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We can’t go on like this... Tories ask Saatchi for help

The Mole: David Cameron’s election campaign isn’t working: will it now?

LAST UPDATED 10:08 AM, MARCH 25, 2010

D

avid Cameron has finally seen the light and recognised that the Tories need more help to secure victory at the general election, now only six weeks away if Gordon Brown calls it for May 6. According to reports overnight, Cameron has gone back to the Saatchis, who famously helped engineer Margaret Thatcher's triumph in 1979 with the legendary 'Labour Isn't Working' poster.

The advertising industry site Campaignlive says M&C Saatchi will work on various briefs to help get the Tory message across. The party's current agency Euro RSCG is not getting sacked: it will remain the 'lead agency' despite being responsible for the unimpressive poster campaign showing Cameron's mugshot and the line "We can't go on like this".

Presumably M&C Saatchi will remind Euro RSCG that one of the first rules of campaigning is NOT to come up with a billboard that invites bloggers and passers-by to deface it, whether digitally or actually.

The Saatchi name has been linked with the Tories ever since 1978. Although Saatchi & Saatchi, as it was then called, resigned the Conservative account nine years later, the party went back to the Saatchi brothers - Maurice and Charles - for the 1997 campaign after they had broken away and relaunched themselves as M&C Saatchi.

The timing of the new Saatchi appointment is critical. A new opinion poll by YouGov shows the Tory lead over Labour has dropped further to just two points (Tories down to 36 per cent, Labour up to 34 per cent), which could give Labour a small majority in a hung parliament.

It should be emphasised that this survey was conducted before yesterday's electioneering Budget and that we'll have to wait for this weekend's polls to give a fairer reflection of voters' intentions.

However, the fact that the gap between the Tories and Labour ever got this close, considering the Conservatives' apparently unassailable lead a year or so ago, will give M&C Saatchi a real challenge.

It is not clear yet who made the decision to call in Saatchi. On the surface, it looks like a snub to Cameron's communications chief Andy Coulson, who picked Euro RSCG in the first place.

And some in Tory circles believe there is still room to bring in the Australian election guru Lynton Crosby, who helped Boris Johnson to victory in the London mayoral election.