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.

No related pages.

She was out and about in Florida. She was there sending out reassuring PR messages to tourists. She told them not to abandon the Gulf Coast, in other words not to believe all the environmental catastrophe talk they’d been hearing on the news. She reminded the world that:

“There are still thousands of miles of beaches not touched by the spill. There are still opportunities to experience these beautiful beaches,”

She added:

“… folks here in Florida and across the Gulf Coast are still depending on visitors and tourist dollars to put food on their tables and to pay their mortgages and to send their kids to college.

Talking of paying bills. A local restaurant owner by the name of Patronis told the First Lady that oysters were off the seafood menu, not because they weren’t available but because “all the oystermen are working for BP,” leaving few men to scrape the oysters from nearby Apalachicola Bay.

Thank God for Mrs Obama and for the local tourist lobby who briefed her well. Her words couldn’t have been better timed, coming as they did as BP finally – we hope – plugged its deep-sea leaking oil pipe. If all goes well, by August the relief oil wells will have sealed the leak permanently. I predict that we will all be shocked by just how quickly the environment and BP’s reputation recovers.

Of course, my message, and I’m sure Mrs Obama’s message likewise, is not that environmental harm has not been done. The message is simply to keep it all in perspective.

This little incident highlights the power of competing PR agendas. There’s been a lot invested by environmentalists and politicians – not least Mrs Obama’s husband – in traducing BP over this spill. But the criticism was hyped and bordered on scaremongering. That had consequences far beyond BP.

Actually, early on in this crisis, President Obama also found himself stressing how lovely and open most of the Gulf beaches were. His remarks then, even more than Mrs Obama’s now, remind us that catastrophism is a very dangerous weapon. Being doomy is great when you’re trying to deflect blame and raise the stakes, but it’s less good when real hoteliers, for instance, get side-swiped as collateral damage.

The trouble is that it is hundreds of times easier to spread ideas, impressions and images of damage – and make them seem widespread, severe and permanent – than it is to remind people of a nuanced picture. This is an important effect of the media, which is much more the politician’s tool than reality is. The media can make one oiled pelican stand for all nature and for every pelican. Reporters can easily go to the most damaged spot and make it stand for the generality of damage, and make damage seem general.

Anyway, after a few months of uncertainty, noise and safe exaggeration, perhaps Mrs Obama’s remarks will see the beginning of a subtler picture. Of course, we have yet to see what the real damage of the spill is. We’ll know much better about a year from now.  Let’s hope Louisiana has thriving seaside and wildlife tourism between now and then and long after.

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Vision 2050 advocates that big business solves mankind’s major social and environmental problems in partnerships with government and society. The aim is to produce enough food, clean water, sanitation, shelter, mobility, education and health to provide for 9 billion humans.

Here’s some of what they think needs doing over the next forty years to make a sustainable planetary society possible:

“These include incorporating the costs of externalities, starting with carbon, ecosystem services and water, into the structure of the marketplace; doubling agricultural output without increasing the amount of land or water used; halting deforestation and increasing yields from planted forests: halving carbon emissions worldwide (based on 2005 levels) by 2050 through a shift to low-carbon energy systems and improved demand-side energy efficiency, and providing universal access to low-carbon mobility.”

The WBCSD explains that:

“As part of this transformation, Vision 2050 calls for a new agenda for business: to work with government and society worldwide to transform markets and competition. New rules for markets will reframe environmental challenges as economic challenges, driving innovation and competition in the direction of sustainability and away from resource- and energy-intensive production. Rationalizing prices to include such externalities as climate and biodiversity impacts will make corporate environmental efficiency a true competitive advantage across all industries and regions.”

How to interrogate this stuff from an independent PR perspective? Sceptically, I suggest.

Big business likes this stuff because it sounds and even is virtuous. It has the merit of turning all kinds of uncertainties into market opportunities. I certainly warm to Vision 2050′s commitment to raising productivity (output) by improving land usage and making better use of genetically modified organisms. I can also see the logic of accepting political realities and in proactively helping governments turn costly externalities into profit-centres.

