He writes about the sometimes bizarre personal behaviour of his colleagues, and asks:

“What is interesting is why politicians take the risk. … My theory is that it’s precisely because of the supreme self-control you have to exercise at the top … Your free-bird instincts want to spring you from that prison of self-control. Then there is the moment of encounter, so exciting, so naughty, so lacking in self-control.

“Suddenly you are transported out of your world of intrigue … and put on a desert island of pleasure, out of it all, released, carefree … It’s an explosion of irresponsibility in an otherwise responsible life.”

Alice Thomson in today’s The Times amusingly remarks that Tony stops just short of advocating adultery as a form of stress relief. But she notes how the white lie of former prime minister Stanley Baldwin that “we are a Cabinet of faithful husbands” ended under Blair. She quotes him saying:

“They [the public] now understand, they empathise, and to some extent they indulge.”

Former Thatcherite minister Cecil Parkinson was never forgiven for fathering a child with Sarah Keays in the 1980s. Fallen Tory minister and now sports commentator David Mellor will always be defined by Antonia de Sancha sucking his toe, says Thomson. But former New Labour ministers Robin Cook, John Prescott and David Blunkett are now more likely to be assessed on their political records or even their croquet playing than their off-side affairs with women, she adds.

I’d love it to be true. But the signs are not good. Foreign Secretary William Hague’s special adviser has just resigned over “untrue and malicious” allegations made against him. Supposedly the two shared a room on the election campaign trail more than once. Who cares what two men did in a hotel room? Their families, perhaps. But the rest of us don’t give a damn if the married shadow and then actual Foreign Secretary is gay or bisexual or not. It would be rather fun if he declared himself a modern metrosexual man in the style of David Beckham, and then still denied the charges.

Of course it doesn’t seem all that likely that a millionaire author would need to bunk up with a staffer as though he were a broke sportsman or musician on tour. But there you go. And one might conjecture why if the events were wholly innocent why WH didn’t just show the media the finger. Though it is plausible that WH felt his wife’s dignity was owed a full-on denunciation of the hacks and their innuendo. Mind you, if the accusations were true, it would still be proper for WH to lie his head off in the style of Hollywood’s “A Guide For The Married Man“, directed with a light touch by Gene Kelly, for the sake of anyone he cared about who cared.

Tony Blair is fluent in French and he has made French values (Swiss, Italian and German ones, too) almost acceptable in British public life. Surely, given that boost, now is the time for David Cameron to say in defence of Hague and his adviser – “move on, it is at worst a family matter. It is of no concern of ours. By all accounts the adviser is a star and good at his job. Both men deny ever having a relationship. Let’s call next business, please”.

I’ll come back to the meat of Tony’s memoirs when I’ve read them myself. But here’s a few first impressions. There’s something very confusing and masked in Tony Blair’s book. Sure, it is confessional: Princess Diana-style. But is it honest about the big issues? My first take is that Tony is all over-the-place and gushing in the book. That’s not helpful when one is interested in finding a rational core to what went on. But then again, his was a three-term emotional roller-coaster of a government from beginning to end. His memoirs, I suppose, were always going to be about him and how he feels and felt, rather than what really went on and why.

Available now: Blair’s memoir A Journey (Hutchinson) priced £25.

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Tony Blair knew he might as well have kept the money he’s going to earn from his book for all the love giving it away would get him. But he also knew he didn’t need the money; that it was blood money; that he owed it to the soldiers. And, he knew that he needed to de-taint the book if it was going to be read, which is what mattered most to him. With a controversial gift, which in itself attracts readers and interest, he decontaminated the brand, not his, but the book’s.

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Crampton says that man does not live by scrubbed pavements alone, and he’s right. In Zurich city as night falls, across the road from the opera house, along the beautiful lakeside promenade near Bellevue, you’ll find hundreds of teenagers loitering. At their feet will be crates of cheap supermarket-bought booze. It’s binge-drinking and joint-smoking time. They create a right mess, which they leave behind for others to clean. But what’s weird to us Brits is that there’s no police in sight and there’s no public stink about it.

When the kids are suitably tanked up they head for the city’s night clubs to take harder drugs and dance. Again, they are left alone to get on with it. Of course, like the underage drinking, cannabis and hard drugs are illegal, but the young have little to fear from the law on Friday and Saturday nights as they openly flout it.

There’s a freedom at play in Zurich that you won’t find in London anymore. But if a fight starts the police suddenly appear on the scene in force. They go in hard because young people sometimes carry knives (Swiss law regarding weapons is relaxed until you try to use one on somebody else). However the courts – unlike the police – are likely to treat the kids gently, which amazes the Germans whose laws are much tougher.

In so-called Swiss-style, Zurich’s left-wing and Green authorities recently ruled that bars showing the World Cup in South Africa on TV must turn the sound off. This decision struck most people as silly in a small city that allows 500 bars and clubs to open after midnight. The authorities heard the protest and allowed the sound.

Noise is a major issue in Switzerland. In my village on Zurich’s Gold Coast the one thing you must not do is make a racket. There is a pervading calmness and church-like silence, which the odd laugh, bark, kid or lawnmower pierces. There’s hardly anybody on the streets. In such places you feel the numbness of Switzerland’s inward-looking family-orientated village life.

