The dead shark crisis meeting: Tory campaign is unfocused, with no message or purpose, CCHQ insiders say

By Alex Smith / @alexsmith1982

In this week’s issue of the Spectator, James Forsyth tells the fascinating tale of a recent high-level Tory crisis meeting in Notting Hill, in which the prominent attitude was “despair” and in which a frustrated George Osborne asked “what’s going wrong?” with the Tory election campaign.

Forsyth writes:

“…though all the Cameroon brains were present in the same room, and considering that everyone there had helped craft the campaign and most considered themselves experts in the dark art of political strategy, no one had an answer. Osborne, who likes to see himself as Brown’s great nemesis, ended the meeting as frustrated as he began it.

It is as clear to the country as it is to the top Tories that the Conservative election campaign is in trouble; that the party seems to be stagnating. One aide puts it like this: ‘A shark has to constantly move forward or it dies. And I think what we’ve got on our hands is a dead shark.’ A senior Tory MP is blunter still: ‘There is a real danger that we might not win this.’ To win, of course, means securing a majority, and an increasing number of Tories believe they aren’t going to get one.”

…Since the beginning of the year, when David Cameron declared the start of his long campaign, the Tory machine has spluttered, while Labour’s has revved up. The Tories have lost momentum and made unforced errors. Labour morale has not been so high for years.”

Anthony Painter says he is unsure of whether Forsyth has it exactly right, and thinks the Tories’ failure to increase their traction may be even more profound; that their real problem is “strategy, not tactics”-the overarching philosophy to both their campaign and policy.

As David Miliband said earlier this week:

“Asking us to believe that their values have changed is hard enough in itself…I think [progressive conservatism] is more of an oxymoron than a sensible or effective or convincing political strategy.”

That failure is brought out by CCHQ aides in Forsyth’s article. One says:

“Everyone struggles to articulate what we are really for…we don’t really have a message or a purpose.”

Equally damning is Forsyth’s assessment that the failings may come from David Cameron’s own weakness:

“He may have held on too long to a team with which he felt personally comfortable even if it didn’t work particularly well. The problems being felt so acutely now – lack of focus, lack of a message to sell on the doorstep, inability to see beyond a two-week news cycle – were complained of a year ago. Even his critics assumed that such problems would be addressed in time for the election. But with the election less than three months away, this seems not to have been the case.”

My view is that the Tory announcements since the turn of the year-tax breaks for married couples but not unmarried couples; an unclear position on where they stand on economic policy; the increased scrutiny on their Swedish schools model; the party’s consistent attack on this country as “broken” as exemplified by their insistence that 54% of teenage girls in some areas become pregnant-have further fed people’s already existing doubts that bubbles beneath their previously favourable-ish polling numbers: that after three years, Cameron had changed the image of his party without ever committing to a new policy thesis; that now it’s crunch time people are taking a closer look, and are discovering what they always feared about the Tories. As Paul Richards quoted from Tim Bale’s new book about the Tories:

“The Tory Party is like a British telephone box, which looks appealing on the outside, but if you open the door it smells really bad.”

Read the full Spectator article here.