It’s worth noting, though, that this means that externalities and social desirables become goods and services which have a state-subsidy or state guaranteed price.

The problem is that state planning risks making the future of the world dependent on the short-term political thinking politicians are prone toward, which is the very opposite of what Vision 2050 aims to achieve. Certainly, WBCSD hopes that governments will map the paths to achieve pre-advertised and pre-announced priced services (the ex-externalities), which is something that may or may not happen.

Yet, when the state is required to map out the big things it wants to happen, won’t it be natural (as the WBCSD knows well) that big firms will be able to gear up to deliver it quicker and better than small firms? Won’t government find itself talking with the big firms which can deliver big stuff?

For instance, BP may have cocked-up in the Gulf of Mexico, but a small firm couldn’t have even begun to get the deal. If you electrify cars, the trains, build new track, put in huge windfarms or solar arrays, deliver new low-pollution chemical plants etc, etc, almost all the sustainability deliverables get delivered quicker by giant firms. So the big problem-makers become the big problem-solvers. Yummy. Trebles all round. And a PR victory to boot, you would think. Perhaps, says I, but it is a short term and limited one. Here’s why.

Vision 2050 assumes that in the future the world will have to cutback on carbon dioxide usage to combat global warming. However, what if we could either suck the carbon from the atmosphere or clean it up effectively as we go at little cost? With the former solution we could turn-reverse global warming and keep using fossil fuels. With the latter solution we could make use of all the fossil fuel resources we desire for as long as they are available without making AGW any worse than it already is (evidence suggests there are still huge reserves of gas, oil and coal waiting to be exploited).

Moreover, if the nuclear fusion technology comes on tap in the next 40 years then our energy usage could increase in intensity almost without limit forever. Energy production might remain centralized with the emergence of fusion. It would also make desalination possible on a grand scale; ending all worries about water shortages in a world that is two thirds covered by oceans. We already know how to build gas pipelines over distances of thousands of miles to deliver energy to our homes, so building a global water-pipe network should not be beyond us (something states might legislate for but might not pay for; while the market might be able to sustain the entire costs because it is profitable to do so).

By making best use of nuclear fission, solar and wind technology, this might facilitate the trend toward greater decentralized energy provision that environmentalists demand and Vision 2010 supposes: that is until fusion  - or something else – replaces them all (again subsidies might help, and they might not, and special pleading might not be attractive to taxpayers either).

My point is not to favour this or that solution over some other possible solution. My point is that innovation creates new industries, new possibilities and paradigms. Another issue is that the WBCSD Vision 2050 is in the business of envisioning. In that regard, I accept that the BCSD has identified all sorts of problems which are up ahead, and it may be right that government has a role in fixing them, helped by big business. My concern is only that we should be careful when big business signs up for a green agenda, but only because it’s neat and now it suits them.

Regardless, they may still be right. But I suspect they’d be quick to argue, whatever the reality was, for legislation, controls etc, which make their life more mappable. That doesn’t make them wrong, but it takes away some of their virtue, which they so boldly lay claim to. In any case, they may – as I fear – wrap us in all sorts of expensive taxpayer action which turns out misguided and which leads to its own backlash that undermines their credibility and reputations for honesty, integrity and insight.

The future is almost certainly unpredictable. And perhaps my most important point of all is that we should instead be encouraging new risk-takers to emerge to solve today’s and tomorrow’s problems. Such risk takers are as likely as not to be competitors to today’s major solution providers. They will make best use of scientific and technological breakthroughs to challenge the existing order. Such innovation and innovators rarely emerge from partnership relationships (cosy clubs) but unfold as the work of disruptive entrepreneurs, as the railways, automobile, IT, internet and bio-pharmaceutical industries did.

Vision 2050 does have PR potential, certainly for spin. It also has potential for making progressive progress through the promotion of partnerships, even if its difficult to know in which field. What grates on me is the self-interested certainty that is embedded in the content and tone of Vision 2050. At the very least I counsel that however well intentioned Vision 2050 is, I don’t think it is a sustainable plan over the next 40 years given the nature of the unknown unknowns – such as politics, serendipity and competition – that are as likely as not to tear the plan’s assumptions to shreds.

