Transcript: PS21 discussion The UK Election

What Weve Learned

Wednesday 13th May, London

Chair: Peter Apps Executive Director, PS21
Frank Spring: US political strategist, independent
consultant for innovation, politics and security issues
and PS21 Global Fellow
Michael Peacock: Europe Middle East and Africa
Politics and Economics Editor, Thomson Reuters
Georgina Stubbs: Journalist, The Sun
Robert Colville: News director, Buzzfeed UK
Peter Apps: Welcome to PS21. We've got a really great panel this evening to
discuss an election that has fascinated us.
We have Frank Spring, global fellow at PS21 also a fellow at the Truman National
Security Project, a US strategist who has spent the last few weeks at
Southampton attempting to win a Labour seat with less success than he had
initially hoped.
We have Mike Peacock, my boss at Reuters. Political, General and Economic
News Head for Europe at Reuters and soon to move to the Bank of England as
their head of media
Georgina Stubbs from The Sun and the Nation who arrived in London seven
weeks ago to cover the election from Merseyside where she was a local
newspaper reporter
Robert Colville, also a PS21 Global Fellow, who is the News Director at Buzzfeed
and former comment editor of the Telegraph and who therefore knows a lot
more about politics than I do.
Discussion this evening is on the UK Election: What have we learnt and what
next?
PA: Everyone here has had an interesting campaign from various interesting
angles. But I wanted to start with Frank. As the outsider here, what did you learn
down in the south coast in the last few weeks? What were your main takeaways?
FS: So, the most of what I was doing down there, and this feeds into the answer
to your question, I was assisting one of Davis's campaigns in Southampton and
working on targeting the voters we were trying to get out. But most of my time

was spent in South Hampton. There are a number of technical points about the
way the Labour set about turning out support vote I think are worth talking
about. One of the principal talking points developed after the election was that
the Labour ran a good campaign, particularly a good field campaign, and that
something else happened. I actually would push back on that a little bit. I think
that there was not a victory here to be won. If this had been a tighter election,
some of the flaws in the execution of Labour's plan would have been apparent
and would have made a much bigger difference.
The two things that started happening that started to get us... You can watch in
real time the SNP talking points coming back from canvasses and leaders come
back from canvasses. I have a number of people come back and say, Oh, I have
met Rowenna and she is a really nice person but I am not voting Labour, I cant
vote for Labour. Given the choice to say if you can vote for the politics then
surely you can vote for the person. No, I'm sorry Ed Miliband is going to destroy
the campaign. There is no talking point for that. There is really nothing you can
say. You could watch that begin to escalate in real time over the last 10 days of
the election.
MP: Were you feeding that back to the centre?
FS: Sure. It all comes back in aggregate form. I dont know what they were
looking at Brewer's Green of the Labour Party but I would be surprised if they
weren't looking at something similar.
PA: Mike, a) How surprised were you, and b) where do we go from here?
MP: Like a lot of people, I was fooled by the data. My starting point was that you
couldnt see Ed Miliband as Prime Minister and I held that view fairly firmly.
Then I sort of wavered as the polls consistently put them neck and neck. So I got
it completely wrong. I am sure we will talk about the polls later but one lesson I
have picked up already -- and it was the same with the Scottish Referendum last
year -- when we had those two polls show a blip towards the Yes vote, one of the
sub-questions was do you think you will be better or worse off in an independent
Scotland. And that consistently showed about 60 to 70% say they would be
worse off in an independent Scotland. Similarly, this time, which I ignored
foolishly, the sub-set on economic competence, Tories were always miles ahead.
So, I guess one lesson I have learnt is to look at the detail of the polls rather than
the headlines. So, where next? I guess it is an obvious point... emotionally, it feels
like a bit of a Conservative landslide because they have so far exceeded
expectations. But it's not. John Major's 1992 majority and we all knew what
happened there. I think there are interesting parallels to be drawn there. And we
forget that the coalition because it was much more cohesive than most people
expected effectively cleared a 70+ majority for the previous government. Now
it's 12. So thats incredibly thin. Cameron will, having exceeded expectations, will
command more loyalty and has been dishing out patronage this week and will
continue to dangle jobs for members of his awkward squad. So he has cards to
play but you imagine that six months or a year down the line, particularly
Europe, when that really comes into view, it is going to get seriously problematic

