7 – Regaining Momentum

“Don’t be fooled by the local election results – the Tories still face an uphill battle in their bid to crush Labour.”
Professor John Curtice, the Independent¹

National campaigning took a back seat on Thursday 4 May as Labour activists across the country concentrated on getting the vote out in the local elections. At Southside, however, behind-the-scenes work on the campaign continued unabated – all departments ploughed on with planning events, fine-tuning policies for the manifesto, and producing content for all the communication channels.

Campaign finance was again top of my ‘to do’ list because we would be making our pitch to the affiliated trade unions, who were coming to Southside for their monthly liaison meeting. Patrick Heneghan and I had finalised the three budget options to present to them after some haggling over the split between digital advertising and direct mail spending. High postal and print costs make direct mail roughly ten times as expensive per item as the average click-through to an online advert, and yet there is no evidence it is proportionately that much more effective. By spending more online, we would reach more voters in more seats. It would also allow us to be nimbler, because online adverts can be turned on and off almost instantly. Patrick had agreed to push digital spending up from a quarter to about a third of the total in each of the three scenarios, but direct marketing was still allocated nearly £4 million in the £7 million budget scenario. Nevertheless, we went into the meeting with a common position.

Jeremy attended for the first 20 minutes to give an over-view of the campaign, but he left us to talk about the details and explain how more money would allow us to go beyond the basics of a campaign tour and whatever mainstream and social media coverage we could achieve without paying for it. None of the unions made commitments then and there, but that was expected. However, what emerged from the discussion, worryingly, was that the political funds of most of the unions had not yet recovered from the spending on the 2015 general election.

This meeting would, a few days later, be portrayed in the Sunday Times in terms I found unrecognisable. A report by the paper’s political editor, Tim Shipman, said I had “demanded £7 million from the trade union barons for a nationwide campaign promoting the leader” and been refused. It quoted an unnamed Labour official as saying “the ‘ask’ was unhinged” and that “a deal was done later for a more realistic amount.”² I had never met Shipman, nor was I given a chance to comment. As noted in Chapter 6, the £7 million figure was not my suggestion but the highest of three options agreed by the joint LOTO-Southside strategy group. As for “promoting the leader,” the £6.5 million core budget already covered the cost of Jeremy’s campaign bus and all the rallies. The scenarios presented to the unions were for spending beyond that, of which nearly all would be for direct mail and digital advertising focused on policies and issues. Not for the first time – or the last – a major national newspaper was publishing a fictitious version of events from a disloyal source.

That day’s strategy meeting took stock of the previous few days. The attacks on us over Brexit and tax had opened the door to fresh questioning of our strategy by Southside directors. We couldn’t win, they argued, by “banging on about leadership” or “flogging the dead horse of Brexit.” They wanted us to concentrate on the NHS, which polled well for Labour. Yet that was precisely the problem: people trusted us on the NHS, but were nevertheless intending to vote Tory because of Brexit and greater confidence in May to deliver it. We had also only just started to tell our wider story of how the country could be transformed to serve the many, not the few. We were not prepared to abandon it at the first sign of trouble. Niall Sookoo, the LOTO campaign co-ordinator, said quietly, “we have to make Theresa May the leader of the Conservative party.” The point was strikingly simple: we could not let her get away with cleansing herself of the Tory brand, which was still toxic in our heartlands. Niall’s comment wasn’t picked up in the meeting, but LOTO decided soon afterwards to refer to ‘Theresa May’s Tories’ and revive the term ‘nasty party’ at every opportunity.

The local election results in the early hours of Friday morning were bad, though not quite as bad as Patrick had projected. We held on – against expectations – in my home city of Cardiff, which had been won back by Labour in 2012 after eight years of no overall majority. We also retained control of the councils in the other two South Wales cities of Newport and Swansea. In England, the earlier-than-anticipated declaration of Ros Jones’ comfortable re-election as mayor of Doncaster – winning on the first round, unlike four years earlier – gave grounds for optimism. But the results in the strongly Brexit-supporting South Wales valleys were a warning signal: we lost control of the councils in Merthyr Tydfil and Blaenau Gwent, and saw our majority slashed in Rhondda Cynon Taff.

