It is seven and a bit weeks since the election and journalists are still being asked why we didn’t see the result coming. It is a fair cop, to which there is no real defence; only a plea of mitigation. It wasn’t just us. Virtually no one saw it coming. The politicians, especially the politicians, didn’t see it coming either. Their crystal balls were completely cracked.
On 8 June, I spent some of the waiting hours before 10pm ringing round candidates of different parties in various parts of the country. When I asked what was going on, to a person they predicted that the Conservatives were going to win a majority, despite fighting an awful campaign that combined titanic arrogance with epic ineptitude. One typical Labour candidate told me: “I think I’ve just about done enough, but it still feels very tight.” As it turned out, his constituency returned him to parliament with a majority increased to nearly five figures.
Lynton Crosby, the Tory campaign strategist who has not been heard from since, sent a last text message to Nick Timothy, the senior aide to Mrs May who has since been defenestrated. The text declared that the Tories were going to “do well”. This belief extended to the apex of the Labour party. John Rentoul, of the Independent, has reported that, on election night, Jeremy Corbyn gathered his inner team at his Islington home to watch the exit poll. Before it was broadcast, the Labour leader had everyone write down a prediction of the result. All of them forecast an enlarged Tory majority. The one exception was Karie Murphy, his office director, who called it for a hung parliament. Perhaps she had a superior feel for public opinion. Perhaps she burnt with a fiercer level of conviction in the cause. Perhaps she just got lucky by taking a punt on an anti-consensus position.
One reason that nearly everyone else got the election wrong was that this contest defied the Tzu Rule. In the The Art of War, Sun Tzu wrote: “Every battle is won or lost before it is fought.” It has usually been the case that election outcomes are determined months – even years – before the actual battle. This has previously been a rule you could rely on, especially when one party begins a campaign with an advantage over the other that looks insuperable.
On the first Thursday of May, just over a month before the day of the general election, there were local government elections. The results were utterly dreadful for Labour; it is now forgotten that those elections produced the worst performance for the challenger party in comparable contests since the 1980s. On the basis of those results, and using a solid method, the BBC gave the Tories a projected national advantage of 11 points. So it wasn’t wrong for people to respond to those results by concluding that Labour was heading for a disaster. On those numbers, the party was on its way to a crushing defeat.
The wrongness was assuming that nothing much would change in the month between then and the national election. Things did change. A lot. The Tzu Rule did not apply. By 8 June, the Tory advantage had shrunk to just two points and with its evaporating lead went its chances of securing a majority. Most opinion pollsters didn’t get the final outcome correct, but they all suggested that something was happening by indicating a narrowing of the gap.
Labour ran a sharper and more dynamic campaign than had been expected, especially by most of its own candidates. The party proved capable of mobilising additional younger voters and previous non-voters, which is one of the reasons many pollsters were confounded. The Tories ran a joyless campaign that went out of its way to anger elements of its core vote and had nothing positive to say to anyone else. They foolishly tried to make it a presidential contest, when led by someone so hopeless at retail politics that Mrs May couldn’t have sold a glass of water to a man dying of thirst.
There is an obvious lesson for the Tories. Don’t do that again. There isn’t much that totally unifies the parliamentary Conservative party these days. On one thing, they do all agree. At the next election, they need to have some positive offers to voters and a chief who is capable of fronting a campaign. One of Mrs May’s mistakes was not to see how the rules of electoral politics were evolving. This lay behind her refusal to participate in TV debates with rival leaders. You may remember that, for the BBC debate staged in Cambridge, she sent along Amber Rudd as her body double.
Mrs May was following the conventional wisdom that a prime minister has more to lose than gain by debating with challengers and, anyway, the public don’t care enough about a no-show for it to make a material difference to the outcome. There are some who still think that was the correct decision. “It would have been even worse if she had debated Corbyn,” one of Mrs May’s cabinet told me recently. Maybe. We can’t be sure. We do know that her absence from TV debates amplified the feeling that an entitled Tory campaign was imperiously demanding that the country give it a bigger majority, no questions asked or answered.
One thing that I did get right about the election was to remark, early in the campaign, that voters react badly when they think they are being taken for granted. It is likely that future prime ministers will be much more wary of strategists who advise them to duck out of TV debates. Good thing too.
Another moral for the Tories from the campaign is that they need a proper contest when they choose their next leader, not the sort of “coronation” that propelled Mrs May into the job before her party had road-tested her on the stump. Here’s the snag. If there is a full-blown battle to be the next Tory leader, then the choice will ultimately go to the membership of the Conservative party. This is an extremely small cohort of mainly elderly people who are, by definition, not at all representative of the average voter. Tory members once thought Iain Duncan Smith was the best person they had available to take on Tony Blair. It will be necessary for the Conservatives to have a contest to select their next leader, but a contest will not in itself guarantee that they make a clever pick.
Labour can also learn something from the misjudgments of the Tory campaign. That lesson is not to believe in your own propaganda. Because Labour did so much better than expectations at the election, there’s a risk that the party becomes beguiled by a myth that it fought a brilliant campaign that only has to be repeated to guarantee them victory next time. Mr Corbyn was certainly a much more effective performer, both on television and on the road, than most anticipated. Many of his promises polled well and there was the additional benefit that the Tories were surprisingly feeble in challenging Labour to explain how it was all going to be paid for. Labour smashed it on social media, owning the digital battlefield of the campaign. By one calculation, pro-Labour content on Facebook was linked to 10 times more than was pro-Tory content. These successes have induced amnesia about the number of howlers that Labour committed during the campaign. Less than a month from polling day, Len McCluskey, the general secretary of Unite and great ally of Mr Corbyn, publicly suggested that Labour would do well to win 200 seats.
The recent exposure of the fissures in the party’s stance on Brexit is an illustration that its own divisions can’t always be camouflaged. The pressure over what was said about student tuition fees suggests that Labour would be wise to expect its prospectus to come under much more fiery scrutiny at the next election than it did this June, when no one thought Mr Corbyn had a chance of becoming prime minister.
An important lesson of the election is to be careful about how you read the lessons of past elections. We journalists got it wrong because we thought the Tzu Rule would continue to apply and, this time at least, it didn’t. Many pollsters got it wrong from a completely sincere desire to get it right. Because they overstated the Labour vote in 2015, pollsters made adjustments to their methods, which meant that they underestimated the Labour vote in 2017.
One of the errors committed by the Tories was to think that they could run another “continuity” campaign and win on the basis of being the “strong and stable” offer. They had missed a shift in the two years that had passed since that strategy worked for them in 2015. By this June, more of the electorate desired “change”.
By the time of the next election, the context will have altered again. One or more of the party leaders will be different. Expectations will have adjusted. The landscape will have been remoulded by events. Previously reliable rules may no longer work – and discarded rules may apply again. The last people to ask what to expect are the politicians. They know even less than journalists.
