Why short campaigns are powerless against dominant narratives
Let’s be honest, the Conservative campaign for next month’s UK general election has been a total car-crash. But does it even matter?
In a recent episode of the ‘How to win an Election’ podcast, Tory grandee and veteran campaigner Danny Finkelstein was unequivocal:
The reason the Conservatives are in this position is not because of the election campaign – it’s because of the fundamentals of politics. It’s because of what happened during the last 5 to 6 years.
– Danny Finkelstein, How to win an Election
He is, of course, absolutely right. As policy experts should know, a short burst of activity at the end of a long-term project cannot possibly change anything at a fundamental level. You need to lay the groundwork.
I have written extensively about policy storytelling and narratives over the course of my career. And I have made the case on many occasions that adopting a campaign approach was the best way to deliver a rich, multi-layered story.
But the truth of the matter is, no campaign that the Conservatives in the UK could ever have run would have changed the outcome of the election in a substantive way. The task was too big, the mountain too high. The best they could hope for was damage limitation.
Three types of campaign narrative
This is because campaigns are simply a mechanism to channel a narrative in an efficient way. According to Finkelstein, there are only ever three election campaign narratives. In order of potency:
It’s time for a change.
We’re on the right track, don’t turn back.
Better the devil you know.
The problem for UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is that with the best will in the world, if his audience is not buying the premise of his story, even the most accomplished campaign will be utterly hopeless. The work needs to be done further upstream.
The Tories are struggling to fight a narrative that is bigger than their campaign
Sunak briefly tried to convince the British public that he was the ‘change candidate’; after which he then rather desperately made the case that the country was ‘on the right track’. Unsurprisingly, neither of these narratives found any resonance beyond the most avid Tory supporters.
In the face of this challenge, Sunak has been forced to fall back on the ‘better the devil you know’ narrative. Unfortunately for him, the British public have by and large lost patience with the Conservative Party.
The Tories had traditionally traded on their reputation for being the party of financial competence, fiscal responsibility and common sense. But after 14 years in power, the ‘devil we did know’ included the morally bankrupt government of Boris Johnson brought down by the ’Partygate’ scandal; and Liz Truss’s tenuous grasp of financial market realities culminating in her crashing the British economy and then being ousted a mere 44 days after taking office.
In a parallel world where the Conservative Party was flying high, the ongoing betting scandal which has dominated their campaign might have been dismissed as a minor inconvenience. After all, the amounts involved are paltry, and the characters are Z-list.
The only reason this story has had legs is because it is reinforcing a dominant narrative – which is not of Sunak’s making – that the Conservatives are irredeemably corrupt, irresponsible, incompetent. And Sunak’s dithering compared to Labour leader Keir Starmer’s decisive action, will have done nothing to convince the electorate that Sunak is the man to change their fortunes.
Take as evidence the far more muted reaction to allegations that a Labour candidate had also been embroiled. 24 hours after the Labour Party had announced they were suspending the candidate immediately, the story has already moved on. There is currently no momentum behind a Labour corruption narrative, so the story isn’t sticking.
By comparison, the narrative about Tory moral bankruptcy has built up, as Finkelstein points out, over the lost 5 or 6 years. Brick by brick. Story by story. This is hard to shift.
The distinction between ‘long campaigns’ vs ‘short campaigns’
You might have realised by now that the headline was intentionally a little puckish. Of course campaigns are not pointless. There are, after all, a number of campaigns in recent times which have successfully challenged dominant narratives – ‘Me Too’ and ‘Vote Leave’, to name a couple.
In fact, apart from paradigm-shifting events like 9/11 or the Covid pandemic, a campaign is often your best chance of shifting a dominant narrative in a relatively peaceful way.
The point I am making here is that it needs to be the right kind of campaign.
In most countries (apart from the US), electoral campaigns involve intense bursts of activity over a short period of time. This is often what policy experts think of when we talk about ‘campaigns’. What is more rarely accounted for is the longer period of low-level activity which precedes the short burst of intense activity – which is often just as important if not more.
The distinction between both periods of activity is formally recognised in UK law, in that they are subject to different spending rules. They are defined as:
the ‘short campaign’ – i.e. a period of about 1-3 months between Parliament being dissolved and polling day; and
the ‘long campaign’ – i.e. a longer period of about a year preceding the short campaign and leading up to polling day.
When Finkelstein said the cause of Conservatives’ woes was not “the campaign” but the events of the last 5 or 6 years – he was specifically taking about the ‘short campaign’.
A short campaign’s success often requires a long campaign
No matter how good Sunak’s short campaign might be, he argued, it would never be enough to change the course of a dominant narrative of Conservative moral bankruptcy. Success in this regard is outside of his control.
What was in his control, however, was the possibility of building a narrative in the 18 months leading up to polling day portraying the Conservative Party as the solution.
From a narrative point of view, his best option would have been to repudiate Johnson and Truss, positioning himself as a break from their form of conservatism of (‘it’s time for a change’). It would not have guaranteed success, but it would have given him his best chance.
Instead, he banked on economic recovery and immigration control (‘we’re on the right track’). This could have been a strong narrative if reality had backed him up. But politically, putting all his eggs in the basket of two intractably vast challenges – which ultimately he had limited control over – left him a hostage to fortune.
Inevitably, the only narrative left for his campaign was ‘better the devil you know’ – which required not just doubt in the alternative (the Labour Party), but trust in his offer (Sunak’s Conservative Party).
The seeds of Sunak’s political failure were sown long before the short campaign, which kicked off when he called the election. What he needed was to plot his long campaign some time ago – less glamorous than the short campaign no doubt, but persistent, resolute and ultimately more impactful.
Policy communicators should consider ‘long campaigns’
The distinction between short and long campaigns is a useful metaphor for policy communicators. While short campaigns can drive a message home, they can only be effective if the campaign harnesses a narrative that already resonates.
Long campaigns, however, offer the chance to challenge competing narratives, and lay the tracks for a narrative which can drive a short campaign to success. The long campaign is where the Overton window is shifted. And the timescale for these changes is typically counted in months and years, rather than weeks.
Policy experts looking should think in terms of long campaigns to prepare the ground to effect policy change, and short campaigns to drive the message home. A report launch may serve the purpose of the short campaign, but more fundamental change requires long-term planning.