As the day progressed, it was hard to make sense of the cross-currents. It was no surprise Steve Rotheram was elected metro mayor of Liverpool City Region by a thumping margin. But – in an echo of the South Wales valleys – we failed to win the mayorship in strongly Leave-voting Tees Valley. Meanwhile, back in the north-west, Andy Burnham won the Greater Manchester metro mayoral contest by an even bigger margin than Steve’s victory on Merseyside. As for the West Midlands, I was hearing from my daughter at the count that things were not going well: Andy Street was ahead on the first ballot and Sion would have to do well on the transfers from the four smaller parties to win on the second. But a text soon afterwards from the Daily Telegraph’s Kate McCann said:

“Second preferences not looking so hot. Our info is that Lib and Green second preferences are going to Street.”

We had planned for different scenarios. Jeremy had gone to Liverpool to join Steve’s celebrations at 4.30pm but, for obvious reasons, he would only go on to Birmingham if Sion won. When news came through that Street had taken West Midlands by a slender 0.8 per cent margin – just 3,776 votes in a turn-out of more than half a million – we reverted to the alternative of Jeremy speaking at a rally in Manchester at 7pm. The trouble was that Andy Burnham had made other plans. With Jeremy already on his way to Manchester, it emerged that Andy had arranged a meal with family and friends and would not be joining him. We faced a ‘damned if you do damned if you don’t’ dilemma: go ahead with the rally without Andy, or cancel it. Karie had little choice but to make the call that – as an Andy snub story would surface either way – going ahead would energise our supporters and send out a message that Jeremy was back on the campaign trail.

Watching that Manchester rally on television at Southside, it was good to see Jeremy arrive flanked by local MPs and shadow cabinet members Becky Long-Bailey and Andrew Gwynne, and then give a typically upbeat and optimistic speech. But the crowd of a few hundred people, while a good turn-out at short notice, was small by Jeremy’s standards, and the event had the slightly chaotic look of the leadership contests. The impression that gave to millions of viewers across the country was not what I thought we wanted with the election only five weeks away.

And yet the local elections results were themselves not quite as disastrous as the media was saying. The loss of 382 council seats was bad for sure, but it was below Patrick Heneghan’s forecast 450-plus figure, and the projected general election vote based on the results put the Tories on 38 per cent and Labour 27 per cent, a narrower gap than the 17 point average of the latest polls. When I tweeted that and said “all to play for,” a few journalists found it very amusing. But were they still prisoners of their own version of the certainty syndrome and failing to see the fluidity of the situation?

The contrarian-inclined Professor John Curtice had been spelling out in interviews all day that these were not great results for a Tory prime minister who had hung her hat on winning a landslide. In a piece that evening for the Independent website, he said that, while they give little reason to anticipate a Labour victory in June, what remains in doubt is just how big a majority the Conservatives might yet secure. He continued:

“Indeed, although a strong advance in the local elections in Scotland gives the (Tory) party good reason to anticipate making some gains north of the border next month, there was little sign of the strong Tory advance in Wales that one recent poll seemed to identify. Meanwhile, despite signal successes for the party in the West Midlands and Tees Valley mayoral races, elsewhere the party struggled to replicate its 2015 performance, let alone improve on it.”³

However optimistically or pessimistically any of us viewed the results at the time, the local elections had certainly given us some pointers, and one of them was that Brexit was playing havoc with traditional voting patterns. The day after the local elections, another member of my emerging personal focus group messaged me asking why the campaign wasn’t saying more about Brexit. Jawwad Mustafa, a Labour member and student in Sunderland, said:

“Brexit happens to be the issue of the day, and the Prime Minister is dominating the conversation on it. Our failure to counteract that will allow the Tories to continue to make the case that they’re best placed to negotiate Brexit when that simply isn’t the case. I heard today a lady in Wales (saying she) is voting Conservative, and the surprising fact is that she works in a food bank. Many people are focusing on Brexit over domestic issues, and we need to get in on that and make our voice loud and clear.”

