This article was taken from the April issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online
Noon, Wednesday 9 December, 2009. Chancellor Alistair Darling stands up in Parliament to lay out his plans to lift Britain out of recession. Four hours earlier, at 8am, shadow chancellor George Osborne and his advisers gathered in their Westminster offices to second--guess what Darling might say. But Osborne's team aren't the only ones waiting on Darling's words.
Half a mile down the road, the Conservative web team want to know too -- so that they can buy up the terms he uses on Google. As Darling begins, the phrases come thick and fast." Each inefficient boiler," he says, "adds over £200 to household bills and one tonne of carbon to the atmosphere a year." Sitting at his computer on the fourth floor of Conservative Campaign Headquarters (CCHQ), Tory online -- community head Craig Elder punches "boiler scrappage scheme" into Google's pay-per-click advertising system and buys the phrase for a few pennies.
Within seconds, anyone Googling "boilers" or using the phrase in Gmail will find a link to a "prebuttal" budget document on the Conservatives' home page -- a rolling response, updated in real time as the Chancellor speaks. Once Darling sits down, Osborne's aides race to read the giant document supporting the speech, pulling together an official response within the hour, which is in turn rolled out through a further set of Google ads.
For the next 24 hours the ads are served up at least one million times, generating more than 10,000 clicks. Such techniques aren't new to British politics: the Tories began experimenting with Google AdWords two years earlier. But Elder and his team are becoming ever more practised in their use, even buying up "James Purnell" at 10pm on June 4 last year only moments after the work and pensions secretary resigned from Gordon Brown's Cabinet, so that anyone searching for the story would see a Tory advertisement.
A week before Alistair Darling made his speech, Osborne's office was handed a leaked government report on cutting IT spending. The usual procedure would be to pass the leak to a friendly journalist.
But sitting in his office, Osborne floated the idea that his team should publish it themselves -- and, rather than simply badmouthing the Government, ask the public for ideas to improve the report.
With the plan agreed, the web team worked through the weekend to build MakeITbetter.org.uk, crowdsourcing "improvements" to the (still unpublished) report. It launched at 10am on November 30, barely 76 hours after the leak had arrived. The site broke under the traffic -- but Osborne had made his point: here was a party trying to do things online that no British political party had ever attempted.
There's an element of PR gimmickry in publishing a leak online, of course. But such initiatives are part of a more concerted Tory technology experiment. Late last year, party strategists toyed with the idea of launching "Tory Labs", a site where policies in development could be floated early for fine-tuning, modelled on computer giant Dell's corporate IdeaStorm crowdsourcing platform.
It didn't happen -- it was too risky and too easy to attack.
But last December David Cameron did announce a £1 million prize to build a national crowdsourcing platform, based on an idea floated by MySociety.org founder Tom Steinberg in a December 2007 talk at Google that he had brought to the Tories in his role as one of their IT -- policy advisers. From its commercials on Spotify to its use of Google Docs to publish Shadow Cabinet expenses and Google's Moderator tool for public votes on its draft election manifesto, the party has finally seen its digital future.
Francis Maude makes an unlikely digital revolutionary. A 56-year-old silver-haired MP for a sleepy corner of West Sussex, he is a self--admitted technophobe. But in the early days of Cameron's leadership, Maude was the man most responsible for pushing through the party's digital upgrade. Maude works on the top floor of Norman Shaw North, the nerve centre of David Cameron's modernising project. He and Osborne have offices on the second floor of the next building, Norman Shaw South, alongside Cameron's strategy director Steve Hilton and a few dozen speechwriters and press handlers.
Maude became Tory chairman before Cameron was leader, taking charge of a battered CCHQ campaign team and a heavily indebted party. Rebuilding its infrastructure would, he knew, take years -- but he was under huge pressure to make changes quickly. As a senior adviser who worked with him at the time put it: "The pace of what we were trying to change in those first six months was unbelievable. There was this small group of maybe half a dozen of us trying to drag this truck, called the Conservative Party, up a very steep hill." Hilton was especially impatient, "always arriving with lots of problems, saying, 'We've got to sort this, and we've got to fix that.'" Hilton's desire for dramatic steps to "decontaminate" the Tory brand meant Cameron was soon dispatched to ride with huskies in the Arctic and hug hoodies. But he was also insistent that the party needed a technology refresh: for starters, a new website and communications strategy that targeted a younger, internet-enabled generation.
