The Politicos Guide to the 2015 General Election

State of the leaders

Isabel Hardman

DAVID CAMERON

Given the rough-and-tumble he’s had with his party over the past few years, David Cameron is heading into this election in surprisingly good shape. Troublesome backbenchers who had given him grief every step of the way through his premiership have faded into the background, for the time being at least. Some have cheered up because they’ve seen the improving economic situation, Labour’s failure to move the polls and the Prime Minister’s 2013 referendum pledge as a sign that Conservative victory of one sort or another is possible next year. The most dangerous figure, David Davis, is far less of a threat to Cameron than he once was, with former supporters melting away. One told me recently that ‘You have got to have some sort of following to do something, but any following he might have had has evaporated because all his predictions of oblivion under Cameron haven’t come true.’ Davis’s interventions after the European elections made far less of a dent than they might have done: many of his sympathisers are simply not interested in causing trouble for the leadership.

Other MPs have required a little more work to bring into line: Andrew Bridgen, for instance, who once hated the Prime Minister so much that he was happy to make public his letter to 1922 Committee Chair Graham Brady calling for a leadership contest. Bridgen retracted that letter this spring after a concerted effort from No. 10 to listen to him and encourage him to back the Prime Minister. The work of this reconciliation team in Downing Street continues, and Cameron himself continues to try harder with his MPs. They accept that he will never really be a natural people person, particularly with people he finds a bit dull or unimportant. But they appreciate his effort, both in holding briefing meetings where Lynton Crosby reassures the party with PowerPoint presentations about strategy, and in inviting more MPs around to Downing Street. His PPS Gavin Williamson’s extraordinary energy has come in handy on this front, too.

But Cameron must not mistake the improved mood in his party for loyalty. Many of those who were his harshest critics are pulling together only for the sake of the Conservatives, not the Prime Minister himself. They will still turn on him after the election if he tries to enter another coalition. It’s not just the troublesome backbenchers: influential ministers have made it known to their colleagues that they would vote against another partnership with the Lib Dems if they were offered a secret ballot to approve a deal.

He also risks giving the impression of stalling on his plans for European reform. He has not appointed a full-time negotiator to work on his behalf and his deliberations over whom to appoint as European Commissioner seemed more focused on pragmatic considerations about by-elections and ministers at the end of their Westminster careers than the key role the new commissioner can play in a renegotiation. His view that he will be campaigning for Britain to stay in the EU because he knows for sure that he can get the reformed Europe and reformed relationship with Europe that he wants has not been scrutinised as fiercely as it might have been by backbenchers, because backbenchers are saving that sort of forceful behaviour for after the 2015 election. But the Prime Minister’s confidence suggests either that he has such a modest vision of a renegotiated settlement that it really will be very easy to get what he wants, or that he is quite deluded: European leaders do recognise that the EU must change, but they are not quite keen for the changes that Cameron is suggesting.

Part of the problem for Cameron is that he’s just not that ideological about Europe. Neither is he ideological about much else. This sounded quite nice in opposition: ‘ideological’ is often used as a synonym for ‘dogmatic’ and ‘stubborn’. But it does mean that it’s easy for this Prime Minister to U-turn, because his initial ideas never had an intellectual underpinning in the first place. Hence his shift from greenery in opposition to ‘taking out the green crap’ in government. Some of the ideas he adopted before entering government deserved to be shrugged off, but perhaps the Conservative leader could approach the 2015 election with greater conviction about what he wants to do with the next five years, and what’s driving him to do it.

ED MILIBAND

No one could accuse Ed Miliband of lacking conviction. The Labour leader boasted that he had greater ‘intellectual self-confidence’ than David Cameron, and while it sounded a pompous thing for someone who graduated with an upper second to say to a first-class graduate, it’s true. Ever since the Labour autumn conference in 2013, Miliband has shown the courage of his convictions by the bucketful. He spent the first few years of leading his party talking about his family background and producing long, confusing and off-putting arguments about producers and predators. Then he announced price controls in the energy sector, and suddenly began to look a whole lot more confident.

