In the words of an old friend of my father's, Nicholas Watt's never been more wrong. So he thinks the Howard Credo is creatively cutting edge? Er, I don't think so.
And the letters page on the Guardian - I mean, I'm sure there's other newspapers, but why should I read them? They probably only say the same thing, differently packaged - may be controversially raging on the Stephen Gately-Savage Garden-R Kelly-Tom Jones continuum, but I know the truth.
So Michael Howard's gone all positive spin/New Labour/Old Conservative/you choose - and he'd have to after all that something-of-the-night-encoded-antisemitism we heard about on his elevation. He needs to rebrand. Don't we all, in these brand-aware times? And that crap about his Mother? Little yidl, big hair, gold slippers? P-u-lease.
Back to the plot. So Nick thinks Michael Howard's new credo is Martin Luther meets R Kelly? Thinks Maurice Saatchi, advertising guru to the chattering classes is a creative genius?
And the whole thing was apparently the brainchild of the Tory advertising guru Maurice Saatchi? That icon of advertising? So Saatchi and his minions laboured away for hours coming up with something original, something contemporary, something that cleverly communicates the core values of Howardism? Er, I don't think so.
I have news. Fresh in from New York. Maurice Saatchi - this time around, anyhow - doesn't have an original idea in his head. I have a framed card on my wall (hence bad quality scan) from my first visit to that temple of Art Deconess in midtown Manahttan, in the late eighties, which is itself a facsimile of an inscription in the wall of the Rockefeller Center. It's a card with the "I believe in the supreme worth of the individual" credo that was John D Rockefeller Junior's thang.
So from the heartland of Tory fontery: check out the partial scan of the Howard Credo (above). And then check out the scan of Our Family Creed, also known as The Things That Make Life Most Worth Living (below), by John D. Rockefeller, Jr:
And check this out: it's the same down to the font and the layout. The font is Fritz Quadrata, which my typographical consultant tells me is "quite seventies", which might mean that Howard is harking back to the power(less) years of seventies strikedom, or it might mean that someone just grabbed it, liked the look of it, rewrote some verbiage, passed it off as an original piece of work, and billed the client (Michael) doubtless a substantial sum of money.
If they'd have come down to Kilburn, I could have knocked it up on Photoshop. I've heard that there's nothing new under the sun, and there may not be, but people should at least try.
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