42 days and nights; Losing a General Election
On the 22nd of May, from the moment I entered the parliamentary estate, I was surrounded by a buzz. The rumours were rife: the General Election was about to be called. The entire day was spent in anticipation.
The Conservative Party were polling at about 23% of the vote. The call to me was illogical and frankly suicidal. The obvious thing to do would have been to wait until November.
Yet, a feature that people often forget when discussing politics is that it's made up of people – thousands of them. Each has a role to play, and calling the General Election meant that quite a lot of them would either definitely lose their job, as their boss was stepping down, or probably lose their job, as their boss's majority was so thin.
All day, people were running up and down the corridors in panic. Every Conservative staffer was in shock. You had people who were absolutely certain it was happening and others in denial, thinking there was no way he would call it so soon. Every stage of grief was represented.
Yet, we only knew for sure the moment Rishi Sunak stepped out of 10 Downing Street in the pouring rain as 'Things Can Only Get Better' played.
From that moment, all hell broke loose. Portcullis House, the main office building on the parliamentary estate, is broken up into four floors of offices, largely delineated by party – Floor 4 is Conservative. The atmosphere there was despondent, to say the least; a former MP remarked that it was like the sinking of the Titanic. Yet on Floor 3, largely a Lib Dem and Labour floor, they were quite literally popping the champagne.
Staffers began packing up as the deadline for being out of your office if your member was stepping down was Friday, 31st of May. Piles of rubbish slowly appeared over the next few days, and plans were set in motion regarding our constituencies electoral strategy.
On the final sitting day of the 2019-2024 Parliament, I made it a point to head out onto the Terrace whilst the late spring sun shone upon the Palace and have what could have been a final Guinness in my time in politics.
I had one last weekend with friends and headed up to Herefordshire at the start of June to begin our fateful campaign.
It's quite easy to assume from movies or TV that British political campaigns are highly polished machines. American media has a huge role to play in this. Americans seem to make it a habit of throwing millions of dollars at irrelevant campaigns and command huge campaign teams with hundreds of people. However, British politics isn't like that.
The total spending limit per seat varies, but it was roughly £20,000 in this General Election. Your task in a seat of 70,000 people is to reach each voter and convince them on how to vote with 28 pence per person. An almost impossible task.
The reality is British General Election campaigns aren’t about convincing voters. They are a data collection operation that relies on groundwork done during the five years beforehand. You go door-to-door asking people if they will vote, how they will vote, and did they vote last time. Every interaction is essentially a robotic script where you get the data and move on as quickly as possible.
From there, you use this data to target leaflets, and this all culminates in a 'get out the vote' campaign – essentially an operation to make sure your voters actually vote on the day. This is because the number of people who say they are going to vote but don’t is shockingly high, and often elections are decided by who can mobilise their base most effectively.
So, six weeks of eight hours a day, asking the same questions over and over again, to then input into a data management software – which frequently crashed – isn’t the nicest task around.
As previously mentioned, most of the real work actually occurs in parliamentary term. A well-run constituency campaign will have been canvassing every month for the five years building up a large active database. However, the reality across the country is that a lot of constituencies had been slacking, which very quickly came back to bite them. On top of this, the central organisation for the Conservative Party, known as CCHQ, were largely a hindrance to good campaigning.
All of these operational failures made campaigning a painful experience, which was then compounded by a putrid political atmosphere. As I was campaigning for a Conservative, the reception wasn’t the most positive. Frequently, doors would be slammed in your face, people would start shouting at you, and often you could see someone come to a door only to turn around and walk away.
To allow a small rant on Ring doorbells: it seems as though no one in the entirety of Herefordshire knows how to correctly set them up. Their doorbells were so loud that often you could hear them a street away. Alongside this, what would often happen is someone would look at you through their phone and just ignore you. Possibly even worse is when they would try and have a full conversation, leading to the awkward situation in which you are standing there talking to a doorbell.
Personally, I am happy to never ring a Ring doorbell for the rest of my life.
The stories from this period are genuinely endless, and I will cherish them for the rest of my life.
A small favourite was in a rural part of the constituency; I spent a long time walking down a driveway, close to 500m, that opened up to this enormous manor house framed with colonnades and an expansive back garden. I dutifully went to ring a doorbell, of course, there was none. I eventually found a knocker and did the deed.
No one came to answer.
Perplexed, I looked through the windows of the house, to see if anyone was around. But it looked as if a bomb had gone off; clothes strewn everywhere and empty bottles galore. At which point, I decided, seeing as I had spent nearly 20 minutes trying to find a soul, to bail. I mentioned this to someone else on the team who told me, 'Oh yes, they are a close friend; they will have gone to Glastonbury.'
But though the atmosphere was putrid and the Conservatives were clearly destined to lose the election, I still found most people were largely respectable.
I will never forget speaking with a couple who at first told me to firmly stay at their gate as I was a 'Tory' (a derogatory term for a Conservative). Slowly, through the conversation, they could see my perspective, commended me for acting on my principles, and invited me for a cup of tea. After further conversation, this was upgraded to a beer. I unfortunately had to decline both offers as we had to move on. But to be treated with kindness and respect whilst I was simply out campaigning for my beliefs was warming to the heart, especially in an atmosphere that was so opposed to my politics.
The General Election also gave me the opportunity to explore Herefordshire. I had lived in the county for a year but never truly knew the place whose constituents I was helping on a daily basis. I can now say I have been far and wide across the whole constituency, from the suburbs of Hereford to the sleepy villages of the Black Mountains. Herefordshire is truly a beautiful place, and the experience of exploring it is one I will be eternally grateful for.
The General Election also taught me a hard lesson about myself, which is that I could not hack being a politician. The expectation of a politician – something that I will write about – is that you have to be tuned into politics every waking moment of the day.
I recently was speaking to an MP who said that most people don’t understand the job. They think we are phoning it in, but 80-hour weeks every week are the norm for him. Early mornings and constant late evenings, with no thanks from constituents.
Don’t get me wrong, the value of serving your constituents and helping to change the country is appealing, but the expectations around that would kill me. Even my brief six weeks of living a life full of only politics was so draining that I’m not quite sure my brain has fully recovered. My only respite was my non-political friends who daily would distract me during the campaign enough to take my mind off the constant politics.
Politics is brutal. One day you are the sitting MP for your constituency, but then at 5am in a dusty leisure centre, it all comes crumbling down, after which you are a has-been.
You could slug your guts out for your constituents for decades, spend every waking moment campaigning. Yet, when the tide changes, you are swept away.
My boss won his re-election by 1,200 votes, from a previous majority of 19,000 (my ego has to note, a number I was almost spot on with before the election). Studies show that in General Elections, the personal vote, i.e., the work a politician does for their constituency, accounts for 2% of the vote; the margin was 1.8%.
By the skin of his teeth, he managed to survive, unlike 175 of his colleagues who lost. On top of the MPs are the forgotten staffers, of which roughly 1,000 people will have lost their jobs.
I am certain I will write again about the General Election, probably more on the operational failures and the stories, but I just wanted to share this brief overview of my time.
Again, really insightful. I loved it