It rained less under a conservative government

Driven by sheer “vainglorious hubris”, the Guardian took pity on the Tories and convened a brainstorming session to come up with a way to relaunch the party. Naturally, they chose to let their readers in on the panel’s deliberations and conclusions.

Look, logo, name

Karmarama’s new look for the party was red. The message behind this was, they explained, “Why blue? Why not red?” In other words, we are not hung up on colours and old allegiances, and neither need you be. Surprisingly, we all thought that this was brilliant, suggesting a party that was open to change.

Then we changed the party logo, the current one being described by Rachel as “a nasty whooshing thing, like something by a regional train operator”. We forbore to remind her just who had brought in regional train operators, and studied instead Karmarama’s idea of a fist with the thumb up. Dave explained that this Conservative hand could then be used in a variety of situations, wittily expressing Victory, Sod Off, Cooperation etc. We bought it.

But what about the name? Tim argued that Conservative was a deeply unpleasant word. Ed retorted that Labour wasn’t nice either if you had spent 24 hours in it giving birth. Tim suggested the Freedom Party but the rest of us said that we weren’t born yesterday.

“Do you have to have a name?” Karmarama asked. “Can’t you just call it Tulip or something?” Now, this isn’t so far-fetched. The Italian left forms the Olive Tree Alliance, so perhaps the Tories could become the Oak Tree, a symbol of sturdiness, longevity and annual renewal? But this is Britain, land of satire. Imagine what a well-placed dog would do next to an oak.

So we settled for “the conservatives”, no off-putting “party” and all in friendly lower case. Oh, and an objection to be lodged very time the word “Tory” is used by the BBC or ITN.

I have to say that my first reaction to this piece was to loathe the emissaries from Karmarama, the advertising agency which volunteered to help out. My second reaction was to laugh out loud at the last stage of the process:

Finally, a leader

The group agreed that there should be one. In which case, said Karmarama, it ought to be someone like Gary Lineker. We demurred, following a desultory discussion taking in Richard Branson and Anita Roddick. Then Gordon told us that the polling evidence showed that the man that women would be most likely to vote for was… Bill Clinton. “It’s all about women,” he added, “they make or break leaders.”

Bill Clinton? With Alan Clark dead, we could only think of one sexy, bad man. John Major. We passed.

[Via Amygdala]