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Stephan Shakespeare: We live in un-visionary times

The year ends with the Tories well up, and Labour well down. It’s been an exciting few months, from the point of view of the horse-race. But how far have we really moved forward in the battle of ideas?

The horse-race matters. It’s not always edifying, but it’s not a trivial part of the democratic process. The politicians’ need to add percents to their score, point by point, is the only fuel for the progress of policy when vision fails, and sadly we can’t expect our politicians to have visions every day. They have to do something, whether it’s a photo-opportunity, a row, or a nice little tit-bit like the inheritance tax cut. What works and what fails gives them some sense of where they might go next, in the absence of any inner drive.

I suspect that if either David Cameron or Gordon Brown could find a real inner drive, a genuine vision for how they might change the country, then their support levels would grow with more solidity. That’s their challenge for 2008. Maybe something in their Christmas crackers will trigger a series of thoughts and emotions that grips their imaginations and leads us somewhere new.

We seem to be in singularly un-visionary times, whether here in the UK, or in the US, or in Europe. We have branding campaigns, and policy-tinkering, but no mission. Many will think this a good thing. Missions and visions can do great harm as well as great good. The last thing we want is a revolution when things are pretty much ok as they are.

Stephan Shakespeare: Will the next election be like 1992 or 1997?

Will the next election more closely resemble 1992 or 1997 – a narrow recovery for the incumbent or a landslide to bury him? Of course it’s completely unknowable, but DC’s intuition on this will make a huge difference to his boldness on strategy and policy. If 1992, then he will want to find new ways to attract the swing voters and will be more willing to take some risks to achieve it; if 1997, he will want to play it safe.

The parallels from recent history – Brown taking over from a long-serving, toppled leader as Major took over from Margret Thatcher – were analysed yesterday by Andrew Rawnsley in The Observer. Rawnsley pointed out what is often forgotten, that Sir John was actually rather successful at first. After the first excitement and polling bounce of the ‘new man’, he went into a difficult period, but then recovered and won a victory with the polls all strongly against him (that was pre-YouGov; the idea that there was a big ‘late swing’ due either to the Sheffield Rally or the front page of The Sun is not taken seriously by the academics who have studied it closely; ‘late swing’ was just an excuse for polling error). It only went wrong for Sir John after that first victory. Rawnsley thinks that Brown still has a long way to go before he can be written off, and may well still pull of Major’s initial success.

The parallels are obviously not exact: John Major was not associated with the entire course of Thatcher’s administration the way Brown is with Blair’s. But still, what if there’s a certain momentum – the honeymoon bounce followed by the disappointment, then the second-chance giving him an election victory – that leaves David Cameron as a version of Neil Kinnock?

Unlikely, but certainly possible were DC to play his cards wrong. His biggest mistake would be to allow his team to think of Brown simply as a loser, one of life’s natural nearly-men. We hear there are some at CCHQ who think it’s all over for Brown and it’s a cruise from here on out; much safer to realise that Brown still holds some strong cards and could win, and that therefore something special is required from DC every week.

Stephan Shakespeare: Who is driving the volatility in the polls?

First, a concession: I over-estimated Gordon Brown. I thought him a stronger politician than he has since proved. I thought his ‘bounce’ would be sustained longer. Had he announced a general election in the middle of the Labour Party conference, he would have easily beaten the Conservatives. But he proved weak, Cameron rallied, and of course now the tables have turned.

What is the true extent of that turnaround? Can the electorate really have moved from a double-digit lead for Labour to double-digits lead for the Tories? Has politics really changed that much? If true, then the volatility is quite extraordinary.

It may not be true. I have a pet theory about this, which I developed while polling in America around the party conventions of 2004. It’s a theory I’m all the more fond of because it’s almost impossible to prove.

As we all know, opinion poll ratings move sharply during the political conference season. There’s always a bounce in favour of the party in the spotlight, and under normal circumstances that bounce diminishes pretty quickly. But why should there be a bounce at all, when we know that people don’t pay much attention, and generally don’t enjoy what they see? Do people really change their mind as a result of some snippets of speeches on the TV and in the papers? And do they then change back when the snippets are gone? It seems inherently implausible.

