Ex-Tory power broker Jenni Byrne offers her version of campaign failures

[PHOTO: Jenni Byrne’s Twitter account]

The former Conservative campaign manager who made an early — and involuntary — exit from the federal election campaign last fall is offering her version of her party’s drubbing at the polls.

In an op-ed article in Monday’s Globe and Mail, Jenni Byrne confirms what many critics of the first-past-the-post electoral system say — that the party needed the Liberals and NDP to split the non-Conservative vote to win.

“The party needed the NDP to do well,” writes Byrne, a formidable Tory backroom power broker during the Conservatives’ decade in power who publicly bore the brunt of the blame for the failed campaign.

“With the NDP rising in the polls for the first half of the campaign, Stephen Harper was well-positioned to be re-elected.”

Byrne says she’d argued since 2011 that the New Democrats were never the main opponent. But her decision to dismantle the party’s “NDP unit,” tasked with tracking and attacking that party, was “internally unpopular.”

“The decision during the campaign to turn our guns on the NDP was a mistake,” she writes. “They were never the party’s enemy.”

The niqab issue was the final straw, she says, crushing the NDP in Quebec.

“It also removed them as a viable alternative in the rest of the country, something Conservatives needed them to be,” writes Byrne, now vice-president of strategic communications for Bayfield Strategy.

In Atlantic Canada, where every single riding went to the Liberals, she blames federal changes to the Employment Insurance program.

On the ground, she says the Conservative campaign was well organized but it was up against an “overwhelming” desire for change.

“Despite the challenges faced in this election, the Conservatives still managed to get 5.6 million votes, only a fraction off of the 5.8 million received in 2011 — and, in fact, earned more votes in this election than it did when it formed government in 2006 (5.4 million) and 2008 (5.2 million).”

It is the first time that the notoriously media-averse Byrne offers her version of the events around the election, for which she was very publicly blamed.

More than a month before election night, media reported that Byrne was sent packing from Harper’s campaign.

The day after the Oct. 19 election, Byrne was excoriated by Tory MP Ron Liepert in an interview with the National Post.

Katherine Fierlbeck, a professor of political science at Dalhousie University, calls Byrne’s analysis “breathtakingly self-serving.”

“Jenni Byrne analyzes Jenni Byrne’s campaign strategy (which lost the election),” Fierlbeck tells Yahoo Canada News.

Byrne takes no responsibility for the loss, she points out.

“That Canadians might have "wanted change” because of the morally vacant and politically opportunistic positions the Conservatives took on so many issues at no point occurs to her here.“

Surely others could provide better analysis, she suggests.

The social media reaction from Byrne’s detractors was also quick and predictably derisive.

“That Jenni Byrne describes political opponents as the ‘enemy,’ says more about why Conservatives lost than her Op-Ed does,” Andrew Tumilty, a Liberal media strategist, writes on Twitter.

James McLeod, a political reporter for the St. John’s Telegram, described it as a “breathtaking exercise in self-delusion.”

“Any Tory who agrees with Jenni Byrne on why CPC lost Atlantic Canada doesn’t understand Atlantic Canada,” Labrador resident Will Fowler writes on Twitter.

Others seized on Byrne’s analysis of the niqab debate as a political mistake.

“On niqab, @Jenni_Byrne says mistake was attacking the NDP. Not their xenophobic position on it,” notes Aditya Rao on Twitter.