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This view – hidden in the Accords’ small print – is much too close to Stalin’s view of authors as “engineers of human souls” for my liking. So, here’s a call to dump the Accords’ illiberal vision of our profession’s role in society.

Before I justify my words, here’s a short explanation of the flaws that lie at the heart of the Stockholm Accords, which were ratified in Stockholm last week. They want to be touchy-feely but also to talk about “governing” media processes. At the same time, and to make things worse, their talk about “governing” media (social and mainstream) is rather stymied by their admitting that they actually control no more than 10 percent of media outcomes. So the Accords have two conflicting and irreconcilable aims, one of which it is accepted by the Accords’ authors that they cannot fulfill. Yet it’s worse. When discussing their “governing” role, they discuss its “ideological” nature. All in all, they’re using words which are either feebly post modern, modish and relativist or nastily authoritarian.

Maybe a huge amount of meaning has been lost in translation. In English (hardly a minority language for our game) this stuff sounds horrible and is reminiscent of long-settled debates. In any language, these approaches make for a very shaky “new” foundation for PRs to build on as we seek to redefine what our practice and mission is in today’s world.

Here’s the key Accord on the “communicative organistaion” that PRs should focus their concerns on:

“The communicative organization ensures full consistency of its storytelling by balancing global transparency, finite resources and time sensitive demands dealing with fast moving inside/outside changes and new conflicts of interests that emerge from multiple stakeholder participation.

“Communication with internal, boundary and external stakeholders is coherent and coordinated with the organization’s mission, vision, values, as well as its actions and behaviors.”

The Accords’ authors are well aware that their text is gibberish to c-level management, the public and even to most PRs. Hence, Toni Muzi Falconi has provided an accompanying glossary and personal explanation of what the real intent is of each of the Accords. As Toni is a prime mover behind the whole process and his is the only explanation offered on the Accords’ website, it seems sensible to assume he expresses fairly well what’s being said. Here he explains what’s meant by the “communicative organisation”:

“A communicative organization recognizes that even the most empowered public relations director cannot realistically hope to govern more than 10% of its communicative behaviours.

“Therefore the communication leader of the organization plays two fundamentally strategic roles:

°an ‘ideological’ role by supporting and providing the organization’s leadership with the necessary, timely and relevant information which allows it to effectively govern the value networks as well as an intelligent, constant and conscious effort to understand the relevant dynamics of society at large:

°a ‘contextual’ role which implies the constant delivery of communicative skills, competencies and tools to the components of its value networks so that they improve their relationships amongst each other and with the other value networks.”

The problem is that the the notion of PRs playing an “ideological role” comes close to saying PR plays a propagandistic function inside organisations. Moreover, the idea that PR can “govern” behaviour – even if it is only communicative behaviour – has illiberal and worrying undertones. One could argue – and I do – that this explanation of the Accords’  intent reveals an attempt to redefine the role of PRs as “ideological governors of value networks”. That is hardly a description of our role that’s designed to win widespread acceptance or one which could conceivably encourage public trust or confidence in what we communicate. Most likely it is a description that – if ever widely promoted – would see open conversation stop the minute any PR entered a room or joined in a discussion.

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My first instinct was to defend Gordon. My second was to laugh. My third was to sympathise with a man who can’t get his relations with the public right. But we need to remember: Tony Blair was always awkward if caught on the hop and (unlike Brown) brilliant in nearly every encounter. But remember, too, Brown is very good in seminar-like discussion where he comes across as intelligent, responsive and funny.

There are few lessons to learn here, except the counsel of perfection: never say anything remotely interesting to anybody or about anybody, ever, even in private.

