GORDON BROWN was at the centre of new claims about undeclared donations after it emerged that Labour’s advertising agency was paid a “token amount” for campaign work on last autumn’s aborted election.

Saatchi & Saatchi, which produced the slogan “Not flash, just Gordon”, is paid a monthly retainer of about £8,000, a rate one leading advertising executive said was “ridiculously low”.

The law on party funding states that services offered to political parties at a discount rate should be registered as “noncash donations”.

The Labour party has failed to declare the Saatchi deal to the Electoral Commission.

The Conservatives last night called on Brown to reveal the full details of the advertising contract.

Saatchi, which used to advise the Tories and came up with the slogan “Labour isn’t working”, was hired by Brown last September.

The agency was asked to come up with campaign ideas for a possible autumn ballot until the prime minister abandoned the plan when opinion polls revealed he might well lose.

When first contacted last week Eleanor Conroy, a spokesman for Saatchi, admitted the agency had offered Labour a special rate.

“It is heavily discounted because we are so keen to work on it and so passionate about it,” she said. “They pay for the costs. We give them a massive discount.

“It is not a charity but there’s stuff that you feel passionate enough about to want to work on. You are not going to charge the same as you would charge Toyota.”

However, she called back later and gave a different account of the agency’s deal with Labour.

“It is not a discount,” she said. “They just get really good value for money. They pay a fee and they pay third-party costs.”

She refused to go into details saying: “These things are very difficult to quantify.”

The chief executive of an advertising company with experience of political campaigns described the Saatchi retainer as “ridiculously low”, calling it a “token amount at best”.

However, a Labour spokesman insisted there was no need to declare the Saatchi deal. He said: “This is an entirely normal and fully commercial arrangement. Contractual commercial arrangements are not donations.”

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