Everything in Moderation

Now here’s a spiffing idea …

The Man in Westminster doesn’t know best; that’s why it’s daft of politicians to attack focus groups

During the 2005 election for a Tory leader (which David Cameron eventually won) much of the discussion was about why the party lost in the general election that had just happened, and how to win again. As a way of emphasising their own authenticity, some candidates and commentators attacked the use of focus groups.

7 September 2005

I’ve come up with a really great idea, one that is bound to help revive the fortunes of the Conservative Party. Hear me out. I bet you’ll think it’s really spiffing.

The Tories should cancel all the professional assistance they have been receiving that helps them to discover what voters think. Instead they should simply guess.

Of course, I don’t expect them to do this entirely unaided. They will be allowed to make full use of some randomly selected comments made to me on the doorstep during the 2001 election campaign, if I can remember them correctly. And I’ll try and dig out some old correspondence, too, if anyone thinks it may come in handy.

Naturally, this will be a little hit and miss. Not to worry. It doesn’t matter what voters think anyway. The party should just trust its instincts, rather than mess around trying to divine the views of the electorate.

What do you think? That ought to do the trick, I reckon.

My idea may strike you as, ahem, a little eccentric. Yet amazingly enough it has become a widespread view in the Tory party. So widespread, indeed, that I feel it necessary to point out that I was being satirical.

Attacking focus-group polling, the assembling of small groups of voters who are interviewed in detail about their opinions, has become a standard piece of rhetoric in the debate on the future of the Tory party. David Davis talks of ‘hocus-pocus focus groups’ and tried to cancel them when he was party chairman. ‘I bring to politics a rejection of focus groups and opinion polls,’ says Ken Clarke. Norman Lamont agrees. Lord Saatchi regrets not being firm in his opposition to focus-group polling. Simon Heffer congratulates them all. Matthew Parris thinks the critics are on the right track. The attack wins applause at constituency suppers and nods of approval at the 1922 Committee.

With so much agreement, it’s a shame it’s a load of nonsense, isn’t it? I’m sorry to sound intemperate. Ever since I worked for some years as a Tory party official, I’ve sat through so many attacks on focus groups. And I’ve been so polite, haven’t said a word, let it all wash over me. Then last week, I just snapped.

Funnily enough, the remark that did it for me didn’t come from a Tory at all. It came from Jon Cruddas, who until pretty recently was a senior adviser to Tony Blair. He urged the Prime Minister to free himself from the ‘dead hand of Middle England’ (top piece of electoral advice, that) and blamed Mr Blair’s shortcomings on his consultation of focus groups.

So here is this man Cruddas, who only enjoyed a position of power because his boss had the perspicacity to understand the need to move the Labour Party towards the centre and the intelligence to use professional polling to help to do it, and even he is attacking focus groups. Time, I decided, to stop letting it wash over me.

Now, it has to be admitted that focus groups can often be comically ill-informed. Attempts to investigate reactions to Michael Howard being Jewish ran aground when a group in Nottingham was asked to name any Jews in public life. A long silence ensued, only broken when one man offered ‘Whoopi Goldberg’ as an answer.

After Gordon Brown announced huge increases in spending on the NHS, I was keen to know the public reaction to the days of headlines that his new policy had attracted. Our pollsters reported back to me that not a single person in eight groups had heard of there being any announcement on anything.

Even when the groups do have views it can be dangerous to follow them. The Government’s policy on soft drugs, for instance, is uncannily similar to the view that a focus group will give – the policing of soft-drug use should be relaxed so that the sale of hard drugs can be combated more successfully. The initial announcement of the new policy was therefore guaranteed a fairly good reception.

Yet there is a difficulty. What if the policy doesn’t work? What if the focus groups are simply wrong, and soft-drug liberalisation leads to greater hard-drug use? The public won’t put its hand up and say: ‘It’s a fair cop, guv. We gave you bad advice.’ They will blame the politicians, and rightly so.

In fact, where focus groups that I helped to commission strayed into discussing detailed policy, the result was almost always incoherent. A polling report we were given on healthcare was headlined – THE NHS: IN A FOG.

Yet, anybody who mistakes a focus group for a meeting of Mensa or the AGM of a think tank is obviously an idiot anyway. That is not their point. What good professional polling does is to help politicians to understand what voters think, what different language means to them, what they care about and what they do and do not understand.

The Conservative Party’s problem has not been listening to too many focus groups, but not listening to them enough.