Miliband finds himself in a nice groove where he can announce appealing retail offer policies, and sit back and watch the government panic for a few weeks before announcing something to relieve the pressure he’s put on ministers. He’s certainly made politics more interesting by moving to the left. The problem is that the energy price freeze, plans to improve the private rented sector and an eye-watering pledge for all patients to see their GP within forty-eight hours have not translated into eye-watering poll leads. Perhaps this is because, as his election strategy chief Douglas Alexander claims, the era of four-party politics means Labour cannot expect runaway poll leads in the run-up to the general election. But perhaps it’s because voters are worried about something bigger than the nice-sounding pledges that Miliband throws at them. Labour still needs to work out a way of talking about the cuts it would make after 2015 without resorting to fine language about long-termism. Cuts that are brutal and produce short-term savings are needed, yet naturally frontbenchers don’t want to talk about them. But the public will struggle to believe in pledges about GP access if they can’t trust Labour to manage the public finances properly.

The low poll leads have not translated into party panic, yet. But grumblings won’t just be directed at the party leader. Ed Miliband has invested heavily in his MPs. Even those who didn’t support him in 2010 are won over by his personal warmth and his desire to consult them. Indeed, his consultation exercises in the run-up to big changes of tack on issues such as immigration and welfare put Whitehall departments to shame when it comes to the amount of time the Labour leader and his team spend talking any backbencher who is vaguely interested in the policy through the details.

This means that not only can Miliband set his party on a course where it pledges to be tougher than the Tories on welfare and immigration, but that when the chips are down he can rely on his party colleagues not to stick their heads above the parapet immediately. He can’t take that for granted forever, though: more people were rattled and became chatty by the European elections. He has been let down consistently by underperforming shadow Cabinet members, and this problem has not been solved by reshuffles. Some of the least proactive or most troublesome members of his team are the most difficult to move, such as Yvette Cooper and Ed Balls. So this leader is not in as strong a state as he could be, because of the team around him.

NICK CLEGG

Nick Clegg does have some similar personnel problems to Miliband – mostly in the form of the Business Secretary Vince Cable, but the Liberal Democrat leader is heading into the election having won many battles in the war for the soul of his party, albeit without any marked improvement in the polls. Cable is no longer such an authoritative figure after a bruising 2013 conference season in which he appeared to have a hissy fit and a sulk over the position the party was taking on the economy. His ally Lord Oakeshott, whose plots to remove whoever is the leader of the day and install his preferred candidate are almost as old as the party itself, has also gone. Oakeshott’s departure from the Lib Dems in May means Clegg no longer has a powerful parliamentarian briefing against him at every turn. He will continue to face grumbles from the Social Liberal Forum, a left-leaning faction within the Lib Dems who have never supported Clegg’s vision for the party or indeed his leadership. But there are insufficient numbers of MPs keen to remove their leader, and members don’t seem hungry for a leadership contest either.

One question for Clegg as he prepares for 2015 is which party he’d instinctively rather do business with, in the event of a coalition with either Labour or the Conservatives being viable. Conventional wisdom is that it is easier for the Liberal Democrats to do a deal with Labour this time around, given the angst that sharing a pillow with the Tories has provoked among the grassroots. But the Lib Dem leader knows that it’s not that simple. In coalition with the Tories, the Lib Dems have been able to portray themselves as the nice, sweet party who stop savage Tory cuts and rein in the worst free market instincts of their partners. But in coalition with Labour, they would be the party blocking new school building projects and other nice goodies that voters quite like but which the government may not be able to afford. The clue is in the line Clegg himself offered at his party’s conference when describing how the Lib Dems could anchor either party: ‘Labour would wreck the recovery. The Conservatives would give us the wrong kind of recovery. Only the Liberal Democrats can finish the job and finish it in a way that is fair.’ Suddenly, the Lib Dems would be the nasty party.

More immediately, Clegg needs to decide how he can persuade voters that the Lib Dems aren’t a ‘nothing’ party or a niche party. His ‘party of IN’ campaign for the 2014 European elections damaged his leadership because he had personally set so much store by this bold and proud Europhile stance. Privately, he admits that his big mistake was to appear an apologist for the EU rather than caveating his enthusiasm with ideas for proper reform of the bloc. But while he tries to cheer up his party with announcements on international development and other policy areas that excite Lib Dem activists, Clegg needs to be careful that he doesn’t neglect exciting voters with the big Lib Dem achievements on the economy.

