What was it like?

So, I have this nagging concern that, with the major social battles of the 20th century fought and won - women’s suffrage, equal rights, free market economics over socialism - and, especially, with all this new media about - why, in the 21st century, is our society diverging rather than converging?

And why aren’t our politicians more sophisticated, more strategic, about how they use these new media opportunities to bring people closer together and unite society – globally as well as domestically.

I have never very impressed by politicians, certainly not professional ‘career politicians’. What have they done? I don’t like their air of superiority, their fiddling expenses and flipping houses to avoid capital gains tax. This was going to be a major issue in this election (not).

I must be better than this lot. In fact, I can prove I am. So I decide to stand up and be counted as an Independent MP. I’m the man.

And that’s my problem. I’m on my own. I’m Independent. I am not a party. I am a person, warts and all.

I don’t have ‘policies’. Aren’t policies executional (rather than strategic)? Why don’t strategic marketers have ‘policies’? What was Lowe’s Heineken policy? Or the BBH Levi’s policy? Or Fallon’s Cadbury policy?

I don’t even like the word ‘policy’. It sounds like the police. If you emphasise the second syllable, you can even pronounce it ‘policey’.

Call me old-fashioned, but I feel more comfortable with setting objectives, agreeing strategies and developing executions - all in one logical flow.

1. What were my objectives?

There is an easy answer – and a more complicated one.

The easy answer is ‘to persuade the constituents of Battersea to vote for me, Hugh Salmon, to be their MP in the House of Commons’.

The complication is that this an unlikely, unrealistic objective to achieve.

So why bother?

Well, there’s the Lottery answer that if you’re not in it, you won’t win it. And, of all elections, this one is very unpredictable. You never know.

But the chances are still low, so are there any other reasons to justify the time and cost involved?

Well, for me, yes. Remember, my over-arching concern is the divergence, rather convergence, of society. Why are we becoming further apart from each other, rather than closer together?

Maybe, by offering myself up, albeit in a non-commercial environment, I could connect with real people. Not target audiences, not demographic profiles, not focus groups. Real people in the real world.

Where would that get me? I didn’t know, but I was keen to find out. If nothing else, it would be a new, interesting and, hopefully, enjoyable experience. And you never know…..

2. What was my strategy?

As I saw it there were three strategic barriers I had to overcome:

i) how to attract attention but, at the same time, be taken seriously?

ii) how to attract local voters, within my constituency, when they are most influenced by national issues and the established parties (and especially, as it turned out, the national party leaders)?

iii) how to balance offline and online media opportunities?

I decided that I would use offline media and ideas to attract attention and get noticed. And thereby, hopefully (because there was no time to test this), potential voters would go to my website where the content would be full and the tone serious and compelling. My ‘manifesto’ ran to 27 pages: www.hughsalmon4battersea.co.uk

I was advised to use all sorts of other online strategies but I had set myself a fourth barrier. I was due to move house right in the middle of the campaign, leaving me bereft of broadband for three weeks prior to 6 May. This was going to be a Blackberry campaign if ever there was one.

3. How did I execute this strategy?

Standing in one of the most contested seats in the country (the Labour majority in 2005 was a mere 163 votes), I was aware the Conservative candidate, in particular, had been ‘working’ the constituency for years. She had fought Pendle (nowhere near Battersea) in 2005, so she knew the game. She infiltrated Battersea like she has been here all her life.

For unsurprising reasons, the seminal book ‘Eating The Big Fish – how challenger brands can compete against brand leaders’ has a particular resonance for me (http://tinyurl.com/2339ere).

As, now, a Challenger brand myself, I read it again. The four principal requirements of a Challenger brand stood out:

i) Self-Referential Identity. For three weeks, I was going to be me. Introducing myself to people, talking about myself, telling them my views, answering their questions about what I thought about their concerns (and there were some surprises, I tell you).

ii) Emotion. To deliver my strategy of getting noticed, I had to find a way of moving people emotionally. Ideally, I would be interesting, approachable, welcoming, human, maybe even fun to engage with.

iii) Intensity. I needed to offer ‘intense projections’ and be ‘vivid’.
Oh dear, this was going to be hard work.

iv) Salience. I had to be ‘highly intrusive’ – unavoidable.

I knew I could not compete with the brand leaders – or their leaders.

I knew I did not have time to knock on every door of the constituency.

I knew they had more money than me.

I had to think.

And I had more reading to do.

The Electoral Commission’s ‘Guidance for Candidates’ runs to 119 pages. Hidden within was the news (to me) that every candidate is entitled to the delivery by Royal Mail of a leaflet to every letter-box in the constituency.

So that was a no-brainer. I needed a leaflet, the brief for which was to get noticed in the short journey between the letter-box and the bin.

My team and I went for a shot of me and the line ‘Battersea needs Hugh’. Not great, but arresting enough we hoped. On the rear, was a personal ‘letter’ from me outlining why I would be the perfect vote and a call to action to my content-filled and seriously argued website.

But we could not rely on the leaflet. And we did not have time to follow it round every letter-box in Battersea. We would have to find a way to get noticed – to achieve ‘salience’ some other way.

Hence renting a milk float bedecked with the line ‘DON’T FLOAT – VOTE!’ (sorry, the line works better in capital letters than upper and lower case).

