Positive v Negative
Matthew Parris writing in The Times adds his voice to those calling for the Tories to 'go positive' with their election campaign, on the basis that they have a good story to tell and should state their case without resorting to Punch and Judy politics or personal attacks on their opponents.
Now every political party has a tendency to get in the gutter when it suits their interests: the Lib Dems are past masters even though they like to portray themselves as honest and straight campaigners.
Labour are not shy about negative campaigning as we saw with 'Project Fear' during the Scottish independence referendum and they also attacked Nick Clegg personally with a embarrassing 'shrinking man' advert which was shown on TV as a party political broadcast.
So maybe things will settle down now that the early days of the election campaign are over and the parties take stock of few weeks that are left.
Panicking Tories need to calm down, dear
By Matthew Parris - The Times
The defence secretary’s ill-advised attack on Ed Miliband showed just how jittery senior Conservatives have become
The Tory election campaign is in Michael Fallon’s debt this weekend. Please, God, give me more confidence that Mr Fallon wasn’t put up to this. With beautiful precision the defence secretary has shown us how not to do things, and the warning could hardly have come at a better point. There is time, but none to lose; and a peak for the Conservatives to conquer first.
If I may adopt John Bunyan’s 17th-century imagery from The Pilgrim’s Progress, that peak is called Mount Calm, its foothills are Mount Authority and Mount Courtesy, and the dangers along the way are the Slough of Negativity and the Monster Panic.
As for Mr Fallon, we can only shudder and look away. Ed Miliband did not stab his brother in the back any more than Margaret Thatcher stabbed the man to whom she owed her political advancement, Edward Heath, in the back. They offered an alternative.
As for Miliband’s stabbing his country in the back, it is possible to question the Labour party’s commitment to Trident without smearing Ed Miliband as some kind of traitor. You would have hoped Tories would have learned from another newspaper’s disastrous attack on Mr Miliband’s father as “the man who hated Britain” that low blows like this rebound to the advantage of the victim.
And let nobody suppose this kind of brutishness “shores up the Tory core”. I have spoken to Tory gatherings in recent weeks in Staffordshire, Cheltenham, Oxfordshire, Derbyshire and (on Thursday night) Southport. If these people — many of them elderly, many to the right of their party, and all totally dedicated to the Tory cause — aren’t the core, I don’t know who is. And they hate negative personal attacks. The Tory core typically set more store, not less, by good manners in politics.
It was a very great shame that David Cameron didn’t distance himself fast from this blunder. It might have given him the chance to show himself a gentleman. He missed it. There’s a real danger of Ed Miliband overtaking a sitting prime minister in the dignity stakes.
That’s a pity, because if you’re going to be called posh — and Cameron always will be — why not trade on the positives that many British people associate with breeding and status? Put in cynical PR terms, the PM is failing to take advantage of his market positioning. He is squandering his brand leverage: the dignity and generosity that as a national leader and as a compassionate Conservative we have associated with him. A big hole marked “reasons to respect” is opening up and waits to be filled.
It’s possible to like a toff, and Cameron had shown early promise of qualifying as toff-u-like. More recently he’s running the risk of successfully rebutting the “u-like” bit without shedding the “toff”. I don’t question campaign director Lynton Crosby’s strategy of reminding people that it’s David versus Ed. That’s just a fact. Nor do I question Mr Crosby’s other theme: “competence versus chaos”. Conservatives believe that’s the choice. I do.
But I invite anyone who has ever tried their hand at doorstep political persuasion to ask themselves this question: what works best with doubtful voters? Launching into a diatribe against your rivals, or framing your case calmly while making it plain you understand the other fellow’s points of view? If you’ve canvassed, if (like me) you’ve spent time this week coaxing supporters into letting you hammer a poster-bearing wooden stake into their flower-beds, you’ll know the answer.
“Gently does it,” is the answer. Everything a columnist doesn’t do. Allow the attractions in the other side’s argument. Hint respectfully at the weaknesses. Position yourself more as moderator than pugilist.