Clegg may be mocked by Labour for being a pushover when it comes to nasty Tory ideas, but he has wielded great power through the Quad and a seldom-mentioned committee that he chairs which examines all the government’s domestic policies. The Home Affairs Committee is Clegg’s opportunity to stop the ideas he doesn’t like, or at least to slow them up considerably, and it is the stranglehold that he places on reform that has led some Tory ministers to think minority government would be preferable in 2015 to another five years of Chairman Clegg.

NIGEL FARAGE

Perhaps Clegg will be robbed of the opportunity to pick 2015’s winner by Nigel Farage, who hopes that UKIP can ‘hold the balance of power’ in the House of Commons next year and possibly offer a confidence and supply agreement. This is a very bold ambition, to put it politely. But the UKIP leader is dead set on getting MPs in the House of Commons, and has made noises about resigning if he fails to do so.

He has failed to secure more than a single defection from the Conservative party, even though these were eminently possible at one stage. One Conservative MP who was on the brink of defecting to UKIP told me that it was Farage himself who put him off. He said: ‘When I looked Farage in the eyes, eyeball to eyeball, I felt this was a person I could not trust and do business with.’

Farage’s own character has certainly come in for plenty of scrutiny over the past few months, and he hasn’t always thrived under the spotlight. At times in the European elections campaign, he appeared to visibly wilt, either giving off-colour answers to questions in interviews, or becoming rattled. One of his challenges in 2015 is to keep his cool while both running for what could be the first UKIP seat in the House of Commons and managing his party’s national campaign. The European election spotlight has considerably less candlepower than the one that will be beamed on Farage for the general election.

ALEX SALMOND

Nigel Farage and Alex Salmond are two insurgents who have shaken up British politics far more than any of the main party leaders could ever dream. Both are also leaders responsible for a large proportion of the profile that their parties enjoy, and this is a challenge for both: what are the SNP and UKIP without Salmond and Farage?

The former is less rattled by being caught out than the latter, but Salmond has still struggled when confronted with details – big details at that – such as the legal advice his government took on an independent Scotland’s membership of the European Union. Nevertheless, he has benefitted from a confused and lacklustre ‘no’ campaign, which contrasts with his party’s old-fashioned campaign style of meetings in village halls and an emotional case for independence.

Even if Salmond doesn’t get the result he wants on 18 September 2014, he has prepared his case for devo-max sufficiently carefully that he can switch from his current campaign for independence-lite to campaigning for a huge handover of power from Westminster. So in some senses, the First Minister will win the referendum if he gets a ‘yes’ vote, or if he gets the close result that gives him the moral victory on which to keep going.

NATALIE BENNETT

The Greens aren’t claiming a political ‘earthquake’ after 2014’s local and European elections. But they’re still tunnelling away, beating the Lib Dems in the European polls to come fourth with nearly 8 per cent of the vote nationally and three MEPs. The party also expanded its local base, gaining seventeen new councillors. Yet many of its activists complain that they’re losing out to UKIP in media coverage. Party leader Natalie Bennett has made the same accusation. She thinks the Greens are now a ‘national party’. That may be true, but the party is going through the sort of difficult adolescence that UKIP would like to avoid: it has not earned universal plaudits for the way it has run Brighton & Hove Council, and since Caroline Lucas relinquished the party leadership, it struggles to get the same kind of headlines as the other insurgent party that it despises – UKIP. Bennett is a useful second voice in the Green Party, but because she does not speak from the Chamber of the House of Commons, her interventions are easy to miss. The next step for the Greens is to work out how to bag national headlines that aren’t just about local political rows.

Isabel Hardman is Assistant Editor of The Spectator.

The Conservative Party general election campaign

Mark Wallace

The next general election will be unlike any other in British political history.

Previously, the timing of every election has been uncertain. Will the Prime Minister go early? Might he or she call a snap election on the back of a sudden bit of good news?

This time round, though, we have known the date for years. The coalition’s decision to introduce fixed-term parliaments didn’t attract as much attention as the ill-fated attempt to introduce the Alternative Vote, but it has had a huge impact on our politics.

