The UK Election: 3. What Difference Does a Manifesto Make?

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

I'm Adam Fleming, host of the BBC's daily news podcast Newscast.

I've been covering politics for the BBC for ages, meaning that 2024 is my sixth general election.

Anyway, today's episode is about manifestos.

What is their place in British political history?

Who are they actually for?

And how do they get written?

One of my really clear memories when it comes to manifestos is the launch of the Conservative Manifesto in 2017 when Theresa May was Prime Minister.

I was given a box filled with copies of the manifesto by a Conservative Party staffer.

And then people from the Conservative Party, including some like ministers, candidates, and activists, were coming up to me asking for a copy because they didn't really know what was in it, which would turn out to be a pretty major theme of that election and a pretty major stumbling block for Theresa May in that campaign.

So that's an example of how manifestos can matter, sometimes not in the way that is intended by their authors.

And we're joined by two manifesto authors today.

We've got Rachel Wolfe, who's the founding partner at Public First, which is a public policy research agency, but she co-wrote the Conservatives 2019 manifesto for Boris Johnson.

And we've also got Jonathan Rutherford.

He's a political advisor who co-wrote Labour's 2015 manifesto when Ed Miliband was in charge.

Rachel, tell me the process for writing the manifestos that you've been involved in.

Well, I suppose the first I should say, unlike Labour, is there is no process if you're the Conservative Party.

You get to make it up anew each time.

So the manifesto I did, which was in 2019, the last general election, it was a very fast election, a bit like this one.

And it was quite a collaborative manifesto because the 2017 manifesto had been quite a secretive manifesto and the view had been that that had blown up a bit.

So we gathered quite a lot of different groups, members of the cabinet, a subcommittee of the cabinet, feed-in from associations, from MPs, from think tanks, obviously the many tens of thousands of emails you get from public affairs companies across the country on what they think should go in.

And it all went into a huge spreadsheet that we whittled down and compared to what was already the election strategy, which had been set before the election campaign and was broadly get Brexit done, which you might remember.

Go forward and let's see if we can get this thing done.

Get Brexit done and vote Conservative on Thursday.

Thank you all very much for what you're doing.

Thank you.

And fund public services and what became levelling up improving places.

So you actually had a spreadsheet of all the ideas and you're like, right, tick, tick, nope, cross, cross, tick, tick.

Yeah, it was a bit more back and forth than that.

But yes, I don't know if everyone has a spreadsheet, but we certainly did.

Jonathan, yes, Rachel's already hinted at the fact that the Labour Party tends to have a bit more institutional sort of arrangements.

Byzantine arrangements, actually.

There's so many different interest groups within the Labour Party, you know, formulating policy.

They have to be sort of politically managed.

So we had two two politicians leading the political management.

I was working with John Crudus at the time.

A lot of the work was sort of done over the previous two years, I think, because we were doing a policy review, which was also thinking about a sort of political renewal for the Labour Party, given that we'd been losing elections.

So writing it, I basically was the scribe.

And it all got sort of fed to me.

And I sat there and I sort of typed it out, retyped it out, went through about sort of 20 drafts.

And again, there was all sorts of people throwing in ideas.

You get these long emails from people coming up with these extraordinary policy ideas they'd like to see included.

But in a way, it was in the ether.

The kind of thinking was already there, and you just had to sort of like pick it up.

So the first job I did was to kind of construct a narrative.

You know, what was it that we wanted to say to people?

And I think looking at it, it was quite complicated.

I thought that Rachel's 2019 was very good at it.

She was get Brexit done.

And then there's a series of statements.

I thought that was very effective.

Well, that sort of moves us a bit away from the processology and onto the actual point of the existence of these documents.

Like, who is a manifesto for?

Because I, as a political journalist, I see it from the customer's point of view.

Like, this is a sales pitch to the voters.

I'm not sure maybe you guys see it that way.

Well, I think what you say is revealing because, in some ways, I think you are literally the customer as a journalist.

I think there are three different ways of thinking about a manifesto.

There's the manifesto as a grid of announcements.

