On June 12 1970, six days before polling in the General Election, a Daily Mail opinion poll put Labour more than twelve percent ahead of the Conservatives. We lost. A majority of 110 over the Tories in 1966 became a deficit of 43.
On the eve of the next General Election in February 1974, Labour’s last private poll put us nine points behind. We won, as the largest party, and got an overall majority later that year in the October election.
If that does not caution against complacency in 2001’s General Election, nothing will.
We were not gloomy about our final poll in 1974 because, despite that crude Tory lead, it also showed that the issue Labour had put at the forefront of its campaign – the cost of living – was what the voters cared about, whereas the main Tory issue – who governs Britain? – had tumbled down the ratings.
Crucially though, both in 1966 and 1974, the favourites lost because they had a record of economic failure. That is another lesson Tony Blair can learn from history.
Speaking at a left-wing lunch a few months ago, I repeated one of Harold Wilson’s favourite sayings that elections were won by ‘half crowns in the pocket’. A strident fellow guest (who didn’t look as if she had ever wanted for half a crown in her life and, like most of the lunchers, was higher on intellectualism than common sense), promptly accused me of being ‘deeply cynical’.
But Wilson was saying what Bill Clinton was to say a generation later: ‘It’s the economy, stupid.’
In general elections, newspapers feast on a scare a day. It’s easy to be distracted by them. My advice to Tony Blair is: don’t be.
In 1974 we had the Wigan slag heaps saga involving the Prime Minister’s personal and political secretary, Lady Falkender and her family, a fake secret Swiss bank account for Wilson’s deputy, Ted Short, a fraudulent minister, Lord Brayley, and an alleged plot involving Wilson’s tax affairs.
Wilson allowed himself to be so distracted by these events that he began the second general election campaign of that year, despite the protests of his staff, with an attack on the press on one of those rare occasions it wasn’t justified or worth it.
The upshot was, that for some of the papers, the early concentration was not what they had to say about the Labour manifesto, but what the Labour Prime Minister had to say about them.
If there’s a genuine scandal or misreporting, don’t ignore it. But it isn’t what the election is about.
The other lesson Labour’s Cabinet can learn from the past is that ‘dirty’ elections, the personal abuse of members of the other parties, loses votes, it doesn’t win them.
The adrenelin of the campaign often sends normal politicians off their rockers. They spend years proclaiming the honesty and integrity of politicians as a whole and then, when the guns start firing, make allegations which are untrue, unjustified or unworthy. ‘Yesterday’s Men’ was a spectacular Labour failure in 1970. It cost us votes. The Tory ‘demon eyes’ posters did the same for John Major in 1997. If politics is a turn-off it affects turnout.
Voters care about their jobs, their homes, their health, their transport, the education of their children, their pensions, and safety from criminal attack. And that’s what they vote for. They may dislike mucky morality, financial shadiness and jobs for the boys, but it rarely affects how they vote. And if that isn’t right, how did Bill Clinton ever win a second term?