for him. And we can run through the history of John Major's primeministership
but there are clear possible parallels there to watch for.
PA: Georgina, this your first election on a national level at the centre of the news
machine. What are your takeaways from the last seven weeks?
GS: I have been working on the Sun's free to view website. We have still taken
the hard line of the paper, quite opinionated. We have been producing less,
creating videos, really engaging people in different ways. It has been really good
to use the digital aspect and engage with people in that way and look at politics
and the general election in a different way. And the thing that I have noticed and
the importance of the means used by parties to engage with people of those
levels.
PA: Rob, you also made the dark jump to the digital world from the old-style
media to Buzzfeed. Firstly, whats your view on how media in general, new and
old, has managed through this and what are your personal takeaways?
RC: My general theme is that nothing is really working anymore. None of the
things we thought we knew have turned out to be true. I mean, in the case of the
media, the wisdom was that the power of the was waning and that Ed Miliband
was weird and geeky and kind of awkward and people like that. And it turned
out that having four or five major newspapers say day after day on their front
page this man is a weirdo loser who cant be trusted to run the country had more
reach than the milder voice. The press did put its cards on the table. The Sun has
always done it. But even the Telegraph and the Mail were sort of throwing
themselves and even the fact that the independents endorsed the coalition. But
there is a whole range of ways in which things that we thought were ... the fact
that Houses of Parliament doesnt work anymore. Millions of people vote for
parties that get a tiny representation in the parliament and thats going to be a
running sore. You've got that fact that everyone thought politics was about the
swing seats, the narrow messages, and it was about precisely identifying the
10,000 voters who would vote for your party, And actually what we got was a
result where Tories were winning seats that no one thought they could win
because there was actually a national mood and no one detected it. Going
forward, the Tories have a tiny majority and it is really hard to see how they are
going to make that work. But when you see well, what can happen and what is
the alterative, Labour are, if you see some of the statistics going out today, if you
assume Scotland is lost or you assume that English votes for English laws, then
you assume that any Labour government will need a majority in England as well
as in Scots. You end up with a situation where Labour is going to need to win in
places like Windsor and Kensington before they can actually form a majority:
they are so far away from power. So you have got a system where a weak Tory
government looks like the default central government.
PA: You also have English MPs for English laws, then the question of who the hell
should be Prime Minister becomes an important one. Because your assumption
is, is the PM in England therefore the natural PM of the United Kingdom. If not,
what the hell do you do about it?

RC: You can never have the Scottish Chancellor again, for example, which some
people might find appealing after recent examples.
PA: Frank, I am sure you dont claim to understand the British constitution,
nobody does, but coming from a country that has one, how dysfunctional do we
look after last week's election?
FS: As an American, I am not on strong legs to stand on to criticise the
functionality of any country's government. I will say that the parallel I can see is
that there is a mood on the left reminds me a little bit of 2004 in America when
we suffered a setback at a time when we actually thought we might win this
thing. We might do OK legislatively, we might win the presidency and this could
be the fight back after the very galling loss in 2000. Instead, we lost and we lost
everywhere. And the Republican gerrymandering process at the state level
appeared to be spilling out and we thought Jesus... I remember Republicans
going around drinking toasts to unlimited power and to Republican majority
forever. 2006, they got destroyed in the mid-term elections; 2008 was what it
was. So, it is possible for a progressive party to return from this, even in the face
of some pretty significant structural problems.
RC: On that, just quickly: What happened in Scotland where they had swings... if
you list the record swings in British political history, then that's probably 8 out
of the top 10. The electorate of these voters are much more volatile.
PA: By that same token, though, of course the SNP would have been a party that
would have been desperate for a PR system for most of its life, suddenly realised
that they are actually there to win it from first past the post. I do wonder to what
extent other parties are looking at this, less the Lib Dems, and thinking
Actually, there is an element in British politics that likes the fact that you get to
form a majority government and a lot of people in Labour have liked the fact that
while they have been knocked out of power for the last few years, when they
have been in, they have been able to do the stuff they want to and didnt like the
fact that Lib Dems looked like they were going to steal their breakfast. What do
think, Mike? Do you see electoral form as an inevitability?
MP: No, I think it is further away than ever after last week for a few simple
reasons. One is, 85 UKIP MPs on the PR and which none of the other parties are
going to be particularly comfortable about. And Lib Dems, have always been
great opponents and that will push them into being the very minor fourth party,
so clearly there is no much reason for them to be shouting about that at the
moment. The big two parties never want to because they always know they are
going to be delivered less seats. But the UKIP factor probably pushes it further
away than it has been for a long time.
PA: And also there will still have to be a referendum, presumably, and most
people in the country do not want UKIP to have 60 MPs, one would imagine. That
kind of factor might be enough to make that prospect further apart.