Its website, built before the 2001 election, had what Maude now quaintly calls a "homemade" quality. Even in 2005, the party had no web strategy, nor a team to implement it. This was a time, one adviser recalls, when "the person who ran the website was also the same person you rang up if your Outlook broke." Maude did find funds for a powerful new database that could track voters and marshal "get out the vote" operations on election day -- called, in a nod to Labour's Excalibur, Merlin. But that was it: fixing the main site was too expensive, and no one knew what to do with it.
Instead, Maude and Hilton focused on piecing together a new team.
Soon after Cameron's victory, Hilton approached Rishi Saha, a former ad man with a taste for fashionable clothing and a passion for technology. Saha, now 31, joined the party (through its website) in 2003, and stood unsuccessfully in 2005 as a London candidate, learning first-hand how unpopular the Tories remained.
He was sceptical. His experience of CCHQ as a candidate had taught him that innovative ideas often ran straight into turf wars and bureaucratic inaction. Would he have the backing, and the money, to reimagine Tory web strategy? Hilton promised that he would.
Reassured, Saha signed on -- soon becoming the party's first head of new media. Saha knew the technological possibilities. But how did they fit in politically? To find out, Maude approached the party's leading blogger, Tim Montgomerie, with an unusual request.
A Tory insider who had setup ConservativeHome.com, Montgomerie had been Iain Duncan Smith's chief of staff. He was also, usefully, known as a close follower of US politics.
Before Barack Obama, George W Bush's Republicans led the world in online campaigning. The Republicans had the most effective blogs, and were especially adept at sneakily using news sites (such as the Drudge Report) to bash opponents.
Bush's 2004 victory had pioneered peer-to-peer campaigning, using the net to connect neighbours and link churchgoers to fellow believers. Knowing this, Maude asked Montgomerie to undertake a trip to the US in early 2006 to see what the Tories could learn.
Montgomerie spent a month in Washington DC, joined for part of the time by Sam Coates, a student who helped ConservativeHome.com and later joined the Tory web team. Networking widely, Montgomerie used a series of meetings to flesh out a theory of how parties needed to change in the internet era. He returned to London with an incendiary PowerPoint presentation, presented to Maude in a conference room at party HQ.
Although voters cared about single issues, he argued, declining trust meant they no longer identified with parties. Meanwhile, on the web, parties were not competing against each other, but against the BBC, The Daily Telegraph and lowly bloggers. Political parties, newspapers and campaigning groups were effectively merging -- so parties had to junk their traditional ways and instead run aggressive, attention-grabbing, single-issue online campaigns, often without party branding, which in turn could gather millions of email addresses with which to speak to voters come election time.
Montgomerie's radical vision for an entirely new model of digital campaigning was never fully implemented by a party struggling to keep the wheels from falling off, but it nonetheless inspired much of the change that was quickly to follow. Cameron was yet to prove himself to his party. The public still saw the Tories as mean and out of touch. So Hilton, in a phase of frenzied experimentation, made a risky strategic call to separate the leader's brand from that of the Conservatives.
First came a push to get Cameron on YouTube, then (in 2006) still a new political medium. Hilton knew Cameron was a natural on camera. And so, on a trip the two took to India, he recorded Cameron's reactions on a hand-held camera. A simple blog on Google's Blogger platform -- at dcindia06.blogspot.com -- hosted clips: first in the airport; then careering through New Delhi on a rickshaw.
Watching Cameron's authentic, likeable performance, Hilton knew he was on to something. Why not, he suggested, an entire Cameron YouTube channel? Working with Saha, he pushed for the project (known internally as "Project 8") to launch at conference in October 2006, Cameron's first as leader.