Jawwad’s comments were of particular interest because they came from a heavily Leave-voting area. If we were to stop the Tories disingenuously mopping up working class Leave voters, we had to warn them what a Tory Brexit would be like. But Jawwad had a further point: Labour had failed to spell out that the 2008 financial crash was a global one and “dispel the myth that the Tories are somehow better at managing the economy.”

The latter was central to our plans for what we had known from the start of the campaign would be a crucial weekend. We had decided at the outset that Jeremy should go to the Midlands – one of our most difficult battlegrounds – on Saturday. But finding a venue had been problematic because we had to avoid areas where the local election results were in doubt, which most of them were. We settled on Leicester for an early afternoon rally that would give Jeremy a chance to give a measured response to the local elections while pivoting the narrative forward to the battle for power at Westminster. It would be scripted so that we had tight messaging going into the Sunday papers, and it would set the scene for an announcement of our personal tax guarantee in a major speech John McDonnell would give the next day on economic policy. The following week would then see the national campaign launch in Manchester on the Tuesday, a series of big policy announcements, and finish with Jeremy’s ‘Philadelphia moment’ speech on security at Chatham House on the Friday.

It would be a manic seven days for everyone involved in the campaign – and crucial to our chances of closing the gap. My own priorities for the weekend were the speeches for the launch and Chatham House, and a script for the PPB on Brexit.

Seumas had asked me to send him the Chatham House draft by lunchtime on Sunday. Jennifer Larbie, LOTO’s foreign policy adviser, had already written a large chunk of it. My job was to frame the policy positions in the wider context of the failure of regime-change wars and the effect they had on our security. The challenge, however, was to find a way into the subject that did not simply follow a well-trodden path or sound like Jeremy saying ‘I told you so’. The anniversary of VE Day, which was on the Monday before the speech, provided a topical peg. It would also allow Jeremy to quote General Eisenhower, who was the supreme commander of the Allied forces in Europe, and went on to warn of the dangers of a “military-industrial complex” gaining “unwarranted influence” on foreign policy. His comments, which I knew would be familiar to Jeremy, were made in an emotional final television address in 1961 after serving two terms as President of the United States. He said:

“Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defence with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”

This was a heartfelt warning from a 70-year-old man who had seen first-hand what a war costing 70 million lives was like and who had been at the centre of cold war tensions and conflicts as president. The fact that he was a Republican would illustrate the point that concern about the influence of the arms industry on foreign policy transcends the left-right divide. And it would also – by implication – rightly put Jeremy among the ‘alert citizenry’ who had questioned the endless interventions that have created more problems than they have solved. The speech reiterated the warning he had made many times that they had not only failed in their own terms, but had also made the world more dangerous and put the security of the British people at risk.

On the wider campaign front, meanwhile, we did seem to be moving forward. Jeremy’s speech in Leicester to a big and enthusiastic audience had come across well on TV and social media. Our personal tax pledge – committing to no increase in VAT or National Insurance contributions and no increase in income tax for 95 per cent of earners – had been released to the media on Saturday for the Sunday papers. John McDonnell would be on The Andrew Marr Show that morning and would then deliver his keynote speech on the economy at the Museum of London. We also had a social media campaign running to publicise the tax pledge, having anticipated that much of the mainstream media would treat it as a ‘bombshell’ for higher earners.

