campaign, which had used the ‘high road, low road’ strategy. This involved projecting an optimistic Tory vision to the electorate (the high road) as well as pressing home the more immediate concerns about the high cost of living (the low road under Labour). The overall vision was crystallised in the 1970 campaign slogan ‘a better tomorrow’, while the message on the doorstep focused on the decreasing value of the pound.

Tucker was instrumental in introducing the brightest and most creative talent to the party ahead of the 1970 campaign. He chose the firm Davidson Pearce to conduct the party’s advertising, and recruited Gordon Reece, a young television producer, and Ronald Millar, an up-and-coming playwright, to assist with the broadcasting and speech-writing. Both continued to serve successive party leaders into the 1990s. Known as the ‘Communications Group’, or more simply ‘the team’ by Heath, Tucker’s admen and television producers fought one of the most professional publicity campaigns the party had yet seen. As Richard Cockett has commented, the 1970 campaign ‘broke important new ground for the Conservatives, as it was the first time that the party had put all its faith in “publicity” professionals from outside Central Office’.

Following the 1974 election defeats and Heath’s removal as leader the following year, Margaret Thatcher set to work reinvigorating the Tory election machine. Her decision to appoint Gordon Reece as the new Director of Publicity heralded a new era of professional campaigning for the party. In 1978 Reece hired Saatchi and Saatchi, the largest advertising agency in Britain with a turnover of £71 million a year, to undertake all aspects of the party’s publicity. The partnership, which lasted almost twenty years, was built on the close working relationship between the party’s chairmen (Lord Thorneycroft and Cecil Parkinson) and Tim Bell, the agency’s managing director. Bell was a true believer in Mrs Thatcher’s mission to change the party and country and he struck up an instant rapport with her, which continued even after he left Saatchi and Saatchi in 1985. The Saatchi brothers, Charles and Maurice, and their lieutenant Jeremy Sinclair, were the creative brains behind a series of eye-catching poster designs and PPBs. The Saatchi and Saatchi campaign leading up to the 1979 election, including the famous ‘Labour Isn’t Working’ poster, which showed a long dole queue snaking out of sight, made a tremendous impact to the company’s advantage as much as to the party’s.

Throughout the elections of the 1980s and the closely fought contest in 1992, Saatchi and Saatchi continued to produce memorable campaigns. Mrs Thatcher took a detailed interest in the agency’s work, inspecting every press advert and poster before expressing a preference. Working to the party’s campaign and policy brief, Saatchi and Saatchi would meticulously prepare a strategy months, or even years, in advance of the start of a campaign. The adverts were simple and hard-hitting. ‘Labour’s Policy on Arms’ (in 1987), ‘Labour’s Tax Bombshell’ and ‘Labour’s Double Whammy’ (in 1992) were among the most successful negative campaign adverts used by the agency. Jeremy Sinclair, the agency’s creative director, who worked on the Tory account for four elections, reflected: ‘We just brought our aggressive advertising style to politics . . . We did do some positive ads, but who remembers them now? It is not peace and tranquillity which attracts people’s attention.’ Innovative techniques were applied to other areas too. Public relations specialists, like Christopher Lawson (the former marketing director of Mars, the confectionary manufacturers) and Harvey Thomas, were brought into Central Office in the early 1980s to give the party a new corporate identity. Lawson designed the blazing-torch logo in 1982, which was printed on all the party’s paperwork and advertising and promotional material. Ahead of the 1987 election it was updated as the ‘Torch of Freedom’ and remains the party’s official logo to this day. Direct mail and telephone canvassing were also exploited fully during the 1980s, while the party invested considerable amounts of money in opinion poll research. Communications became increasingly orientated around television news coverage: the publicity team in Central Office began to schedule ‘photo opportunities’, such as poster unveilings and press conferences, to suit the demands of the television news bulletins. Harvey Thomas was instrumental in turning party conferences and campaign rallies into televisual events, equipped with autocues and striking backdrops. Large corporate donations flooded into the party’s war chest during this period, enabling it comfortably to out-spend the Labour Party, the Social Democratic Party and its successor, the Liberal Democrats, both locally and nationally. Following the success of the 1992 campaign, when the party spent £5.8 million on advertising alone, it looked as if the Conservatives would enter the twenty-first century as an unassailable electoral force. It was not to be.

