Three Things I Learnt from ‘Betting The House'

My knowledge of how political parties work and their structure is pretty poor. Aside from the four seasons of ‘The Thick of It’ and the ‘In The Loop’ l I don’t really have many reference points.

As well as that I’d currently describe myself as politically fatigued. The last couple of years seem to have been full of just a bit too much politics. With that in mind, I have absolutely no idea why I decided to spend most of the weekend reading ‘Betting The House’- the inside story of the 2017 General Election- but I did enjoy it and it’s a very interesting and sometimes terrifying look into how the British political machine truly works.

I also found there were quite a few good marketing/business lessons in there and decided to write this blog with some of the key insights gained. For an election that was apparently called because of Brexit it’s surprising just how little Brexit featured in any of the political campaigns and just how little it features in the book.

As an in-depth look at the 2017 Election Campaign, with incredible access and a host of insights and interviews with those who were there, the Betting The House blurb reads ‘On 18 April 2017, Theresa May called a snap election in an audacious announcement that stunned Britain. With poll leads of more than twenty points over Jeremy Corbyn’s divided Labour Party, the first Tory landslide since Margaret Thatcher’s day seemed certain.

Seven weeks later, Tory dreams had turned to dust. Instead of the decisive victory she was hoping for, May had lost her majority- throwing Brexit into chaos and leaving her premiership hanging by a thread. Jeremy Corbyn and his allies could hardly believe their luck.

Who was to blame for the failed Conservative campaign? What was the secret of Corbyn’s rise? What does it mean for the next stage in British politics? Through exclusive interviews and candid private accounts from key players, political journalists Tim Ross and Tom McTague set out to tackle these questions and more. Betting The House tells the compelling inside story of the most important of elections…’

Needless to say, below I’ll be talking about certain areas of the book so if you do want to read the book for yourself, then now’s the time to stop reading. Saying that, all of the below are small parts that I’ve picked out from the wider narrative so I don’t think I’m spoiling too much if you haven’t read it yet.

Here are three things I have learnt from ‘Betting The House’:

1: Social Media will be the key battleground for all future elections, and party leaders will be front and centre.

This probably goes without saying and should perhaps be a no-brainer but on reading the book, it’s clear that the Conservative and Labour parties (in particular their leaders) differing approaches to social media had an enormous effect on the election and the result that surprised the nation.

In the 2015 General Election when David Cameron secured an unpredicted majority, the gap in digital spending between the two major parties was ginormous with the Conservatives spending £1.2 million on Facebook adverts compared to the speculated £16,000 from the Labour party (this figure has been disputed but no true figure has been released).

Learning from these mistakes, the Labour party took their digital campaign seriously in 2017 with both parties now spending heavily on digital (Conservative- £2million, Labour- £1.2million) with a large amount of those budgets being spent on a number of highly targeted Facebook adverts designed to reach individual voter types.

This evened the playing field massively and with the Conservative Party still having a far superior budget, it can be argued that the completely different approach to these platforms by party leaders had an enormous outcome on the result. Whilst Theresa May and her closest allies treated these platforms with scepticism, Jeremy Corbyn embraced and used them to create a momentum of groundswell of support that completely changed how he was viewed in the eyes of the public and the electorate.

A common theme throughout the book is Theresa May and her closest lieutenants Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill, doing their best to approach the role as differently as possible to May’s successor David Cameron. This includes a scepticism towards social media and a natural inclination not to use Twitter as a way of releasing news in the same way Cameron had.

This was particularly damaging in times of crisis when the general public were looking to hear from their Prime-minister as referenced in this section of the book detailing the immediate aftermath of the Manchester Bomb:

Officials in Tory HQ were desperate for May to make a short, strong statement on Twitter, setting out what she was going to do to get a grip of the crisis. They insisted it was not about politics but about showing ‘national leadership’. The public needed to be reassured and must not be left in the dark for hours. The trio of May, Hill and Timothy refused.

‘There was a huge row’ reveals a senior Tory strategist. ‘There were things they wouldn’t do because “that’s what David Cameron did” and reacting on Twitter was one of them, the Senior Tory says.

That night, Timothy and Hill were adamant. They would wait until after the government’s emergency Cobra committee of security officials had met, and make a statement when the facts were in order. They told the campaign team: “We’re going to have the Cobra meeting and then she’ll make a statement outside No. 10. We do things differently. This is serious.”

The position infuriated CCHQ insiders and their frustration boiled over. ‘There was an exchange of views’ another Tory official admits.

This is a theme throughout the book and whilst May’s team often back-away from using their leaders social media channels, the Corbyn team ramp up their approach putting their party leader front and centre in the social media feeds of people up and down the country.

2: Neither party knew how to use the data available to them and it cost them both a huge price.

