When, as I still believe will happen, the Conservatives win this election, they must sort out how they present themselves to the world for the next five years. The campaign has revealed they are doing it wrong.

You can always raise a cheer by attacking “spin”, but no modern government can succeed without being highly professional in the management of its messages.

The only British governments which dominated the media in the past 40 years were Margaret Thatcher’s and Tony Blair’s (both declining, inevitably, in their third terms). It is no coincidence that their communications chiefs – Bernard Ingham (for her) and Alastair Campbell (for him) – were, in their very different ways, geniuses. Both had a preternatural ability to encapsulate the mission in headline style, and tell the leader frankly when she/he was making mistakes.