Flushing and polishing services for monsters

The Green and Surprisingly Pleasant Land zeros in on the PR flack who have helped the rich to do their worst

Every monster with a lot of cash will be in possession of a well-healed public relations flack. Mohamed Al Fayed, the serial sexual abuser famous for his ownership of the Harrods department store, of course had such a person. He was the suave Michael Cole, a former BBC royal correspondent. Mr Cole sometimes appeared to be umbilically tied to the diminutive tycoon.

Having made himself available at all times to deny any of Mr Al Fayed’s wrongdoings, he is now apparently mute when it comes to speaking about his role as a facilitator of his master’s indefensible behaviour.

Michael Cole is part of coterie of well paid ‘explainers’ who are notorious for having a poor relationship with the truth, a worrisome familiarity with exaggeration, combined with a willingness to intimidate critics.

Mr Cole essentially worked for one man rather than his company but others are focused on a more corporate level. A good example being the disgraced Post Office Communications Director Richard Taylor who not only played a key role in covering up the scandal engulfing his employers but was caught on tape enthusiastically vilifying the victims of the Post Office vicious campaign against its Sub-postmasters.

You often hear PR flacks trying to claim that they were unaware of their client’s misdeeds, a dubious excuse at the best of times but one not afforded to someone like the famous American PR man Mike Sitrick who gets called in after the proverbial shit has hit the fan. Mr Sitrick’s clients have ranged from the film mogul Harvey Weinstein, now in jail for serious sex offenses, to the Los Angeles Catholic Archdiocese reeling under a deluge of child sex abuse allegations surrounding the priesthood.

Mr Sitrick charges top dollar for his services and is proud of taking on the hardest cases or to put it another way, the most odious cases. He does so on grounds that everyone has the right to be heard.

It’s a common defence among PR men engaged in this kind of activity. Sometimes they try to pretend that their job is like that of lawyers who are obliged to take on clients guilty of the most heinous crimes. Lawyers argue, with some justification, that the rule of law requires everyone to have their day in court and that their role is not to determine guilt or innocence but to ensure that justice is served.

PR flacks however often make it their business to ensure that justice is not served.  Unlike the legal system that offers the right of defence to all the accused, the PR system is not available to everyone, only the very rich can avail themselves of this service. Secondly, and precisely because the PR business is riddled with mendacity and outright dubious practises, there are few boundaries that are not crossed by practitioners of this black art. Lawyers are constrained by a bevy of rules governing their behaviour. PR people face no such restraint and often exploit their freedom to act with considerable success.

This begs the question of why they are often successful. Part of the answer lies in the gullibility of the public, often beguiled by the kind of famous people caught engaging in infamous activity. But why are journalists, who are supposed to have scepticism running through their veins, so susceptible to the guile of the PR industry?

Some journalists are guilty of simply being lazy and consider their job to be done if they have channelled enquiries through PR departments and emerged with something to report before deadlines expire.

Equally journalists can be seduced by rather affable PR operatives happy to share their largesse with hacks who are wined and dined, offered tickets to entertainments (it’s not just Prime Ministers who get this treatment).

Many journalists will have an inkling of what’s going on but feel it is expedient to carefully avoid what appears to be dubious but cannot conclusively be proved to be so, particularly in Britain where libel laws are more stringent.

There are, it should be stressed, some perfectly decent people in the PR trade who have the great benefit of not having to defend the indefensible. As a journalist I found myself dealing both with the respectable end of this business, alongside the dodgy flacks.

You had to be something of an idiot not to be able to make the distinction. Yet, in order to get stories you had to deal with both ends of the spectrum. In order to gain access to people in the news you would sometimes be asked to supply questions in advance so that the flacks could work out evasive answers. That never seemed like a good idea to me but negotiation over areas of questioning while not being ideal did not, in my view, cross any red lines.

This kind of negotiation can be considered as fair play in the great cat and mouse game of journalism where getting the story is the ultimate test of a hack’s worth and where moulding the story is the apotheosis of a PR flack’s success.

If success means helping seriously evil people get away with the very bad things the question arises as to whether a self-respecting person would really want to do this? That question is not difficult to answer.