The Fleet Street era of colossal expense accounts and booze-fuelled revelations couldn’t last, of course, but it had one thing going for it. When devious tactics were employed to extract information, more often than not they were employed face to face. It was open warfare of the kind where the loser probably deserved what was coming to them, if only because they’d had a few too many brandies with dessert. Perhaps if a generation of scribblers were not chained to their desks in the Wapping Gulag, the need for hacking might have taken a back seat. Worshipping the powers of a lunchtime claret, and its ability to make a contact sing, might have suppressed the lust for the dark arts.

Journalists have always done whatever it takes to get information. Nobody in the media industry has any illusions about that. Look at how readily Kelvin Mackenzie implicitly defended many of those involved in the phone hacking scandal in his 2010 spat with Chris Bryant, for instance. The point is, though he can sympathise with those who did, Mackenzie didn’t resort to the kind of invasive tactics employed at NI publications in the late 90s and early 00s when he edited the Sun. Sure, he didn’t have some of the technology, but he also didn’t have to.

The culture of the long lunch looked like laziness to the executives who came to re-shape the media landscape throughout the late 80s, but it wasn’t. Between the coppers in the pubs round the Old Bailey and the City Boys in the square mile boozers, the hack of two or three generations past had the kind of network Rebekah Brooks would have to hire armies of Private Investigators to achieve. As post-boom social pressures turned against drinking culture and geographic pressures sent the industry scattered far and wide – Docklands, Wapping etc – this network, decades in the making, was silently dissolved.

What’s more, the newspaper industry became (and still is becoming) a young people’s game. With the culture change the old blood – not just Mackenzie, Wendy Henry, Stewart Higgins et al, but senior reporters and writers – faded away into alternative careers. Rushing in to replace them came the Piers Morgan, Andy Coulson, Rebekah Brooks brand of quick-fire young editor. Following on from them, we’re about to see the dominance of kids fresh out of media courses, ready to follow a formula rather than their nose.

These cultures, both of which in their way prioritise tangible, novel skills over less condensable experience, combine with an increasingly desk-bound age to create isolated environments. If on the one hand you’ve never had time to develop the kind of lifetime people skills and ephemeral networks available to the journalists of bygone decades, and on the other you’ve a world of voicemail and internet based dirt at your under-callused fingertips, the results aren’t hard to predict.

So what’s the answer? These days, the entire media landscape will have shifted more than once in the space of a 1981 Times lunch break, so clearly a straight return to old habits is impossible. But social media doesn’t have to be about disconnection and alienation. With Twitter you can involve yourself in the kind of fast-paced conversational wranglings that occurred over those mythical luncheons. With Foursquare, even the busiest people can align their days sufficiently for some brief face time.

All it takes is a little imagination and media professionals of all kinds can use their instincts, not their phones, for a spot of information gathering.

Arguably, the incandescent political damage done by the phone hacking has savaged the Prime Minister’s brand. Any scandal that needs to propel a failing opposition leader into a favourable light requires emergency PR council. Alas, Ed Milliband isn’t free to dance on the Prime Minister’s misfortune because he too is aided by an ex News International journalist.

Matthew Freud is perhaps one player who has even more to lose. I’ve been operating a PR company breathing the same oxygen as Matthew, but he’s been on an impressive mission and built a far bigger empire. Make no mistake, the omnipresent Freud, eminence grise, is held on high by the phantom in the wings. The PR industry gives credence to the fact that he is the country’s most powerful PR broker. His influence, aided by his marriage to the Murdoch family and his close friendship with Rebekah Brooks, simply cannot be ignored. He sits in the middle of the powerful circle to the advantage of many of his clients.

Why not? Isn’t that what every powerful PR broker has done since the birth of public relations? After all, Freud is related to Edward Bernays, the grandfather of spin. Certainly legend has it that if Matthew was involved on any company account, things happened. Embellishing the corporate Freudian myth became a brilliant pitching device and a pivotal instrument for his empire. Yet now, many are questioning whether this leverage is under threat.

It looks like his desire to be influential in political power has been thwarted, and of course so has Murdoch’s. Suddenly it is possible to ask whether The Sun ever did win an election. Has the spell been broken?

