Historians have always revelled in Elizabeth as perhaps the first monarch who set out to be loved by her people and who saw how such affection was politic. The nearer we come to our own time, the more admiring analysis we find of the skills she brought to this game. We find ourselves recognising them as tricks and techniques we have made into an important trade. And we also find that Elizabeth, as a Renaissance figure, was – in her very modernity – reaching back to classical skills from the inauguration of her reign to its end.

In 1558, as Queen Mary I lay dying in her bed, Philip II of Spain, Mary’s husband, sent his ambassador to consult with Elizabeth. Count de Feria reminded the queen-in-waiting that she would owe her throne to the king of Spain. His case was strong. Since Philip’s marriage to Mary in 1554 he had protected Elizabeth from the Queen’s wrath. It was Philip who finally persuaded his wife to recognise Elizabeth as her rightful successor.

Elizabeth replied that neither the king of Spain nor the nobility of England had paved the way for her reign. That honour, she said, went to her popularity among the English people. Feria wrote to his master, “She is much attached to the people… and is very confident that they are all on her side; which is indeed true”. [Queen Elizabeth, J E Neale, page 54, The Reprint Society, 1942]

The rebuke Elizabeth gave Feria took guts. As Elizabeth waited for Mary I to die, her future was far from assured. She faced a sea of existentially threatening reputational issues that threatened to delegitimise her reign.

Elizabeth I was the daughter of Henry VIII’s second wife Anne Boleyn who was executed for treason, adultery and incest. Officially her mother was decreed never to have married Henry VIII; though that made an absurdity of the adultery allegation. In the reign of Edward VI, Henry VIII’s son and successor, Elizabeth was accused of having sexual relations with Thomas Seymour, husband of her stepmother who was also the old king’s sixth wife (this familial dalliance was taboo in both of England’s major religions). Seymour was executed in 1549 for treasonable activities that seemingly had Elizabeth’s assent and perhaps even her active participation. After Edward VI died young in 1553, Mary I reintroduced Catholicism to England and, on good evidence, suspected Elizabeth of being complicit in a Protestant rebellion bent on deposing her. In response Mary I had Elizabeth sent to the Tower of London. She was made to enter via Traitors’ Gate, which traditionally meant that an execution was imminent. Even though Mary I, daughter of Henry VIII’s first wife Catherine of Aragon, was persuaded to release Elizabeth, she still regarded her half-sister as a bastard child of an infamous woman. As Elizabeth waited to become Queen, neither the Catholic nor Protestant church recognized the legitimacy of her birth. Mary Queen of Scots’ claim to the throne was also arguably more credible than Elizabeth’s (see part 1).

Meanwhile, England was a relatively poor and weak European power. Its economy was struggling; its army and navy were in a pitiful state and no match for the might of Spain or France.

Princess Elizabeth circa. 1546

So, when Elizabeth became Queen of England at the age of 25, her authority and legitimacy were questionable. Her realm was in danger of being overwhelmed by foreign foes.

Elizabeth I and her Privy Council advisers, not least the great Sir William Cecil and formidable Lord Walsingham, were well prepared to meet the challenges they inherited. They had all spent years reading Renaissance literature that revealed the anatomy of the rhetorical arts and the secrets of persuasion. In particular, they had been taught to wrap compelling narratives in the convenience of symbolic metaphors-in-motion, otherwise known as allegories, which appealed to diverse audiences for conflicting reasons. They now had the opportunity to use that knowledge to add world-changing spark, spice and substance to religious and political expression.

Their Elizabethan Renaissance was the age of emblems, symbols and celebrity. The fashion in England was to weave iconographical and allegorical representations of perceived truths and morals into the fabric of sermons, paintings, proclamations, pamphlets, poetry, pageants and other spectacles.

As Roy Strong explains in The Spirit of Britain, some of the images were kept obscure on purpose. The fashion was to produce coats of arms with pompous Latin mottos, fancy wax seals and abstract patterns in paintings and on clothes that carried hidden meanings, which looked and sounded medieval but were in fact of modern origin. Only the most educated members of elite society understood their messages. This obliqueness was a form of self-expression. It was the pursuit of the wealthy, which had a nostalgic and romantic attachment to the old feudal etiquette and styles. For instance, men loved to dress up as knights even though that position in society had been abolished.

In whatever form ideas were spread, the aim was to paint images in people’s imaginations. However, what concerns us more here is communication that reached out to the wider public.

Over the course of Elizabeth I’s reign she developed a compelling narrative theme that was updated regularly. Carefully managed public events were written up in pamphlets which were distributed nationwide. The narrative was then spread to a much larger audience by word of mouth. Above all, the retelling was staged managed literally at the theatre, which, with audiences often as large as 3000, was the major mass medium of the era:

Rather than use the Church as a communications channel to effect public persuasion, a path that might possibly have brought about open rebellion, Elizabeth turned to the Stage. Although this was by no means an open policy, that she did so has been attested to repeatedly by diplomats, intelligence agents, and educated contemporary observers. [Gary B. Goldstein's Did Queen Elizabeth use the theater for social and political propaganda?, 2004]

Traders in business and aristocrats on estates and people on the street then discussed what they had heard and seen. It was also mulled over by members of all classes sharing a drink in England’s taverns.

Elizabeth I and the Three Goddesses, 1569

The objective of Elizabethan image-makers was to compose allegories that got people talking about what was being communicated. Hence allegories designed for mass consumption required people to be able to interpret accurately what was being represented:

…the mentality which now turns to the comparative triviality of the crossword puzzle, then pondered on the sophisticated riddles of the emblems and impress.  [Shakespeare in His Own Age, Allardyce Nicoll, page 181, Cambridge University Press, 1976]

Deciphering and pondering these abstractions on a mass scale required a more literate and politically engaged public. This was something Elizabethan England positively encouraged. However, this social advancement had unintended consequences. As Roy Strong hints at here:

In this manner the visual arts were verbalised, turned into a form of book, a ‘text’ which called for reading by the onlooker. There are no better examples of this than the quite extraordinary portraits of the queen herself, which increasingly, as the reign progressed, took on the form of collections of abstract pattern and symbols disposed in an unnaturalistic manner for the viewer to unravel, and by doing so enter into an inner vision of the idea of monarchy. [The Spirit of Britain, Roy Strong, page 177, Pimlico, 2000]

Ironically, then, allegories designed to be easily understood by a broad audience risked being maliciously and humorously misrepresented. For example, J E Neale tells us in his biography of Queen Elizabeth how “drunken Burley of Totnes” regaled his neighbours with stories about how Lord Robert “did swive” the virgin Queen [page 80]. Shakespeare had the queen of the fairies, which was an allusion to Elizabeth, sleep with an ass in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In 1601, on the eve of his armed rebellion, the Earl of Essex sponsored a public performance of Richard II in the forlorn hope that its storyline would incite London’s masses to join him. Essex and his followers were seduced by the play’s account of Henry Bolingbroke (Essex saw himself) overthrowing Richard II (he saw Elizabeth I) who had abdicated too many of his powers to court advisors (he saw Cecil and Raleigh).

Elizabeth’s successor James I, the first of the Stuarts, continued to communicate through allegories and to encourage the arts. But there was a feeling that the education of the masses had gone too far under the old regime. The Lord Chancellor Francis Bacon told James that he should reduce the number of schools teaching grammar because there was no point producing more scholars than the state could employ. He added that by educating farmers and artisans the realm had become full with “indigent, idle and wanton people, which are but materia rerum novarum [substance of new things]”.

Sadly, toward the end of James I’s mostly peaceful, tolerant and prosperous reign he articulated the old maxim of the divine right of kings. His successor Charles I lost his head defending that right and became an iconic victim of a 16th-17th-century power struggle that encompassed most of Europe .

Sections of Europe’s public, particularly the merchant classes, developed an increasingly distinct identity that was expressed assertively in political and religious matters. New printing presses and better communication links also ensured that new and dissident ideas spread over great distances at great speed. The ruling elites soon discovered, too late in Charles I’s case, that they could not, as they had in times past, easily ignore or silence their opponents.

The Reformation was a public inquisition on the meaning and value of familiar symbols, beliefs and practices that challenged the old elite’s privileges and prejudices. The new ways that dissidents advocated were for many ideas worth dying for, let alone arguing for. At the heart of it was a fundamental dispute about the relationship between religion and politics; it was a test of power between competing factions within society.

People on one side questioned the validity of the old order. They saw God’s word in a new light. On the other, the forces of the counter-Reformation for the salvation of souls defended the old ways. Somewhere in the middle were the humanists who became the catalyst for the creation of a new secular world order. The three tendencies intertwined, but they were really at constant loggerheads in terms of argument, doctrine and the future of society.

Throughout Europe these differences were debated in print and in the pulpits. However the divisions expressed ran much deeper than just a Catholic versus Protestant schism. They also pitted Catholic against Catholic and different Protestant tendencies against each other and monarchists against republicans and vice versa.

For instance, Cervantes pokes fun at the Spanish Inquisition, the church and monks in Don Quixote (1605 – 1615), revealing how the old order in Spain was being undermined from within. The Dutch Catholic humanist Desiderius Erasmus was one of many who delivered a radical, and at times hilarious, critique of his own church’s ecclesiastical abuses: “Luther was guilty of two great crimes – he struck the Pope in his crown, and the monks in their belly”.

Whichever side people took, the ancient world’s rediscovered wisdom and the contemporary humanists who promulgated it influenced how they expressed their own ideas.

To its credit, since the early-15th-Century the Catholic hierarchy in Rome had been funding humanist writers to develop Ciceronianism, the literary movement of the Renaissance. It first encouraged the translation of Greek and Rome classics and the construction of a library in Rome devoted to humanist thought. It then hired humanists to overhaul the church’s Latin communications and to give its sermons more verve. Amazingly, in 1458 it elected the humanist Pius II Pope. He had a reputation as a Casanova (he had two illegitimate children), diplomat and belletrist. He courageously wrote about his life in the style of Cicero in his tell-all Commentaries, the only autobiography ever written by a wearer of the Papal tiara. Among many salacious revelations, the book describes how he was invited to an orgy in Britain, and how his election as Pope was rigged by a group of cardinals conspiring in the urinals. Subsequent popes may not have been inclined toward humanism in quite the same manner as Pius II, but they continued to make full use of its insights and practitioners. For instance, in the 1520s the Church used Cicero-style polemics to combat Martin Luther’s doctrines; one of which, A Dialogue Concerning Heresies, was written by the English Catholic humanist Thomas More.

So by the time Elizabeth became Queen in 1558, the Catholic Church had already spent more than 100 years acquiring a modern voice. It was capable of using rhetoric and humanist writers to produce eloquent arguments in robust pamphlets, proclamations, speeches, broadsides, treatises and invectives designed to rouse people’s spirits and influence their opinions.

Indeed, as early as 1568 the Catholic Church was training secular youth in the Netherlands to oppose English Protestantism. In 1580 a year-old school in Rome sent the first Jesuit missionaries to England to reclaim the land for Catholicism.

Almost twenty years after Elizabeth’s death in 1603, Pope Gregory XV consolidated these efforts in his Congregation of Propaganda Fide.

Elizabethan England was, however, more than a match for the Pope’s PR machine. The Queen herself was a great communicator. While her closest advisers Sir William Cecil and Lord Walsingham were the world’s first modern spindoctors and arguably the best to have ever practiced the art. She also had the support of William Shakespeare. He is thought to have worked for a company of actors and playwrights known as Queen’s Men and later The Lord Chamberlain’s Men, which produced patriotic propaganda for the masses. In her 1947 book, Shakespeare’s Histories: Mirrors of Elizabethan Policy, the American intellectual Lily Campbell states that:

Each of the Shakespeare histories serves a special purpose in elucidating a political problem of Elizabeth’s day and in bringing to bear upon this problem the accepted political philosophy of the Tudors. [Quoted in Gary B. Goldstein's Did Queen Elizabeth use the theater for social and political propaganda?, 2004]

Moreover, there was Edmund Spenser, who wrote the allegorical poem Faerie Queene in Elizabeth’s honour. It proved to be a potent piece of nationalistic propaganda:

Mirrour of grace and Maiestie diuine,
Great Lady of the greatest Isle, whose light
Like Phoebus lampe throughout the world doth shine,
Shed thy faire beames into my feeble eyne,
And raise my thoughts too humble and too vile,
To thinke of that true glorious type of thine (full text here)

Elizabeth I: The Pelican Portrait – an allegory of her selfless love

Elizabeth and her inner-circle were visionaries. Their advantage over both their contemporaries and near successors was their understanding that feudal society’s mores and morals and all forms of immutable religious faith no longer provided sufficient glue to maintain stability. Tyranny was also of limited appeal to them, though not without its uses, given the rise of powerful new social forces capable of asserting their will. Instead, they accepted that the monarchy’s long-term survival meant letting go of some aspects of their control over society. They saw the need to relax somewhat their hold on people’s religious beliefs and practices. They conceded, perhaps reluctantly, that they no longer had a proper monopoly over debate and the dissemination of ideas within their realm. Though censorship remained a frontline weapon wielded with zeal.

Rising to the challenge of recasting her reputation, Elizabeth’s communication strategy was brilliantly formulated to redefine her ambiguities as strengths. Her intention was to make cognitive dissonance work for her.

Elizabeth I took the facts of her position and decisions and made sure that their merit was made glamorous and comprehensible. She made sure that her behaviour was seen (accurately, actually) to be the epitome of statecraft for her people. Everything was tweaked and honed to unite a wide range of audiences who might otherwise threaten her rule.

The first narrative salvo was fired during Elizabeth’s pre-coronation pageants before she’d had a chance to achieve anything. It was a bold and inspired example of Renaissance creativity in practice. Her confidence in her narrative reflected the ancient world’s humanist mantra that people could establish themselves in the esteem of an audience through eloquent words and telling images.

Elizabeth I’s pre-coronation pageants were a mixture of pomp, ceremony and unceremoniousness. It was very much a charm offensive that showcased her trademark touchy feely PR style. But there was more.

As Elizabeth was wheeled through London’s streets she insisted on stopping to talk to passersby. She also replied to the scriptwriters’ themes and interacted with the performances of the actors at the various pageants. As Professor Dale Hoak maintains, this effectively turned the procession into a conversation between the queen and her people:

…something Richard Mulcaster, the ‘reporter’ [he wrote the defining account of the event within a week of it] who helped script the pageants realized was unprecedented. [The Coronations of Edward VI, Mary I, and Elizabeth I, The Transformation of the Tudor Monarchy, Dale Hoak, which can found in Westminster Abbey Reformed: 1540 - 1640, by C S Knighton and Richard Mortimer, page 135, Ashgate, 2003]

Elizabeth encouraged what Mulcaster described as “baser personages” to converse with her in private. They would handover flowers or express their goodwill, while she “staid her chariot, and heard theyr requestes”. According to J E Neale’s biography of Queen Elizabeth I this seemingly unbecoming behaviour from a monarch shocked the envoy from the Italian city of Mantua, who recorded that, “she exceeded the bounds of gravity and decorum” [Queen Elizabeth, J E Neale, page 63, The Reprint Society, 1942].

Ditchley Portrait highlighting her divine powers

Hoak says that Elizabeth I was the first English monarch to exploit the psychological possibilities of a coronation’s spectacle. Her proactive approach demonstrated that she valued her subjects’ opinions and their support. Her behaviour at the pageants communicated that she was their servant as well as their Queen. The seeming unity on the streets of aristocratic courtiers, London magistrates, merchants and artisans signified that the bonds linking the monarch to her people were reciprocal. It conveyed the impression that the bond she had with her people transcended social and official status and that she considered other classes to be level with the nobles in importance. Back then no other kingdom in Europe would have positioned their monarch’s relationship to their people at their coronation in such a populist manner.

Much of Hoak’s information comes from Richard Mulcaster’s account of the pageants in The Passage Of Our Most Drad Soveraigne Lady Quene Elyzabeth Through The Citie Of London To Westminster The Daye Before Her Coronacion. His pamphlet like the pageants he partly drafted was paid for by London’s commercial elite; the narrative and allegories of the pre-coronation pageants were most likely the co-creation of wealthy aldermen, Elizabeth and her advisers.

