ConservativeHome's Election Review

We should have won - but the last election wasn't fought in perfect electoral conditions

By Paul Goodman

I worked with Tim on ConservativeHome's General Election review.  So it's scarcely surprising that I agree with its main conclusions.  The campaign was good on the ground, poor at the centre.  To concede three election debates with Clegg was a blunder.  The manifesto should have pushed a retail offer to voters, not floated a general idea (and one, furthermore, that hadn't been focus group-tested).

Immigration and welfare reform were pushed too late.  This was at least partly because Team Cameron was "fighting the last war" - pushing a "decontamination strategy" when voters were ready to hear a Conservative message.  More evidence for this turned up last weekend, in the form of the £300,000 adverts that showed people "coming out" as Tories.

We should have won.  It's bad for Britain that we didn't.  And it's well worth continuing to hold the Party leadership to account over it - not least to try to ensure that the same errors aren't repeated next time round.   It's true, as Tim writes, that "electorates have become much more volatile" and that "every week we read of politicians (and people from all walks of life) enjoying the highest or lowest ratings ever. It is much easier to achieve large swings than in the past".

Tories ditched £300,000 election ads that included gay shower scene

By Tim Montgomerie

The Sunday Times (£) reports that CCHQ commissioned and paid for a party election broadcast that portrayed people 'coming out' as Conservatives:

"One of the suppressed films that have now emerged shows naked men grappling in a shower, while another depicts a teenager being caught reading what at first appears to be a top shelf magazine. The third unshown ad makes light of teenage sex, portraying a girl confessing to her parents: “I am three months Conservative.”

The Sunday Times says that the ads were dropped for fear of a public backlash. My understanding is a little different. Senior Tories felt that the ads commissioned by Steve Hilton were at best out-of-date and at worst self-loathing. The opponents of the ad campaign felt that the 'decontamination phase' had gone on far too long and we needed to give people positive reasons for voting David Cameron and not to give people a new opportunity to think of Conservatives as the 'nasty party'.

The true cost of these ads is debated. The Sunday Times puts the cost at £100,000. Fraser Nelson has previously mentioned a £500,000 cost of ditched ads that until now we did not know the content. My source has talked of a £300,000 cost but it was submerged in the overall payments to Euro RCSG, the party's main creative agency.

The Coalition is forcing all government departments to publish all expenditures of £25,000 and more. Perhaps a similar commitment is needed for CCHQ expenditure - not necessarily at an election time for fear of giving opponents too much information. But if CCHQ knew that it had to publish its full accounts it might spend donors' money more wisely.

12.30pm Iain Martin's reaction: " a significant Tory party donor said to me recently that he was reluctant to hand the party another check until he got a guarantee that the next Tory election campaign will be run on a completely different basis from that of this year. He said that if he ran his business in that way — with no clear strategy, multiple chiefs and a lack of strong leadership at HQ — he would expect to go bust pretty quickly. He cited the ads, mentioning a figure north of £400,000, and said: “Have they any idea how hard I and other people had to work to earn the money we gave them, so that they could waste it making silly films that weren’t good enough to be shown to the voters?”

Cameron's smokescreen must not hide true reasons for election failure

By Tim Montgomerie

Yesterday, the London Evening Standard's Paul Waugh reported that David Cameron was warning that a lurch to the Right would not have won the last General Election. Jonathan Isaby's own review of the Prime Minister's talk to defeated candidates is here.

Frankly, talking of a lurch to the Right is a straw man argument. It is a smokescreen that is intended to hide the real reasons why the Tories didn't successfully seize the best opportunity we had in a generation to win a majority.

In ConHome's review of the election there is only one conclusion which can be fairly presented as urging a Right-wards move. That is our observation that issues like immigration and welfare reform were under-used. I'll always be puzzled as to why a day of the election was dedicated to the launch of an already-forgotten schools music competition but the potent issue of immigration never got a day's billing.

But the bigger arguments in the election review were about professionalism and proper process rather than ideology:

• The election debates gave the Liberal Democrats by-election status, and disrupted an already disjointed Tory campaign (91% of candidates agreed);
• The Big Society agenda is an exciting governing philosophy but it should never have been put at the heart of the Tory election campaign (71% of candidates agreed);
• The Conservatives stopped losing on the economy but they didn't develop a strong or consistent economic message (70% of candidates agreed);
• The Conservatives never developed an overall strategic message for the General Election (62% agreed).

ConHome's inside story of the election campaign points to lack of clear decision-making (which meant no clear theme was ever decided upon); a poor use of polling (which meant the Big Society was never market tested); and a failure to weaponise or retail-ise policies (with the exception of the last minute pledge on cancer drugs, the hugely expensive NHS pledge, for example, was not turned into doorstep policies) until the Contract was unveiled.

The other issue was trustworthiness. Cameron's ratings started falling on trust immediately after the Lisbon policy decision. Not because of the Europe issue, necessarily, but because voters - led by newspapers like the Mail, accused Cameron of being like other politicians. This reputation was reinforced by a lack of directness on issues like the deficit.

Another red herring regularly proposed in this debate is the idea that Cameron's swing was comparable to Thatcher's in 1979. 1979, to state the obvious, was 31 years ago. In those years electorates have become much more volatile. Every week we read of politicians (and people from all walks of life) enjoying the highest or lowest ratings ever. It is much easier to achieve large swings than in the past. 

I'm determined to keep making these arguments until Downing Street faces up to what happened in the election campaign. Until it does we cannot be confident that the next election will produce a better performance.

> Come to the ConHome Review of the Election fringe meeting at Party Conference. Speakers: Lord Ashcroft, James Forsyth, Iain Martin, Tim Montgomerie and Fraser Nelson.

Cameron spent £111 getting every extra Conservative vote

The Times' Guide to the House of Commons has just been published. It's well worth buying. As well as profiles of every MP it includes a number of interesting essays on the state of politics and the election campaign.

One snippet that interested me was Sam Coates' calculation of the cost of the Tory campaign:

"In [David Cameron's] four years as Leader of the Opposition, from January 2006 to May 6, 2010, a record £122 million went through Tory coffers, by any international political yardstick an extraordinary amount.  Barack Obama’s presidential campaign committee in 2008 raised £450 million.  That was to fund a campaign that won decisively in a country where campaigns hinge on TV advertising and with an electorate five times the size.  In domestic terms this figure is also striking;  Labour’s income was £71 million over the same period, although £22 million of this came while Tony Blair was still in office.  It also beats sums raised in previous Parliaments; the Tories’ income was £49 million and Labour’s £61 million between 2001 and 2005.

Perhaps more intriguing is the limited impact that this vast spending appeared to have.  By Mr Cameron’s own yardstick, set in a Spectator interview shortly before polling day, his own campaign was a failure.  The Conservative vote increased by 3.8 percentage points on its 2005 vote; an increase of 2 million votes net, or, taking in account the higher number of votes received by rival parties, 1.1 million more than last time.  In other words, every additional vote cost the Tories £111.

What is more, for the shrewd financial investor, the archetype of the modern Tory donor, the way the Conservative Party operated under the stewardship of Andy Coulson, Steve Hilton and ultimately George Osborne as general election co-ordinator, must have seemed horrific.  At a national level, half a million pounds was gambled on cinema advertisements that were never shown, £400,000 on a January 2010 “cut the deficit not the NHS” poster campaign later disowned by some senior figures.   About half a million was spent on a much–ridiculed “don’t be a tosser” campaign on the national debt and the same sum again on a national newspaper campaign to recruit internet “friends of the Conservatives”, which was never mentioned again by the leadership."

Tim Montgomerie