the crack

How would you feel if you were Hitler's brother?

2009-01-13T13:31:00.005Z

You can get a good idea of the problems that Adolf’s half-brother Alois encountered from the story on the front page of the Sunday Dispatch of 14 October 1945, which had been used to wrap some lead figures I just unearthed.

ALOIS DOES NOT LIKE HIS NAME: HITLER – He’s quoted as saying “The name Hitler has sometimes been a source of embarrassment to me”, and his strategy was simple – the previous day he’d applied to change his name. To “Hiller”

The rest of the page is a testament to our lack of progress over the years:

900 GOOD HOUSES TO BE KNOCKED DOWN TO EXTEND LONDON AIRPORT – nearly 65 years later the same story, and the same village, Sipson, are in the news for precisely the same reason, as the Government announces its decision on Heathrow's third runway

PALESTINE ALL QUIET – “There have been no new military disturbances in Palestine during the last 24 hours, British military headquarters announced in Jerusalem last night”. However …

USA AND JEWISH CASE – “President Truman is understood to be considering advocacy of the creation of a Jewish State in Palestine, in place of the Jewish-Arab State envisaged by the British 1939 White Paper policy.” You get a clue to recent events when you read “This already delicate and difficult situation in which the British Government finds itself has not been made less difficult by the intervention of President Truman”. It’s all about us, really

US MAY RECRUIT A-BOMB SPIES – Apparently they were going to “live abroad in positions in which they would learn of any large-scale attempts to find the secret of atom bomb manufacture”. Didn’t they do well?

19th CHILD WAS 14lb – And after all those years of rationing too. The mother, from Grimsby, was just 43 and probably ready for further action

JAVA REBELS DECLARE WAR ON DUTCH – This was the work of Soekarno, a busy man, who’d declared an Independent Republic of Indonesia eight weeks previously. This time he gave advance warning of his tactics, listing his weapons of war: “all kinds of firearms; also poison, poisoned darts and arrows; all means of arson; any kind of wild animals ...”. Today, the airport is named after him

QUISLING APPEAL FAILS – Having already turned down suicide and exile, he faced the firing squad 10 days later. Today, traitors are named after him

MEN BEHIND DOCK STRIKES – This was the banner headline. Guess who they were. Step forward The Revolutionary Communist Party. However, in another part of the forest …

BRITISH ARREST SOVIET TROOPS – Ah, those were the days.

Welcome to Boracic Park

2008-12-03T14:42:00.004Z

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

2008-08-27T16:57:00.002Z

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

2008-06-24T09:56:00.002Z

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

2008-06-09T10:06:00.005Z

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

2008-05-27T13:56:00.003Z

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?

2008-05-16T22:31:00.009Z

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

2008-04-24T13:10:00.004Z

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

2008-04-11T14:15:00.003Z

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

2008-03-18T18:39:00.001Z

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

2008-02-28T18:32:00.002Z

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.

Bali Hype

2007-12-17T12:45:00.000Z

David Shenk, in his perceptive book Data Smog, put it neatly: “One of the most vivid consequences of the information glut is a culture awash in histrionics.” PR people beware, particularly those heading back from Bali amid their vapour-trails of greenhouse gases.

The world’s climate change evangelists have communicated so badly that global warming is now moving from being a problem (about climatology) to a meta-problem (about the politics of climatology). They have succumbed to the In-Crowd Effect.

In-Crowds get on our nerves and take many ugly forms, all united in their preening self-importance and their demand that we admire them as a matter of principle. They include the people who won the 2012 Olympics bid for London, eco-warriors, animal rights campaigners, death cults, creationists, riders of the EU gravy train, New Labour policy wonks, MPs, terrorists and Princess Diana fans.

They have booked their place in heaven with a cause more important than anything else, and this sense of disproportion produces tunnel vision about a photon wide, along with a belief that standard rules of proof don’t apply. Distortion and hysteria are OK as long as they help to Wake Us All Up, and Al Gore’s histrionics have, disgracefully, won him a Nobel Prize for precisely this.

But for the rest of us – while we may accept the reality of climate change but admit we don’t understand its dynamics and potential – we know when we’re the Out-Crowd, and we react to this as only human beings can (ie badly).

As a species, we didn’t get where we are today without taking note of what people do rather than what they say, preach, scream or spend our taxes on. In the UK we observe that while our government tells us we’re all doomed to drown, starve and fry, they’re putting in an extra runway at Heathrow, building thousands of houses on flood plains and commissioning new coal-fired power stations.

We see that instead of switching off the lights in their offices when they go home, they have announced the world’s largest windfarms – onshore (south of Glasgow) and offshore (Kent coast). This reversion to centuries-old and cost-inefficient technology is being wildly hyped as showing their commitment, but to what? To grandstanding, sanctimony and cynicism.

These are not “big decisions”, they are big projects, and we know the difference. A big decision might involve targeting a deep cut in our energy consumption, but where’s the fun in that?

As long as members of the climate change lobby pursue their In-Crowd strategy they will fail to get anything useful done and, casting around for an alternative energy source, we will burn their endless reports.

Welcome to the sustainable bonfire of the vanities.

'Tis the season to go bust

2007-12-06T10:31:00.000Z

It is now considered very un-British not to go bankrupt during the Christmas season. Everything is for sale and everything must be bought, no matter what it is.

To the nation at large however, all this giving of gifts, all this wrapping up, this secrecy, seems rather childish and we have to be whipped into doing it.

Every year retailers claim their business will be in ruins unless we rush to the stores and this year they’ve recommended a cut in bank interest rates to help us on our way to financial doom (they got it too). All media run endless pages of suggestions to save us from our impoverished imaginations.

Despite it all, some people go through their whole lives giving and receiving socks at Christmas, in a kind of minimalist ritual, a barely discernible nod in the direction of Goodwill to All Men. They’ll also take a small glass of sweet sherry and a half-pound box of chocolates but draw the line at a grope under the mistletoe. The word “humbug” creeps into their vocabulary.

However, at least our gift exchange systems are more subtle than the classic Polynesian examples which all social anthropology students have to learn about before going to the pub. While the hierarchical distribution of pieces of a butchered animal survives with the dismemberment of the Christmas turkey, we adopt a broad range of approaches and our gifts can be divided into four major categories:

Useful: Power tools, whisky, fly-tying equipment. We’re not terribly good at understanding what counts as useful to other people, which is where our vast “nearly new” industry (particularly in power tools) comes from. It’s also why we drink so much whisky.

Useless: Power tools, things shaped like fish, actual Gifts – things which have no other purpose than to be given to someone else (ie about 75 per cent of all manufactured objects). These gifts cycle through social networks over time, and it can be comforting to find the same one cropping up every few years. When you pass it on again you sometimes paint it first, brush out the dead flies or take the handles off.

Egocentric: Jars of home made jam for instance or a ghastly photograph of your dog made into a jigsaw puzzle.

Deliberately provocative: Socks, for instance, or aggressive lingerie. A great-uncle of mine once gave his wife a ton of horse manure for her Christmas present. She responded with matching bed-linen, something no man has ever consciously bought.

So, anyway, if everything goes according to plan the only people with any cash by 25 December will be retailers, their advertising agencies and PR firms. The rest of us will have to rely on finding a silver threepenny piece in our Christmas Pudding.

Lessons from prehistory

2007-11-05T16:31:00.000Z

If you're the smug type you'll probably enjoy reading books by people who know less than you. Recently I've been entertained by the 1933 edition of the Wonder Encyclopaedia for Children, written by people who had 74 years less knowledge than us but vastly more international real estate (Great Britain Is The Greatest Teutonic Nation On Earth).

The chapter on the history of mankind, for example, is on shaky ground, having been written before it was discovered that Piltdown Man, the alleged Missing Link fossil found in Sussex in 1908, was a total fraud. There's even a helpful reconstruction of what Piltdown Man looked like. He looked like Gordon Brown, our sub-prime minister.

Nonetheless, there's stuff I didn’t know. For example: Early Man Hid From Wild Beasts Until His Cunning Developed.

