When the exit polls came in on election night I saw the same reaction from everyone watching: total shock. Their astonishment was not at the projected hung Parliament we had all been expecting, or at the Tory lead over Labour, but at the thought that the Lib Dems, whose ascendancy had apparently been the story of the campaign, were actually going to lose seats. It was incredible. For weeks the media had been telling us we were into a new era of three party politics, that Nick Clegg’s personal popularity was unmatched by any post-war leader, that the Liberals, after ninety years in the political wilderness, were back. How could they have been so wrong?

Of course, the coalition deal means the 2010 election will still be remembered as a Liberal triumph, even though Clegg – and all those journalists who tied their colours to his mast – probably spent most of election night feeling like they’d been sold a pup. But when the next election comes, we would do well to remember that the final result turned out to be exactly what the polls were predicting at the time the election was called. The campaign – the manifestoes, the debates, the gaffes – changed nothing.

This is because the messages parties send out during the campaign reinforce the ideas people already have, rather than changing them. How could they do anything else? Campaigns are about playing safe and avoiding controversy, as exemplified by the contemptible strategy employed by all three parties of keeping their leaders from meeting real people. Election literature consists of a list of vacuous clichés and appallingly poor copy – every pamphlet I read contained incomprehensible syntax, and countless typos. Posters offer vague, forgettable platitudes.

Above all, so much of the campaign is negative. It baffles me why politicians do this. Negative campaigns almost always backfire. So many politicians and journalists are incapable of realising how easily the public can see through their smears. No-one except Sun journalists thought Gordon Brown misspelling Jacqui Janes’s name meant that he didn’t care about the troops in Afghanistan. Nobody except Sarah Palin believed Barack Obama’s acquaintance with Bill Ayers actually amounted to ‘palling around with terrorists.’

Negative attacks rebound by painting the purveyor as desperate and out of touch when they blow irrelevant issues out of all proportion: Labour’s fatuous obsession with Lord Ashcroft was so self-evidently hypocritical that it blew their opportunity to raise real, constructive questions about tax evasion and the Tories’ pro-business ideology. They also make their purveyors seems unlikeable. The pervasive idea of the Conservatives as the ‘nasty party’ was generated largely by their negative approach to the 1997, 2001, and 2005 elections: negative campaigns aren’t just about attacking the other side, but attacking and blaming anyone – the EU, immigrants, benefit fraudsters – in lieu of offering constructive ways of actually helping people.

The month long campaign that precedes each general election is always bathetic and always inconsequential. This may be because British election campaigns truly last for an entire Parliament, because of the adversarial nature of Parliamentary politics, and the conventions that come with having a formal opposition acting as a permanent government in waiting, making the final four-week run in fairly underwhelming. It’s also down to the unambitious attitude parties take to the formal campaigning, playing it safe – whether with fluffy platitudes, or by mudslinging – and seeming to think they have more to lose than to win. It’s because campaigns are so irrelevant that the swings apparently detected during a campaign, like the apparent Lib Dem ascendancy, always seem to prove illusory.

Filed under: conservatives, labour, libdems, ukpolitics on May 22nd, 2010