But let’s put away the PR rule book and look at what happened. Gordon Brown is a self-righteous man who thinks he is profoundly misunderstood. He has swallowed a 1970s and 1980s PC, anti-prejudice, enlightened rights-mantra, heart and soul. He thinks the rest of the world needs to catch up with this ethic and hasn’t. He meets a working class woman and doesn’t spot that she’s thoughtful and wants him to front up about the deficit and isn’t thrilled by immigration. Clearly, she doesn’t get his deep and enduring value to the economy and the ship of state, and he suspects she’s probably a racist too. Because he knows the media hate him, he’s sure they’ll lap up this old bird. He does what he always does: sees a disaster, especially a personal disaster, and casts around for someone to blame. That would be, in order, the old girl and his own staff. Probably deep down, he’s lacerating himself.

If this had been any other politician, he would have thought the micro gig went quite well (had he stayed silent that’s was how it would have been remembered). End of.

This being GB, he saw a disaster and then compounded it. After that, he did the only thing he could. Grovel, and quick. Otherwise it would all have dragged on interminably. This is also true to his own lights. Like many an old lefty, Gordon sees racism all over the place where it isn’t. By the same token, calling a person a racist is the biggest insult in his canon and calls for self-flagellation when the term is abused.

I do see the logic of saying this is a classic case of overdoing one’s PR response to a small incident (my PR rule book says so, for sure). Certainly, Bigotgate and Mrs Duffy and Gordon’s apology is now the lead story in today’s The Sun. There she condemns him and explains why she no longer plans to vote Labour. His gaffe is now the No. 1 distraction story and embarrassment of yesterday and today and perhaps of the rest of the campaign. That was an example of crisis management of the worst kind.

Actually, though, I think this was not an ordinary PR incident (yes, the PR rule book that I normally draw on in this blog is sometimes totally useless), capable of being handled by ordinary brave tactics and a wry shrug and a respectful public apology etc.

That’s why I can also see the point of and, indeed, I warm to Mathew Parris’s assessment in The Times (his view would normally be mine for anybody but Brown):

“Who did this to him? Who advised him to centre the day’s campaign coverage on Mrs Duffy’s front door? Are the people around Labour’s campaign so shell-shocked, so battle-weary, so insulated from real people by a Maginot line of marketing and communications advice that they have lost confidence in their own assessment of how the public think?”

Though my guess is that his aides did try to stop him spending so much time in conference with Mrs Duffy in her living room; as another article in today’s The Times suggests.

Yet it is my view that this mess was the authentic Gordon Brown. It had to play out as it did given his history of apology avoidance and past arrogance; otherwise a worse climb-down might have been dragged out of him (it’s a moot point).

Oh dear. But I doubt it will determine the outcome of the election. Moreover, he’s got a chance to turn it to his advantage when the other two leaders tease him about the incident tonight in the Election’s final televised debate. He will have been told that his gaffe was factored into the election even before it happened. He can say, “I’m touchy and clunky and short-tempered. I hate prejudice and maybe that’s why, yes, I’m a bit quick off the mark when people criticise immigration (never mind he too wants to hold it back). But I went round to see her straight away and admitted my mistake. Now, can we talk about what these lightweights would have done in the face of a collapse in global capitalism?”

No related pages.

When the election started David Cameron’s Tories looked like they were cruising to some sort of nuanced victory. The first televised leaders’ debate put paid even to that. The Liberal Democrats jumped from a distant third to being front runner or in close second place, depending on which poll you trust. So-called Cleggmania was born. Now some sort of humiliation looks much more likely than it did, even if Cameron becomes PM.

Of course, the leaders’ debate is game-show politics, which makes it even more prone to febrile moodiness than EU or local elections. I agree with my friend Richard D North’s view (expressed on his blog and in his book on Mr Cameron’s Makeover Politics) that we may well be watching the end of 20th Century class politics. Why wouldn’t it get weird? But interestingly, the running is still being made by ordinary newspapers and broadcasters. Who said TV was dying or that dead tree press is dead? One wonders how Clay Shirky and Jeff Jarvis explain such events.

