Trivially, it’s worth mentioning that the ex cathedra utterances of Charles Wheeler were in their way as crushingly orthodox as those of James Cameron, that even more famous and worshipped lefty. Too many of us were steamrollered by their brand of liberalism. Let’s have no golden-ageism here please.

I am not inclined to take lessons on media seriousness from Alastair Campbell, whose own persona I do hugely enjoy, in a sleb way. He was part of the process of reducing politics to gossip. And anyway, I think we have a more serious, more substantial, more substantiated, media now than ever we did. To take one example, The Times has more slebbiness than it used, but no more than is necessary to draw in a female audience to its rather serious material.

I imagine The Times’s quotient of gossip is no worse or larger than in any organ of 18th Century journalism.

More importantly, I am a too-lately admirer of Joseph Addison. I have my late father’s battered copy of the essays by my bedside now. I can say that Addison’s, “The Royal Exchange” (if that is the source of Dr Calcutt’s Addisonian adumbrations) does not really say or imply that trade improves morals, though any self-respecting supporter of capitalism believes it does. Rather, it seems more in the manner of the economist (as opposed to the moralist) Adam Smith in saying that trade produces a miracle of specialist co-operation across trades, climates and nations. Yes, Addison does say that this is a peaceable and amiable process, and yes, he has the idea of a “citizen of the world”, but the improvement he sees in all this is material more than moral. I may be wrong, but I think you need to get to later thinking (Hayek, David Landes, and now Matt Ridley) to get the full-on idea that trade generates the class of co-operation which is the conduit of intellectual and moral exchange.

I dimly recall being taught that “commonality” is a Marxist idea, along with its better-known stablemate, alienation. Anyway and whatever, I don’t buy this bit of Dr Calcutt’s case either.

Indeed, we do need an explanation of why the media is more excited by ordinary (and only notionally “illicit”) sex than by murder these days. I don’t think we’ll find it in Marxist theory. See below for a stab at an explanation.

On the appetite for news in general, I’d recommend going back to Addison. His “The Newspaper” is a brilliant account of the way the medium is the message: create the means of disseminating new gossip, and people will become addicted to it. But even hard, serious news has always been information which someone is prepared to pay for. And nowadays, frankly, the supply has outrun the demand. Or, more precisely, the organs of dissemination are multiplying like crazy, and they all have the same sources. What’s worse, almost all news-makers can publish their own information: the organs of the media are becoming more and more obviously derivative. No wonder the media complains the business model for serious journalism is broken. No wonder they seek to stay afloat by being better at showbusiness than their many rivals.

And here I think Dr Calcutt is on the right track (Marxist or not).  I think we like celebrity stuff because we want to prey on the privacy of famous people. I mean that just as we once liked to fantasise that we were hacking at the bodies of the Ripper’s victims, we now want to hack at the souls of poor Brittney or Giggs. I like this sort of account because it is, I think, more spiritual and sound than any cod-Marxist account is likely to be. We think celebrities have made a Faustian pact with us, and when they falter in any way, we want to inflict pain on them as best we can. It isn’t pretty, but it’s human alright. It’s a bloodsport for readers.

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Lindsey Hilsum

Campbell issued this warning at the University of Westminster, following a short ceremony in which the Charles Wheeler Award for Outstanding Contribution to Broadcast Journalism – in memory of the distinguished BBC correspondent who died in 2008 – was presented by his widow, Lady Dip Wheeler, to Channel 4 News reporter Lindsey Hilsum. In her acceptance speech, Hilsum remembered a time when Wheeler had praised her reporting and she ‘walked on air’ for days afterwards. Following in Wheeler’s footsteps, Hilsum’s reputation rests on coverage of world historic events.

The event was attended by the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, who arrived late.

The Charles Wheeler Award not only recalls its eponymous hero, it also calls up journalism’s preferred image of itself – humane and high-minded, accurate and analytical. Wheeler himself really did embody these qualities: he took accountability to the public so seriously that even in retirement this world-renowned reporter had himself openly listed in the London phonebook as ‘Wheeler, Charles: Journalist’.

Meanwhile, on the streets outside the award ceremony, the day’s headlines added strength to Campbell’s dire warning.

Charles Wheeler

The biggest-selling morning papers had led with further personal details about ‘sex cheat’ Ryan Giggs. The Manchester United footballer was said to have undergone follicular replacement therapy following stress-related hair loss.