This sheds completely new light on human evolution. You can imagine our noble ancestors, hunkered down (behind rocks, according to the pictures), wondering how cunning they’d need to be. From time to time someone would say: Well, are we smart enough yet? And for millennia we must have looked out at the Wild Beasts and thought: Holy shit, have you seen the claws on that thing?

They must have gone through an experimental phase of shoving the smartest folk out into the open where, of course their potential contribution to the gene pool would be nipped in the bud (and everywhere else). After a short period of this everyone would be faking stupidity 24/7 and they’d have realised they were fairly cunning already, so they’ll have started to calibrate: Right, what have got so far then?

Well, we've got kind of oblong stones for scraping things with, flat stones for cutting things with, big stones for bashing things with and sharp, triangular pointed stones on the ends of sticks for, er, what are these for again?

Despite it all we were on our way, and sooner or later: There's a bloke behind that rock over there with a Wheel.

Surely that's enough cunning, they'll have thought, and sprung out.

There's no real indication of what Early Woman was doing all this time. The pictures simply show her dressed as Amy Winehouse and cowering alongside Early Man, in a trend-setting non-division of non-labour.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, we eventually got so cunning that it was November 2007, and yet somehow nothing much had moved on. By and large here in the UK we're simply hiding from the Labour government until our cunning develops.

Let them eat carrots

2007-11-01T20:06:00.000Z

As Alex Levine pointed out, only Irish coffee provides in a single glass all four essential food groups – alcohol, caffeine, sugar and fat. You might have thought that the health food debate could have usefully stopped right there, but no.

According to the World Cancer Research Fund it’s possible to commit suicide by eating bacon sandwiches, something I have done so often that it would have been economically sensible for me to go into pig farming at an early age.

However, no-one apart from the media is listening to these warnings any more. Health fascists and researchers in need of funds tell us what we can’t eat, while the food industry tries to sell us goji berries, which look like rabbit droppings from a bad acid trip.

Not long ago we were told that eating carrots on a daily basis helps to prevent cancer. We saw this coming of course since generations of children here have been forced to eat carrots on the grounds that they help you to see in the dark, and World War 2 fighter pilot heroes were invoked in this propaganda battle.

Those who go on to become fighter pilots of course must wonder from time to time if it was the carrots that got them in.

Since the invention of fire however, we haven’t really had that much use for seeing in the dark around here (except when we’re sea trout fishing or dealing with power cuts) so it would have been nice if our ancestors and government experts could have concentrated on locating some other, more valuable, power. Common sense would have been useful, or second sight, or perhaps the ability to breathe under water.

Even this is a bit unambitious though. In the old days our alchemists spent their time either trying to make gold out of scrap metal or concocting an elixir to confer immortality. Of course they can’t have come anywhere near either of these goals – what was their best result in the transmutation of lead into gold? Lead, obviously. And how many of them are still alive to profit from their elixirs?

At least there’s less scope for serious measurement with the elixir of life, which is why we have ginseng, royal jelly, cod liver oil, broccoli and all the rest of the health food industry. But we only believe in this slop the way we believe in astrology.

So, while sucking on a piece of damp wood first thing in the morning might be good for me, I’ll take the full English breakfast with extra black pudding please. Health food marketers beware – we’re going to die, and there’s nothing you can do to stop us.

We're still burning Catholics

2007-10-22T13:16:00.000Z

Only a few of our national rituals continue to escape the clutches of the PR industry and avoid political correctness. For example, since 1606 we have celebrated the death of Guy Fawkes, a Catholic in a Protestant country, who was discovered beneath the Palace of Westminster shortly before the opening of Parliament on 5 November, surrounded by barrels full of gunpowder. He was arrested, tortured and executed, in that order.

Of course we celebrate the man’s death – not his pragmatism, his enterprise, his derring-do, his chutzpah or his sense of proportion. And how do we do this?

We spend weeks building enormous bonfires, and construct, from old clothes, straw etc, an effigy of Guy Fawkes, known as a guy. As children, we stand on street corners with our guy slumped beside us hustling for money (“penny for the guy”, we bleat at returning commuters).

(Introduced to begging at such a young age we turn into soulless bastards later on, kicking our vagrants, shunning our bag-ladies and refusing to buy The Big Issue. We may still give a penny for the guy though – we were young once.)

We buy loads of fireworks, and bake parkin (a sort of ginger cake), make bonfire toffee (with black treacle) and soup.

On 5 November we put our guy on top of our pile of wood, spray the whole thing with petrol and set it alight, then stand around, consuming our bizarre refreshments. We might go so far as mulled wine, but we will certainly throw potatoes into the holocaust, ostensibly to bake them. Of course they are never seen again (and neither are any scruffy small people who look like guys).

We watch our guys engulfed by the flames. Young children have become emotionally attached to their guys over the weeks of course and the whole business becomes charged with despair as these cuddly effigies, wearing their cast-offs, burn horribly before their eyes.

We let off our fireworks, some of which are unpredictable, since you can get caught out by advances in firework design. In the old days you’d always launch your skyrockets by poking the stick in an empty milk bottle and lighting the blue touch-paper. Nowadays this is likely to result in high-velocity shards of glass taking everyone’s legs off at boot level, while the rocket fizzes round your garden, bouncing off fences, beer mugs, pets, neighbours and so on before exploding in the greenhouse.

We finally get the garden hose out when the flames have caught the fruit trees and almost reached the kitchen window.

The following day it’s cool to ask people how the injuries went at their bonfire, while the media feasts on mutilation horror stories and calls for fireworks to be banned from public sale. And then we forget the whole thing, as we become preoccupied with complaining about Christmas.

Interestingly, although this is a major national event, there are no dedicated greetings cards (except the Get Well Soon designs which become necessary on 6^th November).

So anyway, Merry Bonfire Night.

No laughing matter

2007-10-09T18:40:00.000Z

The season just ended, and trout men have come up out of the river, shaking a summer's worth of twigs, flies and dead bats from our obnoxious headgear. We've trudged back across the fields, our minds elsewhere. We've found our cars, gone to the pub and sneaked back home in the dark to re-acclimatise.

We’ve stacked the rods, hung up the waders, emptied the beer bottles from our bags, filed our catch returns and stared malevolently at our forthcoming calendar.

Eventually, regrettably, our attention has been forced to focus on what you have been making of things while we were otherwise engaged.

You have not shaped up. Your concentration has obviously wandered and our world does not appear to have improved. On the contrary, we've got asymmetric political debate in Burma, another inquest into Princess Diana’s death, the first run on a British bank since the 19^th century and the emergence of the Clinton Cackle as the archetype political laugh.

Politicians don’t have a sense of humour on the whole. Whatever it is in their genes that makes them want to swan about being important and pretending to run things for us, also snips the laughter muscles and by-passes the humour circuitry.

It is their deeds rather than their wit that make us laugh. So, when someone tells you they’re all about substance, not spin, and then hires spin doctors to promote this calumny at every opportunity then you know you’re dealing with a politician – in this case Gordon Brown, ersatz prime minister of the UK.

The advertising campaign designed to make us like the man had a photo of him (dangerous for anyone with a face like a car wreck) and the words “Not Flash. Just Gordon”. At first I thought it was some crazed gin advertisement, and anyway, while I can remember who Flash Gordon is (or will be – he must have been set in the future), I can’t believe he means much to anyone younger than 40. After all, he was all the rage in 1934.

To avoid politicians and retain a sense of disproportion, chalkstream fly fishers must now switch attention to grayling, so it’s out with the box of Red Tags and Treacle Parkins, on with the Barbour jacket and away to the autumn river.

Splitting hairs

2007-09-05T22:21:00.000Z

A 14-year old girl stands accused of murdering her older sister in a dispute about the potential life trajectory of her boyfriend – destined, says the accused, only ever to work in supermarkets.

Because of the age of the defendant, the judge and barristers have decided that during the trial they will – wait for it – remove their wigs. You really couldn’t make it up.

They will claim that their intention is to avoid intimidating the girl, but exposing any modern teenager to the sort of atrocious hairstyles affected by our legal brethren is nothing less than common assault.

