Posts Tagged ‘Lynton Crosby’

The Tory taste of death

28/04/2017, 02:20:10 PM

by Jonathan Todd

We’re having so many elections that Lynton Crosby is usurping Kylie Minogue as our most ubiquitous Antipodean. Painting campaigns in primary colours of risk and security, Better the Devil You Know is his favourite Kylie track.

So starkly are risk and security contrasted that it rapidly descends to Eddie Izzard’s cake or death sketch. This time the “security cake” is made of Brexit, Ed Miliband’s energy price cap, and Philip Hammond’s dearth of fiscal plans. If your pallet is trapped in May 2015, this cake will taste of what we were told was deathly risk. Then security supposedly meant EU membership, opposition to the energy price cap, and George Osborne’s austerity justifying fiscal plans.

Crosby now sells a confused security composed of what he recently told us was risk. Unknowable risks at that. We are not being asked to vote for Brexit but for whatever Theresa May, after a highly complex negotiation with the EU and its member states, decides Brexit means. As fiscal prudence has been redefined as whatever Hammond deems it.

Blank cheque Brexit, aligned with carte blanche fiscal policy, is no security at all. Making this understood is now the task of Labour PPCs.

Robert Harris, writing not long before the election was called in the New Statesman, “can’t quite understand how the members of the Parliamentary Labour Party can sit there day after day, month after month, year after year, knowing that they’re simply heading towards a kind of mincing machine at the next election.”

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The Tories are about to swiftboat Sadiq on terror. How he responds will determine the Mayoral result

27/01/2016, 10:16:23 PM

by Atul Hatwal

The conventional Westminster wisdom is that this is Labour’s year in London. Labour thrashed the Tories in the capital at last year’s general election by 44% to 35% and in a recent poll, Sadiq led Goldsmith by seven points.

However, the conventional wisdom is about to be tested.

In the next few weeks, the Tories are going to roll out their main attack on Sadiq Khan: terror.

Lynton Crosby is running Zac Goldsmith’s campaign and he is nothing if not politically obvious.

The Mayoralty is not a role where conventional attacks over economic issues will resonate.

The public, and Crosby, know that the Mayor cannot crash the economy so the Tory line on what Corbyn’s Labour would do to jobs, growth and taxes, will not be effective.

Neither is the Mayor going to make a profound difference to the state of London transport – no-one can wave a wand and create the extra tube lines or rail services that the capital desperately needs.

Identity and personality not policy will determine voters’ choice.

The Mayoralty is overwhelmingly a symbolic and representative role. Who sits in City Hall says something about how Londoners’ see themselves.

As the son of a migrant, from a working class family, who rose to run a high profile legal firm, Sadiq Khan’s biography is London’s story told best.

Sadiq has also moved deftly to buttress the independence of his brand by pitching himself against Jeremy Corbyn with a range of centrist, business-friendly positions.

He is doing all that’s required to pass the Mayoral threshold in an increasingly Labour city.

The Tories need a game-changer. Something that irrevocably redefines Sadiq in the eyes of Londoners and casts him as Jeremy Corbyn’s candidate.

Cue the impending attack over terror.

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A snog for Crosby, a crate of champagne for Karl Rove – how the Tories swift-boated Labour

11/06/2015, 09:54:37 AM

by Steve Morgan

In the month since its defeat in the general election Labour has been flagellating itself mercilessly over why it lost. The wrong policies, the wrong leader, the wrong campaign manager and ironically this last week it has had to suffer a bunch of think tanks run by middle class north Londoners telling Labour it was too London-centric and middle class.

Whilst these factors may well have contributed to Labour’s defeat, Labour lost because the Conservatives won. The Conservatives won because a little known Australian strategist introduced the real dark arts of American politics to the UK.

The main question Labour should be asking itself now is not, what did we do wrong, but what did the Conservatives do right.

At lunchtime on Election day November 4th 2004 I sat in Sen. John Kerry’s Boston election campaign HQ with his other campaign staff. As with the Gore campaign four years earlier I had spent much of that year in the US helping mobilise the 4 million plus ex-pat vote for the democratic ticket.  That day we were watching Sen. Ted Kennedy on national TV telling America what a Kerry presidency was going to be like. All the midday polls had the Democrats between 8-10 points ahead. Ten hours later Kerry conceded defeat. The genius that was Karl Rove had done it again, Bush remained President.