Later in the day, the London Evening Standard plumped for the personal presence of Mayor Boris Johnson at a police drugs raid in Tottenham – this made the front page. When a suspected drug dealer awoke to find the Mayor of London in his flat, along with police officers, he is reported to have said: ‘What the f*** are you doing here?’

‘I don’t think this chap was pleased to see me’, the Mayor later said. But Johnson must have been pleased that his celebrity status was affirmed by media coverage associating him with decisive police action.

We once thought Ryan Giggs led a passive sex life; but it is none of our business either way

The hairs on Giggsy’s head were headline news. Imagine the front page splash (and the follow-up pages inside) if CSI-style reporters had bagged the pubes from his mistresses’ beds! But the forensic fetish for personality goes way beyond philandering footballers and their ‘wagms’ (‘m’ added for mistresses). It extends to public officials such as Johnson, now known much less for their politics and far more for their personal presentation (in BoJo’s case, the mop of tousled, blond hair which says ‘public school but people-friendly’).

The way his hair is distressed is BoJo’s mode of address: I’m half-way between Hugh Grant and Ron Weasley, and it just so happens I head-up the government of London. Celebrity is the medium, there’s not much message besides, and many journalists seem happy to carry it – the lighter the better.

BoJo is an “hairlarious” politician

In the same vein, subsequent press coverage of the Charles Wheeler Award ceremony featured the banter between the two biggest celebrities in the room. From the stage, Campbell joshed Johnson for arriving late and for going out early on the drugs raid.  Though dedicated to the public role of journalism, even this event was partly colonised by the media-bred, scandal-fed, all-embracing, self-referencing cult of personality.

So Campbell’s warning could not have been more timely; and when I heard him issue it, I really thought I had found a kindred spirit. Charismatic, too, even if his claret and blue is a wrong ‘un (Burnley instead of West Ham).

Recognising that journalism’s recent regression is relative rather than absolute, Campbell used the same phrase which I had made use of in an academic conference the day before: British journalists are defaulting to ‘a new centre of gravity’ (my conference paper proves prior usage). He called upon journalists to re-discover what they are for – as I and my colleagues have done in Proof: reading journalism and society www.proof-reading.org , and again in the recently published book Journalism Studies: a critical introduction. He even agreed with my proposition (I know this because I asked him) that journalists should stand up and say: Giggsy, celebrity, even (for the time being) the ‘question of privacy’ – it’s all sheer follicles! These are non-events, they should be non-stories, and we just have to drop ‘em and go after the ones that matter.

So Mr Campbell and I agreed on four of journalism’s famous Ws: who should do what, where and when. But we parted company on the fifth. Why the compulsive downshifting to molecular celebrity? Campbell came back on this question with the 2Ts answer: time and technology. As he sees it, new media technology drives journalists to churn stuff out all the time, so they have no time to do anything else. But this is like saying that politicians are overtaken by events: it’s true and it’s a truism, with no explanatory power.

Yes, journalists under time pressure will stay within existing tramlines, but that does nothing to explain why tracking celebrity has become the line to follow. Furthermore, it’s by no means certain that online journalists are generating content more rapidly than, say, Harold Evans sitting under the clock at the subs’ desk of the Manchester Evening News, writing and re-writing reports of the 1952 Harrow train crash for successive print editions.

Even if there really is more new stuff today (rather than different ways of cutting up the same old), why should journalism’s expansion have to end in journalism-lite? We might have expected more to mean heavier.

Alastair Campbell had Tony Blair's ear

Though criticising journalism for its default mechanism, Campbell himself was defaulting to technological determinism, which alongside environmental determinism and the new neurological determinism, now constitutes the centre of gravitas on why people do/should not do the things they do. This is a silly place for intelligent people to find themselves in, though not because it contains elements of determinism. Anyone who thinks we simply make our own history must have lost sight of the circumstances we didn’t choose – to coin a phrase. The problem is one of misattribution: the wrong sources (digital media, brain chemistry, the Earth) are being identified as determining factors; and dodgy determinisms such as these can only have a damaging effect on the subjective, collective determination to raise our game.

It’s socially determined, stupid!

