Style's battle for supremacy over substance has been one of the decade's distinguishing features. It started as a tried and tested exercise - repackaging an old product with novel nomenclature.

Estate agents had been at it for decades, until they found their rules changed. Their gloss could be so shiny and slippery that even the touchingly naive knew "compact and bijou" meant "poky", and that "the discerning purchaser may add their own style of decor" meant "fantastically hideous wallpaper needs covering, pronto".

Throughout the 90s, however, this double-speak has been used to probe fresher, more convoluted - some would say more twisted - dimensions, "recreating" the institutions of UK society.

Products scheduled for the re-wrapping, re-parcelling and re-selling turntable included not just your standard Marathon/Snickers fare, but somewhat more complex concepts such as Great Britain/Cool Britannia. After New Man and New Lad came New Labour - just one of the old concepts to be given a glitter dusting and laid out on the shelves for hungry consumers.

Spin cycle

Americans, of course, did it first. Spin is their word - and the grand master of media medics was James Carville, a.k.a. Clinton's pit bull, the Ragin' Cajun.

Spinning hits the big screen

The former US marine started work for Clinton communications in 1991, at the age of 40. His philosophy was simple - strike the opposition before it gets to you. Or if the enemy manages to land the first punch, go for the jugular and savage to death.

He was portrayed as "a master at flipping an interviewer's question, making himself the victim and firing at his critics, working himself into a paroxysm of outrage".

Poster art

In the UK, it was the Conservative Party which won and retained power by harnessing advertising, initially with the classic "Labour isn't working" poster in the late 1970s.

Out went the red flag, in came the rose

But the initiative was seized by Labour by the time of the 1987 general election. With a polished and professional image, the party also started to master the dark art of spinning.

And, at least as far as the British were concerned, there was just one high priest of the mysterious magic, Peter Mandelson.

Hugely controversial inside and outside the Labour Party, Peter Mandelson's influence helped to change the very nature of politics.

Now the frontline became leaks to newspapers, contact between journalists and press officers, and objecting phone calls to recalcitrant or non-compliant reporters.

All sorts of unusual terms became common.

• Focus groups - small meetings of punters, whose reaction to policies is used to judge how they should be launched
• Rapid response - quashing opposition claims by blitzing media outlets the moment they have been made
• Excalibur - a computer system used first in the UK by Labour to build a database of news stories, policy documents and opposition speeches, making rapid response possible
• Prebuttal - where a damaging revelation is scotched before it has even been made
• Downspinning - where public expectations of an announcement are falsely lowered, so that when it finally comes it seems better than expected

Dr Alan Dobson, reader in political theory at the University of Wales, puts the rise of spin down to the media's emphasis on personalities and a presidential style of politics.

For an art dedicated to getting the best possible coverage, it ironically got a very bad press. In his book Labour Camp, the one-time advisor to the Millennium Dome, designer Stephen Bayley, quoted George Orwell on political language. "Political language. . .is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."

Bayley - "organised lying"

Bayley added his own spin to Orwell's: "But what is spin? It has its place in the language and techniques of paid-for communications - which is to say, in the history of organised lying. It is part of the poetics of disinformation."

Responding to the suspicions, Mr Mandelson told the Trade Union Congress in 1997 that he was renouncing his former ways. "No more spinning," he said.

Whether that was any more than a spin itself, however, was open to question.

Here to stay?

So what is the future for spinning? Like an arms race, it is difficult to see any party in the future wanting to fight an election without an accomplished band of spinmeisters, trying to out-prebut each other.

But in a few years we may come to remember Christmas 1998 as the time when spinning reached its zenith. It was then that Mr Mandelson resigned after being unable to spin his way out of the row about his £375,000 home loan from fellow minister Geoffrey Robinson.

Although the newspaper which revealed the story, The Guardian, refused to reveal who had been behind its leak, other papers pointed the finger at Charlie Whelan, Chancellor Gordon Brown's spin doctor.

Mr Whelan denied involvement, but nevertheless also quit, bringing to an end months of spin and counter-spin from differing parts of the government which were not always in complete agreement.

Dr Dobson said he hoped spinning's days were numbered. "I think there will be a reaction against it. I think an issue will arrive that a lot of people will feel strongly about, and they will want a full discussion rather than having packaged anecdotes delivered to them."

Whether it is here to stay or not, someone somewhere even now is probably considering giving the whole profession a new look for the new millennium.

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