In the late 1960s, two ambitious brothers, Charles and Maurice, set up a very small advertising agency in London. They compensated for a lack of clients and connections in the upper echelons of British business with two qualities which usually guarantee success in any walk of life - boundless ambition and unshakeable self-belief. From offices in the heart of London they spent the day phoning the marketing directors of all of the big advertising spenders. Nobody had ever heard of them and they rarely got past the Praetorian Guard of secretaries and PAs. They consoled each other each evening trying to remember the most obnoxious or rude put downs they had endured. But their persistence and ambition paid off and having taken London, the brothers, to the amazement and chagrin of the US advertising industry, took Manhattan. Within 10 years, Saatchi & Saatchi had become the biggest agency in the world and even if this success owed more to a series of bold financial manoeuvres than to great advertising, it was a stunning achievement. Inevitably, they paid over the top for some of the final pieces of the jigsaw and began to look a little exposed as recession took hold in the mid 1980s. But it was our old friend hubris, which was, as ever, responsible for their final downfall.
Having conquered the world of advertising the brothers saw no reason why they couldn't turn their hand to other businesses. They had already begun to dabble in management consultancy but their ambitions were much more likely to be satisfied in another direction; banking. The sleepy world of British banking appeared to offer an opportunity for the brothers to show their unique skills. The Midland Bank became a target but the City, who up to then had backed them and been mildly amused by the brothers with the funny name, in that funny advertising business, were not amused by their presumption in thinking they could apply the same techniques in the more august world of banking. Financial support began to slip away and after a series of unedifying boardroom struggles, Charles and Maurice left the eponymous company with their tails between their legs but with suitably enhanced bank accounts.
But after an unseemly short break they began again from scratch in the business they knew best. With the existing Saatchi & Saatchi company trading under new management, they cheekily called their new operation M&C Saatchi and, with a number of high flying contacts still intact from their previous experience, they were immediately successful. So much so that last year M&C Saatchi actually passed out Saatchi & Saatchi in the UK agency rankings. Maurice - the "M" of M&C Saatchi - has now entered the political arena with a "brilliant manifesto" which claims to chart a new political way for the 21st century.
It is difficult to avoid speculating that hubris may be about to strike in the same place twice. During the heyday of the original Saatchi & Saatchi, one of their most high profile accounts was the Conservative Party and they enjoyed ringside seats during the great Thatcher election victories. They were responsible for arguably one of the great political advertisements of all time - the poster showing a long line of people outside an employment office with the inspired headline - "Labour isn't working". As is so often the case when political parties after a long time in power are resigned to being ousted, they reward their friends either by pardoning them (US), appointing them to the boards of vocational education committees (Ireland), or ennobling them (UK).
Lord Saatchi's little tome - it's only 98 pages plus appendices - purports to be a radical new political charter, characterising the left as caring but incompetent and the right as efficient but cruel. The book proposes that the public is left high and dry in the middle, sceptical of all politics and politicians, but that Maurice will show how they can be lead out of this dilemma. Brief histories of the intellectual development of the Labour Party and Conservative Party in Britain follow. The chapter on the latter is a useful enough introduction to the basis of conservative thinking in the UK and Maurice has obviously been making use of the House of Lords library. He quotes many of the leading conservative thinkers, Burke, Oakeshott, Hayek and Popper and gives a sympathetic account of the essence of their philosophy. The chapter on the Labour Party is not as successful and will raise more than a few eyebrows with the assertion that Tony Blair is the most ruthlessly effective political operator on the left since Karl Marx. It then emerges that the whole purpose of this enterprise is to provide the Tory Party with a manifesto for the 21st century, but even more disappointingly the major plank, in fact the only plank, in the new manifesto is - lower taxes. This is not a particularly original idea but after all those years in advertising dramatising minor differences, Maurice dresses it up with a suitably dramatic concept -Independence Day. This expresses the overall amount of tax people pay in terms of "days per year" - "It calculates how much over the year the average income earner spends in financing the Government's budget. When Independence Day is reached, individuals have fulfilled their obligation to the Government and enjoy full discretion over their earnings for the remainder of the year". Independence Day will of course be declared a national holiday.
If, like me, you are a little underwhelmed by this big idea, it should be pointed out that people who work in advertising are often faced with a situation where, having laboured together over some intractable problem, they do eventually come up with an idea which everyone agrees with - usually late in the evening when people are tired and would prefer to be at home with their families or out for a drink. However in most agencies there is a built-in check that is sometimes referred to as the "overnight test" - where everyone agrees to meet again in the cold light of the next day to see whether the big idea still has any merit. Very often they then decide that it's a load of old cobblers. Maybe they should introduce overnight tests in the House of Lords.
John Fanning is chairman of McConnells Advertising