Instead of technology, neurology and nature, the following, brief episodes – flashes from the history of news – are intended to show that journalism has been socially determined; and so too is our capacity to change its centre of gravity. Revealing the real elements of compulsion can only make the case for concerted change more compelling.

‘News’ – to be distinguished from something which has happened, that happens to be new – has various preconditions, one of which is the position from which to report it. This position was fully established 300 years ago in the merchant city of London, where it was personified in the Spectator magazine, co-edited by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele.

Lloyd’s Coffee-House

In an enormous variety of essays on all aspects of city life, Addison was consistently striving to establish standards of behaviour. The deliberately self-regarding style of his essays reflected new manners and morals, and the Spectator helped to compose well-mannered deliberation into a whole way of life for the emerging bourgeois class. If such refinement seems far removed from the rough and tumble of eighteenth century markets, with fortunes lost and found as tides turned and ships went down to the bottom, it turns out that Addison identified the London Exchange (one of the city’s leading markets) as the most uplifting place in the world. For Addison, valuating commodities and evaluating human behaviour were one and the same habit of mind.

In their mind’s eye, members of his mercantile milieu habitually met at an agreed point of comparison, from which to carry out a continuously comparative study of the world’s worth. Their valuations applied to people as much as things; and their meeting place was also the starting point for a new approach to common values – moral as well as commercial.

To arrive at their shared position, London’s traders were obliged to divest themselves of some personal interests, while investing something of themselves in the creation of common interests, or the public interest. Commonality such as this can only be an abstraction from strictly personal existence; yet it also materialised in London’s eighteenth century coffee houses and in the publications that these traders went there to read. Thus the first, fully fledged reporter, standing aside from particular interests and standing in for the common interest, was called into existence by the unstinting gaze of the merchant. Eighteenth century London had to have its own embodiment of this combination. In the form of the Spectator, founded in 1711, the merchant city acquired the press it deserved.

Professional journalism’s obsession with murder

With hindsight, it appears that the Spectator was a reporter in slow motion: he had the time to compose essays at a time when, relatively speaking, every day was a slow news day. In the 1900s, two centuries later, journalism was already 200 times faster. Not because the associated technology was so very different (nota bene, Alastair Campbell); instead, the whole world was turning like never before.

Meanwhile, the press had become a murder factory: not often a killing machine (though wartime propaganda often amounted to indictment, excitement and incitement); more that the newly established, professional news industry ran on a murderous diet.

‘Get me a murder a day’ was the watchword of popular newspaper editors from the end of the nineteenth century to the turn of the twenty-first. This staple was said to keep the accountants away. Tabloids especially, though they contained a variety of entertaining and informative content, defaulted to the murder story. When facts were sacred, morbid details were the holy of the holy. Even when a reporter’s copy did not begin with someone enjoying the peace of the grave (in news, what happened last comes first), his approach often verged on the murderous. ‘Newsmen’ – in those days it was customary to style themselves as such – were used to looking down on events, and the people in them, from the same vantage point as Lee Harvey Oswald overlooking the presidential motorcade in Dallas.

Nothing but wannabe celebs, confessions, sex, drugs, murder and fire on the front-page

If professional news reporting contained more than a whiff of gunsmoke, it was not because objectifying human subjects is always an act of epistemological violence, only matched by the pathological arrogance of abstracting from their personal particulars. These are the complaints levelled against professional journalism by critical theorists and, latterly, self-doubting journalists; but this does to journalism just what journalism stands accused of, namely, character assassination.

Western journalism was professionalised towards the end of the nineteenth century. It had to be. By that time there was so much more to human life that only a trained observer could hope to encompass it, itemise it and formulate news items before something else came along. At an unprecedented rate, human beings were making more things, making more of themselves, and, in the same process, producing new ways of objectifying themselves, including professionally produced, commercially viable journalism.

Insights into the age of stereotyping

Though journalism was trying to capture the liveliness of human beings, character assassination did indeed occur whenever journalists wrote off being human by reducing it to a formula. Thronged with stock figures and predictable personae, many ‘news’ stories amounted to typing, not writing, i.e. stereotyping rather than character development.

However, the hack’s propensity for the hackneyed results not from objectification but from human subjects being alienated from this process. Our alienation from making the world of objects – making the world our object, is how we came to lose a crucial part of human life – a loss of life which has to be acknowledged in contemporary culture. Popular journalism registered this loss by finding itself in the murder story; hence the editor’s craving for murder, and the reporter targeting his subjects as if about to commit one. This suggests that professional journalism’s quest for murder, was as much the sign of its own times as Addison’s earlier search for morality.

