Ross Why the Tories Won

The Inside Story of the 2015 Election
1. Auflage 2015
ISBN: 978-1-78590-007-5
Verlag: Biteback Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 320 Seiten

When David Cameron returned to Tory headquarters early on the morning of 8 May, he declared his sensational election victory to be 'the sweetest' moment of his political career. The Conservatives had won their first Commons majority for twenty-three years and the Prime Minister had achieved the seemingly impossible: increasing his popularity while in government, winning more seats than in 2010 and confounding almost every pundit and opinion poll in the process. Within hours, his defeated rivals Ed Miliband, Nick Clegg and Nigel Farage had all resigned, stunned and devastated by the brutality of their losses. Political journalist Tim Ross reveals the inside story of the election that shocked Britain. Based on interviews with key figures at the top of the Conservative Party, and with private access to Cabinet ministers, party leaders and their closest aides, this gripping account of the 2015 campaign uncovers the secret tactics the Tories used to such devastating effect.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Ross, Tim

Leseproben

CHAPTER 2

THE WIZARD OF OZ

Omnishambles

Lynton Crosby was adamant. He did not want to work with David Cameron.

It was autumn 2012 and the Australian election strategist had not forgotten that a few months earlier the Prime Minister and his unpopular Chancellor had nearly ruined his reputation. Crosby was furious with them for jeopardising his chances of winning a second term for Boris Johnson as the Mayor of London. For weeks leading up to the mayoral election, he feared that the mid-term mess that Cameron and George Osborne were making of running the country would fatally handicap his candidate’s campaign, allowing Ken Livingstone, the former Labour mayor, to sneak back into City Hall. 9

The election was taking place at the height of the coalition’s unpopularity. Six weeks before the vote, Osborne had delivered the ‘Omnishambles’ Budget, making the Conservative Party a national joke over policies to tax pasties and caravans. Labour had taken a ten-point lead in the national polls, while Ed Miliband was celebrating a successful night of local election results across England. Over lunch on a blustery spring day a few weeks before London went to the polls, Crosby was clear that the idea of working with Cameron was out of the question. He is even said to have believed that Osborne should be sacked. ‘If we lose, it will be their fault,’ Crosby confided to his friends. ‘They’ve got no idea what they’re doing.’ 10

On election night itself, 4 May 2012, Crosby feared that victory had slipped away. At 7 p.m. he had ‘more or less written off’ Johnson’s chances and was depressed, according to those who were with him at the time. But Johnson won. In so doing, he defied the opinion polls, and the political landscape of the time, to retain power in Labour-dominated London. Victory was not merely the result of the unique public appeal of the candidate known simply as ‘Boris’. It was, by Johnson’s own reckoning, in no small part due to Lynton Crosby, who executed the kind of highly focused and disciplined campaign for which he has become known.

In the months that followed his re-election, Johnson lobbied Cameron repeatedly, urging him to recruit Crosby to take charge of the Conservative Party’s campaign for the 2015 general election. Dozens of MPs joined the clamour for the man who ran Johnson’s campaigns in both 2008 and 2012. Cameron, it seems, was open to persuasion. He despatched Andrew Feldman, the Conservative Party co-chairman, and George Osborne to woo Crosby.

But, despite Johnson’s victory, the Australian was still reluctant. He remembered being blamed for the Tory election defeat of 2005, when he ran Michael Howard’s unsuccessful campaign against Tony Blair. More importantly, Crosby had serious doubts about David Cameron’s motivation and appetite for the job of Prime Minister. ‘How do I know it’s not just some fucking frolic for a rich bloke to do?’ he asked friends. 11

In the end, Feldman, Osborne and, ultimately, Cameron himself persuaded Crosby that it would be worthwhile, and in November 2012 he agreed to take on the role part-time. In addition to a hefty fee – reported to have been in the region of £500,000 – Crosby demanded total control over the Conservative campaign. Having been heavily criticised in 2005, he wanted to make sure he was in control in 2015 so that at least he would not be blamed for anyone else’s mistakes. To Tories who questioned the new hierarchy, and few dared to do so to his face, Crosby had a crisp response: the election is a campaign for the chance to run a democracy; the campaign itself is not a democratic process. Someone had to be in charge – and it was Lynton Crosby. He also had a job to do on coaching David Cameron himself. Over the months that followed his appointment, Crosby set about ‘breaking’ the somewhat diffident and laid-back Prime Minister, whom he had witnessed making a mess from afar, and ‘re-making’ him in the mould of a national leader who would command authority and respect. By the time of the election, Crosby was pleased to see his candidate had grown into the role.