The very first clip was to be of the Tory leader at home with his family. Cameron and Hilton debated the risks: let the public into your house and you may never get them out. But they went for it. On Saturday September 30, 2006, the day conference opened, The Guardian's headline declared: "Tories unveil their secret weapon: webcameron". It was a radical step: conferences normally kick off with a big policy announcement, not a YouTube clip. The videos themselves were even more unusual: a strikingly intimate portrait, complete with Cameron wearing rubber gloves as he talked politics doing the dishes.
It was exactly the authentic image Hilton wanted to convey. He then pushed another idea first proposed in Montgomerie's PowerPoint: an attention-grabbing, single-issue campaign that could take the Tories viral. He hired Karmarama, a fashionable Soho ad agency, to dream up "Sort It" -- a series of flashy online ads on the perils of personal debt, featuring more YouTube clips, this time of a fake-tanned American shyster (modelled roughly on The Fast Show's Swiss Toni) trying to convince a twenty something to max out his credit card. Its catchphrase, "Don't be a tosser", led to its quickly being dubbed the "Tosser" campaign. Earlier versions were edgier still, though the original phrase "Don't be a pussy" was junked after internal disputes. But that was the least of the arguments. Agency fees and offline adverts made the campaign hugely expensive. Senior figures worried that Hilton was spending what little money the party had on fashionable one-offs that didn't fit into a wider strategy.
For all the headlines, the campaign also failed to take off online and was widely derided, both by Labour ministers and baffled commentators. Today some party insiders defend it, saying it forced people to look again at the Tories. Others simply shrug, putting it down to a moment when the party had to be seen to be doing things differently. Either way, "Sort It" was quietly dropped. As Maude and Hilton sought to push their party online, Osborne was thinking about how to rid it of its future-phobic reputation. He knew the political value of "owning the new" and took a private trip to California in summer 2006, meeting Silicon Valley entrepreneurs such as LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and Mitchell Baker, the quirky, charismatic chair of Mozilla, which produces Firefox. He returned determined to make the IT issue his own.
The first opportunity came in the autumn, when his team accepted an invitation to give a lecture on "Politics and media in the internet age". But given that he and Cameron still had few firm policies, what would he say? He turned to Rohan Silva, a clever and enthusiastic technology fan, just 25 when hired in March 2006.
Working with Hilton, Silva quickly established himself as the well-connected brain behind Osborne's ideas. He sourced widely: from books such as Wikinomics and The Long Tail, by reaching out to tech innovators such as Tom Steinberg, and sometimes from less likely sources -- as when Tory baroness Sheila Noakes, now 60, emailed Osborne's office about a plan by a freshman American senator called Barack Obama for a website tracking US public spending. This "Google for government" idea fitted perfectly, and a pledge to build a similar UK site became the centrepiece of Osborne's lecture.
The speech won good reviews, especially from bloggers unused to hearing such Tory technology talk. Osborne's enthusiasm grew. Soon after, aides remember him jokingly asking: "So, what's next with the iGeorge agenda?" Internally, the name stuck. Silva was tasked with dreaming up more policies to push forward Conservative thinking on online transparency. Osborne started taking his commitment personally, installing Firefox on his office PC and even cycling to work in a Mozilla T-shirt given to him personally by Baker. Soon after, insiders recall being struck by Osborne's sudden interest in the political potential of such technology. One adviser recalls: "Literally the first time I'd heard the phrase 'Google bomb' was from George." He even turned his occasional video--game habit -- picked up playing Age of Mythology (and more recently
The Beatles: Rock Band) with his children -- to political advantage.
When rumours floated around Westminster in April 2008 that Labour's Jack Straw had punched schools minister Ed Balls after a heated policy argument (both sides strongly denied the story), Osborne wondered aloud if the supposed spat could be turned into an online game. Barely a day later, after Rishi Saha had dug up an open-source "beat 'em up" game on a Japanese website, the party launched A Kick In The Balls -- in which players could set the two Labour politicians against each other, Street Fighter II-style.