Once upon a time, political parties had a mass base, with mass membership, rooted in trade unions, social classes and local constituencies. Not any more. Today the political elite is remote and connects to the masses via the media. The contest for votes is fought on TV and in the tabloids and broadsheets, sometimes in the style of the X-Factor, Britain’s Got Talent and American Idol. Modern elections are always more about style than content, but I don’t think the real intentions of the major parties were ever more obscure to us than they are today.

Supposedly we live in an age of engagement, in an age in which we form interactive online social networks based on common values. But that doesn’t fit well with the British election experience. Social media – Twitter, Facebook and blogs – are just a backdrop to this story. Charlie Beckett summed up the TV-impact well:

…the curious voter can watch the debates and form their own judgements on the basis of what the candidates say and how they perform.This kind of ‘disintermediated’ communication is usually thought of as an Internet phenomenon. But as Michael Cockerill’s excellent documentary on the history of TV debates reminded us – mainstream broadcast media can do it, too, albeit without interactivity.

Moreover, the political party with by far the largest web-based social presence, with the most interactive website, has the least influence of all on public opinion. The British National Party is a joke (though it might win a seat; we’ll see). But according to the web-rankings agency Alexa the BNP is the world’s 28,545 most popular site compared to the Conservatives at 52,423, Lib Dems at 68,446, Labour at 69,527 and political blogging sensation Guido Fawkes at 40,688.

There’s lessons here for firms. Old media still counts for much more than new media. However new media and old media interconnect so both need to be engaged. But it’s largely a myth that the online networked society changes the rules of PR and communication in general. By the way, I shall deal with the advocates of the Stockholm Accords’ misreading of contemporary developments (they think we live in a new value-network society) at a later date. For now I merely remark that in many ways they miss the obvious: the emergence of new media, and the fragmentation it encourages, makes old media more important than ever, even as their audience shrinks, precisely because the mass public is increasingly disengaged from public life.

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Here’s a muse on how the stakeholder doctrine failed both politics and business and how it may not survive the challenge from the BRIC countries where there’s a bit more realism about life.

Let’s start in the present with UK politics. Then we’ll turn to how stakeholder doctrine originated in the trendy 1960s in the business sphere. Finally, I’ll make the case for saving the term “stakeholder”.

What a difference thirteen years makes. Tony Blair’s mission, he said, was to use the stakeholder concept to redefine rights and obligations and to extend accountability in society. Under Mr Blair there was a flurry of government-NGO-private business partnership arrangements. The “Third Sector” swam into view. This was the stuff which Geoff Mulgan and the think tank Demos were promulgating. I suppose the point was that Thatcher gave us popular capitalism and Blair’s mission was to widen the remit to a new participatory, networking society. Trying to move things on, and find a new Tory mission, Mr Cameron castigated Mr Blair’s “bureaucratic accountability” (all that tick-boxing, all those targets which Blair actually inherited from John Major), which he claims he’s going to smash. Mr Cameron has his own “power to the people” agenda, and we’ll see if it happens.

As the New Labour project makes way for David Cameron’s Tories (or something less new than New Labour), we should remind ourselves that the slogan was a fiction. The new active politics was top-down, not bottom-up. This really did mark a significant shift from past practice: Tony Blair’s infamous decision-making “sofa government” was the most unaccountable clique to rule the UK in modern times. It was perhaps even more closed than aristocratic rule once had been. The involvement of stakeholders turned into the manipulation of stakeholders and the sidelining of a democratically elected parliament.

Of course the idea that politics is everybody’s business – that we are all stakeholders in it – is the very core of modern democracy. The term may have gone out fashion in politics, but the political class is obsessing on how to engage people, which is much the same as trying to make more people feel like stakeholders. Indeed, the tragedy is that so many people don’t feel and act like social stakeholders. They’ve volunteered themselves to be on the sidelines, not least by not voting. It’s tempting, too, to think of anti-social people as being the reverse of stakeholders. It’s enough to make one nostalgic for the idea that people are stakeholders in the degree to which they pay taxes and don’t sponge, but that’s another story.

