The Man in Westminster doesn’t know best; that’s why it’s daft of politicians to attack focus groups
During the 2005 election for a Tory leader (which David Cameron eventually won) much of the discussion was about why the party lost in the general election that had just happened, and how to win again. As a way of emphasising their own authenticity, some candidates and commentators attacked the use of focus groups.
I’ve come up with a really great idea, one that is bound to help revive the fortunes of the Conservative Party. Hear me out. I bet you’ll think it’s really spiffing.
The Tories should cancel all the professional assistance they have been receiving that helps them to discover what voters think. Instead they should simply guess.
Of course, I don’t expect them to do this entirely unaided. They will be allowed to make full use of some randomly selected comments made to me on the doorstep during the 2001 election campaign, if I can remember them correctly. And I’ll try and dig out some old correspondence, too, if anyone thinks it may come in handy.
Naturally, this will be a little hit and miss. Not to worry. It doesn’t matter what voters think anyway. The party should just trust its instincts, rather than mess around trying to divine the views of the electorate.
What do you think? That ought to do the trick, I reckon.
My idea may strike you as, ahem, a little eccentric. Yet amazingly enough it has become a widespread view in the Tory party. So widespread, indeed, that I feel it necessary to point out that I was being satirical.
Attacking focus-group polling, the assembling of small groups of voters who are interviewed in detail about their opinions, has become a standard piece of rhetoric in the debate on the future of the Tory party. David Davis talks of ‘hocus-pocus focus groups’ and tried to cancel them when he was party chairman. ‘I bring to politics a rejection of focus groups and opinion polls,’ says Ken Clarke. Norman Lamont agrees. Lord Saatchi regrets not being firm in his opposition to focus-group polling. Simon Heffer congratulates them all. Matthew Parris thinks the critics are on the right track. The attack wins applause at constituency suppers and nods of approval at the 1922 Committee.
With so much agreement, it’s a shame it’s a load of nonsense, isn’t it? I’m sorry to sound intemperate. Ever since I worked for some years as a Tory party official, I’ve sat through so many attacks on focus groups. And I’ve been so polite, haven’t said a word, let it all wash over me. Then last week, I just snapped.
Funnily enough, the remark that did it for me didn’t come from a Tory at all. It came from Jon Cruddas, who until pretty recently was a senior adviser to Tony Blair. He urged the Prime Minister to free himself from the ‘dead hand of Middle England’ (top piece of electoral advice, that) and blamed Mr Blair’s shortcomings on his consultation of focus groups.
So here is this man Cruddas, who only enjoyed a position of power because his boss had the perspicacity to understand the need to move the Labour Party towards the centre and the intelligence to use professional polling to help to do it, and even he is attacking focus groups. Time, I decided, to stop letting it wash over me.
Now, it has to be admitted that focus groups can often be comically ill-informed. Attempts to investigate reactions to Michael Howard being Jewish ran aground when a group in Nottingham was asked to name any Jews in public life. A long silence ensued, only broken when one man offered ‘Whoopi Goldberg’ as an answer.
After Gordon Brown announced huge increases in spending on the NHS, I was keen to know the public reaction to the days of headlines that his new policy had attracted. Our pollsters reported back to me that not a single person in eight groups had heard of there being any announcement on anything.
Even when the groups do have views it can be dangerous to follow them. The Government’s policy on soft drugs, for instance, is uncannily similar to the view that a focus group will give – the policing of soft-drug use should be relaxed so that the sale of hard drugs can be combated more successfully. The initial announcement of the new policy was therefore guaranteed a fairly good reception.
Yet there is a difficulty. What if the policy doesn’t work? What if the focus groups are simply wrong, and soft-drug liberalisation leads to greater hard-drug use? The public won’t put its hand up and say: ‘It’s a fair cop, guv. We gave you bad advice.’ They will blame the politicians, and rightly so.
In fact, where focus groups that I helped to commission strayed into discussing detailed policy, the result was almost always incoherent. A polling report we were given on healthcare was headlined – THE NHS: IN A FOG.
Yet, anybody who mistakes a focus group for a meeting of Mensa or the AGM of a think tank is obviously an idiot anyway. That is not their point. What good professional polling does is to help politicians to understand what voters think, what different language means to them, what they care about and what they do and do not understand.
The Conservative Party’s problem has not been listening to too many focus groups, but not listening to them enough.
A good example is tax policy. The party has spent tens of thousands of pounds on focus groups that tell it that voters do not believe tax-cut promises. This is not an ideological point. It does not say whether voters want tax cuts, that is a different question. Nor whether tax cuts are right, that is yet another question. But it does indicate that the central message of successive Tory election campaigns has cut no ice with voters.
You’d think that one would want to know that. But apparently not. And that’s why the grumbling about focus groups matters so much. It’s why this is not a small argument about how to spend £100,000 of campaign funds.
The opponents of focus groups believe that they know what voters want without having to ask. They also believe that voters need to come to the Conservative Party rather than the Conservative Party moving towards the voters. They believe, they seriously believe, that the Tory party has been too responsive to the electorate.
I don’t think they are quite correct about that, do you?