MP: Just on the other point, I think it is very hard for Labour to win in 2020. I
was a Lobby correspondent from 1999 to 2006 and the only narrative then was
if the Conservatives will ever get back into power because they were so hapless
and so useless and it looked like Labour forever. So, things do change, but I think
when you lost as badly as this, there is a sort of generally a minimum ten-year
cycle to turn it around.
PA: Do you buy that, Georgina, that we might not bounce back or do think they
have the potential?
GS: I think its going to take them a while. One of the interesting maps I saw,
where people voted Labour was the Labour hotspots around the coal fields and
the party may be neglected some of the voters they thought were going to back
them. But yeah, I think it will take them a good ten years to bounce back.
MP: Thats the huge danger for them. Its very early days, but clearly they are
already too kept about what went wrong. Thats one argument. The other, more
plausible one, is that you have got to be at the centre talking to peoples
aspirations if you want to win.
PA: I was really struggling. This is the year that my care would be cut enough to
significantly reduce my standard of living. I wonder if the austerity, even though
it is the same as the last five years, starts to burn through in a way that The
guilty truth about austerity in the last government is that for most people, they
havent noticed it, and I am not sure that will be true for another five years. I also
think if you look at the narrative about the Tories, rather than coalition with Lib
Dems, the hatred for Tories is much more visceral. The Lib Dems were a kind of
shock absorber for all of this. If you couple that with real, actual, notable
austerity, then you wonder if they might be more functional.
MP: Thats an open question. If it seems to be the case this was done for
ideological reasons rather than further cutting the deficit, then I think it would
absolutely hurt the Tories. And I am not sure myself whether it is an
ideologically, small state drive or if it is a deficit reduction drive. But if it is the
former, it will definitely hurt them.
PA: Frank, so what are going to say if you go back to DC and people ask you
whats Britain like? They havent mentioned foreign affairs in this election, are
they gone from the world stage?
FS: I think thats a terrific point because one of the things that neither party was
able to do, and I think this speaks to the idea that the Conservative party is more
precarious than it might look, was able to answer this question of what is
Britains role in the world. Neither of them had a crack at it. I am speaking
primarily from the American experience but I think this is true here to some
extent: the kind of settlement of the post-war world, the deal, if youd like to call
that, between state institutions and citizens was both in Britain and the US
that you work hard, you play by the rules and you win: which basically means,
you work hard, you get an education, you may be buy a house, stay within the

law, and you will be guaranteed a future that is reasonably prosperous and a
dignified old age and your children will do well. And the other one is we are the
good guys, and we have the power to be the good guys. Well both of those have
been quite insulted in the last 15 years in the form of the Iraq war and the global
crash. And no one out there is able to say, if you work hard and play by the rules,
and lose and potentially lose everything, and we are no longer the good guys and
we no longer have the motive or the power to force that notion that we are the
good guys, who are we? And how do we fit into the world? And Labour certainly
didn't have an answer to that. I don't know that that party knows how to talk in
that way. In the absence of that, sure, people defaulted to the Conservatives
because at least they seem to have some kind of direction.
PA: One party that does have a national narrative is the SNP. They have a concept
of what Scotland should look like.
RC: And UKIP.
PA: What are your thoughts on that, Rob? The Telegraph used to be the big organ
of saying we must do this in the world. Does no one care anymore?
RC: I don't think they do, actually. To be fair, its not just foreign policy. There
was a nice chart of issues that voters think people talk too much about and issues
that voters think people don't talk much about. And in the talk too much about,
was Scotland, and in the don't talk enough about was everything else. And
foreign policy was right up there. The only time it intruded was when Ed
Miliband tried to link the Mediterranean migrant crisis into
The EU referendum, its not a national security issue to me. I work for a global
company now and my US colleagues, Putin is the thing they are absolutely
concerned about. We are getting into the EU referendum and I think like the
Scottish referendum people are going to wake up and say Oh my god, we have
this incredibly important decision to make. Lets actually give it a thought.
PA: Which speaks to Britains role in the world. There are a bunch of narratives
around Britains role in the world, like becoming like Switzerland in the
coastline. And that is a narrative that could be pushed but its not really a
discussion that has happened.
RC: And no way does having a referendum as an issue allows you to push it back,
because you can say well we are going to deal with it in 2017. But we will let you
deal with it, unlike Labour who don't want to give the choice.
PA: Georgina, how much was the referendum and Europe a factor in what you
were looking at it.
GS: From my perspective, looking back at my previous elections, this one has
been more about Europe and Scotland than ever before, although it didn't
feature very prominently in the kind of stuff I was writing. But personally, I am
looking forward to having a say in our future.

