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.