The restructure will see The Messina Group, founded in Washington, DC, in 2013, become Fortius Global. Greenbrier, the strategic communications and public affairs firm acquired by The Messina Group in 2017, will be fully integrated into Fortius. The group has operated in 32 countries across six continents, working with Fortune 500 companies, founders and investors, as well as presidents and prime ministers.

As part of the changes, Fortius will formally spin out its political campaigns business into a new, wholly owned entity, MCM². Ty Matsdorf, partner at MCM², said: “Our political work has always been distinct from our corporate advisory business, and with its own name and leadership, we are in a stronger position to expand and grow.”

Fortius, whose name derives from the Latin word for “stronger”, said it operates as a single, integrated advisory firm built around five core practice areas: Strategic Advisory; Policy, Regulatory & Geopolitical; Mergers & Acquisitions; Campaigns & Coalitions; and Communications. The group also comprises legal media firm Signal Interactive Media and media buying company Amplify Media Strategy. The business has been operating in London for some time and is set to open its first permanent office imminently.

“Fortius fights for the ideas that move the world forward”

Messina, who will serve as CEO of Fortius, said: “Fortius fights for the ideas that move the world forward. We built this firm to carry forward the innovation and the culture from the 2012 Obama re-election campaign, and now under Fortius, our team can help clients tackle more complex challenges across more disciplines and geographies.

“For more than a decade, the Messina name carried our mission, but our success has always been driven by the extraordinary partners and people who bring that mission to life every day. Fortius reflects the firm we’ve become, the global ambitions we share, and the collective strength of the team building our future.”

There was a time when Jim Messina was described in the media as “the most important man in Washington you’ve never heard of”. But such anonymity is no more. Today, thanks to turning around the flagging Obama campaign of 2012 and pulling off a similar miracle for Cameron in 2015, Messina is right up there in the Olympian clouds of the DC Beltway election campaign manager hall of fame.

“The most important man in Washington you’ve never heard of”

He’s the first US campaign manager to turn his data-driven “playbook” – focused on aggressive digital messaging and a relentlessly professional “ground game” – into a successful global corporate strategy business. On leaving the White House, he founded The Messina Group (TMG), which now has over 300 international clients and offices in DC, London, LA, San Francisco and Denver.

One of his very first calls after deciding to launch his new consultancy back in 2013 was to David Cameron. He had first met Cameron in 2009 during Obama’s first state visit to Britain during a bilateral meeting.

Despite Cameron being an Eton educated Conservative and Messina a die-hard Democrat (“from the wrong side of the tracks,” as he says), they just clicked. “David had yet to win in 2009. He was in an opposition meeting with Obama so we met and talked for a while. And I was super impressed with Cameron. Really smart. And I was like, oh, that’s interesting.”

Then Cameron’s team called Reggie Love, Obama’s assistant at the White House, and said they wanted to meet with Messina. So in early 2013, Cameron’s team flew over to DC, among them Lynton Crosby, the Australian strategist who had masterminded Boris Johnson’s winning mayoral campaign, and Andrew Feldman, Cameron’s old Etonian tennis partner and former chairman of the Conservative party. The Cameron-Messina courtship began to get serious.

“And then my wife and I flew over and Cameron cooked dinner at Number 10 which was funny as I didn’t realise Downing Street isn’t like the White House. David actually had to cook dinner. He was making me pasta. And he said, ‘Jim, I got you beer’, and he handed me a Budweiser which I thought was funny because nobody in America drinks it! And then we spent a long time talking and I really appreciated his vision of what he was doing for the Tories in terms of modernising them – and the stand he took on same-sex marriage, all those things”.

What became clear was that Cameron’s inner circle – including George Osborne – wanted to hire him to apply the US campaigning methods of the extensively tried-and-tested Messina playbook. This goes back to fourth grade when he wrote a paper saying that when he grew up he wanted to be the president’s campaign manager. “I always was going to be in politics,” he says. “I went to school and got dual degrees in politics and journalism.”

However, America is different from the UK, he adds, in that there’s “way less emphasis on swaying swing voters. In the UK, there are between 20 and 35 per cent undecided voters, and you can vote for two or three major parties. But in the US electorate, there’s only eight to 10 per cent of swing voters who might vote for either and that’s it. And those people think about politics for four minutes a week.”

It was this insight that helped Obama win in 2012, and it was these insights along with spending 2014 building the Conservative Party’s hopelessly inadequate data modelling systems that led to Messina shaking up the 2015 Conservative election machine

” ou hire an American political consultancy because we have a billion-dollar system and we’ve tried everything”

‘‘You don’t hire an American political consultant like me because I’m so much smarter than everyone else. Because Lynton Crosby is just as smart as I am. You hire an American political consultancy because we have a billion-dollar system and we’ve tried everything and we have gone through everything. So a lot of the things we had done in the Obama win, the Tories had just never done before because they didn’t have the money, or it just wasn’t the way you did it in UK politics. It was also a partnership because you had a campaign manager in Lynton who wanted to do some new stuff and didn’t feel territorial’.’

Yet Messina doesn’t see much difference between his political campaigns and working on corporate strategy for Fortune 500 companies. One of his earliest clients after leaving the 2012 Obama campaign was Uber. “I loved that,” he says. “It felt like a campaign too. These tech companies really did have mini campaigns and we had to figure out how to tell the story of a new technology that was built for regulations that were written years before that technology. I help companies all around the world try to tell that story to regulators and governments.”