Removing the uncertainty gives the parties and leaders greater ability to plan everything down to the last detail, but it also provides the potential to bore the electorate silly.

The challenge is to take advantage of the opportunity for fundraising and recruiting your team, while avoiding the risk of getting bogged down and boring in the lengthy slog.

Combine that fixed-term factor with the reality that the Conservatives are incumbents in government, and the party faces a difficult job. Not only is the date of the election conducive to boredom, but incumbents have to fight to ‘finish the job’ and are denied the more exciting ground of demanding ‘change’.

That’s the bad news. The good news is two-fold.

First, governing as part of a coalition is not the same as being a single-party government. There is still room to pitch new, exciting ideas on the basis that they aren’t possible while hobbled by the Liberal Democrats but would be delivered by a majority Conservative government.

Second, boring conservatives have recently proved electorally successful in other countries. Germany’s Merkel, Australia’s Abbott, Canada’s Harper – all are examples of what Tim Montgomerie has called the ‘BoreCons’, and all have won elections in recent years.

Maybe being boring isn’t all that bad. Throw in the fact that when Ed Miliband does manage to excite interest, people tend to find it worrying or just plain weird, and you have the genesis of an opportunity.

THE LESSON OF 2010

The 2010 general election is a bitter memory for the Conservative leadership. Up against Gordon Brown, who boasted a toxic combination of economic disaster and personal unpleasantness, the fresh, young Tory pitch was supposed to sweep the board.

‘Let sunshine win the day’ was David Cameron’s call in opposition. But when polling day came around, voters drew the curtains.

Thankfully, for the nation’s sake, a coalition was hammered together in order to avoid the harmful experience of any more Brownism. But that success also allowed the Conservative Party to avoid fully facing up to the grim fact that we failed to win outright in the most favourable circumstances for a quarter of a century.

Belatedly, and largely behind closed doors, that failure has eventually been analysed. What should have been a stark contrast between tired, bitter Labour and positive, modernised Conservatism was allowed to blur thanks to a confused and confusing pitch to voters.

The Big Society is the most famous example – it took loads of good ideas and naturally conservative principles and hid them in a mush of management speak and sloganeering. Indeed, it grabbed so much of the wrong sort of attention that it distracted from other policies which would have been more easily understood and offered concrete improvements in people’s lives

SAFETY FIRST

So highfalutin language and airy messaging is out for 2015. Instead, Lynton Crosby has made a welcome return as the party’s full-time election strategist, and with him comes a focus on real life and stark divides. Crucially, he also believes in research rather than instinct – he has little time for the commentariat, and prefers to find out scientifically what actual voters are thinking.

No longer are the Conservatives sketching castles in the sky, instead they are down on the ground implementing the now-famous OLTEP (Our Long Term Economic Plan).

Note the second and third words – ‘long’ and ‘term’. OLTEP may have emerged in the language of government, but it is targeted at winning elections. By implication, this is a plan that takes longer than one five-year term in power – and it isn’t a question of ill-defined philosophy, it’s squarely about the economy, meaning the future of your job, your kids’ jobs, your house and your town depend on it.

This is the language of safety, the greatest asset an incumbent party can possess. The plan revolves around tough decisions, cutting the deficit, making welfare more fair, improving education and returning to growth – if you’ve taken the pain of the first few years, do you really want to ditch it just when it starts to pay off?

Like all the best political questions, that only has one answer.

Effectively, the Conservatives will also seek to make Ed Miliband’s theme – ‘the choice’ – answer itself. Your choice is between a long-term economic plan and … what? A return to the bad old days of tax and debt? Trade union-controlled loony Labour? Or, even worse, an ill-defined alternative that no one knows anything about other than the fact that its main proponent can’t eat a sandwich competently?

Crosby is decisive and blunt – fortunately the Prime Minister has given him the necessary authority to do things his way, or else his job would be rather more difficult. He hosts weekly meetings in CCHQ with the top team to ensure that every element of the party is pointing in the right direction, that the left hand knows what the right hand is doing and, most of all, to ensure message discipline.

THE TOP TEAM

With that approach in mind, the team at the top of the Conservative Party should be seen primarily as a campaigning outfit.