Imagine the elector at his kitchen door: he’s a tradesman; two toddlers, a cocker spaniel and a mobile phone are trying to distract him, he has made no great study of politics but says he’s pleased with how the government has helped us out of the economic crisis, and that things don’t look too bad though they could be better. But he’s worried about how the NHS is going to cope, and likes Labour’s generosity here.
Do you say: “Labour? That shower? Ed Milibean? They’ll promise you the moon, cripple our defences and then bankrupt Britain. Only David Cameron will sort everything out. Labour are all hot air. Can you imagine that hypocritical socialist Ed Miliband running a whelk stall, let alone a government? Ignore the siren voices! The dead hand of socialism will throttle the Conservatives’ golden economic legacy!”
Of course not. Every one of those doubts has already occurred to him, but now you’ve pushed it too far and he’s thinking: “This guy’s intolerant, and oversimplifying horribly. Do the Tories take me for an idiot”?
Or do you say: “Labour? They certainly do mean well but it’s not realistic to think we can just throw cash at these problems. Money doesn’t grow on trees and we have to earn it first, with a growing economy and less debt. Mr Cameron’s just being realistic when he says there’s a real problem with paying for all the things we want.
“Mr Miliband’s not a bad man, and I don’t like all these personal attacks on him, but he’s speaking without experience here, and it isn’t fair to promise what you can’t deliver. You’ve got to admit that Gordon Brown didn’t exactly do a brilliant job last time”?
You haven’t in that second answer failed to hint at all the things you shouted in the first, but you’ve sounded fairer. Voters hate the sort who sound as though they’ve blocked their ears to argument. I have never found that mild understatement weakens the case on the doorstep. And Britain is one big doorstep.
I rather suspect that if the Tory campaign falters, there will be an attempt to scapegoat the hired help: Lynton Crosby. But his instinct to stick to a few broad themes that chime with people is right — and ministers’ incessant sub-machine-gun fire of footling little “policy initiatives” that go in one ear and out the other has actually undermined Crosby’s approach and ends up sounding panicky. Torn between initiative-itis and Tourette’s, the Conservatives risk looking like the challengers rather than the incumbents.
Incumbency remains their great possession. With it must go dignity, authority and calm. The record is good. All David Cameron has to do now is be nice, be firm, be seen, be calm, and be. If he can just crack this being business, he’ll win.
The Tory election campaign is in Michael Fallon’s debt this weekend. Please, God, give me more confidence that Mr Fallon wasn’t put up to this. With beautiful precision the defence secretary has shown us how not to do things, and the warning could hardly have come at a better point. There is time, but none to lose; and a peak for the Conservatives to conquer first.
If I may adopt John Bunyan’s 17th-century imagery from The Pilgrim’s Progress, that peak is called Mount Calm, its foothills are Mount Authority and Mount Courtesy, and the dangers along the way are the Slough of Negativity and the Monster Panic.
As for Mr Fallon, we can only shudder and look away. Ed Miliband did not stab his brother in the back any more than Margaret Thatcher stabbed the man to whom she owed her political advancement, Edward Heath, in the back. They offered an alternative.
As for Miliband’s stabbing his country in the back, it is possible to question the Labour party’s commitment to Trident without smearing Ed Miliband as some kind of traitor. You would have hoped Tories would have learned from another newspaper’s disastrous attack on Mr Miliband’s father as “the man who hated Britain” that low blows like this rebound to the advantage of the victim.
And let nobody suppose this kind of brutishness “shores up the Tory core”. I have spoken to Tory gatherings in recent weeks in Staffordshire, Cheltenham, Oxfordshire, Derbyshire and (on Thursday night) Southport. If these people — many of them elderly, many to the right of their party, and all totally dedicated to the Tory cause — aren’t the core, I don’t know who is. And they hate negative personal attacks. The Tory core typically set more store, not less, by good manners in politics.