In the meantime, the Spectator’s mercantile habits – evaluation, evaluation, evaluation – had been extended from already finished objects on sale in London’s markets, to include the human activity of making new objects for sale. This is a shorthand description of the transition from merchant capital to industrial capitalism, which took place in Britain during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The development of industrial capitalism not only entailed the production of millions more things and millions more people to produce (and consume) them, it also introduced a new level of commonality between all things and all people. From now on, anything anyone did, automatically existed in comparison with everything everyone else had ever done. Each human action occurred twice over: in its particulars, and in relation to human activity in general.

No mere repetition, this was an historic achievement. By virtue of their comparability, human activities were liberated from their local settings in time and space. Unleashed in this way, our productive activity served to mobilise even more activity. In the further development of both personality and commonality, there was more to being human; and a wider spectrum of humanity for reporters to report on. Furthermore, there was greater demand for a multi-faceted continuum – art, politics, media – that could hold it all together.

Yet togetherness was promised rather than fulfilled. The same process which brought people together to make the world, and prompted them to consume journalism’s re-making of the world, also contains that violent moment when productive activity in both its aspects (the general and the particular) is forcibly transferred over to the thing which prompted it – capital, and taken over by the people who own capital – the capitalist class. In this moment, when what we do together is commonly privatised, those who have been active are suddenly alienated from their own actions, estranged from the things they have made but no longer own. As millions of people are separated from the actions they have performed together, so we lose the life we have lived together. Aside from productive activity, there is still another life to be lived, but this is typically biased towards personality rather than commonality. Fully associative life is repeatedly destroyed – so many times over that we hardly recognise its destruction.

What’s really changed in the last thirty years?

This carnage, which is as widespread as capitalist production, was indirectly reflected in journalism’s passion for murder. We were misdirected, however, by the indirect nature of this reflection. Though professional journalism has continually spanned the continuum between personality and commonality, when describing the world exclusively in terms of personal experience, it presents both commonality and its violent destruction as a straightforward function of personality. Such misattribution amounts to another obituary for the independent life of our shared humanity.

In the twentieth century, morbid tendencies within popular journalism were offset by mass participation in democratic politics, with its (limited) tendency to move along the continuum in the other direction, from personality towards commonality. However, after the demise of mass political participation in the 1980s and early 1990s, the path was clear for further separation of the productive life of humanity from the rest of our lives. In this instance, separation has occurred literally – along geographical lines.

After two decades of further estrangement, the Western way of life now largely depends on the actualisation of labour in far-flung places, increasingly in the East. Even if we are not directly involved in financial speculation, the personal existence of ‘Wessies’ is increasingly derivative: we derive our existence from the creation of value elsewhere.

Meanwhile, in their restricted leisure time millions of ‘Essies’ prefer to speculate (non-financially) on the lives of those with more time to cultivate their personality – us ‘Wessies’. We duly oblige, securitising our debt to the East by performing a continuous spectacle, trading representations of ourselves – merchandising the self – on the various media platforms which now comprise ‘contemporary Western culture’.

How too much attention turned to sex-cheating celebs

Pamela Anderson announces she’s going on Big Brother

In these circumstances, do not ask why the bell tolled for Big Brother. The show ended and the house was shut down in 2010 (it’s due to be revived on Channel 5 from August 2011), but, from the p-o-v of the industrialising world, you and I have taken up permanent residence in UK Reality TV. We’re all (minor) celebrities now.

Yet life in the spectacle is an impoverished form of existence. As we are further removed from the commonality occurring in production, we tend to fall back even further on our personal life, which tends to become yet more superficial just as we pack ourselves into it, frantically networking in the forlorn attempt to derive more significance from it. Worse still, we cannot but feel that being so dependent on interpersonal existence amounts to betrayal of that other life which we might have had in common.

The fact is we are cheating on an important part of our humanity – our commonality, the other-half-life which ought to partner our personal existence. It’s been so long, we might not know what it is exactly, but we know we are betraying it; and from where we are, we feel compelled to do so.

