It's easy being on the outside criticising. I can't imagine a more care free life than that of Nigel Farage endlessly touring the country and the broadcast studios finding fault with the bigwigs. Now he's come out on top of course, he has a completely different scenario to cope with. He is now held responsible for what is happening. His cheeky chappy persona is no longer an asset. As he shows no sign of retiring he has to develop a new approach. So far he shows no sign of doing that either. Given the damage he has done I am afraid I will withhold my limited supply of sympathy if he fails to succeed in his new role.
But there is one member of the Brexit insurgency who seems to be having no trouble adapting at all. Daniel Hannan's analyses are wrong, his proposals bonkers and his grasp of reality is tenuous. But he does have a great way with words, and is a superb communicator. And unlike Farage he seems to genuinely believe what he says and seems like a likeable guy. He may well actually be a likeable guy in so far as it is possible to work that out for a public figure.
Given the parlous state of the left at the moment, it looks very unlikely that a Labour government is remotely likely either in 2020 or even 2025. It is even possible that social democracy is now on the way out. Another 1945 or 1997 doesn't seem very likely at all soon. This is depressing, but it does have some consolations. With no left wing government to defend, there is the chance to think a bit more deeply. Lack of power and responsibility aren't things to be sought, but the possibilities they offer don't have to be passed up.
My advice is to forget about trying to win power by clever strategies, progressive alliances or presentational panache. None of those will work. It is much better to work at coming up with good ideas and communicating those ideas well. Look at how well the Australian points system story worked for the Brexiters. They sounded like that had a solution to a problem that troubled a lot of people. It worked really well. Obviously the Brexit policy package is of no use to the left, but their way of presenting it is now really relevant. It is now the left that are the marginal group excluded from power that nobody takes seriously. Let's look at how the Brexit team played that hand well enough to come out on top against all the odds.
And as I say, nobody does it better than Daniel Hannan. Here are the five features of his communication style that can be a great model.
1. He is relentlessly positive and polite. The effect of this is that he himself comes across as a positive person. Moaning is rarely persuasive. Here's a sample from Twitter "Loved that #newsnight panel. Cheerful leave voters, none of them racist, none of them complaining of betrayal. So far from the caricature." It sounds much better put that way than trying to argue that the leave voters are hard done by.
2. Always seems well informed, especially about history. He writes about his despair at the decline of Labour from its golden age, peppering it with names of famous Labour figures that contrast with the pigmies of the present day. But even here he manages to put in some praise of Corbyn. You get the impression that he is genuinely sorry for the passing of a great tradition. It is very effective, a lot more so than the blood curdling hatred you often get from the media.
3. He uses humour. When somebody puts forward an academic argument for why the referendum didn't really mean that the majority were in favour of leave he simply agrees but points out that pets votes weren't counted either.
4. He uses simple language and ideas. For example in one post on his blog he looks at a story of a man who made a chicken sandwich from first principles - catching the chicken, milking the cow etc. He then turns it into a parable of how efficient capitalism is. It is quite a tour de force. If you don't do much writing, trust me. Clarity is the toughest thing to achieve.
5. He shows rather than tells. Analysing local election results he goes through all the numbers using the minimum of statistics to show that UKIP are doing worse than the other three big parties. Knowing a bit about stats myself I can see that he is running the numbers in a fairly standard statistical way and there is a vocabulary he could have used to describe what he finds more succinctly, at the cost of losing some readers who aren't familiar with that kind of thing. This is a cost he refuses to accept and instead makes the article a bit longer. He also doesn't put in the obvious, i.e., a graph.
The end effect is that it reads like a conversation rather than a study. It is almost as if he is sharing something interesting he has just discovered.
Obviously as a relatively young Conservative MEP he has not had much of any importance to actually do, so he has had plenty of time to polish his skills. The average lefty has rather more on his plate and can't expect to come up with stuff with quite the degree of polish that Daniel delivers. But the key points I have picked out are not too difficult to apply. Keeping them in mind might well help make the arguments you want to make. There are a lot of people out there who need persuading, so every little helps.
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