Through all this, Osborne's office promoted an agenda of radical online transparency. Inspired by plans floated by Obama, Silva pushed hard for a pledge to publish every item of government spending over £25,000, as well as all government contracts over £10,000. A new public "right to data", first floated in a presentation by Silva to the party's influential policy unit in April 2009, would offer public access to previously secret datasets, which could be made open to, and mashed up by, anyone.
Most recently, in a potentially explosive policy paper published just before last Christmas, the party pledged to publish the details of all new government IT contracts, along with all software code created under those contracts. It would push through such measures with a beefed--up central government IT office, and even a new "skunkworks" tech team at the heart of government -- a radical set of changes, partly developed by Tom Steinberg. Even opponents have been impressed.
Tom Watson, a blogging Labour MP and Brown ally, speaking at a public event hosted by the think tank Demos in November 2009, said the Tory pledges to publish government-spending data would be the most radical policy in any 2010 election manifesto. "So, what do you think about wife-beating?" Sitting in his bedroom checking Facebook on his laptop one evening in February 2009, Charlie Elphicke was taken aback.
As the Conservative candidate for the marginal seat of Dover and Deal, he had become used to odd questions. Even so, this Facebook message was unusual. Elphicke scribbled a reply: he was, he said, against it. But who wanted to know? The correspondent turned out to be an 18-year-old pupil from Dover Grammar, who had Googled Elphicke's website and followed the link to Facebook.
Questions from other pupils followed --"Why isn't there anything in Dover for us to do at night?" asked one -- and before long Elphicke was using his Facebook page to connect with his young constituents. One set up a Facebook group to help him get elected, which now has 71 fans. A few dozen volunteered for his campaign.
Elphicke's web designer, Michael Dent, sees such local moments as part of a broader trend whereby "the latest breed of politicians, like Charlie, are willing to use technology to engage far more directly with the electorate than ever before." He is also following an insight from the Obama campaign -- that online activity matters only for what it contributes on the ground. Like other candidates, Elphicke uses Facebook, Twitter and the party's newer MyConservatives social-networking platform. Last year he launched a site that allowed people to donate £10 via their mobile phones -- until regulators shut it down. But his most successful innovation has been his own website, Elphicke.com.
Having decided that most other candidate websites were "pretty rubbish", Elphicke was introduced to Dent, a bright Oxford University student, through an old teacher of Dent's. They worked up a template for a new local campaigning website -- with a clean design, a local map and YouTube clips on the front page, as well as easy integration with platforms such as Facebook.
The site launched in February 2009 and caught Rishi Saha's eye.
A deal was signed, making Dent the party's informally recommended designer, with 24 candidates and MPs (including Osborne) signing up for the new site. Even so, direct contact with voters requires more than slick websites. Here candidates have a problem: door knocking reaches voters, but people often aren't in or don't want to talk.
You can call -- the Tories have a call centre in their London HQ and a virtual telephone widget built into their MyConservatives platform -- but many voters use only mobiles or are ex-directory.
You can ask the Royal Mail, as Elphicke did early in his campaign, to deliver leaflets, but that can cost thousands.
If each constituency has roughly 50,000 voters, even a superhuman (and wealthy) candidate can hope to reach about only half of them. This is where Merlin -- the party's little-publicised campaigning software, commissioned by Francis Maude back in 2005 and built by a small London-based tech outfit called Conchango -- could really make an impact. Walking round the housing estate, Elphicke carries bundles of A4 sheets listing local names and addresses, taken from BlueChip, the party's old database.
BlueChip houses a decade of data cobbled together from the electoral register and any previous contacts the party may have made with voters. Knocking on doors, candidates mark up their lists with codes: C for Conservative, P for probable, L for Liberal Democrat, and (showing the system's age) S for Socialist, or Labour. On election day, volunteers used to rush round the constituency to ensure that all the Cs and Ps had voted. Merlin changes all that.
