By Tim Montgomerie
This report identifies six key reasons why No2AV triumphed:
There are two big implications of a No vote:
The Liberal Democrats have wanted electoral reform for decades and they have wanted it more than anything else. Nick Clegg could have entered last year’s Coalition negotiations with David Cameron and insisted there be no tuition fees. He could have fought for extra spending for the NHS. He didn’t. The one non-negotiable was some kind of commitment to get rid of Britain’s First Past The Post electoral system.
Liberal Democrats didn’t just want Britain to vote for the Alternative Vote because it would have given them more MPs at nearly every general election – although it would. The big motivation was that it would produce a permanent realignment of British politics. If you want to understand the anger of Vince Cable and Chris Huhne you have to understand that their great hope of a new British politics dominated by them in alliance with left-wing parties has been defeated, defeated for a generation and defeated in large part by the Labour party that they had hoped would be their partners in building a progressive majority.
Only four months ago it all looked so different. The Yes campaign had all of the money. It was ahead in nearly every opinion poll brandishing a message of modernity and change. Every pundit in Britain was attacking the No campaign. It was attacked as juvenile, crude and an insult to the average voter’s intelligence. How did it all change?
If you want to know the mood of the Tory MPs then look at the last opinion poll. When opinion polls started showing that the Yes campaign might win, a dark cloud descended across the parliamentary Conservative Party.
Mark Pritchard was the first Tory to publicly warn David Cameron of the consequences of a Yes vote but the important work to get the Conservative leader to realise the seriousness of the situation was carried out behind-the-scenes. Tory MPs were hearing that the No campaign was struggling to raise money. Tory donors were being told that the priority remained the funding of CCHQ and its operations. Tory Chairman Sayeeda Warsi was questioned by Bernard Jenkin about this in January at a full meeting of the 1922 Committee. At about the same time the Prime Minister met with the executive of the 1922 in 10 Downing Street. It was an awkward meeting. Concerns were expressed about the vigour with which AV was being fought. The Prime Minister was warned that Conservative HQ was “sleepwalking to disaster”. He was told he was set to lose the referendum and that, if he did, the consequences for his authority inside the Conservative Party would be serious. He kept shifting awkwardly in his seat. This was his Downing Street bunker, where his inner team, populated by friends he has known for twenty years, runs the show. He has never been a man who enjoys being told he’s wrong.
The dangers of a Yes vote were spelt out in cold terms by Paul Goodman in an influential article for ConservativeHome:
“In short, the cry will be: "First he messes up the election. Now he's messed up the referendum. We'll never govern again on our own - and I'm going to lose my seat." Even in such circumstances, the Government is unlikely to collapse. Both Tory MPs, furious with the Prime Minister, and Liberal Democrat ones, rejuvenated by a "Yes" vote, would have a common reason not to pull down the pillars of the Coalition temple: both would fear being ousted at the polls. But Cameron would have lost the confidence of the Parliamentary Party. New, "collective leadership" would be demanded. There'd probably be a Cabinet reshuffle, and not on his terms.His authority would be weakened and the Government vulnerable to events. Inevitably, there'd be talk of a challenge, but there's no obvious successor. At any rate, the Prime Minister would be in danger of becoming what Nigel Birch once called one of his heroes, Harold Macmillan: the lost leader.”
We were still in the middle of a period when 10 Downing Street was in denial. Some didn’t realise the campaign was heading for defeat. Others didn’t mind if it was. Enthusiasm for the Coalition, among Cameroons, was at its height. The Spectator’s James Forsyth had reported that a Cabinet Minister and senior aide to the Prime Minister backed AV. There were suggestions that some leading Tories – notably Michael Gove – should back AV to help build a new Liberal Conservative era. The Times’ Daniel Finkelstein, a close confidante of George Osborne, even argued (although actively opposed to AV) that AV might solidify Cameronism. He argued that the only Conservatism that could win an election where second and third preferences counted was Cameron’s detoxified Conservatism. Philip Blond, always anxious to please 10 Downing Street, argued that a Yes vote would “stop extremists” and applied (unsuccessfully) for a grant to the Electoral Reform Society to make a full case for AV.
The penny only started to drop when veteran Tories in the House of Lords started to protest in very large numbers. Former Cabinet minister John Moore and Baroness Trumpington voted against the frontbench for the first time ever when the referendum bill came before them. They argued that a change in Britain’s electoral system should only become law if it was supported by 40% of the British people. Cameron said no. At the Conservative Party Board, members of the voluntary party told co-chairmen Lord Feldman and Baroness Warsi that this referendum was not an ordinary mid-term election. It wasn’t a Scottish election, a local election or a by-election. It was about the Tories’ chance of winning at every general election to come.
