Chris Bryant is haunted by Labour’s general election defeat. He has taken his former colleague Douglas Alexander’s office, and Commons staff have been appearing to collect the former Shadow Foreign Secretary’s computers. ‘They were referring to the computers as “the defeated computers”,’ he says. ‘Politics is quite brutal.’
The defeated computers are a sad symbol of Labour’s loss: Alexander was one of Labour’s many election chiefs, but is now just an ex-MP. But Bryant, who says he did feel in his gut that Labour was going to lose, still seems rather chipper. Perhaps it’s because he is now Shadow Culture Secretary, and is facing John Whittingdale, who has been tasked with being radical in a way that Labour will enjoy opposing. Or perhaps it’s because he can see that the government’s majority of just 12 is going to give him plenty of opportunities for, as he puts it, ‘getting up to something’ on the policy areas he covers. Or perhaps it’s because he was a clue on Pointless the other day, which he seems very pleased about indeed. ‘The question was name an MP between A and C, and Bryant – one person got Bryant, yay! Nobody got Nick Brown. I wasn’t a pointless answer!’
His answers on why Labour lost the election aren’t pointless, either. He says he could see the voters turning against Labour on polling day: ‘Half the people whose doors I knocked, who were all meant to be Labour people, people who had promised to vote Labour, were all voting Tory or had already done so and done so enthusiastically’.
He blames the targets set by the party for a certain number of conversations with voters, which ‘skewed the campaign towards quantity rather than quality’, and a presumption that more Labour people would stick with Labour, and more Lib Dems would come over to the party, too. There was, he says, some rather wishful thinking on the party of canvassers:
‘Optimistic voter identification I think sometimes. If somebody says I’m doubtful and you go, well, how did you vote last time and they say Labour, so we’d go “oh well” where in actual fact that wasn’t happening, and the added complication was I think there was a lot of churning going that way, that way, and all over the place.
‘Interestingly, I mean I should have spotted this better because I ran, ran is a bad word but I was our point person in Clacton, Rochester and Strood and Newark, so I saw what was happening in terms of Labour, former Labour people voting UKIP, former Tory people voting UKIP, former Lib Dems voting UKIP, there was a pentangle of switching that was going on.’
One of the things that the surprising election result has made Bryant think about is giving up Twitter, which he is a rather enthusiastic member of currently. He thinks he spent too much time on the social network during the election, and wonders whether Facebook may be more representative of swing voters who aren’t obsessed with politics.
He had always had a gut feeling that the Conservatives would end up in government, which he told himself must be wrong because the polls said otherwise. This was, Bryant explains, because ‘you can’t go forward to a general election where the only pro-business policy is remaining in the European Union’. He says he met a constituent who ran a small business who told him that he ‘wasn’t going to vote Labour although he’d voted Labour all his life because he just didn’t think we understood how he ran a company’. He adds:
‘If you were somebody who had a real desire to get on in life then Labour wasn’t on your side whereas in actual fact what Labour should always be is the safe repository of people’s hopes.’
He felt that Ed Miliband had a good campaign, but that his major flaw during those last few weeks before the election was when the Labour leader refused to accept on Question Time that Labour overspent: ‘I’ve heard him give a hundred good answers to that very same question and for some reason he didn’t give that answer that night’. But Bryant is rather gentler than you might expect on the way the media portrayed Miliband. Asked whether a future Labour leader needs to worry about bad pictures of bacon sandwiches, Bryant suggests that the way Miliband was treated by some sections of the press was revenge for his stance on phone hacking and press regulation:
‘Am I the one to preach to anyone about bad photos? I’m the inventor of the selfie, I started a trend! It was a double-edged sword, though, wasn’t it, because quite a lot of people respected Ed because he’d taken the fight to Rupert Murdoch and nobody had done that in Britain, in politics before, but it’s a double-edged sword.’
But though he describes Miliband as ‘very engaging’ at events, he later suggests that the party fell into a bad habit that didn’t help the way it engaged with the electorate:
‘I have a concern generally about politics that the patronage model of politics which our parliamentary system is slightly prone to because it’s winner takes it all, means that sometimes people are more obsessed with managing the leader than they are with managing the relationship with the public.
‘If you started life as a researcher and then you became a special advisor and then you became an MP and then you became a member of the Shadow Cabinet or the Cabinet, whichever way round, all through that process you learn not to think first what do I believe but what can I put in the mouth of my boss. What should the line be? So politics becomes a kind of version of quadratic equations and I can’t abide that version of politics and I don’t think voters [do].’
