Tactical Briefing From: The Unit To: GB Subject: Change

So. A good week. Really feels like politics has caught alight once again. There's fire in the activists' bellies and the country is fizzing with the possibilities of progressive politics. In America. The above obviously relates only to America. Not here. In America.

The Hillary-Obama race is especially thrilling to watch from here because the media now feel absolved from making any mention whatsoever of policy differences. The contest is being reported entirely as a race between an exciting skin colour and a freakish gender (in presidential terms). Think there may be a salutary lesson for us here. It's not that policies aren't important. Polling suggests that most voters prefer candidates with policies over candidates with no policies. And that they prefer candidates with more policies over those with fewer. However, in general it seems they are not especially concerned about the content of the policies, unless these are conspicuously mad (disband the Premier League) or unfair (poll tax). Indeed, even mad and unfair policies may get waved through provided they are sufficiently complex (PFI).

Furthermore, the preference for having lots of policies over no policies comes only eighth in the list of priorities when ranked from most to least important in judging the attractiveness of a prime minister. According to pollsters, it comes in between "Should look like the sort of person who would feed your rabbit if you went to Vienna for an unexpected minibreak" (number seven) and "Must be able to correctly identify the leaders of other nations on the UN Security Council by sight" (number nine) (Gallup, 2007).

So, in the policy sense, it feels like you are very much the Hillary of the UK. And increasingly, Cameron is the Obama, appealing to "younger, hipper" voters and the affluent. (That is, dipshits, or people who are so rich that it doesn't really matter to them who is in office - but they'd like to be associated with someone who looks like he moisturises.)

The dream scenario for us, then, would be to keep our Hillary-style white working-class voters while reaching out to the UK Obamites. Now obviously, you don't seem very black. Polling suggests you are widely regarded as being among the whitest men in the UK. Only Norman Tebbit and Hugh Grant are viewed as whiter (ICM, January 2008). However, it would be crass to see Obama as simply the "black" candidate. He is also the candidate of change and of height.

"Change" worked brilliantly for us at the start of your tenure, though we have since backed away from it, obviously. But now, as we enter Phase 2 of our premiership, we wonder if it isn't time for us to revisit change? Our line might be that when we came in in the summer we wanted to change everything. We did. That was great. But now the pace of change has been so great that everything's changed again and we need to do a whole lot more changes.

Let us know your thoughts.

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