Of course, the Prime Minister and the Chancellor still maintain the close alliance which so distinguished them from Blair and Brown’s smouldering rivalry. Each knows that the other is a major reason why they have got this far, and that sustaining that relationship is essential to success in 2015.

Cameron is known to dislike reshuffles, and yet the 14th and 15th of July saw him radically remodel his Cabinet with the election in mind.

Compare the new set-up to the old. The departure of Michael Gove, for example, was openly motivated by a desire to shed baggage among key electorates like teachers and parents. The swift rise of several female ministers – such as Liz Truss and Nicky Morgan – was about picking the voices and faces of the election campaign as much as about chasing a gender target.

Then there are the senior campaigning roles – while William Hague left the Foreign Office and is soon to leave the Commons, his position as Leader of the House is unequivocally a campaigning one. Well liked and a good media performer, he will be deployed around the country battling for votes, as well as shielding against incoming fire, like a Yorkshire Iron Dome.

The party chairman, Grant Shapps, defied those who predicted he would lose his post in the reshuffle and will see the party through the campaign. He has secured his position by radically restructuring and revitalising CCHQ so that it lives up to its name – as a campaign headquarters.

THE HEART OF THE MACHINE

CCHQ, long the source of gripes and the target of barbs within the Conservative Party, has upped its game. Out has gone the byzantine structure and wide-ranging policy work, to be replaced by a more targeted campaigning focus.

In February 2014 it also moved to a new home in Matthew Parker Street, bedecked with posters of victorious Tory leaders, presumably in order to set the right tone.

At the top sit Shapps and Crosby, managing the machine and the message respectively. The chairman’s office is run by Paul Abbott, his chief of staff, who previously worked for Robert Halfon, the campaigning MP for Harlow.

Four teams make up the sharp end of the operation.

The research department, run by Alex Dawson, generates rapid rebuttal, briefings on key issues and political attack material. Over the coming months, the team will grow beyond its current core in order to deal with the increasing intensity of the campaign. Nick Hargrave, a former speechwriter for Cameron, runs the political section, which is charged with maintaining a detailed, instantly accessible database of quotes and claims from the opposition to use against them.

The press team is led by communications director Giles Kenningham, who impressed after leaving ITV to serve as a special advisor to Eric Pickles. His deputy, Tim Collins, used to be Shapps’s chief of staff when in opposition, and then sharpened his skills in the private sector before returning to the fold.

The digital and creative team is headed by digital director Craig Elder and creative director Tom Edmonds, who co-ordinate the party’s advertising, produce party political broadcasts, oversee the increasingly important social media campaigns and generate a constant flow of graphics to add punch to the points the press team want to make. Their work obviously overlaps somewhat with that of Jim Messina, the former Obama campaign manager, who was engaged to advise on digital campaigning from his base in the US.

The largest, and most geographically dispersed, team is the campaigning department, led by Stephen Gilbert and deputy Darren Mott. This is the point of connection between the agents, campaign managers, regional directors and candidates and the central operation. They oversee canvassing databases, candidate selections, by-elections, target seats and all the elements that make the machine run around the country.

DOWN AT THE GRASSROOTS

The leadership is all too aware that the dramatic fall in Conservative membership poses a serious problem. You can have as many good brains as you like, and a nice, shiny office, but if there is no one to risk being bitten by dogs when pushing leaflets through letterboxes (or to risk being bitten by voters when knocking on people’s doors, for that matter) then it is all for naught.

The challenge of restoring the party to its former mass membership status will take far longer than one general election campaign, and will require radical change to our idea of what a political party is. In the meantime, the responsibility for stemming the decline and undoing as much of the damage as possible in time for election day has fallen to Shapps.

With a focus on maintaining campaign capacity, his approach revolves around the idea of shock troops. One hundred people giving an hour a week is, in terms of capacity, the same as ten people giving ten hours a week. Therefore, he established Team 2015 last year in order to find, train and direct the people willing to give more than the minimum.

Team 2015 members don’t have to join the party. Instead, they simply have to be willing to regularly go above and beyond to canvass voters, either in person or by phone. Nor do they necessarily campaign in their home seat – they are allocated to their nearest target seat, to bolster the campaign there where they are most useful.

