Everything in Moderation
But what you have got to understand is that it was all done on purpose. He meant to be dull, you see. The cheesy rhetoric showed that he was too busy running the country to be bothered with crafting good phrases. His shopping list of cheap populist promises was not a worrying revelation that there is nothing there, it was a clever move to dish David Cameron. His lack of a single funny joke was designed to emphasise his seriousness. It was rubbish, but, hey, wasn’t it fantastic?
It’s remarkable how such an eccentric theory has taken hold in the media, but it has. I just keep reminding myself that moods pass. Noel Gallagher’s visit to Downing Street was hailed as a masterstroke, Cool Britannia was regarded as a vote winner and it was believed to be miraculous that Mr Cameron could ride a bicycle.
So I dedicate this column to two assertions. That rubbish is rubbish is rubbish. And that Gordon Brown can call a snap election if he likes, but he might not win it.
As Mr Brown spoke, I realised I was listening to something vaguely familiar. And then suddenly it came to me. He was repeating the standard Tory platform speech from the 2005 election, right down to the pledge to clean hospital wards.
The pitch was exactly the same. In place of the tricksy Tony Blair, let’s put in a hard man who can get the job done, someone who acts rather than emotes. And with the hard man comes a series of hard pledges all about foreigners and guns and drugs and things. These promises come straight out of focus groups. You make liberal use of the two phrases that get applauded at both party conferences – ‘matron’ and ‘cancelling contracts’. The very words of Middle Britain. How can you lose?
Here’s how.
Once upon a time Coca-Cola believed it was onto a winner. In focus-group tests, consumers said they preferred Pepsi. So you make Coke taste more like Pepsi. New Coke was born. And it was a fiasco. In his book Blink, Malcolm Gladwell explains why – consumers preferred Pepsi when they were asked to compare a sip of that drink with a sip of Coke. But when they drank a whole glass? Coke came out on top. Individual policies on immigration and hospital wards pass the sip test, but voters may not want a whole glass of fizzy populism.
Look at it another way. Politicians often wonder why people don’t vote. This is the wrong question. The real puzzler is why on earth anybody bothers voting at all. If you multiply the chance of influencing the outcome by the difference that a change of government might make to your life, you might calculate that the benefit to you is so small that it is not enough to risk, say, the probability that on the way to vote a caravan full of violins falls on your head, having been pushed off a third-floor council house balcony by a drunk dentist.
If a rational view of personal interest cannot explain people’s voting behaviour, what can? That they vote to make a statement about themselves. As the identification of party with class has declined, for instance, so has voting. By supporting a party, voters are declaring what sort of person they are. They want to be able to say that this is something they did for the country and they want their party label to declare that they are a good person, who does the right thing for the country.
A string of policy pronouncements may chime with individual preoccupations without satisfying even those who agree with them. Mr Brown could easily find in an election campaign that his message doesn’t work as well as the focus groups seemed to promise.
It might reasonably be objected that Mr Brown may not have crafted the perfect message but that doesn’t matter because he’s fighting the Tories and they are in a mess. Quite right. Except that it is not only the Tories he is fighting – it’s also the Government’s record.
The public have not made up their mind about Mr Brown. They are reasonably impressed with his handling of the various problems in the summer and reassured that he appears to be moderate and a human being. But they are very sceptical of New Labour politicians bearing gifts.
He says he is going to jail for five years those who illegally carry a gun. Where? He says contract cleaners will be sacked if they don’t meet cleanliness standards. Aren’t they now? He says he’s going to toughen up border controls. Yeah, right.
Mr Brown has excited expectations of change, but he cannot meet them merely by talking. He has to demonstrate change. And if he goes to the country now, he won’t have done. That’s why his poll lead is not stable. How long since he was last on even terms with the Tories? Er, a couple of weeks back, wasn’t it?
Of course, the Tories present a tempting target. It’s very hard to see them winning a majority in the autumn. But is it so hard to see them depriving Labour of its majority? There are serious contradictions in the Tory strategy. Perhaps even insoluble ones. A quick dash to the polls might allow Mr Cameron to go to the country without even trying to resolve them. Anyone who can’t conceive of Mr Cameron appealing to undecided voters in a burst of television exposure is demonstrating a failure of imagination.
An autumn election? It is not hard to see Gordon Brown calling it in haste and repenting at leisure.
Curse of the Premier of the Month
After Gordon Brown’s supposedly glorious summer the reality dawns that he was never much good even then
19 December 2007
Congratulations, James Gordon Brown. For you were the Barclays Manager of the Month for September. I’m just sorry, as you opened the champagne, that no one reminded you of something every football fan knows. The Barclays Manager of the Month trophy comes with a curse.
