Anders Hanson

Don’t get me wrong. I am a big fan of Liberator magazine, and I particularly enjoy Radical Bulletin. But when one of the stories that it covers is one that you have some knowledge of, it does annoy you if they get it wrong.

In the January 2008 edition it inevitably discusses the two recent leadership campaigns. Much of what it says is true, but I found one comment interesting:

Clegg’s second mailing reposed in a Sheffield sorting office to the annoyance of Inverness MP Danny Alexander, who arrived late to stiffen the campaign’s resolve and discovered no-one had asked whether the sacks could be dispatched from elsewhere.

The ‘non-delivery’ of the second Nick Clegg mailing has become a bit of an urban myth. I know countless people who received it, many within only two or three days of it being posted second class from Sheffield and one of those lived in rural Sussex. But if the mail sacks really were hanging around the Sheffield Mail Centre then I would love to know how they would be retrieved and ‘despatched from elsewhere’. I can see the phone conversation now:

Hello, I’m calling from the Liberal Democrats. You collected about 60 mail sacks from our office in Sheffield last week. Now I know that some people have already received the mailings that we sent out, but we think you might have forgotten some of the bags, so I wondered if I could come down and pick them up from you and post them elsewhere

(confused reply from the other end of the phone)

What did they look like? Well just like every other mail bag in your building.

(further reply from Royal Mail on the phone)

Oh, what did the mailing look like? Well it was a fairly anonymous C5 white envelope with a printed label on the front. Do you have anything like that in your premises?

(further incredulity from the other end of the phone)

You mean you have lots of envelopes that look like that, and that you don’t store bags from the Liberal Democrats in a specific place where they can be found again when we want to retrieve them at a later date?

(irate reply with the word ‘wasting our time’ mentioned frequently)

So even if I came down myself and personally searched all 13,000 square metres of the mail centre you don’t think that would be helpful

(phone is put down by Royal Mail with some force)

I think that probably clarifies the matter.

The real scandal was that three times Royal Mail managed to lose the booking that I had made for a van collection from our office (it’s a good job I kept checking with them that they knew about it). In the end it was collected on the day it was supposed to be, but that was after much hassle and asking of favours. It might have been easier if I could ring the local mail centre directly, as I could a year or two ago, but now you can only ring a central number which is only open on weekdays until about 6pm.

I am so proud. Yes, I know it makes me sound soft, but it’s the best way of describing how I feel tonight after watching the Newsnight debate. I am genuinely proud of Nick Clegg’s performance tonight.

Nick answered every question concisely and to the point, but also went on to expand on his brief answer. He was truly liberal, laid to rest most of the accusations against him, seemed genuinely ambitious and visionary, and even dealt well with the difficult questions on coalition and immigration.

But most of all he handled Paxman well, by being persistent, telling him to shut up when he had to, but answering the questions properly at the same time. I think it is fair to say that Paxman wasn’t at his rottweiler best, (maybe he was worried that Chris would punch him), but it showed that Nick can answer the tough questions as well as the easy ones something which, if I’m honest, he hasn’t always done.

As this campaign has gone on I’ve been through ups and downs emotionally. It’s just a part of being so close to the campaign. My summary of how I think it has gone is that Nick started off well, Chris then challenged hard for a while with Trident and school vouchers, it all went flat part way through as the media lost interest, the general consensus was that Chris then won on Question Time (I never blogged on it, but I think that Chris started off strongly and maintained that throughout, Nick got better as it went on and was very good at the end but it wasn’t quite enough), Chris then went mad on The Politics Show (which has gone down badly with members if our canvassing is anything to go by), and then Nick has shone tonight and turned in a stunning performance.

Something for everyone perhaps, but I think what it has shown is that when Nick is good he is brilliant and can really enthuse you, when Chris is good he is competent but dull. I would much rather go with the former.

I ask this question after reading in The Guardian about the leadership debate on The Politics Show followed shortly by an article about New York firefighters opposing Rudy Giuliani’s bid for the Republican presidential nomination.

Where I’m coming from is this. American politics, from the eyes of those of us across the Atlantic, is characterised by relentless negative attacks on your opponent and finding the slightest wrongdoing or policy weakness, exaggerating it massively and then spending thousands running negative campaigns attacking your opponent on those handful of issues. These attacks are either mounted directly by your opposing candidate or by some new organisation set up by ‘interested parties’ who oppose your election, such as the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth who tried to undermine John Kerry’s presidential bid by claiming that he was lying about his Vietnam record.

