In my next post, I intend to tell you why the Conservative Party wants to be in charge. But first, in this post, let's understand what an answer to that question should consist in, and how it should arise for a political Party in the run-up to a General Election. Here's how you do it right: from "The Blair-Mandelson-Campbell playbook", written by New Labour.
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Develop a simple concept of why you want to be in charge, what you stand for, which embodies and expresses a genuine position, whilst at the same time marking you out from others. Something like: "Thatcherism with a human face".
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Consider carefully, over an extended period, what flows both positively and negatively from this (in politics, the greatest success lies in choosing your enemies carefully - no-one seeking to achieve anything can be universally loved). Ensure that all your more detailed statements press your core concept at every opportunity.
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Done well, you never have to state it explicitly, and you can even get away with a position that you couldn't state. (Could Blair have actually said, in 1997, that he stood for "Thatcherism with a human face"? But was there any doubt that that was how New Labour saw itself?)
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Having spent an extended period pressing your message implicitly in many detailed comments and policy announcements, as the Election approaches focus on fewer and fewer things, fewer and fewer policies, fewer and fewer areas of consideration, until by the time of the Election period itself you have boiled the unpacking of your position down into, say, five key pledges. These pledges must engage with real issues of interest and substance, marking out both who/what you favour and (just as importantly) who/what you are against.
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Once you have those pledges, focus upon them. Talk about almost nothing else if you can get away with it. Discuss those pledges in terms that reinforce the core position you adopted at the start. Do not deviate. Do not be distracted. Don't concede a narrow nature to your offering, becoming trapped into statements such as "we'll provide more details later" - everything everyone needs to know is already embodied in those five pledges. Don't make additional last-minute policy announcements.
That's how to win.
Here's how not to do it: from the playbook known as "The road to ruin", written by Many a failed Opposition.
- Never really work out what you stand for - after all, you only ended up as leader as a compromise, and the party's not sure what it really stands for anyway.
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In lieu of any specific concept of what you are about, develop a number of compromise policies. Express these through "official lines", which spokesmen are forced to employ even when they don't quite answer the question asked.
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Try to avoid talking about areas of policy where the governing party is popular and is seen as doing well. Do this even if those areas of policy in which the governing party is seen doing well are the most important areas of policy, and especially if the things your party would like to say in those areas is markedly different from what the governing party is doing. (Perhaps even better, try to "close off" discussion in those areas by pre-announcing binding commitments to do exactly whatever the government is doing there, even if (especially if) that runs contrary to what most key thinkers in your party believe.)
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Talk only in generalities, so as to avoid internal debate, for as long as possible in advance of the election. Promise that you will provide lots more detail "when the time comes".
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As the Election approaches announce more and more, and more and more detailed, ideas, hoping that the sheer mass of policies announced will cover up the fact that you don't know yourself what the answer is to "Why?"
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When you are defeated, proclaim that "It was always going to be difficult to turn things around in one go." and "We have made solid progress - if not in seats, then at least in developing our ideas and programme for the future." and (best of all) "Oppositions do not win elections - governments lose them."
When you look at my two approaches above, I hope it will be clear why I say that Cameron has long been very bad at PR - no-one skilled at PR would deliberately choose something that, on the surface, looked so much like the latter approach. For the truth is that, although the Conservative Party has made enormous strides since 2001 - particularly from 2001-3, though it was not until Cameron's 2005-7 period that anyone started to notice - and although I believe that Cameron has enormous substance to his ideas and would make a huge difference to the way the country is governed (and I don't say that because how he would change things is how I would change them - but oranges are not the only fruit) our spin strategy has been very poor from the start.
We have been all substance and no spin, most painfully exemplified in the (completely unfair and wrong) commonly-held view that we are all spin and no substance.
I'm not convinced that many people could say succinctly why we even wish to hold individual ministries, let alone the Administration as a whole. They might have some ideas about one or two specific things we would do, some specific policies. But policies aren't a why. Once you've enacted your policy, what then? Do you quit because your mission is complete? In electoral terms, policies should serve mainly to unpack what you are about. You're unlikely to be elected simply to do some specific thing - if that were really so popular, the other Party could do it instead.
Cameron has tried to replace the question of why we want to be in charge with the question of why he wants to be in charge. So he tells us how important the NHS is to him personally, because of the way it looked after his son. But that line can't work for anyone else. I can't go out on a doorstep and say "I want the Conservative Party to be in charge of the health service because it looked after David Cameron's son well." He tells us about his character, about what family means to him, about how he is not ashamed to have gone to a good school.
And it's all great. And I don't doubt him for a second. And it doesn't work. Because for all we complain about how things are going in the age of television, we do not have a Presidential system. And that's not just a matter of the Prime Minister not being elected directly. It's also about things like the fact that he does not get to appoint just anyone to be his Executive team. There are other ministers, who are also appointed. And Executive room for action and manoeuvre depends critically on the continued support of the legislature. For all that we complain about the diminished role of MPs, in a presidential system like that in the US there are really only two key pinch-points in the President being the President - he only really needs to secure the support of his party twice - once to get to be the candidate, and once more at the election. A Prime Minister needs the support of his Party every day - and this is by no means theoretical. Blair and Thatcher were both removed via (slightly differing) processes of internal dissent. Prime Ministers can be and are removed by their MPs.
What the public needs to know is why we want to be in charge. They don't. People simply don't know why we (we, the Conservative Party, not David Cameron, the individual, mortal, fallible and replaceable man) want to be in charge - and that's not because they weren't listening to policy announcements a, b, c, d, e, f, g, ..., x, y, z.
Time to change that. I can't do everything, but I can help. That's next...