The Sunday Times front page headline was “Labour tax rise to hit earners on £80,000.” Tim Shipman’s report, which also included the spurious account of our meeting with the unions, opened by saying “Labour will today propose sweeping tax rises for those earning more than £80,000 a year in a bid to shore up the party’s core support.” It said John McDonnell’s speech that day would announce plans that would mean “high earners would have to fund Labour’s spending plans, which the Tories have costed at £45 billion.” This, as Shipman well knew, was misleading. We had already announced a range of tax measures to raise money to fund our plans, none of which would touch income earned from working. Income tax rises for the top 5 per cent would, in fact, account for only 13 per cent of the money we needed to raise. Nearly three-quarters of the cost of new spending would be covered by clamping down on tax avoidance, extending stamp duty to financial derivatives, and partially reversing Tory corporation, inheritance and capital gains tax cuts. In other words, we would invest in the NHS, social care, education and other vital services mainly by taxing unearned income and reversing tax giveaways to big companies.

Not content with erroneous reporting on tax and our campaign finances, the same piece also claimed ‘senior Labour officials’ were saying “Corbyn’s team have abandoned hope of winning and are focused on driving up Labour’s vote share rather than saving key seats.” It said:

“Seumas Milne, Corbyn’s most senior aide, and his deputy Steve Howell will argue Corbyn should keep his job if he matches the 30.4 per cent Ed Miliband won at the general election two years ago.”

An unnamed campaign official was then quoted as saying:

“Their entire focus is motivating Labour and potential Labour voters in safe seats. They have no interest in targeting winnable seats.”

I was dumbfounded. Having spent almost every day since April 18 pushing reluctant senior Labour officials at Southside to target offensive seats, I could barely believe what I was reading. Their argument that we should focus almost-exclusively on defensive seats had a basis in the polls and, while strongly disagreeing, I accepted it was their honest assessment of the situation. But now someone was feeding Shipman with the exact opposite of the truth, and he was reporting it as fact without even checking with either Seumas or me. I was surprised only because hostile newspapers had generally been coming to us for a token comment on negative stories that they would tag on at the end, if only to protect themselves against libel proceedings.

It soon became clear that the Sunday Times piece was part of a concerted attack on Jeremy from within the party. Leading the way – or at least serving as a front person – was Jo Green, a former Labour press officer from the Blair era. In an article for the Spectator, he claimed that Jeremy had given up Labour’s “historic commitment to forming a government” and was only interested in “maximising the vote share, not winning seats.” He said:

“Whatever the result, Corbyn and his supporters will argue millions voted for socialism and the job is not finished. The PLP should not allow this argument to take root. The immediate priority the day after polling day must be to ensure a quick leadership contest. Optimists hope this will see the end of Corbyn and that no hard-left alternative to replace him will be on the ballot. That contest should return to the electoral college system. The three-quid member experiment has been a disaster and surely cannot be repeated. There is also much to be said for only allowing two candidates, rather than indulging fringe candidates. No more ‘lending votes’. Let’s look serious about picking a PM. We’re not a debating society.”⁴

Indeed, we were not a debating society. Tens of thousands of members across the country were eyeballs-out trying to oust the Tories from office and open the door to a society for the many, not the few. Since the election was called, Jeremy had visited 22 constituencies, only five of which were Labour held. With the campaign bus hitting the road from Tuesday, the tempo would increase. By the end of the campaign, Jeremy had visited 82 seats of which 44 were Tory, SNPor Liberal Democrat held. Of course, candidates defending Labour majorities needed support too, especially where a collapse in the UKIP vote might add to the Tory threat. Jeremy was utterly determined to get to as many constituencies as he could. As someone who is five years younger than him, I was awestruck at his energy and indefatigable commitment to winning. The only people behaving like we were a debating society were Jo Green and the anonymous sources feeding newspapers hostile to Labour.