As I see it, Zurich city is a sanity-saving zone. It provides easy-going relief from the close-knit, sometimes stultifying, small towns and villages in which most of Switzerland’s population live.

Bunburying Gnomes: How the elite plays away

The Gnomes of Zurich are practicised masters of Bunburying between the city and their local communities. Unlike in the UK, they’ve never had to worry about being exposed by the tabloid press. There’s little appetite among the Swiss public for knowing what people get up to away from home. Well, so long as they don’t do what one billionaire did when he took underage girls back to his suite at the super-elite Dolder Hotel at 3 a.m. and ended up in prison.

Gnomes cannot rock ‘n’ roll in their garden, outside their house, in the village square, or be seen the worse for wear by their neighbours, except at Zurich’s Street Parade or the local Chilbi. But if they head for Zurich centre they can sample freely almost any bohemian flavour they fancy. Yes, Swiss Germans are wonderfully contradictory.

One of the great attractions of Zurich, besides contemporary art collections, cinemas, circuses, modern cuisine, museums, trams and trains, is the skiing nearby. And what’s striking is how in winter the partying moves partly from Zurich city to places like Davos and St. Moritz. Posh they might be, but both ski resorts are buzzing with all night romping, some drug-taking, loads of boozing and the boisterousness you once found in Brighton and Blackpool, before New Labour outlawed a good night out. But that’s the fun that British university students and the British upper-middle-classes still outrageously pursue after pretending to ski on the piste.

Yet middle-aged families (I’m talking about mine here) can safely take their kids out at night in a ski resort or in Zurich city. That is so long as they don’t slip on the icy streets, and so long as they know which streets to avoid at 3 am. What’s more, there’s plenty to do in both places for people of all ages and lifestyles.

So here comes some advice to Mr. Crampton from a British PR based in Zurich. Next time you spend a couple of days in a city, I suggest that you do more than walk the streets on a quiet Sunday morning before you traduce it in The Times.

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Alexievich’s book provides insight into the personal experience of victims of the world’s worst nuclear accident, arguably man’s greatest industrial accident. One cannot but be moved by the stories the voices tell. They make for morbid, yet compulsive reading.

Begins
In unrelenting monologues, “Voices from Chernobyl” relates the reminiscences of those caught up in events way beyond the bounds of normal experience. One city and 485 villages abandoned, more than 116,000 people forced to leave their homes. Millions more were told that they now lived on contaminated land – their own and their children’s lives at risk for generations to come. Only war or revolution can compare, but then most of the victims who survive those normally return home when it is all over.

There is something uplifting about the stoic acceptance and will to recover shown by many of these victims: “Our husbands died the same year, they were in Chernobyl together, but she’s already planning to get married. I’m not condemning her – that’s life. You need to survive. She has kids.” On the other hand, the book also exposes the pessimism that can afflict human nature, which produces a fatalism that paralyses people, when they lose faith in their ability to shape their own destiny: “We’re going to die, we’re going to die. By year 2000, there won’t be any Belarussians left.” This is a Jekyll and Hyde story.

Many of the locals heard and circulated myths. The authorities were said to have buried the dead from nearby villages in mass graves. Whole populations were supposed to be destined for transfer to Siberia. There were rumours of holding camps being prepared behind Chernobyl to contain and monitor victims before they died. New-born were said to have yellow fluid instead of blood. An apocryphal escaped prisoner hiding in the thirty-kilometre zone became so radioactive the prison would not take him back. Stolichnaya Vodka was believed to provide the best protection against strontium and cesium; two bottles being more effective than one.

Then there were the more credible myths. Hundreds of thousands of people were believed to have met an early death by 1995, millions more were said to be seriously ill. Official-looking reports claimed that children in large numbers were being born with deformities, immune deficiencies and leukaemia, all because of Chernobyl.

There are true tales too, of heroism and love. The voice of Lyudmilla Ignatenko is remarkable; her devotion to her husband unmistakable. He and his colleagues Titenok, Pravik and Tischura, “kicked the graphite with their feet” in a desperate attempt to douse the flames their fire brigade unit discovered on the scene soon after the reactor exploded. They all died seven or so days later in Moscow, and were buried in special leak-proof coffins. What happened to the millions of affected inhabitants living in the neighbourhood afterwards is also well tackled in this book.

“Voices of Chernobyl” tells of drunks asking big questions: “Gorbachev and Licachev [then Gorbachev’s rival], Stalin. Are we a great empire, or not; will we defeat the Americans, or not?” It was 1986: “whose airplanes are better, whose spaceships are more reliable? Well, okay, Chernobyl blew up, but we put the first man in space.”

They got their answer in 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed. There were now three republics handling their affairs, as opposed to one empire, and two of them were so new they barely existed. Chaos ensued. Most of the liquidators went home immediately.

Suddenly, taxi drivers in Kiev could earn a more reliable income than a nuclear power plant director.

