When Silvio Berlusconi went to the polls in 2001, he summed up his agenda in what he called his “Contract with the Italian People”. In fact, it was drawn up for him by Frank Luntz, a Republican political consultant from Washington DC who happened to have framed the “Contract with America” for Newt Gingrich in 1994.

When Francisco Labastida ran for the presidency in Mexico in 2000, he chose as the rallying cry: “It’s the right kind of change, stupid.” It was not the best line, but nor was it his own: it was a confection of the two best phrases – “It’s the economy, stupid” and “Change vs. more of the same” – that James Carville, then serving as Labastida’s consultant, devised for Bill Clinton in 1992.

So, Gordon Brown is by no means the first to find himself doing political karaoke, mouthing the words to an American tune. In recent years spin has become a global business. The British Prime Minister is just the latest buyer.

At Labour conference this week, Mr Brown confessed that “sometimes people say I’m too serious” and he pledged “I will not let you down”. If he sounded just like Al Gore, who at the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles in 2000, also admitted that “sometimes people say I’m too serious” and also made the promise that “I will never let you down”, it was no coincidence. Bob Shrum, the American political consultant who advised Al Gore in 2000, helped to write Mr Brown’s speech. The namecheck to John Smeaton, the “ordinary hero” from Glasgow, was classic Shrum. The touching tale of a boy learning to read was a tried and tested device. And, if there were moments that Mr Brown sounded like a different man speaking – take the floods: “Long after the waters have receded, the memory of their quiet strength remains” – it is because it was.

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The outing of Shrummy, as he is affectionately known, is embarrassing for Mr Brown. The Prime Minister has sought to present himself as a politician of substance rather than style. That he has recruited one of America’s best-known political stylists – the Vidal Sassoon of the convention speech – suggests that Mr Brown is as focused on presentation as his predecessor.

To be sure, he should be: Jim Callaghan rejected the encroachment of the marketing industry into politics. In 1979 he said: “I don’t intend to end this campaign packaged like cornflakes. I shall continue to be myself.” He did. And he lost. Mr Brown has hired the best-known political advertising agency in Britain, M&C Saatchi, to help polish his scruffy brand. And not since No Logo, Naomi Klein’s catchy formula for railing against the advertising industry, has antispin been so neatly spun: Saatchi’s tagline for the Prime Minister is “Not flash, just Gordon”.

But this week’s harmless, possibly accidental, little plagiarism in Bournemouth has also lifted the lid on one of the world’s most discreet, but pervasive industries: the US political consulting business.

Mr Shrum is one of a US foreign legion of campaign managers, speechwriters, pollsters, data miners, and get-out-the-vote specialists who have worked the campaign trail from New Hampshire to California and then taken the lessons learnt from the world’s busiest and most expensive democracy to advise aspiring politicians everywhere.

No nation has spent more time and money on either television or the ballot box than America. And as new media and free elections have spread across the planet, the votes business has been subject to the unstoppable logic of globalisation. The world has opened up as a hungry market for US political know-how.

The Americanisation of politics has been haphazard. Joe Napolitan, the former Hubert Humphrey adviser who claims to have coined the term “political consultant”, was the first American to head out onto the foreign campaign trail, not for political motive but for profit. In 1969, he advised Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines (“This was before he turned into a prick,” he once told me); he went on to do Valéry Giscard d’Estaing in France 1974 (“A terrible job. I had to fly from JFK to Charles de Gaulle, first class . . . Go have lunch with the President of France in the Élysée Palace. And I was getting paid for this.”); he worked with Neil Kinnock in 1992 (“We knew it was a hopeless cause.”).

But the men who turned American political consulting into a worldwide industry were two dropouts called David Sawyer and Scott Miller. One had wanted to be a movie director, the other a football star. Instead, they stumbled into the election business, because it paid well, seemed meaningful and was more fun than real work. The Sawyer Miller Group, in its day, helped Cory Aquino to victory in the Philippines and worked on the ouster of General Pinochet in Chile. They did for international political consultancy what Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice did for musicals. They did not invent the art form, but they helped to forge a massive modern industry.

One of Sawyer Miller’s alumni is Lord Malloch-Brown, the Foreign Minister. Another is Mark McKinnon who went on to advise George W. Bush. His home is in Texas, but his work has taken him from Ecuador to Nigeria. “There is a parochial notion that elections are different everywhere. They are not,” he once said. “The things that drive elections are the same in Nebraska as they are in Ghana.”

This trend may not be a danger to democracy, but it does make it more drab. The Starbucks effect is being felt in politics. Political conventions are starting to feel like high street coffee shops, serving up the same formulas: the intellectual equivalent of tall skinny lattes for everyone. This week a new branch opened in Bournemouth.

James Harding’s book Alpha Dogs: the Men Who Sold America’s Politics to the World is published next year

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