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An ordinary beginning to an extraordinary campaign
Roland Watson
Political Editor
After asking the Queen to dissolve Parliament, Gordon Brown returned from Buckingham Palace to Downing Street and declared: “I come from an ordinary family in an ordinary town.” As the opening line of the 2010 general election, it was designed to draw attention to the privileged background of his Eton-educated Conservative rival, David Cameron. It ill served as a guide for what followed, though, which was, by any standards of modern British political history, extraordinary.
None of the three leaders had led their parties into a general election and each faced a monumental task. Mr Brown was seeking an historic fourth term for Labour against the backdrop of the deepest recession for 60 years. He was also looking to overcome the memory of the election-that-never-was in October 2007 when, five months after inheriting the job from Tony Blair and revving up Labour’s campaign machine, he ducked out of going to the country at the last moment.
Mr Cameron needed to achieve the biggest swing since the war to gain the 116 seats required for a Commons majority. His party had endured a jittery few months in which questions about its economic policy and a tightening in the polls fed off each other to spread deep unease through Tory ranks. He was beginning the campaign with a seven-point lead, well down from the double digits the Tories had enjoyed for most of the past year and not enough for an outright win.
Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat leader, needed to capitalise on the prospects of a hung Parliament. He also had the first televised debates between the leaders to look forward to. They would offer him a stage never before enjoyed by his predecessors: equal prime-time billing with his two rivals. Initially, though, the campaign conformed to type, focusing on the two established parties. Mr Cameron pre-empted Mr Brown’s return from the Palace to stage a rally on the south bank of the Thames, across from Westminster. Waving his finger at the Houses of Parliament, he vowed to “make people feel proud again of that building over there”. He was, he said, campaigning for “the Great Ignored”, a group that encompassed black, white, rich, poor, town and country folk. It was a slogan he ignored for the rest of the campaign.
The styles of the Tory and Labour campaigns differed starkly from the start. As Mr Cameron tore round the country on a leased private plane, Mr Brown made political capital out of financial necessity, travelling by rail in standard class. Labour had raised less than half the Tories’ £18 million war chest, and had spent much of it during the phoney war since the start of the year. Once at his campaigning destinations, Mr Brown rarely delivered speeches, preferring to meet small groups of voters in supermarket canteens or the living rooms of Labour supporters, fuelling questions about whether he was reaching swing voters. Mr Cameron, boasting a campaign team with a sharper eye for “optics”, was pictured repeatedly, sleeves rolled up, in warehouses or stock rooms surrounded by workers and clearly visible logos of well-known brands.
The contrast carried through to their manifestos, in which Labour offered a “smarter” State, the Tories a smaller one. Mr Brown unveiled a traditional-looking pitch in a newly built and soon-to-be-opened wing of a Birmingham hospital. It promised to tailor public services to people’s needs, giving them guarantees on rights of redress against schools, hospitals and police forces if services failed to reach certain standards.
The Tory manifesto was unusual and innovative, and not just for being presented in the semi ruins of Battersea power station. A hard-backed blue book on A5 paper titled An Invitation to Join the Government of Britain, it urged people to take more control over their workplaces, children’s schools and how they are policed and ruled, offering a glimpse of life in what Mr Cameron billed the Big Society.
Mr Clegg chose the City of London as his launch pad, an attempt to show that the party often criticised for having uncosted policies was serious about its finances. The signature policy was to raise the starting threshold for income tax from £6,500 to £10,000, costing £17 billion. The document even included tax tables at the back to show that the sums added up, calculations immediately disputed by Labour and the Tories.
The choice between an empowered individual in a smaller Tory State and a smarter Labour State that provided service guarantees offered the central intellectual dividing line, although both sides fought surprisingly shy of their offering on the stump. Instead, the debate revolved around the economy, in particular whether the £6 billion of immediate savings the Tories were proposing to make in Whitehall, and subsequently used to ease Labour’s proposed rise in national insurance contributions, would help or hinder the recovery.
So far, so normal. The campaign was turned on its head from the moment Mr Clegg stared into the cameras