Candidates can feed in data from surveys posted through voters' doors to create better targeted local "canvass sheets". (This data is also fed directly back to party HQ, giving a more complete picture of local concerns.) More significantly, Merlin integrates Mosaic, a complex "people classification system" developed by the research firm Experian. Mosaic gives a detailed breakdown of 65 consumer "tribes" such as "café bar professionals" and "high-spending families". These socio-demographic categories let candidates see who lives in their patch simply by typing in a postcode.
When Wired interviewed him, Elphicke had not yet begun to use Merlin in his local campaign. But others who had used the system told how its real power emerged when an extra factor is added: industrial-scale tailored opinion polling. Polling thousands, sometimes tens of thousands, of voters is hugely expensive. But here the Conservatives have a second weapon: the deep wallet of treasurer Lord Ashcroft, who bankrolls the party's "key seats" campaign and its large polls of target voters. A poll might seek out the views of a Mosaic group -- say, "overstretched young aspirers" -- living in marginal seats in northern England.
If this group proved sceptical about Conservative policies on policing, the party could respond, using Merlin, by sending a letter on Tory crime policy only to that group. Merlin also promises full hand--held integration for election day: no more printouts to take door to door or voter lists to review, just party workers keeping CCHQ updated in real time about voter turnout and key seat performance using dedicated BlackBerry-like devices.
Frances Maude admits that he "isn't sure" if such plans will be ready in time; Merlin's rollout has, at times, been "difficult".
Some of those who have used it for campaigning say the otherwise powerful system suffers "operational stability" issues (meaning sometimes it doesn't work at all). Others worry that the party lacks the statistical know-how to make sense of its powerful tool.
But on election day, it will still let the Tories target marginal voters in must-win seats more precisely than ever before.
Saturday 6 October, 2007 was a day of celebration -- the day Gordon Brown scrapped calling an early election. Rishi Saha was at home that evening, his team having worked flat out for two weeks under the assumption that the election was definitely going to be held in 2007. It was now off until 2010. Brown had bought Saha the one commodity his team needed: time.
Walking into CCHQ the following Monday, he sat down to write the case for a total overhaul of the party's still antiquated website,
Saha describes 2007 as a tricky year, the party's "most difficult" under Cameron. Often behind in the polls, it waited nervously for an election it thought it might lose. Some of the verve of the early days had gone too, not least because during that summer Hilton's wife Rachel Whetstone had taken a senior position at Google and Hilton had followed her to live in California.
There he took more of a policy role, leaving Saha in sole charge of future web efforts. By the end of 2007, Saha had built a dedicated web team. Sam Roake, a 26-year-old poached from Google's online ads division, worked on the early days of webcameron. Craig Elder, the party's cerebral Scottish head of online communities, joined next, leaving his English literature PhD unfinished. Tom Edmonds was hired as an online copy editor from peer-to-peer lending site Zopa in September, tasked with rewriting the party's web content. Producer and director Nicky Woodhouse, a keen wind surfer but with scant political background, came next, taken on for online video. More recently Saha hired SamCoates, who had been in Washington with Montgomerie in 2006, as well as a dedicated online fundraiser.
Frantic preparation for the "election that wasn't" had revealed how Conservatives.com had become a junk bucket for all the party's business, focusing incoherently on diverse potential audiences: journalists, party members, MPs, councillors and policy experts all had their own sections.
The result was a dull and ineffective site: a swing voter looking for info at 7pm on election day -- the person Saha says he designed the new site around -- would have been lucky to find it, still less to be persuaded to vote Tory Saha convinced his bosses to finance a complete rebuild. The technical challenge wasn't enormous, but Saha's plans were ambitious. He set a tight timescale.
The new site needed to be built, tested and operational 72 hours before the next party conference, in October 2008. And he needed to disprove his party's view that large website projects were under-delivered, overspent and late. Saha wanted to create Google-friendly content by wresting control of the site from the party's powerful press office and junking its jargon-filled policy sections. But it meant winning a deeper battle.
