Caffeine, leaks and creative writing: what it’s like to make a manifesto

My involvement in this extraordinary process came about in November 2019. Months before, on entering No 10, Boris Johnson had asked two of the brightest and nicest people in Westminster, Munira Mirza and Rachel Wolf, to produce his election manifesto. They had spent months putting together the themes, studying the opinion research, consulting MPs and think tanks, and being bombarded with half-baked ideas by every interest group in the country.

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With the deadline approaching, they asked me to come and help with the final editing and drafting — in full knowledge that the last Tory manifesto, in 2017, had blown up both the campaign and Theresa May’s premiership, thanks to its policies on social care. No pressure, then.

Fortunately, our improvised unit — bolstered by Rupert Yorke, Ross Kempsell and many other brilliant colleagues — ended up feeling more like a supergroup than a shambles. But it was still a very strange experience. Because manifestos are, by their nature, very strange things.

Each party is setting out a full list of everything it plans to do over the next five years, in the pretence that there will be no pesky pandemics, invasions or resignations.

They are playing both attack and defence — trying to sell an inspiring vision to the voters, and give their footsoldiers on the doorstep (and the campaign’s media team) lots of positive pledges to talk about, while offering absolutely no weak points for the other side to attack, and somehow making all the numbers add up. It is simultaneously public and private, speaking to the nation while reassuring those within your movement, especially your ministers and MPs, that their concerns have been taken on board.

In other words, it’s an awful lot of pain, for very little electoral gain. At least, that’s the view of many campaign managers, who generally prefer them to be as short, uncontroversial and unmemorable as possible. Certainly, the best-known manifestos are the ones that imploded — Michael Foot’s hard-left effort in 1983, derided by one of his MPs as “the longest suicide note in history”, or May’s in 2017, which made the elementary error of confronting the voters with difficult choices.

So why not just copy the US Republicans, who at the last election simply declared that their party’s platform was whatever Donald Trump said it was?

The answer is that manifestos are not just traditional, but constitutional. Civil servants are expected to take them as holy writ: the annual reports of Whitehall departments, their formal purposes and priorities, still mirror the missions I typed out back then. There is also a convention that the House of Lords cannot block anything promised in a manifesto, because the voters have given it their blessing. And sometimes they really can boost the campaign: witness the impetus that Jeremy Corbyn got from the leaking of his 2017 effort, which promised a cavalcade of “fully costed” goodies (despite those costings being laughably threadbare).

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So what lessons would I offer my successors?

The most obvious is that a manifesto cannot be separated from the campaign. It is always a recipe for dysfunction when policy and communications are controlled by different chieftains — think not just of May in 2017 but Corbyn in 2019 or Cameron in 2010. The messaging and promises need to be entirely consistent, and consistently targeted at those voters you care about the most.

Second, you are not engaged in an act of creative writing, but air traffic control. It is very easy to write a nice sentence about why we, as Conservatives, champion entrepreneurship. It is very hard to make sure that the policy pledge in the next sentence does not contradict what you said 30 pages earlier, and that the figures have been cleared with the Treasury team on the next desk. And indeed that you have the rights to the picture of a smiling businessman on the same page, and that said businessman has lived a life of blameless, Tory-voting probity.

Third, what you leave out is as important as what you put in. It is very difficult, especially if you are in government, to ignore the hundreds of groups that will be desperate for even a single sentence on their chosen cause, and bitterly upset if it is absent. Leaving something out, just as much as putting something in, is a conscious choice.

Fourth, be unsentimental. Once the manifesto was finished, we compiled a huge list of potential attack lines, listing every area where we might be criticised. The eventual pushback from Labour was a breeze by comparison.

Fifth, check every sentence, and cost every sentence. Many times over.

Finally, be wary of politicians. We were determined to be more transparent than May’s team had been. Yet shortly after we presented the draft to a star chamber of cabinet members, key details appeared in The Times. We later learned that our prime suspect had a standing appointment in her diary to leak the contents of each cabinet meeting.

Another minister greeted me — when I came in on the weekend to show her the relevant sections — by asking who the hell I was, and why she didn’t rate anyone important. She then started using her phone to take page-by-page photos of the top-secret document.

What can we expect this time? Both parties will have been working away on their plans for quite a while — Labour’s, we are told, is nearly ready. The size of its lead in the polls means it is almost certain to be a safety-first document, reiterating the party’s existing pledges and cutting off as many angles of attack as possible. Given how far they are behind, the Tories will probably have to make bigger swings — without coming off as Trussite spendthrifts.

It’s a difficult balance to strike. And the crowning irony is that the better you do it, the less anyone will even notice. Good luck, everyone.