Welcome to Boracic Park

That’s right – just now, while we’re still deciding whether to embrace poverty or kill ourselves, we’ve nothing better to do than write headlines with rhyming slang in them (boracic lint = skint, ie penniless).

And while our MPs are industriously fixing the income tax system so its worse excesses kick in about a quark above their salary, the rest of us are trudging round the recession theme park with our heads down looking for small change.However, since I wasn’t born yesterday, or even the day before, I can advise you about how recessions go:

Phase one – Denial

· Wall-to-wall media drivel from soi-disant experts about how to survive a recession and save your job

· Swingeing job cuts in the media

· Applause

· Young people saying life isn’t fair

· Old people saying they’ve seen it all before

· Miserable bastards saying this is the worst thing that ever happened in the history of the world

· Politicians, central bankers, treasury officials etc denying any prospect of a downturn

Phase two – Downturn

· Politicians, central bankers, treasury officials etc saying they’ve been warning about a downturn for years

· Companies going bust

· People having their homes repossessed by banks now partially owned by the people they’re kicking out

· More media drivel, but now with a harder edge, eg: how to live rough / grow turnips / make Christmas presents from gravel / darn socks / go bankrupt / emigrate / beg / shoplift / join the Foreign Legion / become an MP

· Gangs of middle class folk roaming the streets looking for rich people, politicians or bankers to lynch

· Global rope shortage

Phase three – Amnesia

· Sudden realisation that the recession has been over for two or three years but you couldn’t be arsed to go to work

· Credit boom

· Property boom

· What recession?

It’s all about timing isn’t it? By the time anyone’s spotted the problem we’re half way through it, and the only people who ever foresee a recession are those irritating swine who never predict anything else, and are thus as useful as stopped clocks – which are absolutely accurate twice a day. It’s just that you don’t know when.

Luckily I've had the foresight to get my hindsight in early, and I'm already working on the boom after next.

Welcome to Bear World

You thought that Bear Stearns and bear markets would be enough ursines to be getting on with, but no – welcome back to the Russian Bear, grinding its tanks across the Caucasus and scaring the shit out of everyone.

It’s like a blast of fresh air, straight from Siberia. The Russians have finally worked out that they don’t really like McDonald's, Levi’s, free elections, independent media, private enterprise or balsamic vinegar. They’ve given it 17 years, but enough’s enough, and they’re right – we know what we expect from our Russians, and it isn’t effete western rubbish like this.

Like it or not our view of the Russians is still defined by the Cold War – we want them inscrutable and brooding, scrunching around in their snow wearing boots, fur hats and greatcoats. We want them silent, sullen and morose, patrolling their borders and gulags, intercepting radio traffic, bugging hotel rooms, springing tender-traps, rounding up spies, and generally murdering people.

And it’s reassuring to note that they’ve lost little of their style. Liquidating a dissident in London is one of the set moves in this game so, rather than simply shoot Alexander Litvinenko two years ago, the poor man ended up dying on live TV poisoned by polonium-210. Nine out of 10 for artistic merit. And additional bonus points for having the prime suspect elected to the Russian parliament.

These guys are getting back into world class form, but what of the UK? Sadly, our response to the troubles in Georgia has conformed to the tenets of British Lite Culture. It’s true that strafing the Kremlin would probably be going too far, but wallowing in high dudgeon and squeaking with righteous pique isn’t going anywhere. Our Foreign Secretary is rushing around being pompous and building coalitions, and I fully expect ministers to start criticising the Russian military manoeuvres on the basis of their carbon footprint.

Somewhere deep in the Lubyanka a thick-set man with a crew-cut and plastic shoes turns to a henchman: “What has happened to the British? Where are their gunboats, their devious diplomats, their moles? Have they forgotten how to gloat, to infiltrate, to retaliate? Have they no wrath, no shame?”

As it happens, shamefully, we don’t. But by and large we’ve chosen to live in the present, despite the fundamentalist wings of both major political parties and the Anglican Church. Retro-politics is for folks who can’t hack it in the 21st century, but the Russians should remember who won last time. However, will they work this out before things get worse?

The answer to this involves woods and of course bears.