It seems, now, that the newspapers’ influence might be waning generally and that News Corporation’s political clout is actually pretty limited – as the sacrifices made in the name of BSkyB would prove. What is a 168 year old newspaper worth in the face of television’s reach? Not a lot, apparently.

As the old Fleet Street vet Roy Greenslade commented in his blog: “The press is not, and probably never has been, as powerful an agent as politicians seem to believe. On the other hand, it is certainly not as neutral and lacking in influence as proprietors tend to say.”

Politicians are vain and take themselves seriously, they like reading about themselves. The papers are merely convenient scapegoats for the moment that parties or policies fail.

Of course recent events will usher in a change in the way the relationship between Murdoch and the political class works. His perceived brand power will now be playing against him; folk are uncomfortable about a figure that can be portrayed as an over-mighty influence on political affairs. It is apparent that, for the time being, he will actually be unable to wield the power it is claimed he is able to exercise. For this reason, Miliband has ostentatiously burned his bridges with the Murdoch press. This strategy holds the advantage of leaving him looking like a clean man fighting a great power, but without significant electoral risk.

So will Freud’s prestige and standing be overshadowed by the current calamities? Will his legendary parties still arouse and beguile? The Freudian metonymy is disfigured; indisputably, the political class is under pressure to distance itself from the pandemonium and any related individuals. The political class is pragmatic, hardnosed and commonsensical and will steer clear of negative ink and public disdain.

The Freudian cult faces a huge challenge and Freud’s business dexterity will be something to watch. Matthew is a fearless, creative and audacious networker with considerable clout, but his capacity to manoeuvre and redirect his powers will be paramount if his brand is to survive the events of the last 10 days. I guess he is ahead of the curve and plans to reshape his brand persona in the coming months. Whatever; the new world order of PR is upon us.

UPDATE

With the resignation this morning of Rebekah Brooks, it looks like Murdoch is beginning to kick emotional ties into touch. What bearing this will have on Matthew Freud remains to be seen.

30 years later, thanks to the digital enlightenment and the forces of social media, we might well find ourselves experiencing significant social unrest at the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton – according to the Sun, at least, who lead today’s paper with the ever-so-slightly lubricious headline: ‘Anarchists Target Wills & Kate’.

So has the meticulously planned publicity stunt fallen apart already? Do anarchists rule? Is this pure hype – a cheap Monday morning headline – or have we significantly changed as a nation?

Perhaps the Health and Safety executive should be stripped of its killjoy powers, leaving the nation free, with no strings attached, to party as they see fit for the Royal Wedding. I would suggest that the nation is most likely to overwhelmingly express and celebrate its latent royal conditioning.

In all probability the news of Egyptian unrest, currently dominating the zeitgeist, has lead to today’s Sun headline. A significant minority may oppose the wedding, but if you leave those who wholeheartedly approve free to celebrate it as they see fit, within the bounds of law and common sense of course, surely you take the sting away from these supposed ‘anarchist’ troublemakers?

In Celtic mythology, the Year King would be feted and loved and cherished for one full cycle, drawn into the circle of the Earth goddess and made great. Then, to ensure the crops kept growing, he’d be destroyed.

So Katie Price, in her vengeful aspect of the goddess, has struck again and cast Alex Reid’s Year King onto the sacrificial fires. The extraordinary statement she released in The Sun just shows how much she is in control – in her head, we are still living in a matriarchy where no control-freak, fame-hungry male gods have come and usurped her position.

And so the ongoing brand narrative (or should that be brand saga?) that is Katie Price is back and it is time for her to find a new sacrificial mate to keep her news agenda fertile.

Who this will be is bound to cause intrigue. The web is alive with speculation of all sorts, so please feel free to add yours below. I’m always looking out for more correlations between celebrities and mythological figures; this is fertile ground for discussion…

The first is the production of Yes, Prime Minister that has just transferred to the West End. It’s a great show; very funny, very well acted and rather more radical than one would have expected from a comedy institution that makes it to the stage 20-odd years after its heyday. Buy a seat now!

It plays wonderfully to its target audience but, like so much other theatre in the West End, it struggles to reach out to the next generation of audience, the ones that will keep the theatre going as a concern that moves beyond musicals and celebrity-strewn shows. It’s not just this show – West End theatre in general seems a little too content to bask in an (admittedly lucrative) ghetto. So many British institutions – from the arts to politics – are content to do so.

