Lynton Crosby is the wizard of Oz

He masterminded election victories here and in the UK, and is helping British PM David Cameron's next campaign. What is Lynton Crosby's secret?

Lynton Crosby

IT'S 11.30 on a chilly Wednesday morning and Lynton Crosby's London office in swanky Mayfair is buzzing with 30-somethings chatting on mobile phones.

Inside the conference room an unnervingly life-size cardboard cut-out of Boris Johnson stands in a corner while the wall above boasts a splendid, framed photograph of the now world-famous London mayor surrounded by muscular divers atop a 10m Olympic diving board. Johnson is standing at the very edge of the platform, seemingly unfazed by the vertiginous height. Just as I peer to read the date on the picture, a distinctively Australian voice says: "Great shot, isn't it? David Cameron was there too that day ... but no way he'd go and stand up there."

Crosby, crisp shirt, no tie, has a wry smile on his face. No, it's more than a smile; it's the grin of a winner. This is the man the Brits have dubbed "The Wizard of Oz", a "supreme master of the dark arts" who worked on four successive election victories for John Howard in Australia before transferring his "evil genius" to the UK in 2005. Crosby seemed to have lost his winning touch when Conservative leader Michael Howard lost the election that same year - a considerable blip on Crosby's professional radar. But that defeat has finally lost its sting thanks to the euphoria of a second win last year for Tory mayor Johnson in what has long been a Labour-voting city.

Now Crosby has been asked to return to Conservative HQ to help British Prime Minister David Cameron - the fellow not brave enough to stand atop the Olympic diving ladder - win a second term at No. 10 in two years' time. Cameron and Johnson, ferociously competitive Tory alpha-males, probably represent the most fascinating political relationship in the UK. The idea that an Aussie, known universally for his "low tolerance of knob-heads" and a penchant for "effing" as prefix to most nouns, has been recruited to run the campaigns of the nation's two best-known Eton/Oxford graduates must surely amuse Crosby. "Boris is very, very interesting - he seems to be one of the very few that can take people beyond politics," he says.

Settled behind the big table in his office conference room, Crosby leans back on his chair, seemingly relaxed, perhaps even a little nonchalant. Notoriously wary and litigious when it comes to media attention - he has sued or threatened to sue several Australian and a couple of New Zealand journalists over the years - Crosby has taken more than a year to agree to this interview. There have been several false starts before our meeting and when our promised second interview is due to be entered into his diary Crosby disappears, refusing to answer another email or telephone call. The sudden silence - odd even by political standards - makes sense a few weeks later when a well sourced and strategically placed story in London's Daily Telegraph confirms his ₤200,000 return to Conservative Headquarters.

Amusingly, even the best spin doctor can fail to spot a googly and the following day, in a political bitch-slap that could have come out of his own copybook, the Mail on Sunday's front page accused Crosby of a "racist rant", alleging he had demanded that Boris Johnson "concentrate on traditional Tory voters instead of 'f ... ing Muslims'". Clearly leaked by left-leaning Tories who oppose his appointment as campaign manager, the story forced an angry denial of "any recollection" of such behaviour. Crosby, however, has not been quoted in public ever since. "What a serene start for Crosby ... the Aussie revered across the globe as the lobotomy patient's Karl Rove," crowed The Independent.

But on the morning of our interview Crosby is still warm and fuzzy from Johnson's second triumph over Labour veteran Ken Livingstone, and appears uncharacteristically comfortable shooting the political breeze. With hindsight, however, it is likely that he already knew he was headed for David Cameron's office and was careful to focus on Australia - and the current Australian political leadership - as the paradigm for his on-the-record observations. "The thing I find is that on one hand, people see Australia doing well relative to other countries. And yet people say, 'What is it with that PM of yours?' There is a bewilderment about what is going on given that the economic foundations are quite good, and a real question mark over Gillard - voters can't work it out, they can't work her out and that is unusual," he says.

"People didn't have that doubt with Rudd or with [John] Howard ... Then, you'd hear taxi drivers here say, 'You know, your PM John Howard seems to know what he's doing, and good on him'. People were quite positive with Rudd, too; the general reaction was that they thought him quite reasonable and competent. But with Gillard, they just can't fathom her."

Crosby met Gillard many times in the early, "rising star" years of her political career and also knows Tony Abbott very well. Unsurprisingly, he describes Abbott as a "determined and focused" politician but won't be drawn further except to confirm that he will be in Australia for the poll - and that his business partner, Mark Textor, as always, will be conducting the polling. "It's all about politics and the political game now in a way that never was quite as bad," he says. "In Australia, all they are thinking about is the prospect for leadership, the best thing to maximize the chances of winning again given they are in a trough."

