The Tories must stop fighting each other, and focus their fire on the government

For the Tories, it seemed as if August would be the cruellest month. Earlier in the year, much of the party had embarked on a perilous undertaking. It had decided to allow itself the hazardous luxury of hope. Admittedly, only a few Tory MPs had thought that the party could win outright at the next election, but there was a widespread feeling that at least they were back in the game. The phrase ‘all to play for’ was often heard.

Then, once again, the game seemed to slip away. The rise of Ukip and the failure to see off the Liberals rattled Tory MPs, and when the party became nervous it reverted to its bad old self-destructive ways. There was no reason why a story about young candidates complaining about bed-blocking backbenchers should have made headlines for several days, but for the fact that a number of Tory MPs never seem happier than when laying into fellow Tories. In the mid-Nineties, John Major once told his MPs that, when in trouble, a lot of them would automatically form a circle and open fire — after turning inward. In early August, it seemed that nothing had changed.

Yet there has been a fresh outbreak of optimism in Central Office for a surprising reason: focus groups. The Tories have always been ambivalent about focus groups, although they were the first party to use them, back in the early Eighties. In those days, focusing was known as ‘VALS’ research, standing for values, attitudes and lifestyles. The aim was to reach behind the quantitative techniques of traditional opinion polling and to make qualitative assessments of what people were really saying and thinking. But many Tories remained suspicious, especially when Labour took up focus-grouping on a grand scale, under Peter Mandelson’s direction. Senior Tories saw an advantage in contrasting their purity with Labour’s opportunism.