But theatre can, and should, be a cultural shift changer. It should be creating news events that land productions on the front pages. A first night is an event, certainly, and reviews are important, but if more serious commercial theatre is to find its way into the subconscious landscapes of the nation’s youth, then it needs to be a little more hard-arsed about marketing itself, given that traditional advertising is going through such lean times.

Theatre has done some things very well indeed and there’s no doubt that there’s a lot of money in box office for Yes, Prime Minister – a million quid in advance bookings by all accounts. It’s deservedly going to be a very successful show and the producers have done a brilliant job of providing a financial return for the investors.

But that comfortable sensation of box office wealth can lead to complacency – and that could mean that new opportunities are missed. It would be wonderful if the West End used these riches to try some of the online crowd sourcing tactics to engage the next generation of theatregoers in the same way that Punchdrunk, You Me Bum Bum Train, LIFT and Alex Poots’s Manchester Festival do. They need to remember that are living in an era where a thing or a person survives best if they can communicate successfully to the nation as a whole, not just a certain clique. They need to stir in the next generation, not just the Horlicks sippers.

Which leads me to the second conundrum of the week: Ed Miliband’s first nights as leader of the Labour Party. Labour seems to have taken several steps backwards in electing Ed as the next leader of the party, a man who looks like a truculent Portuguese Wine waiter, or perhaps the manager of an Estonian Lap dancing club. When the Mail and the Sun are so eager to attack and splash the phrase Red Ed throughout any and every article on him and given that he is an awkward, less-than-confident seeming public speaker, all I can see is Labour failing to try and regain the dialogue they had with Britain as a whole in the early days of the New Labour project. Labour has to deal with the Red Ed tag quickly – it’s one of those phrases that will filter seamlessly into the social media and digital subconscious and the British public will find themselves subliminally conditioned unless Labour move fast to stamp out its use.

Whatever you think of them, Philip Gould and Peter Mandelson were immensely effective at controlling output and creating a useful conversation between New Labour and the British public – until the relationship was indelibly tainted by their use of spin to manoeuver the country into an unpopular and illegal war. Prior to Iraq, they had dragged Labour out of the ghetto and, in doing so, helped change the face of British politics. They were mindful of the tiniest details and that is a lesson that mustn’t be forgotten.

Now, you have to be media savvy, cool in front of the cameras and able to hold your own up close. Ed’s unmarried status and his slightly ungainly demeanour is a burden for the party, given that it separates him from the majority of voters. This is not, ultimately, a game changer, but it does allow the opposition to gain an initial foothold. For this reason, David Cameron was clearly more afraid of facing David Miliband across the ballot box. Ed, at a distance from the voters and prone to having easy clichés thrown at him, does not seem likely to be anything like as much a threat. I suspect his struggle for polish will set the party back by 20 years – especially given that he follows Gordon Brown, whose lack of personability was at least leavened by many years in office. Not only is Ed not smooth and slick, he’s not long been an MP.

Clear party divisions are certainly to the fore once agian. New Labour is over: so do we have a right/left divide or do we perhaps have a Tory suited New Labour against Old Labour, finger puppets for the trade union bigwigs, looking like Arthur Mullard in a bad George suit?

Love them or loathe them, Clegg and Cameron are in the smooth and slick fit-for-purpose zone, whereas Ed Miliband and his team need to look hard at examples such as Tony Hayward – a prime instance of a figurehead dragging the whole company into the mire, as he was patently not fit to cope with the media hoo-ha. The head of a big corporate organisation or political party has to be fit for purpose. Can an organisation really afford to elect a leader on values alone in these media savvy times?

Both the Labour Party and the West End have failed to take into consideration the way the new media works, I feel. The 10-minute news cycle and the need for new audiences are paramount and, if any trick is missed and any stone is left unturned, the future will begin to look more and more uncertain.

The article is desperate to get people fulminating about spoilt football players in the wake of England’s World Cup flop, on the assumption that these football “legends” are heroes and idols for the nation’s kids who are betraying their legions of fans by going out and being normal. They are doing nothing of the sort.