The Conservatives had defined the modern age of election campaigning and communications. Their advantage over Labour’s own efforts had only been lost on a few occasions since 1918. By the mid-1990s, however, the tables had turned more decisively in Labour’s direction. On the morning after Mrs Thatcher’s landslide victory in 1983, Labour’s General Secretary, Jim Mortimer, decried the premium placed by the Conservatives on slick advertising. He adamantly declared that the Labour Party would never resort to such tactics: ‘We are not presenting politicians as if they were breakfast food or baked beans.’ Mortimer, like the rest of Labour’s 1983 election team, was consigned to the dustbin of history when the party commenced its own electoral revolution. Within four years, Labour had jettisoned the red flag in favour of the red rose, emulating the most successful features of the Tory election machine. Under the direction of Peter Mandelson, Labour’s Director of Campaigns and Communications, and Philip Gould, the opinion pollster and strategist, the Labour Party went from strength to strength in mounting an effective challenge to the Conservatives in the late 1980s and into the 1990s. While Labour advanced, the Conservatives began to falter after their surprise win in 1992. Exhausted and financially overstretched, the machine soldiered on towards the 1997 election, but it soon became clear that even Saatchis could not rescue the party from a series of problems. ‘New Labour, New Danger’ failed as a slogan because Blair and his team worked so hard to remove any ‘danger’ from a New Labour government. New Labour, in contrast, projected an optimistic advertising campaign and assembled a formidable machine, tightly controlled by Mandelson and Gordon Brown at its headquarters in Millbank. Crucially, the Conservatives lost their local campaign advantage in many of the key marginal seats which decided the election.

Between 1997 and 2001, New Labour reigned supreme in the battle to win the hearts and minds of the electorate. The Conservatives under Hague ended their long-standing contract with the Saatchi brothers, employing a smaller Edinburgh-based firm, Yellow M, in 2000 to run their advertising campaign. The party simply could not compete with New Labour’s strength of numbers on the ground, nor could it rival a series of potent negative poster adverts. The first few years of the twenty-first century have seen the Conservative Party attempting to learn from the election-winning techniques employed by Tony Blair’s Labour Party. Central Office was remodelled along the lines of New Labour’s Millbank machine, to include a war room, ‘Geneva’ call centre and a rapid-response computer data base. Michael Howard’s surprise appointment of Maurice Saatchi as party co-chairman in 2003 was further intended to restore a campaigning zeal, not only in Central Office but throughout the party.

As the party strives to mount a successful challenge in the forthcoming general election, eyes have turned to the human face of the Tory election machine: the candidate. One of the reasons why the party struggled in the last decade is the narrow profile of its candidates. Despite efforts at the top of the party to encourage local associations to select candidates from a variety of backgrounds, the overwhelming majority of candidates in winnable seats have been white, male, middle-class and middle-aged. There have only ever been two ethnic minority Conservative MPs elected in the party’s history: Sir M.M. Bhownagree in 1895 and, almost a century later, Nirj Deva in 1992. In the 1992 general election John Taylor’s candidature in Cheltenham, the first black Conservative to be selected for a safe seat, ended in controversy following infighting and abuse from parts of the constituency party. Some party members even urged people to vote against Taylor, allowing the Liberal Democrats to win the seat. Although progress has made in the last few years in selecting a wider range of candidates, particularly those from ethnic minorities, the party has a long way to go before it can reflect the racial, as well as social and gender mix of twenty-first century Britain.

It is not only the scale of an election win that qualifies it to be considered a truly ‘great’ victory, but also its significance in closing and opening chapters in the life of the party and the nation. The greatest victories of the nineteenth century were 1841, 1874 and 1886, ushering in the Peel, Disraeli and Salisbury governments. By 1841 the party had been rebuilt from scratch after the electoral nemesis of 1832, while the general election of 1874 marked a turning point in British political history, ending thirty years of Liberal ascendancy and opening the door to a new era of Conservative governance. On both occasions, the party demonstrated that its electoral fortunes could be restored following years of frustration and division in opposition.