Thousands of people are involved already, and Shapps personally presents the latest figures to the Prime Minister on a regular basis, which demonstrates the importance the leadership places on it.

The grassroots have offered their own version of the scheme – RoadTrip2015, which seeks to be a Tory counterweight to the ability of trade unions to bus large numbers of activists into target seats. Founded by Mark Clarke, the former candidate for Tooting, it proved particularly effective in the Newark by-election, generating thousands of canvassing hours in a must-win battle.

It remains to be seen whether the one-day model of the RoadTrip can prove as successful in a general election, when every seat is fought at once, but it’s undoubtedly adding force to the effort in target seats.

In terms of the wider decline of party membership, both approaches are to an extent stop-gap measures. But there’s a gap that needs stopping right now, so expect both to grow over the coming months.

DEVELOPING POLICY

Of course, a machine is only one part of winning an election. You also need a manifesto for the machine to communicate to voters.

Once upon a time this would have been designed in CCHQ, or the old Conservative Central Office. Now, the process is split between three bodies – the political elements of the Downing Street Policy Unit, the MPs on the Downing Street Policy Board and the five policy committees of the backbench 1922 Committee. Throw in the likely involvement of some of the Chancellor’s people, such as former Policy Exchange boss Neil O’Brien, and it isn’t the simplest of systems.

Overall, policy is the responsibility of Jo Johnson, the MP for Orpington and brother of the London Mayor. He leads the Policy Unit and chairs the Policy Board, as well as reviewing submissions from other organisations.

The MPs on the board – including Margot James, Nadhim Zahawi, Jake Berry, George Eustice, Chris Skidmore, Alun Cairns, Nick Gibb and Paul Uppal – all sit in at least one of five working groups, covering the economy, foreign policy, energy and environment, home and constitutional affairs, and public service reform.

Those five groups almost exactly match the structure of the ’22’s policy committees, which are respectively chaired by John Redwood (Economy), Sir Edward Leigh (Foreign Affairs), Neil Parish (Environment and Local Government), Robert Buckland (Home affairs and the constitution) and Steve Baker (Public Services).

Formally, the idea is for the relevant MPs from the Policy Board, the relevant ’22 representative, and a chairing Cabinet minister to meet regularly on each policy area, feeding everyone’s ideas into the process and connecting the backbenches with the leadership. Whether it works that smoothly remains to be seen.

Beyond that formal structure, others will undoubtedly have an input, too. The Conservative Policy Forum is meant to gather ideas from the party grassroots, Nadhim Zahawi runs a Business Feedback Group to canvass the views of companies, pollster Andrew Cooper is still in close contact with Downing Street and Oliver Letwin has never been known to walk past a policy discussion in his life.

Finally, regardless of the idea or who is pushing it, all must pass the Crosby Test – if it doesn’t fit the strategy, it turns off key voters or it elicits a more explicit comment, it won’t be going in.

FORGETTING 2010

Though the true scale of the shortfall at the last election isn’t often mentioned, its memory still haunts the Conservative Party. Every hope is that 2015 will banish it for good.

A comparison with last time round gives some cause for hope and some for concern.

There is clearer messaging and more hard-headed strategy, some of it imported from Australia.

The central machine is undoubtedly better suited to the task, with its people better focused on the sharp end of campaigning.

The fruits of the new policy process are yet to be seen, and we’ll know more as the manifesto launch approaches, but there are good MPs involved, including some radical voices from the backbenches.

Around the country, the grassroots are much less numerous than we were in 2010 – a serious problem. Those who remain, though, are arguably better organised and more targeted on the must-win seats.

The emergence of fixed-term parliaments has given plenty of time to lay plans. But, as ever, no battle plan survives contact with the enemy completely intact. The big test, of its resilience and flexibility, is yet to come.

Mark Wallace is Executive Editor of ConservativeHome.com.

The Labour Party general election campaign

Paul Richards

For Ed Miliband to enter Downing Street on the morning of Friday 8 May 2015, it will require an astonishing defiance of political gravity. For Labour to win an election just five years after such colossal rejection as in 2010, and to return to office after just one term in opposition, would be unprecedented. This is the challenge Ed Miliband’s Labour Party has set itself.