Intrigued by the big difference in voters' expectations of politicians between Australia and the UK, he observes that Australian MPs do a lot more constituency work than their British counterparts, taking on the role of quasi-social workers, while in the UK, voters choose their Westminster candidates as representatives of their local area but with little anticipation that the MP will have an answer to individual problems. "My view is that if people are paying your salary, if someone votes for you and I pay your salary, I decide what expectations I have, what I want of you and if that is what I want, you'd better do it."

In Britain, admiration for Lynton Crosby in some quarters, primarily the Conservative right, is almost messianic. His face - grey hair, merry eyes behind glasses, masculine jaw - is not familiar to Aussies or Britons and yet he has made power lists in both countries, most recently in the UK's Top 100 influential figures from the Right, published by The Daily Telegraph. Even Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair's supreme spinmeister, found it hard to put the boot in too hard: "When he [Crosby] ran Michael Howard's campaign - which was hopeless by the way, truly dire - I got a travel agent friend to mock me up two first-class Qantas single tickets to Sydney. I was going to deliver them on the morning of the election to him and Mark Textor," he tells me. "In the end I decided to keep them. I didn't blame him for that campaign ... "

Crosby is said to exude an iron-fisted calm and those who have worked with him, including his most vociferous, off-the-record critics, concede he is at his best in a crisis. "He starts very early, works very late. He is highly organised, has a detailed schedule and never panics. There is nothing overly clever about election campaigns but what is difficult is making sure constant discipline is maintained in the team and among the candidates and keeping everyone on message," says a senior Australian political figure who has worked closely with Crosby. "Lynton maintains an extraordinary organisational order in whatever circumstance."

During a telephone chat from his City Hall, Thames-side office, Boris Johnson is breathless in his admiration and describes Crosby as "simply the best campaign manager I have ever seen in any political environment, ever": "He works it out with all of his strange algorithms, polling, part sorcery, part science, and he presents you with this stuff that makes you focus on the things that really matter. He makes sure you are really connecting with what you say, with what people really care about, and that is a formidably important thing. He is very, very good at keeping you focused." When I ask him how many campaign managers he has worked with, the Mayor admits: "To be honest, I have not worked with anyone else."

For Johnson, Crosby created the now-famous "donut strategy", which saw the Tories funnel all their resources onto the outer London boroughs, effectively ceding Labour's inner London heartlands. Johnson was also told, reportedly, at his first dinner with Crosby, "if you let us down, we'll cut your f ... ing knees off".

During the second campaign, Crosby fell into the habit of calling his troops together for a debrief in the late afternoon and throwing a pink cardigan to hail the person who performed best on the day. This has become lore in London's political circles, a gentle touch seen as incongruous with his rough-tongue Aussie persona. On a day-to-day level, Johnson tells me, Crosby is unmatched at "winnowing out the stuff that you might think is important but doesn't help you get the message across".

"I'll give you an example. I'd just built an absolutely brilliant cable car across the river [Thames]. It's a great success, everyone is enjoying it and it got great media coverage. But throughout the election campaign I was forbidden to mention the subject of the cable car. So, we talked about jobs, talked about growth, talked about the things that will make London the greatest city on Earth and so on."

That's hardly rocket science advice, is it Mr Mayor? "Look, I think you should let me put it this way: in 2012, after four years of deep, hard recession, he had to sell an old Etonian, Bullingdon [Oxford] Tory to eight million Londoners who are going through a tough time. That was no mean feat of political sorcery ... Seriously, I can't praise him highly enough."

Even as a child, Crosby loved debating and drama; staging plays and performances in an old shed. Born in 1957 in Kadina, 140km northwest of Adelaide, he was the youngest of three children born to a cereal farmer. His parents adored him and according to his sister, Robyn, would "do anything for him". By all accounts it was a happy and indulged childhood although agriculture was not the young Crosby's thing and he took himself off to the University of Adelaide to study economics - followed by his parents, who moved to be closer to him. Politics piqued his interest early and, after a stint as a market analyst for a petrol company, he worked for several senior South Australian politicians.

Crosby recently made a speech making fun of his one and only unsuccessful tilt at election in 1982, saying he managed to turn a marginal Liberal seat into a safe Labor one and with "hindsight wouldn't have voted for me". It was then, apparently, that he decided he might be better at crafting wins for politicians other than himself. He moved to Queensland to work for the Liberal Party, quickly rising to become state director and then deputy to Federal Liberal Party director Andrew Robb. By 1996, Crosby had forged a key role beside a victorious John Howard, repeating the electoral magic two years later when he successfully identified and targeted a raft of key marginal seats. In 2001, another win came on the back of what became known as the Tampa and Children Overboard affairs - a low in the Australian political discourse that has continued to haunt the retired prime minister and his electoral strategist to this day.