Mulcaster’s text provides some insights into the anxieties surrounding Elizabeth’s coronation. Describing the scene of London’s aldermen handing her one thousand marks in gold, Mulcaster records the exchange of words between Randolph Cholmley, London’s Recorder, and Elizabeth. Cholmley reportedly tells her to “mynd” [the purpose] of the gift. When Elizabeth accepts the money, from the people upon whose tax contribution her state depended, she replies, “no wille in me can lacke.” She adds, “neither doe I trust shall ther lacke any power”. And to drive home her message, she says, “for the safetie and quietness of you all, I will not spare, if nede be to spend my blood”. As Susan Frye assesses:

For just a moment, Elizabeth’s response breaks out of the mould of gracious obedience to make sure of the bargain: I will perform my part, but you must support my sovereignty. [Elizabeth I The Competition for Representation, page 42, Oxford University Press, 1993]

Frye is being astute. Elizabeth I was not yet secure. At the same moment as she celebrated her accession she was negotiating, if only symbolically, with her people about the terms of her rule. The pageants were helping the Queen to gauge public opinion as much as to influence it.

Our concern here is her PR messaging, rather than the events themselves. So let’s review in some more detail the narrative that emerged from her five pre-coronation pageants and from her first post-coronation speech.

Elizabeth I was painted in the mind’s eye as a “queen with the heart of a king”. She was presented as being very much her father’s daughter. This was an image that served her well thirty years later when she rallied her troops to resist the Spanish Armada:

I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too, and think foul scorn that Parma or Spain, or any prince of Europe, should dare to invade the borders of my realm; to which rather than any dishonour shall grow by me, I myself will take up arms, I myself will be your general, judge, and rewarder of every one of your virtues in the field. [1588: Speech to the Troops at Tilbury]

Indeed, Elizabeth’s rhetoric in 1588 was consistent with how she presented herself in 1558. J E Neale writes in his biography of Queen Elizabeth how Spain’s ambassador Count Feria noted at the beginning of her reign that she longed “to do some act that would make her fame spread abroad in her lifetime, and, after occasion memorial for ever” [page 67]. Her messaging always reflected this aspiration.

Elizabeth I: The sieve is a symbol of chastity and purity

At the pre-coronation pageants Elizabeth made a virtue of being the product of Henry VIII’s marriage to Anne Boleyn, the woman blamed for the social turmoil after the break with Rome. She glossed over how her father had denied the legitimacy of her own birth in his will and Second Act of Succession. She instead blamed the problems of her society under the Tudors, not on the Tudors, but on the consequences of the War of Roses, which ended in 1485. The positive messages here were that she was a Tudor and a bringer of unity and concord, the unifier of the two warring houses of Lancaster and York. She was committed to maintaining the peace and that above all was what people wanted to hear.

The pageants’ allegories drew extensively on familiar themes from the Old Testament. Elizabeth explained her escape from the Tower of London, where they kept lions, as if she had had the same God-given help as Daniel when he miraculously escaped Nebuchadnezzar’s lions. The message was communicated by her in a prayer (women didn’t normally lead prayers in public so this was significant). She implied that God had saved her from the Tower so she could become Queen.

Elizabeth also portrayed herself as the new Deborah; a Hebrew goddess, female judge and military leader who rid the land of Canannite idolatry (a clear allusion to Catholicism) and restored good governance to Israel (a dig at Mary I). The allegory made great play of how she would consult the estates of England for the good of her citizens, the same way that the Old Testament in chapters 4 and 5 of Book of Judges said Deborah had.

For the consumption of the educated classes Elizabeth’s character was endowed with mythological qualities associated with the three Roman vestal virgins: Minerva, Vesta and Diana. She was compared most favourably to the goddess Diana, acclaimed for her light, inaccessibility, virginity, sovereignty, supremacy and impassibility.

At the pageant at Temple Bar she was proclaimed as the modern embodiment of two mythological giants, Gogmagot the Albion and Corineus the Britain. This allusion to English folkloric tales linked her spirit and lineage with the mystical founding fathers of England. It also had the benefit of invoking the images of well-known Old Testament characters of almost the same names – see here & here. Such allusions were designed to touch and provoke potent nationalistic and Biblical sentiments that reached out to everybody.

At the pageant Truth, the Daughter of Time, Elizabeth was heard to say “and Time hath brought me hither.” The pageant was:

…set in the form of two hills. One was green and beautiful, and on the summit was a handsome youth, gay in dress and spirits, standing under a green laurel tree: this represented a flourishing commonwealth [Respublica bene instituta]. The other all withered and dead, and a youth in rude apparel sat mournfully under an arid tree: this was the decayed commonwealth [Ruinosa Respublica]. Between was a cave from which Time emerged, leading her daughter Truth who carried and English Bible in hand. [Queen Elizabeth by J E Neale, pages 61/62, The Reprint Society, 1942]

The message had a double edge. The City was expressing what it wanted from her, which was Protestantism. She responded by implying with her actions and words that she was on their side. Elizabeth seemingly confirmed her role as the personification of the Truth by kissing the English Bible and then theatrically holding it aloft before hugging it to her bosom. Afterward she thanked the City for giving her the book. She said with God’s help she would oversee the renewed glory of the commonwealth after Mary’s rule had allowed it to wane. She was going to stamp out vices, which the audience took to be Catholicism, and uphold virtues, which they took to be Protestantism. The crowd cheered; though at the time it was unclear just what plans Elizabeth had in mind for the future of her realm.

The second salvo was fired several weeks after her coronation. Elizabeth I’s maiden speech to Parliament and her Privy council, read for her by Sir John Mason, declared that from now on she stood free from any reputation that had dogged her in times past or present (one assumes she meant before the pre-coronation pageants). Then, addressing the male audience on the sensitive topic of her gender and her marriage intentions, she said:

…albeit it might please almighty God to continue me still in this mind to live out of the state of marriage, yet it is not to be feared but He will so work in my heart and in your wisdom as good provision by his help may be made in convenient time, whereby the realm shall not remain destitute of an heir. That may be a fit governor, and peradventure more beneficial to the realm than such offspring as may come of me. For although I be never so careful of your well doings and mind ever so to be, yet may my issue grow out of kind and become perhaps ungracious. And in the end this shall be for me sufficient, that a marble stone shall declare that a Queen, having reigned such a time, lived and died a virgin.

Elizabeth Coronation portrait

It was a bold position to take. She had declared openly that she was minded not to marry; previously that option had been regarded as unthinkable. But marriage was not out of the question either. Creating this elbowroom was important. It was used as tool of her diplomacy. Beginning with proffering a maybe to marry Philip II, she went on to feign her intention to marry numerous suitors from states whose neutrality she required for a while.

The allegory of the Virgin Queen and Mother of England contained the overarching narrative of Elizabeth’s reign. God had preserved her so she could be wedded to her people. This way she took the judgement of her reputation out of the hands of man and placed it in the higher authority of God. This positioned her almost on the same level as the most elevated female from the New Testament: the Virgin Mary. Of course Catholics worshiped the Virgin Mary’s icon, but that was a practice now frowned upon in Protestant England. Instead, Elizabeth was portrayed as the sacred one, the deliverer of England’s people to a better world. This nationalist sentiment resonated with both England’s Protestants and Catholics.

The appropriation of this familiar theme for a new purpose and person was a stroke of brilliance.

It took the heat out of the thorny problem of finding an heir to throne that had bedevilled the reigns of Henry VIII and Mary I. It allowed her to escape the constraints of traditional female virtue that positioned good women as passive creatures. As Susan Frye says in Elizabeth I, The Competition for Representation, the image of the Virgin Queen portrayed her instead as being free from the confines of marriage and male dominance; she had no husband, father, brother or other male relatives to obey. This was, therefore, a power play.

This clever use of the art of rhetoric persuaded the public, and not least elite society, to alter their perception of what to expect from Elizabeth as a woman and monarch. It provided Elizabeth with the necessary consent to play the man’s role in society as England’s legitimate Queen. Yet Elizabeth’s greatest PR masterstroke was not this, but it was the way in which she was able to unite and motivate her people.

One of the major issues she confronted was filling the vacuum at the heart of English communal life in the wake of the demise of overt Catholicism. Austere Puritans and pious parsons positively discouraged much of the seasonal fun and frolics the old religion had once encouraged in village life. In response, Elizabeth once again revealed her conservative instincts by getting her branding gurus to redefine past practices to serve contemporary purposes.

In 1586 William Warner published his popular poem Albion’s England, which set out a romantic vision of English traditions. It even eulogised the legend of Robin Hood and his merry band of outlaws living in Sherwood Forest:

As Paske [Easter] began our Morrisse, and ere Penticost our May, Tho Robin Hood, Liell John, Frier Tuck, and Marian deftly play, And Lord and ladie gang till Kirke with Lads and Lasses gay. [Quoted in Shakespeare's Festive World: Elizabethan Seasonal Entertainment, François Laroque, page 336, Cambridge University Press, 1991]

Warner implied with wit that Catholic and older pagan irreverent festivities were part of a patriotic culture that celebrated England’s glorious past, which supposedly began with Noah’s flood. Albion’s England met with some ecclesiastical resistance. However because the poem was passed by the censors it gave courage and support to those wanting to restore May Day, Whitsun and summer fun to the parishes and greens of England’s towns and villages.

As I outlined in part 1, Elizabeth I had a great understanding of contemporary realities. There was substance, policies, inspired leadership and a great grasp of ambiguity behind everything Elizabeth did. Above all, we should note that Elizabeth I was her own agency for change (she was not at the mercy of fate). She redefined Renaissance England according to her will and what was possible.

While Elizabeth clearly admired Cicero for his eloquence and insight into how to communicate effectively, she was just as influenced by his views on the principles governing the relationship between rulers and the ruled. Throughout her reign she showed a commitment to the Ciceronian maxim: Salus Populi Est Suprema Lex; the welfare of the people is the ultimate law. She even, for example, created the basis for the world’s first welfare state by introducing the Poor Law, which took a compassionate view of the state’s responsibility to alleviate poverty, in 1601.

English Renaissance communication techniques might appear primitive to us, perhaps. But let’s not forget what Daniel Boorstin says in The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America. He maintains that today’s PR, marketing and advertising executives are “simply the acolytes of the image”. He suggests that modern image-makers obscure the origin of content so that form takes on new meaning, in much the same way that Elizabeth I did. (I shall review the views of Boorstin in the second half of On Message: Propaganda, persuasion and the PR game).

Overall, Elizabeth’s positioning, messaging and policies were ahead of their time. From her cautious beginning she wrapped romance, war, progress and a new national identity in an evolving and compelling meta-narrative. Roy Strong summarizes the uniqueness of her PR achievement well:

Never before had so many lay people been drawn into the creation of a new national identity, one in which the arts were seen to play a crucial role. Even then nothing could have quite prepared anyone for the explosive energy of creation which followed the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588. [The Spirit of Britain, by Roy Strong, page 174]

By the time of Elizabeth’s death in 1603, she had inspired and united a kingdom previously murderously divided by two major religions of almost equal weight.

Out of the Elizabethan era came English nationalism, a new mercantile spirit, English colonialism and a cultural revolution. But from a PR perspective there was something even more significant and lasting to celebrate.

Elizabeth I’s near-separation of politics from religion defined a new space outside of public life, which was its modern counterpart: the private sphere.

What more should it take to become a PR icon than that?

He was Legal & General’s (L&G) chief press officer when he died in 1991, while telling a joke in the middle of a speech, aged 37.

At well over six-feet tall, thickset and broad-shouldered, Gordon was an imposing, yet gentle, character. His distinctive working class accent identified him as being from Glasgow’s Gorbals, a place Americans call the wrong side of the tracks. It, like the man himself, remained stubbornly unaffected throughout his career.

Gordon Macdonald, (1953 – 1991). Legal & General’s Chief Press Officer

Staying true to his roots, he befriended and supported homeless people and tramps he met on his travels. He had a habit of introducing them to his more well-heeled friends, not as objects of pity, but as valued members of his social circle. At the other end of the spectrum, he regularly danced the nights away with the Royals at Tramps in London’s Jermyn Street. Gordon also liked to party with Fleet Street’s hacks and to forge close links with newspaper owners, especially the Rothermere family. His other famous friends included performers such as Richard Harris, Spike Milligan, Mike Reid and Sir John Mills. Yet Gordon was not just a prominent socialite.

By his early thirties he had also become much more than a press officer. He was successful on the well-paid after-dinner and corporate speakers’ circuits. He was a mentor, serial risk taker and creative innovator of PR practice.

He mentored Mike Davies, now director of global communications at PricewaterhouseCoopers, and Tony McGarahan, PR’s very own Red-Adair-style extinguisher of corporate fires. And he mentored me, his deputy at the time of his death (see how Davies and McGarahan credit Macdonald’s important contribution to their success here and here).

Gordon understood that information and public relations were instruments of influence. He knew how to use his knowledge and talent to become a strategic power-broker within L&G. He was not given this elevated role officially. He just seized it. He defied rank and convention by always using the executive lift and toilets. When not holding court in Balls Brothers’ wine bar – known as his other office – Gordon ate in L&G’s executive dinning rooms. It was, he said, the gossip that he picked up in the lifts, toilets and bar that gave him the edge. The Board and senior management team came to trust his opinions. Increasingly, they sought his advice before making important decisions. In return, L&G gave him a licence to operate as he saw fit, warts and all.

After his death, I read the bulky file human resources kept on him. Gordon’s love of gin, wine, food and a good time – on the company credit card – was clearly legendary. Whenever anybody saw fit to complain about his expenses or demands, there was usually an additional note attached from the CEO or Chairman saying things such as settle all bills immediately, give Gordon what he wants. When somebody proposed taking disciplinary action against him for coming back from lunch late and drunk, there were more ‘witnesses’ prepared to say on the record that he was as sober as a judge (all charges were dropped). Gordon never got into serious trouble. Not even when L&G discovered he’d sponsored the kit of the Deal Rugby Club in the firm’s name without permission.

It amuses me to think how Gordon would have coped with today’s politically correct culture. It tickles me to imagine whether even Mike Davies would dare hire anybody like Gordon to represent PricewaterhouseCoopers in 2013. Sadly, I doubt it. That’s because in today’s tick-box world, something of the soul of our profession, and many others, has been lost.

The irony, of course, as recent corporate scandals suggest, is that we seem to be less morally- and ethically-driven today than in Gordon’s more tolerant and fun, not to mention more profitable, times. He certainly knew where to draw the line. For instance, I once sat with Gordon while he chewed to bits a more senior manager who tried to convince him to tell a lie in a press release to cover-up one of L&G’s mistakes. His invaluable reputation for trustworthiness among journalists and within L&G relied on such refreshingly robust candour.

There’s no doubt in my mind that, because of Gordon’s work, L&G punched above its weight in the media, particularly on front-pages of the tabloids. He even provoked The Sun to write an editorial praising L&G (his work with Spike Milligan had something to do with that). Indeed, L&G had a uniquely glamourous and populist, as in ‘the people’s trusted insurer’, image among traditional, some would say boring, insurance firms in the 1980s.

Gordon Heald, then managing director of Gallup, told me that it was Gordon Macdonald who taught Gallup the art of using opinion opinion surveys to promote corporate financial products in the UK. To cite just one example, Macdonald’s ‘price of a wife’ surveys – or, as The Daily Mirror put it, “how much does ‘er in doors cost if she drops dead and has to be replaced by a wage labourer ” – hogged the front pages of both tabloids and broadsheets. It was also Gordon Macdonald who introduced the umberella symbol that is still synomous with L&G’s image.

His early death was lamented in most of the nation’s major media, which was a remarkable feat for a PR man in his thirties. His midweek funeral attracted hundreds of mourners from all walks of life (including the Deal Rugby Club). The readings were given by the oscar-winning actor Sir John Mills, leading PR guru Roddy Dewe, co-founder of Dewe Rogerson, and by Lord Parry, a life peer of the realm.

So here, as inspiration to a new generation of PR professionals and for the benefit of us old ones, comes Lord Parry’s valedictory address, given at St Columba’s Church of Scotland, London, June 27, 1991.

Gordon Macdonald

There are those who know the answers to all the questions. They know about life. They know about death. They know which is the beginning and which the ending. I am not of their number.

My father was. He taught his own children in his home and other people’s children from his Welsh nonconformist chapel’s pulpit that life and death were equal and opposite parts of the same equation: that they were conjoined, added to, multiplied by love and that the whole process of which they were parts was divided, substracted from, diminsished by, the absence of love.