So, usually, by the time the manifesto is published, a huge proportion of it has already been announced and it forms the policy drumbeat of the election campaign.

I would say much more than half the work that we did was about what are the things you're announcing and how are you using that to hammer your point home.

Then there's the manifesto document, which at least the Conservative Party voters do not read.

There you have one launch moment, but the actual document itself is more of a guide for journalists, for your own own activists, campaigners, MPs than it is a document you expect voters to read.

And then probably the most important, but I confess usually the least considered, is how it is used after the election.

The civil servants pour over it line by line.

They use it as the basis for their assumption of what the government will implement.

And the House of Lords uses it as a test for whether a government has a democratic mandate.

Well, yeah, because actually there's laws around what the House of Lords can stop based on whether it's in a manifesto or not.

Exactly.

If you look back at most most manifestos, and I would include 2019, but I don't think it's just 2019, they usually duck things that are very contentious, which might be useful in terms of getting legislation through later, but they fear will blow up the campaign.

And in 2019, because the 2017 election had had this huge explosion around the social care announcement and the reaction to the social care announcement, that was even more true.

And hence why, yeah, in 2017, there was quite a detailed policy from Theresa May and her advisors.

But in 2019, Boris Johnson said, We'll have a plan.

There was a three-point plan, absolutely.

Jonathan, when you were holding the pen for Ed Miliband and his colleagues, who was your intended audience?

Basically, the commentariat.

It was a sort of political classes, but it also, I think, set a tone.

It kind of did bring together all the thinking, and in all its sort of ambition and its limitations, it was actually quite detailed.

It's not a populist document, although I have to say that I think that the Labour Party 2017 one did actually, I think, break through.

I think it was leaked with the idea that, you know, everyone would be horrified by it, and they weren't.

There was a lot of sort of enthusiasm around it.

And got them a lot of extra publicity beyond just the day of the launch.

Totally did.

What I'm loving about all of this is it's so classically British in that there's a bit of statute in there.

There's a bit of law about how the House of Lords interprets what was in a manifesto a few years ago at an election.

But actually most of it just comes down to the people who are there at the time.

One of the reasons that Rachel's 2019 manifesto worked is it echoed Johnson's tone as well.

And he was such a good communicator and a good campaigner that the two kind of worked together.

And I don't know whether it maybe did have more impact, actually, that one than just being for the commentary at all.

Also, I think it had a did it have 19 or like 27 pictures of Boris Johnson?

There was like two pictures of him on every page.

I do remember that.

It was even harder when you finally the back picture of it, which we did spend some time on, was a bunch of workers in hard hats with We Love Boris Johnson.

And the other thing we did, which I'm not sure had any impact and I spent probably a stupid amount of time on, was we had a lot of pictures of the new kinds of candidates.

So there were a lot of more working-class candidates, Red Wall candidates.

So one of the things we tried to portray was that we were communicating to a less traditional kind of conservative voter?

But again, you spend a lot of time on these pictures and checking them out and checking out the candidates, how much of a difference it really makes.

Again, we had these pictures of sort of like ordinary people that Labour was going to appeal to.

And there's a lot of caution going on, and there's an awful lot of horse trading.

I mean, particularly in Labour, it has its clause five meeting when the NEC gets together with the trade union leaders.

The National Executive Committee.

Yeah, the one that runs the party.

And then the trade union leaders come in and the relevant shadow ministers.

And there's already been a lot of horse trading and the various labour bodies and associations have all put in their endless reams of policy ideas.

I got the impression from Jeremy Corbyn's 2019 manifesto that that just got completely out of hand.

26 billion for our NHS, recruiting the doctors and nurses we need, a million new affordable homes to rent or buy.

And it was just like the manifesto was full of stuff.

Remember Supermarket Sweep, the game show, where you basically had like a minute to run by the the supermarket.

I did that one-minute video, didn't he?

I think he was in the back of a car at a time.

Oh, yeah, we just

went boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

Tackle the climate emergency and create hundreds of thousands of new green jobs of the future.

We'll build a national care service with free personal care.

How important is the costing?

