This week represents a very specific moment in the calendar of political lies. It’s the point at which the standard dynamic is inverted and politicians start lying about how badly they are doing rather than how well they are doing. It sounds like honesty. In reality, it is the very pinnacle of dishonesty. It is the unique lie of expectation management at election time.
They’re at it right now. Conservative strategists are telling reporters that they’re braced to lose 800 seats across England, Wales and Scotland at the local elections on Thursday. Labour officials are downplaying their own fortunes, dismissing the perfectly legitimate idea that they could take Tory strongholds in London such as Wandsworth or Westminster.
This is how it always goes. For a brief period before polling day, politicians suddenly start insisting on how badly they are doing. Then the election is held, and, in the early hours of the following morning, they return to their usual script. It’s like a spell has been broken and they are restored to their previous form.
Expectation management is like an antibody which responds to a particular form of bacterial invasion in the body politic. That invasion is elections.
Midterm elections provide something which is very threatening to modern political communication. They provide data. Usually, politics is all about perception. It’s a messy business of briefing and counter-briefing, whispers in corners, leaks to the press and unnamed sources dripping poison into reporters’ ears. It’s a churning slush of attitude, assumption and aspiration. But then local elections come along. They are pure numbers. All the noise goes away for a moment, and you get a snapshot of something real.
The data is imperfect, of course. People vote for all sorts of reasons, on all sorts of different bases. Some vote on local matters, some on national. Some vote for a councillor, others for a party. Some vote one way in locals, then a different way at the general election. But regardless, there’s data to be had there – some of the best data we get about voter intentions between general elections.
The purpose of expectation management is to neutralise the impact of that data. It uses storytelling to blanket the brute reality of the numbers. It turns an Excel spreadsheet into a Word document.
The 2007 local elections provided a perfect encapsulation of this process. They were, in reality, immensely successful for the Conservatives and an absolute disaster for Labour. The Tories won control of 29 councils and gained 911 seats. Labour lost control of eight councils and squandered 505 seats. It was an absolute rout.
But that’s not how it was reported at the time. “Some had predicted a meltdown,” the BBC News analysis said, “but that worst-case scenario was averted.” Gordon Brown, who was about to take over as Labour leader, would “take some comfort from the bad-but-not-disastrous results”. The Tories, meanwhile, were “quick to celebrate their successes” but it wasn’t “the surge many had been hoping for”. Why? “They failed to take some northern areas such as Bury.”
As outlined by Theo Bertram, a Labour advisor, years later, the BBC analysis was uncannily in line with the narrative the party wanted to get out there. They managed to turn a resounding Tory victory into a story of dashed hopes. And that was down to one thing: expectation management.
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The expectations for then-Tory leader David Cameron were set astronomically high. He had to secure places like Crewe, Bolton and Bury. Labour’s lines-to-take after the election often referred to how it had done much better than “some of the dire predictions beforehand”. In reality, it was itself the author of many of the Tories’ sky-high hopes and Labour’s own dire predictions.
That’s what’s happening now. Tory sources predict the loss of 800 seats, knowing it’s highly unlikely to be that bad. Labour downplays the notion they could seize Wandsworth or Westminster, so they don’t become a test of their performance if they fail to do so.
It’s easy to dismiss all this as one of those tiresome things politicians do which isn’t ultimately all that harmful. After all, it only lasts a week or two. And anyway, what do we expect? That professional parties aren’t going to try to influence the narrative around their performance? It’s all very naive.
But expectation management is more pernicious than that. The problem lies in its tone.
Day-to-day political misrepresentation is instantly recognisable. We hear it all the time. Politicians go out of their way to excuse their own party while savaging the other. They deny something took place, then say they can’t talk about it because of the inquiry, then insist we all move on once it has concluded. We know these tactics well.
Expectation management is different. It sounds like they’re being frank with you. It comes across like, finally, for once in their lives, they’re speaking honestly about how things are going. It has the crucial quality of self-criticism – the precise thing which is usually missing from political communication. So your ears stand up and you actually listen for a moment. And in that tone is a mark of respect for voters, a recognition that the time has come to face the ultimate boss.
Even this turns out to be a lie, though. They’re not being frank. They’re not speaking honestly. They’re not really criticising themselves. They are pushing a carefully-constructed narrative, which utilises the tone of honesty and self-criticism to further conceal reality.
In the end, that’s what makes it so damaging. Even here, in this unique point in the political calendar, what sounds like a rare moment of truth turns out to be an even more sophisticated form of lying.
