Almost two decades ago, when I was a lot less grown-up than I am now, ahem, I did something quite childish for a 48-year-old, then working on his party’s third successive winning general election campaign.
Though 2005 failed to match the landslides of 1997 and 2001, we still managed a decent majority, even after all the anger aroused by the Iraq war, and the angst caused by what became known as the TBGBs.
In the end, we turned that tricky relationship between prime minister Tony Blair and chancellor Gordon Brown into an election strategy, a joint TBGB campaign, so putting the economy centre stage throughout, while also signalling that TB was not going to be around for ever.
The Tories were led by Michael Howard, not exactly the toughest opponent, and the campaign run by “Wizard of Oz” Lynton Crosby. Crosby has won a fearsome reputation for himself in Conservative circles, with a fair few successes to his name. But their 2005 campaign was dire. It was relentlessly negative, with much of the focus on immigration, complete with catchy poster lines such as “It’s Not Racist to Impose Limits on Immigration” or “How Would You Feel if a Bloke on Early Release Attacked Your Daughter?” This was all part of a campaign mindset Crosby and Co have deployed in various parts of the world, aimed at ensuring adjacent fears over crime and immigration are fuelled and maximised.
So… my childishness. I had a friend who worked for Qantas, the Australian airline, and I got him to mock up two first-class tickets from London to Sydney, one for Crosby, one for his partner in Conservative crime, Mark Textor. The tickets sat on my desk at Labour HQ for the entirety of the campaign, as I ticked off the days to the moment when I could despatch them to Tory HQ.
When the moment came, however, I had an attack of grown-upness, and put them into my pocket. As a bit of a hoarder, I have kept them. But were I less mature than I now am, I might get back to my friend and ask if I could get one made up for current Aussie Tory strategist, Crosby protege Isaac Levido.
Levido is credited with Crosbyesque powers of genius within the current Tory hierarchy, having helped Boris Johnson to become, alongside Liz Truss, one of the two worst prime ministers in history. Retained by Rishi Sunak, he is largely responsible for the Tories elevating “Stop The Boats” into a life or death national mission worth the spaffing of half a billion quid on a refugees-to-Rwanda policy which, like much else this government names as a priority, doesn’t appear to be working.
“Stop the Boats” did work for Scott Morrison, who was so proud of his achievement that he had a trophy made in the shape of a migrant boat with the words “I stopped these” emblazoned on the side. I imagine that success for Morrison, like Johnson now a very ex- and discredited prime minister, helps explain why Levido thought it could work for Sunak too.
But might the Aussie wizards be making a mistake fairly common to campaign managers, which is to resort to your greatest hits when something new might work better?
I have been in Australia in recent days, and in a by-election the Liberals (which is what the Aussie Tories call themselves) thought they were going to win, they played all the old tunes… fear of crime, fear of immigrants, fear of foreigners. This, from Liberal Party deputy leader Sussan Ley, was right out of the Crosby-Levido playbook. “If you live in Frankston and you’ve got a problem with Victorian women being assaulted by foreign criminals, vote against Labor. If you do not want to see Australian women being assaulted by foreign criminals, vote against Labor. Send Labor a message.” Mmm, nice. Happily, it didn’t work. They lost.
Doing the rounds on social media was a map of Australia, with the whole country covered in the red of Labor, save for tiny Tasmania at the bottom. Australia now has a Labor government at federal level, and Labor in charge in every state but Tasmania, where an election looms. One of the commenters on the red map made clear where they felt the blame for the Tories’ decline should be laid: “The Levido effect,” it said.
Harsh. But I wonder if the old tactics of wedge politics, dog-whistling and dead cats are not working quite as well as they once did. Here’s hoping.
At the Adelaide Writers’ Festival, I attended an event where AUKUS, the US-UK-Australian security partnership helping the Aussies acquire nuclear-powered submarines, was under discussion. It is a huge deal, enormously expensive, and will take a long time to implement – and the sense I picked up was of doubt that it will ever happen, especially if Donald Trump becomes president again and goes even more determinedly down the America First route. “My worry is there is no Plan B,” was a line I kept hearing.
For a Brit, however, the most depressing element of the discussion was the fact that of the three parts of the AUKUS set-up, the UK element was not mentioned once by the four experts on the panel. My God, have we fallen in the eyes of the world.
I like to think I look younger than my 66 years, but I am not in the same league as ex-Victoria premier Steve Bracks, who chaired an event I did in Melbourne. Tanned and handsome, he is an unbelievably youthful-looking 69.
And I wonder if the reason might be that he did something very few political leaders ever do – he stepped down at a time of his choice, when people were not expecting it, in his third term. He was Labor leader and premier of Victoria for much of the Blair era, 1999-2007. The third longest-serving Victorian premier of all time, he was widely expected to go on and win a fourth term, and even a fifth.
“There are basically three routes to leaders falling,” he told me. “Your party kicks you out. The electorate kicks you out. Or scandal. I didn’t fancy any of those.” So he stepped down, aged just 52. He looks a lot healthier than most 69-year-olds, and a lot healthier than any 69-year-old politician I know. The Jürgen Klopp way. It seems to work.
He also, as I heard from current premier Jacinta Allan, remains very informed and engaged, but never says anything publicly that undermines
his successors. That too is a lesson plenty of former leaders could learn, the ludicrous Liz Truss being the latest to join the squad of those who fail to do so.
The worst thing about Australia (apart from the failure to properly address their history and tackle the enormous disadvantages of the indigenous population) is of course that it is so far away. Fifty hours of flying in less than a week is not great for mind and body.
Also, I find it hard to watch films on planes, what with the background noise of engines, announcements and other people’s conversations. So I am very much a loud music listener when it comes to in-flight entertainment, and was thrilled to discover three new German artists.
Check out ELIF, a singer of Turkish descent who for me variously has touches of Amy Winehouse, Dido and Nelly Furtado; Versengold, who mix up rock, pop and folk in a very foot-tapping kind of way; and Lena&Linus, a female-male duo with lovely velvety voices who make German sound a lot sexier than its undeserved reputation as an ugly language.
