257. Diane Abbott, Nigel Farage, and how to plan a campaign

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1:49Hello, welcome to the rest of the politics of me, Alistair Campbell. And me, Rory Stewart. And here we go, Rory, another live YouTube. I'm assuming that the technology is working. Yes, at least my mother with any chance luck will be listening. Alistair, so we're a weekend to the election. And it's kind of very strange, isn't it? There we were coming down on a train with me trying to bet everyone on the train carriage and wouldn't be an election. Suddenly bang, there's an election. And now these party machines, which I guess have probably spent months practicing and thinking what they would do have now unleashed, exploded into this election and were a weekend.

2:33Can I just begin by taking you back to the 97 election and giving us a bit of a sense of what happens in the first week of an election? Do you remember anything about was it a surprise for you? Did you get much warning on when it was going to happen or major round it as late as he could, Denise? What do you mean when it would happen? Yeah, it was late as he could, which was very, very frustrating and exhausting. We kept thinking on his your lovely clock. We kept thinking that it was going to happen and then it didn't and then eventually it did. I mean, there is something about it that you've done so much planning.

3:11But then stuff happens. And so there's this constant battle between trying to keep on your own strategy and having things unleashed upon you. So for example, yesterday, for example, our poll, everybody's poll is shown that the national health service is like the number one that in the cost of living in the two massive issues for the public. Yesterday would obviously have been, they'd obviously decided the first big thing would be the carestown, the set side is store, Rachel reads as the economy, then West Streeting does a big thing on the health service. Can I just set the big context? So for listeners, I guess this will be true for Labour now and probably true for you in 97, at least when I was running, for example, for the Lana Merrill race, we had gridded out for the last, I think, 45 days of the campaign.

4:03We had an announcement for every day. We had a different location. We had a different speech. We had a different journalist lined up. So we tried to create a narrative pattern. So there would be a big moment every few days, a smaller moment every other day. Is it a bit like that? Yeah, you've got the so much, even more so now, I'd say, so much focus on the leaders. So what the leaders doing is massively important, who your other key campaigner for the media is that day. So like today, it's Jeremy Hunt for the Conservatives. It seems to be Darren Jones, the Shadow Chief Secretary for Labour. So yesterday, and then, as you say, you're dotting around the country.

4:43So for example, it's possible to see at the moment, Rishi Soonak, I think I'm writing saying, seems to be focusing mainly on seats which are already conservative. That's a very defensive strategy. Kierstharma kicked off his strategy in Sussex, a very aggressive constituency strategy. That may change, but the plans will all be in place. But then yesterday, what, you know, I said when we did the first podcast last week after the election was called, there will always be things which come up and surprise you. And not just surprise you because of what the event is, but the extent to which it takes over.

5:18So for example, I suspect Rishi Soonak did not know that Michael Gove and Andrea Ledson were going to pull out when they did. That would have knocked him a bit of course. Yes, today. Just just stop on that before we get onto Labour being knocks off course. That presumably would have meant that in the first two days, the campaign, when he was really in his dream would be getting headlines, bang on the policies he wanted to sell. Instead, the times will be leading with Michael Gove stepping down and sort of panagérics to Michael Gove. Is that right? So there's partly just sucking up oxygen properly.

5:50It's part, yeah, because the, if you think about what they've tried to do, they've tried to get the focus. First of all, on his national service thing, then on the, what they call this triple lock plus on pensions. So they've been trying to do that. And on both those occasions, they have managed to land that message, no doubt about that. But at the same time, there's been this other stuff going around. So yesterday, West Streeting wants to set out his big plan on health. He's doing a visit with Kirsta, Emma, out with junior doctors and all that stuff. And Diane Abbott becomes the main story on the news.

