Minority Verdict The Conservative Party, the voters and the 2010 election Michael A. Ashcroft First published in Great Britain in 2010 by Biteback Publishing Ltd Westminster Tower 3 Albert Embankment London SE1 7SP Copyright © Michael A. Ashcroft 2010 Michael A. Ashcroft has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the publisher’s prior permission in writing. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. ISBN 978-1-84954-082-7 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Set in Garamond by SoapBox Printed and bound in Great Britain by xxx Contents Introduction iv 1 The fundamentals 1 2 As it was in the beginning 8 3 A snapshot of the opposition 18 4 Events 26 5 Targeting 59 6 What happened and why 94 Appendix: Selected published polls, 2005-2010 129 About the author 133 Introduction THE RESULT of the 2010 general election was closer than many people expected. Certainly it was closer than Conservatives hoped it would be. With 306 seats in the House of Commons, the Conservative Party was twenty seats short of the overall majority that looked all but assured only weeks before polling day. Even this tally was precarious. If a handful of results had gone the other way, the maths would have looked very different. The Conservatives won 32 seats that required a swing greater than the 4.9 per cent that they achieved nationally from Labour or the 1.4 per cent from the Liberal Democrats. Had they not done so, Labour would have remained the largest party in the Commons and would almost certainly have continued in office. Many Conservatives were disappointed with the result. The party faced a shambolic government, an unpopular Prime Minister, a recession, a huge budget deficit and an over- whelming national desire for change. A year before the election they had been twenty points ahead in the polls. Surely this was an open goal. How could they come so close to missing? To see the result simply as a failure is to underestimate the scale of the challenge the Conservatives faced at this election – and also, it must follow, the scale of what they achieved. The elections of 2005, 2001 and 1997 produced, in descending order, the Conservative Party’s three worst ever results. The Conservatives had never before managed to return to government from a position as weak as the one they faced in 2010. For a majority in the House of Commons the Conservatives needed to gain 117 seats in addition to the ones they already held. This would be by far the highest number of gains since 1931 (under the rather different circumstances of the National Government and the Labour schism that saw 210 Conservative gains with 55 per cent of the popular vote. The highest number of Conservative gains in a “normal” election was 87, in 1950 – in 2010 they needed a third as many again.) An overall majority would need a uniform swing from Labour of 6.9 per cent – again, the highest the party would have achieved since 1931, and far greater than the 5.3 per cent Introduction v achieved by Margaret Thatcher in 1979. The Conservatives needed to gain seats and swing the popular vote on a scale that had been achieved only once since 1945 – by Tony Blair and New Labour in 1997. All this needed to be done on electoral geography that remained chronically skewed towards Labour. For any given vote share, Labour would win more seats than the Conservatives. The unfairness of this was such that at the 2005 election, Labour won 92 more seats in England than the Conservatives, despite coming second in the popular vote. Boundary changes since then would mean an extra 12 seats or so for the Conservatives and seven fewer for Labour – a very small impact given the scale of the imbalance. The effect of this continuing bias was that to achieve a majority of one seat in the House of Commons the Conservatives would need a double-digit lead in the popular vote (while in 2005 Labour had secured a majority of 66 while being ahead on vote share by just 3 points.) Of course, any electoral system will seem unfair to somebody. But the fact remains that there was nothing inevitable about the Conservatives winning the 2010 general election. The political cycle is often described as a pendulum, with power swinging between one party and another as though it were governed by the laws of physics. But politics in Britain is not like a pendulum at all. Politicians are not elected and defeated by gravity, and governments do not lose just because their time is up. If parties want the pendulum to move, they have to push it themselves. Seen in its proper perspective, the 2010 election result is an achievement of historic proportions for David Cameron and the Conservative Party. They did not manage an overall majority. But with 96 gains, they did achieve their best result since 1931 – or, if you consider the extraordinary circumstances of that year, the best Conservative result ever. Yet I, too, was disappointed with it. I think that if the Conservatives had done certain things differently – not just during the campaign – we could have won more votes and more seats. It is important not to draw the wrong conclusions, however. One theory is that we did not achieve a majority because we failed to nail Labour on their record, wrongly chose not to highlight immigration, and talked too much about ourselves. It would be a disaster if this theory were to become the orthodoxy because it is wrong in every particular. This election was about change. The overwhelming majority of voters thought it was time for change – 82 per cent in one survey three months before polling day – yet only 36 per cent voted Conservative. If we had talked even more about Labour’s record than we did (and we talked about it endlessly), the very most we could have achieved was to add vi Introduction to a desire for change that was already clamorous. In fact, it would not even have achieved this. The expenses scandal brought to the fore a yearning to change not just the party of government but the way politics was conducted. A campaign more heavily focused on Labour’s record would have associated us even more inextricably with the kind of politics people longed to do away with. The key to the result lies in the gap between the change people wanted and the change they thought we were offering. Going into the election, voters had little clear idea of what the Conservatives stood for or what we intended to do in government (not least, incidentally, because many thought our campaign was dominated by criticism of Labour). The fact that we had not established ourselves firmly as the party of concrete change allowed the Liberal Democrats to seize their moment. At the same time, Labour’s scaremongering about our intentions still resonated among too many floating voters who were not convinced we had really changed. Talking less about our plans in the months before the election, as some now argue would have been the right course, would have made this problem worse. Neither was immigration the answer. Though important to many voters, it was one of the few issues on which we had an insurmountable lead – as, indeed, it was in 2005 – and was not among the many things on which swing voters in particular needed reassurance. Indeed, putting immigration closer to the centre of the campaign would have reminded too many of the party they rejected at the previous election. The blend of opinion towards the Conservative Party that developed in the first year of David Cameron’s leadership set the pattern for the remainder of the parliament: on the one hand, a tentative hope that the attractive new leader really did represent the prospect of a better government offering real change; on the other, suspicions about substance, concerns that the party was for the better off rather than ordinary people, and a residual fear that the change had been merely cosmetic. How, or whether, this discrepancy was resolved would determine the outcome of the election. In this respect the election was about us, not Labour. Within months of Gordon Brown’s accession, voters had decided to look elsewhere; the questions in their minds was over the alternative. I want to examine the extent to which we answered those questions. I will also give an account of my own involvement with the target seats campaign, and finally I will offer a view of David Cameron’s decision to form a coalition with the Liberal Democrats. My wife says that whatever I do, people always look for a motive – and when they find one, they think they must have missed something. My motivation for writing this book is Introduction vii not to condemn the campaign, still less the individuals who worked on it, whom I regard as friends and colleagues.