An Introduction to Lynton Crosby, David Cameron's Sweary Spin Doctor

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Lynton Crosby is the most Tuckerish figure to enter British politics since Alistair Campbell threatened to shove his last briefing note up the arse of his final lobby correspondent. He loves to swear. He is apparently a "man who never lets an abusive thought form in his mind without immediately forming it into a text and sending it to the object of his wrath". And that’s according to the man he won two elections for – Boris Johnson.

David Cameron's spin doctor – or "election strategist" – is alleged to have told the prime minister's crew that they needed to focus on Tory heartland policies, “not on fucking Muslims”. He is about as proudly unreconstructed an Aussie bloke as they come, listing his hobbies as red wine and red meat. But – in truth – he’s the kind of guy who doesn’t have hobbies and is wedded, at a cellular level, to "the game". The game in question being screwing the nuts off of his political opponents. Lynton Crosby's veins course with born-winner blood, and that’s what attracts everyone to him. And that’s why, despite being relatively unknown outside of Westminster circles, he’s become one of the most powerful men in British politics.

Crosby is an election strategist who made his name by winning three back-to-back elections for Aussie PM John Howard. He’s credited as being the driving force behind Boris’ back-to-back triumphs. Many people thought the credit for those should go to Ken Livingstone, but that’s a different debate. It was Crosby who came up with the London "doughnut strategy". London, he proposed, is, at heart, a doughnut town. The people on the outside – wealthier, more suburban – are natural Tory prey. Those on the inside are a bizarre hotch-potch of rich and poor, cranky and flakey – and god knows what the hell they want. But traditionally all the people on the outside don’t vote in mayoral elections because they don’t see why they should give a damn about either candidate, as neither party talks their rather insular "school-runs and petrol-prices" language.

Hence Boris’ master-stroke of railing against the West London congestion charge. Hence his dogged Nimbyist insistence on no second runway for Heathrow airport, an airport people in the neighbourhood have had 50 years to either get used to or move away from. Boris thumped on and on doggedly, monomaniacally, about outer London’s picket fence concerns, and on each occasion was rewarded by thumping Ken.

For this, Crosby has been proclaimed a political witch doctor, he's been dubbed, "The Wizard of Oz" and now he's been put in charge of David Cameron’s strategy for 2015. Cameron’s been casting around for ideas. He and his team have recognised that what they were doing in 2010 was sub-optimal: a confused chorus of ideas whose hit-all-bases confusion came across as simply weak-willed. Crosby’s job is to simplify. To pull one central message out of all of that. He calls his trademark technique, "dog whistle politics". But that doesn’t simply mean attracting your natural supporters at a gut level – that would just be Politics 101. More subtly, it’s picking out a message that pricks up the ears of your natural voters, while simultaneously not alienating the undecideds.

Often, this has led to accusations of him playing the race card. When Australia’s far-right One Nation party caused a minor political earthquake in 1996, he counselled John Howard against moving to the centre. He couldn’t be seen to attack One Nation (chief policy: opposing “the Asianisation of Australia”) directly. The fact was, riding at nine percent in the polls, the One Nationers were resonating with voters' concerns about uppity Abos engaging in a stealth landgrab and uppity Asians cheekily living in Australia. So, instead, he encouraged Howard to go round the back door: attack "political correctness", encourage Australians to "speak their minds".

It worked, spectacularly. Howard could play the "bigger picture" card and be the statesman while also dog-whistling to One Nation’s core voters that he was at least sympathetic to their feelings. From then on, hard-lining on immigration has often been his trump card. Most notoriously, when Howard later accused a boatload of refugees off Australian waters of throwing their own children overboard so they’d have to be rescued and put ashore.

Many would call the sort of deep-subconscious, emotion-led approach in which he specialises cynical, but Crosby remains agnostic. His views don’t count. Professionally, he understands politics in terms of what works. And that is why he has come to be so good at it. The testimonials are everywhere. “Lynton maintains an extraordinary organisational order in whatever circumstance,” one Aussie cabinet minister reported. He is a "supreme master of the dark arts", according to one Tory MP. Boris called him the greatest political strategist he’d ever worked with, shortly before admitting he’d only ever worked with one. Of course, all this talk of the starry-eyed political master-craftsman tends to neglect the work that Crosby did for another bloke called Howard; Michael. Crosby was called in to advise and ended up as the man who masterminded the, "Are You Thinking What We're Thinking?" posters widely lampooned at the 2005 general election. Classic dog whistle stuff: an encoded values-level invitation to the natural supporters that wouldn’t offend the floaters.

Michael Howard was rewarded for his faith in Crosby, alright, etching a whopping 0.7 percent increase on his party’s 2001 total, against a background of Labour sleaze and the Iraq shitstorm. Then there was that other great failure, Libertas. Crosby was drafted in to work on the anti-EU party of an Irish billionaire who’d managed to temporarily derail the Lisbon Treaty in an Irish referendum. Libertas was going to be the one-stop, pan-European anti-Europe party. Only it didn’t pan out: they managed to return one MP out of 500 they fielded. Another dazzling googly from the Wizard of Oz? Or more evidence that his greatest talent is getting himself associated with the talents of others?

Even within Project Dave, his appointment has stirred up those who see him as a simplistic charlatan: “the lobotomy patient’s Karl Rove”. Left-leaning Tories reportedly leaked the "fucking Muslims" stuff themselves because they were so unhappy at his appointment. There is the sense that, after years of hard work on brand detoxification – Dave running around bumming huskies, doing the dishes like a pussy-whipped house-husband and generally sucking up to gays – Crosby’s arrival will see a return to core right-wing values: a retoxification experiment that already failed under Hague and Howard. Michael Ashcroft, the party’s big-spending donor and unofficial chief pollster, has openly opposed his arrival, arguing that Crosby’s just going to add yet another layer to an already over-full top table of election strategists – Osborne, party chairman Grant Shapps, PR chief Craig Oliver, mind-doctor Steve Hilton and D-Cam himself.

If he is successful at the 2015 General Election, Crosby will get there by doing what everyone says he’s great at: maintaining discipline. At base, election campaigns are confused, sprawling squalls of idiots in rosettes with a range of different priorities yacking incontinently about a hundred different things. Crosby’s role will be to choose the few things everyone should be talking about, then bully them into staying on-message.

If he gets that far. Right now, this born hunter is fast becoming the hunted, as the steady distant drumbeat of scandal eats away at his position. The story is this. He has previously done some very well-paid lobbying work for tobacco companies. And the British government recently did a U-turn on plain-packaging for cigarettes. These two facts could be unrelated. Or they could not. For now, at least, all that anyone can say with certainty is that he was in the room when the gun went off. But, as we enter silly-season, the sheer drip-drip-drip of headlines can in itself be enough to make even the saltiest Adelaide bruiser consider his position. Is he thinking what we’re thinking? And if he is, then how exactly is he going to put his trousers back on without disturbing the whipped cream on Theresa May’s upper thighs?

Follow Gavin and Marta on Twitter: @hurtgavinhaynes / @MartaParszeniew

Illustration by Marta Parszeniew.

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