Are the Tories using Dominic Cummings’ ‘number on the side of a bus’ tactic?

Reports of Labour plans costing £1.2 trillion appear similar to the Vote Leave chief’s £350m for the NHS pledge – but Conservatives have missed one key element, writes John Rentoul

Vote Leave’s campaign bus falsely claimed leaving the EU would free £350m a week for the NHS (Getty)

We should be familiar with it by now. Dominic Cummings, the prime minister’s chief of staff, stumbled on the tactic in the 2011 referendum on the alternative vote. He worked on the “No to AV” campaign, and one of its most effective posters was a photo of a newborn baby, with the slogan: “She needs a maternity unit NOT an alternative voting system – say NO to spending £250m on AV.”

To AV supporters it was infuriating. The reform would allow people to mark their ballot paper with numbers, ranking candidates in order of preference, instead of a cross by a single name. That is all it does. The cost of the change is only the extra time taken to count ballots when a candidate fails to win half the first-preference votes. Yet here was the “No to AV” campaign making up a number and making an emotive claim about the health service.

The 2016 EU referendum featured an untrue number on the side of a bus, and said, “Let’s fund our NHS instead.” It had the same effect: Cummings’ opponents went into paroxysms of indignation, drawing attention to his side’s emotionally powerful message.

Now his side is at it again. “Labour’s terrifying bill for nation revealed,” said the front page of the Mail on Sunday: “£1.2 trillion.” Once again, a disputed number that annoyed the other side. John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor, condemned it as a “ludicrous piece of Tory fake news”.

The Tory costings featured on the front pages of The Sunday Times and The Sunday Telegraph as well, and hence on the BBC.

But this time the tactic hasn’t worked. Perhaps because Cummings has stepped back from the election campaign, his colleagues have got it wrong. They have forgotten the emotional punch. There is no photo of a young child with cancer turned out on to the street because Labour has bankrupted the NHS.

In fact, the message is almost the opposite: Labour will spend so much money on public services that they have to make up a word for it. For most people a trillion might as well be a gazillion – it just means an unimaginably huge sum. So big the Mail on Sunday was forced to translate it into something meaningful for its readers: “That’ll cost every UK household £43,000.”

The reason for this failure goes back to the last election, because the origin of the trillion-pound claim lies not with Cummings at all, but with the Labour Party. In his book about the 2017 election, Professor Phil Cowley, of Queen Mary University of London, revealed that Labour staff could not believe their luck.

They thought the Conservatives could “credibly” claim that the spending pledges in Labour’s manifesto added up to £1 trillion. “It didn’t add up!” said one Labour staffer. “That was obvious to anyone who looked in any detail. I just kept thinking, they’ll tear us apart on this. But the attack never came.”

Well, now it has. The one thing Boris Johnson’s team are determined to do is avoid the mistakes of Theresa May’s campaign last time. But the trouble is that they were so keen to deploy the trillion-pound figure that they didn’t do the back-up work. First, they needed to cost their own manifesto, and second, they needed to cost Labour’s pledges conservatively, so that independent observers would back them up.

As it is, a failed Cummings-style outrage bomb has blown up in Tory faces. In the past, Tory costings of Labour promises have been effective because they were translated into a tax “bombshell” – but the Tories can’t do that this time, not least because they too are promising big public spending increases.