He’s talking primarily about the way the party dealt with immigration, something he nearly resigned over. It was an announcement that Labour might restrict benefits for migrants in work that infuriated him. He says he ‘wasn’t involved in the decision-making’, and only ‘knew slightly before it was announced’ that it was going to happen. It wasn’t just the particular policy that was the problem, but a risk that the MP identifies of ‘pro-Europeans… saying that the EU is bust, it’s bust it’s bust: in the end people will come round and say, “we want to go”. The metaphor I’ve used before is that it’s like a fishmonger who’s selling fish, that keeps on saying the fish is off and eventually people will say I’m not going to buy any fish then.’
What Bryant wants is a positive, emotional case about the European Union from the ‘In’ camp, which he describes as being in a ‘really good’ place at the moment. This is made easier by the fact that the ‘In’ campaign will be the ‘Yes’ campaign to say ‘Yes’ to staying in, and will be even easier now that Labour has changed its stance on a referendum, he says.
‘We pro-Europeans spent all our time arguing against a referendum and that’s a miserable thing to argue whereas what I wanted to say was I want to argue in favour of staying in. I’ve been on Question Time when I’ve been asked those two questions and when it was about referendum yes or no, I just got booed and when it was about staying in or out, it was all hurrah! Of course you can make a passionate emotional staying-in argument.’
Go on then, I say. I want to hear that passionate, emotional staying-in argument. And Bryant gives a jolly good answer.
‘Well to start, in my lifetime Spain, Portugal, all of the Eastern bloc, Greece, were dictatorships, where people from this country could never even go on holiday and people were executed for their political views, all of that is gone. In my parents’ lifetime Europe was the most ravaged continent in the world by war and the fact that all those countries now sit down for interminable meetings in Brussels or Strasbourg or Luxembourg means that they don’t go to war and that is such a success for my parent’s generation and for my generation and we should be really proud of it.
‘Actually historically the Brits have been the people who have taken the most advantage of this. There are more Brits, the country that has exported more people to other places in the EU is the UK, two point something million. Figures are a bit difficult to come by because some people have homes in both and so on but it’s not just people as is caricatured in Spain using the NHS, the Spanish NHS or coming back to the UK and still using the UK NHS, it’s people in all of the countries making their way, the kind of Auf Wiedersehen Pet in a modern setting.’
He also argues that the way Labour deals with Ukip isn’t so much about Europe or immigration, but about the party speaking to those who feel isolated.
‘It is painfully evident in my own seat in the Rhondda but there are some people who feel they are at the end of the line, in my case because it’s a narrow valley and you get to the end of the valley, geographically isolated, difficult to get to work, work’s not coming to them. They feel bruised and lacking in a future and I think whoever is the next leader of the Labour party has got to find a message to those people but blaming foreigners or the European Union isn’t going to cut, I don’t think. So there will be none of the above, people voting none of the above, a plague on all your houses and all that kind of stuff and we’ve got to find a message for the people at the end of the line and Clacton literally is the end of the line.’
The leader he thinks will help reassure those voters who feel at the end of the line is Yvette Cooper, who he says is ‘full of resilience’, and is ‘a good performer in the House of Commons, she’s a human being, and immediately it’s different by virtue of her being a woman’. The female factor was important, he admits, when he was deciding who to back, but it was also that Cooper is someone he’s worked with for several years. Her resilience is something he mentions again when I ask why he didn’t pick one of the other women standing – Mary Creagh or Liz Kendall – as Cooper has ‘been tried in the fiery furnace and I think that matters’.
Whoever wins will have to go through another fiery furnace to make Labour a winning force again. I wonder whether Bryant thinks that 2020 is really too soon to aim to be back in government, and whether the party should embark on a longer-term project. He says:
‘Look, it’s a very tall mountain and it’s just got taller and it will get taller if the boundaries end up going through but the thing is, unless you start climbing through the foothills you don’t get to the top so this is just another extended metaphor and it is sounding remarkably Julie Andrews but you’ve got to climb every mountain, ford every stream! Shall I carry on with these metaphors or have you had way too much already?’
Please do.
‘There may be mists gathering around us, but suddenly we’ll come across a host of golden daffodils.’
Once he’s back off the mountain, Bryant explains that ‘it is neither inevitable that we will win the next general election, nor is it inevitable that we will lose, it’s all down to whether we organise to win.’
Which sounds rather as though Bryant’s gut is undecided about his party’s prospects and whether he’ll be dealing with more ‘defeated computers’ in five years’ time.
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