6:26And again, just just again for, for, listen, just a quick reminder of this story. So Diane Abbott sent out what she said was an early first draft of a piece which basically said that Jewish people and Irish travelers did not experience racism in the way that the back community did. And this led to her apologizing going on an anti -Semitism course being I think suspended from the Labour Party. And the question then was, would she run again? And this became relevant because obviously Jeremy Corbyn, who's basically been thrown out of the Labour Party, is running as an independent against the Labour Canada.

7:11And Jeremy Corbyn and Diane Abbott obviously represent the key momentum left traditional kind of more radical edge of the Labour movement. And the line from Kirsta, Emma, has been no decisions been taken as yet. This is a decision not for me, but for the National Executive Committee of Labour. But of which he's a member? Of which he's a member. And of course, many of the senior members are his absolute loyalists. So I suppose Ascetic might say he probably has a little bit more influence over that process that he's conceding when he says it's nothing to do with him. Yeah, and I mean, I think the thing I would say about it is that it seems to me that a year is quite a long time to be able to get the end to the end of a disciplinary process.

7:54It's a very long time. Particularly over a single article, I mean, you wouldn't have thought it's that complicated. You look at what she said and then you talk to her and she does her course and you can get it through in a few months, right? Yeah, I'd have thought so. So what probably is going on at a deeper level throughout this whole process? I mean, there's been a lot of talk. I know people in that local Labour Party. And I think the feeling has been in recent months that she probably wasn't going to stand that she was finding the whole thing pretty difficult that she's, you know, she is, she does get phenomenal amounts of abuse on social media and that sort of stuff.

8:31And add it to which probably feeling the key of Starmler's message is my change Labour Party, maybe feeling well, I'm not really part of that. But if your, if you're, my feeling was mentioning last night that, you know, Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonald, I think I'm right in saying, rebelled against the Tony Blair Gordon Brown government more than anybody else. We never thought of kicking them out. You have to sort of manage those situations. Now, the thing about, so Keir Starmler has been projecting new Labour Party, change Labour Party, and you couldn't get a bigger symbol of that than Jeremy Corbyn's no longer in the Labour Party.

9:12So would, on that strategy, would it please them for Diana but not to be a candidate? Then probably because she, as you say, very much part of that Corbyn set, very much part of the problems that frankly led to as the catastrophic defeat of 2019. But at the same time, she is extremely popular amongst a lot of people in her constituency. And, you know, we were talking on the main podcast this week about Harriet Harmon, Margaret Hodge, these Margaret Beckett, these kind of giants of the Labour Party and the respect there is for them stepping down. I think there's maybe a figure that this is not being handled in the same way.

9:50Now, there's obviously been discussions going on between the Labour, High Command and Diane Abbott. And it seems to me that something went wrong when somebody, God knows who, briefed, presumably trying to be part of this, Kiers Change Labour Party strategy, briefed that she would not be allowed to stand. And then she's all over the place, says, what the hell is going on. And it's becoming, you know, the feeling I got from what she said yesterday is that I get the sense that she's thinking about standing as an independent if the Labour Party don't allow to stand. And I guess if your Kiers Salmas team, it's annoying because the main reason it's annoying is that it's taking the oxygen out of West Street and being able to do big announcements on the NHS which aren't being properly covered.

10:39It's not really necessarily that you're going to lose many votes. I mean, there will be bits of the Labour left that will be irritated, but they're irritated with Kiers Salma anyway because of Jeremy Corbyn and because of Gaza. And they think that he's sort of betrayed them anyway and that Labour's being, and we'll get onto this, Labour's being too tight on thingsite tax and spend. Yeah. Yeah. So he's not going to worry too much about that. And he's not going to worry too much about the Tory voters because in fact the Tory voters aren't very fond of Diane Abbott anyway. And therefore him having an argument with Diane Abbott, you know, probably helps him a little bit with them.

11:16So it's largely that it's a distraction from the policy that he wants to land, right? It's also you've had a sense of the Conservative Party being kind of all over the place, very factual, very divided, and of their campaign getting off to a bad start. And you've had a sense of Labour being absolutely rock solid and their campaign getting off pretty solidly. So it sort of chinks away at both of those things. I agree with you. I think ultimately this plays, this plays to those who actually want Kiers Salma to be projecting a change Labour party. I guess having around with Diane Abbott maybe helps on that.