Whether or not we share my father’s religious confidence, it is life and death and love that have brought us together from all over Britain to this famous church, in this great city, at noon today.

It is the life and the death of and our love for Gordon Macdonald that multiply this congregation and unite us and we are all diminished by his passing from us.

But we would be unfaithful to the life that has brought us together if we allowed our grief at his death to dominate, to preoccupy us, either here or in the days ahead, because the whole purpose of our being here is to say “Thank You”, together, for all that this ordinary, most extraordianry, young man has given to us and – both in his daily work and in his, cruelly short, little lifetime of good works – to thousands of others, most of whom do not even know his name.

The first time that I heard the name Gordon Macdonald I was the Warden of the Pembrokeshire Teachers’ In-Service Education Centre at Haverfordwest. I was also – and one or two of you might find this harder to relate to – the Parliamentary Candidate of the Labour Party in Pembroke Constituency. My secretary, young enough herself to be interested, said: “There’s a young man to see you. He’s very big and he’s very good-looking. He says he’s from the Western Telegraph. He’s got a lovely Scottish accent. Can he come in?”

He did, of course, and that’s is why – 20 years later – I am in this pulpit today. Providence – and Herbert Thomas, the Editor of the Telegraph – had chosen Gordon Parry to be Gordon Macdonald’s first assignment as a journalist. Welsh though I was and am, I had been born on St. Andrew’s Day. He was brand new out of Glasgow. My daughter was his age.

We were friends in five minutes. Monday morning coffee time became our regular rendezvous.

In a sense, I lacked a son. Gordon was, temporarily, homesick. My wife and I became his “Welsh parents”. Mrs Macdonald and Glenys shared coddling. It’s not every press or PR man who has his annual Christmas cake baked and iced by Lady Parry of Neyland in the County of Dyfed; who has it delivered by the hand of a limping Life Peer of the Realm, and who then takes it with him on a a pre-Christams celebratory tour of the City and wakes the following morning to find it lying snugly alongside him in his cot. “The sweetest thing,” he claimed – probably with peotic licence and protecting his sources – “that I’ve ever had in my bed.”

Fleet Street, as it then was, beckoned young journalists. From the local weeklies of Pembrokeshire, John Edwards had made it to his own by-line on the feature pages of the national dailies. Hugh Whittow, John’s nephew, followed Uncle. Gordon found a happy, rewarding, half-way house for his personality and his growing skills as a communicator in the press office of Legal & General Assurance. Another Welsh father-figure, Emrys Wyn Owen, welcomed and guided him there. We Celts have learned to stick together when we go among the Anglo-Saxons.

In the same way most people collect trophies – souvenirs, stamps, autographs, money – Gordon collected people. Look around you. Look at me. Remember those whose bodies – for compelling reasons – could not be here but whose hearts and minds are. We are, all, the trophies of this young man’s lifetime. Apart from Gordon, we are so assorted a congregation as to have few things in common. Our common chord is that he found us interesting. He cherished good companions. While he was fascinated with and excited by the high and the mighty and all the arrogant energy of people of position, pomp and circumstance, ultimately, it was the person inside the ‘personality’ that he loved. Nor did it matter a scrap to him whether his friends actually held power, glory or wealth. Indeed, the murder of his rugby and music playing private soldier friends of the Royal Marines’ Band at Deal probably did as much as anything, literally, to break his caring heart.

Gordon knew, by instinct, and from his early beginnings in the less than salubrious quarter of Glasgow from which he came, that – as Montaigne said – “Every man is three things. He is what he thinks he is. He is what other men think that he is. He is what he really is.” Making the necessary asexual adjustments to that, in the post-chauvinist era, we know, don’t we, that, having explored what others thought of us, and teased out of us what we thought of ourselves, he stayed with us, whatever we really are.

And, at the same time, he was looking for himself. He was – with his journalistic skills, his zeal and energy for living, to help him – researching answers to those three questions that, in our quieter moments, perplex us all: “Who am I? Where did I come from? Where am I going to?”

Not too long ago, Gordon extended that research into fieldwork when he went back to Scotland. He’d already seen more of the world than he’d ever expected. A guest at the great tables at home and abroad; a talker; a listener; a surrogate son; a broad shoulder to lean on; a borrowed uncle and tutor-guide to the young on the grand tour of adolescence; a lecturer; an after-dinner speaker and master of the one-liner school of wit – Gordon Macdonald, the maturing man, was infinitely more worldly-wise than when he’d left Scotland for Wales

In Glasgow, he walked the streets of his childhood.

They’d changed as much as he had. In PR terms, and as he had, they’d “gone up market”. He was disappointed. Parking his car, he had tried to find the exact spot where the Macdonalds had once lived. In the City of European Culture, one lady took more than a passing interest in his movements.

“Wha’ ar’y'u doin?” she asked. “Wha’ar’yu wantin?” ”Im looking,” he answered, “for the place where I used to live.” ”Ach, y’u'll no’ find it,” she pronounced. “Everything’s changed aroun’ here.”

“No! Not everything, ma’am,” Gordon quipped, as he got into his car. “They’ve still got the nosey neighbours,” and he drove away fast.

It was in a quieter part of Scotland that he came closest to his birthright. On an off-shore island, he met a Macdonald of Macdonald. The old man became another trophy. In capturing him, Gordon recaptured something of himself.

He was, after all, a son of the essential Scotland. I almost said of the essence of Scotland. Gordon took an atavistic pleasure in the beautiful glens of his homeland. He loved Glenfiddich and Glenmorangie especially. A part of his savouring of the whole of the spirit of life, his taste for ‘Usquebaugh’ and his pursuit of those famous Old Grouse of the heather became legendary.

It was a source of delight for him that, of the four Patron Saints of Britain who, in mosaic, grace the arches of the Central Lobby of the Palace of Westminster, it is Saint Andrew who stands over the way to the Bar: not to the Bar of the House, nor to the Bar of Britain’s highest Court of Appeal, but to the Bar where the water and spirit of life flow, not free, but cheap enough, even for a Scotsman.

This son of Scotland, son of Mr and Mrs Macdonald, brother to Marie and Donald, and doting uncle to Ryan, was a borrowed son to me. He called my wife his ‘Welsh Mam’. He treated our daughter, Catherine, as another sister. In this congregation, Gordon has, posthumously, gathered his unique, extended family of the relationships of his lifetime and we are relative to one another because we related to him and he to us.

He brought many of us toghether. Emrys Wyn Owen – although his wife, Ruth, and I grew up simultaneously in Neyland; Roddy Dewe; Joe Palmer: Ted Tilley; Jimmy ‘The Muncher’ Waldron [he died in 2000 penniless leaving a bespoke wardrobe, a full ashtray and a bundle of memories]; the Murphys – John and Mike ; Susan Shaar; John McCarthy; Paul Seaman: the lovely, lively ageless Sir John and Lady Mills; the Harmsworth family of Rothermeres; the young Mottisons. We met when Gordon showed us off to one another.

Some of us went, together, to a Mansion House dinner of the Patten Makers’ Guild, Gordon’s Livery Company. We went – the men that is – in obligatory ‘white tie and tails’. The ladies wore emphatic designer dresses, they were bejewelled, their hair extravagantly coiffured. En route, they took a drink with me in the Peers’ Guest Room of the House of Lords. Their Lordships were impressed – some startled, even – by the splendour of their entry.

Lord Gladwyn – formerly the scholar-diplomat Sir Gladwyn Jebb – was actually impressed enough to raise one eyebrow. “What’s this, Parry?” he muttered to me at the bar. “Is it your Constituency Labour Party annual outing?” Gordon loved that.

He loved so much of life: its ironies, its inconsistencies, its casual calamities, the perpetual challenges of it all, the tears and, especially, the laughter through the tears. He triumphed in the triumphs of his friends just as he shared his own joys, his latest stories, his newest experiences of life, with them.

If you’ve ever read Matthew Arnold’s epic, narrative poem Sohrab and Rustum, you will understand why I re-read it in preparation for this moment. You’ll recall that Rustum was a mighty warrior. You’ll know that he dearly wanted a son and that his wife hid the birth of the boy, Sohrab, from him, telling him that she’d had a baby girl, for fear that the son would follow in his father’s dangerous footsteps. You’ll understand the poignancy and the relevance, the dramatic irony, of Sohrab and Rustum’s finally meeting in combat to the death and learning their relationship too late to avoid the son – with so much living still in him – dying, while the father – tiring of it all – survived. His grief led Rustum to wish to die with his dying son. But Sohrab commanded his father to take a much more difficult path: to accept the sterner discipline of life and even greater responsibilities of love by re-entering the equation rather than exiting from it. Sohrab could have been speaking for Gordon and to us this afternoon. He said:

Do thou the deeds I die too young to do
And reap a second glory in thine age.

There was, too, that ‘druid of the broken body’ and scribe of our Celtic twilight, Dylan Thomas. He was in his thirties when his death tumbled him. Who knows what poems unwritten, went with him? For years he had stretched his talent to his ‘craft’, his ‘sullen art’ writing of life and death and love.

Rabelaisian, taking all living at the full, he’s been mistaken for a pagan poet but he was not. There was in him – as there was in Gordon Macdonald – a love, almost a lust for life, as if he knew that there wasn’t much of it left to savour.

When His friends asked the 32-year-old and about to die Jesus of Nazareth what was the most important discipline of the law, He answered:

This is my commandment, that you love one another

Gordon Macdonald lived and died by that and Dylan Thomas left, for our comfort, the assuring, reassuring lines:

Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion. 

Lord Parry’s eulogy ends.

An appeal from Zurich

We ought to honour Gordon Macdonald’s memory in the 21st Century. He, at least, deserves to have named after him a prestigious annual award for creative and innovative inhouse PR practice by young practitioners. So, if there’s anybody out there with the power and the will to make this happen: please, immortalise Gordon’s legacy.

1. Introduction

Elizabeth I was the first European monarch to rely on the techniques of modern image-making. She made full use of her insights into the Greek and Roman classical traditions, the rediscovery of which sparked the Renaissance. In the process, she turned her initially weak position on the national and international stage into an unassailable one that defined an era.

However her relevance reaches beyond the eponymous Elizabethan age. Her reign marked the beginning of our epoch. She exploited the the narrative of ballads, the pamphlets produced by printing presses, and the enchantment of spectacle to promulgate her agenda. She introduced the English to celebrity culture, which she cultivated at her court. And, besides being the modern mistress of propaganda, Elizabeth also had something original to communicate.

Elizabeth I founded a religiously tolerant society in which secular power overshadowed ecclesiastical influence of all persuasions. In his masterpiece History of Civilisation in England VI, Henry Thomas Buckle claims that her regime was the first instance of government without the central participation of spiritual authority. Elizabeth’s successor James I remarked that she never executed anybody for being a papist.

Her rule marked the beginning of what Buckle coined the age of scepticism:

The more we examine this great principle of scepticism, the more distinctly we shall see the immense part it played in the progress of European civilization. To state in general terms, what in this Introduction [this refers to his book History of Civilization in England VI] will be fully proved, it may be said that to scepticism we owe that spirit of inquiry, which during the last two centuries, has gradually encroached on every department of practical and speculative knowledge; has weakened the authority of the privileged classes, and thus placed liberty on a surer foundation; has chastised the despotism of princes; has restrained the arrogance of nobles; and has even diminished the arrogance of the clergy. In a word, it is this which has remedied the three fundamental errors of the olden time: errors which made the people, in politics too confiding; in science too credulous; in religion too intolerant. [History of Civilization in England VI, page 335, by Henry Thomas Buckle, Longmans Green and Co, 1873]

It is my argument that Elizabeth I’s reign embodied the most progressive sentiments of her age, which were rooted in humanism. She ruled England in the public interest by bringing to bear the full taxonomy of Macheavelian techniques: Teasing, Pretending, Concealing and Distracting. Her regime was abetted by a new class of advisers, hired for their talent rather than their parentage. The state they constructed had modern, moral underpinnings and big ambitions. Their work and legacy reshaped and redefined not just England, but also the future of the world, for the better.

What’s remarkable was how the Renaissance empowered a new class of elite woman in public affairs. In the late 16th century, there was a burst of feminine leaders on the world stage who took control of their societies. The likes of Mary I; Elizabeth I; Mary Queen of Scots; and France’s Catherine de Médicis, emerged, with varying degrees of success, as powerful international stateswomen bent on remoulding Europe and its colonial possessions on their terms.

I think it fair to say that Elizabeth I was the greatest of them all. Her success as a monarch – perhaps Europe’s most esteemed ever – was the result, I shall argue, of her innovative approach to policy making and to the management of her reputation.

As Susan Frey argues in her excellent book Elizabeth I, The Competition for Representation, the genius of Elizabeth was her preparedness to engage conflicting social forces constructively. Elizabeth’s PR strength – and I think PR is the right term – rested on how she dressed her image in those of others, and on how she allowed them to dress their interests in her image. That, as we shall explore in part-2, made her an infuriating and often ambiguous Queen, and it was also what made her a great one.

But before considering how she achieved this feat using rhetoric, narrative, persuasion and evasion, it is necessary to review the times she was born into. We must consider her educational influences, and assess the reputation she’d acquired when she took the throne in 1558.

Hence in part-1, I introduce my main themes. In part-2, I shall substantiate what I argue in part-1 to show how Elizabeth as Queen of England used PR to master her realm and the world.

Let’s begin with a public relations disaster.

2. Naughty goings on in Elizabeth’s bedchamber

Just months after Henry VIII died in 1547, Thomas Seymour married in secret Henry’s widow Catherine Parr. Meanwhile he lobbied the council advising Edward VI, the nine-year-old son of Henry VIII, for permission to wed Catherine.

Historians agree that because Elizabeth lived with Catherine, Seymour’s marriage was most likely a duplicitous move to gain access to the princess. Though it seems that on Catherine Parr’s side she really did love the handsome Seymour. Indeed, she had planned to marry him before Henry VIII proposed to her.

Rumours about Seymour’s lust for Elizabeth soon started to circulate. They were both scandalous and credible. It seems that a partly clothed Seymour would enter fourteen-year-old Elizabeth’s bedcamber, open her curtains and advance on her. He did so before she was dressed and sometimes before she was awake. It is said that he struck her “familiarly” on the back, sometimes on the buttocks. Mostly he indulged in tickling her between the bedsheets. Moreover, Seymour, who was around forty years of age, brazenly made it public that he would have been happier had he married the pubescent Elizabeth, rather than the aging Catherine.

Catherine caught her husband embracing Elizabeth in the girl’s bedchamber. In response, Elizabeth was embarrassingly sent to another home to be educated. Soon after, Catherine died in chid-birth and Thomas Seymour continued wooing Elizabeth shamelessly.

The supposed relationship between Elizabeth and a married man was taboo in the eyes of both the Protestant and Catholic religions (it might have been innocent on her part, but it is doubtful that it was on his). The gossip this provoked was enormously damaging to her reputation.

Moreover, Seymour was eventually executed for treason. The investigation into his plotting, which was real and extensive, pointed toward Elizabeth’s knowledge. While her particpation was never proven, her association with Seymour was implied when it became known that the success of his conspiracy depended upon him marrying her. It was another major blow to her emerging reputation.

3. Renaissance Elizabeth: a woman of substance

While Elizabeth was not a proper princess in her youth (see chapter, From princess to bastard to legitimate heir), she was very much a king’s daughter. She benefitted from the spirit of Thomas More who believed that women were as capable as men of academic achievement. She was educated in an age that saw Europe’s elite women receive an education in Greek, Latin, physics, philosophy, mathematics, astronomy, and not least logic and rhetoric.

Indeed, I maintain that it was Elizabeth’s knowledge of the works Isocrates, Aristotle, Cicero and Saint Cyprian, to name but a few classical influences, that gave her the insights that guided her thoroughly modern style of rule. One example of this was her life-long attachment to Isocrates’ advice (which she recommended to James I) to the prince in To Nicoles, which set out his duties:

You will be a good popular leader if you neither permit the multitude to commit outrages nor allow them to suffer them, but contrive that, while the best men take the honours, the rest shall suffer no wrong; for these are the first and chief elements of a good constitution….