We would decorate it with banners and bunting and bottles. We would drive it up and down the roads of Battersea, we would park it on the High Streets, we would drive it past the stations and the supermarkets and in the parks. We would have children rapping on the back and we would wave and smile and have fun. We would be intrusive and salient with vivid intensity and, by having fun, we would ‘invite a realignment of emotions’. We would achieve a self-reverential identity.

And we did.

I’m telling you, we did. Trust me. As the Challenger brand, in terms of impact, the little fish beat the Big Fish. The Tories had a trestle table!

But no-one was going to the website. According to Google Analytics, we were getting around 50 visits a day, peaking at just over 100 on 6 May itself. In the whole campaign, we did not achieve 1,000 visits to the site.

Yet this was where the serious content had been placed, the arguments discussed, the case made and my 27-page Manifesto housed and hosted (I couldn’t afford a print copy).

So I knew, from very early on, that there was no way this level of interest in the website would translate into any sort of meaningful vote.

But you have made a commitment to the country. You have to carry on.

I was out there, my team was out there and the milk float was out there (apart from when it broke down, but that’s another story). Whenever I handed out a leaflet, I urged people to take a look at the website – but clearly, this strategy was not working. They just weren’t doing it.

Nevertheless, I was enjoying being out there, meeting people, talking to them about the things that mattered to them. There were plenty of surprises, not least that the biggest issue, by far, was Immigration.

MPs expenses, arguably my strongest card, were hardly mentioned.

Immigration came up at the hustings too – those that I was invited to. Small-minded sprats sidelined me and the ‘smaller’ parties, using the TV debates as an excuse for restricting exposure to the three major parties. ‘What’s good enough for the BBC is good enough for us’.

Then I discovered that one of them had been a Labour agent in another constituency and I worked it out. Labour were scared of me!

With a tiny majority to protect, Labour were desperate. By the end of the campaign, the poor Labour candidate was begging for every single vote – and he could hardly bear to look me in the face.

He must have known what was going to happen too, especially after the first TV leader debate on 15 April. But you never know. Nor did he. In the end, although paltry, my vote would have cost him the seat in 2005.

When more open-minded and democratic constituents (including, to their credit, a locally-based trade union) allowed me, as an official candidate, to answer questions at the hustings I really had to concentrate.

The first time I was on top table - alongside Labour, Conservative, Liberal Democrat, UKIP and Green candidates – I realised they all had guidebooks with the answers to give to every ‘policy’ question asked. Yet again, as I could not resist pointing out to the sizeable audience, I had to think!

As an Independent, how would I run the economy? How would I repay the national deficit? What were my views on Iraq and Afghanistan? What did I think about gay couples being turned away from B&Bs? What were my policies on Immigration?

With every answer, I tried to feature a personal story, a human touch. I wanted to emphasise that, in a Parliamentary democracy, the electorate should vote for the best individual candidate for the people of Battersea - what, later, on 16 May, David Cameron admitted to Andrew Marr is ‘a more civilised decision’ than to vote by arcane tribal loyalties or the most charismatic party leader.

So, for example, in my answer on Immigration, I asked if people had read ‘The Lady In The Van’ by Alan Bennett. I said he had let her live in his driveway for nearly 20 years, and it was very generous of him to do so. But he could not let 50 Miss Shepherds live there.

In the same way, I said, as a country, we haven’t got room for everyone who wants to live here so it is a numbers issue, and a control of those numbers issue.

With my own experience of the civil service and my lack of trust in politicians, did I have faith that the people in charge of controlling Immigration were doing so effectively?

My answer would be a resounding ‘no’ – however, as their Independent MP, I would be on top of these people and, if necessary, asking them awkward questions in Parliament.

I had lots of answers like this but they are for a book, not a blog, and I’m not a good enough writer to write a book (I’ve tried).

There is one final ‘What was it Like?’ question that I must address. And that was the count itself. It was in Wandsworth Town Hall, with Battersea (Conservative gain) being counted and announced alongside Putney (Conservative hold) and Tooting (Labour hold).

When you watch these things on TV at home or with some friends, you hear the results read clumsily by the Returning Officer and you smoothly and seamlessly return to the smooth, seamless David Dimbleby to hear considered and interesting analysis by intelligent, well-behaved experts.

Well, it is not like that when you are there, I can tell you. I’ve never been to Millwall Football Club but this was how, in the past, I have imagined it. Talk about aggression! Talk about bigots! Talk about tribal loyalties! Talk about uncivilised behaviour! Talk about divergence!

There were rah-rahs with big blue rosettes sniffing and gloating about their Battersea gain. There were people with big red rosettes (and bright red metallic wigs) pointing at the blues and chanting for Sadiq Khan, the Labour hold, “Yes, we Khan! Yes, we Khan! Yes, we Khan!”.

And all this at three in the morning. Where do these people go all day?

I have every faith that most people are perfectly decent and reasonable. As advertising people know, consumers are not morons. But, I have to say that some of the people at this count were morons and bigots - and, by the way, I have to say more of them wear blue or red than yellow.

I wanted to experience ‘real people in the real world’ but this wasn’t that. Frankly, I wondered what on earth I was doing there. I did not feel comfortable at all. After an intoxicating, invigorating, challenging, exciting experience, this was a horrible, unsettling ending.

So, was it worth it?