British football has moved far too far away from the streets to be able to be seen as the people’s sport any more, and almost nothing of the millions being poured into people like Rooney’s pockets is coming back to the street to allow a new generation of great footballers to develop.

The media, however, still need to build these ordinary, fallible, serially overpaid people into heroes. However, whereas in the past they were built up to be perpetuated as idols (just look at the 1966 World Cup team, who shall forever be used as rods to beat the backs of any English footballers with even an ounce of talent), they are now being built up to be destroyed at the first sign of feet of clay.

The media need these modern footballers to behave badly, as the stories that sell papers are the soap operas, the tales of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. These are the stories that resonate most completely with the 21st century British public; they have been created only to be destroyed for the vicarious thrill of the tabloid- and website-reading masses.

The only extraordinary thing about Rooney is the amount of money he earns for being pretty good at striking a ball towards a net – in the usual run of things, this is a man who would be down the pub most weekends, having a laugh with his mates, not buying mansions. So next time you read an article full of outrage and disappointment, please remember that the media – be it tabloid- or web-based – thrives on badly behaved sports and TV stars and will do all that they can to manufacture the conditions in which said star can fail in style so they can keep on selling you papers.

What do we really expect, though, when the players have too much time, money and self-regard on their hands? Take Ashley Cole, for example: he’s being lambasted in today’s Sun for sending a message on his Blackberry stating that he hates “…England and the fucking people”. It’s not really surprising that a fuss is being made – this was sent before a game had been played.

The FA are taking flack too, which may explain the rumour that Wayne Rooney will be taking part in a fan forum discussion online to diffuse the ugly situation. I can’t imagine it will, especially since Rooney apparently booked himself a holiday in Barbados two days before the dismal match against Germany.

From a PR standpoint, I’d say the best bet would be to have a cooling off period before throwing Rooney to the ravening community of football fans. It seems too desperate and too soon to me.

A cooling off period is advisable – much like the one Capello has been given. Time heals all wounds, they say. Certainly, in this instance, time would allow the England team a chance to become suitably contrite. It should also stop the press and the fans from tearing them to pieces.

Just so long as none of them open their mouths in public for a fortnight, all should be well…

From now on, I suspect, any political instance of this law in action will be known as the ‘Brown Variant’, after unguarded remarks about a woman he had just spoken to on a walkabout were broadcast to the world. He condemned Gillian Duffy as a ‘bigot’ into a radio mic he didn’t realise was still live.

Unsurprisingly, the press have pounced. What is surprising is that this is the first serious gaffe on any side in a flawless, highly polished election campaign. Everything is marshalled and scrubbed until it has passed the hygiene test. All the leaders have been flawless until now – Brown is usually careful to have his own radio mic. Tellingly, he didn’t this time. Instinct suggests there was poor planning by Brown’s minders and that they ignored local intel.

In such circumstances, a walkabout was always going to have ‘disaster’ written all over it. Everyone makes mistakes, but in such a pristine, polished atmosphere, the first slip is always going to be big news.

Gordon Brown has been under enormous pressure – in football terms, he’s been on a nil nil draw with seconds to go, whilst the goalie is run up the field and set up to try and score a decisive corner in the dying seconds of the game, since the first leaders’ debate.

So is this gaffe an election-changing moment? Possibly, but possibly not in the way the right wing press may be hoping. Naturally, the Sun etc are throwing vast amounts of money (£50,000 has been mentioned) in Gillian Duffy’s direction in the hope that she’ll go for Brown’s jugular with them. But she is old school Labour – she may be furiously angry but she still may not want to risk destroying the party for the sake of an (admittedly rude) off the cuff, private comment that happened to be broadcast by mistake.

Mrs Duffy strikes me as a pretty ordinary woman, however, and these are straitened times – presented with enough cash, she may well take the filthy tabloid lucre. If she does, though, Gordon’s spinners will find they have a chink of light.

Another thing to bear in mind is that Brown has behaved impeccably since, taking the blame squarely on the chin and apologising. He’s done well by fronting up and remaining calm. And, once the dust has settled, this human side, this leader with edges in an election of soft, polished curves, might actually go over rather well. Certainly the media are fascinated – the 24/7 news cycle, desperate to cover every moment of the debacle, even shot endless minutes of Duffy’s front door as Brown went in to apologise.

