Letter to the losing party leaders: don’t quit yet, you have vital work to do
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Version 0 of 1. It was five years ago this morning, somewhere in the wretched grey dawn hours, that David Blunkett bowed to the inevitable and announced live on air that Labour had lost the election. Shortly afterwards, his phone rang: a Downing Street staffer had been urgently instructed to shut him up because, as far as Gordon Brown was concerned, Labour hadn’t lost. Brown refused to accept defeat until all possible options were exhausted and was afraid that being seen to blink first would narrow those options. Moral of the story: in the giant game of chicken that tends to follow knife-edge elections, identifying the loser makes pinning down Bill Clinton on his relationship with Monica Lewinsky (“It depends what the definition of ‘is’ is”) look easy. Membership Event: Guardian Live: Election results special So it’s perhaps a bit premature to address the loser of today’s general election, when at the time of writing it’s not even clear who it is. But losers matter, because losers have one last powerful thing to give their parties – a service nobody else can quite perform. You can fail to form a government in a manner that divides your party or one that absorbs some of the inevitable rage and disappointment. But more than that, you can lose in ways that position your party to win again. Above all, that means accepting no comforting fictions about why you lost. Forget the myth of the Sheffield rally; never mind the weirdness that is Labour’s pledge stone, or the utter tedium of Lynton Crosby’s long-term economic plan. Elections are lost over years not weeks, and so-called tipping points are often little more than handy metaphors – moments that symbolise what people were already thinking anyway. The most dangerously seductive fiction to emerge from this largely dreary campaign, however, will be that it’s the SNP wot decided it. It’s a statement of the bleeding obvious that everything would be different if Nicola Sturgeon hadn’t redrawn the map, gobbling up Labour seats and vowing to lock the Tories out regardless. But the Scottish nationalist surge has only loomed so large because both main parties struggled to build a big enough lead in England to trump it. The rise of the SNP is deeply significant for the nation, but for the loser it’s only part of a bigger, long-running story about struggling to break out of their traditional English comfort zones. Which brings us to the awkward matter of resignations. There’s a sensible case, given the closeness of the race and perhaps the possibility of a second election, for nobody resigning. On the other hand, Alex Salmond quitting as SNP leader after narrowly losing the independence referendum looks a masterstroke with hindsight: by going when he could respectably have stayed, Salmond arguably made a future yes vote more likely. It had become clear during the campaign that women were warier than men of independence, and that female voters liked Sturgeon more than Salmond. She was the logical choice to take the SNP to the next level. But Salmond could step aside so confidently only because he had long ago identified and mentored her as his preferred successor. You, dear loser, haven’t. So once a government is formed, if you’re minded to go, then the last thing you should do is go quickly and with dignity. Not unless you’re sure your party already understands why it couldn’t win outright, wants to change and has a clear candidate to lead that change. And if you’re naive enough to believe that, no wonder you lost. William Hague resigned promptly and without fuss in the early hours of 8 June 2001 and was duly praised for liberating his party to move on without him. It repaid him by moving on with Iain Duncan Smith, and we all know how that ended. By contrast, when Michael Howard lost almost as badly as Hague in 2005, he announced his intention to stay on as a caretaker for several months before resigning. He was accused of prolonging the pain and failing to oppose the new government properly, just as some felt that in 2010 Labour gave the coalition a free pass by plunging into a prolonged contest. But defeated parties struggle to get a hearing at first anyway: better surely to invest that dead time in recovery. Howard used it to reshuffle his young proteges – to this day, people argue over whether it was George Osborne or David Cameron he really preferred – into shadow cabinet positions where they could better establish a claim to lead. But, perhaps just as importantly, he gave the party six months for the lessons of three defeats to sink in. Shortly after the 2010 election, I chaired a thinktank conference on why Labour lost, involving a thoughtful bunch of MPs, pollsters and leadership hopefuls. It’s stuck in my mind clearly because there was so little clarity. Everyone in the room had a competing theory, most of which translated as “people didn’t listen to me enough”. Immigration was a consistent theme, but debt and borrowing barely figured; nor did Scottish nationalism. That’s unsurprising, because it’s incredibly hard for anyone who loves their party to see it through the eyes of voters who don’t. Understanding why you lost takes self-critical reflection, mountains of data and often more than one election. It requires the painful realisation that if voters consistently say something’s a problem – if they think you nasty or economically incontinent – then however unfair they’re being, it’s a problem. Facing up to unwelcome truths is a hard, slow process incompatible with a quickie popularity contest in which prospective leadership candidates will naturally try and lift morale. But the big advantage for the loser this time is that both main parties need to examine why they have struggled to break through; it’s just that one will be too busy governing to do it properly. It takes great humility to do a Howard, hanging around while everything you stood for is questioned. But what makes it slightly easier than it sounds is the public sympathy defeated leaders often attract. Remember the unexpected pang of affection for John Major, taking himself stoically off to the cricket after losing office, or even for Brown leaving Downing Street hand in hand with his little boys? Losing is a humanising thing, generating one last, almost guilty, burst of public goodwill. Use it well, and even losers may ultimately pave the way to winning. • While polls remain open please refrain from disclosing your voting choices. 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