In the half-hour following Labour’s manifesto launch today some 50,000 people were sent an animated film with click throughs, Newstatesman.com has learned. The figure is in stark contrast to the mere 8000 copies of the manifesto the party sold in 2005.
This time round, the Labour manifesto has been designed to be “shared”, in what the campaign coordinator Douglas Alexander describes as “the word of mouth election”. The Cabinet was photographed with datasticks that will be distributed, including interactive multimedia presentations as well as a PDF of the document itself.
Alexander and Ed Miliband, the manifesto coordinator, have been the two key figures behind today’s launch. They first met in 1990 in David Miliband’s kitchen, and — as well as making a number of trips together including this one with the New Statesman in Bangladesh and India — together form what has been dubbed here, ‘Next Labour’.
One who knows both men tells NS.com: Their shared theme that Labour should be defenders and reformer of the state runs through chapter after chapter of this manifesto.” Alexander is fond of saying that it is “people who win elections, not posters” and today’s manifesto launch has his “word of mouth” finger prints all over it.
Alexander was influenced by the Obama campaign’s use of PDA handheld devices on which activists showed voters films on the doorstep. But no party anywhere in the world has launched a manifesto using a viral animated film.
Once again Labour’s document is weighty — 10 chapters covering all major policy areas — and party insiders believe that “the standard has now been set for the Tories’
launch tomorrow”. David Cameron was Michael Howard’s manifesto coordinator in 2005, while Oliver Letwin has performed the role for Cameron this time.
Letwin’s talk of a ‘policy pyramid’ drew criticism from Tory MPs at a Westminster briefing.
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