Insight
The Conservative Party leadership campaigns
– a ‘safe campaign’ before a tough winter ahead for health policy
By Vinay Chhana and Amy Trenter
In the face of another challenging winter for the NHS – with elective backlogs, the re-emergence of flu, and rising energy costs – neither Conservative leadership candidate has given much consideration to health policy during the campaign.
Most likely there is a strategic reason for this in that both the strong favourite, Liz Truss, and the outsider, Rishi Sunak, are appealing actively to the Conservative Party membership, and not the general public. That said, it is an area of policy where the eventual winner will need to rapidly get to grips with, and quickly.
We looked at the Twitter output by both candidates and the media coverage of both leadership candidates to understand their stance on health policy in more detail.
Both candidates use Twitter for ‘safe’ economy messaging to reach journalists and their political peers
Twitter is known as a place for polarised debate and journalist scrutiny, and this is reflected in how both candidates have tailored their messaging. For instance, growth, cost of living, tax and Conservative values have been the focus of both candidates’ messaging on Twitter, accounting for 19% of overall posts.
Yet, the more contentious issues on economic policy that are said to energise the Conservative member base have rarely featured on both Truss’ and Sunak’s Twitter messaging. These have included the threat of Corbyn or Starmer, union action and strikes, EU-related red tape and energy security, which have been mentioned in a mere 0.3% of their tweets.
The safe choice of messaging territories for both candidates appears to be driven by discipline to avoid further discussion of their policies by journalists and political opponents.
Health is not the priority for both candidates’ campaigns, economic policy and cultural values are…
Based on a Lexington Data and Insights analysis of their campaign social media, both candidates are more – or at least as likely – to discuss tax, red tape, or even Margaret Thatcher than healthcare and the NHS.
This is especially the case for Truss, who is 43x more likely to talk about economic growth than health and 29x more likely to talk about tax than health. On cultural values, Truss is much more likely to talk about “conservative values” and “Thatcher” (11x and 8x more than health) than Sunak (-63% and -25% less than health).
Sunak appears more comfortable campaigning on health policies than Truss
Sunak is talking about health a lot more than Truss on social media (2.4% of overall posts) and enjoys the support of two former Health Secretaries (Matt Hancock and Jeremy Hunt). When Sunak does talk about health, it is mostly in the context of tackling the COVID-19 pandemic backlog.
On the economy, health policy campaigning is currently about winning an international competition on innovation e.g. Britain as a “science/technology superpower”
The life sciences industry is considered by both as an important driver of growth, and part of their respective overall economic visions. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there is little discussion of the benefits accelerating access to new proven innovations may have for the NHS and for patients.
There is another battle on the horizon on health innovation, namely the access to EU research programmes. Truss has chosen to be the face of a future battle on UK access to the Horizon Europe programme, while Rishi Sunak has proposed the creation of a new research and innovation fund to replace the role of Horizon Europe.
Rishi is inspiring more media coverage for his health policy ideas than Truss. Yet, this may not be a priority for Conservative Party members
When exploring media mentions, again, Sunak scores stronger than Truss, with the former Chancellor mentioned in 3.5% of articles relating to health in comparison to just 3.1% for Truss. Across a total of 50.1K news articles, this represents a difference of 106 news articles).
For Sunak, a number of these are based around his controversial proposals to charge £10 per missed GP appointment. A number of these articles attracted well over 1,300 social media engagements on average, largely on Facebook, which generally over-indexes heavily for the age demographic of Conservative Party members. On average, news articles about the two leaders attracted only 100 social media engagements. This suggests that much of the outrage was Conservative members on social media.
Simply put, the process for GP appointments did not need changing according to Conservative Party members. In short, these messages on health did not land well with Rishi’s target market of party members.
For Liz Truss, a small number of media mentions in relation to health have come towards the end of the campaign. This is as a result of proposals set out during a leadership hustings in Birmingham to divert funding from the NHS raised by the health and care levy towards social care. Social care policy has been thorny politically for the Conservatives for a number of years; it will be fascinating to see whether Truss, should she be the eventual victor, will maintain this focus.
How Lexington Data and Insights can help you learn from which media and campaign messaging lands well and/or attracts controversy
When looking at an issue, Lexington brings its extensive public affairs and comms knowledge to frame and refine our clients’ key objectives such as navigating the world of the NHS and health regulatory processes.
We also look to audience measures provided by different channels e.g. social media, media, focus groups, interviews to inform which messages attract controversy or land well with each stakeholder group. This can come in the form of discussion write ups, media audits, audience segmentation and message testing.
We then feed this evidence and learnings back into our strategies that we design and execute for our clients in the health and med-tech space.
Returning to the leadership campaign, Google searches in the UK for “NHS waiting lists” during the leadership election period are up +86% against the 5-year weekly average and +12% against the 2022 weekly average of searches, suggesting public expectation on health service issues will be waiting on the desk of the new leader.
So when the winner of the contest is announced on 5th September and the shift is made from campaigning to governing for one of the candidates, it is critical that alongside the cost-of-living crisis and the Ukraine war, that health & care is prioritised, especially the covid backlog…
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