11:53I don't think it helps overall because it just gives you that sense of well, you know, who's got a grip here. And I thought it was very interesting. I don't think it worked, but Jeremy Hunt who's being interviewed on today's program this morning, he'd obviously been told because he sort of said one final point if I jumped in at the last time. And it sort of, it wasn't even what they were talking about. But he said, you know, if Kiers Salma can't deal with Diane Abbott, what's he going to be like with Vladimir Putin? I just saw this. Right, right. It kind of affected the aesthetic. But the fact that he's doing it shows that they they hurt his little chip.

12:26One of the things on that really was it was it was slightly laudatory yesterday to see the Tory party chairman, Mark Spencer, the chief whip sort of the former chief whip, standing up and sort of trying to be the big friends of Diane Abbott. And I was thinking if these people are some fans of Diane Abbott, how about giving back the 10 million pounds they took from the guy who said that he wanted somebody to go out and shoot her. So, you know, it's it's just the whole thing added to which maybe we should talk about this economy stuff now. It just is starting to feel like a very, I don't know, very traditional sort of, you know, bang campaign.

13:09And very, very sort of Richard, just before we get on to economy, can I just give us a sense briefly of the first week of your Labour campaign in 1997. What sort of things were going well and what were throwing you off balance as you went into that very successful campaign? I mean, we from memory, I think the first visit we did was to Gloucester. And again, a bit like here, it was it was saying there's no no -go barriers. And we did have a very glass that currently at Torrey seat at the moment with Richard Graham as the MP. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And probably again, you know, somewhere that Labour may be quite hopeful.

13:50But and we did we did we did have a bit of a stroke and a like because on that first visit, that was the day right at the start of the campaign that the sun came out for Labour. The sun newspaper, I suppose. Which presumably is not just great in terms of sun readers, but also created a story in and of itself because exactly, exactly. The other newspapers were like, this is crazy, the sun's come out for Labour. Yeah. And they look, I've always said, I think we overstate the importance of newspapers, particularly now. And I use something message yesterday, he's blind me, you know, the even standards going from and the figure, the circulation figures gone right down.

14:32The paper still have a - Yes, just quickly on that. Even standards gone from when I ran in 2019 to be Mar of London, there were 850 ,000 daily readers of the evening standard. Five years later, there were 200 ,000. It makes complete difference to local democracy. If you were running now as an independent for London, you simply don't have a newspaper to cover these issues and say, and they're going from a daily newspaper to we're down to online and weekly. So basically the evening standards finished and over. And it's a big, I mean, I know you don't like doing journalists indoor baseball, but it is extraordinary because it also is a big significance for journalists, their incomes.

15:13People were saying that they used to be able to pay their months rents on writing a feature article for the evening standard. Now the thing's given out free and now it's not giving out at all. And actually that's a problem just to be serious for my minute. I mean, you and I do this show, but we are partly reliant on the incredible work done by journalists and newspapers and radio and television for a lot of the basic research and stories. And as their income streams collapse and they're advertising revenue collapses, the general knowledge of not just the public, but if commentators is going to collapse with them, you're just, I mean, there'll just be less reporting on London, weren't that just as there are on as we talked about in the past on other regional essays?

15:54No, and also I mean, we talked, I think on the podcast of the Q &A last week about the risk to local democracy of people just not being properly informed. And if you're not having a really seriously informed debate across the media, added to it. And this actually, I think leads me on to what I think the Tories are up to at the moment, what they're kind of overall communication strategy is, I don't think they really care about having their policies ripped apart on the radio and the television. I think they're just landing very big bold messages. So like today, they're saying Labour has a secret plan to put up VAT, Labour will command an idea.