It wasn’t just the usual suspects either. Nick Boles, caricatured as a moderniser, went to see the Chancellor to warn him that David Cameron wouldn’t be removed as Tory leader if AV was passed but the parliamentary party would lose confidence in him. They would, Boles warned, “work to rule”. Eric Pickles, Iain Duncan Smith and Liam Fox mobilised and eventually the party leadership understood.
Cameron walked into George Osborne’s office to tell him that he’d just been told that he’d lose the leadership if AV passed. Cameron thought it funny that MPs could be so melodramatic. Osborne’s face didn’t move. We can’t rule it out, he said, staring at Cameron in a moment where the gravity of the situation dawned on the Prime Minister.
The crunch meeting came in the middle of February when Matthew Elliott, the Chief Executive of the No campaign and founder of the hugely successful TaxPayers’ Alliance, presented a ‘Plan B’ for the campaign at No. 10. Elliott hadn’t been able to run a proper campaign because he had no money. He hadn’t been able to hire staff, organise mailouts and develop a Get Out The Vote operation because he had been spending all of his time trying to get funds for a skeleton campaign. Doors had been politely closing in his face across the City.
‘Plan B’ involved exploiting a loophole in the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act which states that the Electoral Commission can only give official designation to a ‘lead’ campaign group on one side if there’s a credible campaign on the other side to officially designate. Official designation gives the campaign access to a certain amount of taxpayer funding for operational costs, a Royal Mail free delivery to every voter, and two Referendum Broadcasts on the main television channels and radio stations. This loophole was exploited by the No campaign in this year’s Welsh referendum, who could not afford print leaflets or produce broadcasts for their campaign against further powers for the Welsh Assembly.
Elliott’s presentation noted the downsides for non-designation (accusations of ‘dirty tricks’, restricting information to voters, losing moral high ground), but noted that there could be upsides (praise for saving taxpayers’ money, capturing ‘anti-politics’ ground, a return to honest campaigning). His presentation also painted a worse-case scenario if the campaign went for designation (‘We fail to raise the money and cannot afford a free delivery or decent referendum broadcasts. The Yes campaign mount an expensive, slick campaign, giving them the ‘big mo’). It concluded that, as things currently stood with the funding, there was little option but to go for Plan B.
This lead to a number of meetings involving Lord Leach, the No campaign’s Chairman, Matthew Elliott and key people at No 10, including the Prime Minister, Stephen Gilbert and Lord Feldman. Plan B was not acceptable politically to the Prime Minister. Cameron had given an undertaking to Nick Clegg that the campaign would be fought properly. At this point, a switch was flicked. Peter Cruddas became No to AV’s Treasurer and the money started flowing. The PM instructed CCHQ to organise at least one major AV activity event every week for him. After this, the No campaign began properly functioning with its two key aims: To convince every Tory to vote no without undermining the effort to divide the Labour vote. Kick off was late but not fatally so.
Blue and Red together: Jeremy Hunt and Margaret Beckett at the No2AV phone bank.
After this the No campaign began properly functioning with its two key aims:
To convince every Tory to vote no without undermining the effort to divide the Labour vote.
Kick off was late but not fatally so.
Downing Street insist today that they always intended to fight the campaign in the way they did. Don’t believe it. As late as February George Osborne was strangely detached from the referendum campaign and months out-of-date in his understanding of who was running the campaign.
The No campaign began with instincts about how to defend First Past The Post but with the limited funding they enjoyed at the start of the campaign they tested those instincts to destruction until they knew that they had copper-bottomed messages that would move votes. It sounds the obvious thing to do but it wasn’t the approach pursued at the last general election when the Big Society was floated as the Conservative Party’s main message and it hadn’t even be tested.
The No campaign’s three themes were the three Cs: Cost, Complexity and Clegg. All were propagated using online techniques praised by PoliticsHome's Paul Waugh.
Cost. At a time of recession voters were allergic to any unnecessary expenditure. No2AV calculated that changing the electoral system would cost £250 million and in hard-hitting ads they said that there were better ways of spending that money. Pensions. Body armour for soldiers. Life support systems for premature babies.The second C was complexity. First Past The Post was simple, it was One Person, One Vote. The person who comes second or third shouldn’t win. The point was made in a horse race ad from the independent No campaign and in a child’s sport day video from the Tory Party’s No campaign. These ads were scripted by George Eustice MP, a veteran of the successful ‘No to the Euro’ campaign and a daily participant in the No campaign’s morning meetings. The Yes campaign protested that the intelligence of the British people was being insulted but when, 48 hours before polling, interviewing David Cameron, John Humphrys got confused about how AV worked, the No’s campaign’s point was made.
