The UK Election: 1. How Do You Get the Campaign Right?

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Hello, and welcome to Understand the UK Election, your essential guide to the general election.

I'm Adam Fleming.

My day job is presenting the BBC's daily news podcast, Newscast, but I have been covering general elections as a journalist since 2005, meaning this is my sixth general election.

The date has been set, the 4th of July 2024.

And in this first episode, we're going to delve into what the actual purpose of an election campaign for the political parties is.

I'm thinking my biggest miss when it comes to an election campaign is in 2010 when they had the first ever televised leadership debate.

And I missed it because I was stuck in Northern Ireland because of the ash cloud from the Icelandic volcano.

And I missed that massive, massive milestone in British political history.

But don't worry, somebody who's witnessed plenty of milestones is here to help us talk through this issue.

It's my friend and political correspondent, Alex Forsyth.

Hello.

Hello.

Okay, so first of all, what's the sort of typical day like in the campaign when you're on the front line?

I think the thing when you go in to cover an election campaign as a political journalist is that you have to go in prepared for pretty much anything.

So you get a sense of where you might be on kind of day one, but it could be that you don't end up getting home until four days later and you've hit four nations of the UK in between.

I mean, you're on this bus when they do have the battle buses and you're kind of at the mercy of the party's plans.

So you're travelling around with them where they go.

So you see the kind of photo ops with the party leaders out and you know, whatever stunt they're doing or with their sleeves rolled up addressing a whole load of party activists.

But there's also all that stuff behind the scenes, which is a lot of kind of party organisers and spinners trying to just keep it all going to make sure nothing goes wrong, to make sure that, you know, if the party leader in most cases is going to come into contact with the public, that doesn't go wrong.

Also, we should say that certainly in previous election campaigns, if you were assigned to a campaign as the political correspondent following that party leader, you would be with that person constantly for about five or six weeks with the same bunch of journalists as well.

I imagine there was a real sort of like weird camaraderie.

You just have to hope you get on.

I mean, that's kind of step one.

You know, you're spending a lot of time together.

And these campaigns are, you know, for politicians, journalists, there's hours and hours of travel.

You know, there was one day that I remember in the late stages of the 2019 election campaign where I kind of woke up at 4 a.m.

alarm call.

We went to Grimsby Fish Market.

We then had to get on the bus and I have to say we all carried the smell of Grimsby Fish Market with us.

We then got on a very small plane with same smell, you know, kind of permeating through all of our coats.

But you do get a sense, I think, when you're doing a bus like that for a period of time of the operation behind the scenes.

And that tells you about the mood in the party.

It tells you how they think the campaign's going.

You can glean quite a lot just from that time spent in close quarters with the people who are on the kind of front line of these campaigns.

Alex, thank you so much.

Right, our other guests have joined us now.

It's Lee Kane, who was a key strategist for Boris Johnson at various points, including the EU referendum, 2019 election.

And his leadership campaign as well, which seems a long time ago, too.

And we're also joined by John McTernan, who's a political strategist and was Tony Blair's political secretary.

It seems a long time ago, but Tony is still the figure against whom all Labour leaders compare themselves.

Right, so here's the kind of big philosophical question.

We've heard what goes on in a campaign.

We all know what we see on TV and see on the websites and on social media.

What is the purpose fundamentally of all that activity, John?

The purpose if you're in the lead and the opinion policies is to hold on to your voters.

And the purpose if you are behind is to find a way to catch up, to find a weakness in the other guys.

But we always say in campaigning, you don't win in the four weeks of the campaign.

You win in the four years running up to it.

That's a really good point.

You know, Dominic Cummings and I have spent a lot of time in that summer before Boris even walked into Downing Street in the July looking at what is our strategy going to be?

What is the mood of the public?

How can we tell a story that shows that we understand what their concerns are and we've got the solutions to them?

And that's why from day one, you know, we obviously knew that solving the Brexit challenge was going to be the main issue, but it was a gateway to unlocking the other things that people cared about their priorities, you know, schools, crime, the NHS.

So you would have a situation where, you know, the six o'clock news, you would have Dominic Grieve and whoever else sort of all shouting at each other like a rabble in a zoo on, you know, the top of the six.

