A scout badge in public relations

The scouts are 100 years old this year, some of them possibly older and, while I'm a scout fan, I never joined - the closest I got as a boy was to spy on the girl guides at their rituals on the off-chance of some unintentional erotica.

However, it's rather unsettling to know that scouts can get a badge in public relations.

Founding Chief Scout Baden-Powell of course had already fought in India, Afghanistan and South Africa, led the heroic hold-out against the siege of Mafeking and served as inspector-general of the South African Police before he ever got round to working on woggles and campfires.

So, the subtleties of spin-doctoring would surely have seemed effete to a man whose normal approach to communication problems was to lead a cavalry charge into the heart of the opposition, slashing people left and right with a sabre. This highly-focused technique has slipped out of favour since the old boy's day, along with much else.

His original concept for scouting was about life in rough country - he got the idea from Mafeking, where he used teams of boys to run messages through enemy lines. Lighting fires, tracking wild animals, living in camps, digging latrines - these are the sorts of activity he had in mind.

And he backed it all with a stern behavioural code covering everything from walking style (chin out, back straight, arms swinging, heart beating stoutly for England) to Beastliness or Self-Abuse, which he covers in the Continence section of his magnificent book Scouting for Boys.

We apparently get these urges from Dirty Stories, Trashy Books and Lewd Pictures, so nothing much has changed there - but also from Indigestion, Rich Food and Constipation. It's a hazardous life being a lad.

Fortunately there are simple remedies: Arm Exercises (sic), Boxing and Bathing At Once In Cold Water. Now, when I bathe in cold water it's because I've fallen into a river in my relentless pursuit of trout where the current's too strong, the rocks are too slippery, the branch I'm hanging onto breaks off or I've had too much beer.

In the past when this has happened I've tended to get in a bad mood, but now I rejoice that I've staved off the Secret Vice a while longer - and of course avoided having to do any boxing in the short term.

The PR badge requirements are entirely sane however, and you can't get Oak Leaves with it, but I'm not sure we want scouts who can do PR - we want scouts who can spot it, decode it and get back to the campfire, the latrines and the arm exercises.

PR for the Emperor's new weapons

Bearing in mind the hoo-ha over Iraq's non-existent weapons of mass destruction I'm surprised that no-one has asked our government to prove we actually have any ourselves.

Particularly since we're currently arguing over a long-term plan to replace our (alleged) Trident nuclear missile system. And when I say "we" I include Mikhail Gorbachev, who at least has seen plenty. This is Show & Tell without the Show, but then the way the world spins its fighting capabilities has moved on, except in North Korea where the military parade still trumps (or, in fact, is) reality TV.

With conventional weapons, our defence bosses have never seen the point of being armed to the teeth with battle-cruisers, strike bombers, heavy artillery, assault rifles etc and not having a go with then.

But with the nuclear arsenal we have to take things on trust. Indeed in the west we don't even bother testing our nuclear weapons any more - we take the view that they work fine thanks, want to try us out?

For years our nuclear missiles prowled the world on Polaris submarines which we decommissioned in the 1990s without ever using them. (We'd have known if we had, since by now there would only be pockets of us left, mutating our way through a nuclear winter. We have the Royal Navy's lack of curiosity to thank for world peace, such as it is).

Warfare happens when spin breaks down, so frankly, some of our PR people could try a little harder. For instance, around the time we abandoned Polaris, our Royal Navy unveiled their all-new warship, which used Klingon cloaking technology to render it entirely invisible.

As I recall, they decided to hold a photo opportunity (see what I mean?) and we were all up for this - an invisible ship is not the kind of thing you don't see every day, after all. But in fact it's only invisible on radar, dummy - we could see the thing perfectly clearly on TV. I don't think orders flooded in.

If you're going to do a photo opportunity, go large. They should have taken the assembled journalists and arms dealers to a vast expanse of entirely empty sea and said "Right, there you are - 400 battleships. How many shall we put you down for?"

