While Mike Tindall’s injury excludes him from the final team, his presence will be felt nonetheless. A little while ago, I posted a short note warning that, following reportage of an early wild night out across the tabloid press, the England team faced potential PR disaster should they fail to perform. This week that’s been stepped up and nailed down with the long-running tale of his ‘mystery blonde’.

After renewed interest in the story on Monday, the Mail outed the girl as old family friend, and ex-lover, Jessica Palmer on Tuesday. By Wednesday, she was gleefully reported to be going into hiding.

It hasn’t, by any means, been the worst sporting publicity disaster of all time. Even Ryan Giggs’s superinjunction scandal, itself surprisingly minor, far eclipses it as far as recent tabloid splashes go. What’s important, though, is that this coverage has well and truly brought the team out of the back pages and into the front.

It’s a crucial rule. Unless they have a particular promotional goal, sportspeople, artists and other specialist figures should do all they can to stay in their back pages comfort zone: sports reportage, reviews and all the rest of it. This is where they are judged (more or less) solely on their performance. This, therefore, is where they have the greatest degree of control over the way they appear.

Once you’re out in the front pages you’re exposed, buffeted, ravaged but occasionally sent soaring into the air by the capricious winds of tabloid- and hence public- judgement. It’s a whole different game, and the stakes are higher. Tindall’s shenanigans are not disastrous-yet anyway- but they’ve dumped a whole new load of pressure onto the team.

Should tomorrow’s game go well, this will all blow over- it’ll be high spirits, a drunken mistake, perhaps even a piece of necessary team bonding. The public with put it down to a bit of banter in the dressing room and ascribe it as one of the reasons for the team’s success. If this is the case, Mike would still do well to keep a low profile, let it blow over, and thank the black gods of publicity he’s been spared.

Should the game go badly, however, the tabloids have proved they have ammo to make this run, and it’s a safe bet they can find plenty more. Events like the RWC have a narrative automatically imposed upon them, and Tindall’s indiscretions will become written into it as the reason it all fell apart- symptomatic of a lack of dignity, or drive, or focus.

Watch this space, though you probably won’t be watching as closely as Mike will tomorrow afternoon.

The excitable and ubiquitous coverage of ‘labour boy’ Rory Weal following his appearance at the Labour Party Conference on Monday said a lot about the power of narrative. From Melanie Philips’s enraged dismissal of his ‘mantra of hate’ in the mail to the Guardian’s moving video content, everyone found something to grab them about this 16 year old child of the welfare state turned political prodigy.

It’s hardly a surprise: his back story looked pitch-perfect. Following a divorce two and a half years ago, his family home was repossessed and he was cared for by his mother alone: despite her suitably hardworking yet appealingly lowly job as a cleaning supervisor, his ravaged family required a leg up. They aren’t TV Guzzling, lazy tabloid welfare bugbears, yet Rory stated categorically that ‘I owe my wellbeing and that of my whole family to the welfare state’.

Now he’s working to develop his socialist creds: an interview published in the Times on Wednesday was a total spinmeister’s wet dream. In it, he name checks The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist (his ‘call’, in narrative theory terms) in the same breath as extolling almost calculatedly ordinary clothing brands like Primark (where he bought his tie) and Tesco (the suit: ‘great buy’, says Rory). He stresses that his less extraordinary friends are issues driven, too, but acknowledges, humorously, that the issues which drive them involve the ‘trebling of their bus fare’ rather than ‘party politics’. His favourite programme is Question Time, but he despairs, affectionately, of his mother, who won’t stay up to watch it.

In short, he’s a poster boy for Labour’s intended, newly leftist stance. His narrative could have been calculated to ensure that, when he delivered his impassioned and graceful speech, it would provoke the maximum excitement on the left and disruption and rage on the right.

In this, we find the first point to be made: if all this good work is to stick, Labour better be damn sure his narrative continues to ring true. Unfortunately for them, the first cracks appeared on Wednesday, with a piece in the Mail ‘outing’ him as a former private school pupil with a well to do, property developer Dad serving as a counterpoint to the Times piece. There was even a quote from his Gran which must have had the scribbler who got it crying tears of joy: ‘it’s really the first time we’ve heard about his interest in politics. We were surprised because we thought he wanted to go into something like acting’.

It’s telling to study why the right would particularly love to discredit this kid. Weal’s speech commanded the power it did because it acknowledged something which the rest of Labour’s somewhat airbrushed and over-handled conference did not. As any truly intelligent communications professional could tell you, there has to be a place where PR ends.