It might have been one of the last “Soviet” experiences to befall the USSR, but it was also a typical one. It had its villains, including “comrade” Gorbachev whose first instinct was to cover it all up, only to abandon this approach when it became impossible to sustain. He went on to hasten the demise of his crumbling empire; today he is a born-again environmentalist. Chernobyl had its heroes in the fire fighters, liquidators and scientists who did a magnificent and unselfish job cleaning up the mess. Its victims also played their various parts, but never knew whether anything they were told was anything like the truth.

In “Voices”, “liquidator” Arkady Filin tells the story of his father’s memory of defending Moscow in World War II: “I sat in a trench. Shot my rifle. Got buried by an explosion. They dug me out half-alive. That’s it. And back then, my wife left me.” It was years before he learned from films and books that he had been part of a great historical event.

Filin’s point is pertinent. “Voices of Chernobyl” does not grapple objectively with its subject – or pretend that victims understand the wider picture.  The interviews merely record well the confused views of those who suffered. But to do those people justice we need to do more than rely on their impressions. We need to rely on science and study. Otherwise the debilitating angst that most observers confirm to be real and to afflict millions of people in the region will continue.

As with many other issues, scientific opinion regarding Chernobyl is counter-intuitive. There is a massive gap between the scale of the disaster and the official death toll. Anybody aged over 35 will remember the radioactive cloud over Europe and they will know something of the evacuees, abandoned cities and exclusion zones. When scientists say that they observed very few serious physical health problems directly attributable to Chernobyl – including no deformities, few, if any, leukaemia or solid cancers – accusations of a cover-up will be listened to.

Even a cursory look at the margins of the exclusion zone reveals thousands of real people who are sick and disabled, many of them children, most of them elderly, who live in the shadow of a major catastrophe. The region’s mental health has certainly been undermined by such visions, particularly in relation to children – but that does not mean radiation was responsible for their health problems. Neither does it make the case for abandoning science for superstition and intuition.

The so-called good news, because it is still awful, from scientists is promoted by the Chernobyl Forum and endorsed by eight UN agencies and the governments of Belarus, Ukraine and Russia. They confirm that less than 50 people were killed and the worst that could happen in the future is that 4000 lives could be, but may not be, ended prematurely. In their view, much of the land that was evacuated can now be reused for farming and repopulated safely.

There are, however, respectable voices to suggest that the figure of 4000 may be a tenfold underestimate – depending on the parameters and methodology used to measure the accident’s impact on human health. There are wilder – much less credible – claims that 500,000 have already died in Ukraine alone. But whether the “real” number of fatalities over decades is 4000 or 40,000, scientists face the same problem communicating their facts to world fed on a diet of more macabre accounts by the media and anti-nuclear campaigners.

In the final analysis, Svetlana Alexievich uses her “Voices of Chernobyl” to suggest that the wilder claims have credibility. The dustcover and blurb promoting the book tell us to believe that there has been a conspiracy.  Svetlana’s own illness is attributed to Chernobyl as the price she paid for researching the book – yet immune deficiency is not a disease caused by radiation. Hers is a call for faith in ignorance. Her own voice does a disservice to the victims and reinforces the misinformation that has caused so much damage. But in years to come the voices she records will provide a haunting reminder of Chernobyl, and a valuable one at that.

ends

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Promoting his book in The Times Kaletsky says that after the recent crash capitalism is in a period of transition comparable to the 1930s and 1970s. As a leading US diplomat told him:

“Since the crisis, developing countries have lost interest in the old Washington consensus that promoted democracy and liberal economics. Wherever I go in the world, governments and business leaders talk about the new Beijing consensus — the Chinese route to prosperity and power. The West must come up with a new model of capitalism that’s consistent with our political values. Either we reinvent ourselves or we will lose.”

Kaletsky remarks that at Davos the world’s leaders were in denial. Instead of thinking about the future, it was easier to focus on the past, to quibble about regulations and argue about who was to blame.

Kaletsky thinks governments everywhere will interefere more on economics and maybe less on welfare.

I agree. There’s some big changes coming and it is time we discussed the choices we face.

It strikes me that Kaletsky’s book could be the catalyst that sparks the debate about issues such as:

• How will the West compete with China and India?
• Is Kaletsky right that the world has to choose either a Chinese or a Western model of capitalism?
• Will China remain overtly nationalistic and the West broadly globalising?
• How does AGW fit into this?
• How will the West define optimum state economic interference?
• Will the governing elite find economic policy hard to sell to voters?
• Will international competition lower the chances of bells-and-whistles CSR?

Richard Edelman I fear is on the wrong track when he predicts that Kaletsky’s findings fit well with the dominant messaging emanating from CEOs at this year’s Davos:

“The new expectation of business is as a social actor, doing well while doing good. There is a continuum for business executives, from sole reliance on philanthropy to a more complex change of business process to incorporate sustainability into operations.

My first observation is that CEOs were in denial when they belittled the importance of shareholder value and shareholders. My second is that change is about instability and that does not fit well with sustainability. My third is that the good that business does is business done well. The Edelman approach separates “doing good” from “doing well” as if there was something wrong or embarrassing or negative about the core function of business. The Chinese, on the other hand, have no such doubts about the virtue of business done well.