And where does this lead? What bloodcurdling attack-toupées do they have in reserve for the trials of serious career psychopaths?

I suppose it’s pretty clear how all this began. Imagine the scene many thousands of years ago:

A What’s that stuff on your head?

B It’s a wig

A (Looks more closely) But it’s just a clump of mammoth hair and lard

B Yes, it’s good isn’t it?

A It’s fantastic, but what’s it for?

B I thought I might get a job as a judge

A Good call

There is other talismanic headgear at large in the legal environment however. There’s the British policeman’s helmet, recognisable across the galaxy as a symbol of, er, British policemen.

Our police forces constantly try to abandon the helmet in favour of the sort of cool flat caps they’ve seen on cop TV shows, but this is a big mistake.

The old helmet makes our bobbies seem so tall, which has to be an advantage when you’re dealing with desperate villains. Your flat cap is going to make you look like a traffic warden and people are going to feel more like giving you a strong poke in the gob after a few beers on a Friday night.

More importantly, the tall helmet works as a symbolic throwback to the days when the bobby on the beat was the acceptable face of neighbourhood policing – law enforcement at its most socially-targeted.

It has been for so long such a potent symbol of authority that knocking one off a policeman’s head is all you really need to do to make your point. Knifing and shooting our coppers have simply been unnecessary.

Take away the helmet though, and in our darker moments we’ll have to find something else to abuse. A strong poke in the gob will be the least of your worries, constable.

This is all about brand identity, and scrapping heritage, whether in legal headgear or Coca-Cola recipes can bring out the worst in us.

Been there, done that, got the spacesuit

2007-08-15T11:28:00.000Z

As it’s the silly season, space is in the news (and of course everywhere else as even a rudimentary knowledge of quantum electrodynamics will tell you). Another US shuttle has a hole in its shields, NASA is gearing up to put a telescope on the dark side of the moon and plans are being drawn up for a one-star orbiting hotel. All this is a bit of yawn for the British.

It's not that we're against space as such – with HG Wells, Arthur C Clarke, Dan Dare, Dr Who and Hawkwind on our side, we’ve always considered space to be, well, ours.

Indeed if we’d been a little quicker off the mark in 1945 we could have had our own German rocket scientists, but at the time our leaders obviously felt that this would be cheating and left our space programme in the hands of the Ministry of Works, where it languished.

So, while our government concentrated on minutiae such as rebuilding our bombed-out cities and dismantling our Empire, other forces were obliged to take on the cosmos. While we haven't bothered with anything as flashy as a moon programme, we've had a space station in orbit for years.

Launched discreetly from a water-meadow on the country estate of the British Interplanetary Society, and protected by Klingon cloaking technology, our space station is positioned in a relaxing orbit which brings it over Buckingham Palace every Wednesday afternoon at tea time.

Unlike the International Space Station, which comes across as a random collection of corrugated iron sheds rag-bolted to a pair of windmills, Her Majesty's Space Station Indomitable is from an original idea by Sir Christopher Wren.

Of course there have had to be compromises along the way, but fans of British colloquial architecture will revel in the detail – the shuttle-bay, for example, is thatched.

Whereas in the ISS the astronauts spend all their time either conducting worthy experiments, huddling in tin boxes during power cuts or welding on additional Meccano, aboard HMSS Indomitable it's more or less what you'd expect from the British.

There's an oak-panelled 'drawing room with plenty of space for the dogs, a billiard room and a library opening onto a terrace overlooking the orangery. The saloon bar is staffed by secondment from Claridge’s and the milkman calls on Mondays.

Crew and guests are forbidden to fire upon the ISS as it clanks round in the slow lane and after a tour of duty they normally have to be brought back to Earth by force. Earlier this year a mission was sent up by the National Space Centre to repaint the logo in a serif typeface.

Of course when Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic takes over the shuttle franchise his PR people will generate rather more media coverage, but having our brilliant achievements forced out into the open is one of our key communication strategies. Don’t even ask about our time machine, our wormhole cruiser or our immortality patches.

Talking bollocks

2007-08-08T11:35:00.001Z

In media training courses, people are too often coached on how to talk bollocks. Decoding spokesperson-speak should be compulsory in all media studies curricula.

So, enjoy this Q&A from the BBC’s Today programme, when Evan Davis was questioning our glistening new Foreign Secretary after his first trip to Afghanistan.

Evan Davis: “People whose only contact with the Afghanistan government, the government we're supporting, is when their men come and mow down their only source of income.”

OK, it’s not a question, but neither is what follows an answer.

David Miliband: “Well that if I may say so is a bit of a caricature of what's happening.

This means ”Yes this is what’s happening but you’ve described it rather vividly”, but gives the impression of meaning “this is not what's happening”.

Actually the attack is often that there's not enough eradication going on rather than that there's too much …

That’s a different attack.

… and I think I have got to be very careful not to do a rah-rah for what's going on in Afghanistan. It's difficult, it's dangerous and I don't do a rah-rah, there's no point in pretending otherwise ...

OK, we promise not to pretend that he’s doing a rah-rah.

… Equally though it's important that from a distance we don't fall in to a fatalism that says these people would prefer to grow poppy, they'd prefer to live under the Taliban it's all lost because I was only there for forty eight hours so it's wrong for me to pretend I'm the world expert after 48 hours …

This much is clear.

… But I did talk to Provincial Council, elected Provincial Council in Helmand Province. They don't want to go back to 2001 when women couldn't go to school …

They also probably don’t want their mountains painted blue, but that too is irrelevant here.

… There were three women counsellors out of the seven that I met and they were absolutely clear that good government is basic for them …

And the other four?

… and it means moving forward from the Taliban not moving backward …

Time-wasting.

… and it's the Taliban who are driving the drug, who are pushing the drugs not the international forces or our forces.”

Well I didn’t really think the UN had moved into the smack trade, but is he saying that without the Taliban Afghan farmers would settle down to coaxing asparagus from the soil?

Feeble-minded thinking expressed in meaningless drivel like Miliband’s is much of the problem. There’s a global shortage of opiates yet our policy in Afghanistan is to destroy the raw material. Legalise it, buy it, ship it to where it’s needed (ie right here where listening to this stuff demands serious painkillers in major quantities).

Your media studies homework for tonight: Do a rah-rah.

Who's Who?

2007-07-23T10:47:00.000Z

If you think you lead a hectic life, you should see mine: “David Watson, 49, was grabbed by members of a Warner Robins police special response tactical team who swept in when he was distracted by a robot deployed inside his home.”

This from the Macon Telegraph in Georgia, US. And it doesn’t stop there –

I’m in trouble all over the place: in Florida for having insufficient permits for my wallaby, in Norwich for murdering Paul Cavanagh, and back in the US for “failure to obey an order or regulation, damage, destruction or wilful disposition of military property and wrongful use of amphetamine”.

My busy life of crime however, is a side-show. I've built a multi-faceted career, as a barrister in Liverpool, executive director of the Massachusetts Bicycle Coalition, head of trade at Pfizer, superintendent at Napoleon Area Schools and head of Hortapharm, an Amsterdam-based company licensed for research and development of cannabis for pharmaceutical use.

In the academic field I’m professor of psychology at the University of Iowa and professor of education at the Institute of Education (in which role I've been knighted). Keen to keep my hand in, however, I’m soliciting essays for a volume that aims to contribute to a consideration of the politics and aesthetics of transnationalism, and collecting dream-recall reports from 193 undergraduate students.

In my limited spare time I play rugby in New South Wales, table tennis in New Zealand and cricket in England.

I try to keep up in the arts too – I’ve translated Simenon’s The Hotel Majestic, penned a book called Fear No Evil, and written software which will produce 200 different versions of an article in 14 seconds. Musically I've gone for broke, with critics describing my work on highland bagpipes as the first major furtherance of Yoshi Wada's concept of psychedelic bagpipe minimalism.

I should never have googled my name, but with our government hell bent on compulsory ID cards, I thought I’d better find out about some of the people I’ll eventually be confused with.