My theory is based on the trickiest part of any pollster’s task, working out who will and who will not end up actually voting. When pollsters ask people how likely it is that they will vote, more people say they will than end up doing so. We can divide the electorate into three: those who know that they will vote (and do), those who know that they will not vote (and don’t), and those who say they will but won’t.

Stephan Shakespeare is away

Stephan Shakespeare: Politics is still a matter of life and death

British society today is less divided, less ideological; there are no deep rifts in the public mind on basic policy issues or on values or on control; therefore politics is about personality, and winning elections is about mood music. So runs the familiar argument. As far as it goes, it has some validity.

Here’s an alternative angle: all life on earth is programmed for survival and dominance. Everything that really matters is therefore seen through the lens of “what difference will it make for me and my family?” It sometimes feels as if politics has gone pleasantly to sleep, but that can’t be right. If politics matters then it must be about survival and dominance, it must be a never-ending battle.

Maybe politics is no longer the medium for things that really matter? In a world of technocrats, have all the real decisions moved to another level? Certainly with interactive media there has been a huge growth of consumer power, and people are less subject to top-down government. But the politicians still have one basic power: To take something from us and give us something back.

They take some of our freedoms, and give back protections. They take some of our money, and they give back services. They command resources, and they redistribute them. How they do this is vitally important. Rely on an inefficient health service, and you’re more likely to die. Send your kids to a failing school, and you slash their chances of thriving. Politics creates our environment in a very basic, life-and-death way.

Stephan Shakespeare: Get going now, Boris

Last week ConservativeHome noted how CCHQ was concerned at "drift" in Boris Johnson's campaign. Since when we have received numerous examples of a stalling campaign.  In his regular Monday column, Stephan Shakespeare calls on the Tories' Mayoral candidate to demonstrate discipline and courage now.

As a big fan of Boris, I’m getting worried. A while back I wrote that Boris could beat Livingstone and be a good Mayor, but that he needed a ‘Prince Hal Moment’ – where he rejects his bumbling comedic character just as Prince Henry rejects Falstaff to make himself fit to be King. That hasn’t happened. I’m beginning to suspect that dear old Boris thinks it’s enough to be dear old Boris.

There are two types of politician. The one who enters the arena because he or she really wants to change something, driven by a sense of injustice to fight for the people, angered by the stupidity or greed or fear in the affairs of man to order things in a better way, believing against the odds in a vision of how to make the world better - not just by gracing it with his superior grace and wisdom, but by putting everything at the service of progress.

And then there is the type of politician who is driven by mere desire for the job, by simple vanity, a self-admiring impulse to sit in the top seat, or because it’s a jolly good wheeze.

I’m hoping, and I still believe, that Boris is of the first type. London desperately needs a champion who is appalled at the waste and the organisational mess and who wants to change it because he knows that it’s the poor that pay for it with crappy lives. A champion who understands how criminally disproportionate is the slice of the tax-take from Londoners’ pockets that is exported to prop up failure in other parts of the country; who knows that the glittering success of the capital obscures the miserable lives of so many of its citizens.

Stephan Shakespeare: Barn owl sings the Blues

We like to think of ourselves as analytical creatures, capable of taking complex data and making sense of it. I think that’s a fair claim, although very often it’s an inversion of what we mean. We do indeed constantly analyse, comparing small bits of new data to the mass of previously categorized data in our memories, and that is what perception is. When we proudly speak of our analytical abilities, we generally mean something different from plain moment-by-moment perception: we mean producing some grander design. This, I think, is usually an illusion.

Whether or not we consider ourselves ‘musical’, we all have an incredibly advanced ability to process sounds in terms of pitch, rhythm, timbre, and so forth. Even if we can’t sing in tune, we can recognise the distinctive profile of overtones that distinguish the sound of a violin from a piano. (Any note produced by an instrument has a basic pitch and many overtones, that is, additional higher-frequency pitches, of which some louder and some softer, creating a pattern that is the particular sound of a particular instrument).