But we are agreed that things are about to happen. We are agreed that there’s a great debate to be had. And once again, even when I disagree with him, I say hats off to Richard Edelman for raising our horizons and for being at the forefront of discussion. The debate has begun. Watch this space.

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I was raised in Elm Park, having been born in nearby Romford. Elm Park was and remains almost exclusively white, lower working class. It is perhaps the most chav chav-town in chavdom.

The Times gets a warm welcome at the Elm Park Pub from the BNP

Built in the late 1930s, Elm Park was designed to attract young working class families seeking to escape the worst of London’s smog. Its housing consists of well-built three-bedroomed semi-detached properties with back and front gardens. Its streets are tree-lined. There’s a healthy mixture of council houses and privately owned homes in an urban setting on the edge of London’s greenbelt, wedged between Dagenham and Hornchurch. There’s parks nearby and a very good swimming pool. It has much going for it.

My parents arrived and met in Elm Park just before the Second World War. They lived next door to each other. My dad’s a Hackney boy and my mum’s from East Ham. They went to school across the road from Hornchurch airdrome, which played a major part in the Battle of Britain.

My father pays homage every year to an American airman who crash-landed his plane into the playground wall rather than risk smashing into their classroom by attempting to fly over it. The class saw the plane fly away from them and explode. They were covered in glass. The boy next to my father was injured for life. And ever since, the old boys meet annually at the pilot’s grave to say thanks to the Yank. Yes, there’s a good heart in Elm Park.

There was plenty of work in the early days. There was a massive Ford factory in Dagenham, as well as the pharmaceutical company May & Baker. There was Roneo Vickers, then Britain’s largest manufacturer of office machinery. And, not least, there were London’s East End docks working at full capacity.

My dad worked on the buses as a conductor. My mother worked at May & Baker. My grandmothers worked at Roneo Vickers. One grandfather was a leading communist shop steward at Ford’s (he left the party in 1956 in protest against the crushing of the Hungarian uprising by the Soviet Union) the other was a self-employed Tory-voting builder.

But something went wrong in Elm Park. Part of the problem was the run-down, then closure, of both Ford’s plant and London’s docks. But seeing as we were connected to the rest of London by the tube, I don’t buy that explanation for my town’s decline.

Elm Park began its big slide from working class respectability to chavdom in the early 1970s. Elm Park somehow came to embody all that was worst about Britain’s loss of direction at that time. The kids got out of control. We glorified in football hooliganism and ignorance. Our low-grade local schools told us we were there to be trained as manual workers. We said “stuff that”, we don’ want to be like our parents.

For many the rebellion meant giving up on education and ambition. For a few, like me, it meant going up the ladder.

Since the 1970s, the Elm Park pub has been the haunt of gangsters, druggies and football hooligans. I learned to drink and to fight there. The room in which the BNP met was where I practiced karate. Its adjacent bar was where I had many a-run-in with local toughs. As 16-year-olds we got drunk and watched the strippers there on Sunday lunch-times (imagine a mob of 150 baying adrenaline-driven yobs screaming at the girls to get their kit off). The police tried many times to have the pub shut.

Today, the town has a run-down early 1960s feel that’s more “up north” than “down south”. There’s boarded up shops, cheap clothes and food, a very bad cafe and an Indian restaurant which serves abusive racists once the pub shuts. Gangs of young kids roam the streets – it’s an intimidating place to be.

Yet, still, I remember that my gang of West Ham United thugs was a mixture of black and white. Some of us used to leave the footie on Saturdays to help the Socialist Workers’ Party beat up National Fronters, some of whom were our school mates.

I can’t put my finger on Elm Park’s decline. I also don’t want to go blind to the good that remains (hey, that’s my home and I’ve friends still there) or to sell its decent residents short. Any quick tour of my town’s back streets will reveal the pride many still take in their homes and gardens. Most people avoid the Elm Park pub. They take the train or bus to Upminster or Hornchurch instead. There’s many hard-working people living there.

As I sit in my villa by Zurich’s lakeside, I’m still inspired by the best things in the Elm Park I knew. I’ll be forever grateful to many of its old folk (including my parents and a couple of cops who once roughed me up and then lectured me) who set me straight and told me to get a life, get organised, clean up my act, get educated, and get out of town, when I was kid. But part of me regrets ever leaving its streets. Yesterday I wish I’d been there to tell the BNP to f-off.

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What did we expect from him? He’s a footballer, not a saint. He’s not a role model for how we expect our kids to behave either. I particularly take exception to how footballers are allowed to spit on the pitch live on TV. That’s disgusting. But I wouldn’t accept that a child of mine – or a child near me – could spit with impunity because he’s seen it on-field, on telly. Better to tell kids that extraordinary people can get away with dreadful stuff, and maybe when they grow and get to be extraordinary, they can too. But not yet, thank you, not on my watch. (Better keep that rap for your own kids: dishing out advice in public needs to be carefully-judged.)

Anyhoo. As Max Clifford, whose understanding of sporting reputations is second to none, said yesterday on BBC Breakfast TV, true football fans – that’s millions and millions of Brits – are not bothered by who or how many Terry allegedly bedded.

