Crosby's strategy may propel Harper to fourth term

Right wing British blogger Paul Staines says it's “money well spent" by Conservatives to hire Lynton Crosby to do what he does best: win.

Crosby is an Australian political strategist based in London who has been described as a "master of the dark political arts," "the Wizard of Oz," "the Australian Karl Rove," and "one of the most powerful and influential figures in the (Australian) nation," according to a 2012 article in the UK Guardian.

Staines runs the widely read Guido Fawkes London-based blog and is well-acquainted with leading British politicians. He lives 500 yards from Parliament and has been leveraging his position on his blog for more than a decade. He started when Tony Blair was in office and has always been pro Tory. He told National Observer that Crosby has a proven track record of strengthening floundering political campaigns through sometimes crude, sometimes colourful, but often winning strategies.

“He’s going to get a disciplined campaign going,” Staines said. When asked by the National Observer how well he knew the Australian strategist, Staines replied, “I don’t go round his house if that’s what you mean."

Staines knows Crosby as a blunt talker and ruthless organizer with a reputation for dropping F-bombs in conversation.

Indeed, Crosby’s colourful language even extends to heavy-hitting clients such as London’s Conservative Mayor Boris Johnson, having once jokingly threatened to cut his “f***ing knees off" if he lost the 2008 campaign.

“He revels in that image. He speaks in pretty clear Australian," Staines said.

At time of writing, Crosby apparently remains based in London where he maintains an office on Park Lane, an exclusive West End neighbourhood abutting both Hyde Park and the Canadian High Commission. Such genteel surroundings have apparently done nothing to soften his “clear Australian,” image or his merciless tactics during elections.

It’s the economy, stupid

Crosby’s take-no-prisoners approach was most recently on display during the May 2015 general election in Britain, when he helped David Cameron’s Conservative Party score a parliamentary majority, doing away with their junior Liberal Democrat partners after five years of coalition government.

According to an article in the UK Telegraph, Crosby helped secure Cameron’s re-election by urging his Conservative clients to focus heavily on their economic record in a manner not dissimilar to Stephen Harper’s Tories, all the while slamming the previous Labour government as “the party that crashed the economy,” in 2008.

The UK Tories’ key message was simple: their austerity measures had led Britain out of recession to become the fastest-growing G7 economy.

“He got a majority for the Conservatives,” said Staines.

Under Crosby’s tutelage, the UK Conservatives hammered home their economic messaging, while Ed Miliband’s Labour Party were unable to craft a convincing narrative, despite focusing on hot-button issues of income inequality and Britain’s high cost of living.

Meanwhile, anti-immigration politicking was largely left to the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) led by Nigel Farage, according to the British blogger.

Speaking in a rare YouTube video posted on the Guido Fawkes website, Crosby said that UKIP only ended up with one seat despite widespread speculation of a breakthrough, saying that “competence and the capacity to deliver” was the fundamental test for any political party— and that Farage’s party failed.

“I don’t think they’ve got a long-term future…You should never write anyone off, but they will be a voice of discontent. They are very reliant on the performance of their leader Nigel Farage and even he couldn’t win a seat. [It’s the] sixth or seventh time he’s tried to win a Westminster seat,” said Crosby.

Dog whistles?

Crosby’s dismissive view of UKIP, which focused heavily on restricting immigration and is seen as xenophobic by some, may come across as odd from someone who has previously been accused of xenophobia himself.

Crosby is alleged to have used the phrase “F***ing Muslims,” in a rant while working as an advisor for London’s Conservative mayor Boris Johnson during his 2012 campaign, according to an article published Nov. 17, of that year in the Daily Mail.

“He denied it and he did a few Muslim Conservative events. What you've got to understand is the Left were trying to smear him as some crude Aussie crypto-racist. But nobody said 'he called me X, Y and Z',” said Staines.

Johnson himself did not distance himself from a man whose no-nonsense approach to political messaging helped him win two mayoral elections in 2008 and 2012, instead describing Crosby as “the soul of sweetness and kindness,” according to the Daily Mail.

“He definitely used that phrase’ and [also] said: ‘Lynton’s view was that chasing the Muslim vote and other ethnic groups was a waste of time – and he frequently expressed himself in very strong terms. Some people found it very offensive,” said one unnamed source who claimed to witness the event and was quoted by the Daily Mail.

However, another unnamed source told the UK Guardian that Crosby was “dismissive of a lot of people,” suggesting that he was not anti-Muslim per se but simply saw no point courting people unlikely to vote for Johnson.

“He was ruthless about who in the electorate was and wasn't worth bothering with. I remember him saying that if you put a headscarf around a bus, perhaps Muslims might vote for us. He was a lot keener on some minorities than others because they were more likely to go for Boris,” said the source.

Whatever his true beliefs on immigration or Islam, Crosby’s tactics worked: the fixer’s uncompromising approach to election campaign messaging helped Johnson win election as London mayor for the first time in 2008, followed by a second victory in 2012, smashing the myth that Britain’s capital was a Labour fortress.

Neither did Crosby’s alleged “f***king Muslims” comment stop PM Cameron from hiring his expertise in early 2013, a decision that paid off handsomely with his new majority government.

Are you thinking what we’re thinking?

