Unless you’re as optimistic as Jon Ashworth, it’s pretty clear that messaging-wise, Labour have had a pretty bad summer. There are many reasons for this that many wise people have examined in quite some detail and at quite some length, but one of the major strategic errors is that the party appears to have made entirely the wrong assumption about what the Tories had planned for recess. Labour was clearly just lying in wait for more mistakes and bad news to come crawling out of the woodwork over the holidays. But they’d reckoned without the months of careful planning that the Conservatives had put into this slower season.
I understand that the party was holding meetings on how to manage recess months ago, and had planned a programme of announcements, speeches, stunts and neat little infographics about how well their policies are going. They printed half a million more pledge cards to hand out. And they decided to target Labour, and only Labour. ‘The Lib Dems don’t really figure for us at the moment,’ said one senior figure when I asked what happened to the plan to start differentiating between the two Coalition parties. And party strategists insist that they’re relaxed about Ukip now that Lynton Crosby has got a plan for attacking Nigel Farage’s party. The reality is of course slightly different and as James explains in his column this week, many of the key summer attack themes that undermine Labour like immigration and welfare also reassure would-be Ukip voters that the Tories are on the right track.
The focus on Labour means the Tories have started to behave more like a traditional opposition than a party of government. Their strategy this summer has been to attack Labour on the areas where the party is weakest, playing up their own achievements and arguing that Miliband has ‘questions to answer’ on key policy areas.
They’ve been able to respond to bad news in the way that Labour might have hoped it could, too. Grant Shapps sent out this campaign email on Wednesday following the publication of the Electoral Commission’s donations data (although the Joan Edwards row made this a little less potent):
They also have a swing in their step after hiring Jim Messina as campaign strategy adviser, partly because they know that Labour were also making a really concerted effort to poach Barack Obama’s former campaign manager too. That he went for the Tories in the end was partly because Obama likes David Cameron. This, and the recruitment coup itself, appears to have given party morale one more big boost.
But the Conservatives’ opposition-like behaviour is one of the few good by-products of the party having spent so long out of government itself. Ministers had grown so used to finding tricks to wrong-foot the Labour government before 2010 that they’ve now started applying those same tricks to wrong-foot the Labour opposition in the run-up to 2015. A few months ago, the party was behaving as though it wanted to be in opposition, with unproductive and bitter infighting. Now, for the time being at least, it is behaving like a good opposition on the attack, but with the upper hand of being in government.
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