Hence the newly compelling attraction of storylines based on intimate, personal betrayal. This type of saga has supplanted the murder story because it represents, indirectly, the most important, recent development in world history – the betrayal brought on by the further separation of personality from commonality. In journalism, this estrangement has been translated and contained within narrowly personal terms, i.e. transposed into suitable terms for a local audience whose centre of gravity has moved along the human continuum towards the strictly personal. Thus for Western news editors, today’s must-have is a personification of intimacy, self-presentation and alienation: enter the celebrity sex-cheat!

Bill Hagerty, editor, BJR, left. Lady Dip Wheeler, far right. Lindsey Hilsum centre.

But we need not be utterly compelled by the dish of the day. That humanity’s two halves have drifted further apart, may mean it’s harder to realise their connection. However, if more journalists can be persuaded to perform like Charles Wheeler, buoyed by a proper account of why they have been asking so much less of themselves recently, that in itself will add to the measure of humanity.

Dr Andrew Calcutt teaches journalism at the University East London. He is editor of Proof: reading journalism and society www.proof-reading.org; and co-author, with Dr Phil Hammond, of Journalism Studies: a critical introduction (Routledge).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Apropos Paul Seaman’s excellent coverage of the trouble at HP, a big FT analysis piece (“Moral Hazards”, 14/15 August 2010) suggests that there’s a new and very strict “moral” climate about. In particular, the modern CEO has to be virtue personified. The FT notes that CEOs aren’t often castigated for sexual failings, per se. However, if affairs are linked to employees (see the recent case of Mr Hurd, the CEO of HP), then it becomes a matter of abuse of power. If they are linked to competitors, then conflicts of interest are cited. Being casual or naughty about expenses is bad in a more obvious way: because no-one else is allowed lax accounting. (Again, see the Hurd case.)

It’s hard to argue against these versions of the new strictness. Leaders should show a good example, and so on.

I am less thrilled by the way any kind of lying is now bad news, even if it’s small stuff done to cover up embarrassment rather than bad behaviour (see the case of Mr Browne, of BP). In the good old days, white lies were regarded as inevitable and invaluable and there’s merit in that old hypocrisy.

Still, if we insist on banging on about openness, and perhaps we should, then I see that it becomes harder to keep little convenient zones of condoned mendacity.

But I am uneasy about this new Puritanism and I doubt that it will be kept in proper check.

I meet a very wide range of leaders of every kind and always in conditions of strictest privacy. I think I can say that it has taught me that “there’s none so odd as folk”. I mean that it is almost impossible to predict who will have dark secrets, terrible doubts, awesome strength in a crisis, great honour, sudden feebleness. Some people show all of these in a fortnight.

Of all the fallibilities people show I’d say sexual weaknesses (or secrets) outmatch greed, cruelty, fear and a whole bunch of others put together for frequency and career-crashing potential.

So I repeat the earlier caveat: sexual shenanigans (or secrets) should only matter insofar as they are a corporate problem, which ought to be not often. But in the real world, sex still has enormous power to drag reputations under.

This is part of a wider problem.

We see already in politics that there’s a demand for a new institutional and personal purity. The same taste seems to be spreading to firms. The worrying thing of course is to wonder whether we want colourless parliaments peopled by colourless politicians, or colourless firms led by colourless managers.

It seems obvious that politicians can’t be any good and be quite normal. They have to be risk-takers of a high order, and the more so if they are operating in a lively democracy which tips people out of power pretty swiftly and even chaotically. Many good politicians are chancers, and sometimes on a large scale. I should say that scandal is inevitable.

Firms are a bit different, because they are so diverse. A one-man band, or a family firm, or a partnership can be as odd as its customers like. A public firm, especially a large one, is much more likely to be dull, and perhaps needs to be. But should we want its bosses to be very dull?

As a rough guide, the more entrepreneurial an outfit, the more its bosses will be a little naughty. It follows that only if you want an accountants’ paradise can you ordain a firm run by the well-behaved. (And it isn’t guaranteed that accountants will be either dull or decent, of course.)

Here is a way out. We can require the bosses of firms only to be as honest and as well-behaved as they promise to be. I know: you’d still not know whether you’d trusted a liar. But you take my point. We can be very strict about the stated rules, but beyond that, a person’s private life should indeed be private. I think that is Max Moseley’s excellent point as he insists that the media should not have been allowed to pry into his sex-games. But we see the difficulty.

