Perhaps it’s just the heady after-effects of having played an infinitesimally small part in the Victory Of The Boris last week: but what a difference winning makes to the mindset of the party foot soldier (this one, anyway)!

So while standing in line outside City Hall, in the Saturday sun last weekend, with friends and colleagues from HackneyConservatives, I reflected a little on the differences that had been evident in this campaign, and on the lessons to be drawn from it.

First, this was without doubt the most ruthlessly targetted Tory campaign I’ve seen. There was a lot of dog-whistly stuff in the press about a “doughnut” strategy, which I think is a little too broad-brush. Hackney wouldn’t appear in any graphs showing Tory outer borough doughnuts, but we did not resile from campaigning, and nor did we spend the pre-election period providing mutual aid to London’s outer suburbs. What we did do was focus, relentlessly, on those wards which we already knew to contain a sizeable Conservative vote.

Councillor Matthew Coggins (pictured left) was appointed by Team Boris as our borough leader, and he maintained that focus, and the daily leafletting and canvassing (regardless of the weather! Of course the sun is splitting the skies now but in the last weeks of Livingstone, London’s skies decided to treat us to several downpours) in the North Hackney wards we hold. Only once they had been leafletted three times did Matthew permit us to move our campaign to a target ward in the south of the borough – and once that was completed we moved back again to the north.

Undoubtedly this is nothing more than common sense, especially for those of you reading from a safe Conservative or marginal Labour seat with a large and active Conservative association. What was existentially different this time was that the rigidity of the focus had a tangible effect on activists even in a borough like Hackney, which contains two of Labour’s safest parliamentary seats. There were no outbreaks of the sort of personality-driven dithering (”I think we should target ward X” – “no, I prefer ward Y”) that can occur during campaigns run in safe Labour seats. In it to win it, indeed.

On polling day itself, teams from Islington and Hackney moved out to Chingford to GOTV in the most Tory-dense part of our GLA constituency: but by this time we had recruited sufficient newactivists that we could maintain a proper GOTV in the Tory vote-dense parts of Hackney too. We have  never been sufficiently numerous to mount that type of campaign before, and it worked: our vote went up by more than 6% across the GLA seat and we went from a poor third to a stonking second, shoving the LibDems down to the point that they were nearly beaten by the Greens. Congratulations to Alexander Ellis (pictured right, with Boris), a fantastic GLA candidate, and to Cllr Coggins, a focused and effective borough leader. 

So what have I learned? Three points I think:

1. With the right candidate, activists will be inspired to work harder than they have ever done before; new activists will flock to the campaign, with the consequent increased outputs in productivity. I think it all starts with the candidate. Boris got a lot of stick before Christmas, but his capacity for optimism and his generous-minded nature soared above the grubby character-attacks to which he was subject for the last nine months. He’s an inspiration.
2. With sufficient volunteers, there are no No-Go areas for London Tories. We have enough volunteers now to marshall machine-like GOTV campaigns in our safest areas and simultaneously target known supporters in less strong areas on polling day.
3. The Tory Machine is back! And it’s got the taste of victory. That’s why several of the east London Tory Collective will be making our way up to Crewe and Nantwich before May 22. See you at the hustings, comrade!

Oh! There’s one final point which occured to me. The Liberal Democrats are so, like, over, as a political force in London. You could not design a voting system more likely to maximise the votes for a third party, than that which we used in London last week. The Lib Dem vote collapsed to under ten per cent. The message for liberal Londoners is clear – you can get it (liberal government) if you really want – from David Cameron’s Conservatives.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 7th, 2008 at 7:48 am , written by Graeme Archer and is filed under Change. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.