But whilst the idea of everyone being a social or political stakeholder – at least in principle and as an ideal – is valid, and whilst the phrase was borrowed by politicians from business, I don’t think it make sense in a business context.

So now let’s go back a bit and look at how stakeholder doctrine worked its way into business.

The 1960s origins of stakeholder doctrine

The word stakeholder has been around most likely since the 1930s, perhaps before. But its modern persona began to take shape in the 1960s. According R Edward Freeman’s history of the term:

“The actual word “stakeholder” first appeared in management literature in an internal memorandum at Stanford Research Institute (now SRI International, Inc) in 1963. The term was meant to generalize the notion of stockholders as the only group to whom management need be responsive. Thus, the stakeholder concept was originally defined as  “those groups without whose support the organization would cease to exist.”

The groups defined as stakeholders back then consisted of little more than shareowners. So it was tightly defined and designed to help organisations understand and achieve their corporate objectives. But over time, as Freeman describes it, the meaning of stakeholder theory changed dramatically. It began to include people whose personal interests were closely related to those of a firm (employees and so on).  As the doctrine evolved it eventually came to be defined, as Freeman put it, “any group or individual who can affect or is affected by the achievement of the organization’s objectives.” It later evolved to mean the whole of society. This radical development in stakeholder theory dates from around 1975 with the introduction of the “stakeholder audit”. The aim of this was to measure the social costs and benefits of business to all its stakeholders and to give them equal importance to financial results. So what was a deliberately narrowing term transmogrified into its reverse: something as wide as possible.

Freeman identified “stake” as an “interest” or a “share” (in an undertaking) and he considered three groups of stakes: Equity stakes (held by shareholders); economic or market stakes (employees or customers); influencer stakes (interest or activist groups).

Of course, stakeholders like publics are often found in more than one role. Employees can be shareholders, customers can be activists, suppliers might be creditors etc. Their interests might be contradictory in the different roles they occupy. Moreover, the stakeholder’s perception of his or her own interest might not be measurable clearly either by consultation and or research (that’s an issue I’ve looked at on my PR blog in relation to Edelman’s trust survey results here here here).

Reasons to cutback on stakeholder hype

Here are my concerns about the stakeholder doctrine in business:

• Firms were no longer run for the benefit of their owners who risked their capital in them.
• The objective of business with stakeholder theory became the balancing of stakeholder interests (this precluded favouring one group over another) rather than maximising shareholder value by achieving specific corporate objectives as defined by the owners.
• The foundation stones of capitalism are the concepts of private property, the rights of its owners to exploit it, and the first duty of its agents being owed to principals. Those foundations have not been overthrown in a social revolution. Rather they remain legally binding but weakened by populist nonsense in the public domain. The suspicion has to be that stakeholder theorists are crude propagandists trying to effect change by the back door, or that they are self-deluded.
• Stakeholder theory created ambiguities for corporate governance – exactly to whom and for what is management accountable?
• If management is effectively accountable to everybody, then it is not accountable to anybody.
• If “active publics” define stakeholders, as Jim Grunig seems to suggest, then perhaps that gives them power over the silent majority that they don’t deserve? For sure, laws and democracy were long-ago designed to limit activist power in the interest of the greater good.
• The specificity of the terms stakeholder, public and “activist public” as useful categories is rendered meaningless if one accepts Freeman’s definition of what constitutes a stakeholder, which includes the unborn, the environment and much more.
• At its most absurd stakeholder theory identifies irreconcilable forces as each other’s stakeholders. Hence Greenpeace becomes a stakeholder in the nuclear industry.
• Stakeholder theory does little to tackle the real problem business faces today; which is that managers have become unaccountable to their owners for their poor results. Today’s recession is partly caused by irresponsible bankers destroying shareholder value because they pursued short-term interests. The recession is about falling profits, failing businesses and their social consequences, not a shortage of CSR (BTW: corporate governance is not primarily about the relationship of corporations to society).
• Right now, business has to make brutal decisions. Consensus will matter but so will speed and agility. Stakeholder management techniques, if taken seriously, are slow. They lack the robustness to be tough and to set priorities which produce clear winners and losers.
• The insight that stakeholder theorists claim as theirs that relationships, networks and consent are crucial to business success has been known since trading in goods and services began.