Rory Weal became this place. Ed Miliband has been PR’d to within an inch of his life. Granted he looks like someone who should be locked up in the back coding room of a second-tier games developer, but that’s no reason to shine and inflate him so much he turns into a sort of pumped-up, speechmaking sex doll. Rumour has it he even sought advice on his inaugural wave. Take the truth out of Weal, and you take any momentum Labour have gained from this conference away in an instant.

Weal grabbed headlines because he was not thrust forward, presented, positioned (or least did not appear to be) and paradoxically he stood out for it. If he is the real deal, he will be the ultimate example of the power of the truthful brand narrative. If not, British politics will receive a swift and decisive demonstration of what happens when PR tries to build itself.

This is the distinctive sound of the, still mighty, British tabloid press flexing its muscles. Should the team head on to glory in New Zealand, this will all be brushed under the rug as a bit of harmless- probably even necessary- team bonding. But they’d damn well better: if they fail, the papers are now coiled, and they’ll unleash on this stuff with nothing short of relish. The article is a warning: ‘remember Ian Botham?’ says the Mail, ‘yeah, well look on my works, ye mighty, and watch your bloody step’.

The website is thegentlemenranters.com and it features splendid stories and reminiscences about such legends as the late Peter Batt and Leo Clancy, both of whom died recently.

Clancy was an exceptional man: his persuasive skills were so good that, even drunk, he managed to persuade a policeman that the barricades he’d just crashed into were the real threat to the public. He made his name at the Daily Mail but moved to the National Enquirer – which didn’t fit his temperament, so he absconded to South America with two friends and company credit cards, in lieu of severance pay, for a series of hair raising adventures. Click here to read more.

I started my career when these men walked the earth and Fleet Street was littered with the sort of prowling hounds that ate kids like me for breakfast. Things change, things move on, but sometimes there’s a shiver, a splinter of nostalgia and regret that such freewheeling craziness and brilliance is unlikely to happen again in my lifetime.

No camping out on designers’ doorsteps for last year’s attention-grabber supreme, I’m betting – it is surely fair to say that GaGa is cooking up something spectacular this year, after 2010’s meaty extravaganza. And, given the hoo-ha, furoré and small cyclone of speculation and excitement about that outré outfit, and given Gaga’s tendency to want to outdo herself, it’ll be fascinating to see what she turns up in this year, especially for the Grammys.

Things are changing already – the Mail has just had a little huff of shock that Leona Lewis has ditched her wholesome image: “…she turned up at the Never Say Never premiere with dark brown hair, razor sharp fringe and new style clothes,” wrote the Mail. “The top had a pair of red padded lips to cover her chest but left her stomach bare. She wore a pencil skirt and high heels. She’s supposedly starting her own clothing line. What has brought about this change from wholesome to vamp?”

What else but GaGa?

According to reports, GaGa has been knocked off the ‘most talked about fashion icon’ top spot by Kate Middleton this year. She’s going to have to pull something spectacular out of the hat if she’s going to beat the ‘modern princess’ phenomenon into second place again. But she shouldn’t have to worry too much if Leona’s makeover away from the princess mode is anything to go by.

GaGa has an astonishing ability to mould the media narrative and is doing her level best to make everything she does newsworthy before her performance at the 53rd Grammy awards. She’s already brought forward the release of her single Born This Way.

However many awards she wins or costumes she wears this year, it is most likely she will clean up in the news stakes. GaGa is a clever woman – as sharp as Madonna. She has “it”; the “stuff”. Her audience and the media are at her mercy. Whatever costume she comes in, it’ll be something new – she knows how to keep people paying attention. The only thing she could do wrong now is to oversaturate the market with things that are less than worthy of her individualist brand.

All this suggests that pure talent is no longer enough for the stars. GaGa has changed all that. Now lesser lights like Leona have to look and act the part at award ceremonies as it is not enough to just win an award for the music – one has to win the headline awards too.

I first met Geoff at the height of his journalistic powers, as a showbiz reporter for the Star. This was well before the modern British publicity industry started to emulate Hollywood in the late 20th century, taking control of every aspect of their client and shutting out the media if they wouldn’t play ball; before the idea that stars were brands really set in.

Geoff’s big legacy as a journalist is the Princess Margaret awards, now called the Shaftas (shame the title is so crude). In the days when the geriatric Royal PR spin machine shut up shop at 5pm and the old duffers wouldn’t dignify anything with an answer out of working hours, Geoff announced – at five past five – that Princess Margaret was to make a guest appearance on Crossroads. The story was beautifully absurd. Absurd enough to have everyone gleefully report it long before the Palace could step in and correct the story, allowing it to become one of those ‘true at the time’ stories. Out of this came the Princess Margaret awards, celebrating the liberties taken by showbiz journalists.

