Every season of The Apprentice, at least one team fluffs the pitching episode by getting caught up in developing a product without working out how they'll pitch it at the end. Being part of a major party's general election campaign that made fundamentally the same mistake as 15 years of baby entrepreneurs was…eye-opening.
A product is not a pitch
It was my honour to stand as a first-time Labour candidate in the recent general election (in Sevenoaks, an unwinnable, ultra-safe Tory seat). I’m also a communications professional with twenty years’ experience (I used to run 100+ journalists at a division of Northcliffe, have hired and trained pretty much every sort of marketing team there is, was at one time an award-winning journalism and media economics commentator quoted in most major newspapers, currently run PR and messaging for a mid-cap travel company and election campaigns for my local CLP). There have been plenty of articles raking over the reasons Labour lost the election. I have instead some thoughts on, specifically, the messaging behind our losing campaign. These are, needless to say, my personal reflections on my experience.
TL;DR? Labour’s messaging didn’t work.
To be clear, the press team who liaised personally with us as candidates were great - responsive, well-informed, tireless. They did what they could.
But. I flatter myself I’m a reasonably smart guy with a lot of comms experience. I spent every spare waking second in the weeks since the election was called trying to understand the message I was being asked to promote and condense it down into simple, consistent soundbites I could use at hustings, on the doorstep, in newsletters and other comms.
It was impossible.
A wonk manifesto
The campaign and messaging plan was written by wonks for wonks. As the saying goes, most people aren’t interested enough in politics but a handful of us are far too interested. We needed to land our message not just with journalists and other activists but with voters whose political engagement is just high enough to make it down to the polling station most general elections. What we produced instead was hundreds and hundreds of pages, and several new policy announcements a day, for week after week. Imagining that could be used as the basis for a clear general election campaign message that cut through to marginal voters was absurd. It was too much, too often, with no overarching campaign theme to tie it together.
What was our elevator pitch supposed to be on the doorstep? A green industrial revolution end austerity worker control of industries renationalisation free broadband proper NHS funding end homelessness and foodbanks more police more nurses ten billion for social care a national education service cancel tuition fees WASPI restitution regional investment banks something about post offices and a final say on Brexit. Ok. That, per 15 years of failed Apprentice pitches, is the product, not the pitch. As Aditya Chakrabortty says, "what started as (an) anti-austerity movement is now a melange of ideas, most of which look and sound utterly absurd on a doorstep on a rainy morning." And we were up against opponents who had three words. The three words won.
Free broadband
By way of just one example, take the free broadband policy. It came out early in the campaign. I therefore had time to boil it down to something that I could positively convey. I spent the time, did the maths, put in the work, worked out some soundbites about how it was simply cheaper and better to run broadband as a public service.
As a policy it would have made a perfectly good hero message - an easy-to-justify proof of the economic benefits of public provision of basic essential services over doing it privately for profit. But it was immediately lost in the noise of new announcements. As far as I could tell, it landed - so far as anyone noticed it amidst the noise at all - as another mildly negative proof that our manifesto was a bewildering fantasy grab-bag of unaffordable wishes that would crash the economy and/or raise everyone’s taxes for no immediately obvious gain. Why were we going to provide broadband through general taxation when people already had mostly adequate broadband that wasn’t especially pricey? When we announced it, the explanation was that it kept coming up at town hall meetings and focus groups. Fair enough. But what was far more important from a messaging point of view was that in the time it would have taken us to develop and land an argument for it something else had come out, then something else, then something else again. So no-one outside Labour activist circles, barring the people whose doors we happened to knock on during free broadband day, ever got to find any of that out.
Shoot the messengers
Our TV coverage included a lot of Jeremy triumphantly revealing long and complicated policy leaks, adding to the cognitive overload. It somehow also included a lot of airtime for a handful of self-described communists on the very fringes of our movement - people who as a left-wing activist I like and have in some cases enjoyed campaigning alongside, but manifestly provoke outright loathing in some of the voters we most needed to keep or convert. Comparatively little airtime was found for Keir Starmer, Emily Thornberry or John McDonnell, who could have developed and landed credible and potentially popular cases for, respectively, our Brexit policy, internationalism and economic plans. The messengers matter, a lot. We hid those with the most general appeal, and allowed broadcasters to gleefully parade those that appealed only to our existing base. Compare and contrast the Tories, who sensibly hid Rees-Mogg from view for the whole of the election cycle, and even did their absolute best to hide the PM from scrutiny. To quote a former Tory leader, "where there is discord, for god's sake hide in a fridge until it's all over".
Variable quality of datasets
One day I was sent truly excellent, robust data on how much funding each of the 37 state schools in my constituency would gain or lose by the end of the next parliament under Labour, the Lib Dems or Tories. It was gold-dust, the best and most useful thing I received in the campaign. I spent two whole days writing and printing tens of thousands of localised newsletters for each ward, with photos of myself outside each school and charts showing the funding outcome under three possible governments. My wonderful, tireless volunteer teams on the ground spent the last two days of the campaign getting them through letterboxes, and when we got to the count it looked, to me and to some of our opponents, like we’d done best in the villages we’d targeted. But that was the exception, and I almost overlooked the value of it in the constant deluge of other messages from HQ.