Sponsors don’t care much either. If Terry’s sponsors wanted to avoid all hint of scandal they would not have sponsored any footballers in the first place. No more than Kate Moss’s sponsors were surprised when their heroin-chic-looking model was exposed as being an authentic serial coke abuser. The sad truth was that the suspicion that she was debauched was what made her attractive in the first place.

However, sponsorship and humbug are inseparable. Kate Moss first lost and then got back her sponsorship deals. Today she earns more than ever from them. I predict that Tiger Woods will do the same – when he gets out of sex-rehab – and so will John Terry.

Even the great West Ham and England legend Bobby Moore got himself arrested in Bogota, Colombia, for stealing a bracelet six days before the 1970 World Cup in Mexico. Moore was also a notorious late night boozer, a womaniser (behind his wife’s back) and he was rumoured to have been involved in some dodgy business deals. So what? He’s still Britain’s most famous, most revered footballing hero.

But, and it’s quite a big But. Everyone in the public needs to remember that whilst views on private morality have changed a bit, expectations of honesty have changed a lot. The modern trick seems to be that you do not have to tell “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth”. You can tell people to mind their own business, for a start. You can stay schtumm, if you do it prettily or wryly, or whatever. But avoid lying. There was a time when people understood hyprocrisy and though they probably still do, really, you’re fair game if you’re caught out.

So here’re a few rules that might come in useful to stars and their PRs managing similar risks to John Terry and the late Booby Moore:

• Don’t let PRs sell the politically-correct narrative of your personal life.

• Don’t use personal virtues as a shield to promote your professional ones.

• Headlines about your personal virtues are hostages to fortune.

• Avoid the temptation to indulge in moral outbursts on any topic.

• Don’t bring your personal life to work or include it in your PR.

• Those who live by the sword die by it

• Don’t lecture anyone (especially not your staff or your adoring fans) about personal morality.

• Always assume that everything always gets into the media in the end.

• The public love sinners and loathe saints.

Once the story’s out – shrug, smile and tell people to mind their own business (and grovel in rehab while the heat’s on if need be).

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The two Davids are every bit as respectable as Roman Abramovich, Ken Bates or the Glazer family and any other football club owners you could care to mention.

Besides, to be frank, football’s not a squeaky-clean, stodgy, middle-class, anally retentive, joined-up-writing kind of a game. Maybe you’ve noticed? Indeed, the more the world goes in for the tick-box respectability of litigation-averse no-school-trip hi-viz safety-first outdoor-heating smoking dens, the more a large chunk of humanity seeks out the wild-side.

Football fans – from all backgrounds – secretly want a break from the goody-goody new world.

So, for example, England fans dreaming of World Cup glory don’t care what Wayne Rooney did with 45 quid and a 48-year-old grandmother of 16 in a Liverpool brothel.

West Ham fans are not especially impressed by the fact that both our Davids are local boys made good, or that there would hardly be a man or woman on the all-seating stands who hasn’t helped plump up the bank balances of the new owners. We don’t care that they are former East End barrow boys and life-long Hammers’ fans. No more than I was impressed when hapless local boy, and my former school dinner monitor, Glenn Roeder, was once made manager of our team.

We don’t care a monkey’s fart either that one of the Davids once played for our youth team.

No, we want their cash and their commitment to our club. That’s it and it’s a lot. As David Sullivan said today: “It makes no commercial sense to buy this club.” Not with its £110 million’s worth of debt.

Football is a high risk investment. Just like newspaper publishing it attracts adrenalin-driven buccaneers with big egos. They invest for the kudos, influence and sense of power that comes from owning something hundreds of thousands of others are crazy about and which pits their wits and skills against similar titans of their ilk.

Owning a football club is a bit like owning a red Ferrari, fur coat or a yacht. It says you’ve arrived and are enjoying life’s thrills and spills. Just when you’re having to live behind security grilles you can spend Saturday afternoons as a sort of Pleb’s Caesar hoovering up the roar of the crowd and sort of loved by it.

The problem with our last owner was that he was an Icelandic billionaire with a penchant for spending other people’s money in his day job as a banker and at West Ham United. The bad news today is that CB Holding, whose main shareholder is troubled Icelandic bank Straumur, still owns 50% of the club, but the good news is that they’ve relinquished control to the two Davids.

So it’s good riddance to bankrupt stupidity and hello to new ambition from the two nutters bred in London’s East End smog. (Ah, the good-old, bad-old days of real pollution you could stub a toe on.)

Taking what strikes me as a sensible approach, they plan to attract more rich investors – and fans – to share their financial risk. Setting out their stall, here’s what David Sullivan said today on WHUFC.com:

“Our first priority has to be securing the Premier League status of West Ham. I believe the players at this club have shown great commitment in trying circumstances and the new board and I will get behind them in every way we can.

“We will also look to bring in new players to supplement the squad where needed once we have met with the manager.”

And here’s what he told the BBC:

“We have short-term and long-term goals. In the short term, we want to stay in the Premier League and in the long term we would like to be challenging for the top four and the Champions League.”

Come On You Irons!

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I’m from nearby Elm Park on London’s East End border. Ian defined my white working class identity, theatrically and parodically thuggish, gaudily irreverent. Bits of Byron and bits of Mr Pastry thrown in. He was more art school than me (and back then, the difference between art school, university, technical college and plain worker was quite something).

