James Forsyth
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For all Labour’s problems, it still has a formidable election-fighting machine: one driven by visceral hatred of the Tories. They are convinced that the Conservatives are not just wrong but wicked — and they delight in causing the enemy pain. ‘I bet we ruined at least a couple of Tory staffers’ Valentine’s night,’ one remarked to me. (They did.) These feelings have been intensified by Labour’s sense that they are up against a Tory operation that is awash with cash; that they are now the underdogs. They have internalised Lord Mandelson’s injunction to view themselves as insurgents fighting an army. Like most insurgents, they have come to believe that whatever tactics they use are justified by the fact that they wouldn’t win in a conventional fight.
The Brownite political culture that now dominates the party’s election machine has always been hard and aggressive. They do not enjoy government, and are not much good at it. The Brown machine is fundamentally an attack machine. By contrast, the skills of the Cameroons are far more suited to government than electioneering.
This testosterone-fuelled politics contains within it the seeds of its own destruction — as embodied by Damian McBride. He revelled in his ability to intimidate. Just days before he was forced to resign for his role in planning a smear campaign against top Tories and their spouses, I remember watching him take great pleasure in standing in front of a bunch of Tories in a Westminster pub to block their view of the football on the television.
In the end, McBride imploded because he detested the Conservatives too much. He had forgotten Michael Corleone’s edict, ‘Never hate your enemies. It clouds your judgment.’
The Cameron campaign machine isn’t driven by such hatred. Many of its key figures have good friends on the other side of the political divide and it is impossible to imagine them spending their time dreaming up McBride-style smears. But at times it can seem that Labour is fighting rough, donning knuckledusters and splashing the vitriol, while David Cameron is fighting according to Queensberry Rules and being repeatedly punched below the belt. The Tories do, though, seem to have toughened up in the last fortnight. Their attacks on Brown’s ‘death tax’ have been delivered with impressive force.
Even so, there remains an aggression mismatch. But one Tory told me that this is not a source of worry, that a campaign driven by anger is bound to overreach. If the Brownites are left to their own devices they are bound to cross the line. Indeed, some Cabinet ministers are already grumbling that Ed Balls’s desire always to go on the attack is hampering Labour. They were annoyed that Balls rushed on to TV to denounce the new Tory policy on co-ops as a gimmick when a more substantive critique was available.
Waiting for one’s enemy to slip up is an unreliable plan of attack. If Gordon Brown goes for a few weeks without a major error, as he has since Christmas, then the Tories lose momentum and begin to suffer an attack of the jitters.
Crucially, Labour now has a kinder at-mosphere in which to play its Tory-baiting games. The media, consciously or unconsciously, wants to see a contest. At the moment, more scrutiny is being directed at the Tories than at Labour. When George Osborne talks about cuts in the financial year 2010-11, journalists press him on how big they would be and whether they would damage the economy. When Lord Mandelson floats the same idea — as he has, twice — the comments go almost unremarked, despite the fact that they contradict Mr Brown’s main message about the econ-omy. Equally, one can only imagine the frenzy if a Tory MP — and a whip to boot — had publicly described Labour as ‘scum-sucking pigs’ and then lied about having said it. But the Labour MP David Wright’s comments have been treated as a bit of joke rather than as a debasing of our political discourse.
Team Brown has always been a group that thrived in opposition. Fundamentally, their agenda is one of destruction, not governing. But they have one crucial weakness: they can only highlight Tory mistakes — rather than advance their own ideas (of which there are staggeringly few). As Peter Watt, the former Labour general secretary, recently revealed, the Brownites, having agitated to get Blair out of Downing Street for years, had no real election manifesto when they got there in 2007. When faced with radical Tory plans — as they were in the election-that-never-was — the Labour attack dogs go mute, or start barking up the wrong tree. Monday’s successful launch of a bold new Tory policy encouraging employee ownership in the public sector, for instance, has left Labour floundering.
There is a moral in all this. To win the campaign, Mr Cameron needs to take three steps. First, stop unforced errors coming out of central office (perhaps by putting a campaign manager in charge). Next, foster in the Tory operation the same intensity that characterises the Labour one. And finally, make the election a battle of bold policies and ideas. As the last two years have taught us, the Brownites are incapable of joining such battles.
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