In May 2015, David Cameron was swept to victory in defiance of the opinion polls. But it came as no surprise to his wily campaign director, Lynton Crosby. In an exclusive extract from a new book, he explains his brutally effective strategy

“The trouble with a lot of the coverage of elections these days, with all these polls that have come out, is that it is like a kid sitting in the back seat of a car shouting: ‘Are we there yet? Are we there yet?’” says Lynton Crosby, the Conservative party’s 2015 election campaign director. “You just wanna tell them: ‘Shut up, close your eyes, sleep for half an hour, and we will be at grandma’s soon.’”

The media coverage of the 2015 general election was particularly frenzied. A relentless cycle of news and speculation, amid an electoral landscape disrupted by the rise of numerous small parties, changed direction from one moment to the next. Successive polls suggested the country was heading for another coalition. At the eye of the storm was Crosby, hired by David Cameron to deliver the outright election victory that had somehow eluded the Conservatives in 2010. His job was to ignore the voices from the back of the car who told him that his mission was impossible. “Of course, if everyone keeps shouting at you, you hear the noise,” he says. “But if you’re leading a campaign, your job is to stay calm and make everyone around you believe that if you just keep doing what you’re doing, you can win.”

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It was this hardened self-belief in the forensic campaign strategy he had been planning for the past two years that helped Crosby deliver one of the greatest electoral surprises of recent times.

On 9 April 2015, 10 days into the election campaign, defence secretary Michael Fallon launched a brutal attack on Labour leader Ed Miliband. Suggesting that Miliband would scrap the Trident nuclear deterrent in order to strike an electoral deal with the Scottish National party, Fallon told the Times: “Miliband stabbed his own brother in the back to become Labour leader. Now he is willing to stab the United Kingdom in the back to become prime minister.”

Until this point, Labour’s campaign had been gaining momentum: some polls had them narrowly ahead of the Tories and Miliband’s pledge to crack down on nondomicile tax avoidance was dominating the headlines. Fallon’s attack seemed crude and uncalled for. Many commentators suggested that it would backfire. They were wrong.

Crosby, whose record of election victories in his native Australia had earned him the nickname “the Wizard of Oz”, subscribed to a campaigning philosophy about simple messages that tapped into what the electorate might already be thinking. A story by Tim Montgomerie in the Times in early 2015 reported a Downing Street meeting among senior Tories in which they sought to craft more imaginative ways of positioning themselves on the economy. This ranged from cracking down on bankers and building more houses in London to cool the property market to offering more help to the low-paid. According to Montgomerie’s source, Crosby’s response was characteristically frank: “All very fascinating, but voters only need to know two things about the economy: it was broken five years ago by the other lot and it’s OK again now under us.”

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The son of a farmer, Crosby had studied economics at university and ran unsuccessfully as a parliamentary candidate before becoming a campaign strategist, most famously for the leader of the Australian Liberal party, John Howard. Crosby was credited with playing a vital role in Howard’s successive election victories between 1996 and 2004. In 2005, he had been hired by then Tory leader, Michael Howard, to run his UK election campaign. Crosby’s so called dog-whistle approach (whereby advertising often came with an unpalatable rightwing subtext) caused controversy back then – and the Conservatives were defeated at the polls by Tony Blair’s Labour party. Crosby claimed he had been hired too late in the day to make a proper impact: “You can’t fatten the pig on market day,” he was quoted as saying.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Crosby: his priority was to speak directly to voters themselves. Photograph: Stefan Rousseau/PA

The signature ‘dead cat’ manoeuvre

It was Crosby who had been behind Michael Fallon’s attack on Miliband. In order to counter the apparent upturn in Labour’s campaign, Crosby had deployed his signature “dead cat” manoeuvre. Boris Johnson (who had previously employed Crosby as his campaign manager during the 2008 and 2012 London mayoral elections) had once described the strategy like this: “There is one thing that is absolutely certain about throwing a dead cat on the dining room table – and I don’t mean that people will be outraged, alarmed, disgusted. That is true, but irrelevant. The key point, says my Australian friend, is that everyone will shout, ‘Jeez, mate, there’s a dead cat on the table!’ In other words, they will be talking about the dead cat – the thing you want them to talk about – and they will not be talking about the issue that has been causing you so much grief.”

And that is exactly what happened. For the next 24 hours, media attention switched away from Labour’s clampdown on tax loopholes and towards Fallon’s outburst. The veterans at M&C Saatchi, the Conservative party’s primary ad agency, were increasingly impressed by their new campaign boss: “He lent a tremendous discipline and focus to the campaign,” says Jeremy Sinclair. “He could be blunt, but he kept everyone on track.”

