Save the pound

In the doomed 2001 election campaign by the Conservatives in which they made a net gain of a solitary seat, William Hague pandered to the Maastricht rebels to had captured the party from One Nation Tories (epitomised by Hague's successor being Iain Duncan Smith).  His rallying cry was 'Save the Pound', essentially turning the Tories into a single-issue party.  But at least UKIP were not a threat.  Labour MP Stephen Pound even turned it to his advantage, adopting the phrase for his (successful) re-election run - although as he was later humiliated over missing weapons of mass destruction in Iraq (being such an ardent advocate of their existence), this arguably makes 'Save the Pound' the most toxic phrase in British parliamentary history.
Yet we have such phrases as 'sound as pound' and 'quids in' as common-or-garden accoutrements to our language.  That made the Tories' attempt to tap into a popular consciousness as risible as Hague wearing a baseball cap at the Notting Hill Carnival.  Some folksy things work, some don't.  The fact that for many years the pound coin has been the subject of mass counterfeiting has surely not helped.
£45m worth of pound coins are fake out of a total circulation of £1.5bn.  A one in 30 problem may not seem vast though I think some parts of the country are unevenly affected.  In the Medway area, I feel sure that one in three pounds coins are suspect.  The Royal Mint has been messing about with the weights of coins for years, making the entry of the dodgy coins into the money supply all the easier.  You hold a pound coin in your hand and the weight feels too light, the gold sheen unrealistic - criminal professionalism has gone beyond malleable metal that leaves easily identified dents.  When I get pound coins I try to pass them on to another retailer as soon as I can.
The Bank of England must be of the opinion that this lack of confidence in pound coins is widespread.  Hence the introduction of a new twelve-sided, two-tone pound coin, the disruption to vending machines and the like being seen as worth it clearly - parking operators have long expressed the concerns of motorists when 'pound coins' are rejected by the parking meters.  The dominance of the car in British life reaffirmed.
It will be like the threepenny coin (the way the pound constantly falls in relative value will be worth the same in the not too distant future as well) though whether it acquires the idiomatic colloquialism of 'thrupenny bit' (similar to how forecastle is abbreviated to fo'c'sle) remains to be seen.  The Queen will be on one side of the coin as usual.  A competition will be launched for the design of the other side, though why it can't be constantly revised like the two-pound coin, I don't know.  The new pound will be the most secure coinage in the world.  If it inspires even the same confidence as I have in the two-pound coin, it will be very successful.