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Alastair Campbell, Downing Street’s spin czar, will never make a

decent media planner. If the polls are anything to go by, he may need to

think about a new career rather sooner than he would have wished, but I

don’t think he should bother sending his CV round to media agencies.

Tony Blair’s humbling at the Women’s Institute must surely count as one

of the more delicious political banana skins of his three-year

tenure.

’I’ve never been so nervous,’ he stammered at the start of the speech,

not for a second anticipating the fearful savaging from the ’fairy-cake

and doilies’ brigade that was heading his way.

The Mirror exposed the chief agitators the next day - Home Counties

blue-rinsers with fruitily right-wing views - but afterward Downing

Street must have rung to a few fruity epithets itself for having misread

its audience so comprehensively. The view from Fleet Street a week or so

later is that the WI fiasco - and the diabolical showing for Labour in

the polls - may be a turning point for the Blair government.

The WI turned out to be a very bad media planning decision. To have

assumed that this was a bunch of meek and gullible old ladies willing to

be used as a political platform was arrogant and ill-considered.

It was also easily avoidable. It transpires that one of New Labour’s

chief marketing and communications advisers, Philip Gould, had seen a

draft of the speech and warned that it was insubstantial and bland and

projected Tony Blair with - as it were - the wrong brand values.

While Mr Blair is surrounded by more ’spinners’ than the Pakistan

cricket team, Mr Gould is not one of them. Frequently scoffed at for his

use of focus groups, he nonetheless has his feet planted firmly in the

market, and knows better than most how to listen to the electorate. He

knew this was the wrong message for this particular audience.

It was said that in her hey-day Mrs Thatcher could read the public mind

like a book. She had an instinctive touch. Her media gaffes were few and

far between (telling Michael Aspel in a television interview that she

was ’always on the job’ doesn’t qualify). But she was swept away

unceremoniously as soon as she lost the knack in the late 1980s.

John Major was a man of the people too, even if he lacked other prime

ministerial qualities. He famously clawed victory from the jaws of

defeat in the 1992 election with the simple but effective media device

of talking to people from atop a battered soap-box.

For politicians, striking the right note in the right media can reap big

rewards. When they get it wrong, the punishment can be severe. (Who can

remember John Moore, once groomed to be Thatcher’s successor, completely

flunking his parliamentary performances?)

In marketing, the ups and downs may be less precipitous, but the lesson

is clear to all of us in the communications industry. Nowadays, you

can’t afford to get the media strategy wrong any more than you can

afford to get the message wrong.

Above all you have to ensure that medium and message are in total

harmony with one another.