The third C was Clegg. I’ll return back to this theme later.
A fourth argument – that AV was only used in three other countries in the world – was also potent. Margaret Beckett deployed some of these arguments as early as November 2010 in the House of Commons and in an article for The Guardian.
The pundits scoffed at these No campaign tactics. They accused No of trivialising an incredibly important issue of voting reform. Matthew Elliott was accused of “knowing the price of everything and value of nothing”. Was he, some asked, relying too much on the tactics of his hugely successful TaxPayers’ Alliance. Some of the attacks on him were personal, notably from Quentin Letts in a Daily Mail sketch. I can’t say I didn’t share the worries about the campaign’s direction. Elliott didn’t panic. Nor did the two ex-Labour MPs who ran the campaign with him; Joan Ryan and Jane Kennedy. They trusted the copper-bottomed research that (1) had been prepared for him by Lynton Crosby, (2) subsequently double tested by Andrew Cooper, the former Head of Populus who has since become Head of Strategy for the Prime Minister inside Downing Street, and (3) was fine-tuned by BBM, the strategy group established by Alan Barnard and John Braggins (key members of the teams behind Labour’s 1997 and 2001 victories).
Lesser individuals would have crumbled before Fleet Street’s pens but the battle-tested Labour figures in the No campaign and Cameron’s Political Secretary, Stephen Gilbert, gave Elliott the reassurance he needed to stay on course. They were right to do so. The cost arguments against AV moved voters more than any of the other 33 messages that were tested.
The success of ‘Vote Labour, Vote No’ wasn’t just crucial to the outcome of this campaign. It could have important implications for the future of electoral reform in Britain and for the possibility of future LibLab alliances.
A section of the Labour movement has long believed that there is an anti-Tory majority in Britain and that this so-called “progressive majority” is disenfranchised by First Past The Post. This section is small but loud and has given the impression that it was the dominant and growing voice within Labour. The Labour No campaign has proven that it isn’t. We end the No2AV campaign with a majority of Labour MPs publicly declared as supporters of First Past The Post (or, at least, as opponents of AV). Those who haven’t nailed their colours to the mast are also thought to be ‘No’ but out of respect for Ed Miliband stayed silent. The campaign has shown that the mainstream of the Labour Party does not want to change the electoral system for Westminster. In thirteen years of government Labour didn’t even attempt electoral reform. Moreover, the collapse of the Liberal Democrats – particularly in urban Britain, Scotland and the north of England – gives Labour MPs extra hope that they can win outright at the next election, without needing any Lib Dem help. Ed Miliband’s options for the future are also limited. With so many members of his party opposed to AV, let alone PR, he will face internal resistance to any big offers to a future leader of the Liberal Democrats. Key members of his inner team including his chief whip (Winterton) and his spokespeople for health (John Healey), education (Andy Burnham (silently)) and defence (Jim Murphy) stood with David Blunkett, Margaret Beckett, John Prescott and John Reid in the No2AV campaign. As did Tony Lloyd, Chairman of the Parliamentary Labour Party. On the eve of polling day the Labour leader appeared to lock and bolt the door to electoral reform for a generation, saying he did not support anything other than AV as an alternative to First Past The Post.
John Prescott launches an anti-Clegg poster as part of a regional Labour No2AV tour.
It wasn’t always obvious that the No campaign could win the internal debate in Labour. Ed Miliband was wise enough to realise that this was not a Clause IV moment for him. His party was too divided to make this a defining issue of his early leadership. He campaigned for AV but hardly energetically. He gave his party a genuinely free vote. No understood, however, that many Labour members would loyally follow the example of the party leader and this instinct would be encouraged by Cameron’s support for FPTP. It was vital to establish quickly and conclusively that it was okay for Labour voters to oppose AV. Appointing the likes of Lord Prescott as patrons of No2AV was vital in this task. No serious Labour member believes that the former Deputy PM has anything but the party’s interests as his priority. If he was against AV it was okay for them to be against it too.
Former Labour MP Jane Kennedy and Matthew Elliott.
