Britain | The Conservatives' victory
From behind lace curtains
A "silent majority" helps the Tories to pull off their usual surprise
"I HAVE a haunting feeling that there is a silent majority sitting behind its lace curtains, waiting to come out and vote Tory." These were not the eve-of-election words of some fearful Labour spin-doctor on Ed Miliband's team, but of Labour cabinet minister Barbara Castle—on the eve of the 1970 general election.
Then, all the pre-election polls pointed to a handsome victory for the incumbent Labour government, led by Harold Wilson. But, as Ms Castle rightly suspected, the actual result was a handsome victory for Edward Heath's Conservative Party. Now, again, the polls have badly underestimated the Tory vote. Every pre-election poll registered pretty much a dead heat between the Tories and Labour, and thus a hung parliament. The actual result is a majority (albeit a slender one) for David Cameron's Tories. Something similar happened in 1992. The incumbent Tories, led by John Major, were widely expected to lose—and by a good margin, according to the exit poll. But in fact Mr Major won a majority of 21 seats, with 14m votes, the largest number ever cast for any party in British political history.
As Ian Fleming's fictional villain Auric Goldfinger tells James Bond: "They have a saying in Chicago: 'Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it's enemy action.'" Indeed, it seems the Tories' stealth victories will now have to be taken much more seriously by pollsters and pundits, and particularly by the Tories' opponents.
The "silent majority", a term coined by Richard Nixon to mobilise his electoral base before winning the 1968 American presidential election, seems to operate in Britain in favour of caution and small-C conservatism. These are the values that Mr Cameron emphasised at this election, as Mr Major did in 1992. The target audience of these messages does not go to political meetings, write letters to newspapers, blog or tweet, which makes their sentiments harder to register. Polling organisations have found it almost impossible to count them over the course of many decades, even if after the 1992 debacle pollsters altered their techniques to try to pick up more of these "shy Tories", as they are sometimes called.
There will be more re-examination of those polling techniques now. Meanwhile, the Tories' opponents must conduct their own post-mortems. Tony Blair, the leader of the Labour Party between 1994 and 2007, was one of the few who never underestimated the silent majority, and he won three thumping election victories by trimming towards it. Mr Miliband, fatally, chose to disregard it. Their differing approaches will now be at the heart of the internal debate that will consume the Labour party as it picks a leader to succeed Mr Miliband.