Landslide: The Inside Story of the 2024 Election
Welcome to the third of my write-ups of the books about the 2024 general election. This time it is Tim Ross and Rachel Wearmouth’s Landslide: The Inside Story of the 2024 Election, just keeping to my previous target of publishing the review before Christmas.
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After last time’s polling heavy book, Landslide takes us back to a journalistic account of the 2024 general election. By which I mean it is heavy on personal colour and dramatic moments, and lighter on data to tell us how much any of them mattered. Each type of election book has its place, and Landslide does its type very well,1 so well in fact that there is much to pick up from the book even if you have already read Taken As Red or are a weekly devotee of the Tim Shipman long reads.
The personal vignettes from election night are particularly well sourced and give a good understanding of what it feels like to run a national election campaign. Prior to that there is also a compelling narrative of the campaign, organised thematically and so at times getting a little Doctor Who like with the repeated loops back in time to start a new theme from an earlier point.
The drive for journalistic narrative makes the book very readable, though it can also obscure causal analysis at times. So we get a dramatic account of Partygate being a monumental political turning point, rather than a closely argued piece of data analysis that considers how much Johnson’s and the government’s ratings were on the slide before Partygate. (The book which Paula Surridge is contributing too will be very good on the latter, I suspect, and put Partygate into perspective as important yet also coming at the same time as rising heating costs and followed by several other big blow.)
As with every book and long read piece about the election I have read, the book still leaves me baffled by Rishi Sunak. Here, as elsewhere, the account is of someone who loved digging into the details, leaving a puzzle over the number of times the details were messed up during his tenure. This book does have a half-decent stab at explaining why there was no umbrella when he announced the election - and has the best explanation yet of why he went for July rather than later in the year.
Yet it still leaves unexplained the failures of detail over basics of target seat campaign organisation.2 Or (perhaps more controversially), the decision to go for ‘stop the boats’ without the technocratic policy work being done to come up with a workable policy to deliver on the promise. For a spreadsheet touting technocrat, Sunak fumbled frequently.
For those particularly interested in the Liberal Democrats, there is extra detail in here, beyond that found in Taken As Red. There is the Dave McCobb burritos story, now almost an essential for any feature about the Lib Dem general election campaign,3 along with the Josh Babarinde cemetery anecdote, but also fresher material too.
On the other hand, Taken As Red has much more on the background of Morgan McSweeney, while Landslide is a little light on the Labour internal context at times (particularly when making reference to the showdown conference vote on party rules being won, without details on how it was won).
As with Tim Ross’s previous work, there is plenty of detail of target seat campaign tactics, including how the Labour Party used an AI-powered bot to train canvassers. Though perhaps most significant is that, “another significant decision that Labour took was to move away from the 2015 era of micro-targeting of ads on Facebook”. While Labour heavily invested in digital, the main theme was about localising the message by constituency, slicing and dicing the message by candidate rather than slicing and dicing the message by voter segments.
The Conservative digital campaign, by contrast, comes over as an under-funded attempted Hail Mary pass. Hoped for as a substitute for a weak volunteer ground game, it foundered on shortage of money.
The most surprising, and different, section of the book is about the performance of the polls. Plenty of space is given to the scepticism of Martin Boon about the state of political polling. Martin is a very reputable pollster (who I have done occasional work with) and his critique of the state of polling is certainly worth attention. However, while other controversies get conflicting accounts presented to the reader, when it comes to polling the book does little to contextualise his views with those of other pollsters. Even many of the basic numbers of how the polls did are not presented, which makes the account lopsided as there is plenty to say about how well the polls did overall.
The book also gives an outing (and got good press coverage out of) the views of some who wish to see polls curtailed, a view I very much don’t share but which it is good to give some space too. If the book makes it into a paperback version, it would be interesting to hear more from both the authors - journalists themselves - on whether the claim that less coverage of polls would mean more space for serious policy coverage really stands up. I doubt it myself, as I think the absence of more of the latter is due to factors beyond spending time writing about polls. But perhaps journalists such as the authors can make a case based on their own experiences?
All in all then, Landslide provides plenty of fresh detail even for readers who are already very familiar with the election story. Where some of the picture may be questionable, such as over the account of polling, what is in the book is still worth reading, it is just that there is more to say from other perspectives that did not make it into the book.
Definitely worth a read.
And finally, the Pack Mention Index (PMI™)4 is a solid 1, safely quarantined in a footnote.
Get the book
You can get your own copy of Tim Ross and Rachel Wearmouth’s Landslide: The Inside Story of the 2024 Election:
Bookshop.org (“an online bookshop with a mission to financially support local, independent bookshops”)
The next book
My plan is for the next book to be Steve Rayson’s Collapse of the Conservatives: Volatile Voters, Broken Britain and a Punishment Election which handily looks like it will keep up the pattern of these book reviews alternating between those which are journalistic accounts and those which are based on detailed polling analysis.
You can zip ahead of me by getting your copy to read right away from Amazon.
The previous books
Anushka Asthana’s Taken As Red: How Labour Won Big and the Tories Crashed the Party.
Lord Michael Ashcroft’s Losing it: the Conservative Party and the 2024 general election.
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Though I do wince at phrases such as “infinitely worse”.
The best example being my first visit during the campaign to a Lib Dem target seat. Big crowd of activists out canvassing, flying start leaflets already mostly delivered and posters going up. The Conservative campaign? The candidate was still on holiday.
Though I don’t think the story of how in an earlier election Dave McCobb turned a night in the pub into an effective street letter has made it into a political book yet.
Not really a trademark, honest.