It was a very great shame that David Cameron didn’t distance himself fast from this blunder. It might have given him the chance to show himself a gentleman. He missed it. There’s a real danger of Ed Miliband overtaking a sitting prime minister in the dignity stakes.
That’s a pity, because if you’re going to be called posh — and Cameron always will be — why not trade on the positives that many British people associate with breeding and status? Put in cynical PR terms, the PM is failing to take advantage of his market positioning. He is squandering his brand leverage: the dignity and generosity that as a national leader and as a compassionate Conservative we have associated with him. A big hole marked “reasons to respect” is opening up and waits to be filled.
It’s possible to like a toff, and Cameron had shown early promise of qualifying as toff-u-like. More recently he’s running the risk of successfully rebutting the “u-like” bit without shedding the “toff”. I don’t question campaign director Lynton Crosby’s strategy of reminding people that it’s David versus Ed. That’s just a fact. Nor do I question Mr Crosby’s other theme: “competence versus chaos”. Conservatives believe that’s the choice. I do.
But I invite anyone who has ever tried their hand at doorstep political persuasion to ask themselves this question: what works best with doubtful voters? Launching into a diatribe against your rivals, or framing your case calmly while making it plain you understand the other fellow’s points of view? If you’ve canvassed, if (like me) you’ve spent time this week coaxing supporters into letting you hammer a poster-bearing wooden stake into their flower-beds, you’ll know the answer.
“Gently does it,” is the answer. Everything a columnist doesn’t do. Allow the attractions in the other side’s argument. Hint respectfully at the weaknesses. Position yourself more as moderator than pugilist.
Imagine the elector at his kitchen door: he’s a tradesman; two toddlers, a cocker spaniel and a mobile phone are trying to distract him, he has made no great study of politics but says he’s pleased with how the government has helped us out of the economic crisis, and that things don’t look too bad though they could be better. But he’s worried about how the NHS is going to cope, and likes Labour’s generosity here.
Do you say: “Labour? That shower? Ed Milibean? They’ll promise you the moon, cripple our defences and then bankrupt Britain. Only David Cameron will sort everything out. Labour are all hot air. Can you imagine that hypocritical socialist Ed Miliband running a whelk stall, let alone a government? Ignore the siren voices! The dead hand of socialism will throttle the Conservatives’ golden economic legacy!”
Of course not. Every one of those doubts has already occurred to him, but now you’ve pushed it too far and he’s thinking: “This guy’s intolerant, and oversimplifying horribly. Do the Tories take me for an idiot”?
Or do you say: “Labour? They certainly do mean well but it’s not realistic to think we can just throw cash at these problems. Money doesn’t grow on trees and we have to earn it first, with a growing economy and less debt. Mr Cameron’s just being realistic when he says there’s a real problem with paying for all the things we want.
“Mr Miliband’s not a bad man, and I don’t like all these personal attacks on him, but he’s speaking without experience here, and it isn’t fair to promise what you can’t deliver. You’ve got to admit that Gordon Brown didn’t exactly do a brilliant job last time”?
You haven’t in that second answer failed to hint at all the things you shouted in the first, but you’ve sounded fairer. Voters hate the sort who sound as though they’ve blocked their ears to argument. I have never found that mild understatement weakens the case on the doorstep. And Britain is one big doorstep.
I rather suspect that if the Tory campaign falters, there will be an attempt to scapegoat the hired help: Lynton Crosby. But his instinct to stick to a few broad themes that chime with people is right — and ministers’ incessant sub-machine-gun fire of footling little “policy initiatives” that go in one ear and out the other has actually undermined Crosby’s approach and ends up sounding panicky. Torn between initiative-itis and Tourette’s, the Conservatives risk looking like the challengers rather than the incumbents.
Incumbency remains their great possession. With it must go dignity, authority and calm. The record is good. All David Cameron has to do now is be nice, be firm, be seen, be calm, and be. If he can just crack this being business, he’ll win.
