Leaving the praise to the critics, who see it as an equivalent to Johnny Cash’s late bid for credibility, Island’s VP, David Sharpe, seems to have taken it upon himself to do the blaming, in an accusatory leaked email that suggests he would rather not have spent millions on a church album and wanted a repeat of Jones’s Sex Bomb stylings.

This was written in May, but leaked only now, in the week of release, just in time for the Sunday Times, the Telegraph and pretty much every other media outlet to get all hot under the collar about it and puff the album’s arrival in spectacular fashion in news and reviews pages.

Stunt of the week, without a doubt. But that’s not unusual, given that it was also the conversation of the week.

So is this a “regrettable production error”, as the magazine insists, or a full-scale PR fail?

Dyer claims he was misquoted, but his protestations have been lost in the tsunami of complaint – and, unsurprisingly, Dyer’s lost his job.

What grabs me, though, is the possible conspiracy theories implicit in this. Did someone truly believe that this was an ironic suggestion? Does Danny Dyer believe his own hard-man hype? Did someone want rid of Danny Dyer from Zoo magazine? Did someone think that putting in an offensive quote would cause outrage for PR purposes without having the knock on effect of losing Dyer his job? Who was this good PR for?

I could go on for hours. Conspiracy theories; don’t you love them?

The failure of anyone to take meaningful control of the country in the wake of the General Election says a great deal about the hype that the media work up as a cappuccino froth of sound bites. It felt like going to a bad movie – the trailer was exceptional but the movie itself is overlong and a terrible letdown.

We may have had debates, but the analogue TV hype didn’t change voters’ hearts. We may have seen an upsurge of the digital agenda, but Twitter and the new transparency still doesn’t reach the soul of the country, doesn’t reach the grassroots. The election has forced us to question the people pulling the strings.

As Labour, Conservative and Lib Dems slug out a coalition, power-sharing or some other solution, the media and politicians are running to catch up with the fact that they spent all night rubbishing the exit polls (which turned out to be correct) and creating hours of vacuous TV that did not capture the public mood.

It’s a communications issue – the metropolitan and media elite are just not listening to what general populace are and have been saying, whether it’s the stream of complaints about Andrew Neil’s vacuous filler with D List celebs during the BBC’s election broadcast, the graphics and polls that say nothing to anyone, or the fact that the nation wants a change and has no real way, in the current voting system, of effecting it. I guess those that had a vested interest in this arena had to keep canvassing and using the pre-election hyperbole.

And as it turned out, there was no Clegg-mania, just a Parliament-wide decrease in trust. No record numbers at the polls – a few got high turns outs but only a few. After all the hyperbole and the grand predictions, it was little more than a damp squib. For the most part, the great unwashed had heard all the hype many times before and were not about to be converted to any other cause by digital means, or by the smug assumptions of the media or politicians. The only swing was towards dissatisfaction, and there’s no electronic gadget that can show that.

The media and the Westminster village are terribly insular and just don’t seem to get that there is an upsurge of people who have spotted that they’ve been hoodwinked. The public, in their indifference to manipulations, may yet shake up the cosy status quo – this has been, on all levels, an election about wrestling for control.

But the weekend has seen the Westminster village fighting hardest for control – the political classes have been keeping us away from the real issues by using the media as a canvas to paint and posit theories as to how the aftermath of the hung parliament might play out. Realpolitik and the bitter truths of the brutal practicalities of coalition have been hidden. The media have been spreading the same facts in slightly different packaging all over the news for days, feeding us what the politicians perceive to be good for us, rather than the truth.

Regardless, the story of Khan single-handedly wiping out 1,748,000 people in one hour has lasted for generations (click here to read the full article). All good leaders need good PR – and whoever cooked up that bit of spin was amongst the best and greatest. There is, as the saying goes, nothing more dismal than a fact.

But if history has judged Genghis Khan to be legendary, how will history treat Gordon Brown, Nick Clegg and David Cameron? What will they have done to create a legend. Tony Blair was patently eager to leave a legacy, and may leave telltale traces for historians if he’s lucky, but the leaders contesting this election have no compelling story, no legend. At every turn, each one of them – and their advisers – sandpaper away the interesting impulses that lead to great stories accreting around a person.

The extraordinary number of extremists who rushed to claim responsibility for the Times Square bomb plot is a good example of people throwing caution to the wind – the failed bombing will end up being remembered simply because of the amount of people wanting to have done it. What have Brown, Clegg and Cameron done that someone else would try to claim for themselves, however? What have they done that a publicist worth his salt could transform from history into legend?