Max is saying he has a right to his privacy. It doesn’t follow, but I think it is implied, that there are lots of things which might damage a person’s reputation or standing which he or she has a right to keep secret. I agree. I don’t think it’s fair that a leader should be required to satisfy the public that they wouldn’t be shocked by his or her private behaviour. So the public should be shielded from it.

That’s the deal. CEOs (like teachers, footballers and all the so-called role-models) must be squeaky clean in a quite new way, and be shielded from prurience in a quite new way. Only if we have the sense not to pry can we be guaranteed to see good behaviour wherever we look.

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There was no upside to HP’s reputation from ridding itself of Mark Hurd. The Economist described HP as Hurdless chickens. Wall Street pulled the rug on the share price. Shareholders looked on bewildered as, as the FT reports, transparency turned to opacity as the Board lost its nerve. Now let’s review how this might make a movie.

Married and slightly nerdy CEO gets obsessed with an events contractor, B-movie actress and former soft-porn star. He buys her dinner more times than he ought. She claims she was sexually harassed and hires a top lawyer with a nose for publicity.

The CEO gets cleared of the charge by the company. But he has difficulty explaining the more than $10k (perhaps $20k) he claimed on expenses to entertain her. He gets told to jump ship. As a result, HP’s share value drops by around $13 billion. That would be the opening scene. Then would come the flashback.

Mark Hurd’s predecessor knocks billions off HP’s share price after her fraught merger with Compaq proves nigh on disastrous. The Board that once backed Carly Fiorina decides to ditch her, but the news leaks. Yet only fellow Board members were in the know. So she orders private detectives to spy on the Board to uncover the traitor. Before they can report, Carly’s fired.

However, the chairman of the Board continues with the investigation (widened to include senior executives), which stoops to lies and deceit and unethical borderline legality. When the rest of the Board discovers how the culprit was identified, members resign in protest and the chairman is forced out. From then on, whenever somebody knocks on their front door, they fear that they’re being bugged by a colleague (the film would portray their spouses’ paranoia).

Carly’s merger antics alone mean that from day one, Mark Hurd is CEO of a company with a psychologically damaged and neurotic Board. The breaking of the spying story and near-implosion of the Board, just deepen his problems. But against the odds, he restores HP’s fortunes, winning widespread praise for the turnaround.

To top it all the temptress in the story proves to have a heart (surely that’s a heart on her sleeve?). She weeps and says she never wanted him fired. She backs up his defence and says that they never had intercourse. The audience weeps with her on behalf of their fallen hero.

What can we learn from this mess?

Above all, the scandal at HP is more about a failure of corporate governance, team-building and trust, than it is about Mark Hurd’s peccadilloes. The major issue for the Board was trust, and the issue of Hurd’s seemingly falsified expenses.

Contrary to popular opinion, corporate governance is not about CSR and personal ethics so much as about improving corporate performance. It is about making the right operational choices. It is about protecting shareholder interests and about assessing strategies to ensure that corporate assets are used properly to achieve corporate purposes. As Larry Ellison has pointed out, HP’s Board has clearly failed to do its job.

The PR consultants at APCO recommended, rightly, that the Board should proactively make a full disclosure of the “scandal”. However, they wrongly advised that Hurd should be sent packing. They produced mock scandalous headlines of what the media might say if Hurd was not ousted. This scared the risk-adverse, emotional Board. In APCO’s favour, however, they probably knew better than anyone else just how broken were the internal relations at the top of HP (leadership requires trust to function). This was no ordinary crisis.

The Board was like a rabbit caught in headlights. It first froze, then panicked. Not for the first time it collectively put personal feelings before the company’s interests.

Meanwhile, Wall Street punished the Board and the company for firing Hurd.

But what about Mark Hurd’s role in all this? His comment about his resignation (cue $40 million pay off) was revealing. He said:

“I did not live up to the standards and principles of trust and integrity that I have espoused at HP”

So, he knew that he broke the bonds of trust at HP, and that he was guilty of hypocrisy on the morality front. So here’s my guidelines for how to avoid such moral hazards in future:

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

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

• Headlines about your personal virtues are hostages to fortune.

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

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

• Those who live by the sword die by it.

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

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

• The public love sinners and winners. It loathes saints.