For decades parties had organised themselves around broadcast media. Cosy chats with journalists put policies into the next day's paper and got Tory soundbites on the evening news. This world hadn't gone away, but pulling alongside it was a different model, driven fundamentally by search engines. As Saha told Wired: "The new site needed to do one thing: to tempt people in as they floated by doing other things on the web." Agencies were briefed in November 2007, with the winner -- a small, idiosyncratic Hoxton based outfit called Folk -- picked early in 2008. Next came months of "visioning", planning, building and user testing. In addition to being written to maximise its Google impact, the site was to have a new look, a blog, prominent video and new user-friendly sections to highlight its policies and personalities. With days to go, the site was far from finished.
On the afternoon of Tuesday, 23 September -- T minus three until launch -- a nervous Saha walked through the gates of the House of Commons, ready to present his progress to the Shadow Cabinet in an oak-panelled room close to David Cameron's parliamentary office.
The Tory top team, not exactly experts on search -- engine optimisation, listened politely and gave the site the thumbs up.
The centrepiece of the launch was the "wall" -- hundreds of YouTube clips of "ordinary" people saying nice things about Tories. To produce these, Saha had clandestinely gathered 250 friends of friends in a Westminster conference centre a week earlier. It worked, and the project stayed under wraps.
At 8.30am on 26 September, an exhausted Saha flicked the switch and the site went live, half an hour before schedule. There were no hitches. Everything worked. At a capital cost of £240,000, it was on time, on budget, and doing what it promised. Saha's team was finally given control of the website, wresting it from the party's IT division for the first time since 2005. Yet, for Saha, something was still missing. So shortly after the launch, he booked a plane ticket.
If he was to go hunting for ideas, there was only one place to do it: Silicon Valley. David Cameron cheerfully admits that he has problems with technology. He recently bought a MacBook Pro, but prefers to draft speeches by hand. But there is one device he cannot do without: his BlackBerry. He uses it constantly to check speeches, send comments on policy ideas, or just read Westminster's gossipy political blogs.
Drafts of his weekly public emails, pinged to his home on Friday evenings, are answered quickly with one sentence replies signed simply "dc". Cameron also texts close aides -- a habit that has led him, Steve Hilton and others in their office to adopt text speak, with "wud" replacing "would" and "gr8" for "great". If he wins, Cameron will certainly be Britain's first BlackBerry prime minister. But where as he might not be a digital native, he fully signed on as a technology evangelist in October 2007, when he gave a big speech (drafted by Hilton) to Google's Zeitgeist conference in California signing his party up to a vision of a future "post-bureaucratic age". To flesh out the vision, in July last year Cameron dispatched his intellectual A-team -- Hilton, Rohan Silva and his head of policy James O'Shaughnessy -- to the US to hunt for new ideas.
They dashed between New York, Boston and San Francisco, with nearly 50 meetings in four days. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of
The Black Swan, jostled in the team's diary with NewYork mayor Michael Bloomberg and Craiglist's Craig Newmark. The inevitable trip to the Googleplex was balanced by coffee with biotech experts at Stanford, and five meetings were scheduled at MIT's Media Lab on topics ranging from "smart cities" to "personal robotics". Here Comes Everybody author Clay Shirky, who met the trio for coffee, said he was "astonished at how non-partisan their approach was". Micah Sifry, exponent of open-source politics, met them at a restaurant across from New York's Grand Central Station and was struck by "how little they seemed to worry about these new approaches seeming too radical or disruptive. Rather, the tone of our discussions was more, 'How far can the envelope be pushed?'"
Rishi Saha had also been in the US in November 2008, to plan the final stage of the party's web redesign. He too visited Google's HQ, spending election day there. Saha had met Obama briefly, when he had stopped by Cameron's office during a summer visit to the UK.
That Saturday morning, Obama had teased Saha for his relaxed clothing, saying: "Oh, so you must be the web guy." Now he was about to be elected president having used online tools to mobilise a 13-million-strong grassroots army and raised around $500 million through his website -- an inspiration to the entire Conservative technology team. Saha's trip had been facilitated by Rachel Whetstone, Google's head of media and a former Cameron adviser.