David and SamCam’s 1000 mile pic op trek? No. Cameron’s urgent attempts to prove himself fit and healthy? No. Gordon and Sarah on the GMTV sofa? Not a chance. Clegg? Started well then faded into the middle ground along with the rest of them. Unfortunately, all three leaders have been forced into a little huddle in the middle ground, making nice and not making mistakes if they can possibly help it.

The closest anyone’s come to changing his reputation (and not in the way the media hoped) is Brown during Bigotgate – polls suggest that it hasn’t affected him all that badly. Indeed, he’s running through the last few days of the election rather invigorated. I believe that the electorate are yearning for someone or something with a bit of edge. They want politicians like John Prescott to lash out and prove they’re human, people who will “fail better next time”.

I’d suggest that the spin-doctors on all sides need to be looking to Genghis Khan and whoever sold the – obviously ridiculous but utterly compelling – story of killing 1,748,000 people in one hour to the world for a way of making their leader legendary. If someone can come up with a phrase as neat as “a little to the right of Genghis Khan” that applies to Cameron, Clegg or Brown, they will be earning their money. A good PR is essential to a modern leader. Hitler had a great spin doctor in Goebbels and we’re unlikely to forget him.

It would be preferable, of course, if Cameron, Clegg or Brown could find a way to do great and memorable things without resorting to killing millions of people. We all know that cuts are coming, that the coming years will be hard. Any leader who wants their reputation to survive the next five years, let alone the next 500, will need a compelling story to tell to the voters about the changes they will have to make.

From now on, I suspect, any political instance of this law in action will be known as the ‘Brown Variant’, after unguarded remarks about a woman he had just spoken to on a walkabout were broadcast to the world. He condemned Gillian Duffy as a ‘bigot’ into a radio mic he didn’t realise was still live.

Unsurprisingly, the press have pounced. What is surprising is that this is the first serious gaffe on any side in a flawless, highly polished election campaign. Everything is marshalled and scrubbed until it has passed the hygiene test. All the leaders have been flawless until now – Brown is usually careful to have his own radio mic. Tellingly, he didn’t this time. Instinct suggests there was poor planning by Brown’s minders and that they ignored local intel.

In such circumstances, a walkabout was always going to have ‘disaster’ written all over it. Everyone makes mistakes, but in such a pristine, polished atmosphere, the first slip is always going to be big news.

Gordon Brown has been under enormous pressure – in football terms, he’s been on a nil nil draw with seconds to go, whilst the goalie is run up the field and set up to try and score a decisive corner in the dying seconds of the game, since the first leaders’ debate.

So is this gaffe an election-changing moment? Possibly, but possibly not in the way the right wing press may be hoping. Naturally, the Sun etc are throwing vast amounts of money (£50,000 has been mentioned) in Gillian Duffy’s direction in the hope that she’ll go for Brown’s jugular with them. But she is old school Labour – she may be furiously angry but she still may not want to risk destroying the party for the sake of an (admittedly rude) off the cuff, private comment that happened to be broadcast by mistake.

Mrs Duffy strikes me as a pretty ordinary woman, however, and these are straitened times – presented with enough cash, she may well take the filthy tabloid lucre. If she does, though, Gordon’s spinners will find they have a chink of light.

Another thing to bear in mind is that Brown has behaved impeccably since, taking the blame squarely on the chin and apologising. He’s done well by fronting up and remaining calm. And, once the dust has settled, this human side, this leader with edges in an election of soft, polished curves, might actually go over rather well. Certainly the media are fascinated – the 24/7 news cycle, desperate to cover every moment of the debacle, even shot endless minutes of Duffy’s front door as Brown went in to apologise.

However, by stoically doing the right thing – shouldering the blame, apologising and getting on with the campaign – Brown could give the populace just what they didn’t realise they’d wanted all along: a political campaign that isn’t polished to within an inch of its life and that has a genuine sense of danger and surprise. If only Brown had been braver and tackled bigotry in the wake of the comment.

There is, of course, one saving grace for Gordon, one place where he should be able to shine – the debate tomorrow night. It’ll make interesting viewing in the wake of this gaffe.

This is advice that needs to be handed on to Nick Clegg, after last night’s second Leaders’ Debate. He appeared to have spent the week following his remarkable showing in the first debate positively wallowing in the good reviews. Certainly his people believed the good press enough to let Clegg give Brown and Cameron enough room to make up lost ground. That said, he survived pretty well mostly thanks to the MPs’ expenses scandal allowing too many people to see the puppet strings in this campaign.