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Most of the accusations of sexual abuse go back to the 1970s. That was a period during which such practices were commonplace, if not common. It was only in the 1990s that the extent of the problem became a major concern for society.

What was uncovered was that in state-run care homes, Scout troops, St John’s Ambulance Brigade, public schools and religious bodies of different denominations across Europe there were similar scandals lurking under the surface. So the Pope in his letter of apology was right to say that:

“It is true, as many in your country [Ireland] have pointed out, that the problem of child abuse is peculiar neither to Ireland nor to the Church.”

There are some other punches we should pull. I, too, am enticed by the argument that enforced celibacy among Catholic priests encourages such appalling conduct. But then again, how do we explain the behaviour of married women and men who behave the same way? Are young boys more at risk from gay men than from those who say they’re straight? No. We all know it is not that simple.

The goings-on in the British state’s care homes were probably far worse than what went on in the Catholic Church’s domain. The scale of abuse in British public schools between older and younger boys and teachers and all their boys was rampant. Yet that is often the subject of giggles on TV chats shows among celebs who attended them. It seems that some forms of sexual abuse are more lightly thought of than others.

The Catholic Church, like many other religious bodies, does good work. Some of the most formidable minds I’ve ever encountered were the product of Catholic Schools. There is still much to be said in favour of the Church. Besides, for those who share its faith, its mission and purpose are way beyond the terrestrial. It would be a shame if its great (and perhaps inestimable) value was obscured by the real fact of the damage some of its people did and whose harm its culture was not well-adapted to deal with.

But we’re gathered here as PRs, whether in the sight of the Lord or not. Have the RCs handled this well? On recent evidence, I’d say they have. They’ve apologised and shown a determination to change the bits of their world which were wrong. They’ve also come out fighting: they’ve noted that their sins were the sins of the age. Actually, for the RC hierarchy, that takes a bit of courage, since their usual USP and pitch is to declare themselves timelessly aloof from the crisis of the times. But it’s also rather Vatican II: that is, it is in line with a determination to remind itself and the sceptical world that it is a human institution with a divine aspiration to be of use to real people, now.

I’d say the Church is on the way to fixing this crisis. It then faces the long haul of surviving in a secular, populist, demotic world in which almost all its messages – even compared with those of other churches – look very hard to sell. But, hell, the RCs never did have an easy pitch, and they’ve survived – and sometimes outlived – plenty of critics before now.

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Who was Tiger Wood’s audience when he apologized? Surely, he wasn’t speaking to the public because he has not really offended it, has he? Surely he wasn’t addressing his wife either?

On the contrary, he said his wife was blameless, which immediately provoked the responses (a) we knew that already, dummy; and (b) now I don’t like you for the way you’ve spoken about your wife in a PR thingy. So let’s get this straight: until the apology none of us had any reason to think he was a prat, like it was our business anyway.

The truth is presumably that Tiger Wood’s made his awkward apology for the benefit of his future at least partly with his sponsors. But the thought that they were previously completely oblivious to Tiger’s love of luscious ladies is too naive to believe. Tiger was rampant in his enthusiasms off the course. So if Tiger made a mess of his apology it was perhaps because it was insincere except for the regret at getting caught and having to clean up the mess.

But whatever the critics like me may say, what the hell else could Tiger Woods do? And doing it badly may be better than not doing it at all. The reality is that there’s a threatening popular culture at play in society which shrills, “apologise, reform, move on, or we’ll bring your house down.” Besides, one needs to shut things down: if Mr Woods hadn’t said his piece – at length and comprehensively – his re-entry to public life would have been dogged by the media’s sense that there was still some meat on the bone.

One could blame the media. But I don’t. The media reflects popular culture rather than makes it. No, it is the the two-faced smirking sponsors that I blame, and the public whose judgement they fear, of course. Tiger Woods couldn’t resist, for instance, taking a swipe at Accenture in his apology, whom he called “friends”, but who actually walked out on him.

On the face of it, the sponsors are right to be nervous. According to a survey conducted for PRWeek about the John Terry affair, 62 per cent said footballers’ personal lives shaped public opinion of them and a significant 71 per cent thought footballers appeared “above the law”. The funny thing is that neither John Terry or Tiger Woods has broken any laws, but that’s an aside. The public seems to demand of public figures what it would never demand of itself.

