For two years prior to the 2005 General Election, it was my job to phone Philip Gould and tell him how the focus groups had gone. Just a couple of years out of university I found myself standing on station platforms dialling the the man who introduced focus groups to British politics and telling him what my groups had found. Asylum seekers. Iraq. MRSA. Howard Flight. 15% interest rates. The ads flunked. The ads made them cry. Information flying out of my mouth faster than the intercity trains shooting past as Philip managed to combine attentiveness with impatience; constantly asking for more information, more insight.
A memory as vivid as that that will have come to mind for everyone who worked with Philip when they heard of his passing this week at the age of 61. But others knew him much better than me and write more eruditely about the man. So instead of talking about the person, I want to thank him for one of his achievements: putting polling centre stage in British politics. It was vital for the electoral prospects of the Labour party in the 80s and 90s and it is vital for the political health of the country today.
Politics is an insiders' game. If you know a politician or you can pay a lobbyist who knows a politician, you can be pretty much assured that your voice will be heard, if not necessarily acted on. Look at ministers' diaries - not just in this administration but in almost any administration in the world - and you will find plenty of private meetings with CEOs or trade union leaders or activists or journalists or 'community leaders'. For rational but dangerous reasons, the general public generally only enter the diary if they make a good photo-op.
Philip saw the role of the pollster as piercing this circle of the hyper-engaged. Ultimately, a politician's political and substantive success doesn't depend on how happy they make the collected Grand Poobahs. It depends on how well they answer the concerns of families who engage with party politics once every few years but whose lives are profoundly shaped by the decisions politicians make. Those families - the people Philip taught Labour to call 'hardworking' families - don't make it into politicians' diaries but they did make it into Philips' and as a result of his inspiration, they make it into mine.
When you talk to these voters, torn between parties because none seems to speak to them or for them, you find an immense frustration at the way politics works. In that 2005 campaign, I remember starting a focus group with a package from the six o'clock news. Andrew Marr was walking up and down a staircase to illustrate an arcane point about the rise and fall of some element of the Conservative campaign. I barely knew what he was talking about and I was working on the election 18 hours a day. The participants in the focus group, tuning into politics for the first time in four years, had found that politics was a bunch of insiders talking to each other through the television when they could just as easily nip round to each other's offices.
There are some who think that focus groups and polling cheapen politics. I think the opposite is the case. In a time when people are less and less politically active, polling ensures that the mainstream of Britain who don't occupy public places, lunch with editors or employ lobbyists, are represented. They help politicians talk in language that makes sense to people who don't know, don't care and may not believe that there is a difference between a white paper, a green paper and toilet paper. They allow politicians to see past the media consensus and understand what really motivates, frustrates and concerns people. They connect the elite and the people they serve.
Of course polling cannot replace a political project. Voters want real answers to the big challenges they face, but they don't provide those answers. That's not their job. Moreover, each individual, let alone each focus group, holds conflicting views and conflicting values so you cant just endorse what they think. A naïve say-what-they-say approach leads nowhere in political terms as well as ideological ones. The real value of a pollster is not in reporting opinion - any decent research company can measure things accurately - but in knowing where opinion is going and where it is open to being led.
That drive to predict rather than just report has led to the development of a range of new techniques. Powered by the billions of dollars spent each election cycle in the US, DC-based firms are in a race to find new and better ways to understand voters. Philip led the way in bringing that expertise into British politics, and parties, NGOs and companies around the world have followed him - taking my firm into boardrooms as well as Cabinet rooms in every continent bar Antarctica.
But it hasn't all changed. In fact, many of the focus groups I run today are in the exact same homes I was visiting for Philip in 2004. Only now they have Tory MPs and the task is more like the one Labour faced in the early 90s than in 2005. The core insight that helped Philip achieve so much back then will be just as important for Labour at the next election: listening to voters does not compromise your values, it helps you deliver them.