Tories, tactics and the return of the ‘spiral of silence’?

I’m told the consensus amongst Tory cabinet ministers, chatting as they went in for their own political cabinet at Tory HQ without their Lib Dem partners, was that Nick Clegg had probably shot himself in the foot with his video.

One attendee at the special pre-conference meeting said the apology was “too late”, “plastered” the original offence “all over the bulletins” again, and would backfire.

At their meeting, ministers were told that a central message of the Tory conference will be that times have changed and the new austerity demands new policies that Labour’s too old-fashioned to grasp. Labour’s young leader will be portrayed as a man locked in the old ways and not up to the challenges of reforming welfare, making spending go further etc.

And this all plays into trying to cheer up Tories who think the next election is unwinnable. The George Osborne orthodoxy used to be that after the government had implemented the deficit reduction plan, a grateful nation would in 2015, as Britain entered the sunlit economic uplands, return the Tories to power.

Now it looks like 2015 will still be a bit dark and dingy, Tory strategists are punting the line that this might actually be a good thing electorally. Tories are being told that there’s a decent chance that having more deficit reduction work to do the other side of the 2015 election might actually work to the Tories’ advantage, as voters might be nervous of Labour on the economy and won’t feel relaxed enough to let them back into power if there’s more serious cutting still to be done.

Tory strategists take comfort from the Populus poll in The Times suggesting there’s a chunk of voters currently saying they’ll vote Labour but who say they trust David Cameron and the Tories more on the economy. This segment of humanity will be worked on relentlessly in the run-up to 2015. Messages that appeal to this cohort will be road-tested and hammered home. If you happen to belong to this grouping and live in a marginal seat, you might want to pull the curtains and disconnect the phone.

Tories say they are running a target marginals campaign that will be even more effective than the 2010 marginals campaign which led quite a few marginals to go Tory on swings above the national average.

Some Tories even think that the old electoral saviour – “the spiral of silence” – could have made a comeback. That’s the term for “shy” voters who hide their allegiance to a party that’s perceived to be unpopular – like the Tories in 1992 after 13 years in power.

If true, it could mean that the Tories are actually doing 2/3 per cent better than the polls suggest – not enough to transform the landscape, but helpful if true. Some pollsters think that the “shyness” problem was pretty much overcome by the disappearance of face-to-face, in-the-street polling. But does the problem still arise in telephone polling (as Populus conduct their polls) even if it is barely a problem at all in online polling?

It may be none of this gets up Tory hopes much – especially since they’ve lost the benefits of the boundary review. Maybe this will cheer them up a bit: something that Peter Kellner at YouGov has worked out from past polling data.

Though Labour got a 15 per cent lead in the Populus poll this week, that might just be a rogue poll. The general pattern is that Labour’s lead has tended to be at 10 per cent or a bit above. Peter Kellner says polling data shows that no opposition party has won an election without at least once breaking through to a lead of 20 per cent or above over the main government party while in opposition.

There is one exception only: Labour got over 20 per cent above the Tories in 1990 at the height of the poll tax debacle but the Tories dumped the policy and the party leader so that was quite a transformed political scene.

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