Sponsors fear cross-contamination between their chosen ones’ fallen reputations and theirs. This has created a risk-adverse climate. They and the public have become stuck in a cynical cycle of expressing moral outrage at exposures of what would once have been of little concern to anybody but the families of those involved.

But I don’t think we should take the public’s prejudices too seriously because the public doesn’t take them seriously either. So my call is to bin the research findings.

Here comes more advice. If sponsors want to appear authentic, they need to stop creeping to shallow and shifting public opinion. When the sponsors’ stars are found wanting in some way, they should stick by him or her. I am pretty sure the sponsors’ realism and their loyalty will resonate well with the public.

Can’t we respond like adults to the frailties of our super stars? What do you say?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Headlines about your personal virtues are hostages to fortune.

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

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

• Those who live by the sword die by it

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

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

• The public love sinners and loathe saints.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The first time I considered transparency as an issue was as an eighteen year-old reading Lord Chesterfield’s letters to his son. One of them contains this 18th century nugget that I’ve never forgotten:

“Without some dissimulation no business can be carried out at all. It is simulation that is false. Dissimulation is only to hide your cards.”

When I read Paul’s piece it was that quote that came to mind. There are often good reasons not to be too transparent even in public service, I thought.

Consider gays in the US military. The Don’t ask, don’t tell (DADT) is a semi-official licence designed to encourage opaqueness in the military. Personally, I favour the right of gays to serve openly, but if one is going to fudge the issue this seems to be almost an acceptable way to do so. It may be inadequate to purists, but it was a halfway decent staging-post to somewhere more honest (and may be not all that superior).

Or consider collective responsibility in government, as did The Times’s Danny Finkelstein in last Sunday’s edition of Westminster Hour on BBC Radio 4. He said that politicians who always speak their minds honestly cannot be good colleagues, because party government depends on the necessarily artificial device of assuming that there is a collegiate view.

Or consider the necessity of ordinary social deceit. The “Does my bum look big in this?” dilemma faces many people.

Or consider whether a schoolboy owes respect to a headmaster who has not yet (in the boy’s view or that of his father) “earned” it. Well, there is a necessary hypocrisy which suggests that respect is owed ex officio. (See Rod Liddle, Sunday Times, 26 October 2009.)

Or consider the politician who in public espouses infant vaccination but can’t get his spouse to allow it on his own baby? Must he be forced to come clean about the status of his own child?

These cases make me feel that transparency may or may not be valuable in this or that circumstance, but also that it is a new species of infantilism to think that transparency is always and everywhere a Good Thing as a matter of principle.

Perhaps, though, transparency is a decent principle for governance? Again, I think not. Transparency could actually be very bad for corporate and political governance. It may produce the unintended consequence of driving all serious deliberations and decisions deep underground  (off-the-record management that’s not accountable to anybody, ever etc.).

When it comes to managing public finances I agree wholeheartedly that transparency is increasingly hard to argue against. But surely, there’s something wrong when transparency in the UK results in the controversial backdated caps on MPs’ expenses recommended by auditor Sir Thomas Legg? Of course in that case – and there are many – the problem isn’t the transparency but the childishness which greeted the facts it revealed.(Too many of the public were unable to cope with the idea that they were contributing to their legislators’ lifestyles.)

I doubt that forcing people to reveal the “truth” will lead to either party (the informant or the informee) becoming wiser or nicer, at least not quickly.

There’s a very real danger that people will simply lie, or be forced to dissemble with greater and greater sophistication. Or they will become mealy-mouthed, say-nothing niceness cyphers.

Indeed, more transparency can only work well if we all become more and more indifferent to the information we increasingly glean. If we do get to the position where everyone knows everything about our finances (or our sexual orientation), we will also need to be in the position of saying, “So what?” to those who make a big deal of these things (or seek to bully or blackmail us). But there is something very authoritarian about arriving there. Surely, some things are personal, or secret for good political and commercial reasons, and revealing them should not be a public requirement?

As Paul Holmes rightly says on his blog, “transparency is less and less tenable as a strategy, because information has a way of fighting free of constraints….” What does this mean for PRs? I think it means that we need to push back on the demand for transparency as a principle. We should be very specific when we use the term and seek to identify when and where it is best to advocate or reject its use.

Otherwise, I fear, transparency is doomed to become the new opaque, and that wouldn’t be honest, would it?

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