It’s not just leaders making up lost ground – since Obama swept to power, there have been no significant advances in new media’s ability to influence thing. Surprisingly, given that GE2010 was expected to have an enormous social media impact, all the balls are in the analogue media’s court after two game-changing Leaders’ Debates. It has been conclusively proved that many millions of people will watch old media if the content is great.

There’s no doubt that the experience is deepened and aided by new media, and by Twitter in particular, but that’s not what’s been driving the sudden change in the shape of British politics. In the same way that the X Factor created a big moment for old-fashioned “round the box with the family” television, the Leaders’ Debates have made politics absorbing. It’s been political karaoke, particularly from Labour and Conservative, and people like to see a politician who recognizes that he’s on strings and tries to escape them, as Clegg did exceptionally in the first debate and pretty well last night.

It’s this karaoke element that has lead to Gordon Brown’s complaints that this is too much about personalities. But then he is too prone to throwing stats at the audience still – even though his performance last night was more human. Whether he likes it or not, politics does get overshadowed by personalities and the majority of the people who have been newly engaged by these debates have been talking about the personalities as much as, if not more than, the policies.

None of the parties have truly harnessed the digital media – they still rely on pumping out propaganda and all saying that their leader won the debate. None of them seem to have learned from the satirical backlash on Twitter against the right wing press’s demonisation of Clegg – these papers are on the back foot since people started skitting their more rabid pronouncements.

It will probably come down to the third and final debate to carry forward the hype and the election. But will people vote? Have these debates given people the confidence to vote? And will the rumoured upsurge in registered voters translate into hordes at the polling stations? Perhaps we should take a Twitter poll to find out.

The debate was carefully, rigorously planned as an attempt to revivify politics, seen as a necessity now that all trust has been leeched away from politics and politicians. But if the people behind its gaffe-free polish thought that this would help re-engage the electorate, who have been drifting away slowly but surely for years, they were wrong.

Everyone wanted to make the election interesting, wanted to grab the populace and generate positive word of mouth. It’s a shame, then, that the big two parties offered no big ideas, no choice.

Only one man made a concerted effort to engage in a meaningful manner with the populace; Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg. In football terms, he was Michael Owen in his first World Cup appearance – an unmarked outsider who took to the big stage as if he was born to it and blew the crowds away.

Clegg clearly took Cameron and Brown by surprise, easing himself into a position of advantage last night, partly because he wasn’t being heckled by backbenchers but mostly, I suspect, because he couldn’t afford any American advisers – fresh from the Obama campaign and clearly snapped up by Labour and the Tories – schooling him in the best ways to win a TV debate. He did it by using language that was recognisably human rather than highly polished. Whether it was enough to create votes for his party remains to be seen.

All eyes had been on Cameron, of course; the fresh-faced newbie until Clegg stole that crown. Cameron and Gordon Brown came across as too polished, too over-produced – just the sort of thing that gets the electorate switching off in boredom.

The killer component in last night’s debate was complacency. Everything was neat, controlled, polished to the point of looking the same. There were no surprises. The sense that this was a historic event was mostly lost because the main parties treated it as part of the same old same old – a karaoke politics show.

The debate certainly exposed the backroom boys who, now more than ever, need to find real substance and stop using and abusing the endless soundbites that are turning the elctorate off.

The drift away from politics amongst the young is a real threat to democracy, but what is there to engage them? Only Nick Clegg offered a real point of difference last night, but he was still deep within the usual rules of engagement. The populace has lost all but a few shreds of trust in politicians and a PR marketing plan that reads “look, this is how Obama won – WE should do that” is doomed to failure. They should think globally, yes, but Clegg proved they need to act locally.

The main parties have no idea how to win trust – from a PR point of view, they are fiddling whilst Rome burns. This was essentially a smug Westminster village exercise in karaoke politics sold as a major breakthrough.

The media needed to buy into the debate, because they are as culpable as the politicians in the diffusion of ideas and trust.

There were no straightforward winners – but the only loser was Cameron, who had started with nothing to lose but lost it anyway. The fresh face, the new blood, belonged to Nick Clegg. It remains to be seen if the rest of the election plays out this way.