A good example is tax policy. The party has spent tens of thousands of pounds on focus groups that tell it that voters do not believe tax-cut promises. This is not an ideological point. It does not say whether voters want tax cuts, that is a different question. Nor whether tax cuts are right, that is yet another question. But it does indicate that the central message of successive Tory election campaigns has cut no ice with voters.

You’d think that one would want to know that. But apparently not. And that’s why the grumbling about focus groups matters so much. It’s why this is not a small argument about how to spend £100,000 of campaign funds.

The opponents of focus groups believe that they know what voters want without having to ask. They also believe that voters need to come to the Conservative Party rather than the Conservative Party moving towards the voters. They believe, they seriously believe, that the Tory party has been too responsive to the electorate.

I don’t think they are quite correct about that, do you?

Why a mobile phone on a beach sends out a stark message to Gordon Brown

Brown says: let’s make agricultural subsidies history. Where can we get the wristband?

This article appeared in Labour conference week after the speeches of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Mr Blair had fought his last election as leader. There was much speculation about when the latter would replace the former, which he did two years later.

28 September 2005

In the mid-1990s the American mobile phone business realised that it had a problem. It could get men to buy phones, but women just wouldn’t. Women thought mobiles were just boys’ toys.

Then AT&T began screening a commercial that sent sales through the roof. A mother gets ready to leave for work. The house is in chaos, the babysitter has plonked the kids in front of the television. The children start pestering their mother to take them to the beach. ‘I’ve got a meeting with a client,’ says the mother. Her youngest child replies with the line that made the ad famous. ‘When can I be a client?’

The commercial finishes with the mother sitting on the beach, the children running around her, playing happily. She is using her mobile to talk to the client. And throughout the entire commercial, the word ‘phone’ is never mentioned.

Ten years ago this advert was being used to sell phones. These days it is being used to sell a message about political communications. Dave Winston, former adviser to Newt Gingrich and now pollster for the Republican House and Senate campaigns, shows it to his candidates when explaining how he wants them to talk to voters.

He explains to them that they need to touch voters and not just talk at them. They need to make them feel an emotional affinity, a real need, for what the candidate has to offer. They need to appeal as AT&T did.

The traditional method of selling a phone was to talk about battery life, access charges, the reach of the network. It was all about mechanics, never touching on reasons, never touching on people’s (and particularly women’s) daily lives. The traditional pitch for a mobile phone was like … well, it was like a Gordon Brown speech.

On Monday the Chancellor battered his audience with a long list of statistics about finance facilities and percentages of GDP. At one point he offered us the catchy slogan: ‘Let us make agricultural export subsidies history.’ Where do we go to get the wristband?

Mr Brown’s conference address and his Sunday Times interview have been interpreted as closing the gap between the Chancellor and the Prime Minister. They did nothing of the kind. They simply demonstrated the size of the gulf that separates them.

This gulf is not essentially one of policy (although, of course, there are substantial differences). And it cannot be bridged by adopting the Blairite agenda, even if that is Mr Brown’s intention. However hard he looks, the Chancellor will not find the secret of Mr Blair’s appeal hidden in the conclusions of an NHS White Paper. And he will not become a Blairite by promising to implement a pilot scheme for an internal market in the provision of school textbooks.

The key to the Prime Minister’s success is to be found elsewhere – in his personality, in the way he mounts an argument and in his ability to communicate with Middle England. These the Chancellor simply cannot match.

Take Mr Brown’s decision, announced at the weekend, to commission a report on the Middle East so that he could drive the peace process. And whom did he appoint to write the document? That great expert on the Arab question, Ed Balls. Isn’t there anyone else he trusts other than Balls of Arabia? If Tony Blair had done the commissioning, he would have picked someone from far outside his personal circle – the Tory businessman Archie Norman, say. Brown lacks the trust and the confidence.

Then there is his ability to communicate. When designing the Republican House and Senate campaigns for particular pieces of legislation, Dave Winston uses something called ‘communications laddering’. A politician might start with the technical attributes of a policy (say cutting tax by 5 per cent) and then move to its technical benefits (you will have more money in your pocket). Winston wants them to go up the ladder identifying personal benefits that might appeal to the emotions (so, for instance, you might be able to buy music lessons for your children). Support the tax cut and be a better parent.

The classic example of the successful use of communications laddering is provided by the Republican campaign to win support for an increase in the defence budget. Winston was after the support of the group he termed ‘security moms’. Traditionally women have not backed higher military spending, so instead of talking about percentages of spend and the size of the armed forces, the Republicans concentrated on making families safer from attack.

