Revealed: Labour party's general election campaign war room
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Version 0 of 1. Who sits where? How the war room works Tony Blair, on a visit to Labour’s campaign HQ this week, looked around the packed war room with a twinkle in his eye and said: “I’m really surprised to see you all here. I was told the party was so poor, I was expecting just to see Ed and Ian, the general secretary, and an empty room.” At present, Labour HQ is probably staffed by up to 250 people running its election campaign. After a rough first week, the party feels it had the better of the exchanges in the second, ahead of the launch of the party manifestos next week. The fate of the party may lie in this open-plan room. Such war rooms, made famous by the US Democrats in the 1990s, are essentially about information mobility. They have been described as “catalysts for decision-making”. The aim is to get information to the people who need it in real time and by having the decision-makers all in one place to make sure the strategic decisions turn into reality in both the campaign “ground war” and “air war”. That is more than a battle for the hourly news cycle, but what is happening on doorsteps and on social media such as Facebook. The main strategists In Labour’s case the main two strategic minds are the campaign chairman Douglas Alexander and Spencer Livermore, but they are supported by the energetic Lucy Powell, who has an ability to turn meetings into decisions. The first such meeting is with a small group at 7.45am in the leader’s room and the second is with a wider campaign group at 8am. In terms of a traditional air war – a hostile media environment in which Labour can probably hope at best to scrape a draw – Labour strategists believe they have been competitive. One official said: “Any party has to bury its negatives and accentuate its positives. The Conservatives have done the opposite.” Labour’s assessment of the campaign so far Alexander claims: “This week the Tory campaign has lurched from defending tax avoidance and talking embarrassing nonsense about Ed Miliband to littering the country with a series of unfunded, uncosted and unravelling spending commitments.” By defending non-doms and then attacking Miliband so personally, a Labour strategist claimed, the Tories confirmed their two negatives in the space of 48 hours – the party of the rich and the nasty party. The strategist went on: “What are the Conservatives’ supposed positives? The economy and leadership. Their attack on us and claim of a £3,000 tax hike is so far not going anywhere … each time [Miliband] has appeared in the media unmediated has done well. Worst of all, Cameron has given no account of the future.” The issue now is whether Labour has enough policy ammunition to retain the momentum or whether the Tories have held back more in the locker. The Tories may also yet show more flexibility than they have done so far. Labour hopes its strength lies with its ground war. Miliband himself this week described the Conservative party as a “virtual party. It is a Lynton Crosby hologram” [referring to the party’s election campaign chief]. The party’s activist base Labour reckons it has a competitive advantage in its activist base and is well on course to deliver on its target to hold 4m doorstep conversations. By this weekend it will have reached 2.5m, and its field team reckons in marginal seats it was getting out more material than the Tories. Some independent evidence to confirm this advantage exists. As ConservativeHome, a Conservative website, pointed out this week, Ashcroft polling showed in 10 key marginals that Labour, according to voter recall, was now leading the Tories in contacts with voters. The average increase in the share of voters contacted by Tory campaigns in the 10 key seats is 35 percentage points, while the same figure for Labour campaigns is almost 55 percentage points. Alexander stressed there is a long way to go and there will be many twists and turns in what is the tightest election for a generation, but the Tories are being out-campaigned and out-worked by Labour volunteers. Labour claims it has recruited 430 people a day online to help the party and and since January it has managed to raise £1m from 29,566 people online. In the first week of the campaign the party raised £177,863 from 7,348 people, 40% of whom were donating for the first time. There is not yet indisputable momentum for one party, but for Labour, privately once resigned to being crushed by a Tory machine, there is more optimism than for a while. |