Many within the Conservative party had perceived the 2010 election campaign as a shambles. The party had flipflopped over strategy. They had switched ad agency halfway through the campaign. And there had been confusion over who was in charge, with both Andy Coulson and Steve Hilton playing senior, but often conflicting, roles. Cameron would not make the same mistake twice. Crosby had been appointed as the Conservatives’ full-time campaign chief in 2013 for a reported fee of £500,000.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Michael Fallon: the Tory defence minister’s attack on Miliband was masterminded by Crosby. Photograph: Mark Thomas/Rex/Shutterstock

Crosby’s first instruction was for the party to “scrape the barnacles off the boat”, by shedding extraneous policies in favour of a ruthless focus on core issues such as welfare and immigration. It sounded like something that the Saatchi team themselves might advise. But while the perennial Tory admen admired Crosby’s abilities, the feeling wasn’t mutual. “I’m not sure he wanted to hire any agency at first,” says Saatchi exec Bill Muirhead. “And particularly not us, because he likes control and thought there might be a risk we would use the back door to go straight to the prime minister.”

Certainly, a bond had been formed between Cameron and the Saatchi team after the events of 2010. Cameron had sent a note to the agency after the election that read, simply: “What can I say? You’ve done it again.” He and his chancellor, George Osborne, assumed that the admen would be returning to the fold in 2015. But Crosby would take some convincing. “He doesn’t believe in magic,” says Sinclair. “He is very focussed on strategy and is not easily excited about the way in which you execute it.” In other words, it would take more than a funny headline and some glossy images to impress the hard-nosed Australian.

Crosby tells me as much. “Advertising is one in a number of tools in a campaign,” he says, before listing direct mail and phone calls as equally important components. “The most effective advertising is that which takes an existing perception and leverages it. Advertising is, of itself, not a very persuasive medium or a mind-changing tool. Its purpose is really to reinforce and trigger existing perceptions.”

‘It was part of our strategy to target Miliband’s perceived weakness’



The defining theme of the 2015 Conservative campaign came as a surprise to some. Midway through, the Saatchi team would unveil a poster depicting Miliband tucked into the breast pocket of former SNP leader Alex Salmond. It was a classic Saatchi execution: simple, powerful, funny and brutal. It made a significant political point seem entirely self-evident with a minimum of fuss. Later, with characteristic self-congratulation, M&C Saatchi would take out a double-page ad in trade magazine Campaign, demonstrating the relationship between the advent of the poster and increased press coverage of a potential Labour/SNP pact.

But, as Sinclair suggests, Crosby does not believe in magic. Public fears about the prospect of a so called “coalition of chaos” were, Crosby says, prevalent long before the Saatchi poster. “It was part of our strategy to target Miliband’s perceived weakness,” he says. “We knew a whole year before the campaign started that people were concerned that he would succumb too easily to powerful interest groups. The poster was just an expression of that popularly held perception. It didn’t create it, it just drew attention to it.”

Crosby acknowledges the impact the best political advertising can have on what he calls “earned media”. “A great poster, like the Salmond/Miliband one, can get conversations started in the press and on TV because journalists get excited by it,” he says. But for him, exciting the media was very much a secondary concern. His priority was to speak directly to voters themselves. In a particularly close electoral fight, with several minor parties muddying the waters, Crosby knew it was crucial to identify the small groups of voters in marginal seats who could influence the result. And a new media landscape allowed him to communicate with those individuals directly. Social media, he says, “has increased intimacy and speed” of communications. Gigantic posters plastered on British high streets seemed a blunt tool by comparison.

In 2013, around the time Crosby returned to the Tory fold, so too did a lesser-known figure who would play a major role in their campaign. Tom Edmonds had started out as an ad agency copywriter before becoming an in-house creative at Conservative HQ during the 2010 campaign. He had found it a frustrating experience, with the digital work he had produced continually playing second fiddle to the headline-grabbing posters and press ads produced by expensive ad agencies.

This time, there was an appetite for radical change inside the campaign machine. Edmonds’s first task was to identify the exact people the party needed to communicate with. “The first two years was a case of building our database of Tory voters – and potential Tory voters,” he says. “We grew our mailing list from 300,000 to 1.5 million. That doesn’t happen overnight, and it took money. We did some stuff on change.org and other petition sites to find people who were interested in causes that chimed with Conservative values. We sought out like-minded people on YouTube and Facebook. Once you have these people on your mailing list, you can start communicating with them on a regular basis.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Crosby’s team identified specific voting groups and targeted them with bespoke content. Photograph: Graeme Robertson for the Guardian