In fact our recognition of those overtone profiles is so automated once we get beyond early childhood that if we are played only the overtones without the fundamental note, we create the fundamental in our own mind – we hear the fundamental note as if it had been actually played.

Sound recognition is one of the few areas where we can map firing neurons precisely to an outside stimulus, in this case particular notes. In fact, they fire at the same rate as the frequency of the note. We can see what note is being ‘heard’ by the particular part of the brain that is firing. This allows an astonishing trick (I highly recommend “This is your brain on music” by Dr Daniel J Levitin, for a proper explication). Electrodes were placed in part of a barn owl’s brain, and it was played the ‘Blue Danube Waltz’ using tones which excluded the fundamentals (that is, the basic part of the note). In other words, only the overtones were played. Now, by the process previously described, known as ‘restoring the fundamentals’, the owl’s brain produced the missing parts of the tone. And as this meant the neurons firing at the exact rate of the frequencies of the missing notes, it meant that by amplifying what was picked up by the electrodes, the missing fundamentals could now be heard as a playback from the owl’s brain.

Stephan Shakespeare: Time for Cameron's team to step forward

I write looking out over Santa Monica beach, Los Angeles, a few surfers just waxing down their boards under the opalescent orange glow of what will become the first clear sunny day following the engulfing fires. I’m here for business and part holiday, so I’ll keep this brief.

In the UK, we’re reasonably up to date on the Hillary-Obama-Giuliani state of affairs, but out here no-one knows much about Gordon Brown, and few even have heard of David Cameron. But they do refer fondly to Tony Blair, and they are more aware of his Middle East missions than of Brown’s ups and downs.

That’s understandable given how much more influential US politics is on us than British politics is on them.  And how much more colourful it is too, with a much broader layer of the population taking an active interest.

It set me thinking on the difference between the US system of Presidents, Senators, Governors, Congressmen, Mayors, and our party representatives.  The American system is of course much more focused on the leader, and there are many leaders at many levels.  Those leaders generally belong to their party, and feel a loyalty to their party, but they are much more independent from them, feel that they derive their legitimacy direct from the people who elected them and not the party that gave them the platform, and they have their own team that they have hired out of their budget, they do not rely on their party.

Stephan Shakespeare: The importance of person-to-person contact in politics

Mathematicians have found a pattern in the distribution of votes that casts new light on a key driver of voting behaviour. Their research is across hundreds of elections in many countries over several decades, but in spite of great variations in the political and economic conditions prevailing for each of them, what they have found appears to be an underlying pattern. Interestingly, it holds irrespective of when the election was held, suggesting that recent changes in technology, media, and campaigning techniques haven’t greatly changed the basics.

Unfortunately I haven’t seen the research itself, only the write-up in the New Scientist (13th October 2007), and so I can’t say whether these bold claims stack up. Their conclusion appears to be that the most important driver of what proportion of total votes a candidate (as opposed to the popularity of a party and its policies) gets is person-to-person contact. A candidate tries to convince other people to vote for him or her. Those who have become convinced then influence those with whom they come into contact.

Pretty obvious, one might say, and certainly it is an assumption behind many successful campaigning techniques, especially ones used in the US in recent elections. But in one sense maybe it isn’t so obvious: many political strategists have concentrated almost wholly on the ‘air war’, that is, messages via the media.

The authors of this study wouldn’t deny the importance of the candidate’s communication in the media – this is after all the nearest that most of the population will ever come to contact with the candidate. However, this research should remind us that we neglect traditional personal contact campaigns at our peril.

Stephan Shakespeare: Right or wrong, polls now provide a continuous feedback loop between politicians and the public

Polling has had a huge effect on the life of the nation in the past few weeks. 55% of Conservative members surveyed by this site thought it was the polls that were the decisive factor in stopping the election. The up/down on/off drama which trapped Gordon Brown in a bind of his own design hugely weakened him and boosted David Cameron.

This particular polling dynamic is a new development: until quite recently, we didn’t have the conference season constantly punctuated by the latest measures of voting intention, and for two very good reasons. First, my industry used to say, polls during or just after a conference are distorted by the increased media attention that a party gets, so if they are read as settled opinion, they are misleading. Second, until YouGov came along, polls just couldn’t be carried out that fast. I was once criticised by Sir Bob Worcester for running intra-conference polls, but now that we’ve all sped up on delivery, the whole industry is scrambling to meet the demand.

