ABSTRACT
With high hopes raised by the quality and professionalism of the campaign, the outcome was, in the Party’s own words, a ‘devastatingly disappointing result’: not because Labour lost the election – few regarded winning as a realistic scenario – but because, in comparison with the wretchedly mismanaged campaign of 1983, the advance was so weak.1 Why had Labour lost so conclusively in 1987? What factors inhibited people from voting for the Party? Shortly after the 1987 election, a report entitled Labour and Britain in the 1990s was produced by a team comprising Mandelson, Philip Gould, Deborah Mattinson, Roger Jowell (Director of British Social and Community Planning Research), Paul Ormerod (Director of the Henley Centre for Forecasting) and Lord (Andrew) McIntosh from IFF Research Limited2 (Hughes and Wintour, 1990: 60). In the following discussion, the report has been supplemented by interviews with leading strategists, Shadow Agency reports written in 1987, Party documents and other relevant material. The diagnosis of Labour’s predicament had two purposes: to analyse the nature of the problem but also to prepare opinion within the Party for the sweeping changes of policy that the authors believed were essential.
