The first is the production of Yes, Prime Minister that has just transferred to the West End. It’s a great show; very funny, very well acted and rather more radical than one would have expected from a comedy institution that makes it to the stage 20-odd years after its heyday. Buy a seat now!

It plays wonderfully to its target audience but, like so much other theatre in the West End, it struggles to reach out to the next generation of audience, the ones that will keep the theatre going as a concern that moves beyond musicals and celebrity-strewn shows. It’s not just this show – West End theatre in general seems a little too content to bask in an (admittedly lucrative) ghetto. So many British institutions – from the arts to politics – are content to do so.

But theatre can, and should, be a cultural shift changer. It should be creating news events that land productions on the front pages. A first night is an event, certainly, and reviews are important, but if more serious commercial theatre is to find its way into the subconscious landscapes of the nation’s youth, then it needs to be a little more hard-arsed about marketing itself, given that traditional advertising is going through such lean times.

Theatre has done some things very well indeed and there’s no doubt that there’s a lot of money in box office for Yes, Prime Minister – a million quid in advance bookings by all accounts. It’s deservedly going to be a very successful show and the producers have done a brilliant job of providing a financial return for the investors.

But that comfortable sensation of box office wealth can lead to complacency – and that could mean that new opportunities are missed. It would be wonderful if the West End used these riches to try some of the online crowd sourcing tactics to engage the next generation of theatregoers in the same way that Punchdrunk, You Me Bum Bum Train, LIFT and Alex Poots’s Manchester Festival do. They need to remember that are living in an era where a thing or a person survives best if they can communicate successfully to the nation as a whole, not just a certain clique. They need to stir in the next generation, not just the Horlicks sippers.

Which leads me to the second conundrum of the week: Ed Miliband’s first nights as leader of the Labour Party. Labour seems to have taken several steps backwards in electing Ed as the next leader of the party, a man who looks like a truculent Portuguese Wine waiter, or perhaps the manager of an Estonian Lap dancing club. When the Mail and the Sun are so eager to attack and splash the phrase Red Ed throughout any and every article on him and given that he is an awkward, less-than-confident seeming public speaker, all I can see is Labour failing to try and regain the dialogue they had with Britain as a whole in the early days of the New Labour project. Labour has to deal with the Red Ed tag quickly – it’s one of those phrases that will filter seamlessly into the social media and digital subconscious and the British public will find themselves subliminally conditioned unless Labour move fast to stamp out its use.

Whatever you think of them, Philip Gould and Peter Mandelson were immensely effective at controlling output and creating a useful conversation between New Labour and the British public – until the relationship was indelibly tainted by their use of spin to manoeuver the country into an unpopular and illegal war. Prior to Iraq, they had dragged Labour out of the ghetto and, in doing so, helped change the face of British politics. They were mindful of the tiniest details and that is a lesson that mustn’t be forgotten.

Now, you have to be media savvy, cool in front of the cameras and able to hold your own up close. Ed’s unmarried status and his slightly ungainly demeanour is a burden for the party, given that it separates him from the majority of voters. This is not, ultimately, a game changer, but it does allow the opposition to gain an initial foothold. For this reason, David Cameron was clearly more afraid of facing David Miliband across the ballot box. Ed, at a distance from the voters and prone to having easy clichés thrown at him, does not seem likely to be anything like as much a threat. I suspect his struggle for polish will set the party back by 20 years – especially given that he follows Gordon Brown, whose lack of personability was at least leavened by many years in office. Not only is Ed not smooth and slick, he’s not long been an MP.

Clear party divisions are certainly to the fore once agian. New Labour is over: so do we have a right/left divide or do we perhaps have a Tory suited New Labour against Old Labour, finger puppets for the trade union bigwigs, looking like Arthur Mullard in a bad George suit?

Love them or loathe them, Clegg and Cameron are in the smooth and slick fit-for-purpose zone, whereas Ed Miliband and his team need to look hard at examples such as Tony Hayward – a prime instance of a figurehead dragging the whole company into the mire, as he was patently not fit to cope with the media hoo-ha. The head of a big corporate organisation or political party has to be fit for purpose. Can an organisation really afford to elect a leader on values alone in these media savvy times?

