Where did the Conservatives go so wrong?
In short: So many places, but bear with me…
Recently I wrote a piece on what I think of Labour. It wasn’t pretty and it wasn’t flattering but I suppose that’s to be expected given I’m a Conservative member. But I feel I need to turn my ire onto my own party.
We went into the last election incredibly confident. One could argue we were over confident. But we took notice of the polls didn’t we? We saw how the polls put us way ahead of Labour, we were expecting a massive majority. The discussion around the election wasn’t who would win, it was around how big the Conservative majority would be, and as much as I’m pessimistic about my own prospects (I say my own prospects as in my own party), I also bought into this discussion and shouldn’t have. The warning lights were there, but I’ll start at the beginning.
I remember campaigning at the start of the General Election in a safe Labour ward. I was surprised that the candidate I was the agent for wanted to campaign there. I arrogantly thought “oh he doesn’t understand Doncaster, this is why he’s campaigning here”. But he was totally right to campaign there. It went incredibly well. We had people saying that they’d voted Labour all their lives and now they were voting Conservative. I have to admit, I was shocked. Bear in mind this was an area that suffered badly under Thatcher, people had a deep dislike of the Conservatives due to Thatcher. But because of Corbyn (as the replies kept coming back) they said they were going to vote Conservative.
I also remember the day before the Conservative manifesto was released. There was one voter – in the same Labour ward – who said they’d always voted Labour but they weren’t voting Labour now. They also had a ripped up Labour leaflet in their hand, by the way. She wanted to know why she should vote Conservative (she was also grateful someone other than Labour turned up on her doorstep but that’s a different story). She wanted assurances that the Conservative manifesto would be wider than just Brexit. She wanted to know that we’d deal with other issues, especially the cost of energy (which we did promise). I told her that we would have a wide manifesto that would deal with a wide range of issues. She seemed happy with that but little did I know, the Conservative manifesto would ruin it for us.
I just want to say now that we had fantastic candidates in Doncaster who were very passionate in their campaigns and they really cared about the issues that mattered to Doncaster. That is why we increased our vote share across Doncaster.
Back to the manifesto though. While some of the policies were fine (means testing winter fuel allowance etc) the presentation was awful. Why on Earth did we think we could just roll out policies written on the back of a fag packet with no substance and expect people to go for it? Did we think people were stupid? I’m convinced the party did think people are stupid.
The policy from Satan himself – that rubbish on social care – was one of the ones that did it for us. On polling day we were campaigning in a Conservative area reminding people to go out and vote. The responses weren’t as good as we were expecting. They didn’t say they did or were going to vote Labour (mostly), but they weren’t going to vote for us. That’s bad enough in a Conservative area.
Worse than that was the presentation of policy. I have a genuine belief that if you stand by a bad policy after scrutiny people will respect you. They’ll at least respect you for standing by it. It gives the impression you actually believe in it. We didn’t do that though. We u-turned in the middle of an election. I would love to know who’s bright idea that was purely so I can educate them.
So not only did we have bad policies, we couldn’t even look consistent. When we did change policies we pretended we hadn’t changed them.
Far from “strong and stable” we looked – as people are putting it now – “weak and wobbly”. That isn’t the look a Government needs. It isn’t a look that inspired confidence.
As I say, we had great candidates who worked so hard in Doncaster and I do feel sorry for them because essentially they were kneecapped by the party. In such a strong Labour area things were going very well until the manifesto came out and the central party decided to get arrogant.
And that’s the real problem with the national campaign: arrogance. You try going up against a party that is offering hope to people (whatever you think of the policies that’s what Labour offered) and all that will happen is you will lose.
Now the argument is made that we didn’t lose because we ended up with more seats than Labour. Sure, fair point. But think about what our objective was. Our objective was to increase our majority. We failed at doing that. Given that, in reality, we lost the election and we need to recognise that. It won’t do us any good in the next election to arrogantly go on as if we won this election and again expect people to vote for us.
I honestly believe there are people in the central party who need to grow up. We didn’t win. We just managed to make up the numbers. Recognise why we didn’t win, rectify that and then we can win.