A non-conformist who enlivened punk with his arch brand of anarchy and who helped create the punk scene from the Sex shop he ran with Vivienne Westwood, McLaren was a massive inspiration to me. It seems appropriate that he died in 2010, the 200th anniversary of Barnum’s birth – they had a lot in common. Both started out as shopkeepers and both went on to radically alter the world of entertainment – Barnum with his freak shows and circus, McLaren with his situationist pricking and destruction of the ponderous music and hyper-inflated ego of the 70s music scene and beyond.

His influence has spread very far and often into unusual places, such as the art world. After all, there could have been no Damien Hirst or Tracey Emin without McLaren’s influence. As a teenager, collecting my NME from the local Village shop, I was in awe of his ability to paint news on the front pages of the papers as if they were his private canvases, ruthlessly exploiting interesting situations to create money making enterprises – usually out of the most unsafe of bets.

That, indeed, was one of the most admirable things about him and his maverick spirit – he relentlessly pursued the unsafe bet and helped it to change the establishment for the better, more often than not. My admiration only increased after meeting him in 1990. I also worked on the launch of Buffalo Gals Back to Skool.

Where are the mavericks now, though? They’re disappearing too swiftly and not being replaced. We need more people like Malcolm McLaren. Especially in politics.

This has been a week of carefully constructed stunts – this is the stunt election and it has been rigorously planned as such. Long before the election was announced, all parties had co-ordinated their actions with astonishing precision, so as to allow no flaws. This is the election of ‘distraction, distraction, distraction’ – anything to avoid the discussion of actual policies.

There’s been Gordon Brown, photographed with the cabinet to make it as clear as humanly possible that the Labour party’s woes are not all about him. ‘Look,’ the photograph insists, ‘I’m not the only one responsible!’ Nick Clegg has taken to appearing in photographs with his one asset – Vince Cable.

David Cameron, of course, has been pushing his wife front and centre, running for the cameras, trying to make himself seem like a virile man of the people with his sleeves rolled up. The Tories’ careful, planned approach can be seen most clearly in the praise lavished on a new Conservative press officer who sent two teams along to Trafalgar Square to hold up ‘Vote For Change’ placards as Gordon Brown made his way to Buckingham Palace to ask the Queen to dissolve parliament.

Every day people are going into huddles to think up the next act in the Punch and Judy show of electioneering and looking for unmashable content that can get their point across.

Labour must have been so pleased with their Gene Hunt/David Cameron poster, calling on the populace to not let Cameron take Britain back to the 1980s, until they realised that it took the edge off Cameron’s slick Notting Hill image – and then the Tories responded in kind, with photos of Brown perched on a 70s car smiling under the headline “Back to debt, decline and the 1970s with Gordon Brown”. If someone on either side can come up with a slogan or poster that cannot be spoofed, they will probably be knighted.

The sound bites are coming thick and fast too – it’s like gorging on a EEC mountain of foetid candy floss: “Campaign HQ’s deploy their big guns – SarBro and SamCam” anyone? There has been no real campaigning and it will continue this way until the great dividing line of the Leader debates.

The end-of-the-week stunt to crown them all came from the Tory camp, who rolled out Michael Caine to back Cameron’s National Citizen Service – a voluntary scheme for teenagers that resembles the much derided (and hated by Caine when he served in the 1950s) National Service, except that it will be voluntary. Unsurprisingly, given the way the election is running so far, this is a scheme that Caine hopes will “do a bit more than just blow the bloody doors off”. Whatever that actually means.

There have been a number of counters to Caine’s endorsement of the Tories, but my favourite so far is from the brilliant Marina Hyde in the Guardian. She writes: “…the Caine hallmark is… not always a guarantee of quality. For every Hannah and her Sisters there is a Muppet Christmas Carol…”.

Everything in this content-free stunt election is so contrived and rigid and run by Facebook and Twitter. Stuart MacLennan, the recently-fired Labour candidate who used his Twitter feed to describe old people as “coffin dodgers”, amongst other things, has exposed the risks of using social networking for electioneering – but whilst it was patently unkind of him, it does make him seem immediately interesting by comparison to most of the rest of the nodding, smiling candidates.

One of the biggest fallacies doing the rounds with commentators at the moment is that Malcolm McLaren was little more than a redheaded Simon Cowell. Nothing could be further from the truth. The electorate are being offered a series of carefully controlled Simon Cowell karaoke clones as candidates.

Politics needs more people like Malcolm McLaren – people who will take risks and strive to create something exciting for the country as a whole rather than looking to create their own small legacy that will, in the end, matter only to them and not to the people they are supposed to be serving.