Both the Labour Party and the West End have failed to take into consideration the way the new media works, I feel. The 10-minute news cycle and the need for new audiences are paramount and, if any trick is missed and any stone is left unturned, the future will begin to look more and more uncertain.

I can’t help but feel a little unease at the way they present themselves, and the PR wheels running the Cleggameron image juggernaut. I wonder if this honeymoon period will last longer than the usual ones – remember Tony Blair amiably wandering down Downing Street predicting that by the time he left office, the gates Thatcher had installed to keep the terrorists out would have been removed? How ironic that seems now. Or Gordon Brown’s five minutes of popularity when he took over?

I can imagine what isn’t being said in public quite easily – I wonder if the team running the company is telling Dave ‘n’ Nick to save the acrimony for a book deal further down the line?

Regardless, the PR machine has come of age – we may not have an absolutely new kind of politics (yet, at least) but we certainly are seeing a new kind of spin, one that seems set to rule the political agenda. Just so long as it can get the happy couple past the honeymoon period without them falling immediately into painful divorce proceedings, that is.

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.

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.

From the negative electioneering of mashed up, satirical posters, to the dusting down of the old Saatchi creative team – to deliver up what Cameron’s mob hope to be a coup de gras to Labour (as was done under Thatcher) – its been a long and spectacularly phoney war; one that has, alarmingly, only focused on the media process.

Now, with even more spin and blather lined up to cover over the front pages with its own mutated brand of primordial goo, we get Sam and Dave via webcam, at home in their designer kitchen, the fertile photogenic young couple whom the Tories hope will get them over the winning line. Basically, another lump of undigested PR hype posited for the Westminster Village elite as the media heralds the election date and the gears of war grind into place.

Never before, however, have there been more examples and more critique of the marketing, PR and advertising that goes into an election campaign. As various party marketing grandees fumble with Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and guerilla marketing, they fail to grasp that the key issue is going to be whether the great unwashed are actually going to get off their backsides and vote.

The real state of politics is that the nation is utterly disillusioned with the process of power, the government and the corrupt politicians. No matter what the politics, PR and spin are ubiquitous and as a consequence we all mistrust politicians, especially in power. Whether it’s an interesting use of social media or pushing forward a political wife, none of the parties have, to date, proffered any real policies for the electorate to judge.

All we have been given is the slew and spew of marketing and a welter of PR blather. The papers spend more time commenting on new and old media tricks being employed to propel the parties into power than they do on what actually matters – policy!

Have the collective efforts of all the political parties to sell politics been a distraction that has hypnotized a nation? I would say yes, as we have seemingly given in to the Machiavellian forces, hired media hands and the strategies last employed by Obama that will lead each TV debate. This constant distraction and the media obsession with personality politics leads us further away from the real and pressingly urgent issues which are what we should be voting for.

Its an interesting start to the election and leaves me wondering: do the public believe in the theatre of politics at all any more?

Do they believe in the clusters of smiling supporters hanging off their leaders’ every word whilst the hapless media ruck is ignored? Or Cameron’s one man road show bouncing off the walls? Or Gordon’s team greeted en masse by clapping, grinning party faithful? Or slick, formulaic Cameron making speeches with his white shirt sleeves rolled up in an attempt to demonstrate his youth and vitality? The boyish Clegg photographed with Saint Vincent Of Cable?

I am breathless: its day one and already there’s been stunt after stunt, photo opp after photo opp – both Brown and Cameron more shamelessly proactive than Katie Price.

Please please keep it up! I just can’t wait for the TV debates next week…

It was a rather curious and disappointing night; most of the questions from the floor were from people seeking insight via anecdote and I found myself missing the grillings I got from wannabe journalists 15 years ago about the nature of PR. The media has changed, without doubt – celebrity has come to be a sop they use to send us to sleep easily at night, a sort of weak-horlicks fairytale with all the calories and morals removed.

When it comes to celebrity, the media are too often an industry dependent on lives going wrong so they can print half truths and soap operas. The modern media can’t seem to find – or find the time for – the voices of those contributing something of worth to society. Everything is too prearranged. All those bright young things who wanted to be journalists now want to be in PR, as there’s always money to be made there.

But critical opinion is being lost. Does no one want to know how photos of John Terry and his wife in Dubai – which has strict privacy laws – were taken? It had to be by careful arrangement but no one questioned this last night. Everybody knows everything and nothing – the useful details are lost beneath a swath of cosy anecdote.