Whether it’s right or wrong, we now have a continuous feedback loop. Personally, I think it’s right: the more that politicians interact with public opinion, the better for democracy. But only if politicians learn to interact with them appropriately. The tragedy for Gordon Brown was that he didn’t understand the proper way to deal with this new situation. He held the cards in his hand, played them wrong, and was trumped. He deserved no better: this card game was only about winning elections, not about winning for the country.

Stephan Shakespeare: The Tory surge was 90% policy and only 10% speechifying

What a fabulous week for Conservatives: not only have the prospects for the party turned around 180 degrees, they have done so for fully conservative reasons. My one fear – just a little one - is that in all the excitement, party strategists might wrongly ascribe this fundamental shift in opinion to the stage performance on Wednesday and not sufficiently to the policy announcement. The reversal in fortunes is no more than 10 percent down to speechifying; it is 90 down to the policy. Whether the party, in its euphoria, can stay clinically focused on the important stuff and distinguish it from the fluff will make the difference between a temporary fillip and a proper victory.

I don’t tire of repeating it: Voters need a reason to vote; swing voters need a reason to swing.

I’ve argued in these columns that the internal narrative of the Conservative Party is of little interest to the electorate - that the brand management approach of the last year or two could be of sustained interest only to the media class, and they really don’t matter. Instead, I argued, you need to offer the electorate a hard-edged, bankable deal. You can therefore imagine my relief when last week, the British people were offered exactly that: vote Conservative and taxes will come down. Crucially, those tax cuts were explicitly defined, easy to understand, and unambiguously beneficial.

Stephan Shakespeare: The Conservatives must convince voters that they'll make their lives better

I am often asked how hard and fast is the rule that an opposition needs to have a clear lead before entering an election campaign – maybe 5% to 10% - in order to have a good chance of winning. That is, I used to be asked that question often. Obviously with a 7% to 11% poll lead for the government, it seems somewhat less pertinent.

But it’s still worth answering, and the answer sheds light on the current situation for the Conservatives.

Clearly the reversion to the government in an election is not a ‘rule’ at all; anything can happen in politics at any time; but there is a good reason for using it as a default assumption. It’s well grounded in the psychology that applies to polling.

If you are asked “Who will you vote for?”, and you are not a committed supporter of any party, then a degree of game-playing is bound to enter into one’s motivations when answering the question. Governments tend not to be popular. They impose themselves on us in ways that we don’t always like. So when asked the question by pollsters, people are often tempted to use the opportunity to send a message of dissatisfaction to the governing party. Remember the petrol crisis of 2000, when William Hague scored a temporary lead over Blair? Respondents at those polls weren’t seriously saying they now wanted a Hague government, merely that they hated the government’s latest move and wanted to register a protest.

Stephan Shakespeare: Cameron must offer bankable reasons for the uncool majority to vote Conservative (and quickly)

We could be within days of a general election being called, so this is a time to be constructive. How to be constructive when the polls are so gloomy for the Conservatives? Simple: all people are capable of changing their minds, so all elections are winnable. But that means Cameron’s people changing their minds too.

No, not by lurching to the left or right. Cameron has been clear that he will do neither, and he’s absolutely right. I’m not suggesting any weakening of the modernising message. I have always, from well before the rise of DC, argued that the Conservatives needed to fundamentally shift their image, from people who wax lyrical about General Pinochet to people who admire Mandela; from wallowing in nostalgia to appreciating today’s dynamic cultural diversity; from talking about privatisation to talking about social justice. On this front, Cameron has certainly succeeded.

The change that Team Cameron must now urgently make is to focus all their efforts on connecting with ordinary people. At the beginning, Team Cameron staked a great deal on their conviction that everything depended on winning over the commentariat - that a subtle chain-reaction would thus be set off, a trickle-down effect that would work its way from the Grays Inn Road to the Boston Stump. I think that was a mistake. It will never happen. Elections are bottom-up, voters don’t take their lead from pundits.

