Lynton Crosby is the showman – but Mark Textor is the real deal

Lynton Crosby, the ad man who likes his own PR a little too much, has become the barnacle on Cameron’s boat.

What’s the golden rule? When the spin-doctor becomes the story, it’s time to go. When it’s the strategy guy, it’s even worse. Every time David Cameron launches a new “wedge issue” policy, people will point to the work of tobacco lobbyist, Lynton Crosby.

If Cameron and Crosby don’t know this yet, there is one man who already does: Mark Textor, Australian pollster and business partner of Mr Crosby.

Until the weekend, I knew little about the junior partner in Crosby’s operation. Textor portrays himself as a brash-talking, cycle-loving, anti-establishment, alpha male Aussie.

Yet since his waspish response to a polite question asked on Twitter, I’ve taken the time to read everything he has written since 2003. (Labour researchers I recommend reading them here.)

A decade of his articles and commentary reveal a lot. He’s the brains in the Crosby Textor operation, using hard polling to gnaw away at the insecurities of the Australian nation. His skills have been used to great effect for the parties of the right that represent the interests of the elite he claims to despise.

And despite his vulgar front, Textor has an emotional literacy seldom displayed by male political strategists, particularly those on the right of politics.

He displays insight that helped clarify my thinking about the perils of political reporting in the UK. He captures the corrosive effects of “two speed” politics in a brilliant article in the Australian Review:

“Fuelled by this practice of comment on comment, politics in Australia is now running at two speeds. In the fast lane getting air time are some online and TV panellists, desperately trying to plump up their billing hours contributing to the 24-hour commentary cycle.

“They make money by chewing up simple issues and spitting out increasingly nuanced analysis at an ever accelerating rate.”

Sound familiar?

“In the slow lane of this two-speed ‘political economy’ are the confounded voters, their journey fuelled by a more basic but less explosive source: salient events and actual policy developments that affect their lives. Access to health services, changing education standards, increasing financial pressures, job availability and security, a lack of real choice in retail and banking, declines in the quality of their local built and green environment and declining trust in the political class’s willingness or ability to address these issues.”

Textor believes political commentators, so called experts, have to be pulverised by the political parties if they wish to be successful. In a revealing article about elites, he displays a view of the world that would have been welcomed by any one of the union conferences I have attended over the last 20 years:

“For a bloke like me, from the suburbs of Darwin, they sound like an awful little group. Their type would be decked within five minutes in one of my favourite Darwin pubs [The Dolphin]”.

I tweeted a link to this article and was amused that an Australian follower knew the pub, claiming there were far worse places in the locale to get a beer. Proof that there’s always a pecking order for whatever class Mr Textor chooses to self-identify as.

Crosby is now a live issue for the Tories. Yesterday, Paul Goodman over at Conservative Home describes Cameron’s ‘terms of engagement’ document (that restricts his lobbying potential) as a ‘holding position’. He describes the Crosby affair as “rather like a graze that, though trivial in itself, is at risk of infection” but goes on to say the “Party needs Crosby”.

Crosby will be the story between now and polling day. And hanging a lantern on our opponents’ strategy is going to be important for Labour, as Tories turn this election into a mediaeval-style death match between David Cameron and Ed Miliband.

I think Paul Goodman may have reached the wrong conclusion earlier today. On the evidence of his writing, I would say the Conservative Party needs Textor. Crosby is the showman. Textor is the real deal.