There was a fair bit of tough news to swallow all round, but what intrigued me was the way that Osborne deferred to Lib Dem Chief Secretary to the Treasury, David Laws, when it came to handing out the truly hard-to-swallow news.

This is where the coaltion comes into its own for the Tories; they have more seats and more cabinet members than the Lib Dems, but they get to share the pain equally. Should these cuts in spending create a double dip recession, as Labour predicted, the Tories will work hard to offload the worst of it onto the shoulders of their coalition colleagues, as they did today.

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.

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…

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…

Griffin’s PR nous comes hard earned – the BNP’s Director of Publicity, Mark Collett, has had his share of run-ins with the television, having been caught on camera during Channel 4’s Young, Nazi, and Proud documentary in 2002 declaring his admiration for Adolf Hitler and calling homosexuals “AIDS monkeys” on Russell Brand’s Re:Brand show in the same year. Collett is highly unlikely to want Griffin to fall into the same trap, despite the strong likelihood that he will be mercilessly provoked.

So should we allow a thug in a well-cut suit on the TV to attempt to seduce the masses? Is Griffin likely to raise his status to that of statesman in the circumstances? Prohibition would, I suspect, be more likely to fan the flames of disaffection among voters – who have much to be disaffected about at the moment, hence the 6% who voted BNP in the European elections – and the last thing most people, let alone most politicians, want is to allow them more chances to snare votes.

The hope, then, is that Griffin will succumb to anger and show his dark side, which has been slathered in nice suits and careful spin for the last few years. Gordon Brown has gone on record this morning to say that: “it will be a good opportunity to expose what [the BNP] are about”. Russell Brand has said it with more style in The Sun. According to Brand it will help to let the BNP “gurgle up their chuckle-brained hate-broth” on Question Time. “The right thinking people of the Earth are on relatively safe ground when it comes to the ‘war of words’ with televised bigots,” he adds.

A few years ago Griffin told a meeting of the American Friends of the BNP (which included the then leader of the Ku Klux Klan) that: “Once we’re in a position where we control the British broadcasting media, then perhaps one day the British people might change their mind and say, ‘yes, every last [immigrant] must go’. But if you hold that out as your sole aim to start with, you’re not going to get anywhere. So, instead of talking about racial purity, we talk about identity.”

With this in mind, I think that Michael Corleone’s advice in The Godfather Part 2 – “Keep you friends close, but your enemies closer” – is the best bet. Let’s keep Griffin and his hateful, hate-full party close and hope that they deliver a horse’s head to their own bed, making it clear just how appalling their views, which they keep simmering under the veneer of careful PR, really are.

He may have the charisma of a financial director of a small engineering firm in Colchester, but Osborne has been the boldest politician on the block this conference season, playing on the Tories’ current popularity to roll out plans for an austere Britain should the Tories come to power.

“After a year in which trust in parliament has been rocked to the foundations, we know that politics must change forever,” he told the Tory faithful. Then, in a definite nod to both the careful PR husbandry of Andy Coulson, the new Cardinal Richelieu of spin, and the needs of the public, he added: ‘We have to be open and transparent with the people we serve.”

It’s a risk, especially for a Tory party riding its first wave of media support in a long time. Not so long ago the Tories would have been very aware of the media looking carefully at the effect on the public of a group of old Etonians asking country to tighten its belt. But with the Sun on their side, this is the first conference that they are feeling confident at – and Osborne has taken a gamble by asking everyone but the poorest Briton to do exactly that to make sure the country gets out of the huge deficit.

Of course, anyone even paying lip-service to transparency in politics at the moment is likely to do well, however unlikely it is that the transparency will last long after power’s been achieved. Osborne, however, knows full well that he is not likely to end up as unpopular as Gordon Brown, whatever happens. We may have seen huge applause for the prime minister and his wife at the Labour conference last week, but a huge percentage of the people clapping, particularly the Balls and Darlings, are likely to have a dagger with Brown’s name on it concealed about their person. They’re all PR savvy enough to not want to be associated with the sinking of Labour and will be working out ways of leaving Gordon holding the baby.

Talking of hidden daggers, I was at the Pride of Britain awards last night and had the pleasure of watching the popular Piers Morgan working the room with ease, wit and a certain amount of grace. He and his partner, Celia Walden, make a very likeable pair – she’s his Michelle Obama.

