Philip Cowley

Trying to analyse the election spending data? Follow Deep Throat’s advice…

The publication of expenses for last year’s election is a useful reminder of the reality of much of politics. It turns out it’s not all barnstorming speeches and televised debates. There are an awful lot of invoices involved too.

The claim everyone is obsessing about is that Labour spent just £16,000 on Facebook adverts, compared to more than a million spent by the Conservatives. Indeed, Labour seems to have spent less on Facebook adverts than each of the Liberal Democrats, Ukip, and Greens.

No one disputes the fact that the Conservatives outspent Labour on digital campaigning. For public consumption, Labour used to pretend that this didn’t matter – and that their grassroots activists would trump the Conservatives’ virtual campaign. But writing a book about the election, I found that privately Labour’s digital team were happy to admit that if they had the money they would have been doing exactly what the Conservatives were doing.

Still, the official Labour figure seems unfeasibly low, given that Labour were targeting Facebook ads on 63 constituencies. Either the initial release of data has overlooked some invoices – as with the infamous Ed Stone – or (as I suspect) some of the costs of Labour’s digital campaign are lurking in other invoices, less obviously labelled.

Anyway, all of this misses two much more important things about the data released yesterday. The first is that for all the attention given to it, spend on Facebook is still dwarfed by more old fashioned forms of campaigning. This is what I call (with characteristic modesty) Cowley’s Law of Election Campaigns: ‘There is an inverse relationship between the importance of any election campaign technique and the amount of media coverage devoted to it.’

Yes, Facebook is growing in importance, but when we discuss election campaigns, we should remember Deep Throat’s advice: Follow The Money.

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