For months, Labour’s leadership has warned the party and its supporters against complacency. The election and a third term in government, we are told, are by no means in the bag. The purpose of the warning is both clear and logical: to up the electoral ante so that those considering abstention or a protest vote can be in no doubt that the result of their actions may not simply be the reduced Labour majority that some desire, but Michael Howard ending up in Downing Street.
Suddenly, however, these warnings have a little more credibility. In the pre-campaign, the Tories appear to be, at the very least, making inroads into Labour’s poll lead. The media, hitherto the chief purveyors of the inevitability of a Labour victory, are now overawed by the Tories’ ability to display a semblance of competence.
But, however much the sense of Tory revival is media-generated, there is little doubt that the Conservatives have performed well since Christmas. If you want to see how far the Tories have travelled, the best comparison is with the state of their campaign in 2001. Not only is Michael Howard’s leadership unquestioned (at least until after the election) but the party’s usual penchant for in-fighting and backstabbing appears to have gone into remission.
By contrast, even in this crucial pre-campaign period in 2001, William Hague’s ability to run the Tory party – let alone the country – was being openly questioned. Plots abounded and jockeying for the inevitable post-poll leadership election was much more evident than the rather more subtle positioning which is currently going on deep in the jungles of Tory party politics.
Compare, too, what the Tories were talking about at this point in 2001 and Howard’s chosen topic of conversation now. Then, Hague was hawking his ‘save the pound’ campaign around the shires, desperately trying to ensure that the blue rinse brigade who abandoned John Major for the Referendum party in 1997 came home to the Tories. The fact that, at that time, less than one in five people rated the single currency as the most important issue facing the country (compared to the third to two-fifths who rated the economy, education or the NHS as most important) did not deflect Hague from his course.
Today, the Tory leader is setting the news agenda across a wide range of topics – from education and health to crime, asylum and council tax – which far more people are actually bothered about. The Tories, moreover, are venturing deep into traditional Labour territory with their attacks on alleged failings in various public services. There is also something mechanical about the manner in which the Tories are, week in, week out, launching their salvos and then ensuring that little else is talked about by the media for the rest of the week. The Conservatives are being aided by the fact that their allies in the press do not appear to be on strike (or at least working to rule) as they were in the last couple of general elections.
Mawkish though it is, the Conservatives’ use of real-life individuals to make their points – whether it is Margaret Dixon or Maria Hutchings – is also clever. As has been widely discussed, polls continue to show that while most people have been satisfied with their personal experience of the NHS or their children’s schools, many appear to believe that their encounter was the exception rather than the rule. The Tory campaign – by highlighting failings experienced by other patients and parents – helps to reinforce this feeling that schools and hospitals in general have not markedly improved since 1997.
Michael Howard has learned from the Tory debacle of 2001 in another important way. Like Labour in 1997, the Tories are keen to reassure the British public that they do not intend to jettison those elements of the previous government’s approach that are broadly popular. For Labour’s acceptance of trade union reform, privatisation and Ken Clarke’s inflation targets, read the Tories’ acceptance of the national minimum wage, devolution, and Bank of England independence. The Tories are even pledging to match Labour’s spending on health and education in an echo of Gordon Brown’s decision in 1997 to accept the Major government’s spending limits for his first
two years at the Treasury.
These announcements – combined with the Tories’ micro proposals on issues such as school discipline, MRSA, health checks and quotas for immigrants, and highly targeted tax cuts – are designed to suggest that a Conservative government would simply be a tinkering with and, in their view, improvement on Blairism. Like Labour’s pledge card in 1997 or Bill Clinton’s micro initiatives in the run-up to the 1996 presidential election, the Tories’ bite-size policy proposals are designed to get the party at least a hearing from the voters again. The reality, that the Conservatives’ spending proposals and tax cuts don’t add up and that their health and education proposals will soon reduce state provision to a safety net for the poor, does not appear yet to have filtered through to many voters.
The Tories’ rather clever electoral strategy combines with some worrying statistics for Labour’s high command. In January, for instance, Mori reported that while 72 per cent of Tories and 64 per cent of Lib Dems said they were certain to vote in an immediate general election, only 55 per cent of Labour supporters said the same thing. This is, say Mori, a much larger differential than in previous elections and perhaps helps to explain why the gap between those who identify as Labour and the party’s current poll rating on the basis of people certain to vote is still too wide for comfort.
Labour is also keenly aware of what political scientist John Curtice has labelled ‘tactical unwind’: the possible dissipation of anti-Tory tactical voting which managed to inflict such damage on the Conservatives in 1997 and 2001. In scores of seats, the Tories could, even without substantially increasing their vote, come through the middle and win if the Labour vote splinters and the Lib Dem vote rises.
Writing in the Guardian recently, Martin Kettle wondered whether Britain was on the brink of a 1970-style upset where a Labour government, apparently breezing to a third term, is dramatically ejected from office, despite there being little enthusiasm for its opponents. There are two other possible precedents to consider, too. The first is a variation on the 1992 result where, despite a strong popular vote lead, John Major was returned to office with a majority of only 21. In 2005, it’s not impossible to envisage the reverse happening: Labour winning a large majority on a rather unimpressive share of the vote (below 40 per cent, for instance). This would weaken Labour’s moral authority and its claim to have received a mandate to carry through its programme.
For the second scenario, look back to when Margaret Thatcher won her third term in 1987. In that election, the Tories managed to win both an impressive majority and share of the vote. However, it was probably the election at which Labour’s recovery really began: Neil Kinnock succeeded in running a brilliant campaign that helped start to erase the images of the party from the early 1980s. Labour needs to be careful about the lasting impression that the Tories – even if they lose – make in the campaign, that brief period when many otherwise uninterested people pay a little more attention to politics.
Tony Blair, for one, has never underestimated the Tories or their ability to recover. Indeed, it is his near-obsession with occupying any ground that the Conservatives might use as a springboard to revival that has caused such consternation in liberal-left circles. Many others, however, have long assumed that we’ll only know for sure that the Tories are really back in business when their own Blair emerges and the party is forced into a Clause IV moment. Was that a miscalculation? Over the next few weeks, we’ll find out.