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Mystic Met is serial Strategy Boutique john

Police, councils rebrand for total community solutions

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The Met Office's addiction to rebranding has been revealed: it has changed its slogan five times in three years. You'd be hard pressed to find much evidence of this on its website, though.

But the Mystic Met wasn't the most dependent Boutique-botherer. Wiltshire Police changed their historic motto of Primus et Optimus ("First and Best") while adopting the motto "Keeping Wiltshire safe", dropping that for "Delivering safe and satisfied communities" before a few more tweaks gave us "Delivering safe, satisfied and confident communities".

It makes all the difference, you know.

The rebranding, and some of the costs attached, of over 150 public authorities are listed in a newspaper survey. It reveals the work of an army of marketing consultants and expensive wordsmiths.

David Miliband, for example, ordered the Foreign Office to change its mission statement from "Work for the UK's interests in a safe, just and prosperous world" to the more Blairish "Better World, Better Britain".

Well worth it, I think we can all agree, particularly considering how vital this is to the strategic vision implementation plan thingy of the FCO - as this graphic, culled from the FCO's own recruitment material, helpfully illustrates:

So now you know what hell looks like.

Our thoughts go out to the Telegraph staff involved in compiling this survey, a job as repellent and dispiriting as any warzone assignment. ®

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