Ed Miliband needs to win back the centre ground, but he won’t succeed unless he knows what makes it tick
In May 2010 the coalition was formed and David Cameron became prime minister. On 25 September Labour elected Ed Miliband as party leader. Three days later, during the Labour conference and on the day of his leader’s speech, I wrote this, which appeared the following day.
I think that it is high time Ed Miliband visited an American airport. He can wait until this conference thingy is over – Hilary Benn is speaking on sustainable communities on Thursday, and he won’t want to miss that – but the moment that the chair starts thanking the police and the staff and so forth, Ed should high-tail it.
American airports are a magnet for cult groups. And in their hands they carry small bunches of flowers. As travellers pass, group members attempt to give them flowers. They are really persistent, refusing to take no for an answer. And then, when they have successfully handed over their ‘gift’, they ask for a donation. Now you would think that having suffered the irritation of having to accept unwanted flowers, the last thing that the victim would want to do is make a donation. Wrong. It turns out that travellers who finally take a bunch are more likely to give money. They are. There have been studies.
Watch and learn, Ed. People reciprocate favours. Any kind of favours, even ones they didn’t really want in the first place. In his classic book Influence, Robert Cialdini explains how people will reciprocate the receipt of a cheap pen included in a letter seeking a charitable donation, they will reciprocate the concession of a point in an argument, and they will reciprocate liking.
In other words, people are more likely to have affection for you if you show affection for them. Successful car salesmen sometimes exploit this in the crassest way possible, sending birthday cards with the message ‘I like you’ written inside. Or they might do it subtly, by suggesting that they are similar to you. Spotting your golf-club tie, they talk of golf; spotting your son’s football kit, they reveal that they support the same team.
Looking back, I think that one of the crucial political steps from William Hague’s leadership of the Conservative Party to David Cameron’s came with an understanding that liking is reciprocal. Swing voters wouldn’t like the Tories until the Tories liked swing voters. Mr Hague’s Conservatives didn’t look like swing voters, didn’t talk like swing voters and couldn’t understand swing voters. The reaction of swing voters to this was predictable.
Tony Blair writes in his memoirs of his bewilderment that the Tories used to attack him for enjoying both fish and chips and linguini with sun-dried tomatoes. He points out that millions of other people enjoy both these dishes.
Mr Blair, of course, ‘got’ the Tories. His father had been a minor Conservative politician. A friend relates that the moment when he bonded with the former Prime Minister was when he told Mr Blair that his parents always voted Conservative.
And then came Mr Cameron. He understands people who voted for Mr Blair. He rather likes Mr Blair himself. He likes swing voters and they like him back. Funny that. That liking suffused everything he did. It was more important than policy change in helping the Tories to reconnect.
Anyway, I think the reciprocity of liking might turn out to be Ed Miliband’s big problem. Ed, like his brother, is an intelligent, rather nice man. He’s a little serious sometimes, perhaps, but maybe that is just because he cares a lot about the politics of belonging and it weighs him down or something. I don’t, however, think he much likes or understands people who voted for David Cameron.
He regards supporting the Conservatives as a very odd thing to do. He gives you – and I am not the only person to experience this – a sort of compassionate but rather irritated look, as if you are a bit dim, perhaps, and certainly a great disappointment to him.
I suspect that this incomprehension will be reciprocated. And it will prove a big problem for him, one that he will struggle to overcome. Because voters are very sensitive. They can detect immediately what a politician thinks of them.
Oh, and there’s two more things. The first is this – a politician can’t fake it. You can’t pretend to like someone or claim to ‘get it’ if you actually don’t. Authenticity is essential.
After 1997 Conservative politicians knew what they were supposed to say, the boxes they needed to tick. And they said it, they ticked the boxes. But this didn’t mean they really understood, or quite believed, what they were saying. They would use phrases such as ‘I know we seemed out of touch’, rather than ‘I agree we were out of touch’. Many of the words Mr Cameron later used about changing the party were being spoken from the moment of the 1997 defeat, but the sentiment wasn’t the same at all.
The Labour leader’s speech yesterday reminded me very much of those early Tory speeches. The more this week that Mr Miliband has said that he gets it, the less I have believed that he does. The more he said he ‘understood’ voter concerns (rather than shared them) the more I wondered whether he really does. I think it was a speech where his instincts were telling him one thing while his script said something else. And this uncertainty transmitted itself to the audience.
So you can’t fake it. And there’s a second discipline – you can’t change voters. In the words of Billy Joel, you have to like them just the way they are. At the heart of Mr Miliband’s speech, and of his political strategy, is the idea that you can move the centre ground, pick it up and put it down a little to the left. The starting point of the two successful modern attempts at party reform – Tony Blair and David Cameron’s starting point – was that you cannot shift the centre ground.
Events might, but you can’t. You have to accept where the centre ground is, and live with that discipline.
Early in his speech Mr Miliband asserted: ‘The most important lesson of New Labour is this: every time we made progress we did it by challenging the conventional wisdom.’ The truth was the exact opposite.
New Labour made progress by, at long last, after many years of defiance, accepting the conventional wisdom.
Yesterday’s speech veered erratically between conviction and calculation and back again. I think Ed Miliband is going to find it hard to avoid his leadership doing the same.