ID cards will switch our relationship with government through 180 degrees – instead of reporting to us, they will force us to report to them, ending a democratising process begun in 1258 with the Provisions of Oxford imposed on Henry III. This issue is only simmering at present (visit www.no2id.net) but it will, I hope, become a major problem for our leaders.

Sadly, I will not be available to man the barricades, since, as it happens, I died recently having been decapitated by a dolphin in Florida. The beast was reported to be making “funny noises” shortly before the attack, presumably as it checked through its address book to make sure it had the right bloke.

Empty Vessels

2007-07-16T12:36:00.000Z

We knew Blair’s government would be for airheads from the moment they decided to proceed with the Millennium Dome. This monument to British Lite Culture was supposed to attract visitors from around the world (apparently a benefit) by, er … well, that was the problem.

We instantly spotted the empty dome as a metaphor for Blair’s Britain, which at the time was just a massive election win with no content. Of both we asked “what are they going to put in it?”

The government began by using the Emperor’s New Clothes strategy – telling us that, whatever it was they put in the dome, it would be utterly fantastic. Then they switched to the Exception Ploy, announcing things which were not going to be in it, and checking our reactions.

Our collective poker face held firm, so they flew to Disneyland on a fact-finding mission, a move which told us 95% of what we needed to know.

From the moment it opened, in a blitzkrieg of overwrought security, it was a disaster, losing eye-watering amounts of taxpayers’ money and thus continuing the government metaphor.

The thing was divided into zones, designed to answer big questions, such as:

WHO ARE WE? This is a good question as it happens, especially in an era of increasing immigration, but one unlikely to be resolved by zones dedicated to Body, Spirit and Learning and based on what our leaders learned during an afternoon with Donald Duck.

WHAT DO WE DO? This was answered by zones which tackled work, rest and play, which is all we ever do here apart from sleep, so there’s not really much point having a display about it – you might just as well look at us in real life, without zones. Obviously you’d have to pay us for the privilege, but that’s what tourism is all about

Another zone, which didn’t get quite so much PR fanfare, was the No Car Zone, which prevented anyone parking within two miles of the place.

The dome has been closed for years until now, when business has taken over. Now it’s the O2 – a venue for pop concerts. Simple. The government and the PR business obsess endlessly about sending signals and delivering messages. But content is the point.

When the first of our millennium domes was built, at Stonehenge, there wasn’t so much debate about what to put in it. Over here a display of grass. By the altar an exhibition of axes. See the sun rise at dawn on the Solstice. Just pop the white robe on and lie down on this slab. Goat rides. Face painting by the main entrance. Woad available. Toilets wherever you like.

We’ve lost a lot.

Guilt-edged marketing

2007-07-09T14:46:00.000Z

Scooter Libby did wrong, got caught and had his punishment cancelled by friends for whom he did a good turn. This kind of sleaze is scarcely new although in marketing terms you need look no further back than 500 years when the Catholic Church sale of indulgences peaked.

At its most bare-faced this wheeze offered remission of temporal punishment for sins committed, in return for cash. However, its main outcome was not consumer cynicism but Protestants.

Nowadays, in the UK at least, we’re a fairly godless bunch and thus two of our major atavistic needs have to be addressed differently.

First, we want answers to the big existential questions – how did the universe begin, where did we come from, where’s the nearest pub etc. In the old days (and in much of the US today it seems) we asked our priests, and they told us stuff which has turned out to be bollocks.

Second, we need something to anchor our ethics: our sense of what’s fair and right; how to decide in moral conflicts; who deserves our understanding and who we ought to hang.

Our priests have had a better track record here but even so we now turn increasingly to agony aunts and lawyers, while politicians (of all people) try to get in on the act.

Of course our need for ethics is wrapped up with our need to feel guilt and then assuage it through atonement. In the 21st century though, instead of worrying about original sin and the Ten Commandments, which are now more likely to be Reality TV formats than moral paranoia triggers, we have poverty, hunger, genocide, animal extinctions, disease and climate change to feast on.

It’s taken the marketing industry a while to catch up but they’re beginning to hit their stride, not only with Live Aid, Live Eight, Live Earth and other such narcissism, but more deeply with cause marketing.

Thus, welcome to Freetrade, Greenpeace, Carbon footprints and Organic food. In the UK hens’ eggs are classified by the amount of suffering the hens are going through to produce them. The less pain the higher the price.

So, at the secular confessional we gladly take away our punishments of tree-planting, environmental taxes, recycling, ethical stocks and free-range eggs. We know we have sinned and we need to feel the lash.

And the PR business continues to take all this further, seeking an edge from altruism everywhere. A recent PR Week article was devoted to “cultural collusion” – in which companies strip out guilt via paying money to the arts. I’d like to think the PR people were being up front about their deceit (“collusion”: secret agreement or understanding for purposes of trickery or fraud – OED), but in fact it just shows how vapid all this can be.

Bring back hell.

One Man's War

2007-07-02T09:21:00.000Z

It is more than 40 years since I personally declared war on the United States of America in a brief note to the ambassador. For added gravitas I wrote it on proper paper with a fountain pen. Obviously I wasn't entirely sure of the rules, and imagined a possible scene in the Grosvenor Square Embassy mail‑room:

A: Uh oh, we've got a declaration of war here

B: Who's it from?

A: Some kid called David Watson

B: Is it in fountain pen?

A: Yes

B: Does he have any weapons of mass destruction?

A: It doesn't say

B: OK, file it under "Won"

I can't remember what prompted me to this dangerous course of action, but for several weeks afterwards I kept an eye open for strike bombers over our house, and travelled to school as if moving through enemy territory – keeping to the shadows, zig‑zagging across open spaces and wearing a false moustache.

I wondered how the official reply might read – eg:

Dear Mr Watson,

Thanks for your note of the 15th inst. declaring war. We accept, on condition that you sign the Geneva Convention.

Yours sincerely,

The US Ambassador

I mean, when countries declare war on you is it essential to write back to make things official? Or is it enough simply to have a flight of stealth bombers attack your TV station?

Anyway, at least such a reply would have given me a way out. I mean, where do you go to sign the Geneva Convention? Geneva? The Post Office?

However, they never wrote back, leaving me in limbo. When you're entirely on your own, war can be fairly time‑consuming and, what with homework, piano lessons and puberty to deal with, I didn't manage to extract as much value from it as I'd have liked.

With the prevailing level of pocket money, finance was obviously my biggest problem. With more resources I could at least have had some of the paraphernalia – an espionage operation, secret passwords, propaganda, medals, etc.

Of course it says something about the Special Relationship between our countries, or perhaps the embassy filing system, that I had no problem getting a US visa 15 years later. However, the fact remains that I may still be technically at war with America, which is a slight worry.

However, while it has been a rather lonely struggle, there have been no casualties and no problems with reconstruction. In addition, I get to write the history of it, so when I’ve nothing better to do …

In the UK we’ve been tempted, rather unfairly, to see Iraq as one man's war also – Tony Blair’s. But he didn’t so much declare war on Saddam’s Iraq as commit to solidarity with Bush’s US. His real one man’s wars were in Kosovo and Sierra Leone, where he came out on top, so I’m glad I didn’t declare war on him.

If he hadn't finished me off by now he'd have handed me over to Gordon Brown last week - a man who's been at war with me, and most other people, for 10 years already. And I think he's winning.

We're going to live forever

2007-06-21T18:56:00.000Z

If you were considering a smoking holiday in the UK you’d better get a move on. From 1 July this egregious behaviour is against the law in all public enclosed spaces here, saving thousands of lives.

And since our government’s default approach is always to treat us as fools, no-smoking notices must now go up everywhere (cathedrals, massage parlours, opium dens) and there are dark rumours of Lung Ranger hit teams ready to swoop on those who disobey.

Since over a quarter of adults in the UK smoke, this new, er, wheeze has caused a fair amount of debate, mainly in pubs over a couple of pints and a pack of Woodbines but even smokers have seen the writing on the wall. They've always believed that you need to show your lungs who’s boss, but hey ho.

