Better Together Apart

Here's a good story from The Times about the Better Together campaign which just goes to show that even politicians who are ostensibly on the same side have no compunction about knifing one another in the back.

So Gordon Brown, who is a very part-time MP these days, feels perfectly free to pull the rug from under his old colleague, Alistair Darling, even though Brown is widely perceived to have been one of the most useless Labour Prime Ministers of modern times.

If you ask me, there's more than a touch of misplaced arrogance in this high-handed approach which is why I wouldn't trust the Better Together parties to deliver on their post referendum pledges to ramp up the powers of the Scottish Parliament.

Because if they were serious they would have been championing extra powers years ago instead of doing so only once the political campaigning was underway.  

Better together - as long as it’s not in the same room

Unionists lead the polls, but not with a fully united front Getty Images

Unionists lead the polls, but not with a fully united front Getty Images

Sam Coates and Lindsay McIntosh - The Times

They call it Better Together, but on June 9, with exactly 100 days to go until the referendum on Scottish independence, it was safer that the key protagonists in the efforts to save the Union ended the day far, far apart.

For weeks, the pro-union campaign had been agonising neurotically over the 100 days event in Glasgow, fronted by Alistair Darling.

Three “demographically appropriate” people were chosen to help to front it. The biggest names in Scottish politics had been urged to stay away so as not to muddy the message. Meanwhile, more time than appropriate was spent agonising between different fonts to use for the campaign’s new slogan, “No Thanks”. The event passed without a hitch, but within three hours it had been all but forgotten.

For 345 miles away, over lunch, Gordon Brown used his first appearance before Westminster journalists for a long while to lay out an alternative vision to keep a United Kingdom. In an act of unanticipated political brutality, the former prime minister suggested that Mr Darling’s efforts, backed by the Westminster coalition government, were misguided.

The campaign was at risk of losing Scotland “by mistake”, he announced. Major announcements had been “patronising”. What was needed was a “patriotic vision” for Scotland, he said, in an apparent dig at the more technocratic approach of Mr Darling. He then put down his thoughts in written form in The Guardian. There was no doubt in the drab offices which house Better Together above a shopping centre in Glasgow, that this was a hostile act from someone they thought they had finally steered on to their team. Nor does it help that Mr Brown’s arguments find favour with some in Westminster. Some are swayed by his alternative, more emo- tive model for Better Together, which could appeal more effectively to undecided C1 and C2 voters.

“It’s amazing we managed not to rise to it in public,” one campaign source said. The episode captured, in one day, the pressures and trials of the campaign group under Mr Darling and Blair McDougall, a former Labour special adviser.

Started in the summer of 2012, Better Together has had to accommodate some of the most disparate and volatile forces in British politics. The team has had to keep together a three-party campaign when the respective leaderships are turning their sights firmly on to the general election next year.

Particular strength has been needed to unite disparate factions in the Scottish Labour Party, which has been licking its wounds since its drubbing in the Holyrood elections of 2011. Divisions either side of the border have not helped. The party’s attempts to offer Scots a robust package of new powers for Holyrood were stymied when Westminster Labour and Scottish Labour clashed. The party looked less progressive than the Scottish Conser- vatives, who offered what they did not — full control over income tax.

Personality tensions are rife. Douglas Alexander, the shadow foreign secretary, is often on hand, having played an important role selecting a new advertising agency, but any sense that Mr Darling is being edged out of the way is strongly denied. There appears to be an uneasy truce between Jim Murphy, the shadow international development secretary, and Mr Alexander.

So long as Better Together can maintain similar poll leads to the one revealed by YouGov today, the campaign should just about be able to hold the line. The “wobble” in April, which caused a narrowing of the lead held by the No campaign , showed what happens if there is even a hint of defeat.

While the Scottish Tory party is part of Better Together, unnamed English Tories have irked the campaign with their briefings.One minister blew a hole in the carefully orchestrated rejection of a currency union by saying that “of course” a deal would be done.

To try to avoid a repeat, a string of senior figures take part in a morning conference-call debrief. Among those who dial in to Better Together HQ are Mr Murphy, Mr Alexander, Frank Roy, the Labour MP and veteran organiser, and Danny Alexander, the Liberal Democrat chief secretary to the treasury. Andrew Dunlop, a No 10 special adviser who worked in the policy unit under John Major, is also often on hand, helping to galvanise Whitehall, and stopping departments, such as the Ministry of Defence, causing unnecessary surprises.

The team is on its third marketing agency, M&C Saatchi, which was retained last month to help to produce TV and newspaper advertisements. Some insiders say that the previous two agencies, who worked on an ad hoc basis for Better Together, were not properly selected, which the campaign denies. The sniping continues. Mr Darling, according to one of those involved, suffers from “never having been at the sharp end of an election campaign”. One said that the team beneath him “aren’t battle hardened”, lacking the grit of someone like Lynton Crosby, the Tory election campaign chief.

There are also claims that the “grid” for the final 100 days has been all but threadbare until recently, in the face of well organised and long-planned effort from the nationalists.

“I’ve always found them smart, hard working and tactically astute, although I think they have never thought much about their strategy,” said one figure involved in Better Together. However, they say the top people are “stretched too thin for comfort”.

Despite the structural difficulties, at its core is a confidence. One of those involved said that the campaign is hoping for victory by 60 per cent to 40 per cent, and there is even a chance of knocking the nationalists out by a margin of 2 to 1. Mr Darling himself tends to give a more cautious take, nervous that such talk breeds complacency where few can predict the response to emotional heart strings tugged by Alex Salmond’s team in the weeks ahead.

With money, comes attempts at interference. George Osborne has told friends that while he is not intimately involved in Scotland, he holds a connoisseur’s appreciation for a fellow tactician and master politician, while other Tories not connected to the campaign offer anonymous advice regularly from the comfort of SW1.

Mr McDougall said: “Often it is difficult when people outside of the room don’t necessarily understand what the thinking is behind that, particularly if they are hundreds of miles away or have never lived or experienced things in Scotland.”

Nor do they seem worried at the regular reports that there is a bigger ground war campaign by those who want independence. Rob Murray, deputy director of operations (grassroots), said that the Yes camp is happy to talk to itself — filling halls with supporters — rather than attempting to convert the undecided voters.

Nor does Better Together look like performing a last-minute pivot and embracing a more overtly sentimental campaign. “I understand why people who feel passionately unionist who live in England may think why aren’t you waving union flags and doing a really emotional campaign,” Mr McDougall said. “We’re running the campaign we think will work most effectively with those undecided voters for whom it is not an identity decision . . . it’s an economic one.”