THE failure of The Independent Group for Change — aka Change UK — shows that a whole way of “doing politics” doesn’t do the business anymore.

The theory was that politics involved selling a product to a passive electorate. The product, the party’s “retail offer,” should be selected from a narrow range of “sensible” positions, as designed and decided on by expert gatekeepers: corporate funded think tanks come up with the ideas.

National media pundits and editors decide which policies and parties are the “favourites.” Multi-millionaires fund the parties, which use the money to pay expensive consultants to package them. At some point party members might be brought in as cheerleaders and to do a bit of voluntary work and generally do as they are told.

Change UK had plenty of support from the pundits and press. A party founded by New Labour holdouts like Chuka Umunna and supposedly “soft” Tories like Anna Soubry got a lot of media love. The latest figures on party funding from the Electoral Commission show they had the multi-millionaire donors and the PR consultants.

But they have been a complete failure. Their breakaway, in part running away from Corbynism, failed to get any interest in the country — whereas Corbynism itself has attracted both big grassroots interest and increased Labour’s vote share.

The obvious lesson — a radical politics from the left can work where conventionally packaged centrism stumbles — will be happily ignored by the pundits until reality tries to teach it to them again.

Change UK’s European election campaign was a disaster for the party. It was so bad that Chuka Umunna fled his own party soon after. Their 1 per cent result effectively killed the new party at birth. The result is also bad news for Johnny Hornby’s ad agency, The&Partnership (pronounced “the and partnership”).

The latest Electoral Commission release shows The&Partnership were Change UK’s biggest supporter, giving £130,000 worth of free comms and advertising work. Hornby’s gift represented nearly half of all Change UK’s income.

Hornby worked on political advertising for Labour in the Blair years, and is a friend of Peter Mandelson. Hornby told newspaper City AM that “any centrist-minded, pro-business, pro-European should be as actively and passionately supportive of Change UK and The Independent Group as we are.”

However, his passionate support wasn’t very helpful: Hornby’s firm designed Change UK’s much maligned “big black stripes” logo. Hornby told Little Black Book, an advertising magazine, that the logo “deliberately avoids the conventions of British party branding.” Unfortunately, this and his other work for Change UK helped the party avoid the other convention of British parties: winning votes.

The&Partnership say they “create big, bold and bionic work that blends world-class creativity with smart data, progressive technology and artificial intelligence.” It looks like that kind of techno-jargon and waffle, which was once seen as so vital in technocratic politics, is no substitute for policies that address people’s real need for social change.

The&Partnership gave Change UK a “New Labour” blandness. But in a Tory-ish touch, Change UK also managed to get their own rule-breaking payments from a Russian banker. They received £4,100 in donations from  Dmitry Leus, but had to return the money  because he was an “impermissible donor.”

Leus grew up in Turkmenistan, becoming a director of various Moscow-based banks in the 2000s. Leus then moved to Britain, where he runs his own investment firm, Imperium Investments. Change UK had to return his donations because Leus is not actually registered to vote in Britain.

Change UK were not breaking any moulds with their other funders either, relying on £50,000 from multi-millionaire hedge fund boss Ewan Kirk, founder of Cantab Capital Partners, and £50,000 from private equity businessman David Symondson, managing director of Cobden Advisors (Jersey) ltd, which invests in real estate and hotels — using some offshore methods along the way.

The death of Change UK should see the death of the billionaire-funded-consultant-designed-media-friendly politics of New Labour or Cameron’s Tories. But the continued existence of billionaires, consultants and a pliant media means we will see more attempts, and more failures, of this formula.