Garnering third party support

Third party support is an important political asset. Nobody trusts politicians any longer (when did they ever?) and so it’s useful to draft in supposedly apolitical backers to support your plans.

Yesterday’s PMQs was a case in point, with David Cameron and Ed Miliband competing for support from GPs. As Jim Pickard writes over on the FT blog, having 42 GPs on side is a little less impressive than having support from the Royal College of GPs, which has 42,000 members. So the PM is seen to have emerged from the exchange as the loser.

Therein lies a problem for the government. Since the general election, the Tories seem to have become decidedly worse at garnering third party support for their policies. Before the poll they did excellently. Remember when more than 20 of Britain’s top business leaders publicly backed George Osborne’s pledge to partially reverse Labour’s planned rise in national insurance.