We did not dignify any of this with a response, but the negative stories did highlight the need to secure more money for the campaign and ensure it was spent – in line with our strategy – on fighting to win. On Monday, May 8, Unite came through with £2.25 million in response to the pitch we had made on local election day. Most of this was earmarked immediately for spending on campaign publicity, but the issue of targeting continued to be a source of tension. While decisions on Jeremy’s campaign visits were entirely in the hands of LOTO, the lists for digital advertising, direct mail and newspaper advertising were managed by Southside. I discussed this with Patrick and told him that LOTO wanted the new money from Unite to go on offensive as well as defensive seats.

For much of that week, we haggled over which constituencies would be targeted for different types of publicity. By Thursday, I decided to put my concern that we were still not fully implementing a ‘campaign to win’ strategy in writing. In an e-mail to Patrick, I said we were not applying “the premise on which we asked the unions for extra money” and pointed out that Jeremy was being publicly attacked on the issue. Patrick, in reply, referred to new polling figures BMG had presented the previous day, which suggested the Tory lead was growing in offensive seats. “I’m not sure where the evidence is to suggest that we have improved in a way that now gives us a chance in these seats,” he said. But, in my view, this was self-fulfilling: we had not been spending money in Tory-held seats and even a turbo-charged Jeremy could not visit all of them.

In the end, the deadlock was broken by Andrew Murray, Unite’s chief of staff, who had been seconded to the campaign and joined us on Friday, May 12. Andrew was treated by Southside directors with the respect that someone from Labour’s largest affiliate should command, and insisted on seeing for himself the data spreadsheets being used for different types of targeting. His pressure produced some concessions, but what really transformed the situation was a step change in our financial position. Not only had the Unite money come in, the flow of small donations from supporters around the country was much greater than expected. As it became clear that we would far exceed the £2 million raised online in 2015, the lists – for direct mail and newspaper advertising as well as digital advertising – were expanded much deeper into Tory territory, helping to deliver some surprise wins.

As well as supporting me on that issue, Andrew’s arrival was timely at a point when the capacity of the senior team in LOTO was stretched very thinly across the multiple things we were trying to oversee. It was good to have another experienced person sitting in the glasshouse helping with decision-making, speech writing and checking the huge flow of content being pumped out by the campaign.

While the targeting wrangle was rumbling on in the background, the campaign launch in Manchester that Tuesday had gone superbly and really lifted everyone only five days after the local elections. At Southside, the mood was buoyant as we watched on television the former Coronation Street actor Julie Hesmondhalgh saying the election must lead to a country that “gives a toss about stuff” and introducing Jeremy as “a man who’s given his life to giving a toss about other people.” Standing in front of the campaign bus, Jeremy invited Andy Burnham on stage to lay to rest the previous Friday’s crossed wires and then put some real fire into a speech that laid out what was at stake in the election.

One of the biggest cheers came when Jeremy thanked Rupert Murdoch for publishing the Sunday Times Rich List showing that Britain’s richest 1,000 people had seen their wealth rise by 14 per cent in the last year to £658 billion – nearly six times the budget of the NHS.

“Imagine the outcry,” he said, “if public sector workers decided to put in for a 14 per cent pay rise. But it’s no surprise that the richest have got even richer after the tens of billions the Tories have handed them in tax cuts. That’s what we mean when we say the system is rigged for the rich.”

That evening, we achieved our best social media results of the campaign to date when Jeremy posted a Daily Mirror story exposing how a third of the top 100 people on the Rich List were also Tory donors. It was seen by more than 2.9 million on Facebook and 2.3 million on Twitter, with more than 60,000 people on each ‘engaging’ with it in some way. And, to round off the launch day, our first PPB – presented by actor Maxine Peake – attracted a 6.5 million television audience and racked up 1.1 mllion views on Labour’s Facebook page.