16:36But what you can guarantee is that there will be social media advertising going out to those people, they think will be swayed by that. So, you know, bring back national service to the appealing to a particularly to older people, triple lock on plus on pensions, Labour are going to put your taxes up, Labour are going to do this. And I don't think they care about this sort of scrutiny because they're just landing the message. Well, so there's something very interesting here. We'll get more into this over the next few weeks. So at the centre of this, and we'll talk about Labour come up, but at the centre of the Conservative campaign is somebody called Isaac Lovido.

17:10And Isaac Lovido is an Australian strategist who made his reputation in Boris Johnson's very successful 2019 campaign. And he's got, he originally had a theory, which was called the AC20 theory, which was going to be, they were going to defend AC seats and then target 20 opposition seats. That seems to have gone, as you say, if you watch, where she's seen out moving around the country, not just recently, but actually the financial times that an amazing analysis since January. He's almost entirely, he's done an incredible number of his site, sort of four in sections in a week. The guy gets around, but he's targeting generally defending these kind of red wall seats with majorities around 10 ,000, which is obviously what about.

17:53So Lovido's got this theory that an election campaign is like a legal case, you make an opening argument, then you do an evidentiary phase with more detail than you have a closing point. But there's a paradox, and I'd love you to kind of answer this paradox. On the one hand, they are going with stick to the plan, whatever that plan supposed to be, say safety first, security, stick to the plan, talk about national security. And on the other hand, they're talking about move fast and break things that throw out crazy policies. Let's be the underdog, let's throw labor off balance. Let's make that so presumably there's a problem.

18:29You can't be doing both at the same time, right? Well, labor has a sort of reverse of that because they're actually both key to start on the racial reeds of use this phrase in the last couple of days. Stability is the change. So in other words, we've had utter chaos, we've had list trusts, we've had Johnson, we've had 50 ,000 ministerial changes and all this stuff. Stability is the change. It's beautiful. So this is sort of mirror that, but at the same time, they're trying to do the same thing. They're saying that they want you to think that, for example, on the health service, there are going to be more NHS appointments.

19:09For example, on mental health, there's going to be mental health support in schools, et cetera. So they want to say there's going to be change, but on these stable foundations. I thought by the way, just on Rishi Surak sort of getting around the place, there is, I want to try and help viewers and listeners to unpick some of the sort of the stuff that you see that isn't quite what it seems. So I just found it sterically funny that there's Rishi Surak. I don't know if you saw this big film, walking down a railway platform with no other people, wearing his hoodie at a backpack, a backpack, getting on the sleeper to go to court.

19:50One, he has got rightly a team of close protection people who are normally not meant to be more than a yard away. They've been told, stay out of the shot. There's a bus load of journalists who are about to be decamped to get off to the train as well. But the shot was meant to say, this guy's just going around the country and he's only been there. Then there was this slightly thing, something which maybe he didn't quite articulate it right. They infuse him in Cornwall and said, how does it feel? You know, you've come here on the train instead of being in your private helicopter, your private plane.

20:27And he said, he said, yeah, it's really, it's really great being on the train. I've taken lots of video and photographs of my kids, almost as though he'd just been on a spaceship. He'd never been on a train before. Anyway, but look, given that, he's got energy and he's getting around. But I think that he, there's something about, I honestly recommend it. I said this at the time. If I wrote my new European column about it, I said, somebody should make Rishi Soonak listen to the interview that we did with Mr. Tarkas, the Greek Prime Minister. I listened back to it yesterday for the first time since we were in Athens a couple of weeks ago now.

21:07But I listened back to it in the car with Fiona. And we were drawing a lot and she said, why can't all politicians in the speed like this? Because if you remember, he was just, it was absorbing questions and then answering them in a thoughtful way. And the thing about Rishi Soonak, he's just got this manner that that is sort of, he's kind of just, and it's the same the same things again and again and again. He had to do that. But say them like they're coming out of your brain, not out of a script. And there was a wonderful shot, I don't if you saw yesterday, there was a down in Cornwall. He was doing one of those sort of rather weird things where he's constantly turning around and sometimes you see his face, sometimes you see his back.