It's a numbers game

In a cellar at dawn, I have severed the jugular vein of sacred bulls against a black rock. If your job application letter contains this line you are either mad or from Borges’s fictional Babylon, where the lottery company runs the state – or perhaps does not exist.

While in the UK Lotto is all about money, the Babylon Lottery goes deeper – the results of a draw may give you wealth or status, but could also decide your exile or execution. Every draw leads to several others, and each of these leads to more, so the lottery becomes infinite and impossible to grasp – any event in society might or might not be the result of an untraceable series of draws. In this regard it is exactly like the workings of the European Union.

However, the communication problem facing the UK lottery is that the only winners the PR team get to work on are those without the commonsense to opt for anonymity. And there’s only so far you can go with your glee over the good fortune of a rapist or armed robber.

We’re never going to find out about the sensible winners. Even if we know them personally they’re going to put their new Bentley Brooklands coupé down to an astute investment or the death of a long-lost relative in the hedge-fund sector. I know I did.

But winning ticket-holders are only one side of the equation – on the other are the Good Causes, which get on average 20,000 lottery grants every year. Of course no-one can remember any of these, so the answer is obviously to change the rules and hypothecate.

You want to save a Leonardo for the nation? Give Jodrell Bank a makeover? Re-take the Bayeux Tapestry? Buy a seat for the Prime Minister on a Mars probe? Pitch it to the National Lottery Distribution Fund. They select the best (or weirdest) and publish a list of one a month for the next year. A Good Causes jackpot rolls over for three weeks and on the fourth the money goes to the project.

This would give the PR people something to get their teeth into. The selection controversies alone would be grist to the communication mill, but at least the wheel would be turning as supporters got behind their project.

So the message is clear: get special-interest lottery targets out into the open on a national scale and start fighting over them.

Unless you want to find yourself in a cellar at dawn with a knife and a sacred bull.

A rummage in the Ex Files

The UK is awash with memoirs from political has-beens: the ex prime minister’s whining wife; his giggling ex fundraiser-in-chief; and Bigfoot, his ex deputy. The only people who will read these are people who are either listed in the index or paid to (ie journalists and lawyers).

Each author has obeyed the first golden rule of memoir writing, which is to cash in while:

· people you are likely to savage (ie Gordon Brown) are still in the news

· publishers (and the public) can remember who you are

· newspapers are still interested in paying for serialisation rights

Large sums of money can be involved, so, if you fancy writing some memoirs yourself, why not use my handy template to save you time? For example, your chapters need to divide up along these lines:

· Early life – how you were so totally disadvantaged it’s surprising you survived at all, growing up in a slum with dysfunctional parents (or in a nice suburban house with a loving and supportive family – your ghost-writer will turn this into a nightmare for you)

· My struggle (it’s best not to use the German for this) – how you overcame everything, and dedicated yourself to the cause of saving humanity

· It wasn’t me, guv – blame lots of other people, but don’t bother naming them, for all the mistakes you made so publicly

· I told them at the time they were wrong – it doesn’t matter if this is untrue, you just have to get it on paper before your victims write their memoirs

· How the media lied about me – get your serialisation rights sorted, then lay into everyone else

· My secret illness – it doesn’t have to be bulimia; pseudo-psychological claptrap works well, but ensure your illness has symptoms which explain your crass behaviour. A famous British jockey, at his trial, relied on an illness whose only symptom was an inability to pay income tax

· My Rock – it doesn’t have to be your butler; it can be the wife who stood by you despite your serial adultery, or perhaps some religion or other you rightly kept quiet about at the time

· Why I hated the people I worked with – you need this for the media interest, but remember that their lawyers will be watching

· Why I couldn’t be honest with you at the time – copy something from Scott McClellan’s What Happened.

Whether you’re an ex politician or an ex CEO currently languishing in jail for fraud, this lot should see you through your book deal. But remember that when the Monster Raving Loony Party finally forms a government your book will take on a new life in the criminal justice system as people are sentenced to read it. To keep your street cred intact you'll want to come somewhere between community service and public flogging.

Come on baby, tick my box

If you live in the UK, and even if you are an opium addict, you’ll have worked out that reality doesn’t matter any more. What matters is “information”. Politicians are happy with this because, while they’re not very good at reality, they’re demons with “information”.