Debate is at an all time low – it is not even fashionable in politics, as Gordon Brown’s giving over of himself to the personal via the medium of his TV interview with Piers Morgan the other day proves. That and the fact that the political parties are all trying to bag celebs to help win the upcoming election (click here to see a piece on this in the Telegraph for which I gave a quote) rather than debate and think their way out of their problems.

I’m well aware that the world is constantly changing, as it should, but to have young wannabe publicists and journalists sidestep entirely a proper discourse and just accept the nature of things as they are on the surface is disturbing. There’s always money to be made – asking questions won’t, in the long run, stem the flow of that income. The power of questions is that, by questioning, one can change things. True constructive analysis and debate is the only way for the media, PR and the world to move forward – equilibrium need not mean stultification.

I’ve been up in the smoke all week and the conversation, from left and right, is dominated by the possibility that the Tories might not win the election. It’s a simple case of making a couple of mistakes and watching confidence seep away. And the ill-advised Tory poster campaign, featuring an airbrushed David Cameron, is not so much a mistake as it is a PR disaster.

The poster, pictured above, has been subvertised and graffitied, lampooned, laughed at and criticised. There is a website dedicated to endless satirical versions of the poster and even the Daily Mail has weighed in to pontificate on the foolishness of it.

What’s equally surprising is that Gordon Brown’s response has been to record a hearts and flowers interview with Piers Morgan. From the quotes that have leaked it seems like Brown is doing his best to get away from the airbrushed PR sheen that has besmirched Cameron’s image and reputation. It could be a triumph or an abject failure, depending on Brown’s delivery, but if it manages to bring out a human side to the notoriously awkward PM, it could mark a radical change in fortunes that no one would have predicted six months ago.

Take, for a start, Hillary’s Secret War, a book detailing the ways in which a rightwing think-tank’s output on the internet was allegedly suppressed by Hillary Clinton during the Clinton regime, which has just been brought to my attention. According to the author, a Richard Poe, Clinton protected her husband’s regime rigorously. “Hillary’s attack machine bullied,” he writes, “blackmailed, terrorized, and intimidated every serious investigator, from journalists to federal prosecutors and independent counsel, until they simply gave up. In many cases, Hillary’s operatives carried out these attacks openly and in full sight of major media. No one blew the whistle. No one cried foul. No one stopped her.”

Poe describes himself as part of ‘the New Underground’: “By the New Underground, I mean the growing network of dissident journalists on cable TV, talk radio, and the Internet. In the course of our labors, we stumble, now and then, upon what Patrick Henry might have called ‘painful truths’.”

The book came out in 2004, but – whether or not you subscribe to Poe’s political leanings – his description of the ways in which information is suppressed rings true enough. There are many ways of suppressing – and getting out – a story. Only this morning I was reading Guido Fawkes’ Twitter feed, which suggested that the MOD were attempting to suppress footage of troops in Afghanistan refusing to shake the hand of Gordon Brown – shortly afterwards, he wrote that a source had confirmed the existence of footage and he was trying to acquire it. This is the New Underground in action – although Poe ascribes it to a rightwing think-tank, it is much more a bipartisan group of journalists and bloggers who won’t let anything lie in the face of suppression.

What, then, of Copenhagen? The internet is fascinated with the ongoing situation around the Climate Change Conference and is awash with information and misinformation. The net coverage is an ongoing fight between painful truths and distractions. The leaking of the East Anglian stats has given all concerned a personal wire service to the onslaught of information in all its variant states of truthfulness.

What many fail to understand is that the format is usually the winner. However many gatekeepers Hillary Clinton is alleged to have set up for the web, however often the MOD try and hide the fact that the troops don’t like an unpopular leader, however much obfuscation, argument and endless counter-argument surrounds Climate Change, the internet – that most flexible of formats – will always win through.

You just have to look at the X Factor for proof. It’s not Joe McElderry who’s won the X Factor, it’s the format. It’s Simon Cowell, who owns the format. The only difference between the X Factor and the internet is that the TV talent show is the sort of Mogadon for the Nation that allows people to suppress news from Copenhagen, merely because you can bury anything on page 20 or in an article on the internet if you have enough articles about tearful contestants – who’ve been slugging it out in a glitterball for the past three months – surrounding the story.