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.

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.

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.

As we hurtle into a new communications age, whipped into a new reality by the digital cat o’ nine tails, must we all, in some fashion, cling on to the wreckage, hoping against hope that our professional intuition and emotional intelligence will keep our heads above water?

In the past I suggested that staring daily into a screen does not help create or build meaningful professional relationships in the physical environment. We need to develop more islands of hope where working trust exists. This is a plea for some measure of contemplation in an age of democratic experimentation; necessary when many around us are using industrial tools to smash through wall and the speed of the public agenda is breathtaking.

We must sidestep the vicious paranoia in the world at large, which threatens to destabilise our ability to trust and understand. Relationships we think we are building are all too often so flimsy and false that sooner or later they will be exploited by the ruthless.

Some might argue that Huhne’s ambition would have led him to suspect a tactical leak coming. Pippa Middleton’s trust in those who are suggesting creating a walkabout snap for the paps might very well lead her on to a path she’ll regret. The lesson for today? Think carefully and be even more careful what you wish for…

I told them that the next step for Woods could be a public display of contrition, perhaps in a television interview. He certainly needs to let people in behind the veneer of perfection and let the public – and the press – see that he is human after all. It worked for David Beckham – his brand was always built on his home life as well as his sporting career and he has survived a number of incautious moments in the last 12 years.

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Arcati, whose blog is the current darling of the blogoshphere and one of its best, sexiest reads, muses, with an amused raised eyebrow, on the possibility that the article – which threw light on Green’s angling for a $9 million raise for Cowell and the idea of broadcasting an American X Factor on Fox to tie Cowell to American Idol for the next two and a half years.

Arcati wryly pricks the egos at work, acknowledging that the story could either be a fabrication or an irritant to the moguls behind X Factor and American Idol. The missing Sabbagh story is either full of “unusually fearless objectivity” or “total tosh” – either could have prompted its pulling.

Regardless, the good Madame, by exposing the article’s vanishment, is gleefully and gloriously helping expose the powerful PR muscle that keeps the X Factor in the public eye.

As we know, the X Factor is the current role model for promoting celebrities, if not neccessarily the ones it is purportedly creating. I’ve been looking at the rise of Cheryl Cole; the Independent asked for my opinion on her success. It all ties in rather nicely with Madam Arcati’s timely piece.

“She is a phenomenon of the moment,” I told the Independent. “There is a time and place for opportunities driven by The X Factor. Marketing is built to capitalise on the moment. With every level of pop, it’s going to be transient. It’s about harvesting the brand at its prime, and knowing their sell by date is firmly tattooed on their arse. There’s no long-term future with Cheryl Cole. You drill your marketing through the ears listening at that moment in time to the music. They’re sinking the drill into the deep well and sucking up the crude while it’s where it is.”

You could say the same about the X Factor and, if the missing Times article is to be believed, the people behind it know this and are pushing to squeeze out every last drop of milk whilst they still can…

There is no doubt that Barnum would have loved Britain’s Got Talent – a cost-effective format that gathers a collection of strange and strangely determined people into its fold and pushes their saleability, if they have any, to the hilt. It’s nothing new – Russell Birdwell conducted star searches for Selznick International back in the 1930s, the Harry Potter films made a public search for their star. The only new thing in the mix is the ability to spread word on the show’s latest runaway idol to the world in seconds flat via YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and the blogosphere.

Cowell is a remarkable man, who puts the business into show with enormous skill. With Britain’s Got Talent, he has recognised, as Barnum did, that there is a vast well of public desire to ogle. They invest briefly in the people that X Factor and Britain’s Got Talent draw out of the woodwork, admire them and root for them for a time when the sing or perform well – within a certain set of strictures – and then watch as they sink slowly and unwillingly back into oblivion.