PA: Thats interesting because the Blair approach was that under no
circumstances should the British people be trusted with this stuff because who
knows what kind of barmy decision they might come up with. And thats actually
the position of the markets and a fair chunk of Britains elite.
MP: And virtually everyone else in Europe. It is a very undemocratic standpoint
but it is not completely indefensible. If you substitute hanging for Europe, the
argument is the same. They have never trusted people with a say on capital
punishment because they think it could go the wrong way. It is a slightly facile
argument. But I do think there is a risk that this overhangs the entire
government, which is an argument for doing it earlier on rather than later on. It
would be sensible to do it in next year rather than 2017. It is an arguable point
that it is better to give people a say than not to give people a say. But actually
there are lot of other more pressing questions at the moment.
PA: The unintended consequences of that referendum are that we thought the
Scotland story ended in September when they voted to stay in the UK. It turned
out that actually the London based parties have basically burned their bridges
and are about to get annihilated. If it looks like the political elite have sewn up
the referendum, which they probably will and persuade people to stay in, one
wonders if there would be a second-tier effect that we will see later.
RC: The Tory party is almost certainly going to tear itself apartThats a weird
sub-text to this election as well. The Tories were campaigning as we need to be
the world party. The stuff about non-doms and mansion taxes were all partly
about the rich, but it was also about the idea that should London be a place
where the global plutocrats can come and play and buy champagne is that the
price we are going to put up with in exchange for national wealth or do we just
close ourselves off and accept that they are all going to move to Switzerland and
well probably be a more equal but slightly poorer place. So youve got these two
arguments sort of cutting across each other.
MP: The interesting thing about that is that contrast I am immensely relaxed
about people getting filthy rich but there is a second part of that equation as
long as people pay their taxes. And thats a sort of completely forgotten part. So,
you are right. Some are referring to Britain as becoming the butler for the world.
PA: You know a phrase one never hears in London but one hears it continuously
outside London is the London problem. Within the M25, almost regardless of
class, London has a lot of money going through it, and jobs and the idea that
people come to London to try their fortune at the age of 18 or 21 and join a
trading company or a military outfit and then they die horribly somewhere in
South Asia which I nearly managed to pull off completely. But London has been
a kind of centre and I do think there is a kind of backlash against that outside
the M25. What were you hearing down in the south coast? Were people pissed
off at London? May be Southampton is the wrong place to look for this
FS: I think thats right. We didn't get a lot of anti-London we got a lot of antipolitics which of course cant be disaggregated from London. But there wasn't a

sense that there is this part of Britain and there is us down here to the extent
that the questions that we got on identity and locality was pretty much about
Scotland. To be fair, the Conservative candidate did run strongly on being a local
candidate. Rowenna, the candidate I was working for, wasn't born in
Southampton and they made a lot of that, I am not sure to what effect.
PA: What do you think, Georgina?
GS: Merseyside is a bit of a labour stronghold, apart from one constituency which
is Lib Dem. My experience there wasn't necessarily anti-London. It was more
about the cut in funding from the coalition that was more of a problem because
they would see the effect on the local councils which are Labour as well. The
bigger issues that I noticed were very low-class things like car parking whether
or not it should be free. It was very insular.
PA: And those kind of issues divide on pretty predictable partisan lines, right?
GS: They all want everything to be free. They are all angry that there is no money.
That was the general feeling.
PA: Theres another bunch of people from South Essex where many people have
semi-skilled jobs but believe that they should be allowed to keep the fruits of
their labour and the classic Tory voter is not a foxhunter. The classic Tory voter
is someone slightly blurred down the socio-economic pecking order. Whats your
take on the polity of the country, Rob?
RC: One of the interesting things about the election and one which we said we
would touch on earlier is the future of UKIP. Because UKIP, even three years ago
was still a Tory resistance movement. It was started there are some fantastic
pictures you can find of the early years. It was basically started as a movement
by people who were bitterly disappointed that the Tories had kicked out
Margaret Thatcher and vowed to complete her glorious legacy as they saw it, but
taking Britain out of Europe and in the process turning Britain into an ultra
libertarian its closest that Britain will ever get to a Republican ideology. And
one of interesting things has been to see UKIP realise that there is this massive
reservoir of people in the north in those coalfield areas who dont really who
have seen their party get taken over by London metropolitanally, who don't
think anyone is worried about immigration or their own concerns. The one
reason I think we are in for a much more volatile period and we realise that Tory
hegemony wont be uninterrupted for the next ten years is that if you look at the
map of the second places the first places was pretty clear, blue in the south, red
in London, red in the coalfields and yellow in the north. But the second places
UKIP has got the north Labour has got a few. Its actually encouraging because
no one party will be able to come back against you but it also shows that there
are these upheavals. And I think thats a really interesting thing to look at. We are
becoming a more regional country, there are people who have been left behind
by globalisation I mean, Ed Balls lost his seat because of UKIP.