21:52And he was face onto the camera and there was a young woman behind him who was pulling the most extraordinary faces as he was sort of, you know, coming out with his bold plan and his this and his inauthentic about the, the kind of constant parroting of the same lines in a way that doesn't feel like they're coming from him. It's very weird, isn't it? And it's something that was very much part of the Cameron Court. I mean, it was partly the way in which, well, I suppose it's actually Linton Crosby, the Australian strategist, the day, push this idea of getting the message out. And I remember when I was a, an MP being doing question time, you'd be sent into training sessions where you've spent two, three hours with people from conservative central office and from number 10 with a script and they would practice you on the script.

22:52And the people that they liked were people like Liz Truss and Priti Patel who would literally simply repeat the same line. Pretty potential, I remember in the 2015 election, produced the same set of seven words, seven times in a two and a half minute radio and two. And I think Rishi Suneats come from this and it's very odd because there are many other professions where people will say similar things a lot. And the ones that springs mine up teachers often have to say similar things a lot. Doctors, priests, right, they're often repeating the same message. But somehow they don't sound like politicians.

23:34And I think the difference you put your finger on is that the teacher, the doctor, the priest is at least minimally listening and is able to adjust a little bit to what's been asked in the context and can reflect a little bit on what they're saying and can put in a bit of a joke. I mean, somehow the politicians and Rishi Suneats is a key example of this. But I did feel it, unfortunately, a little bit with a racial reason for you. That's been an interesting one because we've talked about that a bit and I would recommend people listening to it because I think it's both deeply reassuring for center voters who are worried that Labour would spend a lot more.

24:13I mean, she could not be more clear that she's not going to raise taxes or be spending much more. But I also had a very broad range of reactions to listening to it. There were people who you picked up on this who thought I was too aggressive with her. In my defence, I would say she is going to be the chancellor of the Exchequer. And therefore, actually, I have a real obligation probably to be tougher than actually and tougher than I was with Quasi Corteng who isn't going to be the chancellor of the Exchequer who was a catastrophic chancellor of the Exchequer and is now a bit of history. But then a lot of people, I think, sharing my sense that she too liked Rishi Suneak, there was a sense of set lines and not much stepping back and forming the content.

24:58I would say that while we were chatting away, why did those questions come through? And the reason is that I had the button on private chat, but I would now press it on comments and we have thousands. And I'm going to kick in. There's one here that there being quite a lot about the upcoming TV debate. Now, so on Tuesday evening, there's going to be a debate between Rishi Suneak and Keir Starmer. And I should say, by the way, that you and I are going to do one of these immediately after the TV debate. And that will be a cup of coffee. We're going to get used this because we're going all night, aren't we, on the Channel 4 election night?

25:42Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And did you stay up to 11 o 'clock last night to watch our our debut? No, I wanted to be fresh because I'm doing this and I'm doing London palladium tonight. So I wanted to try to get a bit of sleep. Oh, why are you in Scotland as well? I'm in Scotland now and I'm rushing down after this to do that to 2 ,200 people on the palladium tonight. So yeah, we'll make sure you plug the podcast, not just your book. Okay. Yeah. Anyway, Patrick O 'Brien here, Nick Clegg received a positive bounce in 2010 post -tile of the two main parties making similar in rows this time. I imagine that's why Labour and the Tories have stitched up the first one.

26:18So it's just the two of them. And I've seen very little, I've seen a little bit from the SMP saying that this is anti -democratic and that they're the third party they should be involved. I've not seen much from the Lib Dems. I think these TV debates, they're interesting TV debates and we can talk about this more when the first one happens. But we spent most of 1997 trying to avoid TV debates while pretending that we weren't. We didn't really see much. Tony was so far ahead and my worry with TV debates, less so now, my problem with TV debates is that they just give them media and excuse to talk about themselves and talk about the importance of the media.