Desperate Tories descend into the gutter

A good indicator of how worried the Tory party is about the coming General Election is the degree of personalisation in their attacks on Labour’s leadership.

I’m assuming that the vile smears about Harriet Harman in the Daily Mail are that newspaper’s own work and didn’t emanate from Conservative Central Office.

Rather less offensive, but direct from the Twitter account of Tory Party Chair Grant Shapps MP, was this attempt to have a go at Ed Miliband:

My first reaction was, is that, after nearly four years to come up with attack lines against Ed, the best they can do? It really is desperately weak.

There’s no attack here on Ed’s character. They don’t have any evidence that his judgement or personal behaviour are flawed. There’s no attack on his politics. The early effort to portray him as “Red Ed” didn’t stick. Instead we get stuff having a go at who he is. Incidentally, switch the picture and they could have, and presumably would have, used the same attack lines if David Miliband had been Labour’s leader.

So the three part attack is:

• Ed is a “millionaire”. I think this is based on the value of his house, which his parents gave him. I’m fairly sure it has nothing to do with his actual bank balance or earnings. David Cameron is also a “millionaire” so there’s a bit of a case of pots and kettles here.
• He is the son of a “Marxist”. So what? What on earth have his deceased dad’s views got to do with Ed’s suitability to be PM? Didn’t we have this debate last year with the Mail’s anti-Ralph Miliband piece? I seem to remember it backfiring.
• His “entire life has been spent in political jobs”. Another case of pots and kettles, as David Cameron went from Central Office to Special Adviser to Corporate Affairs at Carlton TV to MP.

There are a number of factors pushing this rather pathetic attempt to go personal:

• They have played their trump card – the beginnings of an economic recovery – and Labour’s poll ratings haven’t budged.
• They don’t have anything positive to offer. There’s nothing in the government’s record that has been particularly popular, in rather sorry contrast to Cameron’s hero Lady Thatcher, who knew how to run with policies such as right-to-buy and the privatisation/mass share ownership that may have wound up the left but were wildly popular with swing voters. I can’t think of anything they are promising they will do if they get back in either.
• It’s what Lynton Crosby does. You don’t hire a campaign consultant whose speciality is attack unless you plan on going negative.
• It’s what they do when their back is to the wall. Remember the laughable “Demon Eyes/New Labour, New Danger” campaign in the run-up to 1997?

Underpinning all this is a belief among Tory strategists (believe it or not, Grant Shapps is apparently a Tory strategist) that they can make this election a replay of 1992 by character assassinating Ed Miliband in the same way that they did Neil Kinnock.

We have to learn from that experience and come up with effective rebuttals for any attacks on Ed (if they are as weak as Shapps’ effort today that shouldn’t be difficult) and also make a better fist at conveying Ed’s likeability (which is basically why he won the leadership) to an electorate that don’t know much about him.

And there were other factors in 1992 that won’t be around to help the Tories in 2015:

• Labour’s fiscal stance in 1992 left it open to charges of preparing the infamous tax “double whammy”. Ed Balls has quite effectively shut down the scope for a policy attack on our economic policy.
• The Tories had already delivered the change voters were craving by dumping Thatcher and replacing her with Major, shooting Labour’s fox. I don’t get the impression they are about to dump Cameron, but then they are pretty ruthless …
• We totally hashed up our campaign with the Jennifer’s Ear party political broadcast fiasco and the Sheffield Rally. Presumably we are not planning to repeat this.

As I’ve said before, trying to replicate past election campaigns decades later is not clever. The Tory attempt to replay 1992 with personalised attacks looks daft, doomed and desperate.