LYNTON CROSBY’S business card carries an Ancient Greek saying: “When you give advice seek to help, not to please.”
The plain-speaking Australian has been living by this code since he was appointed in October by Michael Howard to revive Conservative Party fortunes.
As a hired gun from Down Under, where he ruthlessly masterminded four successive victories for John Howard, Mr Crosby, 48, has already shown that he feels no compunction to crawl to the boss for his six-figure salary. The first stage in a rapid induction process was to size up the Tory leader to work out exactly how he was going to sell him to the British public.
For the first time since he took over the party a year ago, Mr Howard heard some blunt home truths. “People in Howard’s office were just telling him what he wanted to hear and we were getting nowhere,” one party insider said yesterday. “There was no way Lynton was going to do that.
“It was also a managerial mistake to have two party chairmen who did not get on from the start. The morale of the backroom boys is definitely higher now and Lynton really does seem to know something about how to win elections.”
Such a commodity has been in short supply within the offices of successive Tory leaders over recent years. Aides accept that Mr Crosby may not be able to do what he did for Mr Howard’s namesake in Australia in 1996, namely beat a younger, more popular and more charismatic Labour incumbent seemingly way ahead just months before the election. But he can help the Conservatives to do better.
One of the first changes he made since arriving here in a full-time role, is to rename Conservative Central Office as Conservative Campaigning HQ. In contrast to Lord Saatchi, the party co-chairman he usurped as election supremo, he spends long hours in the office and attends several party functions every weekend. He is understood to have told Mr Howard that Lord Saatchi’s approach was 20 years out of date.
He has also seized control of Voter Vault software, bought from the US Republicans by the other Tory co-chairman, Liam Fox. Mr Crosby has pointed out that this is not much better than useless unless it is supplemented with further information allowing the party to identify and target swing voters in marginal seats, the tactic he used to rebuild John Howard’s powerbase in Australia. The Times has learnt that in the next stage of the process Mr Crosby will be taking his message around the country with a tour in January of the seats he means to win.
Mr Crosby was invited over to Britain last year by Iain Duncan Smith and he impressed Michael Howard at a Shadow Cabinet awayday, when he set out how he had attacked Paul Keating, the former Labor Prime Minister of Australia, on the issue of trust.
He said: “Keating was a very clever politician. But Australia had grown tired of clever politicians and they were looking for someone more able to deliver on their promises. They liked that John Howard had a clear set of values and was essentially trustworthy and decent.” Already the Tories are endlessly pushing the line that “Tony Blair is all talk” and it seems that there are more personal attacks in the pipeline. Mr Crosby’s political instincts are on the tax-cutting Right but his real skill is in pinpointing and exploiting the precise issues that motivate people to vote.
In this he is assisted by his business partner, Mark Textor, a pollster who has also been advising the Tories. Mr Textor has been seen recently drinking with David Davis, the Shadow Home Secretary, in Westminster. His specialiaty is producing polling information on fast-moving campaign issues so that election literature can be adapted immediately.
At the height of Australian campaigns, Liberal Party media teams work on 24-hour cycles. Polling results at 4.30am showing a health issue causing concern among women would be followed by a 10am meeting of local politicians to agree a direct-mail shot to address the issue later that day.
Seen as the bad cop to Mr Crosby’s good cop, Mr Textor embraces “wedge politics”, which uses polling to expose underlying prejudices then sends out coded messages designed to appeal to the deeper beliefs.
A less subtle approach is the contentious technique of push-polling, in which supposedly independent pollsters spread negative propaganda about rival parties. Mr Textor and others paid damages of £34,000 to a defeated Australian Labor candidate in 1995 after it was suggested in polling material that she was in favour of abortion after nine months.
In the darkest example of the spinner’s art, John Howard’s re-election campaign in 2001 was scarred by an ugly row over claims that refugees on board a boat called Tampa, had thrown children into the sea to blackmail their way into Australia. The allegation has since been proved to be false but it inspired John Howard’s slogan in the closing days of the campaign: “We decide who will come into this country.”
As one Australian journalist observes: “Does Crosby fight dirty? Oh yes. The 2001 campaign was very divisive in this country, with accusations that Howard won it through racism and xenophobia.”
Another Crosby/Textor technique has been to operate “below the line”. They move the focus away from the national media with regional party bases pumping out election material raising fears, for example, of asylum-seekers moving into the neighbourhood. This approach could mean Michael Howard’s distinctive tones appearing on answerphones around the country during the forthcoming campaign, a method that Labour believes may contravene election laws.
The question now is whether his techniques will work in Britain, where voting is voluntary not compulsory as in Australia, and whether they will work with Michael Howard.
One Australian commentator who knows Mr Crosby well said: “Mr Howard will have to listen and act on his advice; otherwise it will not work. This is something they will have to build up quickly. He did not know Howard until recently. For this to work they have to be frank and honest friends.
“It worked for John Howard. But does Michael like being told what he is no good at? That will be the test.”
Additional reporting by Tom Baldwin, Philip Webster and Roger Maynard in Sydney
WHAT HE SAYS
“You are communicating in an environment where there is considerable scepticism and mistrust . . . therefore people look at motivation when assessing the messages they hear”