How some of this works in politics

• Politicians who big-up stakeholder politics on the basis that it’s particpatory can be taken with a pinch of salt. New Labour went in for the Big Conversation and masses of consultation, but it often turned out to be a sham.
• In the modern perverse definition, stakeholders are self-defining. Victims – or anyone who says they feel strongly – have to be listened to as though they were experts.
• Representative democracy empowers people who go to the trouble of getting elected: stakeholder politics risks undermining that process.

Whose side are PRs on?

One of the startling logical implications of stakeholder theory for PRs is that we no longer remain representatives of our employers. Rather we become brokers of different interest groups, listeners, facilitators and managers of the many stakeholder relationships an organisation has. In this brave new world PRs are more likely to want appear on the side of activists or competitors than on their employer’s side. This fiction needs a reality check in the interest of transparency.

What then was the great attraction of stakeholder theory? In my view it was the opportunity to have power without accountability or risk. This compelling doctrine is a hippy hangover from the post-World-War-II boom. It promised all the benefits of business and political life without the responsibility and disciplines of them; no wonder it became popular among freeloaders.

How to rescue the term stakeholder

Stakeholder theory therefore requires a radical overhaul because the challenges ahead call for risky and accountable leadership. So it will either reform, get real, or be blown away by necessity as the democratic West reorganizes to compete with the BRIC countries.

We should begin with this proposition. It’s a nice compromise, I think. Stakeholders are people with a stake in a firm’s – or any entity’s – well-being. So yes, it can be much wider than shareholders or voters alone. What’s more, legitimate stakeholders may differ very strongly about what a firm’s or country’s aims should be, just as shareholders and voters can. Plenty of people who are not strictly speaking stakeholders may have very interesting and useful views to contribute. Having skin in the game is not the measure of a person’s value to a firm or to the rest of us. But the more skin you have in the game, the more of a stakeholder you can legitimately claim to be. If we are to rehabilitate the stakeholder category usefully, we must first cut the crap.

Note: I owe a debt to Elaine Sternberg’s “Stakeholding: Betraying The Corporation’s Objectives“, SAU, 1998, for insight on this challenging topic.

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When Obama was elected some PR theorists said it was the dawn of a new age of democratic and decentralized public engagement. In the words of Richard Edelman, delivering the Grunig lecture at University of Maryland, the main evidence for this was:

…Obama campaign’s mobilization of five million volunteers, who are able to make decisions on how best to contact voters, attract funds and communicate on social media.

But one year on, the evidence does not stand up. The trend today is toward disengaged elitism, not mass engagement.

As Obama’s popularity plummets, Jacob Weisberg’s writing for Slate blames the childish, ignorant American public – not politicians – for his country’s political and economic crisis. He whines about how the GOP has put the nation in an angry, populist, tea-partying mood.

The Tea Party Movement is a kick in the goolies (English slang) to the Obama Presidency. According to Reason Magazine, the campaign is materially affecting things as big as Scott Brown’s election and as little as a Virginia state vote to outlaw health insurance mandates. It adds that its core messages appeal beyond the movement’s ranks.

Meanwhile, Kurt Andersen rants in New York Magazine about how the walls that the founding fathers erected to contain the mob may no longer hold. He says irregular passions and artful misrepresentations are being whipped up to an unprecedented pitch and volume by the fundamentally new means of 24/7 cable and the hyperdemocratic web (the author of Reset is dead set against nonsense and the worst aspects of modernism).

In contrast, Andersen describes the essence of America’s democracy as being, by the people and for the people, definitely; of the people, not so much. Lamenting the emergence of the tea-party citizens, he says they are:

…under the misapprehension that democratic governing is supposed to be the same as democratic discourse, that elected officials are virtuous to the extent that they too default to unbudging, sky-is-falling recalcitrance and refusal. And the elected officials, as never before, are indulging that populist fantasy.

