One of the most ball-achingly frustrating things about Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party (and there is a lot of competition) is that the internal friction brought upon by his leadership style is causing progressives to have all the wrong arguments.



I don’t just mean the now deathly-dull moderate/socialist civil war in the Labour Party. I also think that the scale of the Labour leadership’s ineptitude is causing folk of different political persuasions to take their eyes off the ball. Liberal Democrats (understandably keen to present ourselves as the sensible alternative to Corbynism) are spending too much time talking about how to ‘fill the centre-left space’ that has been evacuated by Labour. A hard truth for Lib Dems is that we don’t seem to be doing a very good job of that. We are now polling 2% (25% of our GE2015 vote) below what we scored at the disastrous General Election last May. Surely one thing that Lib Dems can learn from last May is that defining ourselves in terms of our opposition to other parties is just not a vote-winner. And yes, politics is about more than winning votes. But you can only act on all of that principled stuff AFTER you’ve won a load of votes.

This is something the Tories have a very firm grasp on (the vote-winning I mean, not the principles). Their 2015 campaign was era-defining. If that sounds hyperbolic, consider where we are now politically compared to where we were a month before the election. We assumed that the Conservatives were a party full of old people who didn’t have the energy to campaign in the way that Labour and the Lib Dems did. We assumed that there was no such thing as a majority government anymore. And we assumed that the Tories spending £100,000 a month on Facebook advertising was a sign of haphazard desperation rather than intelligent targeting.

So, how did they succeed? And more importantly how can we, the good guys, emulate that success? (By the way, this is what I mean by us not having the right arguments- instead of talking about how to win in the future, progressives (and particularly Labour) seem keener on arguing over whose fault it was they lost in the past).

Well there are a few things I believe we can learn from the Tories’ campaign strategies. And one thing we should most definitely not learn. So, without further ado, here is what I reckon progressives should be taking away from the Tories’ victory last May:

1) Don’t waste time talking about process.

This is one of the key tenets of any Crosby campaign strategy. The simple idea is that any time a senior politician pops up on TV to talk up their own campaign he/she is guilty of two things. Firstly, the politician is wasting time that could be spent delivering ‘the message’ (more on that later). Secondly, however, and more subtly, a lack of bluff and bluster concerning the merits of your own campaign can lull your opponents into a false sense of security. This almost certainly perpetuated the myth that the Tories’ campaign infrastructure was creaking, unfit for purpose and only kept alive by the millions of pounds lavished on it by wealthy donors. If you don’t talk up which seats you’re targeting, your opponent could be forced into doing one of two things: either they assume you are not targeting a certain seat and they then take their eye off the ball, or they assume you are targeting every single seat and they spread their resources so thin as to be ineffectual. The lesson for progressives here is simple- don’t brag about your campaign, even if you really do think it’s great. If you really must brag, then do it AFTER you’ve won. That’s something the Tories are pretty darn good at, too.

2) Get digital right

In broad strokes, I would argue that Labour (or at least the Left) won Twitter at the last election, but the Tories won Facebook. The Tories also won the actual election. I do not believe that this is a coincidence.

When we learned that the Tories were pumping millions into Facebook advertising, I know that my first instinct was to assume that it was a waste of money. I had seen the ads coming up on my news feed and clearly I never had any intention of liking or sharing. However, I now understand how that didn’t matter. I was never a target voter anyway. The genius of Tory messages on Facebook was that they didn’t implore you to already be a supporter or even agree with any Tory policies, they just said you would receive ‘updates’ if you liked the page. Take a look at the image below, for instance:

Wanting ‘updates’ from the Prime Minister is something that may well have a universal appeal. It doesn’t ask you to be a ‘fan’ of the Prime Minister, but as a person living in the UK knowing what he is up to could well be interesting information, no matter what your political persuasion.

But this is where the genius of Crosby kicks in. Once you’ve ‘liked’ the page, they’ve got your details (provided you haven’t maxed out your privacy settings and, let’s be honest, you haven’t). If they could see you were the kind of person looking to get onto the housing ladder, you’d get an email around election time about how the Tories’ housing policy could be used to help you. If you worked full time, you’d get an email about how the Tories were cutting your taxes by £800 (blatantly stealing a Lib Dem policy Cameron previously said was unaffordable but hey, all’s fair in love, war and elections).