While all this is good news for notice-makers and bad news for ashtray manufacturers there are other industries which ought to seize the moment. For instance, the nicotine patch business. I've always enjoyed these since they dramatically upgrade the buzz you can derive from a pack of Capstan Full Strength – and that’s saying something.

But why confine the technology to nicotine?

Save time each morning with our breakfast portfolio – never mind the fridge, the pans and the stove, just slap on a bacon and egg patch while you make the tea. Traditionalists who demand an occasional smoked fish meal first thing can apply a pair of Arbroath Smokies patches – imaginatively shaped like the real thing. With one on either side of the torso this is genuine stereo food, and not to be missed by people like you – people at the cutting edge of human experience, people who will try anything once before filing suit.

The system works for all eating opportunities – our lunchbox specials, for instance, are the ultimate convenience food for people who need to keep going in the middle of the day – bond traders, crane drivers, fighter pilots, marathon runners, chess players, PR people etc.

Individual patches offer you three, four or seven course meals, balanced for nutritional value, and using differential release technology to ensure you get your dishes in the right order. All you need to do is get the coffee.

Obesity solved at a stroke, and there are other advantages – dentists will need to re-train. Every significant human advance must have its casualties, and it’s time dentists took their share.

Is there no end to Cultural Sensitivity?

2007-06-12T11:31:00.000Z

No there isn’t. It’s how we try to understand our fellow nitwits and ensure we hit the right buttons when we communicate with them. More examples, as threatened last time:

TOWN / COUNTRY: Most people here live in towns, and romanticise the country. When they take a trip there however they find no stage coaches rattling through quaint villages, no be-smocked peasants quaffing cider by haystacks and few hens scratching around drowsy farmyards in the sun.

Instead they find billions of chickens confined in tiny cages in giant sheds, a housing concept borrowed from towns and cities.

This town/country split was brought into sharp relief by the fox hunting issue which occupied more parliamentary time than any other in Blair’s government.

It’s largely people in the towns who seem to be against it, while if you live in the country you normally couldn’t care less until a pack of hounds and five dozen horses pursue a fox in through your front door and out through the French windows. Anyway, it’s illegal now, although I doubt if foxes have noticed.

LABOUR / CONSERVATIVE: When confronted, it’s always best to claim you base your voting pattern on local issues, because no-one will know what they are. This enables you to talk through your hat for hours, and gives you time to work out the point of view of the weirdo you so unwisely stood next to when you ordered your beer. It never occurred to you that this would be the reason for the free space at an otherwise crowded bar.

LIVERPOOL / EVERTON: It’s always wise to check if there’s any deadly rivalry going back generations between supporters of competing football clubs in your neighbourhood. This is essential information on Merseyside and in many other places too, especially Glasgow.

Remember that Glasgow Celtic manager Jock Stein, when asked if he thought football really was a matter of life and death, replied “It’s much more important than that”.

TEA / COFFEE: Unless you were counting on staying awake for weeks on end in a prolonged juddering caffeine fit, drink tea here in the UK. On business, however, go for coffee, since good tea is beyond most companies, and no-one will give you a glass of absinthe.

NORTH / SOUTH: Look around. Can you see rolling countryside, sunshine, sleepy country towns, orchards, wealth, Heathrow, traffic chaos, effete cultural behaviour or the French coast? If so, you’re in the south.

Or can you see driving rain, dark satanic mills, coal mines, steel works, factory chimneys, bleak moors, cobbled streets, back-to-back terraced housing, outside toilets, people in flat caps drinking thin beer out of straight glasses, pigeon lofts, whippet racing or black pudding? If so, you’re in the past.

GET IT / DON’T GET IT: People who get cultural sensitivity know that when they communicate they’re addressing something richer than a target audience. Those who don’t are condemned to wonder why their campaign bombed.

Let's do Cultural Sensitivity

2007-05-29T09:21:00.000Z

When an American client asked if I could provide cultural sensitivity advice I saw a rich vein.

While PR people divide up populations into target audiences, modern societies consist of an interlocking network of entrenched camps populated by people of diametrically opposed views, and here in the UK we’ve had plenty of time to dig ourselves in.

The prickly English relationship with the Scots and the Irish dates back to the Iron Age, while Yorkshire and Lancashire are still divided by the Wars of the Roses which finished just before Columbus set sail.

There are many other opposing coteries here that you ought to be aware of if you want to enter pubs with any confidence and in general avoid the kind of social gaffe which could result in a visit to one of our diminishing stock of accident & emergency units. For instance:

UPPER / LOWER CLASS: It’s only in society that scum settles at the bottom. At the top of the greasy pole here are your royals, aristocrats and investment bankers. Everyone else is middle class, whether they like it or not, except the homeless. Wealth is not the point. It’s about breeding.

Foreigners are outside of this system of course, and simply foreign. Their breeding, if any, is irrelevant to us. Their quaint kings and queens are of no interest now we no longer cement our national alliances by inter-marriage between royal families. Instead we now have the Eurovision Song Contest.

PRO / ANTI EUROPE: The credibility of the EU is undermined by the fact that it’s a political construct. Since the real issues are so opaque, this is strictly a meta-division, defined by which division you’re in, not whether or not you agree with its alleged stance, hence the vacuity of the current debate.

PROTESTANT / CATHOLIC: This really only matters in Scotland, Ireland and the afterlife. That’s Celts for you.

OXFORD / CAMBRIDGE: This is mainly important on Boat Race day, when people realise that shouting for one crew over the other is the only way to remain awake during the TV coverage.

You’ll note that some of the more obvious divisions (eg black/white, straight/gay, male/female, lawyer/non-lawyer) are missing here, along with left-hand/right-hand, which is only relevant in cricket – where it’s astonishingly important.

This is because we’ve had plenty of time to get over these and move on. Our divisions are arcane, difficult to spot, and of course they cement society together, because people are members of different combinations of them. It’s what cultural sensitivity is all about, here and everywhere.

This is a rich vein. More when I get back from the fishing trip.

Light my fire

2007-05-21T10:51:00.001Z

New media such as blogs have hardly altered PR practice at all, say 21% of the 200 senior level communicators (including me, naturally) who make up the President’s Panel of The Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR).

Well, the principles may not alter but all new communication systems change the practice – some more than others however.

For example, from my office I can see part of a medieval communication system – Ditchling Beacon, one of the highest points on the South Downs – where they’d light bonfires if they saw, for example, the Spanish Armada impudently sailing up the English Channel.

On the North Downs people would look out for Ditchling Beacon to light up so they could ignite their fire, and so on until the message reached the king. So, depending on where he was, he’d probably have been among the last to know.

But the system was essentially binary – either the thing was on fire or it wasn’t. Hello, Ditchling Beacon’s lit up – what does he mean? Has anyone seen my pig? The Middle Ages are over? It’s cold up here?

They must have agreed beforehand what it would mean – OK, the next time I light up my beacon it means the Spanish Armada’s coming, right?

So there will have been teams of messengers charging up and down, telling everyone what the next bonfire would mean, and meanwhile, out in the Channel, your Spanish sea captains would see the beacon blazing away – Well, they’ve spotted us then (yawn).

Of course I’m probably simplifying things. Give people a communication system and they’ll find ways to exploit it – maybe they had several fires on each beacon. Hey, he’s lit up three fires at Ditchling, so ... (looks it up) ... Tobacco’s Been Discovered.

Or maybe they varied the colour – Ho, a blue flame ... (translates) ... The Bloke on the Beacon After Yours is Sleeping With Your Wife.

Anyway, you can see why this failed to energise the nascent PR business – not enough scope for manipulating the content. What price “The Spanish Armada, sponsored by Toledo Swords SA, is coming”?

Such simple systems have survived into modern times however. During the cold war, we had a four minute warning system here, set up to inform the nation that we were about to be hit by a barrage of ghastly foreign nuclear warheads.

During these 240 seconds we were expected to get our tax affairs straight, return our library books, dig a deep underground shelter and lay in provisions. I wouldn’t have stood a chance of course, but 400 years ago I’d have been among the first to know about the Spanish Armada.