OK, so Chris Huhne’s criticisms of Nick Clegg are not quite in that league, far from it, but what is happening in the Liberal Democrat leadership campaign is far more negative than we have seen before, and is something that even the other parties have stopped doing in their leadership elections (when they bother to have them). It is one thing to question your opponent on their views and to challenge them on their record, but to send a briefing to ITV which contains distortions to try and brief against your opponent is underhand. Still, it has had the unintended consequence of making many people who watched the programme ring up the Clegg Campaign to offer their help and support.

I accept that negative campaigning is a standard part of electioneering, whether people like it or not. All opinion polls will tell you that the public don’t like punch and judy politics and they don’t like negative campaigning, but the reason why parties do it is a mixture of hotheadedness and the fact that negative campaigning usually works. Actually, that is a simplification. Negative campaigning works when what you are saying is reasonable and you are drawing parallels between what you say and what they say. But to distort your opponent’s views, tell people he is lying and then simply barrack them on national TV does not, in my view, come within the bounds of being reasonable. Particularly when that opponent is in your own party. If Nick is elected leader, and if the other political parties (as I suspect they will) use the ‘Calamity Clegg’ line against him, then Chris will have seriously undermined the party as a whole and not just Nick Clegg.

The reason I ask the question in the title of my post though is because that is how I feel about it. It struck me when I read the Guardian that there were clear parallels, but I am unsure as to whether it is an exaggeration to say that the Huhne campaign is adopting American campaign techniques or not. Another thing I’ll throw in though is that Chris Huhne bought me the book “Buck Up, Suck Up and Come Back When you Foul Up“, when I worked for him, which perhaps could give some validity to my question. This book by James Carville and Paul Bergala covering Bill Clinton’s campaign techniques is interesting and yes, there are useful things in it, but whether we want to adopt that way of campaigning is something I have major doubts over.

My final comment on the Politics Show debate though is purely a personal gripe. I wish politicians wouldn’t use the phrase ‘flip-flop’ to describe an opponents political views. It is yet another Americanism that came over here following the Bush versus Kerry presidential contest, and I just hate the phrase. It says nothing and just annoys me. Nothing rational I know, but a personal feeling.

GUARDIAN: New York firefighters to oppose Giuliani

N.B. Thanks to Nich Starling who I hope won’t mind me stealing his alternative Chris Huhne logo.

If there is one thing that struck me more than anything at this week’s conference, it is that most people are now genuinely at ease with Ming Campbell’s leadership of the party.  It is however also true that people are discussing who comes next.

What I sensed in the last week is that people are starting to understand where Ming Campbell is coming from, and appreciate that even if it is not what they would have chosen.  This is tending to be along the following lines.  Firstly, with David Cameron’s personal popularity waning, people are recognising the advantage of having a leader with experience and gravitas who is genuinely respected by the public.  Secondly, despite the hiccups in the week before, he gave a good performance in everything that he did at conference and his leader’s speech was him in top form and giving the same excellent speeches that he gave in the leadership hustings.  Thirdly, people are also seeing that he is starting to whip the party in to better shape in terms of how it operates, pushing forward the party’s talent and the campaigns the party has
run over the last year have been more dynamic and proactive.   Not all of these things can be attributed to Ming alone, but they are a part of his way of operating as a leader.

But despite this, people are openly discussing the future.  Any why not?  There should be no contradiction in being content with the current next leader, but also looking for which person will come next.  Ming himself has said that he will lead the party at the next election, and in to the next parliament, but he has not said that he will go on and on and on.  The Independent debate at conference with Nick Clegg and Chris Huhne was inevitably seen by many as a debate being between the most likely candidates for the leadership next time.  Apart from the fact that this assumes they will the only two contenders, which I think is unlikely, this does a disservice to two brilliant politicians who both gave important contributions to the subject of how the Lib Dems move closer to power.  Indeed it should also be quite possible for someone to say that they might one day want to stand to be leader, without it being seen either as premature or underhand.  It is sad that any MP who breaks from the line of saying “there isn’t a vacancy and I fully support Ming” is then pilloried, despite being one of the MPs that is closest to and most supportive of the current leader.

