If Tony Blair has his wits about him he'll send a thank-you card the size of an election poster to the Women's Institute. He owes them. Big time.
In one bout of tewibly civilised heckling, they've offered a lesson New Labour needs to learn and learn fast. Which is that the central plank in its public relations strategy is inappropriate, ineffectual, ill-judged, inoffensive and boring as all hell.
New Labour's PR problems began with winning the general election. They'd need to have had their legs and arms tied together and duct tape over their mouths not to have won the last general election, given the sensible collapse of the Tory vote. But a myth speedily developed that Peter Mandelson's wizard PR wheezes were what had really won it for them.
So spin and PR machination became central to their very existence from that point on. Admittedly, they cocked up one big PR event or issue after another, and the Prime Minister's personal PR man was obnoxious to any hack unprepared to have multiple orgasms at every Blair sighting. But time, thought, money and brain power went into maintaining their image.
As they moved into mid-term, the focus tightened. Now it was time to make the electorate grateful. Now it was time to go out and ram home to the inattentive general public that New Labour had kept its electoral promises.
But never mind the irony. Feel the boredom.
Imagine this. You have been married for three and a bit years. The bloom is off the whatsit, but you're hanging in. And you know what happens? Your spouse starts arriving home in the evening and telling you stuff.
"When we got married, I promised I would be faithful to you," he says (or she says). "And all this week, I have been completely faithful to you."
Or the reminders are financial.
"When we wed, I promised you I'd contribute to the mortgage, and - here, look at this document from the building society - I have kept that promise on a monthly basis."
He (or she) keeps this up on every occasion your paths cross. Options suggest themselves. You can leave him (or her). Hit him (or her) over the head with the chiminea you've just bought for the back garden. Or maybe certify the looper.
The one option that will never suggest itself is that you, the listener to all these claims of kept promises, will be moved to gratitude, appreciation, warmth, love and long-term commitment. You'd be out of your tree. Stick with this creep for more years of reminder-nagging? What's in it for you, the nagee?
It's precisely the same situation when it comes to governments. No voter in their right mind is ever going to be thrilled at the prospect of sitting through yet another speech awash in claims of promises kept, duties delivered on.
Governments are like hotels: bloody hell, we expect them to have beds and towels. If they want to impress guests, they have to do more than boast that each bed has four legs and claiming that the previous hoteliers were given to shortchanging beds by giving them only three apiece.
The Women's Institute heckled Tony when he told them about initiatives undertaken, cuts in interest rates since the last election and other see-what-I've-done-for-you blether. Significantly, though, they didn't heckle him when he was interesting about issues like the idea of taking driver's licences from fathers who don't pay up for the support of their kids.
That's the thing about the general public. All you have to do is be interesting and they'll be interested. But New Labour has lost the plot of how to be interesting. They even spent a fortune to publish a book about what the government has achieved and put it in Tesco for shoppers to grab along with the weekend bottle of wine and the carton of sushi.
The terrible thing about a myth the size of New Labour's is that it's contagious and infectious. Other governments tend to copy the PR crime. So newspaper readers begin to drown in the Spend Story.
The Spend Story can start with a press release, a press conference or a ministerial speech, but the bottom line's the same: "We, the Wonderful, are committing £39 billion pounds to X. Or Y. Or Z."
Never mind that, even in these monied days, most of us get kind of lost once you go above a few million. Never mind that £39 billion never, ever emotionally connects with Auntie Annie's delayed hip swap or the traffic jams damning every driver's soul.
Reminding the electorate that you've kept your promises to them is the biggest communications blunder a Government can make. Repeatedly telling the Spend Story is the second. The third is allowing ministers (or prime ministers) to make boring speeches.
For some reason it seems to happen to every government, of every party. Once they get into the ministerial seats they get so tied up with other tasks that they lose touch with the obvious likes and dislikes of any normal audience.
Obvious? Well, it's pretty obvious that no audience wants any minister to give a speech including any of the following:
A chunk of Irish at the beginning and end to show we still know what country we're in.
A revise-before-exams section telling the (usually expert) audience a million things they already know.
A few patronising references to the charity/industry/institution being addressed, barbed with indications as to how they might do their job better.
A sentence saying there are no simple solutions to complex problems. "No quick fixes" is the preferred version of this. "Not throwing money at problems" also figures.
A text so densely written in Hazlitt's `big, grey words of the lexicon' that the listeners feel as if they're standing in fast-setting cement and the minister delivering it falls over every second paragraph. (Because it's been written by a civil servant unfamiliar with the way the minister actually talks and thinks.)
By the time ministers get into the habit of this kind of speech, they're usually also marinaded to a turn in mistrust of any audience, and so they schedule their appearances to avoid the question-and-answer bit which might force them to be real.
This entire stew of communications errors starts with one single ingredient: the assumption made by people who have been superb in opposition that, once they go into Government, they own and must constantly defend the status quo. Every now and again a small party going into a coalition government is smart enough to take the opposition mentality into the ministerial offices with it and continue to look for windmills to tilt at, but it's rare.
For the most part the brightest and best, going into government, freeze-frame their manifestoes and spend the next couple of years putting approving ticks beside all the bits that have come to fruition.
Meanwhile, the rest of us have moved on to new, different and better whinges . . .
Terry Prone is managing director of Carr Communications.