Another day I was sent the talking point that our policies would save an average family £6,700. Not just our opponents but independent fact checkers quickly and easily demonstrated that no “average” family was paying for two annual adult railcards for both parents to commute into London plus childcare for one infant and one school-age child but living on the breadline. (Conceivably the country genuinely contains a handful of such families somewhere an hour from London. If so they are by no means typical).
Some of the £6.7k family saving calculations included inflation, some not. There was no consistent base year or base case. Assuming the benefit of the doubt, perhaps someone somewhere thought the general thrust of our proposal for a fairer society so obviously better that it wasn’t necessary for our talking points to stand up to detailed mathematical scrutiny. If so they were badly wrong. Pretty much as soon as I saw it I resolved unilaterally never to mention the whole “families £6.7k better off” talking point. I knew I couldn’t defend it without dissembling or lying and when it was trivially demolished in public debate it would add fuel to the depiction of my party as innumerate spendthrifts and drag my own credibility down along with it.
Messaging overload
The policies and messages followed thick and fast. At one point the party sent over three press releases in the space of 24 hours. Quite soon, I started ignoring most of them. Then all of them. There simply wasn’t time to develop them into any sort of coherent argument that could be used often enough or simply enough to land. It became a sort of distant and hypothetical press theatre, existing almost in a vacuum that never got as far as being useful to present to voters.
In the end, by necessity I boiled down my own argument to three reasonably simple talking points for the doorstep and the hustings.
- We had ten wasted years of austerity behind us, and just ten years ahead of us to fix the climate crisis. Our opponents deliberately caused the first and didn’t have a credible plan to address the second.
- The reckless experiment of the last ten years to shrink the state to unprecedented levels led to homelessness, food banks and economic stagnation. We had a modest proposal to restore the size of the UK state to a normal European level, which our opponents were disingenuously misdescribing as novel and unaffordable as they dragged us with reckless haste towards a state the size of the US.
- When we did this before in 1945 Tories and newspaper barons said it would bankrupt the country. Nonetheless, out of the ruins of war we built the NHS, the welfare state and million homes in six years. Labour did it before and we could do it again.
Mostly I tried to stick to detailed macroeconomics, where I was comfortable and thought I would sound most plausible, and where my opponents seemed to limit their attacks to relatively general attempts to brand my party as vaguely fiscally irresponsible. The message that we understood the economy on a deep and detailed level seemed like an important one. At hustings at least, it seemed to land and the local press picked up the key points I had tried to make in their summaries. Perhaps it helped.
Message discipline
It was easy and fun in debates to mock the Tories’ endless repetition of a simplistic and trivially false three-word catchphrase. During one hustings I had the crowd counting along with me and laughing as a local Conservative, completely predictably, rolled out the catchphrase time after time. But it remained that we didn’t have anything comparably simple to sum up our own offering, or the message discipline to make it land consistently, from spokesperson to spokesperson, day after day, debate after debate, until the people we needed to reach - people unlike ourselves not obsessed with the minutiae of the electoral debate - had both heard and internalised it.
Needless to say, in the end it didn’t work. We lost. The hubris of recent attempts to imply we somehow won has been both ludicrous and counter-productive. We lost, lost badly, people will suffer for five years because of it and we won’t win next time either unless we accept the fact and face the necessary changes.
Our messaging did not work. It was too complicated. There was too much of it. Much of it was so new there had been no time to prepare the electorate or even the press for its novelty. There was no single theme. No pitch. It was only sometimes mathematically robust enough to bear even good faith neutral scrutiny, let alone the inevitable attempts of our opponents to demolish it. There was too little discipline around it, and precisely because there was so much of it different spokespeople were left to pick the bits that suited us, diluting any attempt at an overall theme. And it was, far too often, conveyed by messengers manifestly repellent to the voters we most needed to persuade while our most plausible and effective communicators were kept bizarrely out of sight.
The wash-up that isn't; the reflections that aren't
Almost all of the discussion following our defeat has taken the form of people insisting that their own longest-standing grievances are now vindicated. Centrists insist we could have performed better at the centre (the fate of the Lib Dems and ChangeUK suggests to me otherwise). Lexiteers claim we could have won by supporting Brexit (we would have lost a different half of our electoral coalition, which may have been better or worse only at the margin). Some odious gaggle of pseudo-left racists even seem to have managed momentarily to unite the party in condemning their implication we could have won if only we’d been willing to throw in our lot with racists. Happily it seems that even in defeat we are agreed that we are not.
My own position is simpler. I backed Jeremy Corbyn and the Corbyn project wholeheartedly and without serious reservation. I spent three years of my life, and the recent campaign cycle, making the case for a Corbyn government. I still believe a Corbyn government would have made a far, far better world. Perhaps one day something like it even will, if we change both the message and the messengers.
But it is not enough in politics to be right. To win one must also be popular. And to be popular one must agree a clear and consistent message, delivered by messengers, that people like enough to vote for. We didn't. And so we lost.
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