AN UNEXPECTED LEADER

Ed Miliband is the unexpected leader. As the son of a Marxist politics professor, his life-long passion for politics is no surprise. He spent the summer of 1986 in the basement of Tony Benn’s Holland Park home, helping to archive old minutes of meetings and notes for speeches. Aside from a spell as an economics lecturer at Harvard, Miliband has worked in and around Westminster all his adult life. He was a special advisor at the Treasury, then an MP in 2005, then a minister in Gordon Brown’s government.

His victory in the 2010 leadership contest, beating four other candidates (Andy Burnham, David Miliband, Diane Abbott and Ed Balls) was a shock to many political observers. Ed Miliband won 50.65 per cent of Labour’s electoral college, after second, third and fourth preferences votes were counted defeating the last remaining candidate David Miliband by 1.3 per cent. Because Ed Miliband came first only in the trade union section of the electoral college, and came second in the sections for party members and for parliamentarians, his opponents have accused him of being ‘in the pockets of the unions’, especially the 1.5 million member-strong Unite.

MILIBAND AS LEADER OF THE OPPOSITION

Miliband’s five years as Leader of the Opposition have been characterised by a series of bold and eye-catching tactical moves, and a willingness to take tough decisions. The greatest achievement has been to maintain unity in the Labour Party, not noted for outpourings of brotherly love in previous periods of opposition. Those anticipating or even hoping for a blood-bath were disappointed.

One of his first moves as leader was to scrap the Labour Party’s custom in opposition of MPs electing the members of the shadow Cabinet. Tony Blair had accommodated this odd ritual between 1994 and 1997. Instead, Miliband appointed the team he wanted, being prepared to sack colleagues. In subsequent reshuffles, he has promoted the younger MPs (especially those who backed him for leader) and brought on new talent from the 2010 intake and the subsequent by-election victors.

This means the Labour goes into the election with a front-bench team which balances the battle-hardened veterans of the Tony Blair and Gordon Brown eras with the energy and enthusiasm of the likes of Luciana Berger, Tristram Hunt, Chuka Umunna, Rachel Reeves, Liz Kendall, Dan Jarvis, Gloria De Piero and Emma Reynolds. His shadow Cabinet even includes one veteran of the Michael Foot era, Labour’s deputy leader Harriet Harman.

His period in opposition has been characterised by taking on vested interests, from the Murdoch empire, to the utility companies, to the trade unions. This latter group saw their voting strength inside Labour curtailed at a Special Conference in 2014, so that future leaders will be elected with one-member-one-vote. Whilst not quite amounting to a ‘Clause IV moment’, the reforms were nonetheless a bold sign of strength, which even Tony Blair had not dared to attempt.

LABOUR’S STANDING IN THE POLLS AND AT THE BALLOT BOX

Labour has been ahead in the opinion polls since 2010, albeit with a gradually diminishing lead since the steady ten-point leads of 2010 and 2011. Worryingly for Labour, Ed Miliband will fight the 2015 election with opinion poll ratings showing his party behind on economic competence, and with him personally behind on leadership. For example, the IPSOS-MORI poll in September 2013 put Labour on minus eighteen on the economy and Miliband on minus two on the net rating of the opposition leader versus the Prime Minister.

Tony Blair’s Labour was behind on the economy, just, in the run-up to 1997, but Blair had a leadership rating of plus sixty-one. James Callaghan led Margaret Thatcher on leadership throughout the 1979 election, yet she won a majority of forty-four. At the annual gathering of the New Labour group Progress in May 2014, the pollster Peter Kellner of YouGov suggested that Labour could not secure a mandate whilst being simultaneously behind on leadership and the economy. If Miliband leads Labour to victory, this will be yet another political record he has smashed.

In the by-elections since 2010, Labour has had some solid performances, alongside some disappointments. Current front-benchers and future stars including Dan Jarvis, Seema Malhotra, Jon Ashworth, Andy Sawford and Steve Reed entered Parliament in by-elections. But Labour lost, painfully, in Bradford West to George Galloway, and came fourth in Eastleigh despite a spirited campaign by author John O’Farrell. In the London Mayor elections in 2012, Labour’s Ken Livingstone lost to the Conservative candidate Boris Johnson for a second time.

