Here is a referendum recipe for disaster. Choose an issue that no one cares about, get the most unpopular man in Britain to champion it, antagonize the few people who might support it and hold it on a day when everyone will use it to kick the most unpopular man in Britain. Welcome to the 2011 referendum on the alternative vote.

With the benefit of a week’s hindsight, it’s clear that the referendum was going to be hard to win, but there were some key strategic errors the campaign made: most of them right from the start.

The first was to assume that something as technical as voting change could morph into a people’s campaign. Either the people are already in the driving seat, take the Gurkhas for example, or can be mobilised quickly because the issue is so emotive e.g. banning handguns after Dunblane. Neither was true of electoral reform.

Campaigners mistook the very real public distaste for politics following the expenses crisis as evidence that people would flock to a campaign calling for change. Sadly the change that the alternative vote promised was too small to be convincingly put forward as a response to our political malaise. Our campaign’s strapline ‘A small change that will make a big difference’ should have been ‘a small change that will make a small difference’. The public might have just about have bought that.

Having set the stage for a people versus the politicians fight, the media scuppered our ability to field anyone except for a politician. Apart from a few appearances, our able campaign Vice-Chair Jonathan Bartley was shunned by the broadcasters in favour of Liberal Democrat ministers nicely setting up a coalition split story that dominated the whole campaign.

We soldiered on trying to field more exciting and well known non-politicians: Martin Bell, the man who cleaned up politics all those years ago, Billy Bragg, who orchestrated vote swops across the country in 1997, Greg Dyke who made a stand on Iraq, but it didn’t help. The No campaign had Margaret Beckett and John Prescott and our spokespeople just didn’t fit the media crib.

The campaign failed to identify that the key voters in the referendum would be Labour. It was Labour voters who would be voting in the local elections across England, but particularly in the North to kick Nick Clegg. Given the timing of the referendum, the key test was whether we could persuade those voters who didn’t care either way about the referendum to use it to batter Cameron instead of Clegg. Since the national Yes campaign was non-party political, it was down to Labour Yes to make the running on this.

While the No campaign pumped out literature featuring Clegg across the North targeting Labour voters, Labour Yes had a small budget to print and hand deliver anti-Cameron leaflets in the areas where we had supportive MPs which were mainly in the South. The only Labour voter targeted literature also had to be delivered by volunteers, while the mailed literature went to swing voters likely to turn out. The need to target Labour voters was realised too late in the campaign when the dye had already set. Alan Johnson, Tessa Jowell, John Denham and other shadow cabinet ministers did a fine job of trying to make the Labour case, but should have been used as the key spokespeople for the campaign from the start. Instead, Liberal Democrat ministers dived into rows about AV as a proxy for other disagreements in the coalition. For the most part, it felt as if they were in denial about their sheer unpopularity.

And then came the megaphone broadcast. Supportive Labour MPs were already pretty peeved by the Yes campaign’s messaging that AV would make MPs work harder. In truth, the message should have been that AV would make MPs work harder for your vote, a subtle but important difference. When they were confronted by a caricature of themselves hiding from voters and gorging on posh lunches, it tipped a number into the No camp, and many into the ‘yes in principle, but I’m coming nowhere near your campaign’. Even Liberal Democrat MPs refused to deliver literature which said they were lazy. As the most ferocious street campaigners in politics, you can see why. We shot our messengers.

Cameron’s firm support for the No campaign and the Conservative Party’s commitment was the game changer. Up until the prime minister gave his speech on 18 February, the polls had been leaning towards yes, from that day forward they nose-dived. Meanwhile, Tory donors were lined up to channel cash into literature which bore the Labour Party’s logo and which was distributed in local council election areas where there would be a strong Labour vote. It is wonderfully ironic that Andrew Cook who donated to the Conservatives, and opposed the Sheffield Forgemaster loan, put his money into the No campaign which funded Labour branded literature which probably helped to rout the Lib Dems from office in Sheffield. The Tories’ steely determination to protect the status quo through whatever means possible has to be admired.

In the end, the Yes campaign’s army of young, passionate volunteers were let down by strategic failures of message and targeting. For me, their commitment made the Yes campaign an uplifting experience, a taste of how a more pluralist, hopeful politics could come to be. This year might have been about the gutter politics of babies in ventilators, but oddly it has strengthened the resolve of those who believe we’ll eventually find a better way.

Jessica Asato was the director of the Labour Yes campaign

Tags: Alternative vote, AV Referendum 2011, David Cameron, Jessica Asato, Yes to AV