“Show that you reverence truth so deeply that your word is more to be trusted than other men’s oaths [We'll examine in part-2 the extent to which Elizabeth used deception, fudge and outright lies during her reign].”

Elizabeth’s education helped her lead from the front. It gave her the strength and depth to craft her own propaganda and to think strategically, independently of her advisers. Her book-learning meant that she was never bamboozled or belittled in discussion with Europe’s elite. For instance, because she spoke English, French, Latin, Spanish and some Italian, she could negotiate with world leaders or their ambassadors in person.

Through Elizabeth’s education at the hands of Oxford and Cambridge humanists, she absorbed a new post-feudal notion of virtue. It was one popularized by Petrarch. It prized achieving Cicero’s “concordia ordinum” (agreement of or between the classes) and advocated “Virtus and Fortuna”, which promoted Cicero’s mantra, then novel, that people could master their own fate. She would have been taught, and went on to demonstrate, that at the heart of human culture, lies virtue, which consists of the union of eloquence and wisdom in the cultivated man of affairs.

She was most likely influenced by thinkers such as Machavelli, who was a practical thinker and a republican by inclination. He lived in a world in which princes were usurping republics, or in which aristocrats were corrupting them, and then killing each other to keep or retain their grip on the state. He saw for himself in Florence the consequences of this in human blood and turmoil. He longed for, and wrote about how to obtain, stability.

In his controversial work The Prince he says bluntly that being moral is no way to achieve one’s ends in an immoral world:

“One must be a fox in order to recognise traps, and a lion to frighten off wolves. Those who simply act like lions are stupid. So it follows that a prudent ruler cannot, and must not, honour his word when it places him at a disadvantage.”

He says princes should pursue honour and glory and through that bring happiness to the people. He wrote about how elites must obtain and retain authority and gain legitimacy in the eyes of the people. But first they must consolidate their power or face annihilation.

In the world Machiavelli wrote about it was no longer enough for rulers to be paragons of virtue or for church leaders and princes to rely on feudal virtues of birth-right, fealty, chivalry, courage, self-sacrifice, honour and loyalty. He made plain that in the new world, rulers had no God-given legitimacy, right to rule or right to be loved, respected and obeyed.

In place of feudal virtues, Machiavelli said modern prince required a good reputation and positive public opinion to maintain their legitimacy and power. Machavelli believed that the first duty of leaders was to protect their people from external threats. His main concern focused on how to forge bonds between citizens and how to achieve social cohesion. For him the spirit of community and service started with family, friends and neighbours, because if you couldn’t mobilize them you could never compete with other contenders for power.

Machiavelli was an early advocate of social equality. For him the old feudal system was not capable of satisfying the different aspirations of the classes of the commonwealths that he saw developing in Europe. Inspired by Cicero and the legacy of the Roman republic, he believed that the key to successful government was the ability to keep the various classes in a state of equilibrium.

In short, the modern prince had to represent constituencies of influence and power in a consensual manner in order to justify wielding their authority over others.

According to him, it is the mobilisation of power (one major part of which is public opinion) that settles disputes about what ought to be done in society. But his advice was as cynical as it was pragmatic:

“One can say this in general of men: they are ungrateful, disloyal, insincere and deceitful, timid of danger and avid of profit…. Love is a bond of obligation which these miserable creatures break whenever it suits them to do so; but fear holds them fast by a dread of punishment that never passes” Ibid

But Machiavelli also put his faith in the public and popularized the term publica voce. He wrote:

“A people is more prudent, more stable, and of better judgment than a prince.”

He maintained that an uncontrolled mob led astray could be more easily persuaded by a good man and more easily led back into a good way than a could a stubborn prince:

“No one can speak to a wicked prince, and the only remedy is steel…. To cure the malady of the people words are enough” (Quoted from translations of Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio; 3 vols. published between 1512-1517 (Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livius)

However, he believed that neither words nor force were enough to determine an outcome:

“… [the] prince who bases his power entirely on…words, finding himself completely without other preparations, comes to ruin;” (Source: The Prince).

Such humanistic and conflicted insights formed a very important part of Elizabeth’s rigorous education. It was an education that she could relate to as she managed her own affairs and saw how others mismanaged theirs.

4. Henry VIII and the Reformation 

As we know, Henry VIII married six times in his quest to breed a male line of succession. He feared that a female heir would either have to marry at home or abroad. The former risked provoking civil war as faction fought faction. The latter risked making England a mere province of a foreign realm.

When Henry VIII defied the Pope and divorced his first wife Catherine of Aragon in 1533 he broke with Rome. However this break was motivated by practical considerations rather than by a religious schism. The dispute revolved around his right to divorce Catherine, mother of princess Mary, so that he could acquire a younger wife capable of producing a male heir. The Act of Supremacy of 1534 made the King “supreme head on earth” and united civil and religious law under his command. Yet after the Pope’s authority was rejected, religious worship and belief remained essentially Catholic. What changed dramatically was England’s identity in Europe and its unique sense of being in control of its own destiny.

Henry VIII’s break with Rome was opportunistic. But it was also the logical consequence of already existing nationalistic and religious senitiment. As early as the 14th century John Wycliffe’s English Lollards, known as hedge- (or lay) priests, began their campaign against the doctrine of purgatory, papal corruption, pilgrimage and the worship of relics. They campaigned for the introduction of the English vernacular in church worship. They maintained that loyalty to their king came before loyalty to a foreign Pope. Their movement sparked the European Reformation, more than one hundred years before Luther published his revolutionary Ninety-five Theses in 1517.

Wycliffe’s Lollards represented a radical tendency in England. It was one that influenced the Peasants Revolt of 1381, though Wyatt himself opposed it. They set in train a tradition of critical thinking which interrogated previously fixed values, mores and beliefs about the relationship between church and state, power and wealth. But the transformation of English and European society took many hundreds of years to take full root. It was still in flux when Elizabeth I came to power.

As a consequence of Henry VIII’s battle with Rome, he centralized power over the English state. In the process he dismantled the feudal order, which had in large part revolved around the old religion, including its monasteries, and the regional influence of barons. The power of the Catholic church was smashed in a series of increasingly dramatic moves, culminating in the eventual dismantling of England’s monasteries. Henry VIII reforms also involved redefining the role of England’s barons, who came to rely on parliament and their position in the Royal court for their power and income.

As Rome’s influence waned, England’s parliament – particularly its chamber of commons – grew in significance. Parliament expressed a distinctly Protestant and humanist outlook. Though in reality, the humanist movement’s leading figures and thinkers were papists such as Petrarch, More, Erasmus and Machiavelli, with their essentially modern liberal, individualistic and tolerant outlook.

5. From princess to bastard 

Born in 1533, princess Elizabeth was declared illegitimate three years later when Henry VIII’s second wife Anne Boleyn was convicted of treason and beheaded. Anne Boleyn’s crime supposedly involved committing adultery with five men, including her own brother. In declaring Henry VIII’s separation from Anne Boleyn legal, it was adjudged that they had never been officially married; it is then moot how she could also be convicted of adultery. While Tudor law is beyond this essay’s scope, and beyond my comprehension, it appears that Henry VIII’s pre-marriage affair with Anne’s sister had something to do with the ruling.

Henry VIII’s next wife was Jane Seymour. She publicly, perhaps under pressure from the King, promised to marry him within 24 hours of Anne Boleyn’s execution. She gave him an heir the next year with the birth of Edward (Edward VI 12 October 1537 – 6 July 1553) but she died within weeks of his birth.

Nine years later, Edward Tudor inherited the throne of England. Of course, others, notably John Dudley, 1st Duke of Northumberland, known historically, and perhaps unfairly, as the “wicked Duke”, ruled in Edward’s name. However his reign was short. Tuberculosis killed Edward VI at the tender age of 15.

What is worth noting about Edward VI’s rule was the pace of the Reformation and the mess made of organizing his succession.

Edward tried to hand the crown’s power to his cousin Lady Jane Grey, an educated Renaissance Protestant, and a fan of Plato, and daughter-in-law of the Duke of Northumberland. Edward VI clearly favoured this great-granddaughter of Henry VII over his half-sisters because he considered Mary and Elizabeth to be his father’s illegitimate children.

Edward VI’s intention was probably to ensure religious continuity. Certainly, under Edward’s and his advisers’ rule, significant steps were taken to Anglicise the Church of England. Forms of worship in English churches became definably Protestant. In particular, Edward VI ended the Chantries, introduced the Book of Common Prayer, and reformed the communion service, under the guidance of Thomas Crammer, the then Archbishop of Canterbury. Yet Edward’s and Northumberland’s plan for a Protestant succession was doomed.

Lady Jane Grey’s fate – as a Protestant martyr of the Reformation - was quickly sealed when the Privy Council, an elite inner circle of royal advisers, which had initially endorsed Edward VI’s will, changed sides. Their point of view was perhaps influenced by the troops lining up behind Mary claim to the throne. They were threatening to march on London, while Northumberland had set off to arrest her. Their decision to betray Northumberland was also perhaps a genuine concern for constitutional law, which did indeed make Edward VI’s will legally suspect, and Mary’s claim overwhelming. Whatever their motivation, their subsequent support for Mary ended Lady Jane Grey’s nine days’ rule (some historians count her reign as being of 12-days’ duration) as Queen of England in 1553.

It was never Mary’s stated intention to execute Lady Jane Grey. But a failed Protestant uprising in 1554 in protest at Mary’s proposed marriage to Catholic Philip, the prince of Spain, son of Spain’s King Charles V, made chopping off her head appear justifiable. She was executed to supposedly put an end to Protestant pretensions of her restoration.

However, paradoxically, the Protestant revolt led by Sir Thomas Wyatt, was not in support of Grey, but actually motivated by a call to put Mary’s sister Elizabeth on the throne. It may even, we suspect, have had her complicit support (we’ll review that later). What these episodes tell us, however, is that Catholicism was far from dead and that Protestantism did not yet reign unassailably supreme either.

6. Bloody Mary

Queen Mary came to power as a Catholic monarch the country was evenly divided between worshippers the two competing faiths. But, as the historian J. E. Neale points out in his 1933 classic biography Queen Elizabeth, Mary 1st ruled a country in which the Reformation was already twenty years old. The young generation had never known a time in which papal authority held-sway over English affairs. London and the other major towns, the hubs of wealth and power, were mostly of Protestant persuasion; while the North of England remained largely Catholic. Many of clergy of the church of England had taken wives; they therefore had no interest in becoming apostates again. Moreover, Protestants had an overwhelming vested motivation for opposing any return to Catholicism:

“The sale of monastic and chantry lands had converted the Reformation into a colossal business interest in which everyone, yeoman, merchant, gentleman, and nobleman, with any free capital, had invested. Lands had changed hands like shares in a modern company, involving a range of speculators far greater than the number of actual holders, many as they were.” [J E Neale Queen Elizabeth, page 33]

England was, as Neale states, a country which rejoiced in its insularity and hatred of foreigners and foreign jurisdiction. Nevertheless there was no lack of support for Mary. In addition, Mary had on her side the countervailing force of respect for her feudal rights as Queen. There was a deference and acceptance in society for the privileges of birth and position. These were ideas rooted in Medieval morality.

Cynicism, of course, was rife. Mary I’s weakness was her inflated view of the monarch’s position. Despite having a first-class Renaissance education, she failed to appreciate that her modern role was to serve the interests of others first and foremost. In contrast, Mary I took her role as being “God-given” and serving God (of course Elizabeth used the same language, but Mary I took it to heart). While all was not as it was in the past, Mary I tried to rule as if she had the power of Henry VIII.

First she married a foreign Catholic prince, who was destined to be king of Spain. Then she reimposed Catholicism on England by bringing back papal authority and the heresy laws. She was a determined and devout Queen swimming against the stream:

“She preferred death, she said, to any other husband. Her marriage was the most personal act of her reign, and it was fatal. It struck harshly upon insular prejudice and aroused the Englishry of everyone. In fear it bred of secular foreign dominance, it emphasized the alien character of papal supremacy; and two oppositions – Politique and Protestant – were wedded. To be mere English and to be Protestant began to seem one and the same thing” [J E Neale, Queen Elizabeth, page 35]

Mary 1st was on a crusade of sorts. But to get her way and to keep her grip on power Mary I increasingly had to resort to force. Heresy was treason and in 1555 she had around 300 Protestants burned at the stake. This earned her the title “Bloody Mary”. The atmosphere at some of the executions was often decidedly hostile toward the executioners and supportive of the condemned.

Her marriage to Prince Philip of Spain (later King Philip II) was a farce. Parliament would not grant him the title of King, which was a snub to Mary. Meanwhile, he preferred being home in Spain to living with his much older wife in England. She had two phantom pregnancies, which only served to undermine her reputation and credibility. Her failure to produce an hier also made Elizabeth’s postion as heir apparent stronger.

Moreover, her husband Philip became an ally of Elizabeth. He reasoned that Mary Queen of Scots, a friend Spain’s enemy France, was not an acceptable alternative to Mary I if the latter were to die first. He instinctively understood that he might require Elizabeth’s goodwill in the future.

Moreover, Mary I lost Calais to the French in an unnecessary war with France, which was her husband and Spain’s cause, not England’s. The loss of Calais was considered a major national humiliation.

While legally she re-cemented church and state with Catholicism, in practice she failed to undermine Protestantism. The gentry mostly sabotaged her attempt to regain the land they had seized from the monasteries. Catholicism never underwent a popular revival beyond the already converted.

Meanwhile, she made her own court of chosen courtiers Catholic. She appointed Catholic bishops. She also manipulated Parliament, but only up to a point. More than once Parliament defied her and many of its members plotted against her.

Mary’s five-year rule of England rule was a disaster. Though we shouldn’t underestimate that she had every chance of success in her quest to restore Catholicism. Pointing to what might have been, Roy Strong remarks in The Spirit of Britain:

“The grass roots resurgence for the old ways provides abundant evidence that had she lived longer or produced a child things would have taken a very different course. But the accession of her sister Elizabeth in 1558 was to decree otherwise” [page147}

Yet to most observers of the day, including Catholics, her rule seemingly demonstrated what Henry VIII thought; women were unfit to rule a kingdom.

Just months before Elizabeth took the throne, John Knox, leader of the Protestant Reformation, published his First Blast against the Monstrous Regiment of Women. He ranted about how women were weak, frail, impatient, feeble, and foolish:

"...they were the port and gate of the Devil; their covetousness, like the gulf of Hell, was insatiable. For the weak to nourish the strong, the foolish to govern the discreet, in brief, for women to rule men, was contumely to God and the subversion of good order and justice. The Bible, the Fathers, Aristotle, the Classical world, were at one on the subject; men, Knox thought, were less than the beasts to permit such an inversion of God's order." [Queen Elizabeth by J E Neale, page 63]

Elizabeth’s problems with “bloody Mary”

Relations between the two sisters were not good. Mary I considered Elizabeth to be the child of an infamous woman. She blamed Elizabeth for outraging her mother Catherine of Aragon. Mary, with good reason, never trusted Elizabeth.

Twice Mary I came close to having Elizabeth’s head chopped off. The first time was during Wyatt’s rebellion. Under interrogation, Wyatt admitted writing twice to Elizabeth. But the answers he received were verbal and did not provide sufficient proof of complicity to convict Elizabeth of treason; not least because the messages may have been from servants taking the princes’s name in vain. And not least because public opinion made it unacceptable to execute her without good evidence (the court eventually acquitted Elizabeth); Lady Jane Grey was different because there was already an act of attainder in her name.

However the suspicion of complicity was enough for Mary to lock Elizabeth in the Tower of London, where she entered at Traitors’ Gate and stayed for two months in 1554. Afterward, Elizabeth was confined to a country house under close guard.

Elizabeth’s faith was a matter of contention. She begged Mary I to believe that she was a Catholic. She even attended Mass. But Mary I grew disillusioned and doubted the sincerity of her conversion. While Mary’s husband the King Spain took it as a hopeful sign that it was possible in the future for Elizabeth to marry a Catholic.

The second time Mary had cause to convict Elizabeth of treason was in 1555, there was much more evidence. Her London residence Somerset House was searched and a hoard of seditious, anti-Catholic books and papers, ballads and caricatures was discovered. Many of Elizabeth’s servants were arrested and sent to the Tower of London. But this time things were different.  The balance of public opinion was increasingly hostile to Mary. As J E Neale remarks, officially, Elizabeth had to be regarded as the victim of irresponsible knaves.

