OTTAWA — Prime Minister Stephen Harper is losing his chief spokesman as the Conservative government struggles to manage a string of controversies and a sense of policy drift in the crucial two-year run-up period before the next election.

Andrew MacDougall, Harper’s seventh communications director, will depart in September amid a retrenching of senior staff in the PMO. After this summer’s cabinet shuffle, Harper is seeking to once again hit the re-boot button on his government.

The bilingual MacDougall will join Publicis Groupe in London, part of MSL GROUP, as a senior strategist, the British firm announced in a release Tuesday.

After 16 months as Harper’s spokesman, MacDougall leaves during a difficult period. Harper’s trade agenda has stalled, key oil and gas pipeline proposals are stumbling amid widespread protests, and the uproar has grown over Senate expenses.

But MacDougall’s decision was portrayed as largely personal in his note to staff, in which he said his desire to move to London “is long-standing and deep-seated.”

It leaves the prime minister, who lost trusted chief of staff Nigel Wright in the Senate affair, searching for his eighth communications director since he took power in 2006. That’s not counting the three that Harper employed as leader of the Opposition.

“The alumni club is getting so large we’re going to have to rent the Partridge family bus for our reunions,” quipped Ottawa lobbyist Jim Armour, a former Preston Manning staffer who worked as Harper’s communications chief while in Opposition.

Armour, vice-president of Summa Strategies, said while the top communications job is a key position for Harper to fill, “what’s lacking right now” is a clear direction in the government’s agenda. Controversies over robocalls and Senate expenses would not be garnering the same public attention if new, clear and substantive initiatives, not holdovers from the past two election campaigns, were underway, said Armour.

Harper, he said, will be “doing the right thing” when he prorogues Parliament in the fall, as expected, and kickstarts it with a new Speech from the Throne and a fresh agenda.

The prime minister, who has long directed his own communications strategy, has lately resorted to falling back on trusted, longtime advisers, promoting Ray Novak to chief of staff, and seeking the advice of Jenni Byrne, who runs the Conservative Party’s political operations.

Well-mannered, wry-humoured, and a skilled golfer, MacDougall was regarded by journalists in the parliamentary press gallery as an effective spokesperson for the Conservative government. Since 2008, he had served as deputy press secretary, then press secretary before taking the top job last year.

It’s a thankless position: to craft the government’s message for a demanding boss and deliver it to skeptical media, made all the worse by tough rules that restrict one’s post-politics career earning potential.

Still, MacDougall was seen as easing the flow of information and allowing ministerial offices to communicate more freely than they had under his immediate predecessors even as he continued to protect the prime minister, to block damaging information, and to aggressively push back at what he saw as unfair coverage of the government.

MacDougall sent a note to staff shortly before he broke the news on Twitter, thanking PMO employees, his predecessors, and Harper for his trust.

“I am grateful for the prime minister’s confidence. It has been a rare privilege to watch firsthand how the prime minister has led Canada through these tough economic times. To have been a small part of this endeavour will forever rank as one of my proudest accomplishments.”

He also tossed in a sop to the media: “And thank you as well to the media for making this an interesting experience. (I know what you’re thinking, but I know how this town works; these words will fall into their hands and they’ll get whiny if I don’t say goodbye to them, too.)”

Where are they now? Past PMO directors of communications under Stephen Harper

Andrew MacDougall, April 2012 to present, will take up a strategic consultancy job in London, UK in September following the G-20 summit in Russia.

Angelo Persichilli, Aug. 2011 to April 2012, became a federally-appointed citizenship judge in GTA in April.

Dimitri Soudas, April 2010 to Aug. 2011, is executive director at the Canadian Olympic Committee.

John Williamson, Sept. 2009 to April 2010, was elected Conservative MP for New Brunswick Southwest in May 2011.

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Kory Teneycke, July 2008 to Sept. 2009, is vice-president of Sun News television network.

Sandra Buckler, Feb. 2006 to July 2008, did not respond to Star’s email inquiry, but LinkedIn profile shows she left post as chief of staff to then-Health Minister Leona Aglukkaq in December.

William Stairs, Feb. 2006, left a national PR firm to run his own communications consultancy in Ottawa.

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