Cameron panics as Labour's Miliband contracts Buhari's US-based campaign adviser

David Axelrod, pictured with Barack Obama during the 2008 campaign, said Miliband had impressed by taking on ‘some powerful interests’. Photograph: Jason Reed/Reuters

The British Labour Party have engaged Barack Obama's most influential campaign adviser, during two presidential victories to help its 2015 election campaign. David Axelrod, who recently advised Muhammadu Buhari's campaign team,  has been given the title of senior strategic adviser and told the Guardian that Labour's political and economic analysis was similar to the central themes deployed in Obama's successful re-election campaign. According to the Guardian the conservatives are now panic-stricken.

Having recently demonstrated his prowess, by selling hardly electable Muhammadu Buhari to 'Nigerians', it wasn't hard for Axelrod to sell his capabilities to the struggling Labour campaign. According to a series of emails obtained by the Washington Free Beacon and interviews with sources on the ground, a political consulting firm AKPD founded by Axelrod was found to have been far more involved in backing controversial Nigerian presidential candidate Gen. Muhammadu Buhari than previously disclosed. Axelrod’s firm, the Chicago-based AKPD, admitted to doing work on behalf of Buhari’s All Progressives Congress (APC) party in the past, but claimed to have ceased its ties in March 2014 after the Islamist terror group Boko Haram kidnapped hundreds of Nigerian schoolgirls.

However, emails sent between senior APC party members and advisers show that contrary to the firm’s claims, AKPD has quietly continued to perform political work on Buhari’s behalf as he fights to unseat current President Goodluck Jonathan.

Axelrod's arrival on the British scene will pit him against the Australian Lynton Crosby, the Conservative campaign consultant, who is one the toughest campaign operators. But he will not be as hands-on as his rival: he will first visit the UK in May, and Labour's overall campaign structure, the subject of recent leaks and rivalries, remains unchanged. It is also, more intriguingly, as it pits him against a former Obama colleague, Jim Messina, who has been hired by David Cameron. Axelrod was reluctant to discuss Messina, except to promise he had the capacity to surprise.

Muhammadu Buhari

According to the Guardian the political guru said that he had signed up "because I have had some long conversations with Ed Miliband over the course of the past year and it was less about politics, and more about this issue of how in the 21st century you create healthy economies in which opportunity is broadly available, and people can stay ahead of the cost of living".

The deal was finalised last week by Douglas Alexander, the Labour election co-ordinator, and involved what is being described as a six-figure sum to pay for the services of Axelrod and the firm, AKPD, until the general election in May next year.

Axelrod was integral not just to Obama's two presidential victories in 2008 and 2012, but also to Obama's election as a senator in 2004. He has been described as a lobe of the Obama brain.