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.

I’d say not. It strikes me, looking at this morning’s excitable ruminations on SamCam’s modelling “past” in the press, that this is a sure-fire PR distraction from Lord Ashcroft and other pre-electoral woes, that the Tories will revel in the “slightly racy” past of SamCam at the expense of having to worry about her husband’s policies and his party’s veracity.

The Mail’s Amanda Platell doesn’t think that it will hurt. The Mail’s subs may have suggested, at the top of her comment this morning on the story the Mail on Sunday broke, that the photo shoot would get the Tory old guard spluttering, but Platell’s prose purples to the point that you would imagine that all they’ll really be doing is salivating.

“The resulting look is more flirtatious than outright raunchy,” writes Platell. “Think Sharon Maughan in her Gold Blend coffee advert days – with hair piled high and outfits that are part dinner party minx, part Boden Barbie. And those legs… dear God, those legs! Thoroughbred filly that she is, Sam’s are a fine-fetlocked pair that would not look out of place passing the Cheltenham finishing post. Jealous? Moi? You bet.”

“These pictures are an excellent mix of glamour and politics in the run-up to the election,” Sam Barcroft, of the Barcroft Media agency, told the Times. “It is an opportunity for picture editors to turn politics, which is often slightly dull, into something slightly more fragrant.”

My issue with all of this is that we need to be voting for politicians and policies, not the spouses of the party leaders. However sharp, alluring or glossily packaged they may be, if they’re not actually standing for parliament they should not be occupying the front pages in a bid to turn the tide of an election. Image has been all in politics for too long – what we actually need is substance.

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.