The Tories and Karl Rove: formal advice, or just the sincerest form of flattery?

By Emma Burnell / @RealEmmaBurnell

Following the revelations from leaked RNC documentation earlier this month that Republicans were planning to sell access to David Cameron to raise funds, I can’t help but wonder if recent political developments in the UK have a touch of the Karl Rove “magic” about them. Maybe it’s reciprocation? Who knows.

The Tory line this week is that the Labour Party is in the pocket of the unions, that the government is therefore unable to stand firm against them and – even more insanely – that Unite donating to Labour is the equivalent of the donations recieved by the Tories from Michael Ashcroft.

Let me break it down for you:

Ashcroft = One tax dodger who gave millions and has unparalleled access and power within a political party.

Unite = Thousands of UK taxpayers who legally contribute to a legal political fund with the party whose values closest match theirs.

The Tory attempts to make the Unite union’s funding of the Labour Party the focus of the week’s news has all the hallmarks of a classic Rove campaign: take your own candidate/party’s most high profile weakness, and project it onto the other side. For Rove’s Bush Republicans, read the “war president” and attacks on John Kerry’s impressive military background.

One of the Tories’ weakest flanks has for some time been Lord Ashcroft – not only that he was a non-dom, or that he took the best part of a decade to declare that, or that as a donor he is also a high-ranking official in the Tory Party; but also the fact that he has accompanied William Hague on foreign policy trips where his interests were far from clear.

The Rove playbook dictates that these are credible areas on which to attack your opponents. The Tories started with Lord Paul, a fellow non-dom and Labour donor. That didn’t get much traction, though; it’s quite clear that Lord Paul doesn’t have anything like the sway within Labour that Ashcroft does with the Tories.

So on they moved to Charlie Whelan and Unite. Whelan is a pretty perfect candidate. He’s not known for his discretion. Rather, he seems to relish a certain public profile. He used to work for Gordon Brown, and – crucially – currently works for a Union presently threatening a high profile strike. Whelan isn’t the head of the organisation, but attacking him ties the whole story quite neatly to the Prime Minister – hence, he’s been the principle target of the Tory vitriol.

This classic piece of Rovian campaigning is having the desired effect in some ways. It isn’t designed to simply damage the Labour Party with the classic old Tory refrain of “Union rampage” or to link the Labour Party closely with the potential industrial action – though these are bonus asides. No, the main reason this move is so insidious is that it is an attempt to reinforce public opinion that “they’re all the same” which always works better when you are actually the party behaving the worst.

We need to fight this smear, not by bowing to it and giving it credence – that never works, look at poor John Kerry – but by taking it on and fighting it. Labour is rightly – and should remain – proud of our union links, and we should never let the politics of Rove win.

An alternative version of this post is published at scarletstandard.co.uk.