We’ve already had one hysterical moment, with David Cameron turning in a karaoke version of Obama when he rolled up his sleeves yesterday. He may have been trying to look hip, but looked more like the sort of embarrassing school teacher who apes trends remorselessly – two years after they’ve come off the boil. Unlike embarrassing teachers, Cameron made the news.

There’s also likely to be a lot of spoofing going on. Political comedy and spoofs need to be good if they’re going to work. In fact, they need to be funny and to the point. But, if the Lib Dems’ “Labservative” attempted satire is anything to go by, the signs are not good. You cannot crowbar something in and hope for the best. That is not, of course, going to stop anyone from trying.

As a consequence of all this, I have decided to bring back Stuntwatch for the duration of the General Election. Starting this Friday, I will be rounding up the best and the worst of the week’s electioneering stunts. It’s going to be a long, strange four weeks…

Few people in PR, it seems, have considered the way that SideWiki will change the lives of beleaguered PR folk. I believe that, in time, this tool will significantly change the way brands strategize, think and exist. SideWiki is going to challenge PR by providing the masses with the tool for the ultimate expression of people power, something uncontainable that will need constant monitoring.

As the name suggests, this is a tool that allows anyone who wants to (and who has the right browser – Firefox or IE) to comment on anything on the web and have that comment displayed in a pop out window alongside for all to see. All they have to do is download the Google toolbar and they’re ready to go. SideWiki will change the way that everything is perceived, especially once it reaches more browsers.

A lot of the PR industry, however, is living like an ostrich with mange; only just summoning up the energy to bury its collective head in the sand. Too many PR folk are too busy pitching half-arsed ideas to see the real threat. The clear and present danger for sluggish PRs is the way that the net continues to develop and construct devices that enable individuals to increase their power. These devices shift as quickly as riptides and, at the moment, it seems that the only people that can survive them are the consumers they cater for.

SideWiki will make it impossible to promote one message and not be held to account. Organisations that have traditionally engaged only in one way conversations or broadcast models will struggle to survive in a SideWiki world. Angry at the latest government wrongdoing? Why not post your grievances next the department where everyone can see them? Find out the ethical practices of confectionary giant aren’t quite as ethical as its advertising suggests? SideWiki is there to help and any PR firm that fails to provide acceptable answers will be open to further public assault by irate consumers.

Brand integrity has to be at the core of brand thinking if the brands are to survive this transparency. Companies will be compelled to consider taking a real position and relate to a set of ideas the marketplace cares about – SideWiki will surely force their hand into a position of fundamental and overwhelming transparency. For fashionable PR execs this transparency will either be terrifying or inspiring. I hope that, thanks to SideWiki, we will see the death of the myopic PR clone and evolve to a position where serious strategic thinkers in PR will challenge the other marketing dinosaurs.

The recession has herded agencies into a pit; they have been humbled in particular by ad agencies who are moving in on proven PR processes, eager to keep making money but who aren’t necessarily experts in that field. The American company Crispin Porter & Bogusky declared in a recent Campaign article that they had asked the agency to stop writing ad script and start writing PR releases instead. Very 1980s. Also in the mix are highly creative and respected agencies like Fallon and Mother, who are taking a firm hand in the PR aspects of campaigns.

PR companies must offer and embrace sophisticated monitoring and tracking devices to keep their clients up to speed, offer solutions and encourage brand bravery and transparency. If they don’t, they will die.

Predictable PR is on the red list of endangered species. The evolution of SideWiki is a seminal moment, when the industry’s destiny is in its own hands. Development forces contributing to the evolution of the web are threatening PR’s demise. PR budgets on the whole bring about reactive, crisis thinking, based on negative responses that threaten their clients’ spot in the market.

The Innocent brand signaled the way forward back in 1997. Lacking bags of readies to spend on traditional marketing, they chose instead to launch a multitude of catalyst conversations around their packaging and experiential events. They were a word of mouth success well before the full web revolution and have paved the way for many more campaigns using the new technology.

Applying the ancient conventions and old codes of conduct of communications to the new world of parallel influence will only accelerate the inconsequence of traditional marketers. The Social Media world encloses our personal and professional actions – the only answer for PR folk is to take a more active role in being brand custodians, representing a higher degree of brands and reputation management.

Ad agencies once proactively shaped vision but now PR is demonstrably just as capable at understanding and cultivating future thinking, if not more so. PR has always engaged in a two-way conversation and should be capitalising on this to earn their clients’ trust. SideWiki is a call to arms – there is no excuse for complacency, as failure in today’s landscape is public, searchable, and enduring.