Leaving the praise to the critics, who see it as an equivalent to Johnny Cash’s late bid for credibility, Island’s VP, David Sharpe, seems to have taken it upon himself to do the blaming, in an accusatory leaked email that suggests he would rather not have spent millions on a church album and wanted a repeat of Jones’s Sex Bomb stylings.

This was written in May, but leaked only now, in the week of release, just in time for the Sunday Times, the Telegraph and pretty much every other media outlet to get all hot under the collar about it and puff the album’s arrival in spectacular fashion in news and reviews pages.

Stunt of the week, without a doubt. But that’s not unusual, given that it was also the conversation of the week.

Snippets like “Later, the Telegraph’s party goes to dinner at the Goring Hotel in Victoria, where I sit next to Sir John Sawers, the head of MI6 – it is a real-life James Bond moment” and “Back in the gym for 5.45am where my personal trainer Gary nearly kills me – but luckily he is gorgeous to look at so I don’t mind” really set the tone, if a tone can be found in amongst the slew of names of the successful, rich and famous.

It was a relief to find this piece, by Ivan Clark, on Brand Republic. Thank god for Ivan – whether it’s the exact truth or exaggerated for satirical purposes doesn’t matter. He pricks and deflates the heavily shoulder-padded, driven and boastful efforts from people like Collins.

“Alarm wakes me at 8.00 am,” writes Ivan. “Lie in bed smoking Marlboro Red whilst listening to R4’s Today Show. Now replete with the bluffers guide to what is important to the London media village, I get up.”

And: “These adlads and adettes seem to find themselves most interesting. Park my moped right outside the office. Everyone else is still at the gym, I pop round the corner for a toasted egg and bacon sandwich with brown sauce. I need the carbs and protein ‘cos it’s nearly 11.00 am and time for the traditional Friday lunchtime in the pub. See lots of famous faces but can’t remember who, as by the time I get home at 9.00 pm, having gone via my local, everyone looks like Jedward.”

I don’t know anything about Claudine Collins’s life, but from this extract I worry that she’s taking her work – and herself – a little too seriously, which could lead all too easily to bitterness in later life. The beauty of Ivan’s piece is that it is a stark and funny reminder that a job is just a job and that the real business of living takes place as much outside one’s workplace as within it.

Who needs a flak when you talk directly to the people? The evidence that stellar Twitter personalities – in the shape of Ashton Kutcher, Jonathan Ross, Stephen Fry and Sarah Brown – have benefited from this thesis is proof that they are shining examples of successful DIY #PR 3.0.

Perhaps this is correct; but then along comes a public figure in reputation meltdown and the sages have to return to the drawing board and reluctantly agree that good council is worth the investment.

The front page of the Telegraph this morning outs the great white hope and Treasury chief David Laws for a dubious £40k expenses claim.

As the media hurricane picks up speed, various coalition friends are working slavishly hard across news channels to validate the credentials of Laws, the economic genius. The defence? At a time of crisis, Laws is a ‘vital and integral component of the squeaky clean Coalition’. In the interest of the country we should ignore the creative accounting that saw him claim up to £950 a month for eight years to rent rooms in two properties owned by his “partner”. Merely a technicality and the good ship Great Britain is charting tricky waters, so men of his calibre are needed on watch.

The billion dollar question is this: what possesses someone in such high office to think that the expenses issue would not make fizzing front page banner headlines. How would he be able to do his job with this whiff of creative accounting hanging over his office. Well, he is a human and it seems that the stupid gene is embedded in every last one of us, even economic geniuses.

The election was fought with pious politics and politicians, who droned on about a new age of parliament. An election campaign that guaranteed the public they would once again be able to trust the political class. Oh dear, did Mr. Laws believe he was above and beyond scrutiny?

It’s important to applaud his efforts to not declare his sexuality. This is not an issue – it’s his life and he should be allowed to live it in the way he chooses. Thank God the sad, bad days of homophobic Sunday tabloid outing is dead. But I am afraid that, on the issues of probity, he has to be unassailable. Power will damn the political class unless a physician can be found to administer a vaccine to eliminate the virus that causes hubris.

More importantly, this sorry case underlines the importance of a PR figure who can interface with individuals in the pressurised bubble of public life. No matter how good you think you are, you need a confidante who asks difficult questions and tells it to you straight. Human error is a fact so it’s essential that someone close can endeavour to challenge the stupid gene.