I fell to wondering what this popularity could mean for his position in the Simon Cowell empire. Piers is getting to be much more popular than he used to be; will Cowell – the alpha male of the X Factory– allow someone on one of his shows to be this genuinely liked?

It’s time to be vigilant – this has all the makings of an epic off-screen soap opera that could run and run. Keep your eyes peeled for the next thrilling installment, coming soon!

Take Michael Jackson, whose death has seen the worst elements of him shorn away, with only the adulation left; there’s now a competition to design a fitting memorial for him. And of the entries, there’s not one but three suggestions to build a Jackson-shaped island off Dubai, next to the other man made islands. The proposals would, of course, all have theme-parks on them – a home for Neverland ranch, if the new owner feels the need to sell it.

It’s astonishingly gauche, but somehow hardly surprising. I half expect one of the entries to win and then we’ll be able to see a Jackson-shaped landmass from space. What an alien visitor would make of this is another question.

An alien visitor’s reaction to the relentless plundering of Jackson’s brand in the months since his death would make for interesting reading, too. The family started it, with Jackson’s father launching a record label in the wake of his son’s death. The only way from here is to plunder more, until all the contrary mystery that Jackson maintained is gone.

Not that you have to be dead for your brand to be plundered: licensing firm CKX Inc recently bought an 80% stake in the image rights to the great boxer Muhammed Ali, paying around $50 million to use his name, image and likeness of the boxing champ, as he was at the height of his powers, as they see fit. Ali retains 20% of himself in the deal (more, I suspect, than is actually left of the iconic boxing champion in him) as well as taking the money upfront, a shrewd deal for a man who was so badly damaged by boxing, one which guarantees his survival in the collective consciousness.

The same plunder is happening with all sorts of iconic figures of the 20th century, from Marilyn Monroe to Elvis to Che Guevara. Their images have been in use for years, generating awesome amounts of money for the license holders and for the estates of the dead stars, but it will be interesting to see where new technology takes their images – we’ve already seen Laurence Olivier resurrected for theatre and film, but as the technology advances, so will the scope for looting the brands of dead stars. Whole films carried by computer-generated versions of James Dean? A new romcom starring Elvis and Marilyn with a supporting role for Che? The possibilities are terrifyingly endless.

What fun the brand looters could have with Peter Mandelson, who stood up at the Labour conference the other day and completed his resurrection. As Quentin Letts pointed out in the Mail: “There were self-puncturing jokes, swishes of kitten claw and a series of exaggerated waist swivels, arm gesticulations and eye flashes worthy of a Michael Jackson impersonator.”

It leaves me wondering what we would be left with if Mandelson were to shuffle, untimely, off this mortal coil. Preserve him in aspic now and we would have the new, pantomime Machiavelli, the glamorous manipulator, the ultimate in Lazarene politician-kind.

Simply, he is the current brand apotheosis of this type of politics and the standing ovation he received at the Labour conference is as good as any baptism in waves of spin. Now he is free to fight his way to the leadership of the Labour party. I wonder which way the Sun would turn if he was in charge?

That said, I doubt anyone would consider building an island in his honour, should he pass on suddenly. A scale model of the Millennium Dome in a model village somewhere, perhaps, but that’s about it. Which is more than can be said for Gordon Brown, mind you, who, despite a rousing speech at the conference yesterday, has yet to shake off Steve Bell’s branding of him as a rain-cloud. His only hope for long-term brand management is his wife…

“The publicist Mark Borkowski, a prolific user of new media, believes that Sarah Brown has shown herself far more adept in this area than her husband could ever hope to be. ‘She is operating in areas where he doesn’t have any hope of generating traction,’ he says. ‘He cannot YouTube, she can. He cannot Twitter, she can. Gordon can’t generate sympathetic votes, she can, particularly from women. They’re trying to turn her into a yin to his yang.’

“Borkowski traces the origins of Sarah Brown’s strategy back to last year’s Labour Party conference in Manchester, when she stepped up to the microphone in defence of her under-attack husband. ‘Some people at the time claimed she needed to be arm-twisted into that but actually it was a bit of a toe in the water to see how it would go.’

“Despite her PR background, it will not have been easy for her. She once said of the Hobsbawm Macaulay way of working: ‘Julia goes out to lunch with people so I don’t have to.’ One industry source recalls that ‘She never really hung out with the PR crowd.’”