PA: Its interesting because the UK has been a two-party state in all but name for
basically throughout its political history. And the liberals imploded and Labour
rose relatively quickly even though it didn't feel that way at the time. One
transitioned to the other pretty quickly. It now feels like it is broken.
RC: The coalition was the great weird accident of British political history. Before
2011, we transitioned from two-party politics to three-party politics. If you look
at the map again, you had in those areas in the north, the Tories were so hated
after Thatcher and Major that they became that Lib Dems were the national
party of opposition. And it was the same in the south. Labour was so hated
thanks to Gordon Brown that the Lib Dems were the natural party. So weirdly,
there were two big parties but the country was split into three. By forming a
coalition, that process which had been going on for thirty years or so was kind of
shattered leaving this massive space for a party of opposition, which UKIP has
filled in the north and no one has actually filled yet in the south.
PA: The last election transitioned into three-party politics and we have now
transitioned into four or five, depending on whether you believe Lib Dems will
ever be back. And I do wonder whether there will be a backlash in favour of if
this government is hated, does that justify the Lib Dems existence again? Whats
your feeling down the south coast, Frank? Is there a Lib Dem resurgence to be
had in places like there or do you think they are toast?
FS: The Lib Dems I think have a long way to go. Of all the parties, Lib Dems were
the ones that were absolutely nowhere. But I wouldn't necessarily count out any
party. You know, they obviously got 20% of the vote at one point. So there is
clearly at least some reservoir of affection there. But what story would they have
to tell? What narrative could they possibly spin that would bring them back in
the next 10 years?
PA: The only narrative they have got is the one Clegg pushed which clearly didnt
work now the head to the Labour and the heart to the Conservatives. But I
wonder if an unpopular Conservative government followed by an unpopular
Labour government might reopen that. What do you think, Mike?
MP: Well, thats quite a long time down the road, isnt it? Of course, its possible.
And the one great advantage they have got back is that they can have the luxury
of opposition again. So they can say what they like and they can promise what
they like. And there are no consequences for it. Which is always what the Lib
Dems did. So the luxury of opposition has always worked for them. So, your point
is absolutely right. They would campaign one way in the north and one way in
the south, which would be almost diametrically opposite campaigns locally
depending on who they are up against. And when you are in opposition you can
sort of getaway with that. When you are in government, you break one big
promise. I have to say I am still amazed by that and somewhat encouraged that
one big promise broken on tuition fees has never been forgotten. Having said
that, there have been promises that have been broken by others that have
instantly been forgotten.