In 2019, Boris Johnson wasn't under a lot of pressure to be fiscally responsible.

Well, actually, I think

it was critical for us.

And it's critical because until you have your fiscal envelope, you cannot figure out what you're able to announce and afford.

So, that was probably the first big decision of the manifesto.

So, you basically have to sort of set your terms of this is going to be the broad shape of how much we'll spend in a parliament, and then you work on it.

And then, otherwise, you can't decide whether you can do a childcare announcement or extra schools funding or more doctors.

And certainly, for a Conservative Party, but I think also for a Labour Party, it really matters that when you publish the manifesto, the external experts like the IFS say it adds up.

That's very important.

Yeah, I think also because Labour sees itself as not trusted on finances and not trusted with the economy, that that was always from the very beginning a sort of major concern about any policy that was going to be put in had to be sort of costed and checked.

With that particular manifesto, I managed to hold on to the pen till about 24 hours before it was due for publication, then I lost control of it.

And that's when

the spending lock thing was put on the front page and a couple of thousand extra words were shoved in.

Oh, and the spending lock was Ed Bowles, the shadow chancellor's in that mission.

Yeah,

it was included because they were in a sort of panic, really, about whether or not there was a clear enough statement of Labour's fiscal conservatism in it, which we're going to see the same again now.

I mean, Rachel, in a way, Rachel Reeves has sort of set that out early on, that she is going to be the sort of Iron Chancellor around not spending and everything.

But, you know, that is always been the sort of big anxiety of Labour leaderships.

And it is a massive choice.

So if we take what Rachel Rees has done very effectively, she's been very clear that she's going to be fiscally responsible, or at least as fiscally responsible as the Conservatives.

But that will then mean that people won't be able to put in the big spending items that they think will really convince the voters on health or education or crime.

So you do have to make that.

choice and it's a difficult choice because voters would like both.

What about the other parties who have got much less chance, some would say zero chance of actually getting into government?

They've still got to produce these documents and have an answer for all of these questions.

Well I think they're about optimizing their political distinctiveness and

much less worried about calculating how various parts of their manifesto will go down with the electorate.

But let's see what the Greens do.

The Greens, you know, and Labour are worried about the Greens, particularly in the inner parts of the cities where where there are more younger, liberal, middle-class people that might well vote for them and might you know be turned off labour.

It'd be interesting to see whether the Greens feel they need to be more calculating in what they put into their manifesto.

And of course, if there's the prospect of a hung parliament, what's in the Liberal Democrat manifesto becomes very important, as we saw in 2010.

Yeah, my impression with the Lib Dems is that they put enormous effort into their manifesto, and from partly that political distinctiveness point of view, but also quite a sort of policy idealism point of view which I think was beaten out of all of us because the assumption is you really are going to win or lose the election partly as a response to this manifesto.

Looking back at the manifestos you've written what would you do differently?

Now knowing everything you know about how these documents land and what goes wrong and what goes right with them.

You're absolutely tied to the mood and the discourse, for want of a better word, of the party leadership.

So in a way you can't do it differently to the circumstances within you in which you're working.

But in an ideal world, I'd make it shorter, a much clearer narrative with clear points at the beginning so that

people could sort of read the whole thing really in the first 500 to 600 words.

I suppose I would inch more towards what you did, which is not on language, but I think we could have been

a bit more serious and detailed about the things that were going to change how we governed after.

There were reasons we didn't, because we didn't want it to lose the election, but it would have helped, I think, in the succeeding years.

Rachel, thank you very much.

Thank you.

And Jonathan, thanks to you too.

Thank you for your pleasure.

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

You can find the full series on BBC Sounds right now.

Just search for Understand the UK election.

And if you would like to keep up to date with everything that's going on during the campaign, you can listen to me on Newscast, our daily podcast, which is available also on BBC Sounds.

Bye.

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At Bright Horizons, infants discover first steps.

Toddlers discover independence, and preschoolers discover bold ideas.

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Come visit one of our Bright Horizons centers in the Bay Area and see for yourself how we turn wonder into wisdom.

Schedule your visit today at BrightHorizons.com.

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