In days of yore, our leaders oppressed us rather more honestly, with swords, spears, stocks, thumbscrews, dungeons, gallows, tithes, Latin and Hell – but that was when we worked for them. Since the Provisions of Oxford in 1258, however, they’ve been increasingly working for us. But that’s just the information; the reality is different.

Politicians, civil servants and policy wonks now inhabit a meta-world, intent on managing not reality itself, but the information about it. A recent example concerns pre-school “education”, which in our country involves children from the age of 24 months (that’s right) to five years.

You, opium addict or not, might think that this would be all about preparing our children for life in the real world – developing an enquiring mind, a sense of proportion, a capacity for fun and basic manners, for instance – but you would be wrong.

The latest wheeze, a national and compulsory curriculum called the Early Years Foundation Stage, in fact sets 500 milestones involving 69 separate “skills” and compels the adults in charge to gather information about the process.

While some of the skills they’re after are beyond belief, that’s hardly surprising, coming from these wraiths of the meta-world, but it’s not the issue here.

The issue is that once again it’s about information, not reality. The nation’s tiny tots are to be condemned to ceaseless monitoring by people with stopwatches and clipboards, endlessly ticking boxes. When all the boxes are ticked, our children are ready for life, no matter what they’re like.

Set aside for a moment the infinite arrogance of our wraith-wonks who must seriously believe that they, and only they, can define a human being, and that they can do it with information like this. Consider the information itself – what’s it for?

It’s for them, and has no use in the real world. They will collate it, read it, check it, analyse it, write it up, summarise it, abstract from it, comment on it, tweak it, spin it, convert it into pie-charts, burn it onto CD and leave it in a pub, put it on PowerPoint, brief ministers on it, write papers about it, email it by mistake to the Burmese government, upload it to YouTube, and leak it to the Daily Mail.

Companies and their PR advisers have traditionally looked with envy on the power of politicians, but they know they’re different – by and large they gather their information from the real world (what we actually buy, what we hate about things) and exploit it ruthlessly. They know that if we stop adding their product to our cart they’re dead.

Politicians and their hench-people should think about carts more. Specifically about those we know as tumbrels.

Who's your father, referee?

Internal communication is all the rage and some, although not enough, very smart people work in the field. They struggle to get people singing from the same hymn sheet and embedding silly corporate mission statements in their work. Done well, however, this is powerful voodoo.

Football (ie soccer) clubs should take heed. Unlike in normal business, where you don’t expect 75,000 fans cheering you on as you wrestle with next year’s budget, football clubs like to play before big crowds of their own supporters. Why? Because they figure their fans give them uplift. Home advantage is not to do with the slope or viscosity of the pitch, the light, or the idiosyncratic wind - it’s about the crowd.

The crowd sings its particular anthems (there’s not a huge repertoire and many are shared among all fans), they boo the opposition and the officials and they cheer their own team – unless they’re playing badly in which case they’ll boo them as well. Booing is what crowds do best. Racial insults are outlawed, but otherwise, football crowds are rightly praised for their irreverent sense of humour.

This is all very well, but a smart team would understand that this could be taken further.

Imagine, as you lead your visiting team onto the field where the home crowd have been roped in to my scheme, that you are greeted by a crowd chanting the name of each of your players followed by a searing indictment of their ability and probity.

Each player’s weak points will have been researched, chants passed around on the club intranet, and rehearsed during the hour before the match.

How good is a visiting player going to feel if, every time he gets the ball, 50,000 people in unison refer to his recent adultery, warts, operation to enlarge his penis, unwise property investments, and so on?

Your own team’s goals are celebrated with a rendition of the Hallelujah Chorus, while an opposition score gets the kind of low hissing which so disoriented Eve in the Garden of Eden.

A decent crowd, with a few weeks’ practice ought to be able to add two goals to their side every match until the opposition fans catch on. As the project slips into gear it will be interesting to find out, among other things, if all crowds currently sing in the same key. If they do, then why? And if they don’t, then, well, why?

When Manchester United and Chelsea learn of this development, there will be excellent business for the internal communication arm of Campaignteam but bad news for sanity. So it’s a definite go-er.

