We didn’t shoot ourselves in the foot... it was a shot to the head
ANDREW PIERCE reveals the story behind the Tories’ catastrophic campaign
THERESA May faced brutal recriminations from Tory ministers and MPs last night over her election fiasco.
The party’s campaign was branded ‘a complete pig’s ear’ by one MP. Another said: ‘We didn’t shoot ourselves in the foot, we shot ourselves in the head.’
They demanded Mrs May’s senior advisers be ‘taken out and shot’ as the price for her remaining in No 10.
Fury was also directed at the Prime Minister’s joint chiefs of staff Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill, who were blamed for bouncing her into the snap election and overseeing the disastrous campaign tactics and manifesto.
Mrs May yesterday appeared to hint they could face the chop. Announcing her senior ministers would stay in place, she added: ‘Other personnel issues are for other days.’
Asked if Mr Timothy and Miss Hill should be fired - former minister Anna Soubry told Channel 4 News: ‘Yes.’
Mrs May also faces a showdown over the issue at a meeting of the 1922 Committee of backbenchers next week.
Furious MPs attacked the social care policy – dubbed a ‘dementia tax’ – which was toxic on the doorsteps.
Former minister Rob Wilson, who lost his Reading East seat, said that the manifesto ‘put an Exocet through the heart of our main supporters – older people’.
Ribble Valley MP Nigel Evans said: ‘We didn’t shoot ourselves in the foot, we shot ourselves in the head.’ He added: ‘The campaign was going swimmingly well until we launched our own manifesto, when we did the triple assault on our core vote, the elderly. And quite frankly, from then on in people were not interested in the Labour party’s manifesto. All they wanted to know was were they going to lose their winter weather payments and what the impact of the so-called dementia tax was going to be.
‘We hijacked our own campaign and from then on it was an absolute disaster.’
Mr Evans also took aim at the Prime Minister’s tightlycontrolled style of government, saying: ‘ Had some of the Cabinet ministers seen that policy beforehand then surely that never would have featured in our manifesto.’
But there was also concern about the dysfunctional nature of the campaign.
Right-winger Philip Davies said it was time to ‘accept people are tired of austerity’. But he also attacked the campaign, saying: ‘I think it’s fair to say we made a bit of a pig’s ear of the national campaign really, to be honest.
‘The manifesto wasn’t very good, particularly in terms of social care. Dropping a policy on people a few weeks before an election that seemed to come out of thin air was clearly a bad mistake.’ Sarah Wollaston, Tory chairman of the Commons health committee, added: ‘I cannot see how the inner circle of special advisers can continue in post. It needs to be far more inclusive in future.’
Former Tory chancellor Lord Lamont said ‘there have been a lot of complaints’ about Mrs May’s inner circle. He added: ‘I think it is definitely the case that the Prime Minister has got to pursue a collective style of government, consulting ministers and not relying just on special advisers.’
One minister said Mr Timothy and Miss Hill should be ‘taken out and shot’. Another said: ‘Fiona and Nick will have to go – The Prime Minister might try to protect them but the party will not wear it.’
Former education secretary Nicky Morgan said Mrs May was right not to resign, but called for sweeping changes to the way she governs. ‘I think there’s real fury against the campaign, and the buck stops at the top,’ she said.
Mrs May relies heavily on her two most senior aides, with whom she has worked closely for years. They are blamed for helping persuade her to gamble on an election to take advantage of Labour’s weakness in the polls.
They have also taken the flak for tactics and the shambolic manifesto.
Criticism focused on a trio of policies hitting the party’s core older supporters – scrapping winter fuel allowance payments for most, ending the ‘triple lock’ protecting the state pension and leaving them open to potentially huge social care costs.
‘Absolute disaster’
CAST YOUR mind back seven weeks. Theresa May had just returned to Downing Street after a five-day walking holiday with her husband in Snowdonia. Out of the blue, she announced there would be a general election.
