Barack Obama sent his pollster Jim Messina to the UK in 2014 with his blessing and a message to stop Ed Miliband winning the general election, it was claimed in a victory speech given by a Conservative Party co-chairman the night of the election.



Lord Feldman’s remarks are described in a new book on the 2015 election by two academics, Philip Cowley and Dennis Kavanagh.

Any suggestion that Obama had a preference for David Cameron over Labour, the Democrat’s natural allies, will come as a shock to the Miliband camp.

The claim is made in a footnote in The British General Election of 2015, but the authors say they have double sourced Feldman’s remarks that Messina was sent to help the Conservatives with Obama’s “explicit approval”.

Messina’s expertise was in identifying segments of voters, especially those most likely to respond to a central narrative built around economic security.

In 2014, Labour hired its own adviser from the Obama campaign team, David Axelrod, but for whatever reason he failed to have the same impact for the Miliband campaign.

According to the book, Messina was also important in identifying Miliband’s unfitness for office. Conservative post-election analysis revealed that across its key seats, more than 80% of people who thought Miliband was not fit for office voted Conservative in the end, suggesting he was critical to the result.

The book also discloses that Russell Brand had decided and told the Labour campaign that he would back Miliband before he interviewed the Labour leader, even though the Labour campaign team pretended during the election that his endorsement depended on Miliband’s answers to the questions posed by Brand in the interview.

The disclosure raises questions about whether Brand colluded with Miliband to string out his endorsement – the first tranche of the interview was produced on 29 April and the second tranche on 4 May.

Cowley and Kavanagh say three separate sources told them that Brand had agreed to endorse Miliband before the interview.

It has also been alleged that Brand tipped off a friend that he was due to interview Miliband at his house, and a picture of the Miliband team arriving at his east London house appeared on Twitter, so throwing the Labour team’s media schedule into chaos.

The study also reports that Labour planned to offer the Liberal Democrats three cabinet seats in the event of a hung parliament, including deputy prime minister, Treasury chief secretary and education secretary. The precise formulation would have depended on the scale of Labour’s dependence on the Lib Dems to secure an overall majority.

Cowley and and Kavanagh also examined the impact of the polling error during the election and the extent to which this led to a focus in the election coverage on the process issues around the election, such as how a hung parliament might work, as opposed to the policy issues raised.

The book argues: “If we assume the polls were as wrong throughout the parliament as they were on election day and adjust the voting intention polling data accordingly, then the polling crossover [ie Conservatives overtaking Labour] occurred sometime around July 2013, with the Conservative lead slowly but steadily increasing after that. Indeed Labour led and probably only narrowly for around 18 months between roughly March 2012 and July 2013.”

The authors say that if this is correct, it is possible to contend the 2010-15 parliament could have been very different. Alternative possibilities include a Labour ejection of Miliband as party leader in 2014, a Cameron decision to collapse the coalition early to prompt an election and a different result in Scotland.

The authors conclude: “If so this is a much bigger democratic problem than the polls being wrong during the six weeks of the short election campaign.”