I want to introduce you to some statistical work on the fortunes of Premier League gaffers. You see, I think it can help us answer a puzzling political question.
Back in the summer the media portrayed Mr Brown as a political demigod. Now he is written about as someone who would be lucky to win third prize in the East of England tiddlywinks competition. The standard narrative is that he changed. He started brilliantly, but when he called off the election, he lost his way. But is that really right? Perhaps the standard narrative is just a way for the media to get itself off the hook. Perhaps the truth is simply that the summer’s reporting was hyperbolic nonsense.
And this matters. It matters because of the light it sheds on the coverage of politics and the light it sheds on what is really going wrong for Gordon Brown.
But first – the football. Every month, one Premier League manager is honoured for his team’s performance. And most fans do not regard this as a blessing. They note that no sooner has the boss of their team been photographed with the trophy and a sheepish grin, than their side begins to lose. The curse of Barclays Manager of the Month strikes.
Now I am not a big one for curses normally, but this one? There’s something in it. Here’s how it works. The boss who wins the award does so because his team did better than anyone expected that month. This might indeed have been because his team had genuinely improved. However, that’s not usually the reason for the run of good results. The reason is that victories and defeats come in clusters.
A team that have the ability to win 50 per cent of their games will not ordinarily do so by winning and losing alternate fixtures. They will win a few, lose a few, perhaps have a draw in the middle somewhere. And guess what happens to you if a cluster of victories happens to coincide with a calendar month? Come on down, manager of the month. The problem is that a cluster of defeats is quite likely to be on the way to even things out.
The whole idea of a manager of the month, in other words, is ridiculous. A few weeks is far too short a time to judge whether real improvement has taken place. And handing out a trophy for a cluster of victories shows a touching faith in the ability of people to change.
Forgive me switching sports for a moment. Over in America the baseball manager Billy Beane has built a successful team upon a recognition that players don’t change. In Moneyball, his bestselling book on Beane, the journalist Michael Lewis records how most baseball managers ignore the flaws of promising youths because they think these flaws can be eliminated. Beane picks them knowing that he will have to live with their flaws. Players don’t change.
The coverage of Mr Brown this summer made both these errors. It assumed, as the Barclays Manager of the Month does, that a cluster of victories is the same as a real improvement. And it demonstrated a touching, but misplaced, faith that politicians can simply change who they are and eliminate their flaws.
The result was a ridiculous overestimate of some fairly prosaic acts by the incoming Prime Minister. Did he deal with the terrorist attacks brilliantly? Not really. He didn’t have all that much to do. Was his handling of the floods a triumph? Hardly. The Audit Commission has been damning about the inconsistent, badly targeted government assistance. Foot-and-mouth? I think it has to be a ‘no’ on that one too. And coming back from holiday early was a good stunt but maybe even that wasn’t smart. The man has looked exhausted ever since.
And now, in an attempt to make the narrative work, the summer’s political genius has become winter’s dunce. Nothing can go right for this comic character. Vince Cable captured this point and made people laugh when he said that the Prime Minister had within a few weeks turned from Stalin into Mr Bean. Witty. But honestly, how likely is it?
Gordon Brown has been a consistent character – his virtues and his defects. His brooding intelligence, his inability to make a decision, his relentless drive, his attachment to a closed clique. These things weren’t going to change. He wasn’t a new man in the summer and he isn’t a dolt now.
Isn’t this all just history? Not quite. The standard narrative rather underestimates the troubles facing Mr Brown. It describes his difficulties as a few extraordinary incidents hitting him in quick succession. That’s something he can turn round once he catches his breath. But understand his difficulty as an underlying problem that existed in the summer and you see the hole that he is in.
People have turned against the Government not because of a few bad media stories, but because people wanted change, felt Mr Brown might bring change and now feel that he won’t. It is the long-standing disaffection with New Labour he is really suffering from.
What does this analysis tell us about the coverage of politics? That we are too inclined to ignore long-term trends because we are busy covering immediate incidents. That we are carried away with the idea that people change, merely because change makes a good story. That we often record the noise rather than the signal.
We are too inclined to believe that a week is a long time in politics. It isn’t – any more than a month is a long time in football management.
Some sage advice: ignore the results
It’s opinion polls, not local elections, that count. And where’s the fun in knowing that?
30 April 2008
Forty per cent of British women who go on a holiday to Spain have sex with a stranger within the first five hours of their arrival. Believe this? Then you are ready to follow this week’s local election results.
Nearly one quarter of young drug users have smoked cannabis together with their parents. Convinced? Then you are missing your vocation. A job awaits you as a political reporter.