FS: In spite of my questioning of what narrative could possibly bring them back,
they werent completely annihilated at the council level, which suggests that
somewhere out there people are still willing to give them a shot. As long as you
still have a solid council base, you are not completely out of the game.
PA: Theres a second-tier politics going on in the UK at the local level, which no
one has looked at since Thursday night because they havent recovered from
what has happened at the macro level.
RC: The Tories have probably thought about positioning on that score. Its quite
hard to see suddenly everybody voting for the Tories in the council elections
next year because no government is ever popular at that stage.
PA: And every other party can blame the Tories for everything that has gone
wrong.
GS: To go back to the Lib Dem argument and whether they will come back, do
you not think they might struggle financially? They have lost a lot of cash in short
money and I have heard rumours that they are back to southern HQ.
PA: Thats a good point. It raises the question of how important do the big bucks
of fundraising turn out to be. Labour was making a lot of fuss about how well
they were doing in crowd-sourcing funding towards the end of the election. To
what extent was what happened down in Southampton about money?
FS: So what happened with us was not a function of money. Thanks entirely to
this particular candidates skill for fundraising. So that's not a particularly
instructive example because she was very, very good at funding her own
campaign. But I think one of the things if I were looking at how Labour did this
time around, there was a sense of constraint. The universe of the voters they
were trying to talk to shrank some of that was probably a technical decision
down to the now infamous 35% strategy that the Labour was trying to push. But
some of the shrinkage in the number of people they were trying to talk to
throw in a lot of volunteers at the dwindling number of voters was about the
fact that you need money to mount a really big field push. A good field push is
really a pricey business. I think one of the big questions if I were say one of the
big union funders of this party wanting to know what I got for my money over
the course of the last five years one of the questions Id ask was what were Ed
Milibands quarterly fundraising goals? Did he have any? And Ed Balls
fundraising goals, if he had any. If not, why not?
GS: They carved out that in stone, didn't they?
FS: Exactly! That was 30,000 pounds well spent. Whatever that was.
PA: Which actually bought them quite a lot votes.
FS: A single organisers salary for a year spent on this piece of granite.

PA: Is it fair to say that the Hilary campaign will not be investing in a large lump
of granite?
FS: I am pushing vigorously that they invest in a large number of granite stones.
RC: But thats the thing. Its a sign of how strange this election got. The received
wisdom two weeks ago, a week ago was that Labour had a better ground game,
that Labour had more support and Tories. Even the etched stone, there were
many people in our office who thought that was a brilliant idea because it was
obviously designed to be spoofed on social media thus putting its promises in the
sight of people who would normally not see Labour party promises.
PA: It didn't result in.. when no one looks at a manifesto, how do you make them
look at one? You carve it in a 30,000 pound piece of granite. Ill be honest, its the
only time I looked at the list of Labour pledges.
RC: Also, I looked at the metrics as part of our election coverage. I think we got
about 140,000 hits on the two pieces we did about the etched stone. Quite a lot of
that was because we developed the tools to turn it into a shopping list or rap
lyrics and just put it on Twitter. And many people found that funny.
PA: What are the lessons from Buzzfeeds election battle? This was a platform
that barely existed five years ago, so it clearly was trying something new with
new kind of resources.
RC: To be honest, the dirty secret is that quite a lot of our work was quite
traditional. We didn't do the commodities work that others were doing but we
went down to candidates, we went down to seats, we talked to all the candidates,
we were the one who predicted that Nigel Farage wouldn't win in South Thanet.
PA: So, you didn't that through conventional journalism?
RC: Yes. But we also had Miliband was one of our great discoveries. Half the
people were so convinced that there was a sort of conspiracy or Labour plot. But
it wasn't. It was genuinely teenage girls who thought Ed Miliband was quite hot.
Its been a really interesting election just seeing how, having a reminder that
people who talk to each other on Facebook and find funny don't actually reflect
what the nation thinks.
PA: I do wonder if we could have predicted this. If you were to watch the last five
episodes of Have I Got News for You, you would reach the same conclusion as the
election. Miliband was mocked a lot. Georgina, whats your takeaway on the
hybrid media a mixture of traditional media and some of the more interesting
internet stuff.
GS: We were in quite a unique position because weve got the Sun as well, so we
were arble to draw in everything from our parliament team. We also had
columnists and contributors that provided us with some controversial content at
times. I don't know if you have seen the Katie Hopkins and migrants story And

