Driving into Axminster yesterday, I had this flash of inspiration about David Cameron, and why he is like a cheap bottle of Vodka.

Cheapo Vodka packaging cloaks itself in reassurance with crypto-Russian cyrillic typography, phrases like ‘Original Imperial Filtered’, and brand names suggestive of either the USSR or the Tsars: Moskva, Nikolas, Iskra, Romanoff, Ivanoff, Vladivar, and even Pavlova. But then in the small print on the back of the bottle is the phrase ‘Distilled under licence in Warrington using a similar recipe to Estonian Babushka’.

You see, Dave would like to convince us that he’s an Old Estonian, when really he’s just an Old Etonian.

Our Prime Minister is ersatz. He is the crushed acorn where the ground coffee bean should be. He would have us believe that he is Born to Rule, whereas really he dispenses Corn to Fool.

Throughout the neocon world we inhabit today, Cornball politicians offer profoundly unconvincing smiles, winks, schmaltzy anecdotes (“I was only saying to Michelle and the kids and our dogs and the Priest and Hillary today”) and flakey evidence of normality to try and convince us that they are the genuine article. When in fact, of course, they are the ultimate counterfeit knock-off.

I continued to mull on this theme as a woman barged in front of me at the supermarket, and deposited her trolley at the aisle devoted to small baskets, for example like the one I was carrying. I waited patiently along with many others as this lady dumped 35 items into a surface designed for eight, and then took a phone call as the sheepish till-bloke beeped her items past the beeper thing.

“That’ll be £30.19,” he suggested, as she waved at him to do the packing for her. Eventually, she ended the call, and then wrestled her purse full-on for several minutes before producing what looked like a pocket Encyclopaedia Britannica, but was in fact her loyalty points haul for the year to date.

But this gave me more time to muse, and as the queue behind me snaked off and around two aisles, my mind went back to David Cameron with an added degree of insight. I thought, “Why be a phoney when everyone else is being a phoney?” Surely – I pondered – that’s bad marketing.

This led me in turn to think of friends and acquaintances I know at the moment who are doing well in business by being different. In total, I decided, I knew three – which, in these times, is more than most folks do, I suspect. They’re in very different lines of work, but overall I’d say these professions have one thing in common: they tend to be associated largely with hucksters, snake-oil salesmen, target-setting, devious wording in the contracts, over-promised under-delivery, outrageously high-margin pricing when the timing is right (for them) and very poor after-sales service.

I remembered, quite suddenly, one of those blindingly obvious conclusions one absorbs from time to time in life: honesty really is the best policy. It was so involving for a minute or two, my mind was taken off the irritating person in front of me at the till, who by this time was engaged in a long debate with the assistant about which of her points, tokens and offers were or were not valid.

What all three of these mates tend to do in business is this: they describe exactly what they do, what their philosophy of approach and delivery is, and what it will cost. Their clients in turn then discover over time that the astonishing usp is that they’re telling the truth. They also work out, gradually, that they won’t be charged any more until the service or object they purchased is functioning properly. And finally, it becomes clear over months and then years that there are no hardsell phone calls explaining why they should buy something it had never occurred to them beforehand that they might need.

None of this trio do any advertising or marketing at all, apart from having a website using tags that would attract search engines. All three tell me that 70% of their business comes from recommendation. And all three tell me that they have more than enough work.

As a former research, marketing, and communications strategy bloke, this immediately says to me that there is lots of room in their sector for others to do what they’re doing. But above all, the bottom line here is that they have healthy yet fair margins, genuine learned expertise, and a very low cost of sales. None of them has a ‘growth model’. Their growth is more than enough as it is, and they’ve no desire to become huge, if that means they lose the culture that’s been so successful for them.

At last, the lady ahead of me had flounced off to complain at the service desk. The till guy checked my four items after a slight eye-roll, I paid in cash (this startled him slightly) and as I strolled out of the door towards my car, the pushy and utterly self-absorbed pillock who’d kept us all waiting was busy waving her arms about….all the while having left her trolley slap-bang in the way of everyone leaving the main till row.

There is a connection here. None of my chums would do business with Mobile Phone Pushy Token Memememeee Woman if they could help it: their view in two out of three cases is that life’s too short for arseholes, and if people want more than they offer, they’re politely invited to look for it elsewhere. The third person (a woman, as it happens) takes a more pragmatic view: she simply charges them more – which, she argues, is perfectly fair. I’m inclined to agree. We not only get what we pay for in this life, quite often we pay for what we think we ought to get. Assumed entitlement comes expensive – as indeed it should.

Here’s another pointer: in two out of three cases, my friends are dealing in products and services where the big players are multinational. They both gain enormously from the grudging, half-hearted, poorly explained  and expensive service on offer from these Big Boys. Their selling platform is local service, trust and support….but with exactly the same qualifications as the wiseasses trying to cut costs by shoving customers into FAQs, forums, and all the other smokey mirrors they think are so clever.

This leads me to one final conclusion. I suspect that – along with the necessity (and fulfilment) of shining a merciless spotlight into the dark places occupied by Those in Charge today – there may be a natural social process taking place here. It’s possible – as yet I’m not entirely sure – that neocon globalism has within its body corporate the malignant cells of its own early death. (I say ‘early’ rather than premature: it couldn’t come soon enough for me).

Genuine competition is in the end based on far more than price and fashion. Above all, the winners in any market keep things simple, and never, ever forget that the end-user buying their kit, clothes, software or other services is the only focus they need. Intermediaries, shareholders and other mysterious ‘stakeholders’ are a means to an end, and far too often a distraction that at best gets in the way, and at worst can wind up destroying the company.

Thankfully, the accountant-driven lab-rats running globalist multinationals do not grasp this, and never will. When the shareholder numbers aren’t right, they will shout “Headcount!” and fire lots of people. Quite a few of those people then go off to a community somewhere, and start up businesses that exploit the flaws in beanthink. Ironically, it may well be that Big creates Community without meaning to: as the Buddhists say, good must always come from bad.

At a macro level, the deregulation of employment removes the Entitled Useless folk from the workplace – although batty pc tends to then put them back in again. But dog-eat-dog neoconservative economics also create total disloyalty in the workforce, greed in the senior management, emphasis on money rather than quality  – and ultimately, very good employees who get fired….and then go off to serve frustrated consumers. In short, ultimately it delivers suspicion by default.

The small business that both improves the product experience (and suggests competitors to the customer) is then a David to the globalist Goliath.

Of course, that still leaves us with the awkward truth that our Prime Minister is a 37.5% bottle of Kameronoff distilled under licence from Murdoch, Gove, Hunt & Partners. But it also suggests an obvious alternative.

Boris Johnson would have us believe that he is the alternative: in fact, he is nothing more than Hitler to Cameron’s Papen. But somewhere out there (and I doubt if he or she is an elected representative at Westminster) there is the genuine article: a Dalai Lama for our times.