This week in Brexitland, April 4, 2024

A look into the Tories’ general election campaign strategy, one which is so bad, they could do even worse than the polls suggest they will as a result

This is from the April 2, 2024 edition of inews, a story by Hugo Guy and Richard Vaughan:

The Conservatives are committed to a strategy which now looks remarkably ambitious known as “80:20” – targeting resources on 80 marginal seats already held by the party, and 20 more that it could take from Labour, the Liberal Democrats or the SNP. To keep their majority in Parliament, the Tories would need to keep at least half of those key 80 – something polls now suggest is very unlikely.

“Conservative Campaign Headquarters (CCHQ) say they are sticking with the 80:20 strategy because they have to – if they didn’t there would be an outcry,” an MP told i. “But certain seats are certainly not getting the resources they would like.”

When I first read that snippet on Twitter a couple of days ago, I assumed it must be from an older story, one at least pre-2024. When I found out that the Tories are still on course to pursue such a daft strategy, my heart sank a little. The most successful political party in history might really be about to die.

I know most of you reading this hate the Conservative party and it’s hard to blame you for that. They deserve to be annihilated for Brexit, Johnson and Truss alone, never mind many other failings. But I worry sometimes about the future of British politics if they get smashed as badly as some predictions now suggest. And if they follow the 80:20 strategy during the election campaign, they will be maximising the chances of that happening.

Let’s dig into it a little. Crawley is the 80th most vulnerable Tory seat by my reckoning. It’s a classic swing seat, having been Labour during the Blair period and Tory since 2010. The MP there is a chap named Henry Smith. And I’ll tell you what, if Henry Smith keeps this seat for the Conservative party at the general election, it will be a miraculous event. Which isn’t to say it won’t happen - it’s just that if it does, it will be a freak occurrence which massively bucks the national trend. Same goes for the 79 seats more vulnerable than Crawley - they will all go Labour unless something extraordinary occurs.

Okay, rewind - the Tories don’t have to put resource into the 80 most vulnerable seats in the name of an 80:20 strategy. They could write off, say, the most marginal 30, 40, 50, whatever and then say they’ll defend further up the line. Okay, what’s the 130th most vulnerable Tory seat at the moment then? By my reckoning, that’s Stafford. Here’s another classic swing seat, red during the New Labour era, Tory since 2010. A healthy majority of almost 15k in 2019 - but again, if the polls are even close to being right, Stafford is going to Labour. Almost for certain. However much campaigning time and money the Tories plug into the seat.

All right then, where should the Tories draw the line if not Stafford? This isn’t the right question to ask because the 80:20 strategy is so deeply, fundamentally flawed. They need to rip up 80:20 entirely. The strategy they should probably pursue instead is this: take the 50 safest seats. Bank those. Perhaps even this is foolhardy given the state of the polls, but I think the Conservative party has to figure that if they no longer have even 50 impossible to lose seats nationwide, the party is well and truly over. This done, they should then put everything they have into the next 100 more vulnerable seats with a view to holding somewhere between 150 and 200 if all goes very well. This is their best case scenario as things stand.

And I haven’t even come to the maddest bit of the 80:20 strategy, which is the “20” bit. Which 20 seats are the Tories thinking they have a chance of taking off of Labour at the general election? The 20th most “vulnerable” Labour seat is Newport West and Islwyn. This is a new constituency, but it is made up largely of the current Newport West seat. This was held by Labour in a by-election held in April of 2019, one of the more, shall we say, vulnerable times for the Labour Party in its recent history, and then held at the 2019 general election several months later.

If Labour managed to keep this area in the depths of their Corbyn-induced torpor, do the Tories really think putting resource in to try and win it with Sunak’s bunch polling in the mid to early 20s is a great idea? Apparently so.

The Conservative party are going to lose the next general election. They could lose it a lot less badly and give themselves a chance to bounce back reasonably quickly if they talk themselves out of the idea that they are going to hold Crawley or take seats in South Wales off of Labour this time round. If they focus on where they could possibly make an actual difference, they might minimise the pain they have to absorb. Yet I say this knowing they aren’t going to do that. They will almost certainly pursue the 80:20 strategy into the void.

Thanks for reading. If you haven’t subscribed, please do and I’ll be back next week with the worst of Brexit.