LABOUR’S SECRET WEAPON

One reason for Labour’s optimism, despite the polls, entering the election is its belief in the efficacy of its ground operation. Thanks to the tireless efforts of doughty general secretary Iain McNicol, Labour has placed huge emphasis on developing its local doorstep campaigning (what it calls its ‘field operations’), backed by professional organisers in its 106 target (or ‘battle-ground’) seats, and supported by an army of volunteers. In the New Labour era, the number of Labour officials at party headquarters outnumbered those in the regional offices by two to one. Today’s 350 staff are evenly balanced between the party’s regional offices and party HQ at Brewer’s Green, equidistant between Victoria Station and the Houses of Parliament.

After the 2014 local and European elections, campaign boss Douglas Alexander MP could claim that Labour activists had knocked on seven million doors. As Michael Dugher MP, campaign communications chief, told The Independent in November 2013: ‘Labour still has its historic competitive advantage – people. Tory Party membership is dying on its arse and no one is joining the Liberal Democrats.’

The party intends to use digital media to reach out to, and interact with, its key audiences. The party has hired Blue State Digital, the company founded by Howard Dean’s online campaigners, which went on to deliver the digital campaign for Obama. The link man between Blue State Digital and Labour’s Brewer’s Green HQ is Matthew McGregor, who has worked on the Obama campaign in 2012 and the less successful Australian Labor Party campaign in 2013.

It seems to be working. In the month after Mr Miliband’s pledge to freeze energy bills, Labour’s ‘#freezethatbill’ hashtag on Twitter had 13,378 tweets, and Labour reached about 1.2 million people through Facebook in the month after its promise. A Facebook and Twitter Thunderclap sent by 900 Labour supporters reached 4.5 million potential voters.

Labour’s emphasis is on building relationships with the electors, not merely asking for their vote. This entails a huge philosophical shift from Labour’s 1990s Millbank operation, modelled on Clinton’s Little Rock, which was all about a unified ‘air war’ and ‘ground war’, with simple, repeated messages, rapid rebuttal of the opponents’ arguments, and a massive ‘get out the vote’ (GOTV) effort on polling day. Iain McNicol and others have dismissed this as vote harvesting, transactional politics, unsuited to the digital age.

THE AMERICANS HAVE LANDED

The best proof of this shift in thinking is the arrival of Arnie Graf. With a desk at Labour’s Brewer’s Green headquarters alongside the general secretary, Graf occupies a position at the heart of the campaign. Graf is a down-to-earth community organiser, credited with mentoring a young Barack Obama, with fifty years’ experience of mobilising working-class communities in Chicago and New York. He has visited all of the 106 target seats, recruiting new supporters, mobilising networks, building local campaigns, and inspiring people that politics can make a difference. Allied to the Movement for Change, founded in the UK in 2010 as the catalyst for community organising, Arnie Graf has brought the kind of politics which inspired Obama to the streets of British cities.

The evidence is that community organising can be linked to successful electioneering. A poll by Lord Ashcroft after the Wythenshaw & Sale East by-election in February 2014 suggested that residents in that part of Manchester were significantly more likely to say they had received a visit, letter or leaflet from Labour supporters than from those of any other party. The hand of Graf was apparent behind the campaign, and the victor, Cllr Mike Kane, was a member of the Movement for Change.

Labour’s campaign was given a vote of confidence in April 2014 with the arrival of David Axelrod, one of the architects of Barack Obama’s victories. Labour hired David Axelrod’s AKPD for an undisclosed six-figure sum, after successful wooing by Douglas Alexander. Axelrod cut his teeth in Chicago Democrat politics, helping Harold Washington, the first black mayor of Chicago, to victory in 1983. Axelrod, and his colleagues Larry Grisolano and Mike Donilon, will work closely with Labour’s campaign director Spencer Livermore, and the veteran US pollster Stan Greenberg. He reports to Ed Miliband and Douglas Alexander.

THE BATTLEGROUND

Labour is targeting 106 parliamentary seats in this election. Party strategists are assuming every Labour MP, or those standing in their