How a car salesman and an anti-war demonstration illustrate a strategy for modernising the Tories
At the 2005 Conservative conference David Cameron made a highly successful pitch for the leadership on a platform of modernisation. The favourite David Davis’s speech fell flat. This piece appeared after the conference but before the first leadership ballot of MPs.
Joe Girard sold a lot of cars. A lot. For twelve years in a row he featured in The Guinness Book of World Records as the world’s greatest salesman. Let me tell you how he did it.
On birthdays and public holidays potential customers would receive a card from Mr Girard. They might get as many as twelve a year. ‘Happy Birthday’ the card would read, or ‘Happy Easter’, or whatever. And then followed the words: ‘I like you. From Joe Girard, Chrysler Montana.’ As Girard put it: ‘There’s nothing else on the card. Nothin’ but my name. I’m just telling ’em that I like ’em.’ And it works. People like to be liked.
Since I was first alerted to Mr Girard’s activities by the social psychologist Robert Cialdini, I have talked of them often to Conservative audiences. You see, I think the Tory party has spent a great deal of the past two decades sending out cards reading, ‘Happy birthday, we don’t like you.’ And, naturally, it doesn’t work.
I was thinking of Mr Girard again when I read the recent comments of the right-wing columnist Simon Heffer. He ridiculed the Tory modernisers for believing that the party lost elections because it was ‘insufficiently nice to homosexuals’. Well, yes Simon, you gorgeous meaty boy, the Tory party has lost votes by being insufficiently nice to homosexuals. But there’s worse news to come. You might be asked to be nice to some other people, too.
The reason? Because of a moderniser’s strategy for reviving the Conservative Party that they are calling ‘show, don’t tell’.
For the last week the leadership contender David Cameron has been urged by innumerable columnists to start putting ‘meat on the policy bones’. He is disinclined to oblige. He argues that the advice misses the point. And he is right.
The starting point for the alternative ‘show, don’t tell’ strategy is the poll-finding that featured prominently in the conference speech of party chairman Francis Maude – that those who agree with a particular policy are far less likely to assent to the proposition if they know that it is a Tory policy. The Conservative Party is damaging its own cause.
This means that the central job of a new Tory leader is to put the Conservative argument in a different way; to win trust and wider support for the policies of the Centre Right, not just to outline new schemes; to embody a new attitude, talk a new language, show that he is in touch with voter concerns; to be the change, not just to talk about it.
Just as the Thatcher revolution applied some basic economics to public policy, so modernisation involves accepting some basic social psychology.
The things for which Tory modernisers are most mocked – going around without a tie, drinking cappuccinos in Notting Hill, organising focus groups, recognising how Tony Blair has changed politics and being sufficiently nice to homosexuals – are not risible at all. Dressing like the rest of Britain, sounding like the rest of Britain, setting as policy priorities the things that voters care about most and relating better to upper-middle-class people in metropolitan areas are important.
Take dress. Few things have brought more ridicule down upon Tory modernisers than dressing differently. What a trivial thing to worry about. Yes? No. Dress matters.
As Cialdini states in his book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion: ‘We are more likely to help those who dress like us.’ He cites, for instance, an experiment conducted in the early 1970s when experimenters, dressed either as ‘straights’ or as ‘hippies’, approached students and asked them for some change for the telephone. The students were far more likely to help if the experimenter was dressed as they were. Similarly marchers in an anti-war demonstration were much more likely to sign a petition proffered by a person dressed like them. Indeed many of them signed without bothering to read it first.
Most of this isn’t rocket science. And I think that this is what bothers the critics. Sounding moderate, shaping your political programme around the priorities of the electorate, avoiding pointless attacks on harmless groups (why, for instance, do Tories go on about people studying golf-course management? What did greenkeepers do wrong?), eschewing silly partisan name-calling. It all seems too simple. The critics yearn for some huge ideological betrayal that they can then denounce. They are almost begging Mr Cameron to disappoint them with some policy sell-out that they can disagree with.
Yet a policy sell-out wouldn’t help. Of course it will be necessary to change Tory policy priorities and, in time, there will certainly need to be policy development in new areas. This is a critical part of demonstrating that the Conservative Party’s culture has changed. But the central insight of ‘show, don’t tell’ is that until the Conservative Party is once again listened to, liked and trusted, its policies, changed or not, will make no impact at all.
The Tory peer Lord Ashcroft had the pollster Populus track public recognition of Tory policies during the last campaign. Recognition that the Tories had been campaigning for a tax cut reached a peak of 3 per cent. Fewer still believed that they meant it.
This is the reason that David Davis’s conference failure was so devastating. He didn’t trip over the platform and bang his head on the lectern. He didn’t talk gibberish: he’s an intelligent man. It’s just that suddenly everyone could see that he can tell but he can’t show, that he can talk of change but he can never be the change.
There has been so much new policy during this leadership campaign. This candidate wants to restore advanced dividend tax credits, that candidate wants to lengthen the contract period for charitable provision of public services, a third candidate wants a new charities tax regime. But can you recall which candidate wanted which policy?
Exactly. Putting policy meat on the bones just isn’t the point. David Cameron should go on ignoring those who tell him that it is.