The cod survey is ubiquitous. Britain’s favourite flavour of yoghurt as determined by 132 respondents on the Yoghurt Council website; the ten top musical acts of the last millennium (winner Robbie Williams, runner-up Mozart) as nominated by listeners to LBC; the news that 38 per cent of people prefer their vacuum cleaner to their spouse (according to a survey of vacuum cleaner retailers).
Most of these start their life on the PC of a hopeful PR executive and end it in the news-in-brief column of a free-circulation newspaper. But imagine if a cod survey were to dominate political debate for a week, become the lead item on the news, create a massive storm that swirls around the feet of the Prime Minister. Well, imagine no longer because that is precisely what is about to happen.
At the end of this week, millions of voters will go to the polls and elect thousands of local government representatives. And the results will matter to those who live in the areas involved. But they will also be reported as providing a useful guide to the state of national opinion, a verdict on the Prime Minister and a glimpse of the result of the next general election. Such reporting is a preposterous error.
Ask a politician to respond to an opinion poll finding and chances are you will get back this cliché: ‘I don’t believe in polls, I believe in real votes in real ballot boxes.’ Michael Heseltine even gave this answer once when he was asked about the views of Polish people. Journalists pretend to be cynical when they hear this cliché. But really it represents our view too. Surely real voters going out to cast their ballot in proper elections are giving us a clearer view of the political picture than opinion polls?
No, they aren’t.
Let me start with the question. Any pollster will tell you that tiny changes in wording can make a big difference to the outcome of a survey. If, for instance, you remind people that the Liberal Democrats exist before asking about voting intention, the number who say they are Liberal Democrats increases.
But here we are not talking about tiny differences. We’re talking about trying to find out who you want to be prime minister by asking who you want, say, to be mayor of london. It is hardly surprising if this does not prove very enlightening.
Next, there is the nature of the sample. This week’s local elections do not take place in every part of the country, so one can only guess at what might have happened in the places that are not going to the polls. But there is an even more serious problem with the sample – it is a self-selecting group of enthusiasts.
The surveys that I mentioned at the beginning of this article – the holiday sex poll and the cannabis poll – were real examples. They came from magazines that asked their readers to write in with their drug and holiday experiences. Naturally, respondents were people happy to share details of their love life and drug use and sufficiently motivated to put pen to paper. Not exactly representative.
Those who vote in local elections are a similar bunch. Not sex addicts and drug users, but unusually enthusiastic about their own peculiar vice – picking their local councillor. Angry protesters and political junkies form a much bigger proportion of the local vote than they do in a general election. The sample in local elections seems so much better than that provided by pollsters, because it is so much larger. But unfortunately it isn’t properly balanced.
And finally – a minor point this, but worth noting – there is the fact that not every seat is contested by every party. Quite often voters will go to the polls to find that there is no Labour candidate, say.
None of these is merely a theoretical point. The proportions of votes cast in local elections and those cast in general elections are wildly different. But there are analysts who will play with the figures and claim they can tell you what it all means. They will dominate the coverage next weekend and the Prime Minister’s future may depend on what they had to say.
For them I have two questions. The first is – how? How can you really adjust properly for the different questions voters were asked and for the unrepresentative enthusiasm of the sample?
The other question is – why? Why would you bother? Who would construct a poll by, to start with, asking millions of people in only some parts of the country to go down to their local school if they want to and opine on an entirely different matter; and then, reverse-engineer the results?
Surely you would just ask 1,000 or so voters in a representative sample what their general election voting intention is? You would use a poll, with all its imperfections.
But that would mean admitting that anything we will find out on Thursday, we already know more accurately now. And where’s the fun in that?
Everyone agrees he’s got to go. So why hasn’t he?
Bobby Kennedy and the Brazilian football team explain why toppling Gordon Brown is only a possibility, not a certainty
By 2009 the frenzy over Gordon Brown fighting an election as a genius had turned into a frenzy about him being deposed. A challenger was expected at any moment, but I was dubious. This article appeared the day before Labour did disastrously in the European elections, a fiasco that was widely anticipated.
3 June 2009
John F. Kennedy, always the cooler, more considered of the Kennedys, watched his brother Robert dive off a sailboat into frigid waters off the coast of Maine, laughed and shook his head. He remarked to his close aide Ted Sorensen: ‘Well, that either showed a lot of guts or no sense at all, depending how you look at it.’
Sorensen recalled these words when he found himself riding in Robert Kennedy’s campaign plane, supporting a presidential bid that most of the old JFK team, including him, believed was doomed. Bobby Kennedy’s 1968 campaign, taking on a sitting president in his own party, either showed guts or no sense at all. It depended how you looked at it.