One of the key themes of the books (and I imagine in general) is how political parties use data to drive their decisions. Theresa May made the decision to call the snap election on the back of data analysing the public opinion of her compared to Corbyn, both parties used data to highlight the seats they want to target and many of the key players used data to guess the outcome of the election, proving drastically wrong once the results are in.       

However, the one thing I found the most striking about the use of data in the book was two-fold:

1: The conservative party did not notice the rising support of the labour party until it was too late.

2: The labour party (and Momentum, a political organisation that grew out of Corbyn’s first leadership campaign) focused on solidifying seats which they thought were in danger when in truth these seats would be won with a massive majority.

This was particularly a missed opportunity for the labour party. Throughout the campaign they had mobilised a massive support of on-the-ground ‘door knockers’ speaking to people in the street to gain support. However as this section of the book states, if they had focused their resources into areas that they actually neglected, then they could have achieved an even better result than they had.

On 8 June, thousands of Momentum activists descended on defensive seats which they assumed were in danger of falling to the Conservatives. In East London, 350 activists spent the morning and much of the afternoon in Dagenham, where the Labour MP Jon Cruddas was sitting on a majority of 5,000. At 4.30pm they were joined by people from Ilford North, where Labour’s Wes Streeting was defending a slender 600-vote majority. In both seats there was a sizeable UKIP presence. The question was where would these UKIP voters choose to put their faith in 2017? Many assumed they would all switch to the Tories, who had become the party for hard Brexit, thanks to May’s promise to quit the EU single market. But it wasn’t that simple.

Momentum did not think of sending their activists on the thirty-minute drive to Thurrock, a three-way marginal, fought over by the Tories, Labour and UKIP. The Conservative candidate Jackie Doyle-Price had a wafer-thin majority of 500 votes but it was assumed she would be returned easily because the 15,000 UKIP voters in her constituency seemed unlikely to switch to Jeremy Corbyn.

On election night, Momentum looked on in horror as Labour came within 350 votes of taking Thurrock despite a collapse in UKIP’s vote, while Joe Cruddas was comfortable returned in Dagenham and Wes Stressing turned a majority of 600 into one of 10,000. They had the army, but they were station on a Maginot Line of their own imagination while the battle was quietly raging nearby.

Neither party had a great deal of time to plan the election or their strategy but a greater of understanding of mid-campaign data, or even taking the time to try and understand it, could have had a massive impact on the results for either party.

The Conservative Party would have seen that their predicted whitewash was not such a walk in the park and the Labour Party, and in turn Momentum, could have developed a greater understanding of where their seats were safe and where they had a genuine opportunity to gain more.

3: Influencer Marketing has a place in politics.

Throughout the election campaign the communications and spin teams of each party went to work to build up their candidate whilst challenging and vilifying their opponent. This is not something that is new.

Throughout the book there are multiple references of big hits landed from both sides in the terms of social media videos going viral and generating millions of hits to hurt their opponent.

However, it was a tactic more expected when marketing consumer goods that had a lasting impact with vast amounts of third-party content backing Labour generating emotive viral content that was seen throughout the country. These videos- from groups such as Momentum, People’s Assembly Against Austerity and Health Campaigns Together- as they were not paid for by the party and therefore were not subject to campaign guidelines, could be more creative, more brutal and more direct in their landing significant blows throughout the campaign, For example:

Clean cut, smartly dressed and handsome, Dr James Crane gazes intensely, straight into the camera. A stethoscope hung around his neck, Dr Crane delivers his health warning in the tone of medical authority that’s halfway between friendly and stern: ‘If you care about the NHS, vote for anyone but the Conservatives.’

This and other similar videos clocked views in the millions and spread the anti-Tory anti-Austerity message viral on an almost daily basis. I genuinely believe this is something we can expect to see in all elections moving forward as social media allows groups to get their message to the masses at a fraction of the cost that it would take to use more traditional mediums. Influencer marketing is alive and well in politics.

The impact is summed up perfectly in this section of the book:

‘The vote NHS video is one example of how third-party groups played a major role in boosting Labour’s campaign on social media. Inside CCHQ, they certainly noticed. Tory staff estimated that fifty or more different organisations engaged in opposing the Conservatives- or some of the party’s policies- online, with trade unions promoting Labour plans to their members, activists in the League Against Cruel Sports opposing fox hunting, campaigning organisations like 38 degrees pushing for money for the NHS, and Momentum’s pro-Corbyn movement all committed in their digital battle. A Tory insider says: ‘The groups that deserve an enormous amount of credit are these third-party campaigning groups who share a very obvious objective with the Labour Party: to “get rid of this Tory government”

All-in-all I enjoyed the book and if you are interested you should give it a whirl. As I said earlier, my knowledge of how political parties work is pretty much non-existent but the book was still easy to read and follow. It gives an in-depth and insightful look into an election that we’re still feeling the reverberations from now.