Seeing the big picture

2007-05-14T11:43:00.000Z

Salvador Dali could see the big picture. One of his works is called Fifty Abstract Pictures Which as Seen from Two Yards Change into Three Lenins Masquerading as Chinese and as Seen From Six Yards Appear as the Head of a Royal Bengal Tiger.

From even further away it looks like a coloured blob, like all paintings, but that’s not the point.

At the other end of the scale there is HD Turing’s 1948 essay The Problem of the Olive (we’re talking about flies that trout eat) in which he concludes that the best way to distinguish between three species of Baetis is to examine the colour of their eyes. He inscrutably declares that in B. rhodani “the eyes are madder brown (which has a distinctly red tinge)”.

Here is a picture so small as to be invisible to the naked eye. While he’s got his magnifying glass out comparing eyes the next bloke on the riverbank has tied on a hairy green-looking thing and caught the bloody fish.

In British Lite Culture we take the Turing approach. Thus, last week there was a nasty accident on the anticlockwise carriageway of Europe’s busiest road, the M25 – London’s orbital motorway – in which six people died. The police closed the carriageway for nine hours, bringing chaos to the surrounding area and presumably costing millions of pounds.

Now, I have nothing against the British police, despite having been searched (dogs and guns, the full works) under Section 44 of the Terrorism Act while provocatively dropping my wife off at Gatwick Airport.

But increasingly they’re missing the big picture. After all, what exactly is to be learned from a fingertip search of 500 metres of motorway? When I ask this people say “we need to know what happened”, and at first sight this seems sensible.

However, the job of the Highways Agency and the traffic police is not to pick obsessively over history but to keep traffic flowing. Their efforts on the M25 will end up as free consultancy for the insurance companies but I doubt if anyone else will truly benefit – certainly not the thousands of people whose lives were massively disrupted while skid-marks were measured.

In the PR business, as elsewhere, seeing the big picture helps your career trajectory as well as your client. Those who ask Why are we doing this in 10pt? stay writing press releases, while those who ask Why are we doing this at all? get promoted to account director

Remember that while small picture people re-arrange the deckchairs on the Titanic, the big picture types are getting into lifeboats (and the serious spin doctors are telling everyone we just stopped to take on fresh ice).

Fly-fishing your way to business success

2007-05-07T12:49:00.001Z

The trout season is underway on British rivers, and fly-fishers are exhuming the kind of clothing you normally see on scarecrows, shaking the bottle-tops out of their fishing bags, filling their hip flasks, reviewing their tackle and buying bizarre hats.

Those with jobs know the close relationship between work and play – and not only because one pays for the other.

For example, PR people have put fly-fishing on their “active” corporate hospitality menu to spice up the constant barrage of golf, clay pigeon shooting and lunch. A summer’s day spent stalking trout on a chalkstream half a mile from your guest is not perfect for deal-making, but it’s obviously better than being roped together in a blizzard on the north face of the Matterhorn.

But fly-fishers also believe they learn business lessons without actually having to go to the office. And even if they are wrong, at the very worst they are by now millions of trout ahead. Here’s an initial selection of such wisdom.

Getting into rivers is easier than getting out. If you've waded downstream in a powerful river, the chances are that you won’t be able to wade back up – and in several of the rivers I’ve fallen into you'll also by now be wobbling on the brink of an invisible slippery ledge, with a sheer drop on three sides. Lesson: always have an exit strategy – a fall-back position could involve drowning.

Why have one fishing rod when 40 or 50 would do just as well? Fly-fishers maintain that you need them in different lengths, actions and materials – and buy more rods than they ever use. In business one obvious parallel is financial reporting, where the x-dimensional views of every last penny can obscure the fact that you’re going bust.

Ugly flies can catch beautiful fish. Successful fly-fishers know that the flies they tie are designed to catch fish, not win prizes. In businesses like advertising and PR there’s a temptation to see analogies with the trophy cabinets of football clubs. But in sport, the trophies are the objective. In business we should look at the client’s ROI as well as our own.

Hell and high water are all in a day’s fishing. Although you returned from the river drenched, broke and knackered, you’re going to do it again tomorrow because you love it. Back in the office, if you’re not having fun you’re doing something wrong.

David Shenk, in his perceptive book Data Smog, says: one of the most vivid consequences of the information glut is a culture awash in histrionics.

PR people are not wholly to blame for this but they’re among the prime suspects. Nearly 400 years ago, legendary English angler Izaak Walton said: Study to be quiet.

These four words are worth a business book to themselves but, taking his advice, I’ll shut up now.

Missing media

2007-04-30T08:47:00.000Z

Media fragmentation is a fact of the PR landscape but makes people concentrate on cliques and miss the big picture. Take boys’ magazines – they don’t cover boys. But things weren’t always like this. A letter in the February 1964 edition of the Boy’s Own Paper (BOP) ends Do other readers leave their tortoises out during winter?

Sadly an energetic correspondence on pet hibernation strategy didn’t follow, which probably began the decline of the British tortoise, while the magazine died three years later as less arduous approaches to boyhood, involving beer, girls, rock music and radical politics, took hold.

BOP readers engaged in a constant rampage of bicycling, canoeing, and birds-nesting. In their improvised tents on Ben Nevis, they’d light fires, darn socks, scrutinise Ordnance Survey maps, whittle catapults and blow birds’ eggs.

BOP articles, therefore, were all about doing things: camping with a boat, racing model cars, grayling fishing and (yes) making diesel (You will have to do this in bulk), sending you down to the chemist for anaesthetic ether, nitromethane and amyl nitrate (If you explain what you want it for there should be no trouble in getting it).

Of course this was for model aircraft, not bombs. These were Great British Schoolboys, skinning their own rabbits, building bivouacs and radio sets, trainspotting and digging latrines at the slightest provocation.

This was an age when boys were not only expected to be polite and do well in exams but also to survive in the wild, arrest escaped convicts, expose international conspiracies and thwart rocket spies. Their dogs, meanwhile, would foil burglars and find the missing jewels.

Today the problem page would cover girls, skin complaints and fashion, whereas BOP focuses instead largely on legal matters, reflecting the hands-on approach of its readers: Did you realise that every time you threaten to give someone a good bashing, the chances are you are breaking the law?

The readers’ letters reveal a fellowship of taxonomists. One begins I collect weapons and I find it is a very expensive hobby, while others bring news of collected bones, nutcrackers, golf-balls and teeth. One pleads More Articles on Cycle Maintenance Please.

The fiction is 100 per cent adventure (Spotted Killer, Unseen Enemy), while the advertising has recruitment ads for the armed forces and banks among the tents, fishing tackle, cameras and gear (Save up the Libby’s milk labels and get a 4-inch blade sheath knife).

And while some boys who read BOP are now running our rabbit farms, blue-chip corporates and diesel supplies, others are our major criminals, rock dinosaurs and property tycoons. They helped to make The Dangerous Book for Boys by the Iggulden brothers a recent bestseller in the UK.

Great British Schoolboys are still out there, some of them in their sixties. Just because there isn’t a magazine for them, it doesn’t mean they don’t exist.

Taking the rap

2007-04-23T08:30:00.000Z

Companies can learn a lot from governments, one of whose prime tasks is to take the blame for everything whether it’s their fault or not. While they take the credit for all good things they never admit to failure, in flagrant disregard of perfectly obvious facts. But we shouldn’t mind, because we’re going to blame them anyway.

While this is unfair, it's part of the social contract and based on fairly recent history: when “we” needed more data on the effects of nuclear weapons British armed forces were subjected to some of the quickest suntans in history; to test our chemical arsenal, taxpayers who thought they were volunteering to help find a cure for the common cold got something way beyond the healing power of Vick’s Vapour Rub or even prayer.

It's this kind of skulduggery that prevents us from buying Christmas presents for our leaders, or inviting them to baby-sit.

But until very recently we haven’t expected admissions of guilt or apologies. British Lite Culture is changing this – everyone’s a victim and the witch hunt has moved into the commercial world.

