Move along, nothing to see here

On Negativism
Labour tonight, to the tune of 'The Way We Were', devoted its PEB to a recounting of Michael Howard's career in politics thus far. Nothing else, just what the Tory leader was made of. Which was pitiful stuff for a governing party in its eighth year in office. Though the continued focus on what Howard did as minister is a tribute to the half-life of Thatcherism, it being by far the most important political thing to have happened in this country for fifty years. For his part in that at least the man ought to take some comfort. Today, otherwise, was not so happy for the Conservative leader. Certainly not as viewed from within the CCHQ bubble. Things started off with Mr Howard's morning conference rightly denouncing the government, for their failure to let Parliament tighten up the legislation that allows political parties to collate returns of the much more laxly acquired postal ballots. The only problem for Mr Howard, as hacks a plenty pointed out after his speech, was that the Tory party is presently doing everything he had just denounced. Later in the day, his participation in a BBC Radio 4 phone-in was effectively ruined by his inability to hear the uniformly negative questions being asked of him. Pity the peons who had to deal with the gnashing after all that. But Michael Howard's problem isn't that there are cock-ups like these, but that his campaign just hasn't ignited: there is no bite to his attack on the government.

Ships in the night, like the launch of the SNP and UKIP manifestos, came and went today. The SNP will assuredly suffer from the fact that every Scottish voter there is knows that sending a purely provincial party to the Union parliament isn't even an effective protest vote. Since, however, whatever gains either party can make, or even, in the case of the (separatist) Nationalists, hold on to, are at the expense of other opposition parties, neither UKIP nor the SNP can even begin to contribute to Labour having a smaller majority. A good night on 5th May for the Playboy of the West End will see Alex Salmond holding off the Tory challenge to the SNP's current crop of MPs; for UKIP, stunning and unexpected success will be measured by the number of defeated Tory candidates who grimly see successful Labour majorities smaller than the UKIP tally in each seat in question. All of this leaves open the central problem of the election: why the Tory case against the government has achieved no purchase at all.

In part it's because things that were once upon a time reckoned to be central to Labour's woes, such as, we've been told now for 3 years, the war in Iraq, really never bothered all that many people. And of course the people for whom this was going to be a pivotal, allegiance-switching issue, were hardly likely to plump for the (we were for the war before Tony was) Tory party. That there was anger and tension inside Mr Howard's retinue today — and will be more of over the weekend, as the stomach acid begins to churn about which frontbenchers will be arraigned in the Sundays, all acting under the license Mr Howard gave them courtesy of the Flight business — is unsurprising. Albeit, outside the bubble next to no one will have cared about the supposed gaffes, or for that matter, the pointless negativism of Labour's PEB (you don't need to hammer home a given: as Michael Howard is already an 'unpopular' politician, harping on about it runs the real risk of delivering him some perverse sympathy votes). All this angst will, though, be about trivialities: what's wrong with the Tory campaign isn't the small stuff, it's the big stuff.

There's already a myth growing up, assiduously cultivated by those masters of individual self-promotion, Maurice Saatchi and Guy Black, that this has been a 'successful' election campaign. That even if it goes down to hideous, repetitive defeat, it at least has been a professional effort, and therefore in signal contrast to 2001 or 1997. In truth, this has been a campaign self-neutered long before it started, that has had nothing to say, and has often proceeded to say it badly. None of this, for campaigns matters so very, very little, can ever truthfully be measured by the general election result. But even if the Tories do pull back 20 to 40 seats, it won't be because of their limp and uninspired strategy. In what is shaping up to be the most atypical set of election results in the post-war period, we shouldn't allow the particular strangeness of the results we'll hear that Friday morning three weeks off, to distract our attention from the aesthetic disaster that has been the Tory campaign. Far from 'winning it, but losing the election' (cf. Mandelson of Labour and 1987), the Tories are currently set to get the result their campaign deserves, if not what their cause does.

For the duration of the campaign, the Social Affairs Unit will be publishing regular commentaries on the progress of the UK election. These commentaries represent the views of the anonymous commentator, not those of the Social Affairs Unit, its Trustees, Advisors or Director.