Knowing your audience

What we can learn about Tory members from the messages the Tories send them

Political parties are often wrong, but they’re rarely stupid. That means that when political parties say or do things that look wrong and stupid, it’s best to assume that they’re not as stupid as they look - even if they might be as wrong as they look.

For example, the Tories’ latest slogan for attacking the Labour Party, which they’ve used again and again since the start of 2024, is that Labour will take Britain “back to square one”.¹ This looks stupid: after all, things are self-evidently worse now, on a wide range of metrics from NHS waiting lists to interest rates to the cost of living, than they were a decade ago, or two decades ago. A lot of voters would like a lot of things to be the way they were before. See for example this encounter last month between Rishi Sunak and a voter who asks why he can’t make the NHS “all go back to how it used to be”. There are worse places to go than back.

As an attack line, “Keir Starmer would take us back to square one” might be flawed, but it’s probably not stupid, and it’s probably got some evidence behind it. I’d expect it to have tested relatively well with some of the Tories’ target voters, at least compared to some other options (don’t forget that in a world in which the Conservatives are 15-20 points behind Labour, most attack lines are probably suboptimal).

In particular, it’s worth thinking about who it’s actually aimed at: presumably the Tories’ most important target voters, who are likely to be people who voted for them last time, are considering voting Labour or not voting this time, but are still unsure about Labour, probably because of a combination of worries about their plans and bad memories of previous Labour governments, and who might conceivably come back. This target group isn’t enough to win the Tories the election, but they’re straightforwardly doomed without them. If you’re the kind of voter who mocks “back to square one”, then it probably wasn’t aimed at you in the first place.

Lots of political communication isn’t aimed at you, or me. For example, I regularly receive Conservative Party communications that aren’t aimed at me because, half a lifetime ago, I signed up to their supporters’ mailing list, and I haven’t unsubscribed even though it isn’t my job to look at this stuff any more.² And I’ve noticed something quite interesting in a lot of the messages the Tories send their own supporters. For example, here’s an email from Conservative Party Chairman Richard Holden last Friday, following the Kingswood and Wellingborough by-elections:

Here’s a fundraising appeal from January, signed “CCHQ Updates”:³

Here’s another post by-election defeat email - there are a lot of these, these days - after Tamworth and Mid Bedfordshire in October:

And here’s a fundraising email from former Conservative Party Chairman Greg “I am CCHQ” Hands, immediately after Keir Starmer’s Labour Party Conference speech:

Have you noticed what all of these emails have in common, which most of the Tories’ more public-facing communications lack? It’s that they all make a point of referring to Labour’s Deputy Leader Angela Rayner. And what we can deduce from this is that the Tories think, almost certainly rightly, that their most committed supporters - their members and the people who have signed up to receive supporter emails - particularly dislike Angela Rayner, and are particularly motivated by the idea of stopping her getting into power.

In this respect, Conservative supporters are not like the country. Focus groups carried out by my employer, Public First,⁴ have increasingly found voters talking positively and unprompted about Rayner, “Britain’s most popular politician”, saying they liked her straightforward, honest manner. It is not entirely clear what Conservative members find so objectionable in a working class woman with a strong regional accent who left school at 16 as a single mum but went on to build a successful political career while retaining a reputation for straight-talking honesty, but whatever it is it doesn’t appear to be shared by the general public. The Conservatives know that their strongest supporters dislike Rayner, so they point to her in supporter-facing comms. But they know that normal voters don’t, so they mention her a lot less in public-facing comms. In both cases, they are following the evidence.

Here’s another party supporter-facing graphic designed to motivate donations to the Conservative Party. Again, we can assume that the Tories have some evidence of what messages, and which Labour politicians, most motivate their members and supporters to donate:

Keir Starmer is there. He has to be there, he’s the leader. But there’s Angela Rayner again. And there’s Emily Thornberry, the Shadow Attorney General - an important role, but arguably not in the top three most senior roles in the Labour Party. Why is Emily Thornberry there? The most obvious answer is that the Conservatives have identified her as one of the Labour politicians most likely to motivate their strongest supporters to donate to keep out of office. Thornberry, like Rayner, provokes Tories; both are rewarded by Tories being provoked by them. In Thornberry’s case, this consists of things like Tories being unable to resist referring to her as “Lady Nugee” (a title to which Thornberry is entitled by virtue of her marriage, but which she chooses not to use).⁵

Why is Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves not there, despite her seniority? The most obvious answer is that she doesn’t rank with Angela Rayner and Emily Thornberry as someone that Conservative supporters want to keep out of power. And given her focus on economic credibility and reassurance and not being provocative that’s good news, I think, for Rachel Reeves.

Lots of political communications aren’t aimed at you. But if you assume that political parties aren’t stupid, then political communications that aren’t aimed at you can tell you a lot about the people they are aimed at.

1. The article I linked to just there includes the line “In an indication of how bitter and personal this year’s election campaign could be, Mr Sunak told voters in Accrington, Lancashire: ‘The alternative is Keir Starmer, who would just take us back to square one’.” If you think that’s bitter and personal, just wait until you start following politics.

2. Of all the dark arts of political attack, giving the other side your contact details so that they voluntarily send you their stuff is surely the least dark.

3. They address me as “Sir/Madam” because, I guess, I didn’t give them my name when I signed up. It means that every time they email me I read it in the voice of an over-attentive waiter.

4. Not, I should say, carried out by me.

5. Referring to Emily Thornberry as Lady Nugee falls foul of the Quentin Letts rule: if something is the kind of thing Quentin Letts would write, don’t write it.