Try applying Winston’s model to a typical Brown speech. The Chancellor spends most of the time right at the bottom of the ladder, talking about the technical attributes of his policy (‘£55 billion of debts written off for ever, the delivery of debt cancellation of 100 per cent’). Occasionally he travels up one rung and sets out a possible benefit of his programme (greater share ownership, to use an example from Monday’s speech) but he very rarely moves successfully from these rational components of a political message to the emotional ones. If ever he does, it is to touch the emotions of Labour activists rather than those of Middle England.

Mr Blair, by contrast, finds ascending the communications ladder simple. He brings his arguments back time after time to real people and their concerns – to the patient anxious for the results of a diagnostic test, the young family struggling to afford their first home, the disabled person needing help to get back into the workforce.

He makes real arguments too. For all that he has a formidable intellect, Mr Brown’s speech was simply relentless. That of Mr Blair was compelling.

The Brownites believe they can adopt the best bits of Mr Blair’s agenda and move on smoothly. They will find it isn’t as easy as that, nowhere near as easy. Mr Brown and his circle have never properly appreciated the political brilliance of Tony Blair. When he is gone they will. And they will miss it. Oh, how they will miss it.

Happy birthday! We like you

How a car salesman and an anti-war demonstration illustrate a strategy for modernising the Tories

At the 2005 Conservative conference David Cameron made a highly successful pitch for the leadership on a platform of modernisation. The favourite David Davis’s speech fell flat. This piece appeared after the conference but before the first leadership ballot of MPs.

12 October 2005

Joe Girard sold a lot of cars. A lot. For twelve years in a row he featured in The Guinness Book of World Records as the world’s greatest salesman. Let me tell you how he did it.

On birthdays and public holidays potential customers would receive a card from Mr Girard. They might get as many as twelve a year. ‘Happy Birthday’ the card would read, or ‘Happy Easter’, or whatever. And then followed the words: ‘I like you. From Joe Girard, Chrysler Montana.’ As Girard put it: ‘There’s nothing else on the card. Nothin’ but my name. I’m just telling ’em that I like ’em.’ And it works. People like to be liked.

Since I was first alerted to Mr Girard’s activities by the social psychologist Robert Cialdini, I have talked of them often to Conservative audiences. You see, I think the Tory party has spent a great deal of the past two decades sending out cards reading, ‘Happy birthday, we don’t like you.’ And, naturally, it doesn’t work.

I was thinking of Mr Girard again when I read the recent comments of the right-wing columnist Simon Heffer. He ridiculed the Tory modernisers for believing that the party lost elections because it was ‘insufficiently nice to homosexuals’. Well, yes Simon, you gorgeous meaty boy, the Tory party has lost votes by being insufficiently nice to homosexuals. But there’s worse news to come. You might be asked to be nice to some other people, too.

The reason? Because of a moderniser’s strategy for reviving the Conservative Party that they are calling ‘show, don’t tell’.

For the last week the leadership contender David Cameron has been urged by innumerable columnists to start putting ‘meat on the policy bones’. He is disinclined to oblige. He argues that the advice misses the point. And he is right.

The starting point for the alternative ‘show, don’t tell’ strategy is the poll-finding that featured prominently in the conference speech of party chairman Francis Maude – that those who agree with a particular policy are far less likely to assent to the proposition if they know that it is a Tory policy. The Conservative Party is damaging its own cause.

This means that the central job of a new Tory leader is to put the Conservative argument in a different way; to win trust and wider support for the policies of the Centre Right, not just to outline new schemes; to embody a new attitude, talk a new language, show that he is in touch with voter concerns; to be the change, not just to talk about it.

Just as the Thatcher revolution applied some basic economics to public policy, so modernisation involves accepting some basic social psychology.

The things for which Tory modernisers are most mocked – going around without a tie, drinking cappuccinos in Notting Hill, organising focus groups, recognising how Tony Blair has changed politics and being sufficiently nice to homosexuals – are not risible at all. Dressing like the rest of Britain, sounding like the rest of Britain, setting as policy priorities the things that voters care about most and relating better to upper-middle-class people in metropolitan areas are important.

Take dress. Few things have brought more ridicule down upon Tory modernisers than dressing differently. What a trivial thing to worry about. Yes? No. Dress matters.

As Cialdini states in his book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion: ‘We are more likely to help those who dress like us.’ He cites, for instance, an experiment conducted in the early 1970s when experimenters, dressed either as ‘straights’ or as ‘hippies’, approached students and asked them for some change for the telephone. The students were far more likely to help if the experimenter was dressed as they were. Similarly marchers in an anti-war demonstration were much more likely to sign a petition proffered by a person dressed like them. Indeed many of them signed without bothering to read it first.