thats where Ill leave that. And we were able to do a few Buzzfeed style stories.
So we were able to draw in from every avenue.
PA: Mike, the main Reuters fan base is financial services. I remember one of your
colleagues wrote a story that markets wouldn't care one way or another who
won the election. Is that true?
MP: This was relatively minor compared to Greece and everything else that
people are fixating on in the financial markets. If you take a long, long view of
Britain, it is stable, it has never defaulted quite, it got close to it in the 70s. People
expected that within a margin the main parties to be reasonably well run and
nothing too mad to be done. And thats basically what the international
investment community thinks. It would take quite a lot to rock that. Leaving the
EU would be enough, definitely. And Scotland, if it leaves, could be. But it would
require something of that sort of magnitude to really change the outside
worldview of Britain as a reasonably stable, well-run country that is not going to
pitched into a civil war or a coup.
PA: Ill open the floor to questions, now. Jennifer Brindisi, you were on a PS21
panel two weeks ago on what this election would mean for foreign policy. What
are your thoughts now that the election is over?
JB: I was speaking to someone who is in the Labour party. And one point they
made that I think is interesting is that there was this grouped view for so long on
the left that Ed Miliband was doing gradually better and better without taking
into the broader perspective that while he might be doing incrementally better,
benchmarked against what you would normally expect from a politician, he was
still woefully off the mark. And I think coming back to another point on foreign
policy, the intervention in Chatham House, he was very statesman like. He does
have a far better presence in person than he does on television. But it just wasn't
enough. And it always comes down to that James Carville quote Its the economy,
stupid. And if you have a prime minister who looks the part and who isnt being
mocked every single day for a variety of tasks from eating a sandwich to really
unhelpful interventions in the business world then it comes back to a prime
minister that quite frankly was his to lose from the beginning. And the Labour
strategy was really buggered from about 2010.
PA: Despite the media narrative that Eds doing better, it sounds like on street he
was doing worse, wasn't he Frank, in the last few days.
FS: Yes. I think that point about his seeming to do better and first of all, let me
just say that the media has to talk about something. At some point, having even a
little bit of edge doing better is at least a narrative as opposed to saying the guy
we have been saying is terrible for the last two years turns out is actually terrible
again today. I mean, theres not much of a story to tell.
RC: I remember Ed doing a little better. His personal ratings on leadership went
up by about 30 points within a month. The problem was they were going up from
a record low.

PA: I think the same day you ran a piece which was pictures of Ed Miliband with
Alan Partridge quotes.
RC: Also, on the Which Politician would you Like to Bang quiz, I think Ed did
quite a lot better, although Clegg did best of all.
FS: To be fair, his uptick in performance, that was a real thing. But it is also this
theory this is the third election I have been tracking: Scotland, the US midterm and this one in a way, two or three weeks before the election, there has
been a peak for the opposition party before it turns to the incumbent. So this is a
theory I have been working on is that this is the electorate sort of throwing a
strop in the polls and letting the sitting party know, we could turf you out if we
chose to. And that may be whats happened here.
PA: To an extent, this is what the councilmen in UKIP have found: we don't want
Farage but we don't like the established order.
MP: Exactly. And that I think may be the biggest question of all: Has UKIP formed
a base from which to build on? And actually, it may not be all about Farage. They
would have to find someone more compelling which is not obvious at the
moment. But the cult of Nigel doesn't do them any favours in the long run if they
are going to be a long-term party. I don't know the answer to that.
John Raines, IHS: I think its interesting that we have talked so much about the
decimation of the Lib Dems and the Labour, but very little about the success
strategy of the Conservatives. Granted that in some respects, the economy is
doing relatively well, there is a weak opposition and the issue of Scotland. But if
you had a list or a masterstroke of the Conservatives during this campaign, what
would say it would be?
FS: If you have seen any of the reports that have come out of Battleground
polling that were released this morning, it wasn't about a single masterstroke
but they were incredibly disciplined, they knew what they were there to say,
they said it constantly. And so in some of the after discussions that asked people
what they did, you know, what do the Conservatives stand for? And they said,
improving the economy. And they asked what do the Labour stand for? And
nothing. So there you have it. They knew what they were there to sell and they
sold it consistently and well.
PA: Rob, do you think the Conservatives had a successful strategy or did they just
get lucky?
RC: They had a very successful strategy. They had a guy who was absolutely
unafraid to run a boring, brutal campaign and they had a guy who was very, very
good at finding the data, which actually supported that. We found that they did
weird polls in weird places and those were the polls that told them what was
going on. On the UKIP point, one really interesting thing about Farage is that he
has probably single-handedly kept Britain in the EU, I would argue. Because as