Steve Hilton was there too. Having moved to the West Coast, he had consistently worked from a desk inside the Googleplex.
One evening Saha ran into Sergey Brin at a party; they talked politics, and he played with Brin's demo Android phone. And it was at Google that he was to make his most important contact. In meetings to learn about forthcoming Google products, Saha found himself chatting about the election with a young engineer who mentioned in passing that he had been a longtime "precinct captain" for Obama's campaign, often using its social-networking platform My.BarackObama.com or MyBO.
Saha asked for a demo.
He had played about with MyBO before but as he said later: "This guy talked me through in detail what worked, and what the problems were. They were probably the single most important 30 minutes in helping me understand what we needed to do next." Two Google staffers took him through the Obama and McCain campaigns' sophisticated paid-for search advertising strategies: Obama had been spending $1 million a month on Google search alone and developing increasingly sophisticated campaigns, defensively buying up terms used by opponents and reacting to news in real time, at the very second a story broke. Saha learned about Google's Moderator platform; he met teams at Yahoo and Facebook, and showed particular interest in Facebook's Connect system, a handy way of authenticating people for political sites based on their Facebook profiles.
Returning to the UK, Saha and his team set about building the final stage of their new campaigning toolkit. The team had run various online experiments and rebuilt their main site. The party's push to improve its email marketing had been integrated with the main site, using CheetahMail, also provided by Experian.
Yet beyond Merlin, the party had yet to do much for local candidates such as Charlie Elphicke. This was the gap MyConservatives was meant to fill. Built over nine months using Drupal by developers LBi, and led by Coates, it was launched at party conference to give local activists tools to help them organise events, raise money and access a virtual phone bank to call wavering voters. The site won enthusiastic internal reviews, not just from the usual digital boosters but also from the party's hardheaded press chief, Andy Coulson. It even had a sense of humour: the site's "404" error message features a smiling Eric Pickles, the Tories' bluff Yorkshire chairman, holding up a sign saying: "Sorry chum, we couldn't find your page." Saha's technology platform was complete.
In a sharp charcoal-grey suit jacket, Saha is onstage making a keynote speech to the Personal Democracy Forum, a gathering of political technology experts, in Barcelona's Torre Agbar tower.
Huddled delegates have been talking over cups of coffee about the 2010 election. One notes that Saha's team asked people to donate their Facebook status to the Tories during the 2009 European elections, predicting similar polling-day stunts. Others talk of the coming "Google surge" of targeted last--minute online political ads, and mutter about the secretive arm's length hit squads all three parties have set up to push out damaging/amusing YouTube attacks. The consensus Most Radical Technology for Election 2010 is the camera phone: who, exactly, will be gotcha'd first?
Wired meets Joe Rospars, the streetwise former head of Obama's online operation. He questions whether the Tories really did learn the lesson of Obama's campaign: that what matters in politics is the mobilisation of real people. "For all their databases and search -- engine tricks, you have to ask what is the quality of interaction most people will have with the Tories during your British election. If they're still only getting leaflets, or even emails, and not a knock on the door from a neighbour they know, then they are only halfway to getting what we did." Other knowledgeable observers who have spoken on condition of anonymity have voiced similar doubts.
A common theme is that Conservative efforts are impressive, but hugely expensive. As one put it: "When you spend half a million quid on a rubbish campaign to get people to be your friend on Facebook, as they did in 2008, you've got to expect more for your cash." Saha, though, remains upbeat. "The only way we will rebuild the trust that has been lost is by opening up access, giving the public more, and making them feel a part of the team, a part of what we are trying to do," he says towards the end of his speech. "Unlike some, I'm optimistic about this, and I think technology and new media are just integral to our ability to do this." He sits down to strong applause. In his eyes there is a steely confidence.
OK, he seems to say to the audience. We have this election. We've built our machine. We like the look of it. Some of you think it's not going to work? Fine. Bring it on.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
