The election gurus ruined campaign, says sacked aide
THERESA May never wanted to run a presidential-style campaign, one of her closest allies revealed last night.
Nick Timothy, who quit as the Prime Minister’s joint chief of staff after last week’s election setback, pinned the blame for the controversial approach on ‘campaign consultants’ – thought to be a reference to Sir Lynton Crosby and other well-paid advisers.
He said the PM was ‘never comfortable hogging the limelight’.
Mr Timothy said election ‘gurus’ brought in to advise the Tories also appeared to miss the Labour surge that cost Mrs May her majority. He said Sir Lynton told him on polling day that the Tories were on course to ‘do well’ with a majority of more than 60. Jim Messina, an American campaign expert brought in after advising Barack Obama, privately predicted a majority of 92.
‘Nobody inside CCHQ was prepared for election night’s 10pm exit poll,’ Mr Timothy said.
The early stages of the Tory campaign focused almost entirely on Mrs May, with the word ‘Conservative’ all but absent from campaign literature, and other ministers banished to the sidelines.
Describing the campaign as a failure, Mr Timothy wrote in the Spectator: ‘Before it began, we envisaged a return to traditional campaigning methods, with daily press conferences to scrutinise Labour and promote our policies. Theresa, never comfortable hogging the limelight, expected to make more use of her ministerial team.
‘On the advice of the campaign consultants, and following opinion research that showed Theresa to be far more popular than the party or her colleagues, we eschewed our instincts. We were wrong to do so.’
Sir Lynton declined to comment last night but he is known to have been frustrated by Mrs May’s failure to appoint a single campaign chief at the start, resulting in a muddled strategy.
Mr Timothy was blamed for devising the Tories’ controversial social care shake-up that derailed Mrs May’s election campaign. The plan, which critics dubbed the ‘dementia tax’, was aban- doned by Mrs May just four days after the manifesto launch, following a backlash from voters and MPs.
Mr Timothy defended the policy, saying the country needed an ‘honest’ discussion on how to pay for an ageing population. ‘We can ask older people to meet the costs, subject to certain protections, from the wealth they have accrued, or we can tax younger generations even more,’ he said. ‘Somehow we have reached a point where older people with assets expect younger, poorer people to pay for their care. That is not sustainable; neither is it socially just.’
He also defended the wider manifesto, which was criticised for containing too many tough policies, such as scrapping free school dinners for some infants and ending the triple lock on pensions.
Critics claim it struggled to compete with Labour’s spendthrift giveaways.
Mr Timothy said: ‘The manifesto was later written off as “the worst in history”. One of the criticisms is that, instead of offering voters giveaways and bribes, we spelt out where cuts would fall.
‘While I accept that the manifesto might have been too ambitious, I worry that the implication of this argument is that politicians should not be straight with the electorate.’