In the 2005 UK general election, the master strategist lent assistance to then-Tory leader Michael Howard, who ran a poster campaign widely seen as anti-immigrant under the supposedly Crosby-devised slogan, ‘It's not racist to impose limits on immigration … Are you thinking what we're thinking?’

However Staines said that Crosby himself was not behind this messaging, telling the Observer that he joined the campaign at a late stage, but was blamed for it regardless.

“It’s unlikely he’d do something so blatantly obvious. He wouldn’t have done something like that,” said Staines.

However, not everyone shared Staines’s view that Crosby was not the force behind such fear-mongering tactics, one dissenter being Australian Labor Party strategist Justin Di Lollo whose colleagues bore the brunt of previous elections in the Wizard of Oz’s home country.

"The hallmarks of the Crosby campaign are negative campaigning, often around race or immigration," said Di Lollo in a 2012 Guardian interview. "It's the type of campaigning that involves really tearing at the fabric of society for shorter-term political gains.”

It was in 1996 when Crosby first burst onto the scene as a fixer, helping then-Liberal leader John Howard win election as his native Australia's PM for the first time in 1996.

By 2001, when Howard won re-election with Crosby’s help, the use of anti-refugee fear-mongering became apparent. Howard claimed that Afghan asylum seekers were throwing their children into the sea, using emotional blackmail to enter the country via boats.

"A political party doesn't take that road unless it feels like it's in quite a lot of trouble,” said Di Lollo to the Guardian. “In politics, it is entirely possible to excite negative attitudes in the community and turn them into votes, but that can come at a terrible price. It can undermine community harmony and attitudes towards tolerance. He has probably one of the world's best capacities to utilize this sort of campaigning.”

Howard’s centre-right Liberal Party won four consecutive victories thanks to Crosby’s help.

It was a formidable achievement for the cereal farmer's son from Kadina, a town of less than 5,000 people in South Australia, who rose from his humble origins to propel right-wing politicians into office, and now runs a consulting firm with his business partner Mark Textor. The Crosby-Textor Group currently maintains head offices in London, Sydney, and Milan, which also covers the United Arab Emirates.

Writing in The Guardian in 2013, Australian journalist Debra Jopson said: "Through his business activities, Crosby has been seen as an enemy to those who advocate for the rights of asylum seekers, Gypsies, Indigenous people, women seeking abortions and gay marriage activists. Indeed, because of his marketing methods, it could be argued that he has helped to push politics in the western world to the right."

Aussie fear tactics match Harper government’s xenophobia

If Crosby is indeed the xenophobe that some make him out to be, his addition to Team Harper comes at a critical time, with Canada’s economy sliding into recession, an exodus of refugees fleeing Syria for the West, and cratering poll numbers just five weeks from election day.

Harper’s own MPs and supporters have also been prone to outbursts of prejudice, the latest example being Brampton-Centre MP Bal Gosal, who told the Toronto Star, “The majority of people don’t want them,” when asked about Syrian refugees.

In March of this year, Tory MP Larry Miller said that Muslim women should “stay the hell where you came from,” if they wore niqabs during citizenship ceremonies.

Around the same time that Miller landed in hot water for anti-Muslim comments, New Brunswick MP John Williamson told a conference in Ottawa that it made no sense paying “whities” to stay home while companies bring in “brown people” as temporary foreign workers.

Williamson’s comments were slammed by his fellow Tories, including MP Devinder Shory who posted on Twitter that he was “extremely disappointed by the racist comments,” made by his colleague.

Both Miller and Williamson later apologized for their remarks.

Staines wasn’t in a position to comment on Canada’s political system or controversies such as these, but nonetheless felt that the Harper Conservatives could benefit from Crosby’s disciplined and focused style of political messaging, in the run-up to Canada’s 2015 federal election.

At time of writing it remains unclear what role Crosby will play in Harper's campaign, or if he's even in Canada right now.

"Crosby is somebody that pretty much everyone in our organization has known for a long time, we've had a lot of cross-pollination over the years with our friends in Australia and also the U.K," is all that Tory campaign spokesperson Kory Teneycke told the CBC on Sept. 10.

However, Crosby's addition to Team Harper may be a violation of the Canada Elections Act, which heavily restricts foreign involvement in Canadian politics.

The Canadian Press reported that "The Canada Elections Act specifies that it is illegal for anyone who is not a Canadian citizen or permanent resident to 'in any way induce electors' to vote or refrain from voting for a particular candidate"— but despite this, Elections Canada have determined that advising a campaign on how to win does not include "inducing" people to vote for a certain candidate.

Harper's Conservatives need all the help they can get if they are to win a fourth term on Oct. 19, as the latest opinion poll numbers make grim reading for the Tories.

As of Sept. 13, Thomas Mulcair's NDP enjoy a slight lead at 31.5 per cent, while Justin Trudeau's Liberals are holding second place at 29.9 per cent, and Harper's Conservatives are trailing third at 29.6 per cent, according to the latest Poll Tracker results. While all three parties are nearly neck and neck at time of writing, the NDP have held a consistent lead in polls over the summer.

No comment from the Wizard

The Observer tried calling Crosby’s London, England, office on Sept. 11 but one of his directors who answered the phone declined to make any remarks on the record.

However, Crosby himself, when contacted by the UK’s New Statesman magazine for an interview in 2012, said that he was fed up being misrepresented by British journalists.

He has yet to comment on Canadian journalists.