PM David Cameron PM Stephen Harper : Lib-Dem Cries Heard In Both Countries

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper on Tuesday welcomed the appointment of David Cameron, a fellow Tory, as Britain's next prime minister-AFP

They have met earlier. On April 03, 2009 Prime Minister Stephen Harper met David Cameron. Canadian Conservative officials also held talks at UK Tory HQ to exchange campaign ideas. The meeting concluded a busy round of international bilaterals for the Tory leader, all on the margins of the G20.
British politicians could learn a thing or two from Harper. At a time when virtually every incumbent government is suffering from the recession, his Tories might increase their numbers. Not bad when you remember that, in 1993, Canada's Conservatives were left with just two MPs. So how did Harper do it?


Well, he stopped fretting about the handful of Liberal-Tory floating voters, and went after the 40 per cent of Canadians who had stopped voting altogether. He shed his party's Establishment image, and embraced an anti-politician, decentralist, tax-cutting agenda. His party duly lost support in the posher parts of Toronto, but more than made it up in suburban and rural Canada - including Quebec. ("There are guys out there who listen to French talk radio and French country music", Harper's chief strategist told me).

The result? Canada is becoming less like Scandinavia, more like the rest of the Anglosphere - though, anticipating the charge of being American patsies, the Tories have adroitly picked a fight with their neighbours over the Northwest Passage. Canada's Conservatives, in short, have made their country freer, richer and safer. It's about time the rest of the world noticed -The First Post

The British and Canadian Press has some fun with suggestion Patrick Muttart of Mercury Public Affairs was involved in the Cameron campaign here and here.

Macleans Who are the important people Stephen Harper's cabinet

The Brand Man: Patrick Muttart
As the story goes, Patrick Muttart was in Australia this fall to observe the campaign of prime minister John Howard, a conservative from whom the Harper brain trust drew many lessons for its own 2006 election run. When Howard lost, after 11 years in office, Muttart found himself surrounded by the vanquished. "Patrick was taken aback by the fact that here were all these people who suddenly lost their jobs and were feeling rather despondent," a Conservative insider says. "And his reaction was that he never wanted to feel that way."

Muttart, a deputy chief of staff responsible for "strategic planning," is essentially charged with just that--ensuring this government never knows defeat. Where others deal with the day-to-day news cycles and controversies, Muttart is responsible for building a sustainable and successful Conservative brand. It's no small responsibility. Muttart is one of three advisers--along with director of communications Sandra Buckler and chief of staff Ian Brodie--whom the Prime Minister is known to call any time of the day or night.

When he arrived in Ottawa, he was hailed as a boy wonder. He is now, seemingly, connected with everything--from the Conservative party website (used, as it is, to endlessly mock Stéphane Dion's poor posture) to the fact the stage on Parliament Hill for Canada Day was blue. "One of the things that analyses of the past have shown to Team Harper is that the Liberals appropriated key symbols and brands--they would argue the flag, they would argue the Canada watermark," the Tory insider explains. "The more of a brand imprint you can make, the more significant the impact can be. And this is what Patrick is there to do."

As Tom Flanagan explains in Harper's Team, the University of Calgary professor's account of the last Conservative campaign, Muttart is well-suited to the job. "We had never had someone like Patrick on the campaign team--a high-level strategist with an ability to think in visual terms and dramatize policy," Flanagan writes. "[He] has an eye for colour schemes, photo ops, sound bites, advertising and all the other things that bring political communications to life." Muttart is said, for instance, to have influenced the government's mini-budget, determining which voters the government needed to reach and how specific tax cuts might best be sold.
He is also, by all accounts, a voracious student of politics. For the 2006 election, he drew on the campaigns of Richard Nixon in 1968, Margaret Thatcher in 1979, Newt Gingrich in 1994 and the aforementioned Howard in 1996. But he doesn't just study the winners. After the Conservatives lost in 2004, it was Muttart who co-authored what's been described as a "brutal" memo to party leadership, including Harper, that helped shape the successful run in 2006. "Patrick deserves credit for many things, but one of the things I think he deserves credit for that he doesn't often get is understanding why people have lost and addressing, constructively, mistakes that have been made," says the Conservative. "That's rare in political people. People like to look past mistakes."

So, who is laughing now?