New Saatchi poster needed: “Lynton isn’t working”

I once saw Lynton Crosby having lunch in one of Westminster’s smartest eateries with the editor of a prominent publication. They seemed to be enjoying each other’s company a lot. But that’s what people tell you about the Aussie “maestro”: he’s charming, friendly, down to earth, and good to work with.

He has every reason to smile. He is said to be on a £500,000 deal to steer the Tories’ election campaign for 2015. How’s that working out?

To win the next election the Conservatives needed to “get the barnacles off the boat”, it was said. Keep the messages simple. Re-establish a strong core vote. Stick to some basic, gut issues that Labour would struggle to find an answer to. And don’t mention UKIP. That’s the Crosby formula.

But it’s not obvious that Crosby-style politics are working terribly well for the Tories. The “go home or face arrest” vans that trundled around parts of London – and which were subsequently apparently disowned by Crosby himself – don’t seem to have done much for the party. As for the home office minister who defended them – Mark Harper – well, he has…gone home.

“Get rid of the green crap” was another Crosby-inspired mantra that does not look so clever today. The green crap has hit the fan. It has dominated the agenda for a week or two, and continues to do so. The environment is a barnacle that cannot be scraped off the boat, even if the captain and much of his crew don’t really want to talk about it or deal with it.

And on the issue of Europe, the dream that promising an in/out referendum would calm Tory Eurosceptic ultras, or undermine UKIP, has been exposed as a delusion. Crosby is hoping and waiting for the UKIP threat to fall away. There is little sign of this happening.

Crosby has a mixed track record in this country. On the positive side, he twice helped Boris Johnson win the London mayoralty. In 2008, the Labour government was deeply unpopular, and victory for a strong Tory candidate looked likely. In 2012, in the wake of the omnishambles budget, the task was perhaps harder. Crosby ran a clever and targeted campaign, which worked. Ken Livingstone was no longer quite the formidable candidate he had been in the past, but was no pushover.

Less happily, in 2005 Crosby worked on Michael Howard’s unsuccessful general election campaign. You may remember the “Are you thinking what we’re thinking?” posters – how hard is it to keep a hospital clean, it’s not racist to talk about immigration, and so on. A sour and negative Tory campaign may have quite effectively held the Labour vote down – to just over 35% – but did little to persuade many people to vote Conservative.

Crosby’s approach, in short, may have worked quite well in a head to head fight in London, where his candidate was popular and charismatic. But in a national election the relentless negativity did not get the Tory share above a core figure of about 32% – roughly where their poll rating stands today, as it happens.

In Cameron’s initially slow and uncertain response to the floods you can see the limitations of the Crosby method. First, there was the reluctance to engage on a “non-core” issue such as the environment. Then, the nervousness about allowing UKIP and Tory climate change sceptics the space to denounce “scaremongering” about extreme weather. And finally, the bizarre (focus-group tested?) line that in repairing the damage and building future protection “money is no object” – this from a government that has been telling us austerity is unavoidable, that further cuts are necessary, and that bedroom taxes and reductions in disability living allowance area a sad necessity.

Even as the Conservatives admit that they have to do much better with black and minority ethnic voters, Beth Rigby reports in the FT that Crosby argues against reaching out too far in this direction, as it might blur the [tough] messages on immigration that the “maestro” is keen to promote.

Crosby’s negative tactics have created an opportunity for Ed Miliband to reclaim the centre ground. The vilification of benefits claimants has stirred the Archbishops into (effectively) supporting Labour’s criticism of extreme austerity. The anti-immigrant tone and rhetoric drive more potential Tory voters away and into Labour’s grateful embrace. And now Tory stumbling and equivocation on climate change allows Miliband to erect a big One Nation tent around a huge issue that troubles more and more people.

In 1978 the Tory’s advertising whizz kids Saatchi and Saatchi produced a famous poster with the words “Labour isn’t working” on it, which contained an image of a long queue of apparently jobless people (in fact 20-odd Young Conservatives from Hendon in north London, duplicated to look like a long queue – well I did say it was a piece of advertising). Today, with 14 months or so to go to election day, I would say the verdict is that “Lynton isn’t working” – so far at least.
Since they seem to believe in that sort of thing, the Tories would have been wise to put Crosby on a performance related pay deal. Could have saved them some money. There is still a long way to go to election day. But this maestro needs to start proving his worth, and soon.