We find it rich that Tory grandee Maurice Saatchi now laments the outcome of the recent general election in Great Britain, regretting his failure to overturn “the fiction of the focus groups” in politics. (Isn’t this the same guy who, after helping to elect Maggie Thatcher as prime minister in 1979, introduced such American-style focus groups into U.K. politics as a way to keep her in power?) The former chairman of the U.K.’s Conservative party is now going public with criticisms of his peers in comments written for the U.K. Center for Policy Studies and in an interview with BBC’s Radio 4. This spring, Labor leader Tony Blair retained his party’s power, and Lord Saatchi accuses the Tories of running a “Basil Fawlty election.” For a politician who received his place in the House of Lords largely by virtue of his marketing counsel to Thatcher and other Conservatives, it’s hard not to be cynical about his current admonition that politics must have a “noble purpose.”

—Posted by Noreen O’Leary

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