Mr Laws must do the decent thing and go now – I am sure he will be missed but should take a leaf out of Mandleson’s instruction manual. There is a time and place to return – go now and he can be back before the next General Election.

But next time around he really should employ a personal PR minder to watch his back. He can afford it – and I am sure it will be worth every penny!

It was a rather curious and disappointing night; most of the questions from the floor were from people seeking insight via anecdote and I found myself missing the grillings I got from wannabe journalists 15 years ago about the nature of PR. The media has changed, without doubt – celebrity has come to be a sop they use to send us to sleep easily at night, a sort of weak-horlicks fairytale with all the calories and morals removed.

When it comes to celebrity, the media are too often an industry dependent on lives going wrong so they can print half truths and soap operas. The modern media can’t seem to find – or find the time for – the voices of those contributing something of worth to society. Everything is too prearranged. All those bright young things who wanted to be journalists now want to be in PR, as there’s always money to be made there.

But critical opinion is being lost. Does no one want to know how photos of John Terry and his wife in Dubai – which has strict privacy laws – were taken? It had to be by careful arrangement but no one questioned this last night. Everybody knows everything and nothing – the useful details are lost beneath a swath of cosy anecdote.

Debate is at an all time low – it is not even fashionable in politics, as Gordon Brown’s giving over of himself to the personal via the medium of his TV interview with Piers Morgan the other day proves. That and the fact that the political parties are all trying to bag celebs to help win the upcoming election (click here to see a piece on this in the Telegraph for which I gave a quote) rather than debate and think their way out of their problems.

I’m well aware that the world is constantly changing, as it should, but to have young wannabe publicists and journalists sidestep entirely a proper discourse and just accept the nature of things as they are on the surface is disturbing. There’s always money to be made – asking questions won’t, in the long run, stem the flow of that income. The power of questions is that, by questioning, one can change things. True constructive analysis and debate is the only way for the media, PR and the world to move forward – equilibrium need not mean stultification.

To read the Independent article, click here. To read the Telegraph article, click here.

I believe that Barnum would revel in the way that the Guinness Book of Records has legitismised his interest in the biggest, smallest, oldest and oddest – and he’d surely revel even more in the fact that the sort of picture opportunities he was creating with General Tom Thumb 140 years ago are still as eagerly lapped up (and copied) by news editors today as they were then.

And then there was the image of British Catholics venerating the remains of ‘the greatest saint of modern times’, the Carmelite nun who died in 1897, at Portsmouth Cathedral.

It is rather astounding that such mediaeval-seeming devotional practice still takes place in this modern era, replete as it is with the Jordan vs. Pete parables and the secular Sleb iconography of Heat and its peers. More astounding still is the fact that people are knowingly coming to look at a coffin containing only portions of the saint’s thigh and foot bones, her body having been divided into three after her death. Normally nowadays that’s the sort of behaviour that lurid tabloid headlines are built on…

“Bernard Arnault responded with a polite “merci, mais non” when I asked him if he would care to comment on why Lord Mandelson should have felt the need to clarify that the Louis Vuitton bag that he was pictured beside at Gatwick airport last week did not in fact belong to him.

“Mark Borkowski, the ubiquitous brand manager, tells me it was probably a wise call on the part of the normally chatty boss of Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy. ‘The sooner the case was closed on that one the better for all concerned,’ he says. ‘For Mandelson and for LVMH, it was always going to be a match made in PR hell.’”

To read the article in situ, click here.

“Mark Borkowski, a leading brand and celebrity publicist, said: ‘This is probably one of the biggest gaffes by a fashion retailer – it is a disgrace and a PR nightmare.

‘When people are confronted daily with pictures of heroic soldiers returning from Afghanistan with missing limbs, people will look at this case and think that Abercrombie & Fitch is incredibly shallow.

‘It is potentially very damaging to them and they will need to work hard to restore some depth to their brand if they are to maintain their position in today’s competitive environment.’”

To read the full article, click here.

There are a couple of things that need doing before trust can be restored. First, politicians should be paid a wage that befits their job, as they are in Germany. It needs to be a wage that makes the need for fiddling expenses redundant, that makes the need for expenses redundant; a wage that they can then spend how they see fit on running their homes. If they have moats to clear – and there will most likely always be rich men in Parliament who need to clear their moats – then the cost must come from their own pockets.