Ian embodied English white working class culture long before my clan recognised the chip on their own shoulder. But this was suburban streets working class – lower middle really – not even your two-up, two-down terrace (later your seven-storey, deck access) working class. His was no racist spat. He was a Bohemian with an attitude problem, aesthetic aspirations, with a bully-or-be-bullied cockney swagger. And then there was the limp, which made him sit up and fly right in a way.

For all his career I identified with his roots and vast grasp of the world of music, poetic lyrics and his f***-you, leave-me-alone guttural gruff Essex-boy bellow. During my teens I pushed fruit & veg barrows on Saturdays on Romford Market, and on Sundays I unloaded the van and manned the stall selling blankets and bedspreads on Peitticoat Lane, Wentworth Street. I knew where Ian was coming from: his father drove somebody else’s Rolls Royce, my father worked on the back of somebody else’s Routemaster bus.

I left Dury Falls Secondary Modern in 1975 with no qualifications. (Even my school in Upminster Bridge was a punning homage to my later hero.) I was into football violence and Motown. Friday’s and Saturdays were for getting drunk and punch ups.

My first job was as a railway operating apprentice on London’s Underground. I lasted one day. I phoned my mum from White City tube station and told her I’d resigned because uniforms with caps were not for me.

Instead, I enrolled at Havering Technical College. Everybody was shocked – I’d failed both maths and English at school. What people didn’t know was that when I was bunking off school (I was rarely there in the final year) I was wasn’t out causing trouble. I was touring London’s museums. I was gate-crashing lectures at the Science Museum, Victoria & Albert and the British Museum put on for other schools’ parties. My horizons were being widened.

I knew there was a better world out there than wasting my life in the Elm Park Hotel, as rough an East End boozer as ever there was, or at Zero Six in South End, with its Kermit Pogo Stick Double Ups and onstage knees-ups. So I told London Underground to do the other thing and set out on my great adventure to develop myself.

At Havering Technical College I was a chaotic disaster. I spent too much time flirting in the Spencers Arms at lunch time to ever stand a chance of passing my exams. But from the students’ union events I found arty films, left wing politics, Ian Dury and how to lose badly at poker (no logical connection).

I was never fully comfortable with punk, which like the hippies I dubbed middle class wankers. Motown became boring. I needed something more grown up, more modern, more me. The Clash appealed, I’ll admit. I liked the Sex Pistols, but couldn’t stand their act-tough but soft fans. I sang Tom Robinson’s Glad to be Gay at the Victoria Park anti-racist gig in 1978. Those were empowering times that opened our working class eyes to new ideas.

I’ve never forgotten seeing Ian Dury and The Blockheads at Hammersmith Odeon. During the break my gorgeous companion distracted the man behind the kiosk in the foyer with a full-on view of her bust while I stole a large box of Maltesers. It was very Ian Dury:

In my yellow jersey, I went out on the nick.
South Street Romford, shopping arcade
Got a Razzle magazine, I never paid
Inside my jacket and away double quick.
Good sense told me, once was enough
But I had a cocky eye on more of this stuff
With the Razzle in my pocket, back to have another peek

If the film lives up to the great reviews it has been getting, I’m gonna be in for a treat.

If anyone had told me, back then, that I’d be living in perhaps Switzerland’s most prosperous village, on Zurich’s lakeside, amongst the billionaires, bankers, oligarchs and entrepreneurs, I’d have said they were Barking as well as Romford. Reasons to be cheerful? You bet!

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Roman represents the future of our trade. His quality of thought is becoming more common – though far from common enough – across the in-house and agency world.

Roman Geiser

He embodies how PR is maturing as a business under a new generation’s leadership as it enters its Golden Age.

His take on things ranges from radical ideas for repositioning Swiss banks, to questioning the effectiveness of the S in CSR.  He’s prepared to think big about what disintermediation could do for his clients, while staying alert to the possible downsides for society as a whole. He is cleverly nuanced about social media (a tad over-enthusiastic for my taste, but there you go).

He joined the agency world seven years ago. His background was as a public affairs lobbyist for an umbrella organisation of Swiss businesses. Then he was hired by Jäggi Burson-Marsteller, a formerly family-owned business based in Zurich and Bern, which was bought by BM, Young & Rubicam.

So, as he readied himself for his journey as a PR agency EMEA COO, I asked him to give us an insight in to his business and thinking. Here’s the outcome:

Strategy, evidence and today’s market

PS: I’d like you to describe what the recession has done to your clients, to explain how well your business in EMEA has fared.

RG:  It really depends market by market and positioning by positioning of each unit we have in our organisation. In Switzerland, we work for industries such as energy, pharmaceuticals and food.  If you take those three industries, they’re doing pretty well in the recession.

We see a clear trend to specialisation and focus.  The mid-sized agencies in this market – those offering 360 degree service – have an issue. Clients either want an agency that really understands their business, or an agency with functional or specialist expertise, for instance agencies that are 100% specialised in digital media and social media.  So there is a need for all agencies to find a sweet spot.