But things change, and liberties became less and less desirable to celebrities. And then McCartney found himself in need of a gatekeeper. Geoff, a Beatles fanatic, was the obvious choice; a man who new the game and who could be trusted. A number of kind interviews suggested he would make a happy in-house PR. Geoff of course jumped at the chance and got the job – but he forgot three all-important rules: 1) Never get too close to your heroes; 2) Remember that it’s just a job and 3) Situations always change.

The great publicist Theo Cowan once told me, in a down at heel coffee bar in Soho: “Never forget that PR is just a job, Mark. It’s not a lifestyle, it’s a job.” Geoff, after many good years with the former Beatle, found himself suddenly out in the cold when Heather Mills arrived on the scene. Now he is in a very different place. We should never forget that a job is a job in these straitened times, but it must be strange, if not necessarily satisfactory, to experience such a seismic shift in situation.

Simply, one should never get too close to a client or allow oneself to be sucked in by the lifestyle of your client – they will always move on and there are always too many other people around with their fingers in the same pie. A new marriage or love affair is one of the classic catalysts for change, especially if the new partner is a celebrity too, with their own entourage, as is a big break in America.

Any publicists who believe that the client will always remain faithful are, at best, kidding themselves or at worst seriously deluded. And there are a lot of dilettantes masquerading as publicists nowadays, hooked on the lifestyle and scared of the work who’ll do things for a pittance because they’re daft enough to believe canny producers, managers and clients who tell them they’ll keep then it for the long haul. It’s a hard, hard struggle to plot the course of a client’s career between these rocky outcrops and not everyone has the gift of building relationships in the eternal love triangle of client, media and public.

Publicity is not a glamorous life – it’s hard and thankless. The lesson fresh-faced wannabe publicists need to learn from Geoff’s example is don’t hang on to your ego, be prepared to be dumped and always keep an eye out for the next client opportunity, as you can be sure your clients will be doing the same thing. If you can keep coming up with fresh big ideas every fifteen months you may keep a client for a few more years than others, but nothing is guaranteed.

A publicist can get away with being a yes or no man in a media landscape where the media has been weakened by top publicists in complete control of their clients and lifestyle junkies at the other end of the power spectrum. Whether we like it or not, we need the media to be a little stronger. At the moment, there is little middle ground in the publicity industry, and it needs middle ground. The digital explosion makes it even more complex.

I saw the light and diversified my business offering 10 years ago. I find shoestrings very hard work. I like big budgets. I saw over-supply in the arena and have been proved right as time goes on – more and more in-house folk are being made redundant and every day I see more and more kitchen table businesses setting up.

It’s quite simple to bewitch with the promise of a fast, funky website that seldom matches up to the hype when it arrives. Trust and respect for a publicist’s work is the issue; you have to provide value for money, of course, but not at your own expense. Too few say no, hungering to do the gig rather than walking away. In an age of tight budgets, difficult choices will have to be made. PR folk must make sure the very limited resources are spent on priorities; skill and relevant, intelligent strategies. I believe we should have no higher priority than investing in the future of the craft.

Publicists who don’t invest in the future of the craft urgently need to learn the following from the fate of Geoff Baker: that PR is just a job and that, if they fuck up, there are other jobs that they will have to be prepared to do.

The big question racing round the media and the net is: did Jaffe walk or was he pushed? But in an age when the big news organizations are repositioning themselves as verifiers of the news, given the predominance of the blogosphere and the Twitterati as breakers of the news, it’s never going to be as cut and dried as that.

According to RadarOnline, and quoted in the Mail, Jaffe has stated: “The case was so all encompassing in terms of my time and the strict orders by the judge. I have other clients in serious crises who require my time.”

Reading between the lines, I can’t help but suspect that representing Oksana Grigorieva must have been tough – the story is wall to wall in America and there are any number of people getting in on the act, trying to make a fast buck out of the tabloid feeding frenzy.

Given that the internet is a remorseless story pump (imagine the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico before BP capped it, but replace the oil with a heady brew of gossip, scandal and press releases), any publicist dealing with a story as big as this one is likely to be on it 24 hours a day. That’s not a situation in which one can be strategic, as the constant flurry of rumour, counter-rumour and media theorizing would mean that everything has to be dealt with now, this second, without a moment to plan.

For a publicist, working in a situation like this is akin to throwing one’s career into a spin drier – there is no control to be had, especially when both the leading players seem to be dead set on making each other’s lives extremely difficult which, by extension, makes the lives of those working with them extremely difficult too. A good publicist doesn’t dish the dirt on their client, not even an ex-client whom they parted with acrimoniously.

Not that one is ever likely to find out precisely what is going on behind the scenes – there’s more than enough bullshit flying around to obscure that nicely. Better that a good story gets out, anyway – the truth in these instances is usually pretty dull.