Stealth technology, which is simply the reverse of packaging, is a must-have on the international weaponry front these days, like WMD. With no proof of their existence here in the UK, they could be the ultimate in invisible earnings, but they're going to need better PR than they get.

More date rape we didn't want

Over the years the Western calendar has been raped by the public relations industry. Where we used to have Quarter Days, Lady Days, Christmas Week and Lent we are now forced to confront National Insect Week, National Potato Day, Compost Awareness Week, National Moth Night and Be Nice to Nettles Week.

Fortunately we have several months to prepare for this year's World Car Free Day. We know that our leaders have sat around their conference tables and considered their record on transport:

• Right, how's our strategy going? (What strategy?)
• How much have we invested in infrastructure (Small change)
• What happened to the buses and railways? (Sold them off)
• Where is everybody? (At the out-of-town shopping mall)
• What was that crunching noise under the front wheels? (A cyclist)
• What's the next obvious step? (Resort to vaudeville).

So, they've bought the PR presentation, imagining great photo opportunities featuring businesspeople striding happily to work, traffic wardens asleep in empty parking bays, folk-dancing at deserted crossroads, and so on.

They've picked a day at random and will spend our money telling us what fun it will be to leave at home the only viable means we have have of getting around our desolate social landscape. For sheer bloody cheek this takes a lot of beating, and on the day in question, without thinking about it, the nation has in the past responded as one, with heavier than normal traffic reported by motoring organisations throughout the land.

Like spurious surveys, awareness days are part of the stock in trade of the PR industry, and are normally ignored as a matter of principle. However, they can have their uses if you are the quick-witted sort, since they give you a set of incontrovertible excuses for your erratic and provocative behaviour. When caught in the act you only need to say "I do apologise, I thought it was Taunt a Tourist Day".

This doesn't work for foreigners though. As customs officials prise you out from under a Channel Tunnel train at Waterloo Station it's pointless saying "I'm sorry, I could have sworn it was Illegal Immigration Week."

Have a nice Day.

Click to see who's ahead of you in line to the throne

It is 10 years since the British Royal Family's web site went live at www.royal.gov.uk as a response to endless photos of Fergie's knickers in the red-top press, but its success lulled the Palace PR people into a false sense of security.

• Click to see photos of Fergie's knickers

Suddenly there was a New Labour government, and Her Majesty began to sustain important losses: her mother, who I thought was engineered entirely from intricate Victorian machinery and thus immortal, Princess Diana, and of course the Royal Yacht Britannia. She also began to lose people's deference.

• Click for helpful curtseying diagrams

However, the Royal Family has been our last defence against the politicians we arbitrarily elect from time to time ever since King John was taken behind the bicycle sheds at Runnymede. Since Magna Carta our Royals have always had to look over their shoulders - and for some of them the last thing they saw was from this perspective. The last thing they saw was an axe.

• Click to see an axe

So today's deal is that the politicians get the taxes while the Royals get the palaces, jewels, salmon fishing, grouse shooting, deerstalking and rights over various other flora and fauna.

• Click for recipes featuring sturgeon, swan and corgi

In this arrangement the Royal Family, by and large (ie excluding Prince Charles), would prefer to be left to get on with its own arcane agenda involving all the above plus castles, ceremonies, postage stamp collecting, garden parties, racehorses etc.

• Click if you've got any of the royal racing pigeons in your back yard. Or freezer

And most of us are content to accede to this - our politicians too, which is why both sides are usually so nice to each other in public. If we saw them falling out we'd have to take sides, and that would mean all-out civil war in which we'd happily adopt cool signature hairstyles and cut each other to pieces (again).

• Click to upload your photo and see your head on a spike

The royal web site has evolved over the decade though, and is helping to keep the peace around here. There are some good things about it - it's the only one in the world for which you should stand to attention, and it's surely one of the very few where you can click to pit your sanity against the sound of bagpipes.

God Save the Queen 2.0.