Secondly, the rules must be changed. There are most likely a number of politicians out there who have let their accountants loose on their expenses whilst they pursue a comfortable life in politics, often with little understanding of anything beyond a blinkered vision of their next step up the greasy rungs of Parliament.

There are a lot of MPs out there who have no sense of the real world, who are so wrapped up in stepping from Oxbridge to politics without ever setting foot in reality that they cannot see or understand why there is so much anger directed at them by the electorate.

There is a lot to be said for age and wisdom in parliament – for politicians with a sense of the world, who have had time to live and make mistakes in business and learned from them when the integrity of politics and the country is not at stake. Perhaps we should not allow people to stand as politicians until they are 35 or older?

You might argue that this would not allow in the next William Pitt the Younger – who, it should be remembered, campaigned vigorously against the rotten boroughs that allowed him to enter Parliament, was seen as the honest candidate by the electorate and yet only clung on to power thanks to the patronage of the King. Much has changed since Pitt’s day. Perhaps, then, an aptitude test should be set up, testing potential MPs on how well they understand the world and their place in it?

Britain needs MPs who are savvy, who understand PR – and not in the Machiavellian sense. We need MPs who are able to look clearly at the world and at their place in it, who are able to communicate transparently and effectively with voters through Twitter and the blogosphere, who are willing to be completely accountable for their failures and mistakes and who remember that they are in a position of power by the grace of the people who voted for them and that if they betray that trust, they must pay the price and stand aside for someone else.

Disney never sued Paul Krassner, who conceived the satirical Orgy poster in the wake of Walt Disney’s death, never ordered that the poster be suppressed – although they did take umbrage at a full, commercial run. They were surely aware that the poster actually added to the viability of their brand, to the longevity of the icons Disney created, and that to suppress it entirely would be to suppress the desire of the people who were amused and/or titillated by it to interact with the brand in the future. They were aware that adults need the freedom to play with a brand for future iterations of the brand to reach the audience it is intended for – in Disney’s case, the children.

This is where Morris dancing is failing. Its form has changed little in the last 90 years, since Cecil Sharp saved it by recording Morris dances in The Country Dance Book and setting up, with others, the organisation that is now known as the English Folk Dance and Song Society. Here is an extremely rigid organisation noted for its unwillingness to allow change, being stuck in a mould where participants are perceived as beard-wearing, real ale-loving people over 55 who are prone to shout “Judas” at musicians who defy the sternly stratified traditions. As playful as the Morris may seem, its inability to change or accommodate new ideas is precisely what is neutering it. Where Disney allows satire to breed and change to come, the Morris train-spotters are protectionist and will not allow other traditions to infiltrate and strengthen the brand. Simply, they have no sense of fun and thus no entry level for newcomers.

The same is true of many brands in today’s market – they allow for no undercurrent of anarchy that allows for change and strengthens tradition. Morris men and PR companies, account managers and advertising executives alike pander to their clients’ fears of change and job loss and falling market share and so stay static, which means that they are far less likely to survive. They are selling a process, a structure, an unbending way of doing things that hasn’t changed for years.

Companies like Apple, with the iPhone, and Facebook do it differently – they survive by allowing others in to create new things within the bounds of their platforms. They allow creators in to play. Even Fox TV, a huge structure, part of the behemoth that is the Murdoch media empire, allows a certain amount of fun to be had at their expense by their biggest brand, The Simpsons.

This is a year when everyone must give up the idea of being comfortable, when brands, PR and even Morris men must bring in new people via new ideas, new ways of doing things that are transparent and exciting and engaging for a wide spectrum of consumers and traditions. Those who will survive will eschew process in favour of an open mind. Allowing people to play with brands is the big mantra of the coming months – it is necessary now for us to get away from the fiefdoms of the past and allow fluidity for the 24/7 credit crunch agenda.

It has been speculated that there will only be worldwide peace in the face of an alien invasion; the credit crunch is the beginning of that invasion as far as brands and PR are concerned. Now all we need to ask ourselves is “have we the ability to allow this change to happen?” If not, then we will find ourselves on an endless Escher staircase of ever-diminishing returns.

The Realist