I was on the Continent earlier this week briefing staff on my company’s (excellent) progress over the past year. At one point a photo of David Cameron popped up on screen. I told them that this good looking young(ish) guy would in all likelihood be prime minister of Great Britain within the year. Barely a murmur. Then I told them he would be the first UK PM, if not the first European PM, with a professional PR background. That caught their attention and appreciative nods. (Apparently a recent French PM had a marketing agency background. And of course the man running the UK at the moment, my old boss Lord Mandelson, was a top PR guy once and the best mentor I could wish for). A sort of coming of age for PR they thought.

We should not be surprised. PR is on the ascendancy for many reasons just as politics is in a descendancy. It used to be that lawyers made it to the top in politics – Tony Blair was a lawyer but combined it with great communication skills outside the HoC – because politics was largely about jousting across the Dispatch Box.

Blair, Mandelson and now Cameron know it is about winning the argument in the country, largely through the media, that matters today, with the public increasingly turned off by hot air in Parliament.

PR is about listening as well as talking. It is about connecting and telling powerful stories, not smart alec debating and yaa boo sucks.

So no surprise to this PR guy that our profession – as opposed to political spin which is largely redundant and nasty b*****ks (if one can say that in a family blog – what a lot of media humbug over Dave’s mild cussing on radio yesterday; have you ever been in a non-swearing newsroom???) – is now represented at the highest levels in this country.

That’s why Mandelson was right yesterday to encourage Presidential -style TV debates in the next election, and No10 backroom boys were wrong to downplay it and insist that the weekly PM’s Questions are debate enough. Get real guys. No one outside the Westminster bubble watches or much cares any more.