Amid the surprise, opinion polls gave the Tories a 23-point lead and there was hubristic talk of a Conservative landslide.
So what in the name of political sanity went wrong?
The answer, I’m afraid, is that they conducted an utterly disastrous campaign.
Ironically, at the beginning of the campaign, the Tories’ greatest fear — such was the size of their lead — was complacency.
In truth, Mrs May’s key advisers were aware of the dangers. Sir Lynton Crosby, the Australian strategist who masterminded David Cameron’s surprise general election victory in 2015, told staff that victory was not a foregone conclusion and that polls were over-estimating the Tories’ lead. He reckoned they were only about 10 percentage points ahead of Labour.
Having hired American pollster Jim Messina to Team May — a man who once advised Barack Obama — it was decided to use a tactic that had proved successful in U.S. elections.
Every minister, in every speech and media appearance was told to ram home the message that a May government would be ‘strong and stable’ and that the alternative was a ‘coalition of chaos’.
Fatally reinforcing the idea that this was a ‘coronation’ of Queen Theresa, her photo and name were to be given absolute dominance. She had to be more prominent, too, on all campaign literature — even on a local level.
However, this obsessive over- emphasis on Mrs May backfired when she ducked out of joining the TV debates with other party leaders. Accused of running scared, the Tories’ poll lead began to wane.
Quickly, the PM’s robotic reliance on her single slogan of ‘strong and stable’ was mocked — with TV audiences even tittering whenever she uttered the phrase. Also, the slogan was seen by many as being cynically calculated to disguise her lack of big ideas.
In any case, ‘strong and stable’ were the polar opposite qualities of a politician who had been forced into a screeching U-turn over her social care policy.
Written into the Tory manifesto by her longterm policy confidant Nick Timothy just two days before it was made public, most Cabinet ministers knew nothing about it.
The policy would leave the elderly with only £100,000 of savings after paying for their long-term care. Significantly, it ripped up the Tories’ previous pledge to cap the amount the elderly would have to pay.
Immediately, critics pounced and branded it a ‘dementia tax’. Coming on top of two other manifesto pledges — imposing means-testing for pensioners’ winter fuel allowance and diluting pension guarantees — they were seen as a spiteful, unnecessary and most un-Tory triple whammy against the elderly.
The Cameron government had established a so- called pensions ‘triple lock’ — which guaranteed that state pensions would rise in line with whichever was higher, average earnings, price rises or 2.5 per cent.
ONE senior Tory said: ‘A big policy change like social care should have been road-tested months in advance, not sprung on us weeks before polling day.’
After the inevitable public backlash, the Tories hastily said the policy would be reviewed. But it was too late. Huge harm had been done. In truth, the U-turn marked one of the biggest fiascos in recent political history. Never before had a governing party been forced to rewrite a major element of its manifesto just before polling day.
Mrs May’s dire performance announcing and then denying this U- turn was a public relations disaster. Worse still, the U-turn came just at the moment that postal vote forms — much used by the elderly — were landing on doormats across the country.
Unsurprisingly, the Tories’ poll ratings began to drop. At the start of the campaign, Mrs May’s personal ratings were above 50 per cent. That’s why her name had been plastered over the PM’s blue battle-bus. The name of the party was barely visible.
Lynton Crosby and his team had made another cardinal error — a failure to offer anything of substance to attract young voters who were being seduced by Corbyn’s cynical promise to end university tuition fees, without saying where the money would come from.
It was as if this increasingly vocal section of society — constantly talking to each other on social media — didn’t matter. A Tory minister told me: ‘ We failed abysmally to acknowledge the existence of this youth revolution.
‘We didn’t understand how the young want a future for themselves on their own terms.’
Crucially, this failing became linked to the dissatisfaction felt by the elderly.
Grandparents shared the younger generation’s anger. They were furious that their grandchildren were burdened with huge student loan debts, were struggling to get onto the housing market and often found their first jobs were poorlypaid on zero-hours contracts.