long as the euro-sceptics is associated with the slightly crazy, shrieky people as
opposed to the more plausible mainstream figurehead, then UKIPs popularity
rises as the popularity of leaving the EU falls. And you can absolutely see that.
PA: So it would probably be better off with a Reckless or Carswell rather than
Farage?
RC: I love Douglas Daily and I don't think the other two are quite convincing.
PA: In that case, the question is who have they got? The post-election UKIP
looking at everyone who isnt Nigel Farage and then going on balance Nigel
Farage.
RC: UKIP as a party whose goal is to leave the EU, I think they sort of sacrificed
that to become a political force.
PA: Theres also a lot we don't know. We don't really know to what extent the
taking out of Lib Dems by doing the tuition fees thing was a deliberate Tory
strategy versus a bit of kind of passing luck. We don't know really at this stage
how much the parties were expecting what happened on Thursday night. But it
sounds like the Tories certainly had some polls telling them sounds like. If they
were reading Franks emails, it sounds like the Labour party was putting a brave
face on it in the last few days. What are your big unknowns? What would like to
know about the last five years that you don't that would make more sense to
you?
FS: First, the party I believe, Labour was very confident of victory up until the
exit poll.
PA: So they had the information that they were disregarding?
FS: Also, the information, the way the party gathers information either in polls
which many of them have shown were off or their own field operations doesn't
process this information well. I think they were confident of their numbers until
the moment it became clear that they were absolutely wrong. The unknowns for
he last five years The big question that came to me is where did all these
people come from? We built a lot of effects-based models for our field
projections you know, if we do X amount of fieldwork, what are we likely to
turnout. And we actually turned out the number of voters we had projected
would be enough to win it. And then there 3,000 more Tory voters that appeared
out of nowhere. Who were these people? And this why it reminds of the 2004
elections in the US. Because suddenly there are more of them then there are of
you. And I think these are people that had essentially opted out of the process
and were silent through the process and opted back in at the last second.
FS: A friend of mine was in Scotland, he was a candidate there. He said, basically,
we did a whole bunch of canvassing and we couldn't get anybody under the age
of 45 to come vote for us. We got over 45s, who had landlines and who answered
the doors. The under 45s didn't have landlines and they had mobiles, which we
werent able to get through. But the SNP did. He said the SNP had a very good

Facebook operation and he knew he lost his seat roughly around 9 o clock in the
evening because roughly around 8pm, there was a notice on the SNP page saying
everyone has to come out and vote now. And in half hour they saw a significant
upsurge in people walking through the door. And thats when he knew he lost.
The Tories were spending hundreds of thousands of pounds on Facebook. I am
very old, so I don't have any idea what that means but here are these voters.
Where did they come from?
PA: Georgina, whats your feeling? We seem to have come up with the idea that
social media wasn't important in this election. But may be in some places it was.
GS: I would definitely say thats the case based on my own personal experience
and my own Facebook page. I was quite surprised that how left-wing a lot of
people where. In terms of where these people come from, if they are being faced
with that on Twitter and Facebook, you don't necessarily feel comfortable
coming out as a Tory and saying this is how I am going to vote. Because people
are very definite in their views on the Tories and you might not want to face that
backlash.
MP: That certainly happened last year in Scotland. There were a lot of people
saying they don't care or didn't say how they would vote because they were
aggressively pushed on the other side.
PA: Whats your take, Rob? Did social media matter in this election? The question
really is who these voters are: Are they young people on Facebook or are they
people who are in their 30s and 40s and not answering their phones.
RC: I think social media obviously matters because that is where people are
having their conversations. But one of things people havent caught up with is...
when we say social media, we think Twitter and Facebook. But thats not it.
Theres Instagram, SnapChat and WhatsApp there were all these myriad
conversations going on that are kind of out of the view of the traditional media.
There was a broad consensus across the three main parties that Twitter was a
good way to get your supporters.
PA: Tim, you are talking about social media next week. What are your broad
views on this?
Tim: Very briefly, social media was probably a distraction. I don't think it
reflected what people believed or voted. For me the most interesting fact was
we are not really looking at polls now because they all got it wrong. But Ashcroft
did a poll after the elections and the figure that flew out for me was that
Conservative voters, 49% did not like what the Conservatives were promising.
But 75% of them believed in the morals and values of their party and they
believed in their leader. And with Labour, 66% believed in what was being
offered which surprised me but they didn't believe in Ed.
RC: Its like 2005 people really liked the idea of lower taxes, limiting
immigrants, more prisons you know, they liked all those things. And then you

wrap them all in a really big bow and go Michael Howards is the guy who is going
to give you this, and they go Oh, no.
PA: Do we think Dave could have carried it in 2005?
RC: Well, no. You need 2005 to get to the position where Tories are right now.
But all of Ed Milibands individual policies were popular and that actually
spooked Tories quite a bit. But then when you put them altogether and you add
Milibands face, it suddenly adds up to a thing which I imagine in Southampton
was quite hard to sell.
PA: Does it matter now that Boris is kind of bumbling around in that space as
well?
MP: Hes going to have to play the long game now, doesn't it? I don't think it does
matter. Hes probably just about OK for now. But the longer you stay, the more
stale you become.