While governments can hide behind the social contract, what prevents companies from taking the rap – and they are blamed for everything from obesity to climate change and poverty – are lawyers.

Unfortunately they take it too far, so when corporate spokespeople confront the microphones and cameras their media training kicks in and they start to sound insincere, like government ministers. Speaking like Daleks from tortuous prepared scripts they haemorrhage brand equity from line one. And this is a shame because, as it happens, apologising comes naturally to the British.

Of course there's a catch: we’re happy to apologise profusely for anything, as long as it either doesn't matter or isn’t our fault. So our government is sorry about the rain, the cricket, slavery, the Irish potato famine, the extinction of Neanderthals and the species implosion at the end of the Ordovician, but not about taxation. And not (yet) about Dresden.

Companies do better when they recognise that when their spokesperson speaks, we see a person. When individuals own up, take the rap and apologise we admire them for it, and trust them more. Which companies don’t want that?

As far as the Neanderthals are concerned, they took the arrival of our Cro-Magnon forebears on the chin, in the neck and probably elsewhere, until one of them looked around and thought bugger it – I'm the last one. They were genuine victims, but with no government to blame they had it coming.

Advice to illegal immigrants

2007-04-15T20:26:00.000Z

Illegal immigration is back in the news here with rumours of a new French refugee camp at Sangatte, so here’s some advice in case you were thinking of participating in this foolish activity as part of your 21^st century lite "portfolio" career.

HOW TO ARRIVE. Don't climb into the wheel-bays of a 747 bound for Heathrow unless you want to arrive dead. Immigrating to the UK without papers when dead is still an offence. Much better to come ashore in your beached sperm-whale costume and then sneak off during a lull in the attempts to save your life.

WHERE TO LIVE. Don't bother with the countryside, which is designed to look nice but is where foreigners who suddenly pop up with no idea how to behave are likely to be dumped in the threshing machine. The best bet is to live close to someone who can forge the mountain of paperwork you're going to need.

HOW TO BEHAVE. Obviously you will never be able to behave properly since you're not British so you can opt for either anonymity or a silly hat. The former route depends on a working knowledge of our language and an ability to talk about absolutely anything from a position of total ignorance, but is difficult to sustain because of all the CCTV cameras – 25% of the world’s supply are trained on us.

The silly hat strategy is better since it marks you out as a maniac or a fly-fisher and people will generally avoid or humour you.

WHAT TO DO. While getting a job sounds like a good idea remember that summer is on its way and you're in time for the cricket season. It would be foolhardy to give up your rare position of being in England with nothing to do and yet not technically unemployed. So spend May through September at major cricket matches. This saves you the trouble of constantly being in touch with developments during the Test Matches. If you are a man you absolutely have to know what's going on. Total strangers will say:

* Did they get any reverse swing before lunch?

* Is Flintoff hungover or what?

* Pietersen was never leg-before

* Why are you wearing that silly hat?

* Are you an illegal immigrant?

It's funny how perceptive we can be.

Perhaps it would be better if you simply joined a multinational PR firm and asked to be seconded here. That way you don’t need a silly hat, and you can sell the sperm whale idea to a client.

The playground of the vanities

2007-04-09T15:10:00.000Z

Since children don’t vote in the UK, they’re at the mercy of government whim and widely vilified as obese, inarticulate, feckless and violent.

This is because in British Lite Culture, spin and targets, rather than substance, are the reality, since it’s easier to manage numbers than people. So children must not be educated – they must hit education targets, and government spin demands that most of them do.

Thus the charms of the quadratic equation, the Petrarchan sonnet, the gerund and Boyle’s Law are, insultingly, considered beyond today’s young people, so it’s goodbye to interesting stuff and hello to media studies, raffia work and PR.

Young people get straight A grades in this rubbish and go to university since the target says that 50% of them must.

Simultaneously, statistics show that children are overweight, although they look OK to me, and this is apparently due to their diet, rather than the almost total lack of facilities for, or incentives to, exercise.

When we were sending kids up chimneys and down coal mines, their rights were zero but, in addressing this, our politicians went too far. Today, children’s rights are these:

To remain silent, sullen, morose

To bring in a note from your mum saying you’re too ill to play rugby

To behave as badly as you like without sanction

To be unconstrained by rules of logic, grammar or spelling

To dress like an oik

To own a dog which lives on a diet consisting exclusively of homework

To eat nothing but gloop.

Perhaps these problems are linked. While people sentimentalise their schooldays, there has never been a Golden Era for school lunch, which remains the only meal for which you would automatically adopt the brace position. In their classic book Down With Skool, Willans and Searle summed it up with a section entitled: “Skool food – or the piece of cod which passeth understanding”.

Proper food is to school meals as Chanel No 5 is to a nerve-gas attack, and our children have had the common decency and will to live beaten out of them by a relentless diet of random meat products, chips and algal swill.

So the obvious solution is a dramatic upgrade. Jamie Oliver’s campaign was right but didn’t go far enough. Schoolchildren fed on devilled langoustines, filet mignon and fine claret will not risk expulsion or failure. They will hang around for a glass of Remy, perhaps a decent cigar and a chat about the Outward Bound syllabus and the Latin Poetry Competition.

Why we got Madonna

2007-04-02T10:03:00.000Z

The 1931 edition of the "Woman's Own Book of the Home" has fallen into my hands, and it shows how far women's focus of attention has shifted over the years - and why. The book is arranged alphabetically:

Apoplexy - treatment of
Bedstead - to clean a brass
Calf's Head - to boil

Flipping through its 400 pages caused several of them to fall out so I searched for a remedy, finding only "Books - to preserve from insects" (white pepper and powdered alum). There is no cross-reference from "Insects - to keep out of books", but instead "Insects on Plants - to destroy" and the catch-all "Bugs - to kill". All in all it's a fairly disappointing publication for insects.

For the quite ordinary citizen however it has, with a few notable exceptions, everything. There's all you need to make your own bread, soap, deodorant, toothpaste and cough medicine, plus how to cobble together a sponge bag from an old hot-water-bottle.

But your food is rudimentary - Oatmeal Gruel, Boiled Cow Heel, Turnip Tops and Toast Water, which is made by leaving a slice of toast in a jug of water overnight (Strain before serving. A nourishing drink). And with no National Health Service, your healthcare is largely down to you. Needless to say it's all-action stuff and not for the squeamish:

Leeches - to apply
Tapeworm - to remove
Anthrax - how to treat
Diarrhoea - an Egyptian cure for (it involves pomegranates)

While you're expected to battle sickness on a broad front, it's a different front. Cancer ought to come between "Camphor - uses of" and "Candied peel - to make" but I finally tracked it down to a very short section on "Tumours". While this is often quite helpful (badly fitting corsets account for a number of cases), the facing page has a piece on cultivating nasturtiums which is twice as long.

So, today's obsessions are largely missing. On sex, there's nothing to guide you from The Wedding Reception to Breast Feeding, and little on image and beauty, since there were more basic things to attend to:

Eyebrows - to make grow
Hair - to prevent its falling out
Knock Knees - to straighten (don't ask)

As well as what now seem to be omissions, there's plenty of advice which must surely be wrong - for example The simplest form of fire extinguisher is the hand grenade and, in the unswerving campaign against insects, A fresh bunch of nettles hung up in the window will prevent the entrance of flies.

Only a few years after this book hit the shops the superwomen who used it to manage their lives and families will have taken World War 2 in their stride. But with all this to get on with - and there's plenty more - it's really no wonder that women eventually decided the hell with it, and started becoming bond traders, PR consultants, astronauts and Madonna.

A scout badge in public relations

2007-03-26T10:10:00.000Z

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

2007-03-19T10:40:00.000Z

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

2007-03-12T08:42:00.000Z

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

2007-03-05T12:38:00.000Z

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.

Oh no, it's the Compulsory Olympics

2007-02-27T17:22:00.000Z

SINGAPORE, JULY 2005: London was sentenced to host the 2012 Olympic Games. A public relations team including HRH the Princess Royal, Sebastian Coe and Tony Blair delivered a pitch of such unctuous piety that only a gang of Nazi child-butchers could have rejected it.