This kind of thoughtful and personalised targeting is quite clearly more effective than doing a round robin email about how awful Nigel Farage is, which is the kind of thing that could push UKIP-sympathisers into moving away from your party.

The last word to say on this is that another genius aspect of this Facebook data-gathering is that the Tories don’t need to pay for that information again. They have it forever now, and the rest of the political world will be playing catchup between now and 2020.

3) The dark arts of persuading people to knock on doors

Imagine actually knocking on doors and telling people how great the Tory party is. You’re probably going to get a mouthful of abuse at some point (I once bore witness to my father angrily informing a Conservative activist exactly how far off he should fuck), and, let’s face it, banging on about the “long term economic plan” isn’t exactly a thrilling conversation that you’d want to have 50-100 times in a day even with people who do agree with it.

So how exactly were the Tories able to command this massive army of supporters to flood into target seats last May? The book “Why The Tories Won” by the Telegraph journalist Tim Ross actually shines some light onto this. In the book it is alleged that Grant Shapps, the then Tory Party Chairman, created a rather unique culture around the party’s ‘action days’ of campaigning. Apparently it was not uncommon for one or two romantic liaisons to occur at the end of a hard day of campaigning for the Tories at the hotel the supporters were put up in. Once these rumours got out, Shapps had no intention whatsoever of quashing them.

Now, we all know the benefits of making a day of campaigning feel like a social event. Making them a hook-up opportunity may be going a little too far, but what’s the harm if it’s helping your party’s cause? This is a great example of how outside the box thinking can be used to create more of a buzz around your campaign that Labour and the Lib Dems can stand to learn from, if not emulate entirely.

4) For crying out loud, get ‘the message’ right

Another cornerstone of Crosbyism. The argument goes that it doesn’t matter how great your campaign is, you can have a million people knocking on doors and as many hours of prime-time TV as you like, if your core message isn’t good enough then your campaigning energy will be wasted. It doesn’t matter if you look like a buffoon for repeating the same jargon, the point is that your message will be lodged in people’s minds. In fact, even if you do look a fool for spouting the same phrase over and over, that’s no bad thing because the video of you spouting the phrase will be shared online and the message will be heard by even more people. This is a video of George Osbourne on Andrew Marr repeating the phrase “long term economic plan” over and over and over again. It was put on YouTube by the Labour Party. Lynton Crosby is a genius.

The story of how this message was created is a deeply unfashionable one. Essentially, focus group after focus group after focus group was polled until Crosby was happy with a message that appealed to as many people as possible.

So, as progressives we really need to define what we stand for in a more succinct, understandable and relatable way. Saying “we hate the Tories” simply isn’t good enough.

And finally, the one thing we should NOT learn from Crosby’s success:

There is a difference between ‘winning’ and ‘winning at all costs’

In his first speech after winning the election, David Cameron talked about how he wanted to lead “one nation”, and that he would strive to heal the relationship between the English and the Scots. His party’s campaign strategy told a different story.

As decided by Crosby (who is, perhaps crucially, not British himself), the Conservatives made something of a fetish of talking up how great the SNP were and how they would have Ed Miliband kept in their pockets (as these lovely posters indicated).

The strategy behind this was to convince voters in the South of England that there was a real danger they could be ruled by Scottish people. Never mind that the Prime Minister before Cameron was himself Scottish, or the then Chief Secretary to the Treasury was a Scot. The Tories wanted people in the south of England to think that there was a chance the UK could be run first and foremost for the Scottish if there was a hung parliament. The best chance to avoid this fate was, naturally, to vote Conservative for a stable government with a, ahem, long term economic plan.

As a vote-winning tactic, this worked beautifully. As my old boss Nick Clegg put it, the prospect of Nicola Sturgeon bossing the Prime Minister around chilled the English heart. As a responsible act for a Prime Minister to take regarding the already uncertain future of his family of nations, it was a deeply irresponsible and divisive tactic to employ. I would not want to win an election using a tactic such as this. Stoking up fear and hatred between English and Scottish people undermines the responsibility of a Prime Minister to put the interests of his nation first and foremost.

So, there you have it. Four things we can learn and one tactic we should not repeat. I hope that, as the 2020 election becomes the focus of our efforts in a couple of years’ time, this is the kind of conversation we will be having, rather than arguing over which side of the Labour Party is undermining the other.