Ironically, it was Mary I Catholic husband who finally convinced her to recognize her sister’s right to succession. Which she did on the condition that Elizabeth maintain the Catholic faith. Mary I died in 1558.

Conclusion

When Elizabeth took power aged 25 years of age, her legitimacy as Queen was very much in doubt. Her reputation was marred. Her weaknesses had immense power to hurt her. Even her religious leanings were not transparent. Moreover, she inherited a kingdom that was weak militarily and economically. As J E Neale summed up Elizabeth’s position, quoting a commentator from her time saying:

“The French king bestriding the realm, having one foot in Calais and the other in Scotland. Steadfast enmity, but no steadfast friendship abroad.” [Queen Elizabeth by J E Neale, page 82]

At home her kingdom was divided between two great religions, with Mary Queen of Scots a contender to replace her on behalf of Catholicism, Scotland and France.

Yet her reputation as a monarch arguably ranks highest of all the royals who ever sat on the British throne. She saw off the Spanish Armada, defined a whole era in her name, and was called “Gloriana” by Edmund Spenser in “The Faerie Queene”. How she achieved this will be the subject of part-2.

I sparked controversy by criticising Public Relations Ethics: Contrasting Models from the Rhetorics of Plato, Aristotle, and Isocrates, by Charles W. Marsh Jr, University of Kansas professor of journalism. The response took me by surprise. This piece, then, is a follow-on contribution. It covers what I would have liked to have said had I had more time and been better prepared.

Marsh asks us to believe in the superiority of Isocrates’ ethical and moral approach to communication compared to his contemporaries. He contrasts what he calls the adversarial/advocacy rhetoric of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle to the supposedly more symmetrical and consensual communication techniques developed by Isocrates:

Because Isocratean rhetoricians seek unification and consensus—and because they cannot be certain of a divinely ordained best course of action—they consider the interests and arguments of others in a debate [unlike Aristotle or Plato]. …. the Isocratean rhetorician seeks to attain goals by building relationships in which both parties win. [All quotes from Marsh are from his paper Public Relations Ethics: Contrasting Models from the Rhetorics of Plato, Aristotle, and Isocrates.]

My purpose here is not to provide a comparative analysis of rhetorical rivals. It is to interrogate Marsh’s claims. To set the scene, here are some more quotes that highlight how he wishes to frame Isocrates’ significance and relevance to the modern world:

Isocrates created a moral, symmetrical rhetoric that proved to be more effective, immediately and historically, than its asymmetrical rivals in classical Greece.

He adds:

It [public relations] can, instead [of its Socratic habits], function admirably (in the several senses of that verb phrase) by following the foundation of Isocratean rhetoric: “to form a genuine ‘we’ out of diversity”.

He concludes:

Recent studies, in fact, support what Isocrates demonstrated and, 2 millennia later, the IABC Research Foundation posited that two-way symmetrical public relations, with its idealistic social role, is the most effective model of public relations.

Bold claims indeed. But do they stand up to scrutiny? I think not. There are a number of good reasons to temper our enthusiasm and moderate our praise for Isocrates.

First off, we know more about Isocrates’ criticisms of his rivals for business in the 4th century BC than we know about his actual theories and thinking on rhetoric. As George Law Cawkwell, an Oxford classicist who specialises on the 4th century BC, explains:

Unfortunately, his [Isocrates'] discussion in the speeches “Against the Sophists” and in “On the Exchange” tells one more of what he objected to in other systems than of what he actually had in his own, but it can be safely asserted that, whereas the training of the Platonic Academy was essentially philosophical, that of Isocrates was almost entirely given over to rhetoric, the art of persuasion. [See his briefing at the Latin Library on Isocrates (436-338 BC)]

Nevertheless, we know an awful lot about Isocrates’ politics and his contemporary reputation. We also know much about his work as an adviser and teacher. As Cawkwell goes on to opine and justify:

There is indeed a strong suspicion that Isocrates would lend his talents to any cause whatsoever, merely for the pleasure of presenting it well. The so-called Cyprian orations—”To Nicocles” (c. 372), the “Nicoles” (c. 368), and the “Evagoras” (c. 365)—are concerned with the laudations of monarchs, while the “Archidamus” (366) puts into the mouth of the heir to one of the Spartan kings a speech full of praise for Sparta and Spartanism. One is correspondingly less impressed when in the “Panegyric” and “Panathenaic” orations he professed admiration for Athens. Such exaltation of style and indifference to matter is contemptible, and, insofar as his purpose in his system of education appears to have been to train others to a similar facility, he can hardly escape the censure he accorded to other rhetorical schools. [Ibid]

In contrast to the progressive picture Marsh paints, Isocrates was no friend of radical democracy, or of the consensus, reconciliation and unmediated co-existence it depended on:

Isocrates did have beliefs, however, some of which are revealed in “On the Areopagus,” composed at the end of the Social War, when Athens’ fortunes were at their lowest for 50 years. In this work he commends the ancient constitution of Athens, under which the aristocratic council of the Areopagus exercised a general supervision over the conduct of citizens. Isocrates’ proposals for returning to the system in operation before the days of democracy were not practical but display profoundly conservative inclinations. [Ibid]

Cawkwell also describes how Isocrates sought to unite the warring Greeks by force, seemingly without regard for the merits and morality of whomever might end up in charge:

…in the letter “To Philip”, Isocrates appealed to the King of Macedonia to reconcile the Greeks and lead them against Persia. Since Philip was on the point of intervening in Greece to settle the Second Sacred War (355-346), many have believed that Isocrates was prepared to submit his country to an outside master.

This is unjust, for Isocrates, a political innocent, had only the vaguest idea of what the consequences of such a policy might be. He had in fact made earlier similar appeals to Agesilaus, king of Sparta, to Dionysius I, tyrant of Syracuse, and to Alexander, tyrant of Pherae in Thessaly, none of whom could conceivably have become political master of Greece. The truth is that Isocrates was seeking merely a military leader. [Ibid]

This credible account makes it very difficult for me to accept Marsh’s admiration for Isocrates. It encourages me to think of Iscocrates as an unworldly political thinker. He also comes across as a flexible and rhetorical (PR) gun for hire to the highest bidder. That’s not anything I object to in principle.

The evidence just does not seem to support the claim that Isocrates put the practice of rhetoric (read PR) on to the moral and ethical high ground. Therefore, when an influential and credible professor of journalism stridently promotes Isocrates’ legacy as a role model for developing excellence and best PR practice in the 21st century, I think we need to debate an alternative viewpoint.

Marsh published his paper in 2001, so he had no chance to ponder a more recent source that casts fresh doubt on Isocrates’ moral and ethical credentials (at least in terms we moderns can appreciate).

In 2006, Joseph Stewart Garnjobst published The epistles of Isocrates: A historical and grammatical commentary, which critiques nine surviving letters by Isocrates.

What’s really fascinating about Garnjobst’s thesis is its account of how Isocrates used opportunistic psychological tricks to get inside the minds of prospective clients. He reveals, studiously, how Isocrates positioned himself symmetrically with the existing prejudices and practices of potential customers. He examines how Isocrates greased the egos of monarchs, tyrants and others to win business. He does so verb by verb, line by line to demonstrate how Isocrates spun his texts and messages. In the process, Garnjobst provides insight into Isocrates’ hubris. The sage appeals to potential patrons as one great man talking to others, and he never forgets to name drop, sometimes dishonestly, or to boast of the extent of his self-claimed influence.

Here is one example from nine, Isocrates’ letter seeking paid-work from a newly installed dynast, Timotheus son of Clearchus, in the city-state Heracleia (c 346 BC). Garnjobst examines the underlying meaning of the words used in the context of the challenges faced by both men:

While pleasure is a personal indulgence, virtue and reputation are to Isocrates public matters, since their attainment must take place in the eyes of the people. Thus the pursuit of virtue would fall into the realm of important things and therefore topics suitable for his [Isocrates'] speeches, which he charterizes as sumbouleutic, whereas he leaves personal matters to writers of epideictic and dicanic speeches [he means anybody in the Aristotlian camp or any other competitors among the sophists]. His pursuit of virtue marks Timotheus out as a person with similar thoughts and interests as Isocrates, and a person suitable to receive advice and education. It is this reason, Isocrates suggests, and not merely familial exenia [Greek term for already existing guest friendship] that motivates him to write to the young dynast.

That Timotheus has distanced his regime from his father will, Isocrates suggests (though it will also sound like a warning), make him a favorite of orators and encomiasts looking to the new dynast for patronage for their facile speeches praising his kindness and wisdom. While this was almost certainly true, what it also suggests is that Thimoeus will be lacking in true advisors [author's italics], those such as Ioscrates who will give him honest advice about the most important matters governing dynastic rule.

Isocrates is appealing for patronage. In return, Isocrates says he can help Timotheus develop the reputation he requires to assert effective control over the polis. We can easily imagine how Timotheus’ authority and legitimacy were cast into doubt by the brutal record of his father’s rule. It is said that, among other outrages, Clearchus delighted in giving people drinks laced with wolf’s-bane, which resulted in their prolonged and painful deaths. In turn, Isocrates is obliged to squirm. He had once been Timotheus’ father’s adviser and educator. In the letter, Isocrates explains how he disowned him once he saw his true character (perhaps that former relationship was what made Isocrates an influential guest-friend of Timotheus).

So, as I assessed Isocrates for this piece, I came to appreciate the principled integrity and famed obstinacy of Socrates. He, unlike Isocrates whose fees were higher than any of his competitors, refused to accept any money for educating people. Socrates thought that the taking of fees encouraged the educator to pander to students’ prejudices, rather than do what they’re meant to do, which is challenge them. It strikes me that Garnjobst’s book highlights an example of the moral dilemma that justified Socrates’ stance in Classical Greece.

Now let’s interrogate some more arguments that Marsh presents in support of his claims.

He accuses Aristotle of being amoral for saying rhetoric is the art of discovering the successful means of persuasion in any given situation. He says that’s not an acceptable ethical position. He proposes instead that rhetoric itself has to be an ethical discipline. Indeed, the whole point of his paper is to argue that Isocrates showed the world how to make it so. But this risks misunderstanding both Aristotle and rhetoric. If I read it correctly, Aristotle says it is the user who needs to be ethical. Rhetoric (read PR), on the other hand, is merely a tool, which can be used for good or for bad purposes. I suggest that Aristotle was concerned primarily with human agency (For me, it was this very concern that underpinned Classical Greece’s uniqueness, making it so significant in terms of human progress).

What we also need to bear in mind is that Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and, arguably, Protagoras, invented modern ethics, as well as the modern notions of virtue, rational discourse/conversation and philosophical inquiry.

I believe that Marsh similarly underestimates Aristotle’s depth when he dismisses his understanding of ethos. What he fails to mention is that ethics derives from the word ethos; literally meaning character. Therefore I suggest Marsh is wrong to say that “with Isocrates rhetoric is gradually transformed into ethics”, not least because ethos (ethics) is just one important part of rhetoric. And, surely, Aristotle was right to say that character can be faked and audiences misled by clever masters of rhetoric.

I contend, Aristotle’s contribution to the field of ethics, rhetoric and democracy (whose defining principle he said was freedom), to mention just a few of his claims to fame, deserves more respect and care than Marsh shows.

Furthermore, Marsh would have us accept that Isocrates validates, convincingly, Professor Jim Grunig’s preferred two-way symmetrical model of public relations. Again, I think there are good reasons to dispute this.

To substantiate his point, Marsh’s paper discusses Plato’s use of the theme of love to describe three different approaches to conducting philosophical discourse: the evil lover; non-lover; and noble lover.

According to Marsh’s account, the evil lover reduces his lover to an object fit for the chase. This involves conquest by seduction, or by any means possible, including lies and deception. For the evil lover, the ends justify the means. This is a model that in PR terms, says Marsh, fits Jim Grunig’s two-way asymmetrical model, a form of rhetoric (read PR) that advocates selective truth telling on behalf of clients.

The non-lover lacks passion and lacks a personal motivation, when it comes to developing a relationship with his “loved” one. Therefore, such people are largely indifferent as to whether their courting is successful. Marsh says, this model discussed by Plato corresponds to Grunig’s public information model of public relations, in which organisations deliver objective information to publics that request it. Marsh suggests, not unreasonably, that the premises of the ‘non-lover’ approach, when applied to PR, are flawed because it presupposes that, “the organization makes no other attempt at relationship building.”

The noble lover is Plato’s preferred framework for practicing ethical rhetoric, or more precisely philosophical discourse. Here the lover begins with a firm viewpoint (says Marsh), is sincerely interested in the outcome, and desires to impart his knowledge with a view to improving or ennobling his beloved in some form. In the words of Plato, noble lovers “exhibit no jealousy or meanness toward the loved one, but endeavour by every means in their power to lead him to the likeness of the god whom they honour.”

He critiques and dismisses the usefulness of Plato’s preference for the noble lover “model” for “PR purposes.” Marsh justifies his conclusions by arguing (mistakenly, in my view) that Plato envisages imposing viewpoints on others, rather than discussing them so as to fathom what is mere opinion and what qualifies as being more reliable than that. He then claims that Isocrates put forward a new definition of Plato’s noble-lover model, which prized relationship-building and obtaining unification and consensus in contrast to the latter’s supposedly uncompromising rhetoric.

However, Marsh advances scant evidence to back his claim that Isocrates offers us (never mind the ancients) something of unique value when it comes to insight and defining excellence in PR (or rhetorical) practice. He merely quotes Isocrates saying that good judgement (balancing the interests and arguments of others in debate) rather than science, or a search for illusory absolute truths, should guide people toward the best course of action. But that is the kind of wise viewpoint that Aristotle could also be cited expressing.

What I think Marsh has overlooked is that when Plato was discusing his “lover” tropes, he was talking about motivations as part of a wider body of thought. He was concerned with abstract matters, which I don’t pretend to fully comprehend. These include a critique of relativism, an examination of the relationship between nomos and phusis, and the difference between appearances and reality. Plato was also probing the boundaries between ethics, epistemology and metaphysics. He was attempting to define justice in a consistent manner and to spot universally applicable morals (something Kant was to do much later). It’s worth adding, I think, that all of theses debates, which were begun by Socrates, then developed by Plato and Aristotle, remain ongoing. I note also that while Isocrates was an incredibly astute and insightful thinker, he contributed little of substance – that we know of – to such debates.

Contrariswise: Grunig’s models, which describe one-way communication, public information conduit, aysmmetrical and symmetrical communication, have nothing whatever to do with philosophical issues or with ideas. They are merely process-driven tactical and/or strategic options that institutions can adopt for communication purposes in pursuit of their objectives (see New Moral Agenda for PR for my appraisal of Grunig’s models).

Here’s another example, highlighting how and why I tend to disagree with the popular modern portrayal of Plato in PR circles:

Two problems with Platonic rhetoric, however, have impeded its progress over time: the near impossibility of ascertaining absolute truth and the rhetoric’s aggressive intolerance of opposing viewpoints.

Regardless of whether one agrees with Plato’s philosophical conclusions or not (and to be clear, I reject them), both of Marsh’s objections are vulnerable to informed challenge.

Plato was not intolerant of opposing views. Moreover, in the the spirit of Socrates, Plato would be more likely to ask people what they think and then to get them to interrogate their own arguments, than to say what he thinks. To understand Plato better, the work of the now departed Alvin W Gouldner, Max Weber Professor of Sociology at Washington University (from 1967), is worth citing:

The dialectic [Plato's method of inquiry] is a struggle of minds. It is a contestful way of achieving “truth”. It is congenial to those who think of it – as the Greeks do of aletheia [disclosure] - as that which is non-concealed or forgotten, or as something without deceit. The would-be knower, therefore, does not simply arrive at or find truth, but engages in a struggle to vanquish and to remove the concealment and distortion by which it is assumed truth has been disguised by other persons or forces.  [Enter Plato, Classical Greece and the Origins of Social Theory, page 261, by Alvin W Gouldner, Basic Books Inc. New York, 1965]

Unless I’m mistaken, neither did Plato believe that he had discovered absolute truth, though he was firmly committed to looking for it. He advocated that the way to find it was to engage in dialogue; through a contest of minds. And, significantly, he was not an opponent of two-way communication or of rational discourse: he was their proponent. For him, the commitment to the search for truth was the key to ascertaining whether people entering into debate were behaving in an ethical fashion or not. As Gouldner explains:

The search for truth requires that individuals commit to it, and this above all is the sentiment needed for successful dialectic. Men must want to know the truth more than they must wish to win or to be judged victorious in the conversational contest. [ibid page 262]

In essence, Plato believed in the existence of absolute truth in a similar manner to how religious people believe in an all-knowing God. Plato was unsure that humans would ever come to know the truth. He was absolutely certain that he didn’t possess a monopoly on it. Just like Socrates, Isocrates and Aristotle, Plato campaigned against the eristic rhetoric of the sophists. Though, personally, I think it is neither fair nor useful to talk about the sophists (it became, I suspect, a term of abuse for rivals you don’t like) as if they were a coherent group. They were no such thing. So, perhaps overstating his point, Plato accused all, or at least most, sophists of being lovers of fame who were addicted to winning arguments for winning’s sake.

