Ford is trying a bold new strategy to persuade the car-buying classes that, without quite going for the Ratner strategy of rubbishing its own product, it is now building something of novel and world-beating excellence. #Unlearn is a smart way of selling the idea of a change of direction.

My interest in cars expires with a recognition of the strategy, so I’ve no idea whether the product matches the claim. But I like the idea. Labour could use some of this. In fact, it is on it already.

On Tuesday night, the economist of the Entrepreneurial State, Mariana Mazzucato, wondered, in the course of a brilliant inaugural lecture in a Labour-backed series of talks to fire up a conversation about the state and the economy, what food was necessary to turn timorous business folk from gerbils into lions.

Her answer is mission-oriented public investment, which sounds very much like rocket science until you realise that actually she is pointing at the way entrepreneurs very often ride off the back of state investment.

She argues that we need a way of recognising and talking about this unacknowledged role of the public sector, and points at the way Germany has tackled greening the economy. It’s not just building wind farms, it’s investing massively in research and technological development too.

My interest in Mazzucato’s lecture is not just in what she said, but that she said this in a Labour forum. John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor, has persuaded most of the world’s rock star economists – Mazzucato herself, Thomas Piketty, Joseph Stiglitz and more – to go on tour with him around the UK to get the voters to #unlearn Labour. McDonnell promises to re-energise and maybe revolutionise thinking about the way the UK economy should work.

Tuesday night’s affair was held in the unbelievably well behaved surroundings of the Royal Institution in one of the priciest parts of London, so it was not exactly a gig, and it’s not quite a tour. But that’s the drift. It is a brilliant idea.

Labour, as Margaret Beckett pointed out in her unflabbergasting report on the election defeat, may have had 5 million conversations, but listening is one thing, leadership quite another. The party has not been so hot at persuading voters they know the answers to the economic crisis. That’s partly because Tories always do the narrative of austerity more convincingly than Labour, but it’s not the whole story. Framed for causing the recession, the party has sounded incapable of moving beyond the “Vote Labour and win a microwave” approach to rethinking the economy.

Cynics joke about Labour thinking it was right and it was the voters who were wrong. Obviously, voters are never wrong. But it is undeniable that not all of us has a perfect grasp of the economic options that might be open at any given moment.

After 30 years of a single, Thatcherite version of the proper relationship between the state and the economy, and seven years of blaming Labour for recession, resetting the narrative is going to be tough. Like a medieval city siege it will take a lot of heavy weaponry for the commanders, and a powerful sense of purpose for the troops.

But McDonnell has managed to recruit the heavy weaponry. True, Tuesday night’s event didn’t feel like a cross-section of an eager and engaged population, more a gathering of students and professors so grizzled they may have contributed to Harold Wilson’s defining speech about the white heat of technology back in 1963.

It is also true that neither Jeremy Corbyn, who was at last night’s lecture lolling in the front of the auditorium like a kid too cool for school, nor McDonnell – who hosted it – have the kind of earnest gravitas that John Smith and Gordon Brown brought to Labour’s economic strategy a generation ago.

All the same, the recovery is faltering. The Conservatives face exposure as a one-hit wonder. There is an echo in these days of the generational shift when Margaret Thatcher wrested control of the narrative from her reluctant one nation Tory party and blew up the post-war settlement.

And when it comes to the machinery needed to win a war of ideas, it doesn’t get much more powerful than Mariana Mazzucato and Thomas Piketty. #unlearn.