Alastair Campbell

I enjoy reading Alastair Campbell’s blog posts, he’s obviously an extremely intelligent guy who is passionate about what he believes in, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong in that. He is also very successful and confident in himself, so much so that he doesn’t need me to patronise him either..

However the real joy in reading his blogs is that he he’s so good at spin and political strategy. I’m not assigning values to spin as a tool, but I do think he’s rather good at it and his blog-posts are always illuminative.

But I’m intrigued by his latest (ish) post regarding Labour strategy, in particular that Labour should focus on Cameron:

A quick example

“I've been banging on for ages about the need for Labour to start landing a few blows on Cameron. He has been getting it easy from the media for so long, but frankly he has been getting it too easy from Labour too”.

I can only assume and hope Campbell knows far more than me about these things, but is it right to focus on the personality of Cameron?

If the media and public buy it, then isn’t this the last thing Labour need?

Politcalbetting.com et al are always showing polls about the weakness of Brown when pitched head-to-head against Cameron and also versus potential rivals inside Labour. Would focussing on Cameron automatically draw attention to the alternative (Brown)? And I’m sure, rightly or wrongly, people do not perceive Brown in a positive manner, in fact quite the opposite so focussing on someone the British public view more positively just will not help.

You could argue that 'what else can be done?' though. I suppose you could run an party-centric campaign, but Campbell and Blair’s success in 1997 was running as New-Labour, and separating Tony Blair from the party (e.g. Clause IV), so arguably going ‘back-to-basics’ will not achieve much anyway as swing voters were never enamoured with Labour but with Blair.

So obviously I don’t have any great ideas (and as a Conservative voter I would be surprised if I did) but it doesn’t seem that with current set-up that Campbell’s and Labour’s plan will be overly successful

Then again, you could argue they will lose the 2010 election anyway, so a certain amount of straw-clutching is understandable.

But perhaps accepting they won’t win could be the best thing that happens to Labour. Maybe they could work within the FPTP system in a more rational strategy (a la the Lib-Dems) and focus their energies on getting out the vote in key marginals to restrict the Conservative majority? As Conservatives are disadvantaged by the FPTP system then Labour could get a hung-parliament whilst losing the popular vote, which would be rational to do.

Again, it depends on the political environment, but maybe it is time for Labour or the Conservatives to start utilising the electoral system a bit better? Or would voters be turned off by parochial campaigning?

500 words and not one meaningful suggestion, Labour really are screwed.