There is a huge appetite for the fairytale ending on TV shows such as Britain’s Got Talent, but beyond the fairytale endings, real life isn’t that simple. The audience is always going to want to know what happens next. The pressure of expectation, especially on a global scale, is enough to make anyone crack, let alone a woman with learning difficulties who has been plucked from obscurity and plunged into the vast acid bath of fame. Susan Boyle may be an ugly duckling who has become a swan, but what happens when the public find the next ugly duckling to swoon over? What it amounts to, from either end of the process, is too much pressure on the shoulders of Susan Boyle.

Susan Boyle is very unlikely to be anything but a one hit wonder. I’ll stick my neck out and say that it may well be a mega-hit on the back of all the euphoria because yes, she has a very good voice. Britain’s Got Talent has lifted her from obscurity, but the trouble is it also seems to expect her to deal with the pressures of fame on a scale that nobody could have predicted. The show side-steps the well-worn cliché of the long pub tours and constant struggle that has marked the progress to fame in the past – a process which was still no guarantee of steeling the acts it produced for the sudden onrush of the corrosive processes of mega-fame. Despite the quality of Boyle’s voice and the willingness of the public to love her at the moment, I still can’t see this as a lasting love affair.

I’m not attacking Susan Boyle when I say that I don’t think that people will pay to see her perform in six months time. I just don’t think she’s got the wherewithal to withstand the pressures of fame and I don’t believe the public will stick with her, because too many of them are too in love with the moment of her transformation to consider or care what happens beyond the happy ever after moment of that one big hit, other than to watch her implode. She is not a role model because there is no room for role models in the world of ‘pile ‘em high and sell ‘em cheap’ celebrity.

What I am attacking is the process, the public expectation, the weight being placed on Boyle’s shoulders. As I told the Times, “’You can’t pluck somebody with those issues and fix them overnight. This has been a fantastic soap opera for the fame-makers, Syco [Simon Cowell’s record label] and Talkback TV. I’m not suggesting that they are cynical and deliberately looking to exploit, but they have got their eye on the buck. They’ve done very well out of Paul Potts and they want to see what they can make out of this. We are beginning to see more and more people who are casualties of the process. Jade Goody was over. She was resurrected by her illness.’”

If Boyle overcomes the caustic nature of fame and makes a real go of it – wonderful! I’ll gladly be proved wrong. But I honestly believe that she will have one huge hit and then slowly disappear, most likely because the public will have found another fairytale to follow. If that happens, I just hope the realization that it’s all gone away doesn’t destroy an already palpably fragile woman. She doesn’t deserve that.

“Mark Borkowski, who represents Noel Edmonds, said: ‘We’ve just passed through the over-inflated times. Ross has a huge following and the audiences love him, but with controversy like this the commercial broadcasters don’t want to annoy their advertisers.’

“But any decision to try to drop Ross may have unwelcome consequences, Mr Borkowski said. The presenter is represented by Addison Creswell, whose firm, Off The Kerb, also has on its books such in-demand stars as the comedians Jack Dee and Jo Brand. Mr Borkowski said: ‘Addison Cresswell has a stellar cast of talent that all broadcasters want. When you have a roll call of talent like that in your stable, you have huge bargaining power. Would you want to go into battle with that?’

“Ross has said that he has an affinity with the BBC and that he enjoys the fact that he can both appear on television, on his Friday Night With Jonathan Ross show, as well as his Radio 2 Saturday show. Were he to leave the BBC, he could look to follow the lead of Ricky Gervais, who has laid claim to the title of producing the world’s most downloaded podcast, independently of any broadcaster, with an average of 295,000 per episode. After establishing the success of the format, Gervais resolved to charge £4 for four instalments of the programme.

“Russell Brand does not enter the same league as Ross when it comes to pay, and is thought to pick up about £200,000 a year for his radio show.

“He has carefully cultivated a following in the US, where his foppish image has met with bemusement and celebration in equal measure. Last month, however, he angered many Americans by describing President Bush as a ‘retarded cowboy’ as he hosted the MTV Video Music Awards.

“‘They are a lot more anxious about these things over in the US,’ Mr Borkowski said. ‘This controversy will pedal across the water.’”

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