Nine tips for people writing "ten tips" articles

Apart from having people set fire to your house or force you to watch talent shows on TV, nothing is more irritating than articles offering you tips about how to do things.

These grim pieces, of which there are millions, masquerade as a service but are entirely focused on the superior knowledge of the writer. They are part of the stock in trade of the media relations business at its low-rent end, and too often appear in free magazines. They should normally be torn from the publication, shredded and offered to your hamsters or rare-breed ducks as part of their en suite bathroom paraphernalia.

However, if you insist on proceeding with your tips, here are mine:

1. Work out if you’ve actually got ten tips. Ten is the most popular number by far – presumably thanks to God, whose commandments managed to convey an entire way of life. My research shows that the lowest number of tips people are prepared to offer is two (for Creating Academic Documents). While you can get 27 tips for Wrapping, Storing, and Thawing All the Foods you Freeze, the real inflation is in the corporate world of course – witness 44 Tips for Using Bullets and Numbering, no fewer than 46 Tips for Flip-chart Users and, ludicrously, 57 Tips for Delivering Dynamic Presentations. I gave up at this point and had some whisky. My second tip is therefore:

2. Have some whisky

3. If you feel you haven’t really got as many tips as you think your audience would like, then simply say the same thing in different words a few times – like most people, once they get above half a dozen

4. Treat your audience as if they had been born yesterday

5. Adopt a patronising tone (this is essentially the same as point four, but – you see what I pulled off there? – an extra tip with no work at all)

6. Accept that no-one will learn anything from your tips and that they will see them for what they are – an excuse to get your name into print

7. Don’t give any really useful tips – your readers aren’t expecting them and won’t be able to distinguish them from the ballast

8. Be sanctimonious at all times, particularly about research. Don’t bother doing any research yourself

9. Include your contact details and a photo of you looking sober.

Giving tips is an easy, rigour-lite approach to communication – you can abandon structure and argument in favour of a list, so, when you run out of things to say, just count them up and put the number in the title. Like I did.

Older, Wiser and Crazier

When I was a child, old people seemed like aliens. With their white hair, colossal bosoms and war wounds they would have a lavatory in the backyard and a tin bath in front of the coal fire.

They made their own clothes, skinned rabbits, grew vegetables, saved up pieces of string and ate all food put before them.

They seemed to have had a hard time of things (the war wounds were a give-away) but they didn’t whine about it and indeed seemed pleased that life was simpler for us. The general consensus was that, while they were a bit out of touch with the new technology (eg telephones) and evolving social mores of the later 20th century, they had survived a different, more brutal, world and therefore knew a thing or two.

However, while the onset of British Lite Culture (prop. T Blair) has made it impossible to criticise children any more, it’s de rigeur, for politicians at least, to patronise older people, and their PR advisers egg them on.

For example, our Foreign Office, which must have sorted everything else in the world out while I wasn’t looking, has spent our money surveying what people over the age of 55 get up on their holidays. Now the results are in, they’re not happy:

• More than half eat and drink more while on holiday than at home (surely the point of most holidays)
• Sometimes this makes them drown or get thrown in jail (hey ho)
• 20% have the effrontery to engage in activities they wouldn’t consider at home. Bungee jumping is cited, but one of the main ones is probably voluntary euthanasia, which is illegal here but available in more enlightened places like Switzerland. The rules about assisted dying are made, of course, by people who aren’t old yet and thus have no idea what they’re talking about. Funnily enough old people seem to have a firm grasp of the issues.

The ridiculous Foreign Office Minister Meg Munn (age 48 and a Methodist, a sect not known for its bungee jumping) says that the Foreign Office is “all for over-55s having fun on holiday”. This is generous of them, although whether we enjoy our holidays or not is none of her department’s damn business.

She has much more to say, of course, but she will not be keeping a scrapbook of the media coverage, and she has hopefully fired her PR people (as if).

The reason for this goofy media play was that the Foreign Office gets irritated when their people on the ground have to spring old people from distant jails, but that’s part of what we pay them for.