Mark Penn, the brilliant pollster to Clinton the First and now pollster to Clinton the Second, talks of the ‘impressionable elites’. They are the chatterers in the professional classes who are so comfortable in their daily lives, so free from the survival issues faced by the majority of society, that they can afford to become obsessed with the drama of personality played out in their own special theatre, rather than real policy that creates real change.

“The so-called herd in America,” he says, “is better educated and more issue-focused than ever. Today’s elites are like perpetual college students, far removed from the experiences and struggles shaping everyday life. And so it is a lot easier to spin America’s elites than it is to spin the voters.”

Positive mood music – rebranding and all that – is enough to win an election only if the electorate have firmly rejected the incumbents and have started looking around to see if the opposition might be acceptable. But if the public haven’t yet rejected the incumbents, then the opposition must offer much, much more.

Stephan Shakespeare: Are our aspirant leaders engaged with the lives of ordinary people?

I’ve been banging on recently about the process of politics, arguing that the manner of policy development may be as important as the outcomes. My few readers probably find this theme tangential. But I think last week well illustrated my concerns.

We had a report from a Conservative commission on environmental policy. The purpose of the report was to put forward ideas for saving our planet. That must be good, even if one doesn’t agree with many of the proposed measures. The real problem was that it was put forward by people who in their own behaviour undermine many of the principles they want to impose on the rest of us. John Gummer wouldn’t even let the panel answer the question about how many flights they had all taken recently. Mr Gummer did venture that he needed a 4x4 because of the nature of his constituency. Others no doubt needed additional flights to visit their foreign estates, or to conduct their businesses, or to go on fact-finding missions.

But ordinary hard-working people need their holidays too, and they need to transport their families, and at the same time they need to keep as much of their hard-earned money. By refusing to allow a discussion about the everyday reality behind the principles being proposed, Mr Gummer was saying: We, the experts, know what’s right for you. That means: we’re better than you. And we don’t understand, or don’t care about, the lives you ordinary folk lead.

Stephan Shakespeare: The Tories aren't doing better in the marginals

When polls are spun, we should be very nervous. The purpose of a poll is to provide independent evidence about what people think, evidence that may be used to measure progress or justify a particular strategy. When polling data is misinterpreted, it’s therefore worse than having no data at all, because it gives us confidence in a proposition that may be false. A recent analysis of voter preference in the marginal seats presents just such a danger.

The Conservatives have certainly pulled the polling numbers back impressively recently; a week or so ago the Labour lead stood at 6%-8%, and now the average is down to just 3% using the last polls from ICM (5%), YouGov (3%) and Populus (1%).

However, an analysis of the three most recent Populus polls, separating the data from just the 120 most marginal seats, painted a rather too rosy picture by wrongly suggesting a better result for the Conservatives in the seats that matter most, the 120 ‘most marginals’, prompting ConservativeHome and others to think that the targeted campaigning effort being made in marginal seats is paying dividends.

It may or may not be paying dividends – but the poll analysis provided no evidence for it. In fact, the correct interpretation of the data is that change in voting intention is exactly the same in the marginals as it is in the rest of the country. And that change is zero.

Stephan Shakespeare is away

His column will return next week.

Stephan Shakespeare: The importance of the decision-making process in politics

There are three key components to a political offering: personality, policy, and process. Candidates for leading the nation must appeal to the voter on all three. There is debate of course about their relative importance, with either personality or policy being placed at the head by most people, and process coming a distant third. In fact, most people would say that the process of politics is a big yawn, interesting only to political junkies, and it needn’t feature prominently at all.

And yet, when we consider major recent failures, they have all had failure of process as a key aspect. Tony Blair did not lose the respect of the British voter because of the nature of his policies, not even for the Iraq policy itself, but for the way he made his decisions and how he defended them. John Major was heavily punished for the ERM debacle, which was a policy issue, but the scale of the slaughter derived just as much from the impression of sleaze and incompetence. Even in the case of George Bush, the main accusation against him is not that he went to war, but how and why the decision was reached.