But we'd take Boris out personally and throw him in a hospital or a school.

And he would say, you know, obviously we need to get Brexit done.

I'm going to do that.

And then I'm going to focus on, you know, new nurses, new hospitals, whatever that was.

So by the time the short campaign began, we had really already won.

The work had been done.

It was just then making no mistakes.

So you have the strategy, and maybe that's encapsulated in a particular word or a three-word slogan.

Intellectually, how do you join up the activity, the frenetic activity that's going on on the ground and with the candidates and with the party leaders with that thought, that idea, that word or three words?

The challenge in a campaign is there's a huge amount of noise that comes through.

And one of the real difficulties in politics is to actually keep talking to your actual audience, which is the voters.

The biggest mistake politicians make is they talk to the media.

So the media will be, you know, very exercised for all sorts of issues on a day-to-day basis because they want something new.

So the conflict comes: is that you know, you're there wanting something new on the battle bus or wherever you might be, but we want to keep telling you that, you know, we're for change or what it might be.

That's boring.

So there's this constant friction point.

The thing that I always say about politics is we're obsessed with it.

The average punter thinks about politics for nine minutes a week.

And also, presumably, it's nine chunks of one minute.

Which is why repetition is so important.

And it's why, you know, why did Kirst Armer say in his opening election speech that his dad was a tool

Because only one in ten voters know his dad was a toolmaker.

One in ten voters know that Rishi's

parents had an NHS background.

They're not paying any attention.

I think the first big surprise I ever had about how election campaigns work was when I went out with somebody who was doing classic canvassing.

So with the clipboard, going and knocking on doors.

And I thought their job is to go and convince people to vote for their party.

No, no, no, no.

It's a much more technical job than that.

It's literally gathering data to put into a spreadsheet spreadsheet so you can target people on the day of the vote itself to make sure they go and vote and who to know to send a second and third leaflet to.

And I was quite surprised that it was that detailed and that technical because that's a whole different level from the very kind of narrative big picture stuff.

I think in a campaign all politics, there are a lot more data points than people think.

Inside the sort of 2019 war room, there was a huge amount of data.

We had very detailed sort of polling operations.

As you say, there's a lot that comes from Back from the Ground campaign.

we had quite an interesting sort of double act in Dom and Boris you know Dom as you can imagine very focused on the data and you know with the data operation we had we had data scientists working through the sort of MRP polling models you know very sort of granular and Boris was very much someone who was quite instinctive on politics and I think you know you you don't want to lean too heavily away from one or the other because I think I remember being away with them on the vote leave campaign in about the February with Giesler Stewart and she turned around to me we were in Leeds I think on a battle bus And she said, turn around to me.

She was your big Labour MP.

She was our big labour MP, wonderful, wonderful woman.

And she said, we're going to win this.

And I sort of said, you know, why do you think that?

And she said, it feels to me like it did in 97 with Tony and Labour, where we have this momentum.

When I'm speaking to people, I can sense this desire for change.

But there was nothing in the data set.

She just sensed something from her time, just knocking on doors.

And I thought that was really interesting.

to see.

That's one of the truths about the data points.

You do the big opinion polls, which are quantitative.

They give you big numbers.

you get 1,000, 2,000, 3,000, 5,000 people, and you get a really deep analysis of things.

And you get the call, which is the focus groups.

And in focus groups, you get a feeling for where people are, the language they use to tell you the stories, the language that will move them.

Every focus group I've ever been to gives you something that's golden.

And that's where you get the great campaign slogans from.

Because they're real people's language and you can then play them back to them.

Politics is head and heart.

It's when you can't combine all those things together that they pull away at each other.

And that's when you get incoherent strategies.

And then events happen.

And I don't mean planned events.

I mean things that aren't in the script.

How are you processing them and trying to make them work to your advantage?

I think one of the core things when you run an election campaign is knowing when an event is something you can just ignore and it's media noise and when it's something you actually have to get involved in.

You know, I remember 2019,

we're sort of sat, sort of all our morning meetings, and it's about sort of eight o'clock, and someone's gone out for coffee.

