Over on his blog Alastair Campbell is heartened by the fact the the Conservative election machine seems to be off its rails.
He says, “All quite cheering really and among the reasons why, at a dinner for industry PRs I spoke at last night, so many people seemed to echo the view that the election had gone from being all over a few months ago to wide open now. From thinking not long ago that the Tories had a slick campaign machine headed by a supercommunicator in Cameron, the majority view seemed to be it had descended into something close to a shambles, propped up only by the media’s continuing soft approach to matters Tory.”
There’s a lot of truth in this. I think the CCHQ machine is indeed shambolic and I think it reflects the poor management skills of politicians running the show at Millbank – but also the dumping of clear Conservative ideology. There is no real passion – rather it’s tick-box electioneering run by a bunch of very young and very naive tech-geeks with no real operational management skills. The attempts at damage limitation over the Ashcroft affair were woeful.
However, if the Conservative strategy is in a mess the Labour Party is little better. It’s come down to being a comparison game between two dreadfully out-of-touch political parties that are virtually devoid of any clear political values between them. All the emotional intelligence has been drained and there is no single-minded purpose any longer. The result is that on both sides the only party animals are supine appartchiks who are kicked around by the latest, chosen, policy wonks.
I think Campbell is himself, to some extent at least, to blame for this state of affairs.
Both parties need radical overhaul in order to return to some type of emotionally-led vision for what they stand for. The blandness on both sides is a direct result of the modern superficiality of politics. And it is very, very depressing.
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