In each case, the political process – the degree to which strategies and actions were developed with and through legitimate democratic processes – was critical. Even with Margaret Thatcher, it was her supposed autocratic behaviour that was cited against her as much as her policies or character. The final blow was delivered by her ex-chancellor declaring her to be a bad cricket captain.

Stephan Shakespeare: How should the Conservative Party connect with voters?

Elsewhere on ConservativeHome today a variety of authors are considering the question, what should David Cameron do next? Here I would like to examine not the ‘what’ but the ‘how’.

I suggested last week that the relationship between political parties and the electorate was crucial but neglected. If I am to take an action which involves effort on my part, but which has no mathematical chance of having an actual effect – I mean the act of voting – then I must have some other good reason for doing it. Unfortunately, politicians cannot rely just on the electorate’s sense of duty as the relationship between them and the process becomes ever more artificial and alienating.

Politicians now try harder than ever to create direct relationships with the electorate, and use all the sophistications of modern media management to woo the people. But as with any other seduction, these techniques only work so long as they do not reveal themselves as mere techniques. Post-Blair, it has become harder to convince the public that emoting is backed with genuine feeling. The crucial quality of sincerity has become much harder to manufacture.

I have previously criticised the over-focus on branding at the expense of substance. But of course these two things need not – should not – be opposed. The best branding, the only sustainably successful branding, harmonises with the underlying substance. In other words, all branding depends on sincerity. When we don’t believe the pitch, the pitch actually turns us against the proposition.

I was only being half-ironic when I spoke of ‘manufacturing’ sincerity. It is not entirely oxymoronic. We do not simply have primal feelings: we can actively create the conditions in which feeling develops, just as we develop ideas and policies by deliberately engaging with the world around us with openness and intelligence. This is why I suggest that David Cameron and his team think again about the relationship between political leaders and the electorate, and how they can get to know them directly (rather than only through the sometimes distorting lenses of polling and focus groups). Instead of treating the electorate as a curious object, to be manipulated, can they actually create a genuine relationship?

Stephan Shakespeare: Why vote?

The question of why people vote has perplexed many political scientists, who don't just wonder why people vote the way they do, but why they bother voting at all. To political activists, it might seem obvious, but to many behavioural psychologists it remains a mystery.

After all, it takes effort to vote. Typically, it means leaving your comfortable seat, finding your voting card, and walking some distance to the polling booth. For political junkies, this is an exciting event. For most people, it’s an inconvenience, a disturbance, a pain in the neck.

And what do you get in return for this effort? A moment’s thought shows that there is vanishingly small chance that your vote will actually determine the outcome of anything. When was the last time that a constituency result hung on a single vote? And when was a government determined by the advantage of a single constituency? Multiply the chances and you get a probability equivalent to that of Mars colliding with Jupiter.

Stephan Shakespeare: It's time to focus on pensioners, crime and the economy

Louise Bagshawe responded to my last article by saying that I was completely wrong, there was no need to adjust the strategy, that the present one was remarkably successful. Louise and I must live in different worlds, or else we just have very different expectations when we talk about ‘success’ for the Conservative Party. In the thread below her article, I promised to provide some positive thoughts about what a better strategy might look like. But yesterday two great articles in the Sunday Times, by Andrew Sullivan and Michael Portillo pretty much sum up what I had to say. Nevertheless I’ll proffer some minor points.

Before that, though, let me get Aunt Sally out of the way. The most annoying aspect of the current debate about strategy is the way the ‘loyalists’ characterise any call for change as a demand to ‘lurch to the right’. This is infantile. It’s a convenient way to shift the blame but it won’t do for people who genuinely care about the future of the party. If we start from that premise, we needn’t bother having a debate at all. Most Conservatives I know agree that the party’s image needed to be renewed to show that it is a normal part of the modern world. My own view as a Londoner and as an immigrant (Shakespeare is my wife’s family name which I adopted when we married 23 years ago – until then I was Kukowski) is that Cameron’s championing of tolerance and inclusiveness is terrific. Ideally, Conservatives should be comfortable engaging with both metropolitan and rural values.