The two Bush victories were achieved despite the popularity of Democrat policies. Bush won because Karl Rove was a shrewder strategist, better organiser and far more ruthless than anyone on the Democratic side. While conducting below the radar tactics that have since become known as the wedge and dog whistle strategies Rove used Bush surrogates to publicly launch an endless number of personal attacks on Gore and Kerry. Gore was wooden, lacked personality, was indecisive and prone to over exaggerate his achievements. Kerry was a leftie liberal from a rich family, he didn’t understand hard working Americans, he ‘flip flopped’ on all the major issues and he was no war hero as he claimed.

Throughout both campaigns Republicans repeated these claims time and time again. Attacks on Kerry were particularly ruthless. In 2005 the University of Minnesota published a study showing that 80% of the Republican messaging was negative attacks on Kerry. In contrast the Democrats only attacked Bush 20% of the time.  They had a plan, it was to keep pushing their policies.

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The Tories want to park the bus. But the wheels are falling off

30/03/2015, 09:00:30 AM

by Jonathan Todd

This was the week that the supposed Long Term Economic Plan (LTEP) gave way to short term miscalculation. The question is whether it will have a resonance deep enough to reach beyond the narrow cadre of the politically obsessed and long enough to be felt on 7 May.

It was a good week for Labour. And there are precious few weeks left before the election. The Tory plan was to stuff them full of LTEP. Park a bus of LTEP on the playing field of the election and close off all Labour routes to goal. Lynton Crosby as José Mourinho. But the wheels have looked like they are falling off the Tory bus.

“You had one job,” Crosby must ruefully lament. Instead of LTEP, Cameron needlessly diminished himself by triggering speculation about the Tory leadership and increased agitation among the runners and riders to focus on positioning in this race. It’s akin to John Terry tossing aside mid-match the armband that denotes the Chelsea captain.

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Transparency Mr Cameron? Not when it comes to Lynton Crosby

20/07/2013, 07:00:16 AM

by Michael Dugher

On Wednesday, David Cameron finally unveiled the long-awaited lobbying bill called “Transparency of Lobbying.” The irony of this title has not been lost given that the last week has been dominated by the continued refusal by the prime minister to shed any light on his discussions with the tobacco lobbyist and chief Tory strategist, Lynton Crosby.

David Cameron has now been asked at least twelve times whether he has ever had a conversation with Mr Crosby about cigarette packaging – and he has refused to give a straight answer every time.

In a car-crash interview with Channel 4’s Gary Gibbon on Thursday, which was reminiscent of the famous Jeremy Paxman/ Michael Howard interview when Howard refused to answer a straightforward question a total of twelve times in succession, Cameron repeatedly refused to answer the simple question: have you ever had a conversation or had discussions with Mr Crosby about tobacco and plain packaging?

Each time, Cameron responds with the carefully constructed, legalistic reply: “I have never been lobbied by Mr Crosby on anything”.  This clearly does not answer the question.

So why is David Cameron being so evasive?  It is instructive to look back at the timeline of events to see how the Prime Minister got to this embarrassing situation.  In November last year, Cameron appointed Mr Crosby as a strategy advisor.  Just a few weeks later, Mr Crosby reportedly met with the prime minister, the chancellor and the prime minister’s chief of staff at Chequers to discuss the contents of the forthcoming queen’s speech.  Then, in the queen’s speech in May, the government dropped its plans for standardised tobacco packaging.

Last week, it was also revealed that Mr Crosby even chaired a meeting late last year where members of the tobacco industry discussed how to block the government’s plan to force cigarettes to be sold in plain packets

So what was discussed at the meeting at Chequers and other meetings Cameron had with Mr Crosby before the queen’s speech?  Reports have suggested that Mr Crosby told Cameron to “get the barnacles off the boat” by concentrating on core electoral battlegrounds and abandoning certain legislation.  If Cameron actually never had a conversation about tobacco policy with Mr Crosby, he should simply say so now.

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