Labour hires Obama spin chief who backed higher energy bills
ED MILIBAND has hired a controversial American election guru on a six-figure salary to help him campaign on the cost of living and his vow to freeze energy prices.
David Axelrod – who helped to mastermind Barack Obama’s two presidential election wins – is notorious in the US for a highly-criticised campaign to raise electricity bills.
It is an embarrassing link for the Labour leader who has made a 20-month freeze on fuel prices a key promise ahead of next year’s election. Mr Miliband said in his last party conference speech: ‘Gas and electric companies that put prices up and up and up. It’s not good for an economy.’
Mr Axelrod’s firm was accused of trying to deceive voters in the US by producing
‘Trying to hoodwink the public’
adverts claiming that without a hefty price hike, the lights would go off. Ostensibly, these adverts were produced by a group of local citizens and businesses in Illinois called Consumers Organized for Reliable Electricity.
In fact, the whole campaign was a front for the state’s largest power supplier, ComEd, which paid Mr Axelrod’s lobbying company, ASK Public Strategies, £8million to build support for the price rise in 2006.
When his firm’s involvement was revealed, it caused a political storm with Illinois’s Democratic governor Pat Quinn saying: ‘It’s corporate money trying to hoodwink the public’.
Yesterday Labour hailed the hiring of Mr Axelrod as a major coup following a narrowing of their lead in the polls and claims that their cost of living message will lose momentum as the economy recovers.
Douglas Alexander, the shadow foreign secretary who is in charge of the election campaign, said that energy would be a key part of the message.
Mr Axelrod’s appointment follows a trend for bringing expensive strategists from abroad.
The Tories have hired Austral- ian spin doctor Lynton Crosby to help them win the election in a reported £500,000 deal, and Nick Clegg hired South African Ryan Coetzee as a £110,000 adviser.
But not everyone welcomed the decision. Labour’s Baroness Prosser, a former party treasurer, told the BBC she was ‘not that enthusiastic’.
She said: ‘I can’t really see how a decision has been made to spend that six-figure sum on one person when what we really need is lots and lots of organisation going on around and about in the country to turn out the vote.
‘If we don’t get people coming out of their houses and voting on polling day then we are not going to win.’
Mr Axelrod has apparently not met Mr Miliband in person, but believes he can win. He claimed in an interview: ‘ Ed Miliband understands the struggle that people are going through in Britain to make a living wage, to support their families, to retire with some dignity. He understands that a growing economy demands that you have broad prosperity and not just prosperity that’s hoarded by a few.’
It was Mr Axelrod who persuaded a reluctant Mr Obama to accept the ‘Yes We Can’ slogan in the 2008 presidential election. That campaign swept Mr Obama to the White House on a wave of heady optimism and rhetoric. Six years on, that bold pledge seems a very hollow boast to most Americans and has become a millstone round Mr Obama’s neck.
But Mr Axelrod, the product of a Left-wing family in New York, will have no regrets. His task was simply to get his man into office. In the White House, Mr Obama made Mr Axelrod a senior adviser but, it later emerged, he and other aides soon clashed with Michelle Obama, who was trying to interfere in policymaking.
Although he was credited with once again heading Mr Obama’s campaign strategy in the 2012 election, a well-sourced book last year revealed that he had been pushed out during the campaign following a civil war with other senior officials.
They had been particularly upset, it was claimed, when Mr Axelrod hired a lawyer to negotiate a sweetheart deal that made him rich by taking a small percentage of the cost of every TV advert run by the Obama campaign in 2012.