Conventional politics is stuck, stale and discredited

If politics is “show business for ugly people” it might be worth recalling the famous Hollywood dictum of screenwriter William Goldman: “Nobody knows anything”. What Goldman meant was that producers, writers, directors and executives might struggle to get films made and have millions of dollars poured into them, but nobody could ever know in advance if a movie would be a hit or not. This, coming from the writer of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, All The President’s Men and Marathon Man, is worth thinking about.

British politics has reached a “nobody knows anything” phase. Slight exaggeration, I admit. But essentially true. Who will win Rochester and Strood? Will Labour or the Conservatives suffer more from sustained levels of support for Ukip? Are Ukip really going to win a 10% share of the vote (or more) at the next general election? How many seats can the LibDems hold if their national share is halved (or worse)? Will the SNP make further inroads into Labour territory north of the border? Will the Greens attract much support? And so on. Nobody knows anything.

What this suggests to me is that, in current circumstances, conventional wisdom is for the birds, and most “expert commentators” lack meaningful expertise. It is chaos out there. And that is why the big parties’ response to the changed environment has left their own supporters disappointed and disheartened. Orthodoxy is of limited use in unorthodox times.

We saw this being played out during the Scottish referendum. Now it may be that the leaders of the Better Together campaign will claim that their negative campaigning worked, and that sowing the seeds of doubt in potential Yes voters’ minds was effective. Perhaps it was. But it did not feel like that at the time. And the post referendum reaction of the noisy defeated 45% suggests that long term answers to the desire for independence have not really been found. The old playbook of negativity has been found wanting.

Similarly, almost everything that has so far been thrown at Nigel Farage and Ukip has bounced off them. Trusted negative campaigning techniques, and name-calling, have not worked. Perhaps some cynical voters just don’t believe anything they are told by conventional politicians, and are ready to register their disdain by supporting the “people’s army”. Whatever the reason, no mainstream politician has been able to wipe that almost permanent smile of Farage’s face. He finds rich pickings in some parts of the country for his crude and simplistic, sometimes content-free utterings.

Conventional politics is stuck, stale and discredited. I think back to the shattering and game-changing events of 1992. First, in April, the election that was Labour’s to lose, that couldn’t be lost was… lost. Then, that autumn, the “New Democrats” seemed to reinvent how to do politics in the modern era. “Speed kills”, James Carville, the Democrat strategist, declared. The “war room” was created, and a spin cycle was designed to get ahead of and frame the news bulletins. Focus groups were used to research and test policy ideas with new levels of intensity. It was great fun, and it appeared to work. For two decades this kind of approach has prevailed. The desire to be fast and first has not gone away – consider the reported words of an unnamed No 10 adviser who criticised Theresa May for not wanting to go on the Today programme to make a policy announcement and instead wait to make a Commons statement at mid-day. If you do that, the adviser said, “we will lose the next three hours”. This was considered more important than making a calm announcement in the normal parliamentary way.

Modern political techniques have been honed to perfection, and have now squeezed the life out of the process. There is a telling moment in Kevin Toolis’ play The Confessions of Gordon Brown, when the central figure bemoans what has happened to the business of politics itself. We conduct focus groups to find out what people want, the Brown character says, only to play these very findings back to voters after a short interval. And then we are surprised when the same voters find something impossibly phoney about all this. All parties support hard-working families who play by the rules. All of them are on our side. It is pretty dire. So when an apparently artless and spontaneous figure – a Farage or a Boris Johnson or an Alex Salmond – cocks a snook at authority and makes big or outlandish statements, it gets noticed. It feels different. Never mind the accuracy, enjoy the ride. The post 1992 orthodox playbook has nothing in its pages to help deal with this sort if thing.

It is time to wake up. Not everything has changed. Personal contacts still seem to matter enormously. The much-mocked “community organising” of Arnie Graf – mocked mainly by people who rarely leave central London offices – is one antidote to Farage’s slick and misleading populism. Knocking on doors and talking to voters did not seem to do the Conservatives a lot of harm at the Newark by-election either.

On this subject I think Douglas Carswell may well be at least partly right. Ukip is a kind of “disruptive innovation”, to use the business jargon. The incumbents do look a bit like tired old brands. They risk losing “market share” permanently.

In their struggle to beat Ukip back the big parties will have to find a better and more human story to tell about what they want for the country and how they can achieve it. It has to be a positive and not merely a negative, rebuttal-driven account. Of course start where the voters are, recognising what their concerns are – including immigration. But don’t offer a Ukip-lite version of yourself.

The game has changed. The experts need new ideas, and a new script. Negativity only delivers so much, and certainly not a majority. There is very little time left to lose.