The hard slog of ‘winning the Labour party’ first so that Labour voters could be won later was carried out by former Labour MPs Jane Kennedy (who took on Militant in the 1980s) and Joan Ryan (pictured on right). For weeks on end they almost lived in the atrium of Portcullis House – the place in the parliamentary estate where MPs, journalists and researchers mingle. The campaign that resulted in a majority of the Parliamentary Labour Party opposing AV was won over cappuccino and chocolate muffins. The campaign was also fought in the country. “Whilst Joan Ryan was setting up Labour No to AV and building the national campaign as the deputy campaign director – particularly working out the core vote/swing vote strategy – Jane Kennedy spoke at about two hundred meetings of constituency Labour parties. Some gatherings were of just a dozen activists. Others involved fifty or sixty. Similar meetings were held in many Conservative Associations but whereas the Tory events were largely about how to defeat AV the CLP events were debates. Activists had to be won over. When votes did take place over 80% tended to vote against change. Regional rallies were another important part of the Labour No campaign. Many were fronted by John Prescott and were designed to reach trusted regional and local media.
Towards the end of the campaign there were anticipated signs that David Cameron’s high profile (and successful) attempts to galvanise the Tory vote were confusing some Labour voters. As a result the Tories abandoned the airwaves and focused on their (invisible) ground operations. John Reid adopted a higher profile and David Blunkett fronted No2AV’s final TV broadcast.
I wouldn’t be doing justice to Ryan, Kennedy and the other Labour campaigners if I gave the impression that they were somehow focused on the red vote. They played a full part in the whole campaign and when Matthew Elliott was desperately trying to raise money – in the lean period before Cameron realised what was at stake – they led much of the work on messaging. At the very beginning of the campaign there was a Tory No campaign and a Labour No campaign. This didn’t last. The Chinese walls came down and, in fact, an internal walls in the office was literally demolished to create an open plan war room. The Labour activist who famously turned up at the Crewe and Nantwich by-election in top hat and tails to play class war against Cameron was on the phone to local Tory Chairmen, advising on how they could best motivate their members to campaign on this issue. Ryan and Elliott started sharing a desk to direct operations. This was a massive contrast with the Yes campaign. Despite all the talk of a progressive majority the two pro-AV operations – one focusing on the Labour vote and the other on Lib Dems - always remained distinct. They met just twice a week. The Labour and Tory halves of the official No campaign operated cheek by jowl, 24/7.
Once the Tory leadership had decided to fight the No campaign with everything it had the campaign was relatively uncomplicated.
It worked. It worked magnificently. Anthony Wells of YouGov was just one of the polling experts to notice the dramatic and disproportionate shift in the Tory vote:
“Conservative supporters have consistently opposed AV, but their opposition has become far firmer and more robust over recent weeks. A month ago they were opposed to AV by 58% to 22%, a week ago their opposition had crept up to 62% to 23%. This week Conservative voters split overwhelmingly (76% to 14%) against AV, presumably as a result of David Cameron throwing the full weight of the Conservative machine behind the NO campaign.”
Special mention should be made of Sayeeda Warsi in all of this. The Tory Chairman visited thirty battleground councils during this period and attacking AV was her priority message. Her suggestion that the BNP would benefit from AV made her the biggest target of Chris Huhne’s anger.
The Yes campaigned was determined to argue that AV would stop the BNP from ever winning a seat in Britain. The No campaign had to neutralise this and argued, correctly, that under AV the second preferences of poorly ranked BNP voters could be decisive in close contests. For obvious reasons Warsi delivered this message. Huhne accused the first Muslim member of the British Cabinet of acting like Goebbels. Anyone who knows Ms Warsi knows that she never minds a fight. If you cross her she hits back and hard. She took vicious pummeling from Huhne without reply. She took one for the team. The No campaign was privately delighted with Huhne's tactics. So long as his excitable attacks on the Coalition were eating all the oxygen there was less and less time for the Yes campaign to make the case for change.
Stephen Gilbert, the man Lord Ashcroft picked for his target seats strategy and now the Prime Minister’s Political Secretary, is another of the heroes of this campaign. He acted as the link man between the Tory No campaign and the official and independent No campaign. He helped fine tune the Tory campaign's messages, oversaw polling and with Darren Mott ran the decisive Get Out The Vote operation. Cameron trusts him enough not to second guess him. If Gilbert said a certain tactic was necessary or that an anxiety was misplaced, Cameron’s circle doesn’t need a second opinion.
