Mad men take over the coalition

Abstract

The popularity of the US television series Mad Men seems to have gone to the heads of senior figures in the British establishment, particularly those responsible for public health policy. Based in an advertising agency in Manhattan's Madison Avenue in the 1960s, Matthew Wiener's storylines reveal the deployment of psychological theories and techniques to sell products, such as Lucky Strike cigarettes, in ways that were first exposed in Vance Packard's famous The Hidden Persuaders .1 We Brits have long been suckers for American cultural fashions and intellectual gurus. For the former Labour government, the key figure was Martin Seligman, whose notions of …