In the age of the mass franchise, the Conservatives have secured large mandates to continue their work in government. In 1935 the party won 47.8 per cent of the popular vote with a huge total of 387 MPs under the leadership of Stanley Baldwin, who returned to Downing Street as Prime Minister of the National Government. The 1930s represented the high point of the Conservatives’ electoral fortunes in terms of the share of the vote, reflecting the electorate’s trust in the party as the protectors of the national interest in uncertain times. Both the 1959 and 1983 general elections were two of the most emphatic Conservative wins in the postwar era. In each case, the party had convinced the electorate that it could competently manage the economy and provide the conditions for further prosperity. Harold Macmillan’s boast in 1957 that ‘most of our people have never had it so good’ certainly struck a chord with the voters two years later, when they re-elected his government with an overall majority of 100 (44 fewer seats than Mrs Thatcher’s majority in 1983). Perhaps the two most important Conservative victories of the twentieth century were in 1924 and 1979. In less than ten months after the first Labour government took the seals of office, Stanley Baldwin had regrouped his party to present a strikingly ambitious programme for government. Winning with a staggering majority of 199 (the largest overall majority any party has won since the introduction of the mass franchise in 1918), Baldwin had transformed the electoral fortunes of the Conservative Party in one of the shortest periods of time in British political history. Thatcher’s 1979 victory, achieved with the largest postwar swing to the Conservatives from Labour since 1945, heralded a new era in British politics. Like the results in 1924, the party did well across the country and not just in its heartlands, and middle-class base.

The party has had its fair share of unexpected election results in modern times. In July 1945 it marched unsuspectingly into its greatest defeat since 1906. Winston Churchill and many around him were convinced that his wartime leadership would produce a postwar victory for the party. Most Labour MPs and independent commentators expected him to sweep back to power. However, his stewardship of the party and the state of its organisation were both defective by the end of the war. Central Office and local associations simply lacked the manpower and the facilities to deliver a well-run campaign. Despite this, senior party officials and Tory agents continued to predict a Conservative victory after polls had closed on 5 July. They were in for a shock: Labour had won its first landslide victory with a majority of 146 seats. Some twenty-five years later, many observers believed that Harold Wilson’s Labour government was on course to win a record third term. Under Edward Heath, the party had recovered well after its crushing defeat in 1966, investing much time in developing new policies and a highly professional campaign strategy. Opinion polls and pundits continued to predict a Labour victory even after the release of gloomy trade figures during the course of the campaign, which had further dented Wilson’s reputation on the economy. The surprise came when Heath led the party to victory in June 1970, overturning a Labour majority of nearly a hundred. Perhaps the most startling result for the party in recent times was that of the1992 general election. As in 1970, opinion polls predicted a narrow Labour victory for Neil Kinnock – even the BBC’s and ITN’s exit polls predicted a hung parliament. The night of 9 April 1992 was one of intense excitement for the party following the declaration at 11.23 p.m. of the result in Basildon, Essex. That was the moment when John Major turned to his wife, Norma, saying, ‘You may not know it, but that’s it, we have won.’ His joy was mixed with sorrow a short while later as he watched the pictures of his party chairman and loyal lieutenant, Chris Patten, losing his seat in Bath. Major’s victory in 1992 was a moment of real drama. It was a new peak in the party’s electoral fortunes, winning over 14 million votes – the highest total any party has received in any general election before or since.

THE LAST HOURS OF TORY RULE, 1–2 MAY 1997

The last hours of the party’s eighteen years in power, for all their inevitability, were not short on drama. At the eye of the storm lay the composed figure of the outgoing Prime Minister, John Major. Halfway through the 1997 general election campaign, Major had reconciled himself to defeat. The question now was how badly the party would lose. Two days before polling day, Central Office number-crunchers predicted that the party would win 240 seats. At 5 p.m. on 1 May, election day, Major received a phone call that would confirm his gravest fears. Smith Square informed him that they had seriously overestimated the size of the Tory vote and the party was heading for a catastrophic defeat. Up to that point he had been in buoyant mood, spending the day touring the committee rooms in Huntingdon with his wife, Norma. His demeanour changed dramatically. Close aides who travelled with him back to his home in the constituency. The Finings, described him as being ‘shell-shocked’.

Despite their best efforts, the Prime Minister’s advisers could do little to lighten Major’s spirits. A handful of personal staff from Number 10 and Central Office arrived at the house with several portions of fish and chips, one of his favourite dishes. They were greeted by a deadly silence; Major himself ate without muttering a word. It was as if he had just witnessed a terrible car crash. After the meal, Major repaired to his study to discuss arrangements for the following day with his Principal Private Secretary in London, Alex Allan. He also spoke on the phone with Brian Mawhinney, who as party chairman had managed the day-to-day running of the campaign. Major resolved to phone Tony Blair to concede defeat before he went to his Huntingdon count.