(Back at home we had no interest in it at all until we realised that we were head to head with France, at which point it rightly became a matter of life and death.)

It's just as well we got our gloating in early since within 24 hours of the decision we had the London suicide bombings, and our attention snapped back to the real world.

Our Olympic "team" were now forced to confront the implications of their sanctimonious rhetoric, and with the rose-tinted spectacles off, the vision began to morph. Their Field of the Cloth of Gold, with its countless sports pavilions, flags fluttering to the horizon, seemed more like acres of toxic wasteland, slum clearance and swamp.

From the warm glow of the Star Trek transport system emerged a yard of old railway sidings, a dead bus and a bloke from the local planning authority.

We know that our leaders are incapable of costing out anything more complex than lunch, so it goes without saying that the original budget began to look on the low side (and has now tripled). The only people in the country who would have forgotten to account for VAT were of course in charge of the bid. They have now very sensibly added this in plus an extra £0.4 billion to hire a firm to ensure the costs are kept down (yes). Obviously I've already bid for the job of keeping that firm on track, and created an infinite set of untraceable subsidiaries, each of which ... (you get the picture).

Most worrying of all, however, the alleged nation of bright-eyed, rosy-cheeked nymphs and shepherds eagerly skipping in a summer's breeze now looks more like the most obese country in Europe, slobbing its SUVs around a desolate urban landscape searching for pies.

So today UK Sport has launched an initiative to find tall people, who will be invited to join (or perhaps to be) our rowing, handball and volleyball teams in 2012.

This is a start but it's simply not bold enough: we should return the Olympics to a genuine contest between amateurs on a truly level playing field. Every nation has to enter every event, and it must select its team entirely at random, by picking names from a hat. So, there you are contentedly pursuing your career as neurosurgeon, armed robber, wholesale fruiterer etc when you hear the good news that you've been selected to represent the nation.

The bad news is you drew the pole vault.

Sport for all indeed.

Down and dirty: an introduction to British management technique

2007-02-21T00:30:00.000Z

We tend to disdain modern management jargon here in the UK, where Just In Time refers to the moment you arrived at the pub.

However, as the world's first industrialised nation, our management style goes back a long way and many of today's internationally-recognised methods evolved from our original procedures.

For instance, the basic unit of management - the Threat - has scarcely changed, while its associated technique - ordering people around - survives to this day as the Cascade Briefing.

Being first in the field, we were making this stuff up as we went along, so it took us a while to hit our stride - we didn't abolish the slave trade until 1807 and our initial response to the trade union movement was to arrest the leaders and transport them to Australia.

But we've mellowed since then, introducing more subtle approaches based on greed, for instance, and peer pressure. That these do not always work is demonstrated by the experience of a young man from one of our superstar corporate law firms.

While the £1 million salary was clearly attractive, he realised that to nail that down he had to put in eight years of working 18 hours a day, seven days a week, and his response, sadly, was to kill himself. The firm held a minute's silence in his memory, which at their hourly rates must have cost a small fortune.

Of course I'm simplifying it all a bit here, but I know you have limited patience and many important tasks to accomplish. The thing to remember is that more or less wherever you look in corporations around the world you will see management styles which are based on axioms laid down by us, the people who produced the Luddites, the Tolpuddle Martyrs and the Jarrow March.

Thus, while value migration might seem like a 1990s American concept, we came up with it back when the Cook Islands were a British Protectorate and the top managers on the ground realised that the International Date Line ran through their territory.

As god-fearing people determined to keep Sunday a day of rest for their hapless employees, they would take the obvious step of driving the workforce west across the Line at midnight on Saturday for another hard day's work in the banana plantations, and then of course back east again 24 hours later (guess what?) just in time for Monday.

Have a great, er, weekend.

Growth for the grosser grocers

2007-02-14T11:53:00.000Z

Supermarkets are always in the news, and in the UK they're everywhere else too.

It's more than 10 years since Sainsbury's lost the"UK's biggest" title to Tesco which is currently three times its size and counting. Now in third place, they're making headlines again as a clutch of private equity firms consider a bid of around £9.0 billion.

Of course I'm not engaged to advise any of the parties, so I can offer a completely unbiased (and indeed thoroughly ignorant) opinion. The question is "How will they make money out of this?" and the answers focus on the property portfolio and operating margins.

Well, all supermarket groups like to keep great chunks of real estate on their books to prevent the competition building stores there if nothing else - but they'll need to retain that - while the advantages of sale and lease-back would probably be over-diluted by the new debt.

Margins? To get near Tesco they'd need to quadruple their performance without reducing the shopping experience to North Korean levels, but they must know that the Pyongyang strategy is already working brilliantly for Aldi and Lidl. And anyway, if they try to be just like Tesco and succeed, they'll become, well, just like Tesco, thereby removing any serious differentiation and destroying the brand.

But there is a way: with price, range and presence as given, they should concentrate on service. Currently, customer service consists largely of packing your bags at the checkout, but why stop there?

Why don't they go the whole hog and drive you home, stack your fridge, pour you a beer, make dinner and give you a full body massage? Why not send people round to mow the lawn, redecorate the dining room, clean the pool, wash the dishes and walk the dog? I'd shop there, wouldn't you?

Of course this is only the beginning: retail groups should stop offering loyalty points and start awarding their best customers free servants instead. The more you spend, the more (and better) servants you get. They live in your attic, call you Sir and Madam, wear uniforms, get up before dawn, clean things, make tea and spread malicious gossip about you - all the traditional stuff. All you have to do is buy everything from their store group.

Start saving the coupons.

In the nick of time - a new vision for British jails

2007-02-08T12:50:00.000Z

Our jails are full and this has taken our government by surprise, which is odd. Having created over 3,000 new criminal offences since 1997 you might have thought they'd have seen it coming.

Of course we're ambivalent about prisons in the UK. We know the system doesn't work but we don't mind crooks being subjected to it - after all, if people want to commit crimes then it's just tough if they then find themselves four to a cell with axe-murderers and cannibals 23 hours a day for five years.

It's obvious to me however that prisons are a colossal waste of resources. Locked up in there among the psychopaths are people who have become seriously rich and powerful, and they've got that way by being smart, devious and dangerous.

They have, for example, built up billion-dollar organisations smuggling drugs, trafficking migrants and running vice rings. Increasing numbers are there for their creative interpretation of company law while FDs of blue-chip companies.

There's obviously no point in having these folk sew mailbags, walk round prison yards, take sociology degrees, molest each other and seize hostages. We need to leverage their skills, so here's the offer:

Your accomplices have legged it with the gold bars, your wife's shacked up with your lawyer and you'll be in here for ten years even with good behaviour. You might as well join Wormwood Scrubs plc, keep your brain in shape, and earn some serious money.

Adopting the poacher-turned-landowner model we should be able to develop some world-class consultancies and outsourcing contractors. Prisons would start to compete with each other for talent, and we'd soon have Dartmoor and Holloway bidding for rail franchises, heritage sites and defence contracts. Their tender for a privatised Prison Service would be essential reading.

As management consultants they would have, for legitimate businesspeople, the same attraction that Niccolo Machiavelli would have for politicians had he not been dead for nearly 500 years.

Serious career-minded graduates would be committing crimes geared precisely to the length of sentence they felt they needed before joining Booz Allen or McKinsey on the outside. Some would stay inside deliberately, tactically clouting a warden or setting fire to a cell-block now and again to see an over-running assignment through, while the more practically-minded would be digging tunnels under the walls to get in.

This is clearly a brilliant idea. Why do I get the feeling that it is already happening?

First things second (ie after the cricket)

2007-02-06T13:19:00.000Z

Surely I have better things to do than write to myself? Well, yes of course, but I've already done them.

Much as I love my work, I don't do it 24 hours a day, and with many weeks to go before the start of the trout season, count this as displacement activity. Since I got up at 5.45am to listen to the England v New Zealand cricket I feel as if I've done a day's work anyway, so now I owe myself lunch while I decide on the crack's new editorial policy.