A year later, Crosby and Textor established their consultancy in a bid to diversify their business to the corporate world and not rely solely on the political. For Crosby's critics in the UK - most of them in the Tory left - Crosby's reputation for "dog-whistle" tactics is their biggest fear: that his electoral strategies will end up repudiating "everything David Cameron has stood for". With a track record pushing the envelope on sensitive issues like crime, public safety, law and order and immigration, even observers like Peter Oborne, writing in the London Telegraph, worry that Crosby's appointment will amount to a "public recantation" of the kinder, warmer Conservative image crafted and deployed after the big defeat in 2005.

Crosby himself appears to have very little interest in engaging in the kind of policy make-over dubbed the "Cameronian" project, which aimed to detoxify the Tories of the "nasty party" image and strive for a kinder, more inclusive "Big Society" in the UK.

But placing Crosby at the centre of the political policy narrative is too easy. No doubt he holds solid conservative views. But Crosby is primarily a marketing man, a professional strategist and campaigner whose job is to shape the most presentable and attractive message for his candidate, not to impose or pursue specific policies or agendas.

So, does this role as a hot-shot salesman include being an exponent of "dog-whistle politics", the dark arts of subtle messages and appeals to voters' prejudices that are never explicitly articulated? Cheryl Kernot, former leader of the Australian Democrats, was in the UK during the 2005 election when the now infamous Tory billboards asked voters, "Are you thinking what we're thinking?" Kernot says she immediately recognised Crosby Textor's modus operandi, a style that saw Australia refocus voter attention to asylum seekers, to refugees and an "exploitation of basic instincts and fears of difference and latent prejudice". "That was a brutalising Australian hand and I was fearful of what it meant for British politics. You have one of the most robust civil democracies in the world. Here in Australia, 10 years of focusing on fear really led to a demeaning of our democracy in a way that I'd hate to see in the UK."

Crosby demurs: "Our strength is we understand how to develop a strategy, generally built on research of some sort ... So we do a lot of opinion polling - and not to tell you what to think, but to tell you, 'OK, this is what people think, this is where you want to get, this is where you are now, this is what you need to do and these are the tools to do that'," he tells me. "So it's a navigational tool, to show you where to get to, how and what tactics to use."

Cameron's tough-sounding New Year's message - Eurosceptic, promising further welfare reform and "expecting people to work" - has been read as an appeal to disgruntled Conservative voters and commentators who noted the absence of lines to please the Liberal Democrats. There was no mention, for example, of moves to allow same-sex couples to marry. This, according to London's political commentariat, bore the hallmarks of the "Australian attack-dog strategist", even though he only started work officially on January 1.

Crosby's job for 2015 will simply be to repeat the work he did for John Howard: poll meticulously and pick the handful of core issues that matter to voters, keep the message simple and work it hard to win back the heart of Conservative voters who have lost faith in the party and, to a degree, its leadership.

This will be music to the ears of Conservative MPs like Robert Halfon, who champion a "more blue-collar-friendly conservatism". They argue Crosby is the man to refocus the party on the issues important to the grass roots and if it is immigration or welfare or simply how to encourage the so-called "strivers" over the "skivers", then so be it. "People feel we are not giving them ladders up, but we are not giving them a safety net either," Halfon says.

He first met Crosby during the doomed Michael Howard 2005 campaign but is adamant the loss was not the Australian's fault. "He was there to sell the message and that was brought out before him by Lord Saatchi ... the focus on immigration and that type of thing was done way before he came.

"I found him brilliant in what he did and he is exactly what it says on the tin. He is shrewd. He is cunning. He is clever. He explains things simply. And he is straight. Lynton got Boris re-elected a second time in a hostile climate with six months of bad news and with an economic crisis. And he did it in London, which is a hotchpotch of different views. It was an incredible result. That is why a lot of the Tories want him in party HQ. In 2005, he transformed our party in terms of messaging. We had a clear focus; he made us repeat it again and again. It was relentless."

While Crosby is portrayed almost affectionately in the media in the UK - usually as a "bare-knuckle" fighter or the bloke credited with injecting a bit of the Aussie "mongrel" into Tory politics - it's a different story in Australia. According to a former colleague, Crosby comes across as easygoing at first but deep down can be "hard as nails": "I remember a loyal foot soldier who had been running [a city] office for quite some time. He called her in the night of a party and said, 'Don't bother coming to the party, tell people you are sick and can't make it'. That is how she was made redundant." Another insists it was nowhere near as brutal, suggesting that the timing was unfortunate but the redundancy economically necessary.

