I suspect Gloria de Piero’s shameless plug of this book in last week’s Stylist magazine may raise its profile more than my few thoughts on it published here. My copy of Five Million Conversations is already better thumbed than my candidate’s copy of our general election policy booklet. As it gathers pace and its diary style structure develops, with entertaining thumbnail sketches of characters and moments of high drama and low comedy, almost every page has an insight or observation that resonates with those of us who lived every minute, even if we never saw Ed’s battle bus.
You could say it needs a trigger warning for candidates emblazoned on the front. This was a campaign that had so many strategic contradictions that it was unwinnable. More than any election I have been involved in or reported on, this was an election where the electoral tides pulled and sucked Labour down, because the currents from different directions were just too strong. At the centre was a team struggling with this reality and their own conflicting solutions. At almost every key juncture Ed Miliband is given directly contradictory advice, from Scotland, to the deficit, to even when to stand down as leader.
This unsurprisingly resulted in contorted language, delayed interventions, fudge and muddle. Consider when we finally decided to say we would get the deficit down: when we printed the manifesto. The excruciating incomprehensible language that would make you laugh out loud if it did not make you wince. ‘Budget responsibility lock’? No, me neither.
There is a weird distance you have as a candidate, from the centre. The things that absorb hours of time and tons of emotional and apparently intellectual energy of the top team barely register on the ground. This includes what is seen in Westminster as key moments on the 10 o’clock news. Iain himself expresses faint regret that some of his scoops that hit the headlines make little impact. Imagine how the party’s news team feel when an announcement on rents makes ‘the ten’ yet disappears without trace. None.
Announcements of new policies passed us footsoldiers by, either because they were irrelevant to our community or were pushed out in such a way you just could not use them. The cut in tuition fees was meant to be a ‘game-changer’, but it is clear from this report why that was not the case. The housing pledge added on to the bottom of the Ed stone, treating homes for people like an afterthought. So some of the most intriguing episodes in the book are ones where the specifics are absolutely new. But they are still horrible in their familiarity.
The ‘view from Rochester’, Milifandom, the Ed stone, Ed and the hen party; all are given an extra dimension here as well as fresh stories from the frontline – dodging the planned stop in Falkirk, and ‘campaign stops’ on the way to nowhere.
It is clear there was more than one election campaign being conducted, which made the job of the top team hard if not impossible. Iain’s close-up view and long-term knowledge and understanding of the Labour party and the politics of Scotland reveals that the tensions were so great as to be irreconcilable. The most arresting stories are from Scotland. Almost everything I needed in a three-way fight in south-east England was completely the opposite in Scotland. By trying to meet the demands of each, we did not have a message that convinced either.
Tactical solutions on spending and the constitution whizzed by as incomprehensible but fundamentally suspect to your average voter. Rather it was seen as pleading and needy, the opposite of strong and principled. It was a campaign conducted in a defensive crouch. Anyone who has held that physical position for long will tell you, there is not much you can do from that angle, apart from survive.
The book is called ‘five million conversations’ and one key conclusion is that the number of conversations was rather futile. It was a ground war being conducted without effective air cover, or indeed suitable ammo for political equivalent of hand-to-hand combat – the doorstep conversation.
Iain broke the content of the Beckett report last week and I am sure he found the contents rather satisfying, because they chime with his insights from on the road. His reporting is more colourful and lively and a better read. My belief is only confirmed by the contents of both: that the short campaign tells you nothing, apart from revealing all the mistakes you made much earlier, by which time it is much too late.
It is said history is written by the victors. Iain’s book is at least a record of defeat from a sympathetic and knowledgeable observer. But as a former journalist I can say that if we use either of these hastily written documents as the final word on why we lost I fear we are doomed to repeat the same mistakes. The most depressing aspect of the last five years was a failure to tell a story about the country Labour wished to help shape: neither a story connecting us to our past, of our country or our party, nor a story about our future. The ‘small doorstep bribes’ as described by Jon Cruddas were utterly transactional and did not add up to a hill of beans let alone hope or optimism. His inquiry into why we lost is more insightful than the official report by Margaret Beckett, and Iain rightly quotes him widely here.
Many people keep trying to answer the question, ‘What is our offer?’, for whichever group of disgruntled or alienated voters we are considering at any one time. The central lesson from Iain’s pacy and insightful book is that without resolving some bigger issues about how Labour applies its values to current and future challenges this cobbling-together of a ragtag coalition of competing interests will leave us floundering yet again.
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Polly Billington is the former parliamentary candidate for Thurrock
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Five Million Conversations
Iain Watson
Luath Press | 288pp | £9.99