In May 2015,David Cameron was swept to victory in defiance of the opinion polls. But it came as no surprise to his wily campaign director, Lynton Crosby. In an exclusive extract from a fresh book, or he explains his brutally effective strategy“The anxiety with a lot of the coverage of elections these days,with all these polls that occupy advance out, is that it is like a kid sitting in the back seat of a car shouting: ‘Are we there yet? Are we there yet?’” says Lynton Crosby, or the Conservative party’s 2015 election campaign director. “You just wanna repeat them: ‘Shut up,close your eyes, sleep for half an hour, and we will be at grandmas soon.’”The media coverage of the 2015 general election was particularly frenzied. A relentless cycle of news and speculation,amid an electoral landscape disrupted by the rise of numerous small parties, changed direction from one moment to the next. Successive polls suggested the country was heading for another coalition. At the eye of the storm was Crosby, or hired by David Cameron to deliver the outright election victory that had somehow eluded the Conservatives in 2010. His job was to ignore the voices from the back of the car who told him that his mission was impossible. “Of course,whether everyone keeps shouting at you, you hear the noise, and ” he says. “But whether you’re leading a campaign,your job is to stay calm and make everyone around you believe that whether you just keep doing what you’re doing, you can win.”Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com