Hence, I could conclude, ironically, that Plato’s thinking validates Grunig’s account of what constitutes excellence in PR practice in the 21st century. I prefer to suggest, however, that we must do better than make superficial ahistorical comparisons between the past and the present. We would  profit more by examining the development of communication theory and practice from a sociological and historical perspective (I note in passing that Grunig’s models were devised for use in our mediated world, whereas Classical Greece was mostly an unmediated environment based on peer to peer communication. I find that a significant difference).

Let’s examine Marsh’s assessment of Isocrates some more.

He maintains that unlike Plato, Isocrates did not believe that there was a “divinely ordained best course of action”. That’s not exactly accurate. In Isocrates’ second speech concerning Nicocles, written for the king to communicate what he expects from his subjects, we get an insight into how Isocrates thought that democratic consensus had led the Greeks away from the natural (best) order of things:

He criticized democracies and oligarchies whose rivalries injure the commonwealth. These governments honor those skilled in swaying the crowd, but the monarch claimed he honors those skilled in practice. In war situations monarchy was considered more efficient. Isocrates noted that the gods live under a monarchy. [see here]

I also find it hard to accept the proposition that Isocrates seriously advocated open and free two-way communication, or that he was ever committed to consensus building in a meaningful manner. In his first letter to Nicoles himself, Isocrates advises the king to:

Allow freedom of speech to men of sound wisdom, that you may have friends who will help you to examine any questions on which you may be in doubt. Distinguish those who artfully flatter from those who loyally serve, that the wicked may not get the better of the good. [see here]

I take that to mean that the king must choose whom he trusts. The views of the others, we can suppose, are to be silenced or ignored. In contrast, elsewhere in the poleis of Classical Greece freedom of speech was for everybody. All citizens were considered equal (of course, women, slaves and foreigners were not citizens). Everybody was active in politics and no separate state or state institutions existed within the polis. This equality of voice and decision-making often led to the aristocracy, much to Plato’s anger, being marginalised in the public arena as the poor and middle united against them. Meanwhile, when we talk today about consensus, reconciliation, two-way dialogue and the symmetry of rights (justice: dikaiosune), we normally mean democracy and freedom, not kings – the asymmetrical rule of one over the many – restricting free speech.

So, I maintain that Isocrates was a reactionary by comparison to the spirit that defined the freedom-loving radical democracies in Classical Greece. I also find it hard to think of him as being a suitable role model for us either. However, we know, Plato was democracy’s most potent opponent, not Isocrates, who strikes me as having been on the side of whomever paid him (I don’t think my earlier defence here of Plato collapses because of this challenging fact. That explains why Plato remains so significant and hard to comprehend in the 21st century, I suspect).

As this piece ends, it’s useful to briefly review Isocrates’ impact on Roman rhetoric. Marsh claims:

Cicero and Quintilian could not afford ineffective rhetoric. Their clear preference for the symmetrical rhetoric of Isocrates is its most compelling endorsement.

That view does not correspond with my reading. I suggest, Cicero did not favour Isocrates over Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, or over any other rhetorician. Though I do accept that Cicero did say in his treatise Brutus that the high point of Greek oratory was Isocrates. But we should not read too much into this. Cicero was referring to his admiration for Isocrates’ eloquence and his ability to master sound and rhythm, a crowd-pleasing rhetorical skill that Cicero sought, with much success, to emulate. Yet when it came to taking sides, or to preferring one rhetorical methodology over another, Cicero was too much of a politician to fall into such traps.

In De Oratore, Cicero’s masterpiece on rhetoric, he argues against the one-sidedness of the neo-Atticists who favoured abandoning persuasion for arbitrary critical perfection. Cicero countered that the best orators had to be expedient. In De Oratore, he says over and over that rules and theories are inadequate guides to rhetorical practice. Cicero maintained that personal experience matters much more than theories and models. He believed that orators (read PR pros, politicians, priests in the modern context) needed to be masters of all rhetorical methodologies and styles, and to know when to employ each.

The classicist George Kennedy nails Cicero’s wiliness. In Kennedy’s many books on rhetoric, he explains how Cicero possessed the nouse to maximise existing materials and opportunities. He says that Cicero had the imagination to invent totally new concepts and to break with the past. In other words, Cicero plundered the Greek’s contribution to rhetoric in a very instrumental manner.

Though I feel obliged to say that I share Marsh’s admiration for Cicero’s contribution to the development of philosophy, political and ethical values, the concept of public service (duty), and much more.

Having not examined Quitantilian’s work, I have nothing to say about his views on Isocrates. However, I do wish to draw people’s attention to what Cato said about Isocrates’ legacy. He complained that students from the school of Isocrates wasted so much time on education that they had to use their knowledge to plead before Minos in the underworld.

So, where does all this leave us?

Marsh invites us to believe that Isocrates laid the “effective foundation for [modern] public relations” and that ”history shows that Isocrates’s symmetrical rhetoric clearly was more effective than its adversarial/advocacy rivals.” He also wants us to accept that Isocrates demonstrated that ”effective, achievable ethics foundation for public relations need not function at the relatively low level of the advocacy/adversarial society model.”

I beg to differ.

Global PR Summit speaker Uri Hasson, assistant professor psychology/Neuroscience Institute, Princeton

The social sciences often get in a muddle when they pretend to be scientific. Economics, sociology, history and pre-history, all blaze the trail here. Public relations, a trade steeped in conflicted logic and rhetoric and impressions if ever there was one, ought to be very nervous when its practitioners affect to have a scientific underpinning.

One of the arguments for PR to adopt neuro-scientific findings is precisely to spot the partially hard-wired human characteristics that define what Richard Dawkins calls our cultural memes, which explains all evolution (social and biological) by the differential survival of interacting self-replicating viral-like entities. This outlook is premised on a primitive materialist understanding of human nature, not to mention neo-eugenic theories. It is a viewpoint that maintains that human society is largely the product of pre-programmed (or re-programmable) mind- and fuzzy cultural-genes; in other words, evolutionary psychology. It leads many to believe that science can fathom our world so that PR pros can nudge the right triggers (neural, genetic, cultural) to get people to behave in a predictable, controllable and/or desired manner.

Of course, there is nothing wrong with the science of eugenics (nor with epigenetics) in principle: among other potential benefits, it allows us to eradicate some very awful inherited diseases such as Down’s syndrome. But we should worry when the research of neuroscientists or geneticists aims, or claims, to give scientific weight to ideas that are the social product of prejudice, politics and culture, or which are philosophical in content. In the 20th century, as we all know, some very backward – and nowadays totally discredited – beliefs and ideologies were once said to have had a scientific validity rooted in our supposed ingrained sociobiological make up.

The question is just how much can we rely on quantitative behavioural measures and neuro-scientific insights into our brain patterns to assess qualitative human variables such as our opinions and feelings.

There is a school of PR thought that promotes to clients the predictive power of algorithms and neuro-science to assist in identifying the ‘relationship value’ of networks amongst an institution’s stakeholders. Professor Toni Muzi Falconi advanced such thinking on PR Conversations in his piece ‘Improving stakeholder relationships through nets, neuros and algorithms‘, saying:

“Computer science allows the use of algorithms, which greatly reduce the need to research more than small samples of stakeholder groups. Likewise, neuroscience allows the integration of qualitative and quantitative indicators, which are closely connected to how relationships influence one another.”

Describing what he is looking for, he adds:

“Interactions within stakeholder groups (or between the groups) can reveal – through graphics – the primary relationship nodes, as well as their interconnections. A mathematical analysis of these networks, supported by computer-led software, offers the essential numerical elements of specific indicators/variables.”

I accept that in a digital world we can trawl for lots of interconnected data. Yet it would be a big mistake to read too much meaning into what’s revealed. As Heather Yaxley commented on PR Conversations:

“Whether or not we have relationships with brands and whether or not they can, or should be trying to map our relationship is equally problematic. For example I am not a great fan of Carphone Warehouse generally, but it gave great service in replacing my Blackberry. So what does this mean? Nothing. I don’t care about the company, don’t want it to engage me, build a relationship, etc. It provided a service when I needed it – end of story.”

She, not for the first time, is spot on. However my concerns, and I suspect hers, run much deeper. There is something potentially very dangerous and worrying about this trend that puts PR in the hands of the latest psychological and sociobiological psuedo-scientific theories. For anybody who thinks I exaggerate, here’s the first paragraph from a press release promoting Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science:

“Too much choice can be a bad thing—not just for the individual, but for society. Thinking about choices makes people less sympathetic to others and less likely to support policies that help people, according to a study published…”

It goes on to describe research findings which showed:

“Simply thinking about ‘choice’ made people less likely to support policies promoting greater equality and benefits for society, such as affirmative action, a tax on fuel-inefficient cars, or banning violent video games.”

Hence, to persuade us to think the right way, make the right choices and reduce our levels of stress, these scientists advocate that PR pros should become master-manipulators of neural pathways. Under the guise of evidence-based PR, this is an approach to public engagement that justifies the efficacy of its strategies by citing results based on biased research findings, as Toni Muzi Falconi puts it, “[of no] more than small samples of stakeholder groups.” For example, the same Association for Psychological Science press release cites Krishna Savani of Columbia University opining:

“’In America, we make choices all the time—in the cafeteria, in the supermarket, in the shopping mall,’ Savani says. He wonders if, in the long run, all those consumer choices might have a cumulative negative impact by making people less sympathetic towards others and less concerned about the collective good.”

Barry Schwartz, Dorwin Cartwright Professor of Social Theory and Social Action at Swarthmore College

Such prejudicial reasoning reinforces that of other neuro scientists and psychologists such as Barry Schwartz, who also say we are oppressed and made unhappy by too much choice and freedom. The logic of Savani, Shwartz and Co’s proposition is that, with some major help from PR pros, society should seek to constrain competition relating to things, options and ideas. They maintain that it is both possible and desirable to manipulate the public’s neurons and subconscious genetic programming to ensure that it adopts the right (as in their preferred) behaviour and worldview. This small elite, of course, unlike us more irrational beings known as the mass public, know what is and is not in the public interest.

Their message and that of their PR backers seems to be that capitalism, freedom and democracy are overrated. Contrariwise: I maintain that ethical PR depends upon its practitioners respecting the moral autonomy of different players by helping people make informed decisions. Put another way, the psychobabble which underpins trendy nudge theory rests on ethically suspect and untrustworthy, not to mention unscientific, foundations.

That’s a point made convincingly by the physician, gerontologist and clinical scientist Raymond Tallis in Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Mankind. Tallis pulls apart Richard Dawkin’s neo-Darwinian explanations of human consciousness by exposing its degrading account of humanity’s uniqueness. In summary, Tallis’s book in defence of scientific integrity, which lauds and explains neuro-science’s progress, at the same time exposes neo-neurobabble, as well as biological accounts of culture that maintain ‘we are our brains’ and which reduce self-consciousness to a mirror of biologism.

That’s why I have to applaud Andrew Mayne’s piece on Matt Ridley’s The Rational Optimist where Mayne said that psychobabble spreads when the scientific community lets rip by assuming:

“… their expertise in their own field also gives them a proficiency in totally unrelated areas like economics and political science. Add in group reinforcement from their peers and you have a group of politically and religiously homogenized people who have very different ideas from you and I on what exactly ‘the public good’ means.”

I have also to concur with Mayne’s view that:

“Market theory, evolutionary psychology and neuroeconomics have reinforced what Adam Smith already told us, that the best measure of what brings about the public good isn’t found in measuring just one choice, it’s the cumulative effect of all the different choices that we make as a society. Choice causes anxiety, but it’s an important part of being a human and not a member of an ant colony.”

Having said that, up to a point I suppose that PRs and marketers do indeed, as professor Falconi says, rely on the usefulness of algorithms. For instance, our supermarket loyalty cards and our behaviour on Google allow for useful data-mining to predict what we might be interested in in future. The more supermarkets know about which types of consumers buy which types of products and when, the better they can serve their customers. Moreover, Google’s entire business is rooted in the smart use of algorithms, which we all manipulate to influence search engine optimisation to get the messages of our clients at the top of the pile.

But we shouldn’t get carried away the way that Google’s Eric Schmidt does. He believes that his company’s algorithms can really see inside our minds. He says Google can take serendipity out of the equation. Moving on from telling us how Google is run, he implies that its model could be used to organise the world economy. It could, he believes, enable society to predict electronically in advance what consumers will desire and want in the future. The logical implication being that capitalism can do what communism aims to do, which is to plan production in a conscious fashion; in Schmidt’s world, by seeing into our “unconscious” minds to discover what will soon become a concrete demand.

If I may wander for a moment, Schmidt’s view is very Edward Bernays. Now I admire – and sometimes defend – Bernays. He was clever and insightful, but he was a propagandist: a manipulator. His ideas were in tune with - and perhaps inspired – propaganda techniques on both sides of WW2 and the Cold War. And he used it to flog stuff. It is true that he deliberately used ideas about the “unconscious” – ideas which he got from his uncle Sigmund Freud. I could argue (in line with keeping science out of PR) that the unconscious is a pre-scientific idea as old as the Greeks’ Psyche, and their sophisticated understanding of art and illusion: so he wasn’t all that scientific or original really. I’d rather argue that when propagandists hope to deploy scientific canniness in the media world to influence mass opinion, I hope and believe good old political prejudices (not ‘scientific’ ones), and insightful ideas and reasoned argument will, if they are allowed to, see through the guff. The success of the Bernays-Goebbels axis was not the success of science, not even in its Freudian form, but the failure of the German mass-mind to detect bollocks.

Ok, now that’s off my chest, let’s get back to Schmidt. He believes that most people don’t want Google to answer their questions, but to tell them what they should be doing next. But he sees this as involving more than providing choices. Schmidt views it instead as others deciding (taking the risk and guess work out of the marketplace) in advance which choices we will make:

“The power of individual targeting—the technology will be so good it will be very hard for people to watch or consume something that has not in some sense been tailored for them [in advance].

Though that only works – if for one moment we suspend disbelief and imagine it ever could – if Google plays the role of the communist centralised state by exploiting (and retaining) its de facto monopoly on internet search, aggregation and interaction. But I feel comfortable in saying that will never happen. It won’t happen for the same reason that Schmidt’s reasoning is flawed. Innovation, competition and new risk-taking continually redefine the human experience in new and unpredictable ways, the way Compaq, Microsoft, the internet and Google did recently.

”Google envisions a future in which computers anticipate your whims” The Future according to Larry Page, CNN January 2013

Of course it is wonderful to see a modern capitalist like Schmidt saying that scientific and technological imperatives engineer choice out of consuming and uncertainty out of producing. But the hubris of the thing antagonises one. Doesn’t he know life’s more complicated than that? Doesn’t he spot that if he was right, we might hate him and flock to a search engine that did stuff differently? It is at least intriguing to see a man predicting that what looks like the triumph of his business – information and individualism – is merely the triumph of manipulation. But hold on. This isn’t really manipulation: it’s anticipation as the word ought to be used. It’s not all that creepy or conspiratorial so much as an expression of over-confidence.

Every business in the world takes a crack at getting ahead of the taste of its customers. For my money, the better they get at it, the better my life will be. And of course the genius of the modern world is that huge firms are getting better and better at working out the zillions of niches they have to cater to.

Anyway, you readily see, I think, that any claim that says human behaviour can be explained by, not to mention controlled by, the application of biological and neuro science is codswallop.