This all sounds like me painting a very rosy picture of a very loyal party and denying that there is any dissent simply because of my links to both Nick Clegg and Chris Huhne.  But this is genuinely what I detect is happening, and that view was reinforced at this week’s conference.  Most in the party have no appetite for a leadership contest before the general election, for both the positive reason that they are supportive of Ming and the negative one that it will make the party look silly.  There are of course some people who are trying to undermine Ming’s leadership, but this a fairly small group which includes some MPs but is not, from what I can tell, directly linked to any of the leadership contenders.  But why this doesn’t worry me is because I have now been in the party long enough to remember the unrelenting criticism from some who wanted Paddy Ashdown to go from the moment he started informal links with Tony Blair, and the more immediate undermining of Charles Kennedy which started well before he was finally ousted.  I suspect those who have been party members for far longer than my eleven years will remember the same happening to earlier leaders too.

The people who are undermining Ming the most is the media, and that appears to be for one reason alone.  Despite many journalists having respect for Ming as a person, they have decided on the accepted line and none will deviate from it.  The only way the Liberal Democrats can counteract it, as journalists will find dissent even where there is none, is to keep up the campaigning in their own constituency.  Opinion polls will always show a worse situation for Lib Dems than there is in reality, as the national swing assumes the electoral contest is simply between Labour and the Tories.  In so many seats, that is simply not the case anymore, and the by-elections in Sedgefield and Ealing Southall should confirm that. We need to debate the future, but we need to temper this by not losing heart and keeping up the fight in our own areas.  That’s how we’ll win, and as a result hand on an excellent legacy to whoever is the next leader.

In yesterday’s Independent, former Lib Dem member Donnachadh McCarthy slates the Lib Dems in his article “The shameful truth behind the Lib Dems’ demise”.  He is wrong on so many counts, but I will pick out two.

Firstly, he says that instead of promoting its “good policy paper on how to reduce carbon emissions” the party is instead wanting “to waste enormous political energy over the next few years tackling a pointless referendum on Europe”.  Whatever the rights and wrongs of the party’s call for a referendum on Europe rather than on the new European treaty, he completely misunderstands what the party is doing, but then as someone who resigned in a huff then that is understandable.  The party has spent considerable time over the last year promoting its green tax switch, and constituencies all over the country have been campaigning on it.  I have already been given materials to help me campaign on the extension of our environmental policy that the party adopted yesterday.  The referendum on Europe is not our big campaign idea, it is simply our view on how Europe should be tackled.  Does Donnachadh really believe that when Ming is asked about Europe he should say, “sorry I don’t talk about that I will only talk about the environment?”

Secondly, Donnachadh uses the article to give more publicity to his favourite conspiracy theory about the “corrupting influence that politial lobbying has on the internal dynamics of the party”.  I accept that there are a lot of lobbyists who used to work for the party or still have positions within it.  But that is an inevitable result of the skill sets in both jobs being similar and so moving on from being party staff to be a lobbyist or PR person is a natural career path.  But what Donnachadh forgets is the party’s campaigning is usually driven by the party’s campaigns department, and is not in the hands of a clique around the leader.  The nature of Liberal Democrats is that if the leader told its staff to not campaign on a policy, they would tell him stuff it and they would go ahead and do it anyway.  One of the traits of Lib Dems is that they are non-deferential and a little bit rebellious.  He has a fair comment about some of the unhelpful advisors that Charles Kennedy had when he was leader, but has he not noticed that Charles is now no longer leader?  The staff in Ming’s office are now a completely different set of people, many of whom are far more grounded in the party and its campaigning than those who worked for Charles.  That is one of the things that Ming has improved since he became leader.  Donnachadh really needs to learn that When it comes to things going wrong in the running of the Liberal Democrats, the answer is usually cock-up rather than conspiracy.

Donnachadh does make some valid points about expanding the appeal of the party and broadening its base of supporters and funding.  When Donnachadh was a party activist, he served a useful role in pressing for those sorts of things, and was a useful voice of conscience on party executives.  But what always undermined his arguments was his obsession about conspiracies and apparent misdemeanours when there was no evidence and his concerns were small beer when compared to all the other things in the party that he would have been better spending his energy on.  Unfortunately for Donnachadh this meant that he fell from being a useful person for the party to have around to someone who was wasting his talents on ridiculous statements and unproven allegations.  The Independent should stop giving him the oxygen of publicity for his views on the Liberal Democrats, and instead leave him to concentrate on his excellent work in promoting greener living.

INDEPENDENT: The shameful truth behind the Lib Dems’ demise