Take a two-party system. Drop it into a multi-connected, media frenzied world. And what you get is a system with two steady states and dramatic swings between the two.
When you’re in, you’re in big time. Everything goes your way. But once you’re on the slide, it’s a one way trip to the wilderness. This is the world of disruptive politics – where it can be better to lose well, than even to try to win.
Disruptive politics has one imperative: to change the terrain on which political battles are fought. The disruption results from the opponent’s inability to react. He fights the old battle and is utterly hapless as a result. You know what he is thinking, can predict how he will react, and anticipate his every move with ease.
Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair had instinctive mastery of disruptive politics. Neither was an intellectual colossus nor did they emerge from a vacuum. But, somehow, they had the skill to weave the threads of what was possible into a cloth that had a magical power to mystify their opponents.
The game was up for the Tories when Blair announced he was ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime.’ Yet many Conservatives still believed they could win the 1997 election. They simply didn’t believe that Blair was who he said he was or believed what he said he did. They were still in denial four years later, fighting ‘Phoney Tony’ – their own chimera – rather than the real Prime Minister. Thatcher had previously bewitched Old Labour just as successfully.
In the US of the 80s and 90s, Reagan and (Bill) Clinton sowed similar confusion. For two elections, Democrats fought a George Bush of their own invention. Next Hillary battled an Obama who didn’t exist. Now McCain is doing the same thing. Obama is a flip flopper. No, he’s a lightweight. Wait, did I tell you the one about him ignoring the troops?
It took Margaret Thatcher’s fall to snap the Labour vanguard out of its trance. The second Gulf War has had a similar effect on the Tories. It’s like a return to sobriety – time to rebuild in the cold light of day. The Democrats, meanwhile, were saved by a Deus ex machina. The candidate from nowhere who will, I believe, win convincingly in November and should go from there to a resounding victory in 2012.
So where does this leave the Labour Party? Has it lost both this election and the next one? Well, that depends on what it tries to do now.
Faced with a superior force, the most important thing is to control the manner in which you lose. (Think of how an effective insurgent melts away when a conventional army marches into town – all the better to regroup and seize back the momentum when the time is right).
Should Gordon Brown step down (and I have no opinion on whether he will or should), then the overriding focus of his successor should be to take the party into opposition in good shape.
That means:
- Calling a general election as quickly as possible (while you’re still in a honeymoon period).
- Aiming to win the campaign, even if there’s little chance you can win the vote (you want to go into election day on the up).
- Arriving on the opposition benches with momentum on your side and morale high.
What you shouldn’t do:
- Hold onto power to the bitter end (by which time the press are already speculating about your successor).
- Lose the campaign and the vote (doing worse than the pundits predicted).
- Arrive in opposition fit only to tear yourselves to pieces for the next five years.
It’s a tough course to take and one that will need selling to the party faithful. After all, the faithful would often prefer to die in a ditch than live to fight another day.
