Crewe and Nantwich win takes David Cameron much closer to Number 10

Telegraph ^ | May 23rd, 2008 | Iain Martin

[The_Republican]

It was a stunning night for David Cameron and his party with a majority of 7,860 and a swing of 17.6 per cent, well in excess of what the Tory leader's team expected. For Gordon Brown, a miserable morning will be followed by a rearguard operation this weekend aimed at preventing gloomy MPs going beyond their usual navel-gazing and slipping into full-blown rebellion and regicide.

The Tories appear slightly stunned, a demeanor they should persist with as voters will sniff the first whiff of Tory triumphalism and hate it. The party has no real frame of reference for a by-election win such as this and this morning is emerging blinking into the sunlight. For any Tory under the age of 45, success on such a scale is a sheer novelty.

So, Tory spinners gave their MPs going on TV to react to the result two simple messages. First, emphasise that their party is assembling a coalition - code for, look, all sorts of voters are now happy voting Tory in a way thought unthinkable just six months ago. They hope to make that momentum national. Second, play down the implications and say that the party is a long, long way from government. That's the attempt to avoid triumphalism.

How did the Tories do it? If Labour were in any doubt that the Conservatives now have a ruthless and efficient campaign machine in the making then they should probably grasp it this morning. Where Labour used to be brilliantly organised, it is now the Tory back-room team from CCHQ which is maturing into a killer political force.

The campaign was basic, and focused on a simple message. The Tories divided the seat into seven sectors, with five local offices and an HQ in four portacabins next to railway sheds in Crewe. Eric Pickles, the bluff MP, is getting much of the credit, but insiders say Stephen Gilbert probably deserves at least an equal share. Lord Ashcroft's polling and marginals wizard was the brains behind the scenes.

An MP described him in glowing terms and said that the honed nature of the campaign message meant that every activist knew the story.

"For the first time in a long time the Tories had a clear, consistent message. It was easy to inspire the activists on the ground because they knew what it was about. It was about sending a message to Gordon Brown."

In Number 10, there was no planning done on how to react to a Tory majority of this scale. A loss by a few thousand could be dressed up as merely a mild kicking over 10p but almost 8,000 is two thousand votes worse than even the gloomiest Labour people were predicting in the run up to voting. Older hands, not the incomers brought in by chief strategist Stephen Carter, will know this smells of electoral death. A detailed study of the result, according to a Tory campaign source, will "scare the hell out of them": working class voters in their thirties voted Tory. These are people who previously either did not vote or voted Labour. They feel squeezed, blame the government and have no interest in tribal loyalty of the type personified by Tamsin Dunwoody.

That the line of Labour ministers such as Harriet Harman this morning is that defeat was down to "international factors" shows she and others are a long way from even beginning to understand the nature of the reverse. The analysis insults the intelligence of voters and illustrates again, just as it was with the Tories in the 1990s, that politicians on the way down never grasp they would be much better saying the following: clearly people really hate us, what a kicking we got. We've got a lot of thinking to do, we'll reflect rather than pontificate.

Cameron flies off to the Scottish Tory conference today and will get a hero's welcome, emphasising the real significance of this by-election. Less than a year ago, Cameron was written off prematurely by too many when he was mired in the mess of Grammar schools and Rwanda. He learnt lessons, rebuilt from the wreckage and is assuming the role of PM in waiting. There is a long journey to the general election but in Crewe a giant leap has taken him much, much closer to Number 10.