How Labour used Bush's tactics to get Blair elected

Tony Blair modelled his general election campaign on President George W Bush and regarded Sen John Kerry as weak, the Prime Minister's personal pollster has revealed.
Philip Gould makes the admission in a discussion paper presented at a New Labour retreat this weekend, attended by Mr Blair and his closest allies, including Peter Mandelson. A copy of the paper has been seen by The Sunday Telegraph.

It will infuriate traditional Labour MPs, who will see it as confirmation of the speed and ruthlessness with which Labour's senior figures abandoned a long-time alliance with America's Democrats in favour of the Republicans under President Bush.
Entitled How to Campaign When the World Won't Stop, the document provides an insight into Labour's 2005 election strategy - a "remorseless" focus on the economy, to the exclusion of virtually everything else. A record £18 million was spent on the campaign.

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The disclosures will confirm the suspicions of New Labour's critics that principles are subsumed to strategy and that everything is decided by focus groups. Lord Gould confirms the pre-eminence of strategists such as himself, saying that they are "not spectators", but "actors" who "re-write the script".

But it is his comments on President Bush's second-term victory that will cause the most disquiet in the Labour Party. He writes: "Bush grabbed the campaigning moment and blended robustness of message with maximum personalisation and individuation.
"The unremitting focus on one message - national security - gave certainty and confidence in a world of insecurity."
By contrast, he says of the Kerry campaign: "Sen Kerry was trapped by ambivalence - not certain about the war, he found it hard to appear certain about anything else. We had to be Bush, not Kerry, not in any way in our values, but in our remorseless determination to choose a course and to stick to it, however rough.

Tony Blair should face criminal charges over the "cash for honours" scandal if Scotland Yard's investigation finds that Labour broke the law, voters believe.

A survey for The Sunday Telegraph shows that 54 per cent of those polled believe seats in the House of Lords were offered in return for secret loans or donations to Labour, or for funding of the Government's City Academies programme. Only 28 per cent believe they were not.

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They are concentrating their inquiries on the £14 million of secret loans obtained by Labour last year. The money went to fund the 2005 election campaign, which cost £18 million and included an array of sophisticated polling techniques.

Of those who agreed to lend the party money, four were subsequently nominated by Mr Blair for a peerage. Dr Chai Patel, Sir David Garrard, Barry Townsley and Sir Gulam Noon lent a total of £5 million. All their nominations were later blocked by the appointments commission.

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