What’s wrong with the present strategy is not that it is too left or too centrist but that it is concerned with the wrong things. It is entirely about the internal narrative of the Conservative Party – about how David Cameron’s Conservatives are new and nice. If this is your mission, you don’t deserve to win an election, you just deserve a pat on the back.

You win an election by showing the voters that you are there for them, that you will defend their security, that you will provide them with a better future. So stop serving up 1997 Blairism. Stop talking about how you are changing – why should anyone outside of the political class possibly care? And start talking about how life for everyone will change if you win power. Get rid of the self-obsession and start looking outwards. Cut the vanity and the eternal celebration of how clever you are, and make it your mission that old-age pensioners feel more comfortable.

Stephan Shakespeare: Changing the leader would be madness for the party; but it is also madness not to change a flawed strategy

“No lurch to the right”, “stay the course”, “stick with the centre ground”, “no wobble” – when these familiar phrases appear in the press, we can sum up the situation with one word: “trouble”.

The next election is still winnable for David Cameron. But it will demand clear thinking. Above all, Tory strategists must understand that in the modern world – and after all, we strive to be ‘modern’ – there is no such thing as a ‘centre ground’. We live in a multi-dimensional world, we do not aggregate around some fixed mid-position on a line on a graph. Where would you place the Gordon Brown of taper relief, which he has pledged to continue even for private equity? On the left or right? It’s certainly not centrist.

So far, CCHQ has provided a one-dimensional strategy: changing the party brand from nasty to nice. No problem with that, DC has done really well on that account. Whether or not the Conservatives were ever truly seen in those terms, there is no doubt that the image of knee-jerk cutters of public services was a real problem.

Stephan Shakespeare: The public need to be convinced that changing government is worth the risk

Michael Portillo, who I greatly admire, used his Sunday Times column on the weekend before the Southall and Sedgefield by-elections to call on David Cameron to show more ‘cojones’, reminding him that the ‘half-hearted’ don’t get to the top. He meant that up to now the modernising project had lacked the necessary ruthlessness, and that DC should stop feeding the party’s ‘baying right’.

Since then the party has had two awful by-elections – twice pushed into third place – and yesterday was hit with two more woeful opinion polls. Maybe Michael’s suggestion that DC is not yet sufficiently like Blair is the correct explanation for the recent down-turn in David Cameron’s fortunes. Maybe the party needed an even more modern candidate in Southall.

Unlikely, but possible. One thing strikes me as certain, however: the ultra-modernisers are already starting to prepare the ground for blaming any future failure on ‘the baying right’.

This seems unfair. ‘The right’ has never been better behaved. It has preferred to mutter under its breath rather than make trouble, constantly reiterating (correctly) that David Cameron is ‘the only show in town’, accepting that there is no alternative.

Stephan Shakespeare: The Brown honeymoon will likely endure for at least six months

The 'two polls' that appeared in Sunday’s newspapers, each purportedly showing a 7 per cent lead for Labour, were in fact one and the same poll, with two different bits given to two different newspapers, and each press released separately the evening before. So Conservatives thinking that two polls have now confirmed a continuing downward trend can take a crumb of comfort from knowing it was just the one.

The Sunday Telegraph got the proper ‘state of the parties’ question, while the News of the World were given a rather curious follow-up – “Now that Brown has taken over, and faces Cameron and Campbell, are you feeling warmer to the idea of supporting the Tories/Labour/Lib Dems?” I have no idea what this is supposed to mean. Feeling ‘warmer’ towards supporting something isn’t the same as voting for it.

We pollsters can sometimes find ourselves writing some pretty weird polling questions, and they can obscure as much as they reveal. In the months before Blair quit the stage, we were asking people how they would vote if Brown were the Labour leader. I warned this question could turn out to be misleading (people can’t know how they will vote under different conditions in the future), but YouGov asked it along with the other pollsters because that’s what newspapers required. The results suggested that Brown would be a pushover for Cameron, and Tories became rather optimistic. At that time I predicted that Brown would perform well in the transfer of power, and that the British people would be generous to the man they saw as finally getting ‘his turn’. That’s happened, and I suspect both this generosity from the public and the quality of his performance will endure for at least six months. Brown could easily call an election before this period is over.