There is also little money in this game. Very few tabloid figures can afford to remunerate for the sort of 24/7 council and strategic advice that the Mel/Oksana situation demands. Characters who allow their lives to be defined by opinion and the lust of the crowd will undoubtedly be terrible clients. It usually takes about 48 hours to come to that realisation.

And, most importantly, a sensible 60-year-old cherishes his life over and above high emotional spin cycle. Whisper it, who needs a toxic client. There is no glamour. There is only the horror.

I’d say not. It strikes me, looking at this morning’s excitable ruminations on SamCam’s modelling “past” in the press, that this is a sure-fire PR distraction from Lord Ashcroft and other pre-electoral woes, that the Tories will revel in the “slightly racy” past of SamCam at the expense of having to worry about her husband’s policies and his party’s veracity.

The Mail’s Amanda Platell doesn’t think that it will hurt. The Mail’s subs may have suggested, at the top of her comment this morning on the story the Mail on Sunday broke, that the photo shoot would get the Tory old guard spluttering, but Platell’s prose purples to the point that you would imagine that all they’ll really be doing is salivating.

“The resulting look is more flirtatious than outright raunchy,” writes Platell. “Think Sharon Maughan in her Gold Blend coffee advert days – with hair piled high and outfits that are part dinner party minx, part Boden Barbie. And those legs… dear God, those legs! Thoroughbred filly that she is, Sam’s are a fine-fetlocked pair that would not look out of place passing the Cheltenham finishing post. Jealous? Moi? You bet.”

“These pictures are an excellent mix of glamour and politics in the run-up to the election,” Sam Barcroft, of the Barcroft Media agency, told the Times. “It is an opportunity for picture editors to turn politics, which is often slightly dull, into something slightly more fragrant.”

My issue with all of this is that we need to be voting for politicians and policies, not the spouses of the party leaders. However sharp, alluring or glossily packaged they may be, if they’re not actually standing for parliament they should not be occupying the front pages in a bid to turn the tide of an election. Image has been all in politics for too long – what we actually need is substance.

The BBC seem to think that the revelations about cutbacks in the last few days are a job well done, given the leak to the Times and the reactions it engendered. The deliberate leak is certainly a small PR coup, given that it went to one of the papers most vocally opposed to the BBC and it shows Auntie Beeb willing to wield the axe.

But will the cutting of BBC6 Music and the Asian Network be seen, at least by papers such as the Daily Mail who are naturally opposed to the BBC and didn’t get the exclusive, as anything more than cosmetic, as more than the the wielding of a very small axe? Given that exclusives are thin on the ground nowadays, what could the long-term PR repercussions of not giving them the story too be? I suspect that it may involve papers that didn’t get the deal finding bigger axes of their own.

Not that they should spread themselves amongst the papers too thinly, either, as Andrew Lloyd Webber did with his recent appearance on innumerate covers plugging the Phantom of the Opera sequel, Love Never Dies. Love dies pretty quickly if you offer up exclusives to everyone. A short-term PR buzz will not over-ride media ill will at being played for long.

It appears that the BBC is an organisation run by media opinion rather than careful management. They would surely be better off if they showed a little Reithian backbone. In a recession, it is easy for the media to quibble with Jeremy Paxman’s £1 million wage. The BBC should not cave in and start paying him less – in Paxman’s case, given his interrogative and fearless style, it is money well spent. It’s also worth remembering that the US networks would consider such a sum peanuts.

Small PR coups are not what the BBC should be about. They need to stick closer to their guns and believe in themselves more fiercely. They should learn from Paxman; they need to be the interrogators in their relationship with the media, presenting a strong agenda rather than sheepishly seeking the approval of opponents who would gladly tear the entire corporation to shreds.

I’ve been up in the smoke all week and the conversation, from left and right, is dominated by the possibility that the Tories might not win the election. It’s a simple case of making a couple of mistakes and watching confidence seep away. And the ill-advised Tory poster campaign, featuring an airbrushed David Cameron, is not so much a mistake as it is a PR disaster.

The poster, pictured above, has been subvertised and graffitied, lampooned, laughed at and criticised. There is a website dedicated to endless satirical versions of the poster and even the Daily Mail has weighed in to pontificate on the foolishness of it.

What’s equally surprising is that Gordon Brown’s response has been to record a hearts and flowers interview with Piers Morgan. From the quotes that have leaked it seems like Brown is doing his best to get away from the airbrushed PR sheen that has besmirched Cameron’s image and reputation. It could be a triumph or an abject failure, depending on Brown’s delivery, but if it manages to bring out a human side to the notoriously awkward PM, it could mark a radical change in fortunes that no one would have predicted six months ago.