In any sane society the PR wonks, before coming up with their fatuous communication strategies, would first have wondered why so many older people would have as their role model a truly great man who died not so long ago aged only 67 – Hunter S Thompson. I’ll tell you why when you’re older.

Bare Sterns

Every so often our bankers are caught with their trousers down and their naked backsides on grisly public display. We are tempted to seize the opportunity to give them a good kicking, but hell – they know where we live (until they repossess our home). What a bummer.

In the past we’ve seen our banks brought low by dodgy loans to South American governments, institutionalised money laundering, rogue traders and most recently sub-prime mortgages.

The sleight of hand which has taken this latest chunk of risk and spread it like mycelium throughout the world’s financial system is impressive, but right now all banks assume that every other bank is in the same mess as they are, so – impasse. No-one’s lending to anyone and as far as liquidity is concerned they’ve gone from snake oil to embalming fluid in a matter of weeks.

In good times (ie between banking meltdowns) our financial services companies treat punters with contempt and you only have to watch commercial TV for an evening to see this. Advertising for financial products in the UK starts from the premise that the product range is sufficiently complicated to rule out the possibility of just telling us about them.

So, adopting and adapting David Ogilvy’s insight that “when you've got nothing to say, sing it”, they hit us with 30-second commercials featuring crooning bank tellers, cartoon newlyweds or half-baked comedy sketches.

They must see our chain of reasoning as something like “Hey, these people can really sing – let’s give them all our money to look after.”

My own bank, some years ago, closed my branch down during a multi-zillion pound TV campaign focusing entirely on how they weren‘t closing any branches down. Oh how we laughed.

I kept my account with them of course since chutzpah of this quality only shows up infrequently.

However, we don’t need banks to make us laugh or gnash our teeth – we’ve already got politicians for that. From our banks we prefer clarity, although we’re never going to get it.

And yet, despite it all, complex financial instruments and products are here to stay. Lots of smart and rapacious people depend on this and, although they screw up badly now and again, the industry would go nowhere if we didn’t let them test the envelope.

So, as we consider just how far up shit creek these people have hauled the rest of us we should resist the temptation to kick ass, but we’ll certainly remember that, when we use the term “merchant banker”, it has a secondary meaning.

As rhyming slang.

Kosovo - an early to-do list

So, hello Kosovo. It must be nice to be a new country with everything to play for. There’s obviously plenty to do – there’s a new currency to design, tax collectors and tourism ministers to recruit, an entry for the Eurovision Song Contest to pen, a national drink to, well, drink.

On top of all that you need a national anthem – not your usual dirge, but something more likely to scare the shit out of anyone hearing it. In fact something like the hakka, performed by the New Zealand Rugby Union team before each match. This seems to say “We are mighty. You are feeble and have the gonads of mice. We are going to kill you.”

It’s important to get all the cultural sensitivities right and I think that strikes the right note.

Of course it’s a relatively civilised business setting up your country these days. In colonial times we never used to worry about other people's cultural sensitivity. Or their religions, laws, land rights, customs, women, dignity, reserves of spices/gold/slaves/opiates/diamonds/uranium etc.

Our civil servants have sat round many a mahogany table with our allies, carving up continents more or less at random. They've got out protractors, rulers, dividers and all those other geometry instruments that no-one has seen since 1970.

They've drawn nice neat lines round colossal swathes of territory and said OK let's call it Rhodesia. No matter that the new borders slice straight through ancient tribal homelands, bisect your royal palace at the billiard room, give you a piece of lake measuring four feet by 1,500 miles, put the source of your main water supply in the hands of your deadliest enemies and place your bauxite reserves in the Spanish enclave next door.

It’s tough that we couldn't find anywhere for the Palestinians, Kurds, Tamils, Karen, Welsh, Basques, etc but look, we've DRAWN it now.

These fellows played their cartography to win. If you were so rude as to disagree with their arbitrary geometry, then we'd simply pile in a couple of hundred crack troops and have you swinging from your palace balcony in no time.

These days we can't get away with such whimsical behaviour as you have probably noticed. By and large people can do what they like inside their own borders. Our governments concentrate instead on telling us what we can do in our own homes - individually we're easier to subdue than United Nations delegations, hedge fund billionaires and the Taleban.