We see a certain cautiousness. There’s a psychological impact on even healthy businesses. Investments are taken more slowly than before.

Some services have become commoditised.  However the more strategically an agency is positioned the better it is protected from the crisis.  So offering product PR in the fast moving consumer goods area, for example, has become a low margin business.  Or even doing financial communications around standard transactions like public offerings has become internalised by banks and commoditised.

That means the higher up the value chain you are, and the better the quality of service you offer, the better off you are during the crisis.  Services like doing press releases, or just media relations in multi markets – those are not services where you can differentiate your brand. They are really price-based discussions which put your margins under pressure.

Burson-Marsteller is known in the industry as being extremely strategic. Of course, all agencies claim that!

PS: What exactly does ‘strategic’ mean?

GS:  If I take the Swiss example, we are very successful in healthcare.  We have a team of scientists here.  We have four medical doctors and a professor at Rockefeller University.  You need that kind of calibre to really bring evidence to the table to provide analysis. Then you can have a discussion with the client based on “This is the existing mindset and this how we get to where we want to go”. For me, that insight and knowledge and in-depth analysis based on qualitative and quantitative research is evidence-based.  And it starts at the beginning of a project.

Froth on the boom’s coffee or the caffeine in the latte?

PS: Do you agree with me that PR was guilty of putting the froth on the late boom’s coffee? Or put another way, if bankers have had to say sorry, do we need to, too?

RG: I understand where you’re coming from. One of the key reasons to have a PR agency, or a trusted advisor, is to bring critical faculty to the table and to ask the right questions. And, for sure, in certain industries the PR industry profited from the hype and we were part of the overall economic system.  At the same time, I believe there were great attempts to warn and also to support CEOs in their function.

PS: To warn?

RG: Yes to warn. You like to quote Dr Leslie Gaines-Ross on your blog. She recently highlighted how the trend from celebrity CEO to credibility CEO, more of “please show me” and not just the glamour stuff, began some four or five years ago. And that’s a kind of clear anti-hype warning that came from the PR industry itself.

Burson-Marsteller tried to engage the Swiss Bankers Association, for instance, in some pre-emptive reputational research during the boom. But what do you do when a decision-maker tells me “Thanks for your advice but we don’t have an issue”? That’s why I feel we did our job properly.

What kind of capitalism comes next?

PS: Will the new boom produce a different capitalism, particularly considering that the world’s most dynamic economies are going to be amongst its least democratic?

RG: I don’t think that there will be new models to capitalism.  I mean, it’s a pretty well established domain, right? There will be a new global balance of economies being at the table as equals with with the US in some fields.  That, I believe, is certainly more than a trend.

PS: Is there a new morality to capitalism?

RG: First, capitalism is not anti-moral. Second it’s been in practice for decades. So it won’t have a new shape or new dimensions in future.

I wouldn’t jump to saying: “Here is the new global regime with new power bases”. For instance, I still see the US, just by its historic capability for revitalisation, reinvention and innovation, as a strong leader and player in the future.  But it’s interesting to see that the most recent growth and first signals for recovery came clearly from China, also from India, but basically from China, which is new.

We shouldn’t underestimate the power of the old economies. In a world which is getting much more complex, with multi-stakeholder management, with so many stakeholder groups having an impact on your business, that calls for managing complexity.  And if you look at the continent which really has experience of managing complexity from language to cultures, it is Europe.

Where is PR headed?

PS: What are the three major three trends that will dominate the PR landscape over the next ten years?

RG: The key trend definitely is social media and digital communications and the shift of paradigm from mass media into more dialogue-oriented communications. That’s a huge shift. But its impact varies from market to market, culture to culture. For instance, Switzerland is highly digitalised, but it also values privacy. People don’t speak up on blogs here, as they do in the UK, and give their opinions.

Second, I would say, is the balance of purpose and performance in an organisation in order to build trust longer term.  It’s basically the question of: “What is the purpose of a corporate, of a multi-national?”.  It’s very often around employees.  It’s around the products and the services for consumers.  So it’s around the mission and vision of a company

The third trend is multi-stakeholder transparency in a globalised world.  Companies operating around the globe need to demonstrate transparency and to explain themselves to many more stakeholders in the age of trend No. 1.

It’s not about structures but about leadership

PS: How will PR agencies change their business models and services?

RG: The first one sounds easy, but it’s extremely complex to make digital communication more than an add-on to your communications programmes. Very often you say “What could we do digitally?  Do we do a website? And yes, there are new trends like Twitter.  We need to offer that in our communications programme”.  And that’s the wrong attitude.  I believe digital or kind of low-cost media needs to become an integrated part of all communication concepts.

At the same time, you need to understand your business extremely well to see the limits of digital social media, such as in pharmaceuticals for obvious regulatory reasons.  Going into it with a kind of hype attitude can be dangerous. It’s new, but it’s more than just a fad. But it’s not a revolution. It’s an evolution. It’s an evolution which brings the business more into the dialogue-oriented sectors of communications.

The multi-stakeholder global trend goes into new agency models, which I believe are going to be more international.  PR agencies are still coming out of the first phase of family-owned businesses with very local business models.  But we are becoming more digital and more international.  Offering that service to your client becomes more and more important.

