Louise Bagshawe: Heineken Tories

Opinion polls are making enjoyable reading at the moment, aren’t they? The last one gave David Cameron, on the swing, a decent workable majority. But what’s interesting to me is delving into the individual seats we need to win in order to get that majority. One of the greatest attractions of Anthony Wells’ Polling Report site is its constituency by constituency analysis. If you’re a true political anorak (guilty, m’lud) you may while away some time reading around the supposedly difficult seats and reading lots of comments that doubt the Tories can take them. Yet on UNS, those seats fall like dominoes.

There are a couple of ways of looking at this. The first is to acknowledge the axiom that a candidate really doesn’t make all that much difference in a general election, at least not on the positive side. If a candidate mis-steps they can lose the seat, but a positive effect seems to be capped, in conventional wisdom, at an absolute maximum of two thousand votes. Along with this, we must take note of what I believe Sean Fear called the “special pleading” effect, where local factors seem to weigh more heavily in the eye of the local beholder than they actually do in a general election; all kinds of Tory MPs in “we can’t lose here” seats with good personal reputations nevertheless were washed away by the massive Labour swing in ’97.

Fair enough. I acknowledge both those factors. But the difference between overall power and a hung parliament will be made by PPCs and local activists in “difficult but winnable” seats, seats where, if you analyse them, there are structural problems – perhaps some councillor losses, perhaps a large Labour/LibDem majority. We still have to take those seats, and plenty of them, for David Cameron to win a working majority.

And in order to win these seats, which I call “goalpost seats”, we’re going to have to be creative. We need to be Heineken Tories – refreshing the voters other Tories cannot reach. How is this to be achieved? Well, candidate selection is one part of it. Associations are picking modern, dynamic, likeable PPCs, and this has picked up good press. But I think there is a campaign strategy that will work well.

I did appallingly badly in round one of selections, because I delivered a bad speech poorly. I worked on it and did quite a bit better in the second round. The difference was that in the second round, when I applied to a constituency, I did as much as I possibly could to research that area, its towns and villages and its problems. And this was a bit of the speech that I included in every selection: “And if you select me, ladies and gentlemen, I will fight this seat like a Liberal Democrat. No, I don’t mean I will make up dodgy bar charts and personally smear my opponent. I mean I will fight on small local issues as well as constituency-wide ones….” . Whereupon I gave some examples.

Now it may be heresy to praise the LibDems in any way at all, but we should look dispassionately at the facts. They are political limpets, clinging on to seats where the swing means they should rightly have been washed away. Even when they were at 11% in the polls nobody predicted a total LibDem wipe out. They do well at by elections, because they have a flying squad of activists prepared to descend on a seat like yellow locusts, but by-elections don’t matter. I’m more interested in the disproportionate amount of votes and seats they get versus their actual support.

One thing the LibDems are excellent at, and I think to be Heineken Tories we need to become excellent at, is the paper war. LibDems are brilliant at delivering their Focus leaflets, low-cost, grainy, full of ultra-local issues. And I believe to win in the tough seats, this is the answer for us. Obviously I’m not getting into specifics about our campaign in Corby & East Northants next year, but let me take an example from the past. In May, as I’ve mentioned before in this column, local Tories took control of Irthlingborough. It had been Labour for 106 many decades. We took all four district council seats and ten out of twelve town council seats. Now this town was investigated by the Guardian in a piece on party funding (I face a Labour minister with 145k expenses). Our victory there was written up in the article thus:

“[An independent councilor] says there are two reasons for the town's political volatility: "people moving up from London", and the Tories' big budgets. "The Conservatives did a very, very big campaign," she says. "We were flooded: loads and loads of leaflets. What I heard was that they saw Irthlingborough as a trial run for the whole constituency."

"There were so many bits and bobs coming through the door," says 47-year-old Kerry Britchford, one of her regular customers. "There seemed to be two a week. They must have been really spending money, you know?"

Here, perhaps, is the proof that for the moment, the handsomely funded groundwork for a Conservative win at the next election is proceeding apace.

We smiled in the office when we read this: “proof” that target seats cash is winning our war. Actually, not one penny of target seat funding was spent in Irthlingborough’s local campaign in May. The leaflets were cheaply produced and came under normal local election limits. It’s just that an army of councilors and candidates worked incredibly hard on the paper war in an area that was traditionally safe Labour. We got the message out there, and it worked spectacularly.

These days there is technology out there – the LibDems use it – to produce grainy leaflets very cheaply. Of course we need to fight a normal constituency campaign, but I would suggest that on top of that a programme of incredibly local and issues driven literature will work wonders. Let’s not forget that Labour don’t just lack money from legitimate sources. They also lack activists. Conservatives have the councilor base to get micro-targeted leaflets through doors. Ward by ward, village by village, issue by issue. My friend and former flatmate Nigel Huddleston has just been selected for the tough but winnable seat of Luton South. The estimable Sean Fear of Political Betting did an article last week on the two Lutons, North and South, and the difficulty we face in taking them. Well, we have two dynamic, different young candidates for those seats, and I’ll be suggesting to Nigel that (and this is just one example) he do a leaflet specifically for his Muslim voters around Eid al-Fitr next year. I believe that localism, ultra localism, micro issues campaigning, can win us seats like Luton South and others we need in order to sweep Labour away for good. We should fight the LibDems paper war using the one thing Labour cannot gerrymander away – our activist and councilor advantage.

Comments

[HF]

Louise, absolutely right about the tactics.

Doing the same in our little area.

Many candidates careers will unfortunately be cut short because they do not understand the sense of what you have written.

[James Burdett]

Great article and incredibly perceptive plan!

[James Burdett]

I think that there may have been issues earlier! This is a great article proposing a sound approach.

[TFA Tory]

There are pictures Heineken Tories, CFers, on Guido's blog. They look like they have been drinking lots of Dutch lager. Nanny Lansley would not approve!

[Alex Swanson]

Not disagreeing as such - but this sort of approach requires hours and hours of tramping round streets. That means lots of people giving up lots of time, and that in turn means leadership and motivation.

It is therefore a shame that the current leadership team has spent two years sneering at its own people and their beliefs. I've complained about that on here many times before, and I don't think that the handful of populist ideas we've seen over the past few months are likely to make a serious difference. Real attitude change is required.

[Yet Another Anon]

but by-elections don’t matter
Although first the Liberal Party and now the Liberal Democrats built up their position on by-elections, many current Liberal Democrat seats were first won at by-elections, including previously safe Labour seats.

The Conservative Party is still struggling in parliamentary by-elections, oppositions have gone on from winning huge by-election victories to lose spectacularily, but then again opposition parties doing badly in by-elections don't seem to do well at following General Elections. By-elections also affect the balance of power - even if it doesn't put a majority on a knife-edge or end it, it can be the difference between a piece of legislation passing and not passing.

[Yet Another Anon]

but by-elections don’t matter
Although first the Liberal Party and now the Liberal Democrats built up their position on by-elections, many current Liberal Democrat seats were first won at by-elections, including previously safe Labour seats.

The Conservative Party is still struggling in parliamentary by-elections, oppositions have gone on from winning huge by-election victories to lose spectacularily, but then again opposition parties doing badly in by-elections don't seem to do well at following General Elections. By-elections also affect the balance of power - even if it doesn't put a majority on a knife-edge or end it, it can be the difference between a piece of legislation passing and not passing.