For David Cameron, it would prove to be a price worth paying. Crosby’s remarkable stewardship was to be the decisive factor in the Conservatives winning a shock majority in 2015. One source close to the Prime Minister has described the Australian as a ‘genius’. 12 Another senior Tory figure says: ‘It was Lynton’s show. Everyone else was pretty secondary. He had that strength of character and personality. He just carries authority and doesn’t mess around. If it had not been for him, we probably wouldn’t have won.’ 13

Australia

Born in Kadina, South Australia, in 1957, Lynton Crosby has described himself as ‘just a Methodist farm boy from the middle of nowhere’. His father sold the family farm when Crosby was a child and moved the family into the town of Kadina, where they started a craft shop. 14 His devoted parents were both loyal supporters of the right-wing Australian Liberal Party. As a precocious schoolboy, Crosby took on his left-wing teachers in classroom debates about politics and joined the Liberal Party aged eighteen. He even raised money for the party by staging musicals, and remains an avid theatre-lover. After studying for a degree in economics at the University of Adelaide, he went to work for the party, taking on a succession of roles.

In 1982, he tasted electoral defeat first-hand as a candidate, turning, in his words, a marginal Liberal seat into a safe Labor one. ‘In hindsight,’ he told the Australian newspaper The Age, ‘I wouldn’t have voted for me.’ Crosby took a number of roles in the oil industry before returning to politics in the 1990s, at a time when the Liberal Party was struggling. He won attention for his work at a regional level and was made deputy director and later national director of the Liberals in time for the 1996 general election, which, under John Howard’s leadership, the party won. With Crosby’s help – and that of his future business partner, the pollster Mark ‘Tex’ Textor – Howard won successive elections and remained Prime Minister until 2007. Crosby’s successes earned him his nickname, the Wizard of Oz.

His reputation as a political magician who had revived the fortunes of the flagging right in Australia saw Crosby hired to save Michael Howard’s struggling Tory campaign in the British general election of 2005. Although Howard failed to oust Tony Blair, he did significantly cut Labour’s majority. The Tories won thirty-two more seats in 2005 than at the previous election in 2001. Tory insiders from the time report that Crosby was drafted in too late to make a decisive difference to Howard’s chances, only starting work a few months before polling day. But he did inject a much-needed late burst of life into the campaign.

Not everyone was a fan. Plenty of commentators – a breed of journalist whom Crosby has grown to despise – objected to what was termed the ‘dog whistle politics’ that the Howard 2005 campaign deployed. Crosby’s message at the time focused on attacking Labour’s record on immigration, crime, school discipline and deadly hospital superbug infections. ‘Are you thinking what we’re thinking?’ was the Tory slogan for election billboards. It appeared at the bottom of handwritten posters with messages such as ‘It’s not racist to impose limits on immigration’.

It was a slogan that effectively urged voters to reject the political correctness ‘gone mad’ that the right believed New Labour was enshrining into the law of the land. It was also an attempt to make an intimate appeal to voters’ private thoughts, to sway their hearts rather than their heads. Crosby’s method was to point up a well-chosen selection of threats that had the potential to generate fear – killer infections, hordes of migrants, and marauding gangs of youths. While Howard’s campaign under Crosby’s direction may have been unfairly caricatured as ‘nasty’, it hardly amounted to a positive vision for Britain. However, when Blair returned to No. 10, with a significantly reduced majority, he declared that he had heard the voters’ message on immigration and on anti-social behaviour. He promised to ‘bring back a proper sense of respect in our schools, in our communities, in our towns, in our villages’. The message Blair said he had heard was one crafted carefully by Lynton Crosby.

London

Crosby set up the London arm of his company, Crosby-Textor, with Mark Fullbrook, to become CTF Partners in 2010. The venture required Crosby and his wife Dawn – who have two daughters and four grandchildren in Australia – to divide their time across two hemispheres of the globe.

When he was appointed as a consultant to David Cameron’s campaign in autumn 2012, Crosby’s critics feared he would fail because they remembered his unsuccessful ‘core vote’ strategy from 2005. Lord Ashcroft, the Tory grandee and former party treasurer, said his opposition to the appointment was ‘nothing personal’ but warned that the party must be able to appeal to the wider electorate beyond traditional Tory voters. ‘To win a majority, we need to attract people who thought about voting Conservative in 2010 but decided against it, not just keep existing Tories on board,’ Ashcroft wrote on the influential website ConservativeHome.com. 15

Crosby’s methods had been controversial in Australia, too. Particularly contentious was his use of so-called ‘wedge’...