Earlier I talked about the No campaign’s three ‘C’s’; cost, complexity and Clegg. I’ve briefly described the first two. The third ‘C’ – Clegg – was always going to be the most controversial. Clegg could have used the Coalition negotiations with David Cameron to stop tuition fees. He didn’t. The decades-long hope of his party for electoral reform was Clegg’s number one demand. Under AV or, particularly, PR the Liberal Democrats would gain MPs and could routinely hold the balance of power. Hung parliaments and the broken promises that go with them would become the norm. Matthew Elliott was itching to put Clegg on the ballot paper. He signaled his intentions in an article for ConservativeHome on 4th January. Quoting Professor Bogdanor’s words AV would, he warned, turn the Liberal Democrats into the ‘Kingmakers of British Politics’. “Governments,” he concluded, “should be chosen by voters, not the MPs of Britain's third party.”
ConservativeHome also argued that Clegg must be targeted. Downing Street worried about this tactic but the Labour half of the No campaign insisted that Clegg’s face and his “broken promises” needed to feature prominently on all literature. Labour voters don’t like Cameron but they hate Clegg. They feel betrayed. The idea that Clegg should gain AV as a reward for his alliance with the Tories stuck in the Labour throat.
Putting Clegg on the literature produced some of the biggest tensions within the No team. Conservative HQ repeatedly asked that photographs of their Coalition partner be removed from literature. Ryan, Kennedy and the other Labour leaders of the No campaign insisted that the images of the Deputy Prime Minister - and the language of broken promises - stayed. In a game of brinkmanship, the Labour Says No team threatened to pull the plug on the whole campaign if Clegg was off limits. The red half of the campaign knew that the targeting of the Liberal Democrat leader was essential if the Labour vote was to turn out and to vote no.
This was a campaign that Yes could have won and at one stage they led in nearly all opinion polls. YouGov was always more sceptical about the strength of the Yes vote but one pollster, ComRes, once gave the AV camp a 27% lead. Ipsos MORI’s historical polling has long showed that the public were open to a more proportional system of election. The British people, largely undecided and uninformed about AV, were open to arguments but the onus was always on the Yes campaign to make its case. Otherwise, as Peter Kellner had warned, the traditional pattern of referenda would occur and undecided voters would support the status quo (http://my.yougov.com/commentaries/peter-kellner/voting-reform-why-the-campaign-really-will-ma.aspx):
“The status quo tends to gain ground in referendums on issues where countries are divided. This happened in Scotland in 1979, when a large pro-devolution majority melted away in the final fortnight of the campaign; in Spain in 1986, where the public narrowly voted to stay in NATO after all; and in Australia in 1999, when the apparently dominant republicans ended up heavily defeated in a referendum to replace the Queen as head of state. I would not be greatly surprised if something similar happened here with voting reform.”
If Clegg and the Liberal Democrats are the big losers of this campaign there are three big winners.
First are the Labour opponents of electoral reform. Joan Ryan and Jane Kennedy won the internal argument in their party, much to the annoyance of Neil Kinnock and the other believers in an anti-Tory majority. Ed Miliband knows that if he offers any kind of AV or PR to Nick Clegg or his successor he risks a major clash with his own party. The British people have rejected AV and won’t want politicians asking any similar kind of question, any time soon. They’d rather attention was focused on their living standards.
The second big winner is Matthew Elliott, the man chosen by Rodney Leach to be No’s Campaign Director. Elliott fought a national cross-party campaign that was universally derided by the Westminster commentariat until it was obvious that it was working. Now, undoubtedly, there’ll be a rush to claim credit - confirming the maxim that success has many fathers while failure is abandoned as an orphan. I can’t remember a mainstream commentator who celebrated the No campaign’s tactics. The campaign provides a new model of how campaigns should be fought. Elliott ignored the talking heads and ran a campaign that chimed with voters, not the metropolitan elite. He should also be congratulated for managing relations between very different Labour and Conservative personalities. There were disagreements but they never bubbled over. He also confronted Cameron over the vital issue of funding, forcing the Tory leadership to fight with a vigour that was proportionate to the disaster of defeat.
The third big winner is Cameron himself. He won a major victory and his great gamble paid off. Liberal Democrats voted for the boundary review that should give the Conservatives up to twenty extra MPs at the next election and in return he delivered on holding the AV referendum. The huge No2AV operation merant Conservative HQ was fighting at a close-to-general-election pace and that energisation of the Tory vote explains much better than expected local council results. In saving First Past The Post the Tory leader put the long-term electoral interests of the Conservative Party before the short-term interests of his Coalition. Conservative MPs, more than at any time in a year, now see him as on their side and as a winner. In the tough times that lie ahead, in the economy and in managing his increasingly unhappy Coalition partners, he’ll need that new reservoir of goodwill.
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> ConservativeHome's main posts on the AV campaign.
> Some No2AV videos.
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