Emails and tweets to win over wavering voters

As the election drew closer, Edmonds and his 10-strong team – under the stewardship of Crosby – began producing bespoke content for specific voting groups around the country. There were those who perceived the Conservative campaign to be low-key in comparison to the theatrical broadcasts and poster unveilings of the past. But Edmonds insists this was a view generated by a London-based media that was not the target of their carefully planned digital campaign. He shows me a selection of messages, each sent out to different types of potential Tory voter. One tweet was designed specifically with female Ukip waverers in mind: “We knew they would lean Conservative when the choice was about the economy, and their family’s future,” explains Edmonds. The message read: “We’re building a brighter, more secure future for our children and grandchildren. A vote for Ukip, or any party other than the Conservatives, would let in Labour and the SNP – and risk everything we’ve achieved together over the last five years.” Attached was a short video about the economic recovery.

Another sponsored tweet, aimed squarely at Lib Dem waverers in the south-west, declared: “This general election is not like last time. By voting Lib Dem you could end up with a chaotic coalition of Ed Miliband and who-knows-what other parties that could put the economy, jobs and public services at risk.” The accompanying image showed a swingometer with Cameron looking decidedly prime ministerial on one side, and a confused looking Miliband, flanked by Salmond and new SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon on the other. An arrow pointed to a small amount of white space dividing them, beneath the headline: “Yours is one of 23 seats that will decide this election.”

It was a graphic and immediate way of spoonfeeding key people the notion of tactical voting. “In terms of how we communicated with the public, it was a complete turnaround from 2010,” says Edmonds. “We could put together ideas quickly in-house, get a quick approval from Lynton, who would be sat beside us in the office, then send it out immediately. We could also track its impact. If it seemed to be working, we would press on. If people weren’t engaging, we tried something else.” The amount of online activity by the Conservatives was immense: in April, the press reported that the party was spending £100,000 per month on Facebook advertising alone (a figure which Edmonds confirms was “roughly accurate”).

Meanwhile, the press was paying closer attention to the more visible ads being created by M&C Saatchi. As far back as 2014, Sinclair and Muirhead had been pitching their ideas for the campaign ahead. “We produced an image of a bucket of manure and a shovel,” says Sinclair. “The headline read: ‘We’re sorry it’s taking us so long to clear up Labour’s mess.’ We presented it to the leadership at party headquarters and everyone seemed to like it. The prime minister is very receptive to advertising and so is George Osborne. They laughed.” There was an enthusiasm among key members of the campaign team to run the poster right away and set the tone for the following year’s battle. But one figure – a woman who Muirhead and Sinclair refuse to name – argued against the idea, saying: “I don’t think people find manure particularly attractive.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Tories’ wrecking ball poster. Photograph: M&C Saatchi

At the start of March, billboards across the UK were plastered with a gigantic wrecking ball smashing into a headline that read: “A recovering economy. Don’t let Labour wreck it.” It was as blunt and confrontational as one would expect from an M&C Saatchi poster. And in its wanton simplicity, it was straight out of the Lynton Crosby playbook. “Labour will wreck the economy, that was the perception that our research proved was already out there,” says Crosby. “And that was all we really wanted to say. In any campaign, you have limited resources. You cannot talk about 50 different things because people don’t have time to think about them all.”

Crosby continually fed Saatchis evidence that Miliband was perceived as dangerously weak by large parts of the public. In early 2015, Sinclair and Muirhead had presented a poster depicting the Labour leader standing beside the deep end of a swimming pool wearing goggles, a rubber ring and inflatable armbands. There was no headline; the image said it all. But focus groups suggested the poster was perhaps too mean. The Saatchi team created a second draft of the poster, in which Miliband was joined by Salmond, dressed in a lifeguard’s uniform, with a speech bubble that read: “I’ll save you!” Salmond was no longer leader of the SNP, but his public profile had been boosted by the 2014 independence referendum and the Saatchi team used it to their advantage. The poster was received positively by focus groups. But the Saatchi team refined it further, depicting a gormless-looking Miliband peeping out of Salmond’s top pocket. The poster simultaneously convinced floating voters in England that a vote for any party other than the Conservatives would deliver a “coalition of chaos” – while those in Scotland were further convinced that a vote for the SNP would deliver serious influence for the party in Westminster.

On 9 April (just as the Times was reporting Fallon’s attack on Miliband), the Guardian splashed its front page with the headline: “Labour Moves Ahead of Tories on Day the Polls Turned.” The article continued: “The strongest, if still tentative, sign that the Conservatives’ narrow and negative campaign is misfiring emerged on Thursday when three polls showed Labour moving ahead and, for the first time, one poll found that Ed Miliband had more positive personal approval ratings than David Cameron.”