Back in Australia, few colleagues who worked with Crosby are willing to talk on the record, his name seeming to elicit fear. There's no doubt Crosby will go to some lengths to protect his good name. Crosby Textor pursued the website Crikey in 2007 over a story linking the company with a leaked Liberal Party internal poll. The so-called "secret Liberal dossier" was without doubt a political Exocet for John Howard. It found that voters believed his government had "given up" and become negative and poll-driven while Howard himself was viewed as "old and dishonest". Worse still, it also delivered the news that the electorate was looking to Labor's Kevin Rudd for "generational change".

Crosby Textor's legal action categorically denying anything to do with the leak won them damages and a detailed apology from Crikey acknowledging that the allegations were false. And it shut down any further public discussion about the file's provenance or its sender's motives. Ultimately, the relationship between Howard and Crosby appeared to suffer and the former prime minister's biography, pointedly, contains just one line about his former chief strategist.

When I ask Mark Textor about the company's legal actions against journalists or political critics, he says candidly: "We object to opinions based on gossip. We just run professional clinical and methodological approaches to clients' problems. We have a good reputation and we will protect it. That is why we have survived for 10 years and we are still growing the business. We have a reputation to protect. And we will."

Textor says that, since they joined forces 10 years ago, the duo have worked on every continent and are veterans of more than 200 commercial campaigns spanning 50 or more countries. They have worked in Iraq, pitched to work in Syria, and now have offices in Milan as well as London and Australia. Turnover is in the multi-millions.

According to Crosby, however, the "political work" might be "high profile but doesn't pay many of the bills": "It is our heritage, so you do it. Then, we have corporate clients that could have anything from a reputational issue to, say, a float. We apply campaign tactics, advise on what are the tools needed to achieve an objective: PR, advertising, how to get coverage, polling. We manage these different tools to work out what should be deployed for the benefit of a client and a particular problem."

Colleagues say Crosby and Textor are good mates on the surface, as well as business partners. But they are also deeply competitive. One recalls a snow dome in the Melbourne office which had "Lynton's photo on one side and Tex on the other": "We'd turn it around depending on who was due in to the office," she said.

Crosby and Textor recently celebrated 10 years in business together with a big party at Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Arts. A video of congratulations featured John Howard, several state premiers, including Barry O'Farrell, New Zealand's Prime Minister John Key and a rambunctious Boris Johnson, who described his campaign manager as "The Crosbinator - 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".

Of the private Crosby, not being interviewed adds to the mystique. He has long been happily married to wife Dawn, also a former Liberal Party staffer; they are parents to two adult daughters and now grandparents, too. Friends say Crosby is witty, good company, loves a steak and a red wine or two and is mad about theatre. In London, he has joined forces with Mark Fullbrook, a former head of campaigns for the British Conservatives who is married to Tory MP Lorraine Fullbrook. Both are known for a wide network of business and political contacts. Crosby, however, is rarely seen in social news coverage. While he returns to Australia regularly, the UK may well now be home.

Textor reckons his business partner has rarely veered far from his core South Australian Methodist values, with hard work and commitment to family at the centre of his life. But Textor also takes great delight in adding that his mate has a longstanding fascination for Dame Edna Everage, even "going to a party once" dressed as the housewives' friend. At his 50th birthday party, wife Dawn hired an impersonator to greet guests at the door - not one who played Dame Edna, but a Crosby lookalike. "Oh, and he was very good," laughs Textor.

In 2010, the election that forced David Cameron and the Conservatives into bed with the Liberal Democrats, British electoral pundits concluded that victory slipped away because the Tories sounded "too vapid, too tentative, too polite". "There is nothing vapid, tentative or polite about Crosby," observes Andrew Gimson, Boris Johnson's biographer. "He will insist that they work out what they are going to tell the voters, and then he will get them to tell it - with merciless consistency - for months on end."

Says Crosby: "The simple rule of politics for me has always been - and this stands true particularly now in hard times - that when in doubt, stand for something. If people do not believe you stand for something, you will be in trouble."

Political leaders the world over are in deepest trouble, he says, when the electorate turns off and stops listening, usually when the perception spreads that national policy decisions are being driven by the desire to retain office, not for the national interest. "Sensitivities and anger are heightened when times are tough. Voters are thinking, 'Jeez, times are tough and here you are playing games ... Everything is about the next election, not about the nation'." David Cameron, Julia Gillard, Tony Abbott, are you listening?