Posts Tagged ‘alistair campbell’

Careful what you wish for in the new communications age

According to Private Eye, Times media correspondent Patrick Foster was sacked after being earwigged by the BBC’s head of Press during a call in which he made a rather inappropriate comment to Caroline Thomson, the BBC’s chief operating officer. Paul Mylrea, head of press at the Beeb, swiftly raced off a letter of complaint to the Times and Foster has apparently been sacked.

Are we really operating in such a venomous and cut-throat arena these days? Are the new generation of PRs set to completely and unquestioningly inherit the methodology of the Alistair Campbell school of PR – to seek and destroy by any backstabbing methods available? Will we all be thrust into an environment of fear?

This last weekend, we heard how Chris Huhne had been (potentially) undone by his wife. Last week I did a number of media noddys on the great Twitter privacy debate. The same week I delivered an open heart-to-heart on the future code of business in PR at #think11. Read the rest of this entry »

Lobbying for Power

Most people in the country are worrying about the leadership of the country under the new coalition, and their concerns for the nation run to a number of issues, from what will happen with capital gains tax, what will happen with inheritance tax, will there or won’t there be cuts in public services, will the economy survive and will we have a stable government?

Not me. I have perceived a new threat. I am wondering nervously what the reaction will be when the nation wakes up and realises that they have, in David Cameron, an ex-PR man as Prime Minister. An ex-PR man, moreover, of whom Jeff Randall – quoted in the Mirror – said: “In my experience, he never gave a straight answer when dissemblance was a plausible alternative.” Read the rest of this entry »

The Spin and the Power

Most people in the country are worrying about the leadership of the country under the new coalition, and their concerns for the nation run to a number of issues, from what will happen with capital gains tax, what will happen with inheritance tax, will there or won’t there be cuts in public services, will the economy survive and will we have a stable government?

Not me. I have perceived a new threat. I am wondering nervously what the reaction will be when the nation wakes up and realises that they have, in David Cameron, an ex-PR man as Prime Minister. Read the rest of this entry »

Borkowski