Opinion polls that were falsely encouraging to Labour



Labour’s main ad agency for the 2015 campaign was Lucky Generals, founded in 2013 by lifelong Labour supporters Danny Brooke-Taylor and Helen Calcraft. But by this stage, says Brooke-Taylor, the party had “gone quiet” on his agency. Some posters attacking the Tory record on the NHS had appeared online but nobody knew who had created them. It seemed that the encouraging movement in the opinion polls had convinced Miliband and his team that they were on course for a narrow victory with or without extra campaign advice.

Meanwhile, at Crosby’s campaign nerve centre, there was a great deal more scepticism towards the polls. “All of the polls they referred to were well within the margin of error,” says Crosby. “There is laziness to political discourse. Commentators sit in their offices and think: ‘I’ll go and write a column.’ They have not gone out there and talked to a voter. They would not know a bloody voter if they fell over one. Then they look at a poll and assume that a poll is a proxy for what is really going on.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest David Cameron and Crosby during the London mayoral campaign in 2012. Photograph: Andrew Parsons/i-Images

The polls continuously pointed towards a hung parliament with the Conservatives as the slightly larger party. The eventual result, in which Cameron was able to form a government with an overall majority of 12 seats, proved the biggest shock since the 1992 election. Crosby and pollster-in-chief Jim Messina were perhaps the only people in the country who were not surprised, having ignored the public opinion polls throughout the campaign. “Ask my wife and she will tell you that I was the most relaxed I have ever been during a campaign,” says Crosby. “That does not mean there weren’t some highly stressful nights. But when you looked at the numbers and put them into our model, I always believed that David Cameron would be prime minister.”

Crosby insists that polls overestimated the turnout among groups more likely to vote Labour, such as young people and ethnic minorities. “Newspapers are not interested in reporting statistical dead heats,” he says. “There is no drama in that. They want to speculate about who is going to win. We were using polling differently. We’d look at polls and think: ‘Well, shit, we are down with women! Why are we down with women? And what can we do about it?’

“All pollsters and polls make assumptions,” he continues “Any pollster will tell you that a poll with a margin of error of plus or minus 3% means the numbers could be 3% higher or lower, 95% percent of the time. Five percent of the time, they could be completely out of queue with what is going on. But the media just grab the top line and focus on that.”

Labour’s final campaign debacle was the unveiling of Miliband’s so-called “Ed Stone”, a 2.6 metre-high, two-tonne stone with Labour’s key election pledges chiselled into it. Miliband declared that, once elected, he would erect the stone in the Downing Street rose garden to remind him of his goals. It was the immediate subject of online ridicule. Having cost an estimated £30,000 to make, it was found just days after the election dumped in a warehouse on an industrial estate in Woolwich, south London.

Brooke-Taylor had watched its unveiling on the news, aghast. “I was initially worried that it might have been somehow based on one of our ideas, which it wasn’t,” he says. “But at least it was offering something positive, not just bashing the Tories, like everything else.” But for many, it was symbolic of a vague and complacent Labour campaign strategy that would, ultimately, doom them to one of their worst ever election defeats.

“Labour thought that because the Conservatives did not win 2010, when they had Gordon Brown as their leader and the economy was in the toilet, the Tories would be unable to win [in 2015] and all they had to do was sit on the horse and hang on,” says Crosby. “They never said sorry for their mishaps, they never really did an honest review of their policies, they never had a story about the future for the British people. They just did not do the work. They were intellectually lazy and thought themselves intellectually superior.”

The 2015 election might have seen influence slip further from the hands of traditional ad agencies. But the principles that Crosby successfully applied to the Conservative campaign (brevity, relentlessness, focus on and leverage of public preconceptions) were the same ones that ad agencies – not least the Saatchis – had been espousing for decades. It was not the strategy that Crosby changed but the execution.

Digital media has increased both the possibilities and demands of political communication. Edmonds’s team at Tory HQ was better able to keep pace with the fast-turnaround world of digital content. Suddenly, traditional advertising agencies seemed flat-footed by comparison.

For Sinclair and Muirhead at M&C Saatchi, the campaign had been like no other they had worked on before. “People in Westminster didn’t see the real picture because there were not as many 48-sheet posters as usual,” says Muirhead. “It was based more upon micro-targeting very specific groups of voters in marginal seats.” Sinclair is nevertheless convinced that the bigger, national message still played a crucial role in the result. “The whole thing was based on a very simple message: only two people could be prime minister. One of them is weak, the other is David Cameron. Cameron won the election because he was the more convincing prime minister. And we are at our best when we have a good product to work with.”

This is an edited extract from the paperback edition of Mad Men & Bad Men: When British Politics Met Advertising, by Sam Delaney, published by Faber & Faber on 4 February at £9.99 rrp. To order a discounted copy, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846.