So in contrast to the PR utopians who promoted the benefits of neuro-scientific insights at The Holmes Report’s Global PR Summit 2012, I maintain their claims are about as believable as the now discredited, but recently fashionable, idea, which suggested that computer-based equations devised by boffins could produce packages that strip the risk out of financial instruments and end the boom and bust cycle. So let people aim to map the human mass mind: I imagine they’ll have all the luck which has attended those who try to map a single one.

For more on this from me see here.

Note: this is an updated essay which first appeared on this blog on April 1, 2011.

The big picture

Anyone who cares about Britain, its government and its wider official culture is shaken and stirred by recent media storms. PR professionals ought to be a great position to understand what’s been going on. After all, they are media-obsessed, and narratives and messaging are at the heart of the problem faced by our institutions.

The people at the top of our society need to understand far better than they do that they are in the grip of crappy narratives. Some are of their own making; others are thrust on them. It is too little realised that when they slip up, the problem is often that they have been distracted from reality by phantasms they have aimed to promote or preserve or they have been shafted by phantasms the malicious foist on them. The bellowing of the media amplifies these ghosts so they become the new reality, and a very loud one.

The main point of what follows is to show that there is a very wide – a post modern – conspiracy of the fanciful and that we now need to cultivate real leadership, and a taste for reality. It is almost as important to note that the great difficulty for those running anything now is that nearly everyone yearns for an ideal which they mostly (except in their own area of operations) affect to despise: that there be a few good people in charge.

The problem discussed here is mostly official, though firms need to learn to describe themselves more robustly too.  Still, though it’s easy to bemoan the cupidity and venality of the people who run our capitalism, at least they fell prey to the greed we employ them for. Actually, unless they are in retail, they have also shown a nearly sublime indifference to the media storm around them.

The media is more or less blameless: for all its power, it is as bad and useless as its audiences demand. At the high end, its mistakes are mostly intellectual. Even the commercial gutter press has only been horrible in an exaggerated version of its own, particular ancient habits: the sole real surprise has been the way its boss-class looks and sounds so like that of other bureaucracies.

The people who run the police, the BBC, our Civil Service, quite a few junior politicians and the most recent three Prime Ministers, have been more depressing. They have seemed willing to behave out of character and betray the core traditions of their offices. And of course, their prat-falls often involved the media. Our power-merchants seemed, so often, like moths to the flame.

Because Britain is almost always the test-bed for the next cultural revolution, I am quite inclined to think our current difficulties are not terminal: they are – with luck – a sign of growing pains as our governing class adjusts to new forms of excellence and accountability. Of course they face the difficulty that modern politics and bureaucracy begin with a lie: they have to pretend to despise themselves for being elitist.

How PR could have helped

Good public relations mostly reminds people that the truth will out. Bankers couldn’t fix Libor in private; parliamentary expenses frauds were bound to leak; BBC journalists wouldn’t suppress their own story; the Downing Street CCTV would say something about Plebgate. But of course it is the second truth of PR that the facts will often get bent out of shape before they get straightened out, if they ever do. MPs might have guessed that a few expenses frauds would be made to characterise their entire rather mean allowance system; the BBC that it would be forgotten that it was perhaps only scrupulous to be wary of broadcasting the Savile allegations; News International that phone hacking was a pretty ordinary matter of criminality, for all that it exploded a culture war. Even so, much of what unfolded was avoidable. An old, wise PR could also stress that every malfeasance would feed into a separate and an often phoney meta-narrative. That’s sod’s law and will take decades of boring probity to undo.

A sophisticated PR could have told the highest echelons of our political class that sooner or later, those who are in thrall to narrative and to media management will be portrayed as empty vessels. To an important extent, that at least will be an accurate portrayal.

Life at the top: Political rot

Let’s see where we have been. For a decade or so we witnessed a sort of political melt-down, and it derived from the way politicians capitulated to the media. Messrs Blair, Blair and Cameron in their different ways were governed by their media operations. Tony Blair believed that his New Labour creation would be stillborn without maximum story-control. He did not realise, or didn’t care, that he wasn’t writing the script; the scripts – over the years he tried several - were writing him. Gordon Brown seems to have believed himself immunised from ordinary considerations by having been the son of the manse. David Cameron stayed a little more rooted in the reality community, but he understood that where Labour had had to bury socialism, the Tories had to bury nastiness. He made the mistake of thinking it wise to bury the whole animal, just to be sure. He took the enormous risk of being a blank. In both cases, the new total politics – the belief in politics as three parts narrative to one part government – seemed to have left too little energy or oxygen for the wider body politic. The main character of Blairism has turned out to be vacuity, relieved only by a scatter of initiatives, sustained spending, and – amazingly - war. Cameronism may turn out to be a very un-Tory Omnishambles, relieved only by a certain economic sternness and rationalised by the inevitable fudged murkiness of coalition. (The combined, valuable legacy of these two smooth – rather opaque – men may well be to have found the keys to John Major’s country at ease with itself.)

The central paradox is that the masters of narrative seem to have been enfeebled by their willingness to take the media so seriously. Luckily, the dominance of narrative will probably implode. It embodies tendencies which have proved close to ruinous to governance, a matter few politicians care about until near retirement. But media-obsession has been shown to damage political reputations quite quickly, and that sort of thing matters far more urgently to the cleverest practitioners. Already some young political stars seem to be learning how to do their proper thing. Peter Oborne has often remarked that in modern Britain we see a professional political class. It is beginning to spawn some interesting types. The “intake of 2010″ may turn out alright.

Life a little lower down: institutional meltdown

It is less clear that a new generation of administrators have found ways of expressing themselves and explaining how they want to work. There is a post-Thatcher, Blairite administrative class of apparatchiks which poses great difficulties. Some of the members of the “quangocracy” figure in Quentin Letts’s Fifty People Who Buggered-up Britain, and he was too unkind about them. Still, his point is well-made: To be amongst the modern nomenklatura is to have proved oneself adapt at a certain sort of PC script, all about inclusivity and openness. Cultural bureaucrats especially are adept at a trahison des clercs, which sees e metropolitan elite casually trashing culture in the name of accessibility. Nearly everywhere, behind a façade of populism, we find smooth operators, often with a large arrogance only slightly hidden by practiced dissembling. Onora O’Neill is surely right to point to what she calls the “perversions of trust”: mantras of transparency, and even its fetishistic practice, do not guarantee that trust will emerge – or is even seriously intended. People rely on a reading of character as the best guarantee of trust-worthiness: this is the oddly personal element in professions and institutions and talking to a script seldom reassures people that it is in place.

At the very top now we seem to miss that curious mixture of savviness, clubbability and honour which once glued things together, and rooted them, and not always in a good way. Instead we have hyper-networkers who are schooled in a special sort of correct thought and behaviour. They are compliant and understand compliance. We have swapped one form of conformism (one forged in the Empire,  warfare and the Classics) and substituted it for another (cooked up in multiculturalism, seminars and Channel 4). To a large extent, to run a public institution one must first exude a victim-orientated liberalism and then insist that there is wisdom in crowds.

Whitehall farce

The highest strata of the Civil Service faced a special difficulty. They were bound to be in turmoil as Whitehall shifted from being a provider to framing itself as a facilitator. The old governance of Pall Mall has become The Archipelago State. The Civil Service was, in theory, scrapping itself in an orgy of outsourcing and devolution. Its most senior people were also prepared to sacrifice long-standing, workable traditions of independence because they believed – with their political masters – that there was no alternative to running government from Message Central in Number 10. One after the other, four retired Cabinet Secretaries have bemoaned this tendency, seeming to forget they had been the gate-keepers who sold the pass.

The curious life and death of The Establishment

I am not unduly nostalgic about our old bureaucracies. Misplaced loyalty to class or organisation; a dislike of rocked boats; an acceptance of convention; a toleration of general uselessness:  for much of the 20th Century these played their part in how things were run. Failures were often covered up, at least for a while. People suffered because of the discrete charms of the bourgeois.

In many ways, schools, hospitals, GP surgeries, law courts, police stations (and the backs of police vans) and the BBC are probably better run than they used to be. Maybe even children’s and old people’s homes, and welfare offices, are too. (The terrible press they get shouldn’t be our guide to their condition.) Affluence, media assertiveness and performance monitoring have combined with increased education to make this country quite a happy and successful place.

We should not trash the past, though. There never was a British Establishment in quite the way that is often supposed and much of our erstwhile elitism was public-spirited. Top People were, anyway, prone to promote their own mythologies. The liberal journalist Anthony Sampson, I am afraid, only had to amplify their own story to go on to peddle the view that the country was ruled by networks bound together by Old School ties, and by Varsity cliques, which were the creatures of an upper middle class. Just as things in the real world were changing fast, his “Anatomy of Britain” books fed into a older story of decline, ossification and snobbishness which nested nicely with the Beyond the Fringe, TW3, Fortune and Bird satire industry of the time. It has morphed into the near-monopoly of the cynical pseudo-dissidence of Have I Got News For You. The misreading of class changes was threaded through Yes, Minister, the TV show which enshrined, with perfect mis-timing, the idea of an unaccountable administrative elite just as the Civil Service was in fact ceding power to the politicians and the media.

These tropes were always sloppy and misleading and are now importantly redundant. But they remain much more powerful as myths now than they ever were as facts. We can see this in the easy assumption that the Tories are toffs and thus out of touch. This is a glamorous classed-up version of the general view that politicians from whatever sort of estate are out for themselves. Never mind that too many of them have become constituent-obsessed social workers and fixers, as James Gray, MP has had the courage to point out: for now, the dominant image is the old one.

Curious shifts in modern politics

Indeed, the political commentariat may be institutionally blind to the most important developments on their patch. Modern young MPs may have begun to abandon party loyalty and the top-down messaging and management of Blair and Cameron. There are signs of a greater independence of thought amongst some MPs, but it sometimes takes the form of a brutal populism. Indeed, there may even be a belief that social media embody some sort of unstoppable General Will. Michael Portillo seems sound on this stuff (“Cameron shouldn’t fear the EU wolf”, Financial Times, 14 December 2012). Ferdinand Mount’s The New Few argues, contrariwise, that oligarchic tendencies are growing in our political parties. I reply that if he is right that they are strong, it is worth noting that they are newly-embattled.

The modern narrative and the institution

The perennial sloppiness of the media and its audiences are in lock-step. Certain sorts of stories and narratives have acquired very serious clout. They have developed a life of their own. They are pushed and then volumised on many platforms, in a deafening unison. The common denominator is that all authority is always assumed to be self-serving. People in command or in a position to understand awkward facts feel powerless to resist the wall of half-truth and delusion. And yet, paradoxically, they often seek to manipulate what they rightly fear will become unmanageable.

This is where we see the paramount need for experience, savviness and character at the top our institutions. In the modern world, where public exposure is so brutal (and where old defensive mechanisms have decayed) it may be that only a robust honesty and a stroppy integrity will work, and only in the long – seldom the short – term. An institution can only gain trust when it proves itself honest and that will often require that its staff and leaders be bloody-minded.

To a surprising degree, institutions and especially government, will need to own its own truths. Pace Baronness O’Neill, the modern passion to submit oneself to independent monitoring or investigation or inquiry does not actually produce trust. It makes the public stir itself into the realisation that public bodies don’t even trust themselves to work out where their weaknesses lie and what their mistakes were. Indeed, they are blind to their own merits and unable to promote them. We may come to see that neither Chilcot nor Leveson could fulfill their billing: they were over-hyped blockbusters, full of shock and awe, but also a distraction from more quietly fixing some broken stuff we knew about already. One’s character – one’s reputation – cannot so easily be outsourced.

Hard case: the BBC

When the BBC pulled one Newsnight investigation (into Savile) and then botched another (into a very old story which had been often been travestied before), we saw that this great media institution had absolutely no idea how stories work. It was used to producing news items and reports and seems to have made the enormous mistake of thinking that in some sense it could control them. So, a Newsnight editor could shelve an investigation and neither he nor anyone else at the BBC seems to have realised what a powerful life of its own it would have. (David Elstein chronicles the events well here.)

In the Newsnight cases, and it applies a little in the case of the BBC 2006 climate change seminar story too, the BBC may have been foolish enough to think that its being nice and liberal and even well-behaved in its own way would be insulation against the horrors which the rest of the media – and its own staff – reserve for the unwashed of the right. I can easily see how all the BBC’s mistakes got made, and they weren’t the worst mistakes in the world by a long chalk. But they were all chronically naïve and unworldly.

Savvy PR would have told the BBC top brass that a Newsnight-shaped shit-storm was heading their way and no amount of guidelines and compliance would save them from it.

BBC staff weren’t wicked. But they were variously feeble. In both Newsnight disasters no-one seems to have been seriously concerned that for the BBC to do the right institutional thing, actual individuals had to become the grit in the oyster. One can except, perhaps, the Newsnight  editor who started it all by thinking it might be wrong to trash the reputation of a dead man on what he thought was inadequate research. It is important to see that this editorial decision was not the serious mistake which got made. Curiously, it was as though no-one felt they had agency. No-one felt they owned the story. More prosaically, and in language older professionals would have understood, the absence of “grip” was centre stage.

Hard case: Plebgate

The Plebgate drama adds a further dimension to the story of how stories behave now. It has become a commonplace that everyone wants to star in one. Worse, people – including, perhaps, policemen or their union – who are close to media action become specially tempted by the possibility of manipulating a story to their own advantage. Of course, we don’t yet know where the blame lies for Plebgate. But it looks possible that some uniformed coppers and some Police Federation reps may have been seduced by class tropes, satirical riffs and techniques of spin. If so, they did not understand what they were doing. Goodness alone knows why the Met’s Commissioner responded to quite damning evidence by at first stressing that his concern was the welfare of his officers.

Last lessons

The police can’t really win in Plebgate. At worse, Andrew Mitchell can be accused of losing his cool with a job’s worth. At best, policemen with guns seem like big girls’ blouses. The BBC, likewise, can only watch and learn: its vaunted ethics of impartiality and public service may have transmogrified into unworldiness. It may need to abandon its Olympian superiority.

Some crucial people in the BBC and the police seem to have had the terrible PR training that afflicts most of our new ruling classes. That’s to say: they didn’t remember they are in a goldfish bowl. They seemed to forget that the truth or something quite like it would be bound to get out. They forgot the appalling behaviour of stories. They hadn’t been told: Don’t tweak these tigers; don’t imagine you can hang on to their tails.

If you can’t be savvy enough, and no-one ever is, the better thing is to be honourable or at least cheerfully adult. Oddly, that keeps you clear of many disasters as well as allowing you to sleep at night.

The real problem with Leveson’s report is that a high court judge has, almost amusingly, set himself up as a PR guru qualified to issue guidelines to the police and politicians about spinning PR practice. In the process, he ends up seeking to micromanage their processes and rules (codes) of engagement and to fiddle with the terminology they use to describe what they do. Let’s examine Leveson’s proposals in point 75 on page 43 of his executive summary as an example. There he states that:

The term ‘off-the-record briefing’ should be discontinued. The term ‘non-reportable briefing’ should be used to cover a background briefing which is not to be reported, and the term ‘embargoed briefing’ should be used to cover a situation where the content of the briefing may be reported but not until a specified event or time. These terms more neutrally describe what are legitimate police and media interactions.

One could conclude from this paragraph that Leveson’s intention was to ban ‘off the record briefings’, but that would be a mistake. Elsewhere he states quite clearly that that’s not what he means to achieve:

Everybody agrees that such briefings can operate in the public interest, particularly in the context of a relationship of trust between individual journalists and police officers: even-handedness is, however, critical. However, in the light of evidence I have heard I am concerned about the lack of clarity inherent in the use of the term and in the precise information to which it refers: I have therefore recommended that briefings should be designated as open, embargoed (in time), non-reportable or, where a combination, clear so as to be beyond doubt. (point 93 on p. 21 of his executive summary)

But if his intention was merely to change the PR vocabulary in order to avoid ambiguity, he’s failed.

Calling something a ‘non-reportable briefing’ implies just that: what’s said is clearly not meant to end up in print or to be reported anywhere else. Whereas PR pros and journalists know that ‘off the record’ more often than not means ‘non-attributable’ because the person doing the briefing does indeed hope to see most of what’s said appear in print/on air as ‘sources/insiders say/suggest/tell me’, or even (especially in ‘deep’ off the record) as the reporter’s very own insight without mentioning who inspired them to think so clearly.

