There may be good reason for Lynton Crosby’s return to strike fear into Labour hearts, warns Rafael Behr
The rule in politics is that something has gone wrong when the adviser becomes the story. The exception is when part of the story is how effective the adviser is turning out to be.
Officially, Lynton Crosby is a part-time ‘campaign consultant’ working for the Conservatives. By Westminster reputation he is the master strategist who has banished the bungling from David Cameron’s operation, put it on a war footing and sent Labour scurrying for cover. Even allowing for breathless Fleet Street exaggeration, it is an achievement on a contract of just one day per week.
The rest of the time, Crosby, an Australian citizen now resident in London, has obligations to other private clients. Their very existence is the main reason he has made headlines. For Labour, the combination of corporate lobbyist and prime ministerial consigliere in one man is conflict of interest incarnate. The Tories see desperation in those attacks, which remain unsupported by proof of wrongdoing. Crosby will work full time for the Tories from next year. Meanwhile, the vilification of the ‘Wizard of Oz’ is taken as a measure of the fear he strikes in enemy breasts.
How justified is that confidence? Crosby is a hired gun, paid not for his beliefs but his capacity to deliver victory. That reputation was built in Australia; his UK hit rate is mixed. He twice steered Boris Johnson to victory in London mayoral polls. But he also ran Michael Howard’s 2005 campaign with the memorably unsuccessful slogan ‘Are you thinking what we’re thinking?’ Combined with complaints about crime and immigration, the question acquired a hint of menace that reinforced toxic perceptions of Tories as embittered about the complexion of modern Britain. It was a misreading of the national mood.
Crosby’s defenders in the Conservative party point out that he did not draft the 2005 manifesto (that was Cameron’s role at the time) and could not be held responsible for flaws in the party brand. There were no reactionary undertones when the task was wooing London’s liberal-left electorate. Crosby stood in the wings as Johnson cherished the capital as a beacon of tolerance and diversity.
Still, the focus on a handful of simple policies, with a heavy accent on crime and immigration, is the Crosby strategic trademark. The standard device is rightwing populism that reaches over squeamish metropolitan heads, showing up bien pensant opposition as arrogant and elitist. One of Crosby’s first instructions to Cameron was famously to ‘get the barnacles off the boat’ – jettison policy that impedes the streamlined delivery of a core message.
There are a few moderate Tories who worry that carnivorous Conservatism will hit the same cultural barrier with a British electorate in 2015 that it struck in 2005 and 2010. The main reason Cameron does not have a parliamentary majority is that he failed to erase the mid-1990s caricature of the snarling Tory curmudgeon.
The more prevalent view in the Conservative ranks is that Crosby is providing exactly the kind of ruthless focus that had been missing from the Cameron project. A frequent complaint about the Downing Street operation had been that it lacked aggression. The policy unit was run by civil servants until earlier this year. Jeremy Heywood, the cabinet secretary, was said to enjoy too much power. The prime minister himself was routinely accused of being too comfortable in the trappings of his office and too comradely with the Liberal Democrats to appreciate how lonely and disenfranchised his party was feeling.
Many Tory MPs thought Cameron was insufficiently stung by the mediocre 2010 result and so was not adequately focused on doing better next time. They wanted evidence that someone at the heart of the machine was focused not on oiling the wheels of coalition but on sticking it to Labour and the Liberal Democrats. That person is Crosby.
He has advised Cameron to reach out more to his own party. He has also addressed groups of MPs directly, with a series of presentations reassuring them that the tide is flowing in a Tory direction. He has been particularly effective in calming nerves about the threat from Nigel Farage. This has been achieved partly by the adoption of language and policies – on Europe, welfare, crime and immigration – that are unabashedly targeted at voters leaning towards the United Kingdom Independence party.
Crosby has also coached Conservative MPs in how to remind their disgruntled supporters that ultimately the 2015 election will come down to a choice between a government led by Cameron and one led by Ed Miliband. It works a treat, say Tories who have deployed the line in their local associations. Whatever grassroots activists find distasteful in the incumbent prime minister pales beside their horror of the Labour leader.
Making the 2015 contest as presidential as possible will be central to the Tory strategy. The judgement in No 10 is that Miliband looks weak and has squandered the precious early years when novelty and public goodwill give a new leader the latitude to shape his own image. That control decays with time. The Tories are now confident they can make their own story about the Labour leader stick before he has set out his stall.
Crosby was important in the decision to go hard after Miliband over his relations with Unite and Len McCluskey, not because of some neo-Thatcherite vendetta against trade unions but because it helped portray the Labour leader as a pushover. Crosby also reportedly steered Cameron away from his initial reluctance to pick a fight with Labour over neglect in NHS hospitals. Instead, he advised attacking on any and every front. The tactical logic there is that, while the Tories cannot outpoll Labour in terms of trust with the health service, they can force the opposition to look defensive about its own legacy. That leaves less room for attacking the government.
Under Crosby’s guidance the Tories have set a frenetic pace of attack to deny Miliband time to articulate a rival account of how Britain should be governed. That then helps entrench the view, vital for Tory election prospects, that there is no credible alternative.
So the outline of a Crosby-inspired campaign is clear enough. It starts with the proposition that Cameron is the only serious contender to be a strong prime minister in difficult times. It defines strength as the capacity to address problems that festered under Labour: the budget deficit, debt, uncontrolled immigration, a soaring welfare bill, denial of a European referendum. It presses hard on those ‘wedge’ issues that are meant to prise Miliband away from mainstream, swing voters. It challenges the Labour leader to match ‘tough’ positions on, say, benefit cheats and illegal migrants that are so far from his soft-left comfort zone that he looks awkward and inauthentic if he tries and weak if he does not.
As important as Spartan politics in the Crosby formula is discipline in sticking to the script. There has been a marked homogenisation of Tory Twitter streams since he came on board. MPs are expected to use their social media accounts to relay the official line. Previously many had been running ad hoc and off-message commentary.
It was quasi-military discipline that Crosby famously brought to Johnson’s successful campaigns for City Hall. With hindsight those victories look easy, but in 2008 there was plenty of doubt that a Tory carpetbagger could defeat Ken Livingstone on his home turf. What Crosby understood was that Johnson was likeable but perceived as unreliable. So his main focus was ensuring that the candidate looked serious, focused and non-maverick at all times. That robbed Labour of the opportunity to declare the Tory challenger unworthy of a proper job running the capital. Crosby kept Johnson on a tight leash, reportedly telling him in one of their first encounters: ‘If you let us down, we’ll cut your fucking knees off.’ It is a running joke among senior Tories that Cameron and George Osborne hired Crosby because they needed someone who would swear at them.
A higher profanity count in Downing Street is unlikely to make the difference at the next election. Still, there appears to be a rough correlation between Crosby’s arrival and a number of other important indicators: greater rigour to Cameron’s political operation; a reduction in the number of ridiculous Tory own goals; a new ferocity in attacks on the opposition; greater unity in the parliamentary party; less panic about UKIP; higher morale; and a narrowing of Labour’s opinion poll lead.
It is always hazardous to attribute cause where there may be just coincidence and cyclical variation. There is still time for public opinion to shift in unforeseen directions. The economic outlook is uncertain enough – and the squeeze on living standards pronounced enough – to allow for a full spectrum of plausible political scenarios over the next two years.
Still, Labour has been warned. It has had just a small taste of what happens when the Tories mobilise in Crosby-style battle formation. In the first encounter it looked as if Miliband’s defences were too easily overrun.
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Rafael Behr is political editor of the New Statesman
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Cartoon: Adrian Teal