And then you've sort of got an eye on the TV, and you know, there's some Good Morning Britain journalists chasing after Boris, and he's like, and it ends up in a fridge.

Are they taking him into the fridge?

Yeah.

Why are they taking him into the fridge?

I'll be with you in a second.

I'll be with you in a second.

I have an airpiece here in my hands ready to go.

Right, he's been taken inside into the freezer.

He's gone into the fridge.

There's a sunker.

Sway heroic work so far, isn't it?

That was heroic work.

But when your campaign is a good campaign, when the message is right, when these things tend to be sort of amusing side notes that people forget about, and it's on Twitter, but the country doesn't really care.

You said when events happen, do you respond or not respond?

The thing is, you test the challenge coming in and you say, does this blow us off our strategy?

Yes.

Do we need to respond to it?

Yes.

We make a response.

Does it change our strategy?

No.

Just picking up on John's point as well, I think, you know, one of those core decisions you have to make is, you know, can we just ride this out and keep going where we are?

Is this a 24-hour cycle?

What it'd be, or is this the sort of thing that's going to run for days and days?

And people aren't going to hear us going out and talking about change or sticking with the plan or whatever it might be.

They're actually going to hear...

this particular issue.

Often you find things like someone's not vetted a candidate properly.

So they've said something somewhere or they've written an article that is actually going to get a lot of attention.

And again, it's been able to decide quickly: is this something we can defend?

Does the Prime Minister want to go onto the T V tomorrow and talk about this?

Or actually, if it's not, right, we act now, we remove them from the candidates' list.

So it's like, okay, there's been a mistake in the vetting.

We've taken the decision, we've moved forwards.

And you sort of lance the boil.

That's the only place for Keir now where they can go wrong.

One of those issues bubbles up and they handle it poorly, and the whole narrative can start to twist.

And just in terms of where we are with campaigning in 2024, what are things that you think are going to kind of die out from the traditions and what are things that are going to grow in future elections?

Well, the big campaign rally, that has sort of died and been reborn as an assembled one.

I mean, in the 50s, Peckham Rye Common, which is near where I live, was used for big election rallies.

Gateskill came down and gave a rally, and real people went to assemble and come and now you don't see real people at a rally.

So I think that's turned into a kind of a new kind of genre.

I think social media, the best social media, is not coming to me or you or Lee.

It's coming to the undecided floating voters.

You know, you look at American politics and you can say the winning candidates dominate the media of the moment.

Roosevelt was great, radio, JFK was great, television.

Donald Trump was great.

Twitter.

We are fighting the fake news.

It's fake, phony, fake.

Crooked Hillary.

Crooked Hillary.

Now, sleepy John, build that wall.

I think the social media points are a very interesting one.

You know, I think every election we hear, it's the new, you know, it's the first social media election.

I think that that ships.

Yeah, this is my fifth first social media election.

But if you actually look, you know, we did a report this year on, you know, I talk to the nation where people are getting their news from.

Of those top 10 media sources, there was not a newspaper within it, which is a huge change from where we were 20, 30 years ago.

It's dominated.

It's still, you know, broadcast is still king.

And I think if there's one place in a campaign I want us to be, it's the top of the six and ten on the BBC.

That is the gold standard you're looking for.

But Facebook is very close behind and it has that double power of, you know, it's your friends and peers sharing it, which is very powerful.

And under sort of 35s, what was really striking was you were seeing an awful lot of the visual platforms, TikTok, Instagram, being a place where people get their news.

And we are going to have a whole episode of Understand the UK Election, which is dedicated to the role of the media.

John, thank you very much.

And Lee, thanks to you too.

Thank you for having me.

Thanks.

And that's all for this episode of Understand the UK Election.

Next time, we will be looking at who are those candidates who knock on your door asking for your vote at this time of year.

And you can find the rest of our series on BBC Sounds.

Just search understand the UK election.

We will have everything from what goes into a manifesto to how much we can predict how people will vote all the way through to what actually happens on Election Day itself.

Please do join me for all of it.

And if you'd like to see a full list of candidates for any constituency in the UK, that is available now on the BBC News websites.

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