AT A cocktail bar in a city near you there lurks a loft-living single woman on whom the future of the Conservatives depends, and she doesn’t even know it.

Her identity and importance to the Tory party has come as a complete surprise, discovered only as a result of using the most sophisticated computer technology yet deployed in a British election.

Forget Mondeo Man or Worcester Woman, those crude labels of bygone campaigns. The Tories are on first-name terms with this group as well as knowing exactly where its members live, which supermarket they shop at, where they go on holiday and, most importantly, which issues are most likely to make them turn Tory. According to Liam Fox, the party’s co-chairman, who bought the software from America, it will revolutionise the way elections are fought.

“We have to get away from this arrogance in politicians, that they decide what the voters should hear,” Dr Fox said. “Previously we decided a central message. Now we can conduct bespoke campaigning.”

What Dr Fox is most excited about is the way that the Voter Vault software has revealed whole new swaths of society that the party had not targeted before, because it never knew they could be persuaded to vote Tory. Now Conservatives can pinpoint members of four groups that they must convert if they are to win. None of them is the middle-class, middle-aged Tory of stereotype, and two are highly unexpected: twenty-something members of the cool urban elite that marketers call “Urban Intelligence” and nicknamed Ben and Chloe; and, at the other end of the spectrum, the “Community Ties”, families living in deprived former mining and dock towns who felt betrayed by Margaret Thatcher, nicknamed Lee and Noreen.

“The Tory party has allowed itself to become characterised by the seats we hold, not by the seats we need to win to form a government,” Dr Fox said.

The program uses the detailed information held on the UK’s 23 million households by the marketing company Experion, available for use by groups such as supermarkets and junk-mailers — or the Government.

Most of it comes from the 2001 Census but also includes information from the Electoral Roll, consumer credit activity, council tax information, the shareholder’s register and about 400 other bits of information, such as magazine subscriptions and store cards.

Most of this data is protected — so the Conservatives will not know exactly what brand of cat food a woman at a given address buys; but they will know that the woman belongs to a very distinct lifestyle group who share the same views.

The next stage is testing these profiles against known Conservative voters and information gathered by local party activists canvassing door to door. In this way the program can learn very accurately what makes a person likely to vote a particular way.

Ben or Chloe may think of themselves as non-partisan, but their every lifestyle choice gives them a political DNA the party will be able to decode.

The system was adapted from the database used by President Bush’s team to win a second term. For the past three months Dr Fox has toured 162 of 168 Tory target seats, explaining to each where each of the four types live in their area, and how the party should be targeting them. If they can win Ben and Chloe’s vote, the Tories may just have a chance of winning back the inner cities.

Dr Fox is encouraged by the fact that Urban Intelligence have been the biggest growth group of those joining the party since Michael Howard took over, bringing the average age of new members down to 41. “They’re a very interesting group, economically conservative but socially liberal,” he said. “We know they’re more concerned about crime but less about Europe, and they worry about education rather than asylum and immigration.”

However, Central Office has a long way to go before it wins them over. Research shows that in the past the Urban Intelligence group has been more likely to vote Labour, and the Community Ties have highly emotional historical reasons not to vote Conservative. As the people of Wakefield, one of the Tories’ target towns pointed out, why should they vote for the party that destroyed their communities?

Ben and Chloe

How many: 7 per cent of households
Where: mostly in inner London and the inner areas of large provincial cities, especially those with popular universities.
Who: single, no children, lives alone, 25-34, lived in house for less than one year.
Graduate Job: professional
Household income: £50,000+
Type of property: purpose built flats, privately rented
House value: £195,000
Supermarket: branches of urban “local” supermarkets
Holiday: weekend mini-breaks booked on internet
Media: internet

Lee and Noreen

How many: 16 per cent of households
Where: common in former coalfield regions, in old steel and shipbuilding towns and places with docks and chemical plants.
Who: married, age 25-44, children, lived in house for more than nine years. No qualifications
Job: manufacturing/mining
Household income: £13,500 — £24,999
Type of property: terraced houses owned with mortgage
House value: £94,000
Holidays: self-catering, package
Supermarket: Asda, Morrisons
Media: Mirror, The Sun

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