Labour MPs who are hoping to trigger a leadership election might be advised to find a way of shorting Lloyds TSB shares, as it appears that shareholders in the Black Horse bank have more power over Gordon Brown at the moment than his parliamentary party.

The short-term volatility of Lloyds shares is a good summary of the political situation - in which it is hard to see much farther than a fortnight, rather than towards the next election. Which is hardly surprising, but it is a pity, because anybody who can think ahead to the next election ought to appreciate that there are longer-term media trends that should - if used properly - change the face of politics next time round.

It is worth remembering that YouTube did not exist during the last election (it was launched in December of 2005), that social networking was not in anybody's consciousness and the broadband penetration that makes internet video possible has roughly doubled from 30 per cent to 60 per cent.

Taken together, it makes possible the use of a direct, powerful communications technique - video - in a way that the relatively few party political broadcasts do not allow. It enables the emergence of the American model of paid-for television advertising, albeit online.

One veteran campaign strategist talks about the prospects for “pre-buttal” - whereby political parties get their retaliation in first. If, say, the Conservatives know that Gordon Brown is going to make a speech on the economy at noon - they can release, two hours earlier, a video clip that, perhaps, reprises the banking crisis of the past year.

An image of a queue outside Northern Rock, or of Lehman Brothers staff suddenly losing their jobs against a backdrop of “no more boom and bust” is likely to be more powerful in the public imagination than a worthy speech about how Britain is well equipped to deal with tough global conditions.

The notion of unrestricted political video advertising may sound disturbing to those who recall the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth campaign that punctured John Kerry's war hero image in the 2004 US presidential race.

However, changes in technology are hard to resist - and there is no good free speech argument to restrict political advertising online, particularly in the week in which Google had to concede that religious anti-abortion groups should be allowed to place adverts against the keyword “abortion”.

British politics has long been more presidential than is admitted but this dynamic suggests that more Americanisation looms.

— Dame Marjorie Scardino, Pearson's Texan chief executive, once observed that “the rich are always rich”, which was how she explained several years of continuous advertising growth at the How to Spend It supplement of the Financial Times.

Nothing much has changed, if the performance of Wallpaper, the luxury design monthly, is anything to go by. Wallpaper may be read by only 113,000, but they are obviously the right 113,000, as print advertising is up by 14 per cent so far this year, and, if anything, performance is improving. October, just out, is 428 pages - a record issue.

Digital advertising is up by 63 per cent, too. Luxury advertisers tend to hold budgets fairly steady year on year, because it takes the loss of many millions to dent a real fortune.

But Wallpaper's advertising base goes beyond the Pradas and the Guccis - the luxury market - to the premium brands, such as Mercedes-Benz and Nokia's top-end phones. As City jobs disappear, premium brands will be hit. Only a few are rich enough not to notice the loss of a six-figure salary.

Don't expect the boom in demand for luxury and premium advertising to disappear. However, as the quite rich start feeling, well, not quite so rich, the parts of the media that have had an easy ride so far will probably feel something of a pinch, too. Next year is going to be lot harder than 2008 for the media business, and this year hasn't exactly been a blast.

— YouTube, a Google subsidiary, was rumbled by The Times this week for failing to take down videos glorifying gang violence as it promised it would. YouTube operates a “notice and takedown” policy, arguing that it cannot employ enough people to monitor the 13 hours of content that it says are uploaded every minute.

Yet the policy has its limits. After all, if those watching are entertained by a video, however tasteless, why would they complain? It's like asking drunks to decide licensing laws.

Google is hugely profitable. It can afford to employ a large team of monitors, and YouTube staff should watch every video that crosses a certain viewing threshold. Otherwise politicians will create a regulator to do it for them.

dan.sabbagh@thetimes.co.uk

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