Sometimes, an off the record briefing is intended to save the PR, the client and the journalist the embarrassment of a story’s appearing at all.  For instance, the press officer might let a reporter know – deeply off the record - that such-and-such a complainant against one’s client or employer (a police officer, say)  is bonkers or vicious and not to be trusted.  That, by the way, is why PR professionals need to cultivate journalists: both sides need to earn and deserve trust.

As to Sir Brian’s remarks on the use of background briefings – he is similarly confused or ill-informed.

Background briefings are often designed to bring journalists up to speed, with the intention of helping them to produce informed reports about complex issues. Hence, they are rarely used to get across hard news. They are often about quite boring matters of policy or technology which the journalist needs to understand and do so well enough to be confident about glossing over the nuts and bolts which inform a story but would clutter it to the point of unreadability.

The use of the term ‘embargoed’ is so deeply ingrained in the culture of journalists and PR professionals that I don’ think the good judge has anything useful to add. I’ve had a number of instances in my career when journalists have broken my embargoed comments or press releases, and I’ve made them grovel afterward. Such instances often taught me not to trust them. However, it has to be said that while breaking such rules is already considered shameful, sadly, standards have slipped in recent years and embargoes have been broken routinely by some journalists. This often means that PRs feel they have to withold information which would have helped journalists write more intelligently, if only they’d waited for the starting gun to publish.

Moreover, Leveson’s call for the police and their PR handlers to manage their media relations in a more even-handed manner is naive. There are good reasons why PR pros might favour journalist ‘a’ over journalist ‘b’ for this or that story. We are often talking about making judgement calls involving relationships based on trust. Sometimes, life is not fair; so be it. The issue of corruption and or overly-familiar relationships is another issue altogether.

Hence Lord Justice Leveson’s preference for imposing bureaucratic solutions that prioritise tinkering with PR’s operational codes, guidelines and terminology might be well-intentioned, rather than anything sinister, but that does not make it necessarily helpful or particularly insightful. Take this example:

For officers of the rank of Commander or Assistant Chief Constable and above, dealing with policy or significant organisational or operational matters, formality and record keeping should be required. More junior ranks should follow the Guidance issued by the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) which includes only speaking to the press on topics for which they have responsibility for communicating and a policing purpose for doing so. I have also made recommendations designed to reduce the risk of abuse. (point 94 on p. 21/22 of his executive summary

An experienced press officer might see things differently. A junior police officer talking to the media unaccompanied by a press officer might pose a bigger threat of going off message than a senior officer with 20 years of media relations under their belt. Then, there’s the thorny issue that I raised previously (here and here) about defining what constitutes ‘policy’ versus ‘organisational’ versus ‘operational’ matters.

It strikes me that the judge was bamboozled by the evidence he heard at his inquiry relating to ‘tip offs, taking media on operations, off-the-record briefings, leaks, whistle-blowing, entertainment’ (see: point 90 on p. 21 of his executive summary). It would seem, then, that Leveson is not only a clumsy wordsmith, he also rather arrogantly over-estimated his own expertise and grasp of all things PR.

Having said all that, I do share Leveson’s wish to encourage the police to develop more formal relations with the media. I share his disgust for how the police – not to mention politicians – have managed their media relations over the last few decades. In fact, I’ve long banged on that drum and called for change. The difference between me and Leveson, however, is that much of my critique has focused on the prejudices and practices of PR professionals themselves. I’ve accused them of being, too often, more keen to serve the media’s needs than their employer’s. Anybody who wants to know more should read my ‘Cops should exercise right to silence‘ and ‘Three Mile Island to G20: lessons in crisis PR‘.

Richard Edelman’s Voodoo Academia replies to Professor Aneel Karnani of the University of Michigan’s Business School’s The Case Against Corporate Social Responsibility. But who’s voodooing whom?

Here’s the essence of Professor Karnani’s case:

“Companies that simply do everything they can to boost profits will end up increasing social welfare. In circumstances in which profits and social welfare are in direct opposition, an appeal to corporate social responsibility will almost always be ineffective, because executives are unlikely to act voluntarily in the public interest and against shareholder interests.”

Here’s the essence of Mr. Edelman’s reply:

“[Edelman's case studies] demonstrate that contrary to Karnani’s assertion, the decision isn’t whether to run an effective, “smart” business or a socially responsible, engaged one. Performance with purpose (a term used by PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi) is not an either/or proposition.”

Now, as it happens, Richard Edelman makes a good point. But he also misses it completely. The core social purpose of a corporation is to provide whatever goods or services it is in business to deliver – be that street cleaning, cigarettes, incubators, medicines, machine guns or bubble gum. Mr Edelman, in contrast, believes that a smart business is an engaged one with a purpose. Engaged in what else other than what it does, I ask.

Mr. Edelman tries to explain it with three examples drawn from his client base:

“Unilever’s Omo Detergent adopted the “Dirt is Good” campaign – aligning with the brand’s business proposition by asserting that “every child has the right” to be a child and get dirty. After fielding new academic research highlighting the importance of outside play for the physical and social development of children and engaging parents, governments and NGOs to take action, the campaign triggered real social change – Vietnamese schools agree to assess national provisions for school recess while the brand commits to build 100 playgrounds over three years.”

He’s shooting himself in the foot. Unilever’s campaign has self-interest at its core. The aim here is to produce more dirty children that will require the use of more of its product to clean up the mess. Moreover, from my experience as a parent, kids don’t need much encouragement to get their clothes dirty or to play outside (try stopping them).

He tells us how the Clorox Brita’s FilterForGood campaign:

“…inspires consumers – and communities – to take a personal pledge and even engage in (planet) healthy competition with others to reduce their bottled-water use, as well as informs them about other environmentally-friendly decisions that each can personally make.”

In essence, he’s positioning his client’s “healthy product” against the bottled water industry’s and mains suppliers’ supposedly environmentally unfriendly or unhealthy alternatives. That is, for as long as Brita remains a client and come the day Edelman represents, say, San Pellegrino, or has to convince us that a utility produces a product fit to drink straight from the tap. This should warn us that the “public interest” Mr. Edelman favours is often just the selfish interests of his clients.

Then, if those two weak cases weren’t enough, he adds:

“The Pepsi Refresh Project, partnering with NGOs and experts, is directly crowd sourcing ideas from consumers to foster innovation in social good – awarding more than $20 million this year to fund local community initiatives and ideas that refresh the world.”

Regardless of the trendy crowd sourcing, that’s just a classic – old-style – brand marketing and awareness-raising campaign. It is, actually, a very low budget one for a company with $9.4 billion in revenues.

One wonders why Mr. Edelman didn’t mention another esteemed client: Ryan Air. It is one which is likely to accuse Professor Karnani of being soft rather than harsh in his defence of profit. Ryan Air states unambiguously that shareholder value comes before its staff, customers, partners and suppliers. Ryan Air has little time for stakeholder PR or for CSR, except as the butt of jokes. Here’s the brief that Edelman pitched for:

“Wanted: PR firm who is able to LOL at the advertising gags, and doesn’t mind poking fun at expensive airports, rivals, prime ministers … and even popes! No precious, sensitive, politically correct or clock-watching publicists need apply. Long hours, stamina and patience of St. Christopher, the patron saint of travel, are all prequisites.”

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not against corporations acting responsibly or managing their risks properly. I accept Ryan Air is an outlier; though it is one which has moved an entire industry’s behaviour in its direction. It is just that most CSR is shallow dishonest nonsense that sails close to propaganda, as BP’s Beyond Petroleum clearly did.

It is precisely such transparent charades and double-speak that generates the disabling cynicism that undermines public confidence in modern institutions. So there’s something refreshing about Professor Karnani’s bluntness and Ryan Air’s Michael O’Leary’s loud mouth.

Of course, in one sense there’s a bit of voodoo coming from both Mr. Edelman and Professor Karnani. The problem with deciding between profit-first or profit-with-purpose is that they are difficult to separate. Firms live within society and have all kinds of unavoidable obligations to fulfill as they produce profit.

One has to ask some tough questions about Mr. Edelman’s motivation, however. His main concern seems not to be the public good as much as helping firms restore their credibility and by so doing avoid state interference in their affairs. He says:

“We are at a very important moment in the relationship between business and society. The catastrophic economic events of September 2008 undermined the confidence in the private sector’s ability to self-regulate. Bankruptcies of centerpiece companies in the global economy, such as GM, plus reputation issues for leaders in finance (Goldman Sachs), energy (BP) and transport (Toyota) have called into question the values of corporate leaders. In the race for public credibility, it is fortunate for business that its prime regulator, government, is not seen as a worthy replacement as the leader in the dance.”

My beef is not with what Mr. Edelman wants to achieve; a free and mostly self-regulated market place. It is with how he believes that he can win public acceptance for it. I rebel, as do most people who are moderately sceptical of corporate humbug, to his pandering to the more infantile elements of this discussion; you know, the audience who cannot (supposedly) be told the truth because it would destroy their illusions.

So, I’d like to leave you with what I think is an effective demolition of Mr. Edelman’s style of PR, by quoting Professor Karnani’s robust expose of it:

“Executives are hired to maximize profits; that is their responsibility to their company’s shareholders. Even if executives wanted to forgo some profit to benefit society, they could expect to lose their jobs if they tried—and be replaced by managers who would restore profit as the top priority. The movement for corporate social responsibility is in direct opposition, in such cases, to the movement for better corporate governance, which demands that managers fulfill their fiduciary duty to act in the shareholders’ interest or be relieved of their responsibilities. That’s one reason so many companies talk a great deal about social responsibility but do nothing—a tactic known as greenwashing.”

Exactly!

Note; this was first published in August, 2010

Phil Morgan’s comment

Thanks for your comments – an interesting blog and good to see your views.

When we said “This acknowledgement of the expertise and support provided by public relations professionals underlines the need for them to be accountable to a code of conduct as well” we were refering to our own code of conduct, which requires professionals to deal honestly with the public. We’re not talking about any other codes but the ones that are available to hold professionals in public relations to account.

The recommendation in the report was specifically when policy or organisational matters are being discussed, not, as you point out, for on the spot, crime scene press handling. This would appear to support the idea put forward later that police officers and staff should communicate within their area of competence, responsibly and where there is a policing reason for doing so.

I think you may be over-reading our comment about the professional accountability of those working in public relations into Leveson’s comments about ‘off-the-record’. It seems to me that his call for a change in terminology is to reduce confusion about the relationships through which information is conveyed to the press. It wasn’t our intention to endorse this and our position is at best neutral. Simple steps that increase transparency, particularly in sensitive areas of media relations, should be welcomed.

It will come as no surprise that I disagree with your assessment of PR as a trade – which, if it remains so, is certainly moving towards professionalisation. Accountability to a code of conduct is currently as close to a licence to operate as public relations has got, but it is available and it would at least underline expected standards of professional conduct if more people operating in this area were accountable.

More generally, whether it’s statutory or non-statutory, the resulting regulatory structure is unlikely to account for the rise in digital communication or the fragmentation of media that is rapidly taking place. The business model that supports journalism is struggling to put it mildly and it seems to me unlikely that the newspaper industry in 10 years time will resemble the one we have at the moment.

An open letter to CIPR

Dear Phil Morgan,

Thank you for responding on behalf of CIPR to my blog ‘PRs shouldn’t rush to welcome Leveson‘. You raise some interesting and considered points, and in that spirit, here are seven points, followed by a plea, that I hope you’ll take onboard.

1. Losing control

When it comes to codes of conduct, Leveson would make PR professionals responsible for obeying “his” code, or more precisely the one regulating the media; backed by statutory control, as he strongly recommends, or the more voluntary one – which would still somehow be legally binding - as David Cameron prefers.

That effectively takes things out of CIPR’s and the PR trade’s control. That has profound implications for PR professionals. Surely, that’s not what any of us has ever desired? At the very least it should make us wary of making any immediate response to Leveson’s report beyond “we’ll get back to you on that”?

2. Orwellian implications?

I was pleased to hear that CIPR is neutral about replacing “off the record” with “non-reportable briefing”. However…

I urge you to consider critically the implications of Leveson’s proposal to define the use of acceptable language and opinion and practice. For example: another way of reporting an “off the record briefing” is “inside sources inform me” etc. Don’t you see – as I do – something ever so slightly Orwellian about society policing by statute (or by any other means backed by penalties for disobedience) the use in print and on air of such phrases and nuances?

3. Problems with PR policing the police

Regarding the presence of press officers being made mandatory when “policy or organisational matters are being discussed” by the police, I would suggest that it is far from easy, perhaps even impossible in practice, to meaningfully separate “operational” matters (call it real-time policing) from things defined as “organisational”. Hence, I fear (see 4) that if this recommendation became an obligation enshrined in statute or any form of legally binding code of practice it would create a clammed-up bureaucratic culture that harms good policing and damages their public relations.

4. Is transparency the new opaque that undermines trust?

The issue of policing police media relations is part of a wider concern I have about how Leveson understands the issue of transparency and the public interest. He proposes that all meetings between the media and public officials (particularly police and politicians) should be monitored. However this smacks of the same mentality that led Tony Blair to introduce the Freedom of Information Act, which he later called a dangerous act and cited as one of the biggest mistakes of his period in power. That was because it had the opposite effect to the one he intended: it drove decision-making underground (or on to his sofa) and undermined trust between officials who were fearful of their critical and often conflicted thinking, not to mention their private candidness, ever becoming public. In turn, that didn’t help encourage the public to trust what politicians said and did at any level.

In my opinion: there has to be a flexible balance between recommended procedures and best practice and commonsense. That is something that hard and fast rules enforced by draconian penalties does not allow for.

5. Limits to PR codes of conduct

CIPR might want to sign up for a code which is strongly Leveson-compliant, and even enshrine that code in its constitution. That may be fine and suit CIPR. But much PR would go on around that, and as a trade. It may be also that PR firms could make some of their contracts “Leveson-complaint/Professional” and others more “Dark Arts/Trade”, or at least keep them free of restrictive codes: say abroad or outside of the public sector in the UK. Some PR pros might sign up to CIPR’s codes as a cover for their intention to continue indulging the dark arts - until you expel them and thus they lose their CIPR (Leveson-approved) kite-mark.

The real dilemma is, however, that because PR is a trade, you cannot stop PRs from being PRs because they break a particular code; whereas, by contrast, doctors and lawyers can be struck off and legally prevented from practicing their profession. A profession is a compulsory body or it is nothing.

6. Principles and the fundamentals of PR and journalism

There’s an important issue of principle here, too. PR facilitates debate and conversation in democratic countries, as does journalism. It is my contention that both arts should be left open for anybody with an interest, the ability and/or a cause to advocate, to practice without interference from the state and or any (except the barest minimum) legally binding codes specifically governing such activities. That is people (including PRs) should be free to hold public discussions and free to express their opinions in print or elsewhere in public.

My point here should not be mistaken: ethics and morals matter a great deal. Though I have to add a reality check to avoid misunderstanding. When push comes to shove people should be free to do PR or journalism with no more constraint than attaches to the ordinary citizen. Blogger, PR, writer journo: all equal before the law, and as accountable for harassment and libel.

Put another way, it worries me that people who support Leveson’s report seemingly propose (celebrate even) making people who live in the UK less free than people in America.

7. Relevance of Leveson in the globalised digital age

We, as your comment insightfully confirms, agree about how the current changes in the world of modern communication – ones PR pros grasp better than most – will make most of Leveson’s report redundant and unenforcible in the medium term. It is not difficult, then, to imagine how Leveson’s proposals risk making an ass of regulation and/or the law; but also of us if we do not speak out about the dangers ahead. That for me makes a compelling justification – in the interest of honest debate – for us to push back today on any attempts to lumber our trade – not to mention mainstream media and society – with an overly-proscriptive set of rules of engagement.

Therefore, I would hope my seven points reinforce my contention that we should think this stuff through properly before we rush to support Leveson’s proposals. Hence in conclusion I’d like to add a request: I kindly urge CIPR to do more to encourage a wider debate within our ranks about the implications of Leveson’s recommendations for our great trade.

In that spirit, I hope that this exchange of views receives a positive response.

Yours sincerely,

Paul Seaman,

Editor,  21st Century PR Issues