Hill+Knowlton Strategies

The debates are over. Now is the time for decisions to be made. So says the Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

His fear though must be that the voters have already decided. Their minds are already made up. And what they seem to have decided whoever it is who will run Britain it won’t be Gordon Brown.

No one believed that the debates would be the forum in which the PM would flourish, but in the last one he had to. Nothing suggests that the public feel he did.

Now the Labour campaign have less than a week to find a way to reach out to the one in four voters who say they have yet to make up their minds. The question is how.

David Cameron hasn’t flourished in the debates as some thought he would, but he has done enough it seems. This has not been a triumphant march to Downing Street for the Conservatives, partly thanks to the surprise effect of Nick Clegg.

But there is just the sense that they are beginning to inch their way to a meaningful gap over their opponents.

Yes the holy grail of a 40 per cent share of the vote seems far away, but leads of two and three per cent are now regularly turning into leads of five and seven points in some polls.

If Labour and the LibDems fade, in an election when the contest seems genuinely three way, the Conservatives could pick up seats more easily than they expected without the scale of swing that was described when it looked like a two horse race.

The last seven days are going to be the hard yards of this campaign as all three main parties try to grind out votes.

For Labour at the moment it looks like a battle for survival – they may be all but guaranteed to be second in the number of seats but to come third in the popular vote would be devastating.

Clegg’s LibDems need to ensure that this election doesn’t turn into a psyche-scarring false dawn. They are likely to fade a little, but are unlikely to get a chance like this again to grasp second place.

And for David Cameron, his own personal survival is at stake. Many within his own party will question how he cannot win an outright majority in these circumstances – and unpopular PM, a party in office for 13 years, the worst recession for 60 years and then the expenses scandal.

If he fails to win a majority we can expect to be back at the polls within 12 months, but there will be many in his party who will feel they might need a new leader for that election if he fails to convince in this one.

The questions in the final week are these. Can the Conservatives do enough for outright victory? Will the Labour vote collapse to make that easier for them? And can Nick Clegg stop his vote softening and regain momentum?

And all of this in an election where the Governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, has said that the party that wins is likely to be out for a generation because of all the unpopular things they will have to do to straighten the nation’s finances.

A good election to lose? No one in the leadership of the three parties will think so. And then there is the question of how badly it is lost.

This election has been the most dramatic and unpredictable for decades. Predictions now are risky.

But unless there is a dramatic shift, it looks like this election might just be the first in a pair.

And how the bond markets react to that will determine the futures of the parties – and the futures of millions of Britons.

We promised yesterday to assess the fallout from #bigotgate and the impact it might have, so here we go:

The Heartbeat graph below details recent Twitter activity referencing the three party leaders and suggests Gillian Duffy did indeed have a big impact online.

Is this the moment the election turned?

We’ll analyse the fallout in a Heartbeat post tomorrow.

Webmongs, I won’t lie to you – I am having what fat, sweaty policemen from 1970s detective shows would legitimately refer to as ‘a rough one’ (quite possibly whilst mopping their sweaty forehead with a gingham handkerchief – repeated attempts to find an image to accompany this phrase have proved fruitless, but I can now safely say that I do not recommend Googling “fat sweaty police chief” with Safe Search turned off).

Despite this, my dedication to bringing you the very best some stuff I found online this week continues unwavering. Not least because this post marks the 10th anniversary of this (in)glorious experiment in exactly how much rubbish one can get away with churning out in the name of ‘work’. That’s right – you’ve now had 10 weeks of this crap. It probably feels like longer.

To celebrate this momentous milestone, I would like to run a competition. That’s right, YOU CAN WIN A PRIZE. Just leave a comment at the bottom of this post, telling me something interesting. The person who posts the thing which I like best will win…a book. One of my books, to be precise (I’ll try and make an appropriate choice depending on who it is). I might even throw in some other stuff too, depending on what I’ve got knocking around at home.

I’ve just reread that – effectively what I’m offering you is a random choice of second-hand novel and possibly some other miscellaneous, used tat. This is a rubbish competition. Sorry.To make up for this, here’s some links and words:

Read the rest of this entry »

Day two in the Big Election House and no one got evicted.

The pressure was on David Cameron who, had he put in a performance as poor as the first debate, would certainly have been on the way out. Instead he pulled out a strong performance which keeps him in touch with Nick Clegg who breezed through again.

And Gordon Brown? He certainly took risks. Admitting his weakness in presentation and asking the public to vote for him even if they don’t like him was brave. He was better, he didn’t win but he kept himself in the game.

Which all sets up the third crucial debate next Thursday.

This is the talent game show meets the mini-series. Three debates on consecutive Thursdays followed up by a 12 hour special the following week when the winner – or winners – or indeed multiple losers – will be revealed.

This will be a test of not just whether the political system will change but also the media landscape. The Tory press are battering Nick Clegg. If the public stick with him their power will have been enormously undermined.

The first debate hugely influenced tactics for the second and what will be fascinating is how the second influences tactics for the crucial third.

Cameron had learned from the Clegg play book, and indeed so had Brown. The key was to make it one candidate against two. A three party race perhaps, but with each party trying to make this election a binary choice.

So it was Cameron’s change against Clegg and Brown on the left. Clegg against the ‘two old parties’. Brown’s experience against the naivety of his two younger opponents.

That seems to be a test which Clegg is still best placed to win.

All the leaders can claim to have had their moments in the debate and that is reflected in the polls. The LibDems and Tories are neck and neck, but Labour are also back in touch and back in the game.

