Originally Posted by Chris

Way back before the 1997 general election I covered the Wirral South by election for the paper I worked on. I was based in a different office but they needed extra staff because this was a big one - a by-election just months before a GE which Labour was expected to win, and the only question was by how much. Wirral South was seen as a dry run and a harbinger. T Blair was in town and I was called in because I’m from Wirral so I knew the lay of the land.

As the day went on there were press releases flying about from all parties, and I gleefully picked on one in which the Tories crowed over Blair holding a press conference in a pub called the Cheshire Cat. Cue one-liners about big smiles with nothing substantial behind them, etc etc etc. I thought I’d written a very clever piece about that, but the editor fired it straight back and boomed across the room words to the effect of, “You need to have another go at that. All that stuff about the pub is just hot air. Your real story is buried about halfway down”.

He was right, of course. Journalists and political junkies love to snigger at what these days we would call memeable content but they tend to obfuscate the real story. The wet press conference, the staged warehouse Q&A, the Titanic walkabout are all inept, but what really gives the game away is the thing nobody’s talking about nearly as much, which is that at the time the election was called around 100 local associations hadn’t chosen a candidate. That represents a failure of national leadership, a failure of communication between central office and local associations, and perhaps most troubling of all for CCHQ it is evidence of rotting at the roots. Back in the day I was accustomed to getting press releases from prospective parliamentary candidates well over a year before the latest possible election date in 1997. It’s a key part of ongoing campaigning and name recognition. And clearly it hasn’t been happening. They are in big, big trouble.