Since 1987, every Labour election campaign has benefited from Philip Gould’s strategic advice. His work with focus groups has become the stuff of legend, steering the party to three historic election victories. When it became clear that Tony Blair was leaving Downing Street, Gould took up a role in Freud Communications in early 2007. The year after, he contracted cancer and was told he had little chance of surviving. But he pulled through and now he has found himself back involved in Labour’s 2010 election campaign. He joins other members of the New Labour royal family who have returned to help the party in recent times, including Peter Mandelson, Alastair Campbell, and we’re told, Tony Blair.

‘I’m doing focus groups again and I’m absolutely loving it’, Gould tells us. He’s buoyed by the fact that he finds that the public don’t have ‘any great love for the Conservatives’. ‘They’re not fully convinced by the leader of the Conservative party, and they’re certainly not convinced by the Conservatives themselves. If David Cameron had kept himself in a modernising position all the way along, and had genuinely changed his party, then I think he’d be in a much stronger position’.

While Cameron made an ‘initial strategic decision to change his party,’ ‘a couple of years ago he came to a position where he didn’t feel it was necessary, or did not feel he was able, to change the party fully.’ So what should Cameron have changed more? ‘Tony Blair used to say it was only when the Conservative party had changed on Europe that you’d really think the party had changed. On Europe [Cameron] didn’t confront his party at all – I think that’s quite a fundamental thing.’
While at pains to say he isn’t exaggerating or simply making a political point, Gould suggests the public have ‘an instinctive sense’ that the Tories haven’t changed. ‘In modern life the motivation of an individual, of an organisation, of a political party is just completely central in evaluating trust. And people just are not persuaded by their motivations. There’s an ambivalence between left and right, and in that ambivalence uncertainty grows, so when it comes to their policy of cutting the deficit, people do not know if it’s driven by dogma or by a desire for economic efficiency.

‘When you look at polls of their new members, they do have quite rightwing attitudes, on the NHS, on Europe certainly, on the size of the state. There’s reason to doubt.’ And as Gould knows from the scars of 1992, ‘to really get a thumping majority you have to avoid reason to doubt.’ ‘For all of Labour’s failings, they kind of know Labour’s on their side and have got the right values. That’s really why we’re still in the game.’

When we suggest that most commentators do feel that the Tories have successfully decontaminated their brand, Gould retorts: ‘You don’t decontaminate brands, you decontaminate parties. New Labour was never about decontaminating the brand. If you’d said to Tony Blair in 1995 “we need to decontaminate the brand”, he would have laughed in your face!’ I remember very well when I went to see him in 1994, I’d written some note or other, and he just looked at it and threw it away saying “look, unless it says that we’ve changed the party top to bottom, root to branch, it’s not worth reading.”‘

Gould believes this is the difference between New Labour and the new Tories. According to Gould, Blair ‘was always looking for evidence of fundamental change’. The 1997 manifesto ‘from Europe to taxation to the family to crime’ showed that Blair had confronted the party head on. Perhaps reflecting on his role in the world of PR, Gould reflects: ‘Modern communication, modern politics, modern campaigning isn’t about brand, it’s about substance. You can’t change the periphery unless you change the core.’

So can Labour win? ‘Yes,’ he says, before the question is even finished. ‘The polls have us at about seven points, you can win from this point and, to be honest, for me to say that we can win, when six months or a year ago that didn’t look so likely, is a remarkable position to be in.’ He suggests that Labour’s fortunes are also boosted by ‘pulling together with a degree of optimism and solidarity that is really quite moving’. Citing a canvassing session with his daughter Georgia Gould who is standing as a council candidate in Camden, he says: ‘There were about 10 members of the action team from various wings of the party and the way they were coming together, the way they wanted to win, the way they believed they could win – it really gives grounds for hope. It is a good moment.’

If this all sounds a bit Obama-esque, that’s because Gould very much believes that Labour can learn from that historic campaign. ‘I don’t think you can just simplistically take lessons from Obama, but having said that it was the most wonderful campaign, probably the greatest campaign of the modern era, and what defined it as such was the extraordinary combination of disciplined, focused leadership and message, and incredible desire and capacity to involve and include people. For me that’s what campaigning should be about.’

Gould was particularly impressed by the times when ‘Obama could have taken the short cut, could have hit some low blows, but he didn’t, he took the high ground’. Suggesting perhaps that Labour hasn’t always taken the difficult path itself, he says: ‘I believe in the high ground in politics now.’ This is needed even more so, he believes, because of the ‘anti-political mood’, which can only be defeated with ‘hope’.

Could hope form part of Labour’s election narrative, we ask? Reflecting back to the focus groups he has talked to recently, Gould agrees that ‘there is a kind of desire in the public for optimism, for hope, for a better future’. It’s up to Labour to show that ‘this is a country that has a future, that can be dynamic, that can be fair, that can give opportunity to people’. And that optimism should pertain to the future of the Labour party too, Gould feels, when we ask him about the next generation. ‘There is so much talent and ability in the party’, he enthuses. ‘I have a lot of time for James Purnell and David Miliband, and Ed Miliband, and of course Douglas Alexander. But the generation below them is full of talent, and then there’s a generation below them who is full of talent too.’
As one of the founding architects of New Labour, what does he think should replace it? Gould responds: ‘New Labour doesn’t exist as an abstraction, it exists as a tradition within the Labour party, a tradition of revisionism that certainly goes back obviously to the 1950s, but actually goes back earlier than that. The need to modernise the party, the need to connect the values of the party, the changing context is completely crucial for a progressive politics and progressive parties. And I think what New Labour changes into is a new version of New Labour.’ But Gould doesn’t believe it’s his generation who should be in charge of creating that new version: ‘it’s for the generations that follow … and not everybody will want to be part of that tradition of revisionism and modernisation.’

What is Gould’s parting advice for Labour’s activists for after the election? ‘This is a moment of solidarity … and it should be combined with desire and a hunger for change and renewal which should never abate,’ he says. ‘That is where the party should be after the election, win or lose, and I very much hope that we win and I’ll certainly do everything I can to ensure that it does. But I think that what many of us feel at this time, is closer to the Labour party as we like it and we want it to be than we have done for a while. Let’s just try and keep that closeness going.’

Photo: timdifford 2010