Did the Tories buy the election?

The slaughter of his erstwhile partners the Liberal Democrats was the key to the David Cameron’s outright victory on May 7th. His 25 gains from the Lib Dem was about twice what most pollsters and pundits expected.

Equally important was the Tories’ ability to match Labour in the key marginals, where Tory gains balanced Labour’s meagre haul of Tory seats.

Cameron’s success in forming a Tory-only government was no great national victory. It was a bits and pieces triumph with the the Tory national vote share of 37% up by less than 1% on 2010.

The Labour increase up 1.5% at 30.5% was obviously disappointing but even more uncomfortable is the reality that the Tories won the ground war using their massive cash advantage.

It was reckoned that the Tories would lack foot soldiers but they amassed a war chest of nearly £80 million according to Guardian.

Then they had to make sure they could spend it legally and just before Christmas the Observer revealed that Conservative Ministers slipped through a 23% hike in spending limits – unnoticed by Lib Dem partners in the Government and the Labour opposition. The Observer reported that this was in the face of a warning by the Electoral Commission against such “excessive spending to prevent the perception of undue influence over the outcome of the election.”

To ask the question “did the Tories buy the election?” is to invite a simple answer. Of course they did. They always do.

John Major’s triumph in 1992 was financed was financed by a series of dodgy donations from foreign backers.  The gory details are set out in a 1994 report by Professor Justin Fisher of Brunel.

These included £2 million from Greek shipping billionaire John Latsis, and £1 million from Sir Yue-Kong Pao, a friend of Denis Thatcher’s and big donations from other Hong Kong businessmen. Then there was the £3million bank guarantee from Lord Ashcroft’s ADT – which as Fisher points out was based in Bermuda and showed the Tories were happy to use foreign cash to fund their campaigning. In those days the donations were secret and only reached the light of day thanks to rigorous investigative journalism.

Although the 1992 victory is being compared to Cameron’s there are striking differences. Major polled more than 14 million votes to Labour 11.5 million. That was a 42% to 35% advantage in national vote share – but he ended up with a majority of just 20. Labour had developed an extremely effective key seat strategy that denied Major 20 seats that might otherwise have won.

The political implications of that small majority were profound. When Major’s government imploded on Black Wednesday less than 6 months after polling day, with interest rate hikes and tax rises, it was prey to by election defeats and defections.  The Tories slipped to around 30% in the polls where they flatlined for more than a decade.

Fast forward to 2010 and the the Tories had a two-to-one cash advantage according to the Electoral Commission – one of the fruits of the 1997 Labour landslide. And they’d wised up to key seat campaigning. The man in charge then was the then deputy chairman Lord Ashcroft who has described the operation in exhaustive detail in his inquest on the Tory campaign. He says that in the 18 months running up to polling day “target seats received nearly 74 million centrally produced fliers, leaflets, postcards, surveys, newspapers and magazines.” It paid off, he says. The keys seats showed bigger swings to the Tories than the national average and that, he claims produced an extra 23 gains from Labour and another 9 from the Lib Dems.

This time the role was taken up Jim Messina, recruited by the Tories from among top Obama campaigners. In an interview with the Times(£) he gives an insight into how the cash was spent. The Tories employed micro-targeting techniques from the US, which were:

“so sophisticated that in the final week the party was having multiple contacts via Facebook, phone and on the doorstep with individual voters who had been identified as likely to switch from the Liberal Democrats or choose the Tories over Labour.”

“Facebook was the crucial weapon; using data which the social media site sells to advertisers, he was able to target key constituencies and get to niche groups of voters.

“We went in and took very deep dives in the seats and to see what was do-able, what was winnable . . . who were the voters, who were potential waverers, thinking about leaving the Lib Dems; who were the voters trying to decide between us and Labour; and who were the voters considering leaving us for Ukip — and we were able to have very focused messages to all of those people.”

“It’s expensive, it’s difficult, but you’re gonna miss a bunch of close races if you don’t.”

Labour have been developing similar techniques with the help of “data guru” Ian Warren.

But according to reports in the Mirror his techniques have been used to counter the Ukip threat. The “Ribena test” (coloured Ukip purple) uses demographic information to carry out risk assessments for the 50 MPs deemed most at risk from Ukip. A party source told the paper: “This is the most sophisticated election tool we’ve developed.”

To match the Tory operation this would need to be scaled up and extended. Which brings up the next big question – can Labour match the Tories on raising cash? Answers by text or email to the new leader.