Of course, managing the matrix of markets and practices in agencies is extremely demanding. It needs people who like to work together. And it starts at the top.  So if you have a management team or market leaders who like each other and work together well, you have the key ingredients for not working in silos any more.  So there is no real ideal structural model. You can have all kind of bonus systems and financial incentives. But what is really needed is investment in a team that works together collaboratively and which produces success stories together. That’s the way to go.

What are reputations made of? A five point list

PS: How would you explain the success of Apple and Ryanair’s PR, both of which, for different reasons and in different ways, seem to do everything wrong, and yet seem to get everything right in terms of their reputation and business strategy?

RG: My explanation would be that it is always multi-dimensional. Let me list the top five elements that create great reputations for firms.

First, is how they develop talent and how attractive are they for potential employees.  Take Apple.  They are doing that extremely successfully.

Second is product and services of high quality.  You can be as digital as you want.  You can be as corporate responsible as you want.  If you don’t get your product right, if you have a problem explaining your hedge fund to your target group because you don’t understand it yourself, you might ask yourself the question, “Is my product really a good product”.  In the case of Apple or Ryanair, they have solid services, good products, which fit into very specific target groups.

Third, transparent leadership structures.

The fourth is financial results and performance. If you drive a business which is financially sound, you create the momentum for a sound reputation. And that brings me to number five.

The last one on my list would be CEO reputation.  And here again both Ryanair and Apple score through the roof on that one.

It is the balance between these five factors creates a good reputation and trust. You do not need to be top on all five. But it’s always a dimension of those aspects.  And other reputation studies maybe have a different ranking. But it’s those that I’ve listed which are the key drivers that count.

Time to ditch the S in CSR? And what is CR about?

PS: Is CSR a marketing tool or a genuine attempt to inject morality into capitalism?

RG: This really comes under my “purpose and performance” answer. Let me explain. I prioritise the  concept of responsibility rather than the social bit of it. That’s because “social” is corporate giving and sponsoring. But corporate responsibility goes to supply chain management and to diversity in the workplace. It goes to labour standards in all kinds of countries. It goes to compliance issues, too.

If you take corporate responsibility or give that angle to CR as a communication platform, we are talking evidence-based communication. We are talking about content and not just about how you brand it or how you position it and how you make a better marketing tool out of it. It is really about how you run your business and how you act responsibly in the roles in which you operate.

Elevator pitch to put Swiss banking back on track

PS: Good to hear. I’ve always advocated dropping the S in CSR and also for promoting business sustainability much more forcibly than we currently do.

Now, moving on. Please pick an unpopular person, institution, firm or country and make an “elevator pitch” for it.

RG: I’d pitch the financial sector in Switzerland.  And what I’d be pitching would have nothing to do with communications.

PS: Okay, go ahead.

RG:  Behaviour drives communications and reputations. It’s all driven by behaviour.  And the first behaviour recommendation I’d make to the Swiss banks would be not to base a product or the financial sector on a system of differentiation of tax evasion and tax fraud.

The only differentiation that matters is excellence in Swiss banking. There are huge assets which come with excellent banking and the positioning of it. So Swiss banks should not hide behind a smart legal differentiation of evasion and fraud. That’s not the way to go.

Second, nobody likes secrets.  We do like privacy, though.  Why is Swiss banking branded “banking secrecy”?  It’s the protection of the individual and the protection of one’s privacy that matters. And that is a different concept.

My third point would be look at self-regulation. I say don’t wait until the regulators push their positions on you.  Self-regulation can be a very healthy way to come out of the crisis stronger and to keep enough room for your core business.

My fourth is look at the products, because the banking products have become too complicated. There are many ways to shape products in more understandable ways. After all, good products, as we discussed earlier, are one of the key drivers of reputations. Products need to be much more transparent. Any risks in those products require a clear assessment of the portfolio. Sometimes in the boom years, the underlying risks were not clear even to specialists working in the field.

Power shifts in media – good news and not so good news

PS:  Ask yourself the question I should have asked you.

RG: A point you haven’t mentioned is the role of old media, if you want. There is right now a power shift of who produces relevant content and who has the power to invest in content?  And that shift goes from media to the PR sector.  It goes to in-house PR, external PR. And as a PR man, I could say it’s a great strength. But as somebody who is socially or politically aware, I would say it can do harm to the balance of democracy, because media have an important role there.  And sizing down all those newspapers, and taking away their ability power to do in-depth research is a problem.

At the same time you have big companies, PR firms basically involved in paid-content production.  It doesn’t mean that the content is not correct, but it always presents one perspective in a discussion and I believe there still needs to be strong media to play a role in public debates.

Certainly, big corporate can become the media. Why not have Nike TV doing sports programmes? But I like the “competition of ideas”. If you want to have a competition you need a few players being part of that competition.

PS: Do you have any closing remarks?

RG: Yes. If you ask our founder Harold Burson what makes a great PR person he says “curiosity”. And I think it is fascinating right now to be a PR person. There are so many things going on. We are challenged more than ever before. There’s loads of opportunity. I think we can say it is a new age, as you say, a golden one.

PS: Thanks. Great stuff, if I may say so.

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