The final lap (part 2)
(for introduction and part one go here)
Summer 2007 - Gordon Brown and the wasted bounce
The Conservatives first established a steady lead in Spring 2006. The trigger was "Labour's black Wednesday" - the combination of several bad news stories that came within a day of each other: Patricia Hewitt claiming the NHS had its best year ever and being heckled by the RCN, John Prescott's affair, and the foreign prisoner release scandal. They have faded into the past now, but back then they combined to knock the government's popularity before the local elections and give the Conservatives a good maiden victory under Cameron.
Together they serve as a good illustration of the fact that it's often not the big scandals that sap a governments support; it's the cumulative little things, the slow unpopularity that parties in government gather over time just because of all the little mistakes, scandals and rows - just generally being there for too long and taking the blame for everything bad that happens. David Sanders at Essex University calls it the "costs of governing", and reckons a government loses 3 percentage points of support each Parliament just by being there. The most symbolic expression of that "cost of government" effect, and one I make no apology for returning to regularly here, is "time for a change": the point when the public just get tired of a government and want to see the back of it.
Labour remained behind in the vast majority of polls for the rest of Tony Blair's leadership before shooting ahead again during the "Brown bounce", the summer following Gordon Brown's accession to the Labour leadership when the party briefly enjoyed double-point leads in the polls, before a combination of the end of the media honeymoon, a more successful than expected Conservative conference, and disasterously handled speculation of an early election brought Labour crashing down to earth again.
My view is that Labour's present problems stem largely in what happened, or what didn't happen, during the Brown bounce. Firstly there's the bleeding obvious - it left Labour with Gordon Brown as their leader. Gordon Brown's leadership drags Labour down in several ways. Most basically we do have an increasingly Presidential system, and a certain percentage of people will decide their vote mostly (or at least partially) upon which party leader they think will make the best Prime Minister. In the PoliticsHome marginal seats survey back in 2008 12% said it was their main consideration in voting, 50% a factor.
Even apart from those who consciously base their vote on their preferred party leader, the party leader is a major factor in the image of the party and in getting the party's message across, and Gordon Brown's poll ratings are uniformly dire. The only attempt I've seen to drag a silver lining out of his polling figures is that his raw approval figures normally aren't as bad as the government as a whole, though I think even that is misleading. Ipsos-MORI occasionally ask a question tackling whether people like a party leader more than their party in a far more direct manner, giving people the chance of saying whether they like both the leader and their party, the party but not the leader, the leader but not the party, or neither the leader nor the party. When they last asked the question about Gordon Brown and Labour in July 2008 18% of people said they liked both Brown and the Labour party, 11% liked Brown, but not Labour, 21% liked Labour, but not Brown. This gave a total for people liking Brown of 29%, and Labour 39%. In contrast the figures for David Cameron and the Conservatives were 54% and 43% respectively. The Conservatives were of course in a much stronger position in Summer 2008, but the thing to note is that Cameron was more liked than his party by 11 points, Brown was less liked than his party by 10 points.
Beyond his personal lack of appeal to voters, Gordon Brown is also an old face, who when he had the opportunity did little to distance himself from the Blair government. In September 2006, 70% of people told ICM it was "time for a change", with just 23% saying they would rather stick with Labour. It is this sort of feeling that sweeps governments from office, and Labour needed to do something to make that change and renew themselves in office. Gordon Brown's message on becoming Prime Minister was indeed one of change, promising a "new Government with new priorities" and ending with "now let the work of change begin". It didn't work. During the "Brown bounce" in August 2007 that fell to only 55%, with 31% saying they would rather stick with Labour. A reduction, but not enough of one and, more importantly, it didn't stick. By March 2009 the proportion of people saying it was "time for change" was back up to 69%.
If we compare the handover to that between Thatcher and Major in 1990, then Major was a comparatively new face. He replaced a leader who had been traumatically ousted, and he immediately did a U-turn on what was at the time the policy most associated with Thatcher, the poll tax. It worked as a change (or at least, it bought the Tories 5 years). In contrast, Gordon Brown had been a central figure throughout the whole of the Blair government, Blair left on a high with no repudiation of him by the Labour party, and despite speaking of change, there was no obvious or symbolic reversal of Blairite policies. Gordon Brown did announce the date of British withdrawal from Iraq during the bounce, but even then it was perceived as a strategy to wrong-foot the opposition, rather than a reverse of what had gone before. If a new leader had entered government saying Iraq was a horrible mistake that should never have happened, or picked a couple of symbolic policies to reverse like, for example, tuition fees, then perhaps Labour could have renewed themself in office.
The other thing that Gordon Brown arguably failed to do in those few months of public and media goodwill was to give his government a purpose or compelling narrative. In short, he didn't explain to the public what his government was there for, or why they needed to keep it there.
In hindsight, the Brown bounce looks very much like a surge of goodwill towards Gordon Brown personally that was never translated into support for the Labour government and was largely wasted. While Gordon Brown enjoyed very positive approval ratings during the bounce, the Labour government's approval ratings remained negative (see page 15 of this MORI report for a good illustration), it was a personal bounce for Brown and people gave the new leader a chance. Before long, Labour were once again trailing badly in the polls.
Back at the start of 2008 I predicted that Labour would never be able to regain a lead in the polls under Gordon Brown unless some unforeseen event came along to turn the world upside down.
Since then there has indeed been at least one event that has turned the world upside down, so in the next part I'll look at the credit crunch and the recession.