Most of this isn’t rocket science. And I think that this is what bothers the critics. Sounding moderate, shaping your political programme around the priorities of the electorate, avoiding pointless attacks on harmless groups (why, for instance, do Tories go on about people studying golf-course management? What did greenkeepers do wrong?), eschewing silly partisan name-calling. It all seems too simple. The critics yearn for some huge ideological betrayal that they can then denounce. They are almost begging Mr Cameron to disappoint them with some policy sell-out that they can disagree with.

Yet a policy sell-out wouldn’t help. Of course it will be necessary to change Tory policy priorities and, in time, there will certainly need to be policy development in new areas. This is a critical part of demonstrating that the Conservative Party’s culture has changed. But the central insight of ‘show, don’t tell’ is that until the Conservative Party is once again listened to, liked and trusted, its policies, changed or not, will make no impact at all.

The Tory peer Lord Ashcroft had the pollster Populus track public recognition of Tory policies during the last campaign. Recognition that the Tories had been campaigning for a tax cut reached a peak of 3 per cent. Fewer still believed that they meant it.

This is the reason that David Davis’s conference failure was so devastating. He didn’t trip over the platform and bang his head on the lectern. He didn’t talk gibberish: he’s an intelligent man. It’s just that suddenly everyone could see that he can tell but he can’t show, that he can talk of change but he can never be the change.

There has been so much new policy during this leadership campaign. This candidate wants to restore advanced dividend tax credits, that candidate wants to lengthen the contract period for charitable provision of public services, a third candidate wants a new charities tax regime. But can you recall which candidate wanted which policy?

Exactly. Putting policy meat on the bones just isn’t the point. David Cameron should go on ignoring those who tell him that it is.

Top Tory tips: climb the ladder, check out the ceiling and see the cheese

How optimism trumps over pessimism in life and in politics

30 November 2005

This is what happened when John Lennon first met Yoko Ono. It was at an avant-garde art exhibition at the fashionable Indica Gallery in London. In the middle of the room, Yoko had placed a ladder, on the top of which lay a magnifying glass. This could be used to read some tiny letters written on the ceiling. So the Beatle duly ascended, picked up the magnifying glass and read the scribbled word. And all it said was this – ‘yes’.

It was that word that made Lennon stay. As he told countless interviewers in the coming years, if the scribbled word had said ‘no’, he wouldn’t have hung around.

Now, as a Beatles devotee, I’m perfectly well aware that in addition to being a genius, John Lennon was an idiot. And anything to do with the absurd Yoko Ono has me on my guard. Yet I watched a TV programme last week that made me wonder if Lennon wasn’t onto something after all.

David Davis and David Cameron were on Sky News, taking part in another debate (surely it must be over soon, somebody, please, please, do something) when an argument began over the new licensing legislation. This does not sound very promising, I agree, but, as it happens, the exchange turned out to be one of the most significant of the entire leadership election.

‘We have a situation where the centre of many cities and towns in this country are no-go areas for decent people,’ said Mr Davis, giving 8 o’clock as the curfew for decent people and arguing that the Government was making things worse. I have listened to Conservatives making Mr Davis’s point in roughly similar language countless times and thought nothing of it, so David Cameron’s reply took me by surprise. ‘We must not make everyone who wants to go out and have a drink on a Friday and Saturday night sound like a criminal,’ he said.

The moment I heard this I recognised the debate the two were having. An unresolved, half-buried Tory argument was rising to the surface. Should the Conservative Party paint the skies blue or should they paint them black?

Ponder for a moment which of the contenders was correct and it is obvious that they both are. Eight o’clock may be on the early side, but Mr Davis is right that many people avoid town centres at night because of the drunken, rowdy behaviour of others. And Mr Cameron is right that it is madness for the Conservative Party to regard every young person in town in the evening as indecent. Lots of people are just out to have a good time, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

It is precisely because both men are right that the strategic choice they each made is so fascinating. The same set of political facts can be expressed in two entirely different ways with a completely different emphasis.

In the very early days of opposition, after the devastating result of 1997, the Conservatives debated these alternatives openly, even giving the different options labels as a shorthand. The party could be pessimistic about all the great threats overhead (painting the sky black) or it could be optimistic about the possibilities for Britain (painting the sky blue).

But the debate never came to a conclusion. The ‘realities’ of opposition kicked in, taking over from the academic discussions. Without fully realising the choice it was making, the Tory party began to paint the skies black, became the pessimistic party.