However, by stoically doing the right thing – shouldering the blame, apologising and getting on with the campaign – Brown could give the populace just what they didn’t realise they’d wanted all along: a political campaign that isn’t polished to within an inch of its life and that has a genuine sense of danger and surprise. If only Brown had been braver and tackled bigotry in the wake of the comment.

There is, of course, one saving grace for Gordon, one place where he should be able to shine – the debate tomorrow night. It’ll make interesting viewing in the wake of this gaffe.

Griffin’s PR nous comes hard earned – the BNP’s Director of Publicity, Mark Collett, has had his share of run-ins with the television, having been caught on camera during Channel 4’s Young, Nazi, and Proud documentary in 2002 declaring his admiration for Adolf Hitler and calling homosexuals “AIDS monkeys” on Russell Brand’s Re:Brand show in the same year. Collett is highly unlikely to want Griffin to fall into the same trap, despite the strong likelihood that he will be mercilessly provoked.

So should we allow a thug in a well-cut suit on the TV to attempt to seduce the masses? Is Griffin likely to raise his status to that of statesman in the circumstances? Prohibition would, I suspect, be more likely to fan the flames of disaffection among voters – who have much to be disaffected about at the moment, hence the 6% who voted BNP in the European elections – and the last thing most people, let alone most politicians, want is to allow them more chances to snare votes.

The hope, then, is that Griffin will succumb to anger and show his dark side, which has been slathered in nice suits and careful spin for the last few years. Gordon Brown has gone on record this morning to say that: “it will be a good opportunity to expose what [the BNP] are about”. Russell Brand has said it with more style in The Sun. According to Brand it will help to let the BNP “gurgle up their chuckle-brained hate-broth” on Question Time. “The right thinking people of the Earth are on relatively safe ground when it comes to the ‘war of words’ with televised bigots,” he adds.

A few years ago Griffin told a meeting of the American Friends of the BNP (which included the then leader of the Ku Klux Klan) that: “Once we’re in a position where we control the British broadcasting media, then perhaps one day the British people might change their mind and say, ‘yes, every last [immigrant] must go’. But if you hold that out as your sole aim to start with, you’re not going to get anywhere. So, instead of talking about racial purity, we talk about identity.”

With this in mind, I think that Michael Corleone’s advice in The Godfather Part 2 – “Keep you friends close, but your enemies closer” – is the best bet. Let’s keep Griffin and his hateful, hate-full party close and hope that they deliver a horse’s head to their own bed, making it clear just how appalling their views, which they keep simmering under the veneer of careful PR, really are.

“Twitter users will get the chance to communicate with departed showbiz stars this Halloween — in the world’s first online séance,” proclaims the paper. “Tweeters can choose which of their deceased idols they want to talk to, pick a question — then follow the ‘Tweance’ in real time using the social networking site.”

The ‘Tweance’ has been cooked up by Angels Fancy Dress, doubtless keen to move some spooky costumes this October. Mundane considerations aside, they clearly have an almost psychic understanding of the way the web works and, more importantly, the way people engage with social networking sites; they have drawn in all the triggers needed for a publicity windfall – celebrity, the chance to communicate with dead celebrities and the opportunity for millions to nominate who will be spoken to and to see all the answers coming out in real time.

They’ve brought in “top psychic” Jayne Wallace, who has already “contacted the spirit of Jade Goody in a séance organised by The Sun” – she “will quiz four late stars nominated by Twitterers between 10am and 12pm on Friday October 30”.

Whatever you think of psychics and the possibilities of contacting the dead, there is no escaping the fact that there are plenty of people out there who believe – and no doubt that they will be following this Tweance religiously as well as nominating their favourite dead celebrities and sending in questions. This could go right round the world.

What excites me most about this is the way that Twitter is being used to break new ground. I ran the first ever Twithibition, an exhibition of great publicity stunts at the Edinburgh Fringe, in the summer. This Tweance is the next step towards making Twitter the communication channel of choice for the world, a place where things can happen instantly and effect real change whilst you watch. It’s thrilling.

All I need to decide now is whom to nominate…