When the polls closed at 10 p.m. and the exit polls were broadcast, predicting a Labour landslide, Major watched the television alone and began to write his acceptance speech. At 1.30 a.m., he telephoned Blair who was already at his count in Sedgefield. During their five-minute conversation, Major conceded defeat and congratulated him. ‘It is a testing job, unique and sometimes enjoyable’, ajor said, adding, ‘You have a big majority, you should enjoy it.’ Relations between the two men had deteriorated during the campaign, particularly after Blair predicted that the Conservatives would scrap the state pension if re-elected for a fifth term. But their conversation was honest and amicable. Major returned to the living room to watch the first results being declared. The extent of the defeat became clear when Labour gained the safe Birmingham seat of Edgbaston. According to one present, Major was transfixed in front of the television, whispering to himself, ‘I just don’t believe it, I don’t believe it.’ Ironically, in his constituency home 200 miles north, Blair was uttering the same words to the same results. One by one, Tory strongholds were swept away – from Hove to Wimbledon, Harrogate to Worcester. There was genuine regret when Michael Portillo lost his seat to the New Labour juggernaut and muffled cheers when others, like David Evans, the populist right-wing MP who had been a constant thorn in Major’s side, lost their seats. At 2.30 a.m., Major and his team were driven to the count and to hear the declaration of the result. His own majority, 18,140, was the largest Tory majority in the land, but it was still well below the figure he achieved five years before.

Major had decided a few days before that he would stand down as party leader in the event of a heavy defeat, but was in two minds about when to make the announcement. When he arrived at Central Office at 5 a.m., he was greeted by Michael Portillo. Major clasped his hands warmly and was patted on the back by exhausted party workers as he walked up the stairs in the front hall. ‘Okay we lost’, Major declared stoically in a cheery speech to the assembled crowd in Central Office, but he predicted the party would come back to fight another day. Having consulted with Mawhinney and Cranborne, he decided to postpone his announcement to stand down as leader until later that morning. Back at Number 10, Major repaired upstairs to the flat for a breakfast with his family and close aides, before he made his way around the staff to bid them farewell. During a short speech thanking them for their service after six and a half years, some began to cry, while others did their best to hold back the tears. His last request was to ask that they refrained from clapping him out – as was the tradition for departing prime ministers – for fear that he would lose his composure.

With Norma and his children by his side, Major left the front door of Number 10 at 11.25 to make his last speech as Prime Minister. He congratulated the incoming government, saying that they would inherit an economy much stronger than that bequeathed to the party eighteen years before. ‘When the curtain falls it is time to get off the stage and that is what I propose to do’, Major said, making way for his surviving parliamentary colleagues to choose a new leader. After tendering his resignation to the Queen at Buckingham Palace, Major headed south of the river to watch cricket at the Oval, only a few miles away from where he had started out in life.

The defeats of 1832, 1906 and 1945 must rank as three of the heaviest in the party’s long history. Although the party underwent periods of soul-searching and difficulty in their wake, the defeats, bar that of 1906 perhaps, did not actually crush the party so badly that it found electoral recovery an almost impossible task. The defeat of 1997 was the most crushing defeat of the twentieth century, coming only five years after John Major’s personal triumph at the polls. The Conservative Parliamentary Party was cut to half its former size; and its share of the vote, 30.7 per cent, was the lowest since 1832. It was a truly awful night for the Conservative Party. Never before had the party failed to win a single seat in Scotland. Seven Cabinet ministers lost their seats, including the Foreign Secretary, Malcolm Rifkind and, perhaps most famously of all, Michael Portillo, who lost the ‘safe’ north London suburban seat of Enfield Southgate on a swing of 17 per cent to Labour. If 1992 had been a night of relief and jubilation for the party, then 1997 surpassed it as one of despair and disbelief.

The result of the 2001 general election was in many ways even more harrowing for the party. Managing to win only one additional seat and improving its share of the vote by a mere percentage point, the party had found itself singularly incapable of regaining any lost ground after the rout of 1997. Rarely has the party lost two successive elections in such dramatic style.

It will take all the reserves of energy, strategic and tactical brilliance to transform the party’s electoral fortunes once again. However, if the last 150 years or so are anything to go by, there is every chance that the Conservative Party will savour victory in the not too distant future.