Why Labour should learn from Boris Johnson and Donald Trump instead of trying to reclaim the centre ground

“Smell the coffee”, Lord Ashcroft’s report on the Conservatives’ 2005 election defeat, has the status of a small classic. Like Theresa May’s 2002 “nasty party” speech, or David Cameron’s 2006 proscription of “banging on about Europe”, it is remembered as a milestone in the Conservative Party’s journey back to electability.

For as long as the Tories obsessed about immigration and the EU, Ashcroft warned, they were damned to appeal only to a rump of older and working class voters, while actively putting off the aspirational metropolitans they needed to win. This week, Ashcroft has published “Diagnosis of Defeat”, professing to offer a similar wake up call to Labour post–Jeremy Corbyn.

In fact, this isn’t new. After the 2010 and 2015 elections, “Smell the coffee” was already being borrowed as the title of op eds about Labour, while political science professors reflected sagely that it was now the left’s turn to take Ashcroft’s advice, regain economic credibility, and take back the centre ground.

The report’s other influence was on the obsession with polling that now provides mood music to British politics – both in the anxious triangulations of parties and the oscillation from apprehension to elation among party activists whenever the many polling Twitter accounts tweets.

In 2015, the Economist speculated that the regular polls which Ashcroft has paid for and then published ever since his landmark report were “in a way, making him more influential” than when he was merely a controversial donor and Deputy Chair of the Conservative Party. “Labour strategists”, the profile noted, “are addicted to them”.

Though granting Labour a respectable enough vote share, the 2019 election returned the party to prewar levels of parliamentary seats. As Ashcroft suggests, many Labour members’ priorities are as alien to the wider electorate as those of Tory members in 2005. Is the solution for the losing party, then, the same as it ever was – to face facts, smell the coffee and become more like the winning one?

Much of the detail of Ashcroft’s report will actually come as no surprise to most Corbynites. That the leadership made a huge error in caving in to middle class liberals over Brexit is the orthodoxy of the Corbynite faithful. That Corbyn was personally unpopular they are painfully aware, though the media demolitions of Brown and Miliband in their time lends more credence to Labour members’ blaming of the existing media than Ashcroft allows. The persistence, meanwhile, of justified complaints about New Labour’s indifference to inequality, along with unjustified ones about Gordon Brown “selling the gold”, should give pause to those who think the solution is to re-embrace the legacy of New Labour.

The major problem with “Smell the coffee” style analyses, however, is that the original wasn’t even right about the Conservatives. While the “heir to Blair” Cameron fared better against a crash wounded Labour than Michael Howard did, it was only when the party identified itself with the kind of base-pleasing red meat Ashcroft counselled against (an In/Out referendum in 2015, “Get Brexit Done” in 2019) that it actually won majorities.

What “Smell the coffee” couldn’t anticipate and “Diagnosis of Defeat” misses, in other words, is how the political upsets of Brexit and Donald Trump’s election victory in 2016, or even Labour’s surprise advances in 2017, show the unpredictable power of a motivated base and an anti-establishment programme. Even if it seems to represent a politics Ashcroft himself would warn only a minority care about, such a prospectus can clearly become the new common sense very quickly.

While the Ashcroft of “Smell the coffee” is remembered as a socially liberal moderniser, that of “Diagnosis of Defeat” is more akin to the spate of would be populist culture warriors who have come to prominence since Brexit, complaining about “woke culture” and transgender pronouns, while proposing that Labour needs to get tough on immigration.

Ashcroft’s analysis, then, has finally arrived at the logic of the polling industry in general: inviting us to assume that people’s momentary opinions work as a predictor of what they will always be. In this he joins commentators such as Matthew Goodwin and Eric Kaufmann, who have read in Brexit and Trump an articulation of the eternal values of those who prefer order over change (socially conservative “somewheres” as opposed to freewheeling liberal “anywheres”). In fact, of those Americans who described their vote in 2016 as a vote for change, the vast majority were Trump voters; while in 2017, 16% of former UKIP voters switched to Corbyn.

For all such commentators’ invocation of intransient socially conservative values, ours is a moment where voters are mainly notable for their ability to change their minds. This is sometimes noted by Ashcroft’s polled subjects, who “above all […] were at pains to point out that they would take each election as it comes”. It is only by repudiating Ashcroft’s advice to become more centrist that the Tories have finally won a powerful majority. Labour should do the same with “Diagnosis of Defeat”.