The following evening, I walked across St James’ Park to get some exercise before catching the Tube back to where I was staying. The day had been tense – Andrew Murray had not arrived at this point to help resolve the targeting issues – and the stroll was helping me clear my head and re-connect with the outside world. It was a fine spring evening and the park was bustling with people. As I passed Horse Guards Parade, my phone started vibrating. It was a text from Kate McCann at the Daily Telegraph asking me to phone her. I get on well with Kate, but a call from her is rarely good news. I phoned James Schneider to check what was breaking. Someone had leaked our manifesto to the Telegraph and Daily Mirror. Seumas was in a meeting, but James had spoken to him and was handling the calls. Both papers had the whole document, and there was not much we could say because it had not yet been endorsed by Labour’s NEC, shadow cabinet and union affiliates at what is known as the Clause V meeting. That was due to take place the next day – Thursday, May 11 – and had almost unlimited potential for volatility.

The next 24 hours were fraught. Most of the media was speculating about Labour in-fighting or attacking the manifesto as a left-wing throwback to the 1970s. We had to pull Jeremy out of a poster campaign launch on Thursday morning to avoid him facing a barrage of questions he couldn’t answer without pre-judging the Clause V meeting. And to literally add pain to events, the car taking Jeremy to the meeting collided with a BBC camera operator, Giles Wooltorton, injuring his foot. Anyone who thinks the leak was a smart double game by Jeremy’s team has no idea how concerned we were about the sensitivities around the manifesto and the risk of divisions surfacing at the Clause V meeting.

My own view is that the leak is much more likely to have been instigated by enemies of the Labour party than any of the factions inside it. There was no upside to it from any genuine Labour point of view. But there were plenty of people hostile to the party who could have paid handsomely to disrupt our campaign and pre-empt our launch of the manifesto the following Tuesday. Motive is usually the key to these things.

At Southside, it was an emotional moment when Jeremy emerged from the Clause V meeting to tell the media that the manifesto had been unanimously adopted. He said:

“We’ve amended a draft document that was put forward in the most informed, interesting, sensible discussion and debate in our party, and we’ll present this manifesto to the British people in the next few days. Our manifesto will be an offer – and we believe the policies in it are very popular – an offer that will transform the lives of many people in our society and ensure that we have a government in Britain on 8 June that will work for the many, not the few and give everyone in our society a decent opportunity and a decent chance. So, nobody is ignored, nobody is forgotten and nobody is left behind. The details will be published in the next few days. The details will be set out to you, including the costings of all the pledges and promises that we make.”

The Clause V meeting had gone on a long time but only because people had issues to press that were secondary to the core themes. Trident renewal had to be in the manifesto because it is Labour conference policy, but otherwise Jeremy’s opponents in the party were briefing privately that “they were content to let him have the manifesto he wants but in return he must take full responsibility if voters find it less appealing than he does.”⁵

After the Clause V meeting, Jeremy came directly back to Southside to run through his Chatham House speech with Jennifer Larbie and me. He was in fine spirits. The tensions of the day had evaporated by then, and he instantly turned his attention to the finer points of international affairs. He made a few tweaks to the speech, one of which was the important addition of a reference to the 1969 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. He was keen to make the link to an achievement of former Labour prime minister Harold Wilson and highlight its relevance now as a basis for preventing the spread of nuclear weapons.

When he took the stage at Chatham House the next morning, you could tell he felt on home turf, talking about a subject that was his life’s work – how we could build a more peaceful and just world. The speech was broadcast live on the news channels and Facebook. It did the job we set out to do in presenting an alternative view of the security issue. While it did not prove to be the defining ‘Philadelphia moment’ I had envisaged, it certainly set us in good stead for those moments when they came.

¹ John Curtice, professor of politics at Strathclyde University, see the Independent, 5.5.2017.

² Tim Shipman, ‘Labour tax rise to hit earners on £80,000,’ the Sunday Times, 7.5.2017.

³ John Curtice, the Independent, 5.5.2017.

⁴ Jo Green, ‘How to save the Labour party’, the Spectator, 5.5.2017.

⁵ Iain Watson, BBC political correspondent, ‘General election 2017: Labour manifesto draft leaked,’ BBC, 11.5.2017.