If the key marginal seats for the next general election were a football match, the blue team has been out on the pitch for 10 minutes kicking the ball into the back of Labour’s net. Meanwhile, the red team are unaccountably still in the dressing room bickering about the outgoing manager’s big decision a couple of years ago, complaining that we only won the last cup three-nil instead of the 10-nil victories in 1997 and 2001, and debating who should be the deputy team captain.
The Tory party’s A-list of high-flying parliamentary candidates has met with external derision and internal grouching from disappointed B-list candidates. However, another aspect of David Cameron’s overhaul of the Tory parliamentary candidate selection process is more impressive, and means they have stolen a march on us. Cameron has realised that in the 2005 general election, the seats the Tories gained were those where they selected candidates early and ran an effective, well-funded, long campaign. A serious flaw in the current election funding rules means that spending limits only kick in once the election is formally declared, so spending before then is unrestricted.
So, in many target seats the Tories selected a candidate very early and worked the constituency like crazy (often using funds donated by key donors like Lord Ashcroft), with direct mailshots, leaflets (often in the form of advertorials wrapped around local free newspapers, and therefore delivered commercially rather than by activists), and both paid-for and volunteer phone canvassing.
This, at the very least, neutralised the incumbency advantage of sitting Labour MPs. Traditionally, one would expect the sitting MP to have a head start if standing for re-election, because of their greater name recognition, work they have done for the area and ability to communicate through annual report mailshots and the like.
At the next election, the Tories will be better funded than Labour in almost every marginal seat – not just those handpicked to get Lord Ashcroft’s largesse – because their new moderate stance has attracted donors, and Labour’s have been scared off by the ‘loans for peerages’ allegations. And they have already (by mid-January) selected 107 candidates in seats with no sitting Tory MP – mainly in the most marginal ones. All these 107 candidates are out profiling themselves and meeting potential voters.
In contrast, Labour has barely started its own selection process. Only 10 candidates have been selected in seats without a clear incumbent Labour MP. The trigger ballot process, a time-consuming but necessary formality in almost all seats (there has only been one actual deselection – Reading East – in a decade), is only just starting, and will tie up the time of the few party staff in the regions remaining after recent redundancies.
The slow start to the selection process might have been forgivable in the run-up to the 2001 and 2005 elections, when the battleground was almost entirely defensive, as Labour already had a huge majority, and where incumbent MPs were already in place as candidates (even if not formally reselected) and out and about in their seats.
This time, though, the delay could have dire consequences. We are now defending a smaller majority. The 47 seats Labour lost last time, although many of them are on paper eminently winnable with small opposition majorities, will in fact be more difficult to crack as they will all suffer the phenomenon known as ‘double-incumbency’, which boosted Labour in its 1997 gains in the subsequent 2001 general election. The double incumbency effect tends to boost the majorities of new MPs by a couple of thousand the first time they seek re-election, because they get an incumbency boost from their new profile as the MP. At the same time, the old incumbency advantage the other party’s previous MP had is stripped away.
So it would be hard enough for Labour to regain the seats it lost in 2005, even if it had candidates in place and was campaigning hard. But, in almost every case, it doesn’t. We need to get candidates in place as quickly as possible in every seat, and have them out campaigning and mobilising their local parties – particularly as staff cuts in the party mean that parliamentary candidates need to act, unpaid, as their own organisers. Every week when the Tories have a candidate in place and we don’t is another few hundred voters we haven’t canvassed, or another few thousand not leafleted. There isn’t any time to lose.