Surely, the Tory Party, which stands for aspiration and selfimprovement, ought to have offered the next generation some hope. By contrast, Labour was offering a dream- list of policies for the young.
The abolition of university tuition fees, the reintroduction of maintenance grants, student debt to be wiped out, free lunches for pupils, a minimum wage of £10 an hour and the voting age to be lowered to 16. It may have been La La Land economics, but it worked.
As one Tory said: ‘We offered nothing for aspirational voters.
‘There was little optimism. It was all gloom and despondency — with relentlessly negative attacks on Corbyn.’
The Tories’ decision to include a promise of a free Commons vote on fox-hunting — a bizarre move considering that many Tory women believe it to be a cruel sport — was another gift for Labour, which it used to dub the Tories the ‘nasty party’ all over again.
Conversely, there was huge frustration in the Tory ranks that the improving economy was rarely raised during the campaign, even though the party was streets ahead of Labour on the issue.
Chancellor Philip Hammond was hardly used in the media to highlight Tory strengths and expose the lunacy of Corbyn’s tax-andspend policies. This unhelpfully fuelled speculation that if she won, May might sack Hammond. By now the blame-game was beginning in earnest at Tory HQ.
In the sights of many were Mrs May’s chief of staff Nick Timothy (the man behind the social care policy fiasco) and his colleague Fiona Hill, a no-nonsense former Sky News journalist.
ENEMIES of Timothy and Hill had long dubbed them the unofficial deputy prime ministers. Bearded Timothy — also nicknamed Rasputin — has particularly annoyed senior ministers, such as Hammond, who have complained about his behaviour. They have been appalled by his bullying and the way he often swears at ministers.
After Hammond described Timothy as ‘economically illiterate’, the latter reacted by urging May to move or sack Hammond in the next Cabinet reshuffle.
And yet, a senior minister, has said: ‘There is huge resentment at the collapse of Cabinet government. Politicians have been relegated to the sidelines by un- elected unaccountable advisers.’
During the campaign, the pair were accused of being control freaks — excluding all but a close circle of May intimates and restricting the PM’s public appearances to tightly-controlled events.
Local people were rarely given a chance to engage with her.
Such a centralised operation also ensured that during factory or office walk-abouts, few members of the public or media were allowed to engage with her.
There were flare-ups, too, on the Tory battle-bus when party staff were ordered by Timothy and Hill to establish in advance all questions that the media planned to ask Mrs May.
By now, I’m told, the PM looked ‘tense and frightened’.
A veteran Tory MP said: ‘Unfortunately, Theresa May is a bad public speaker and there was no fizz in her media performances. By contrast, Corbyn looked relaxed and like a cheerful uncle who would give you the birthday present you always wanted. Above all, he looked increasingly credible.’
With one poll showing the Tories down to a five-point lead, there was panic in Downing Street.
The weekend before the Manchester terror atrocity, it seemed that Labour might even draw level in the polls.
But Tories hoped that their strong law and order record and Corbyn’s shameful history of befriending terrorists would play right back into their hands.
However, this did not happen. After the terror attack, and the subsequent atrocity at London Bridge, Labour ruthlessly exploited the fact that as Home Secretary, Mrs May had cut 20,000 police jobs. Their cynical claims were taken up by a BBC determined to present Corbyn in an attractive light.
Inevitably, Tory HQ is now awash with recriminations.
Supporters of Crosby say he never had complete control of the campaign until the last week as Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill called most of the shots.
Others say Crosby — nicknamed the Wizard of Oz — is trying to shift the blame.
Ultimately, the fatal flaw in Crosby’s plan was to make Mrs May the focus of the election, and to ignore the bread and butter issues such as the economy and immigration.
Veteran general election campaign strategists are in despair at Mrs May’s performance.
Lord ( Tim) Bell, who masterminded Margaret Thatcher’s three election victories, said: ‘It was the worst campaign I have ever seen. There was nothing positive to persuade people to vote Conservative.’
That’s a massive admission of political failure.