Labour will hope that the economy is where Gordon Brown can triumph in the last debate and come across as stability as people to the part of the campaign when they tend to vote with their wallets not their hearts.

Cameron will hope that his voice of change will be more compelling than Clegg’s.

Both Cameron and Brown have a momentum of sorts after the debate but Clegg showed he had resilience.

But this election still looks like the most astonishing game of political Russian roulette we have seen in modern times. If the Conservatives don’t win they could go into melt down. If we end up with a LibDem/Labour coalition, electoral reform could end the Tories chances of ever forming a majority government.

If Labour come third their survival could be in question.

Can Nick Clegg keep it up and could he win the popular vote and claim to have the biggest mandate to be PM in a hung parliament?

This is arguably the biggest tv cliffhanger since Dallas and the question ‘who shot JR?’

The thing is we are not quite sure who is getting shot yet……

Ahead of the second leaders’ debate tonight, Paul Sinclair analyses the impact of ‘Cleggmania’ to date, asks what Gordon Brown and David Cameron have to do to redress the balance in their favour, and discusses what we can expect to see from all three leaders as the campaign enters the final two weeks.

In advance of the second leaders’ debate on Sky later today, a quick analysis on Heartbeat shows that none of the parties have taken a decisive lead on foreign affairs issues such as the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan or Europe online. The graphics below demonstrate that references to the parties and these issues respectively are experiencing peaks and troughs in tandem and in relatively low numbers too.

This, I think, demonstrates to an extent that discussion on real policy issues is being stifled in favour of personality and that the parties’ are failing to differentiate themselves on these issues to the electorate.

The Lib Dems are on top, we assume this is because of their success following the last leaders’ debate. It will be interesting to see if they can stay there and if any specific issues peak after this evening’s debate.  

Incidentally, the dramatic rise of Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats following the last debate is captured perfectly in the graph below.

Let’s see if tonight’s debate has anything like the impact of the first.

Apart from the hint that most political commentators don’t really like the public, the commentariat have been fairly explicit in what they think this election is about.

It is the Pop Idol election. Thanks to the LibDems bounce in the polls after the first TV debate, the election has been turned into a gameshow. Can Nice Nick make it through the next two weeks?

I would put it a slightly different way. This is the ‘F*** you’ election. The public seem to dislike the Prime Minister and they don’t much like David Cameron. They want to punish someone for the MPs’ expenses, the bankers and the fact that we are in for tough times ahead. They want to punish them. They just didn’t know how until now.

The debates meant they saw for the first time a guy they didn’t really know. Nick Clegg didn’t win the debate with a great argument, or a clever line. He won it by sounding like the public and not being Brown or Cameron.

The polls suggest to me the public are saying: “We are going to vote for him ‘cos it will really f*** you two.”

That makes Clegg almost impossible to attack. His new support isn’t built on policy or ideas – however good they are – it is primarily built on the fact he is not the other two and sounds credible. He appears apolitical and therefore if the political establishment beat him up in the usual way it might only boost his credibility.

It is like a teenager realising that everything their disapproving parents say about their girl/boy friend is true but still going out with them anyway to piss ma and pa off. Nothing they say will then change their behaviour.

I am not saying the public are teenagers – they are the boss. But maybe they are sick of being treated like children and this is the best way available to them to make a point.

As we blogged last week, the Public Affairs team here at H&K is using a new tool developed by Sysomos called Heartbeat to track the online fortunes of the political parties during the General Election campaign.

Today, we ask what the impact of Nick Clegg winning the first Election debate and enjoying the subsequent surge in media interest has been from an online perspective.

In a nutshell, Clegg’s performance had a dramatic impact online. As can be seen from the graph below, the Liberal Democrats leapt into first place in terms of mentions following the debate. And even more importantly for them, they’ve stayed there ever since. By contrast, the Conservatives trajectory has continued steadily downward from the day before the debate onwards.

This surge is even more profound when we focus in on the party leaders themselves. Mentions of Nick Clegg were already growing in anticipation of the debate, but following his performance, his online profile soared.

What’s harder to analyse though is the surge in mentions for Gordon Brown. Some of this, we assume, will be discussion of the Icelandic volcano incident and the American probe into Goldman Sachs. 

Finally, a lot has been made of this year’s Election being the first ‘digital election’. The debate was watched by just under 10 million people, but how much impact did it make online via the likes of Twitter? Tweetminster reported that around 35,500 people tweeted during the debates, leading to an average of 29 tweets per second over the 90 minutes. What’s perhaps even more interesting though, is what happened the day after.

A quick scan using Heartbeat reveals the number of tweets referencing David Cameron, Gordon Brown and Nick Clegg were fairly similar on the day of the debate, all peaking at around 4,500. However, whilst Brown and Cameron then went backwards the following day, Clegg enjoyed something like a 40% rise in tweets, going through the 6,200 mark. His party were also quick to make the most of the new online interest in their leader, quickly adopting the ‘iagreewithnick’ hashtag and changing their Twitter profile picture to this phrase as well.

So what does this all mean for the next few days of the campaign? The fightback by the Conservatives and, to a lesser extent, Labour has already begun. The next debate is also only two days away, presenting Clegg with the challenge of how to match last week’s performance. Equally, it presents David Cameron in particular with the horrible job of trying to burst the Clegg bubble without turning personal and aggressive – exactly the kind of politics that the public is rejecting.

Earlier today, I spoke to Catherine Cross, Head of Media Training at H&K, on last night’s Election debate and the performance of the three party leaders. Here are Catherine’s thoughts…