It seems, then, that critical thinkers are “deserting” dialogue and increasingly seeing Grunig’s two-way symmetrical model as a threat.

The reason is that Middle America is feared. It’s a case of What’s The Matter with Kansas, Thomas Frank’s bestseller, which attempted to solve the conundrum of how so-called ruling class conservatism became the creed of millions of ordinary Americans. His answer was that the masses were so stupid they’d been duped. Our old friends, cognitive dissonance, false consciousness and denial are in play.

Obama nearly let his elitist contempt for the masses – the white and black working class – out of the bag during his campaign with his ‘cling to guns and religion’, remark.

Anybody who still harbours a hope today that Obama’s regime is listening to criticism from friend or foe, let alone engaged in dialogue, hasn’t taken note of the recent rant from the White House’s chief of sfaff Rahm Emanuel. He’s been dismissing liberals as “retards”.

Regular readers of this blog know that I admire elite thought and achievement. They will also know that I believe that it is the job of leaders to lead.

I’m a critic of the two-way symmetrical “orthodoxy” that Grunig espouses. It is my belief that if one seeks answers or to find one’s direction in the crowd, one comes up with confusion (or worse, a horrible gungho certainty), which leads to paralysis (or a parity of unpleasantness).

Nevertheless, I maintain that dialogue, consultation and two-way communication has its place. But so does decision-making, which must not be shirked.

In reality, I don’t think there is any correct model for conducting PR. That’s because PR is an art, not a science. It is more results-driven than method-driven. It is a flexible tool designed for a specific purpose, which comes from above. Put simply, PR serves whoever pays for it, or whomever else it is accountable to, including the law and other stakeholders.

Moreover, how could anybody have ever really thought that somebody with Obama’s preacher-style approach to politics could ever become the leader of a new engaged movement based on real-time dialogue?

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Let’s first get a sense of what’s being said. Here’s comment number one on Cameron’s latest piece “Labour have lost the right to govern“:

“…with your wishy-washy performance, I am not convinced that you are the man to lead the Conservatives forward.”

Then there’s others, and here’s some badlights:

“…It is time for all none believers to resing the House – as this is the only way to bring the matter to a head”

“….When is the last time that a politician ever proclaimed anything other than anger at a pre-election budget and called it all manner of fraud etc etc etc.”

“David, You’ve always struck me as a decent guy, and coming from a working class background, with aspirations of bettering my lot in life, I find Brown’s class war abhorrent.

“Help is only an email away – just ask me.”

“Apart from the rubbish spoutd by the pro tobacco candidate, all of these comments simply rereat what too many people are saying, far far too many.”

“I have allways been a Conservative voter but after watching PMQ time every week i dont personally feel your strong enough to run this country.”

“I am a lifelong conservative from a business/conservative background. I don’t believe that any of you have “earned” the right to form the next government.”

What kind of masochist sets himself up for this? There were were 144 comments on this piece. Most of them were unhelpful and illiterate. It was difficult to know (there were no click-throughs to websites) whether they were from real people or were organised hits by political opponents. Many were arguably the work of the angry brigade with time on their hands.

The question is what purpose does providing a platform to such ranting serve? It does nothing, I would argue, to advance David Cameron’s image. Reading the comments was far from exhilarating or illuminating. It was in fact depressing.

I then switched over to the Labour Party’s website. To its credit – never mind the reason – there was no room or facility to leave comments. Labour seems to have had the good sense to put its blogs elsewhere.

The question is should political leaders blog, Twitter or use Facebook? Well,I think not. It seems that Barack Obama kind of agrees with me. He revealed recently that he’s never Twittered in his life and that he can’t use the Blackberry he clutched so conspicuously during his election campaign.

Politics and politicians have an image problem. But phoney engagement, dialogue and interactivity will not help solve it. Such techniques have nothing to do with serious debate or with listening. Our politicians should show more self-respect and dignity if they want to win back our respect – and that means standing back from social media nonsense.

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