If Lynton Crosby were a football manager, he'd be Jose Mourinho

It isn’t just the steamroller negativity, but the reliance on confected paranoia

David Cameron's election guru Lynton Crosby (AFP/Getty)

Yesterday, as Ed Balls Day dawned, I woke beneath a fog of foreboding. This was all wrong. When awaking on the anniversary of Balls tweeting his own name, you expect to feel the pure exhilaration of the five-year-old finding a Christmas stocking at the end of the bed. Ed Balls Day is meant to be a time of unconfined joy.

For the shadow Chancellor himself, maybe the disappointing GDP growth figures made it so. Yet even that heartening sign that the economic recovery is stalling couldn’t dispel the suspicion that the election may finally be breaking for the Conservatives.

Labour supporters who follow the polls with crazed obsessiveness will have been chilled by Monday’s verdict. The shift towards the Tories was marginal, and the betting markets barely responded. But three of the four (including the reliable YouGov) detected some movement.

One must never over-react to a single day’s figures, as the polling laureate Nate Silver teaches. But the drip-drip-drip of hysteria about Nicola Sturgeon being poised across the border, waiting to march on Westminster to unleash anarchy and hasten the End of Days, must have some effect. If it swings it for David Cameron, much of the credit will belong to a political figure from farther afield than Clydeside.

With apologies to those who find sporting analogies bemusing, but especially to a Prime Minister who cannot hope to comprehend such a reference, it will not be clear which football manager Lynton Crosby resembles until the early hours of 8 May. If the electorate rains acid on Tory hopes, he might be Steve McClaren wandering forlornly along the Wembley touchline beneath his trusty umbrella.

Until proven otherwise, the template seems the Portuguese with whom he shares a knack for winning in different countries with the same stultifying tactics. Jose Mourinho’s record in Portugal, Italy, Spain and here leaves no doubt that he is a genius. What makes him so hard to love is that the genius is wholly defensive. However talented the squad at his disposal, the mechanical, error-avoidance brand of football he replicates could be marketed as a homeopathic remedy for insomnia. Had Mourinho coached the 1970 Brazilians, he would have dropped Jairzinho for the final for not tracking back, and redeployed Pele as a holding midfielder.

It isn’t just the steamroller negativity of this campaign that brings Mourinho to mind, but the reliance on confected paranoia. Crosby denies any involvement in the following, it must be acknowledged. Famously, while he was running John Howard’s 2001 re-election campaign, ministers claimed that sick and desperate asylum seekers stranded in Australian waters (how tragically topical that feels today) had thrown their own children overboard in a cynical ruse to gain access to the land of plenty. Whoever dreamed up this myth, it worked. Howard won an election he had seemed certain to lose, and Crosby’s reputation as the larrikin Karl “Turd Blossom” Rove was made.

He later built a British – or rather an English – campaign for another adorable Howard, Michael, which included stoking fear about immigrants under its delectably subtle slogan, “Are you thinking what we’re thinking?” Although the 2005 election was unwinnable for the Tories, that too worked. The Conservatives came within a few points of Labour, and won more votes in England. He then ground out a narrow mayoral win for Boris Johnson, whom Ed Miliband coolly dismantled on Sunday by advising him to ditch the ocker thug if and when he has the chance.

“Lynton Crosby put him up to that,” a laughing Miliband said in an aside to Andrew Marr after a brittle and phuttering Boris reprised that fratricidal back-stabber gibberish. “Don’t do what Lynton says to you. Come on Boris, you’re better than that. If you become leader of the Tory party, get rid of Lynton … Honestly, he doesn’t do much for you.”

Perhaps Miliband spoke too soon. It could be that Lynton is doing much for the Tories with his Mourinho-esque fixation on holding their shape, breaking up the opposition’s momentum, and fostering a bunker mentality with the scaremongering about a fiendish plot against domestic interests. Where Mourinho once synthesised paranoia to make unproven accusations about a Swedish referee colluding with Barcelona’s Frank Rijkaard at half-time, the crux of Crosby’s Meisterplan to win English marginals is also the spectre of dodgy foreigners (even if they are compatriots) and their knavish tricks.

The conspiracy theory about the SNP secretly colluding with Labour to cheat England of its birthright, deafeningly projected by friends and masters in the Tory press, is spooking Ukip voters. As things stand, it is unlikely to steer enough of them back into the Conservative fold for Cameron to win a majority, though this is not its sole intent. A secondary ambition, just as when Mourinho made his allegations against Frisk and Rijkaard (like his Barca successor Pep Guardiola, a David Axelrod of coaches who wanted to win the beautiful way), is pre-emptively to question the legitimacy of the result; to lay the ground to dismiss a Labour government tacitly backed by the SNP as an outrageous cheat.

To have one brutalist natural-born Australian working to fix a British election is a misfortune. Two of the bleeders at the same game begins to look grotesque. Last week, I cited Rupert Murdoch’s edict to The Sun’s editor, to ramp up the Miliband persecution in pursuance of his business interests, as one strong reason to vote Labour. Added to the list today is the central involvement in this vicious, venal and deceitful campaign of Lynton Crosby. Winning ugly is one thing. Winning Medusa-hideous would be another.