Robert Kennedy hated President Johnson. ‘He’s mean, bitter, a vicious animal in many ways,’ Kennedy complained. His young advisers thought LBJ was sure to lose in the end in 1968 whatever Bobby did. And if LBJ lost, and Kennedy stayed out of the race, then Kennedy would go down with him. It would be ‘eclipse – irretrievable’, his trusted aide Adam Walinsky warned him. Yet still, Kennedy had hesitated before running.
There were good political reasons for this hesitation. In his compelling book on Kennedy’s 1968 effort, The Last Campaign, Thurston Clarke explains how the more seasoned ‘honorary Kennedys’, JFK’s extended family of advisers, joined forces with the Democratic establishment to urge RFK to stay out. He couldn’t win the nomination, they said. He’d just spoil it for Johnson. And in the background there was always the possibility, the nagging thought, that it could all end in tragedy. As it did. Friday marks the doleful anniversary of Bobby’s assassination.
So why did Kennedy do it? Why did he take the plunge? What turned his confident public statements that he would not run into a decision to go for it? In one word – Vietnam.
Kennedy could not support Johnson through the campaign as a war that he hated continued to escalate. Political considerations could be balanced. This couldn’t. He could not stay silent; he had to make the case. And when he had finally decided to take the plunge he told friends: ‘I don’t know what is going to happen, but at least I’m at peace with myself.’ Clarke believes that, in the end, Kennedy felt morally compelled to stand.
The decision Kennedy agonised over – to challenge for the crown, or not to – must surely be in the minds of some of Gordon Brown’s Cabinet today. Those that are left, that is.
Surely they can see what the rest of us can see. That Labour led by Mr Brown is doomed to terrible, catastrophic defeat. That no one, no one, could lead Labour to a worse defeat than he. That waiting it out for another year does not bring dignified defeat for a united government.
What could possibly be stopping them, then? Why is the departure of Gordon Brown as Labour leader still only a possibility and not a certainty?
The first reason is what one might call the Bobby Kennedy reason. Mr Brown’s critics do not have a Vietnam War to compel them to act. They only have the hedged-about political considerations that led RFK to hesitate. If cabinet ministers were to call for Mr Brown to go, what would they cite as the reason? Merely that Mr Brown would lead Labour to defeat? That may be of interest to the Labour Party, but hardly to the rest of us. It certainly doesn’t constitute a moral case for action.
When Michael Heseltine stood against Margaret Thatcher, he offered a clear change of direction. So did John Redwood when he challenged John Major. Both felt that they could no longer stand aside, that they needed to make their case. They believed that their moment had come. Is there anyone in the Cabinet of whom that is true now? Upon what grounds?
If Mr Brown survives, there is something else he can thank – the fact that there is a market failure in the market for political coups.
It is tempting to use social psychology to analyse the behaviour of the Labour Cabinet. One could suggest that they are adhering to a social norm, going along with the group. Just as hundreds of followers of the Reverend Jim Jones drank poison just to fit in, so cabinet ministers are keeping quiet as they all commit suicide together.
But this description doesn’t quite fit. Because, unlike Jones’s followers, most individual cabinet ministers are only too aware of what is going on. And they don’t want to die.
So economics provides a better way of understanding why they still might not act. A market failure can exist where it is impossible for people to gain the full benefit of the costs that they incur by acting. And this may yet save Mr Brown.
The benefit of Brown’s demise – increased support for Labour – is shared among most members of the Labour Party. The cost – the risk of sticking your head above the parapet and then finding no one else has joined you – is concentrated on the person doing the head-sticking. It could be in everyone’s interest for Mr Brown to go, but still in no one person’s interest to start the movement against him. Naturally someone could decide to move, heedless of this calculation. But market failure explains why such an obviously sensible thing for Labour to do might yet remain undone.
There is a final reason. Let’s call it the World Cup reason. Brazil were the best team in the last football World Cup. In any game they played, they were favourites. Yet it still remained unlikely they would win the whole tournament. And they didn’t. The reason is simple statistics. A string of things, each of which are probable, taken together become improbable. It was very likely that Brazil would win any one individual match, but unlikely they would win them all.
It is very probable that Labour will achieve such a bad result tomorrow that the party will be jolted. It is very probable that in the next week one or more Labour MPs may announce that it is time for Mr Brown to go. It is very probable that Mr Brown could be forced out if there were a revolt. But for all three things to happen? That’s a great deal less probable.
It is hard to believe, isn’t it, that Gordon Brown can carry on like this. It’s extraordinary to think he might. But, really, he can. He shouldn’t do, he might not, but he can.
Keep plugging away. The brand is a winner
Tories think that the job of changing their party’s image is complete. It isn’t – and complacency could be fatal
This appeared as the 2010 election campaign was under way and responded to a feeling that the Tory campaign was underpowered and inconsistent. It picks up again on the issue of brand and deepens my analysis.