Category Archives: PR

Remembering my wonderful Dad

Posted on by
1

Robert Charles Skinner, 27 November 1926 – 21 February 2023

Ten years ago, I had one of the most wonderful evenings of my life.

I was having dinner with my father, Bob Skinner, at Penarth Yacht Club in Wales. A few hours earlier my mother Rosemary had had a successful cancer operation at the age of 84, and we were celebrating. Dad spoke movingly about losing his father Frank when he was 16 in 1942, and his deep regret that he never had the chance to get to know him. For the very first time, I admitted to Dad that when I was 16 I was scared the same thing would happen. (Dad’s grandfather also died young.)

Happily, Dad remained a precious part of my life for 43 years after I passed the milestone of turning 16. But those days have now come to an end. He slipped the surly bonds of Earth on 21 February, and I will always be grateful for the time we had together. He was an inspiration to me: his zest for life, his sense of fairness and his way with words lit up my life. I followed him into public relations, and one of the proudest days of my life was when we stood on the terrace of the House of Lords after I was made a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Public Relations almost 40 years after Dad himself became a Fellow.

I’ll write again about Dad in the coming weeks. I have a lifetime of memories, together with Dad’s extensive writing about his life and work, to cherish. I couldn’t have wished for a better father. Thanks, Dad. I will always love you.

When British mortgage rates hit 15.4 percent

Posted on by
Reply

John Major – the man who prompted my announcement

Mortgage rates doubling. Home owners in despair. Thousands of homes being repossessed.

Sounds familiar? This was Britain in 1990. I was running Nationwide Building Society’s press office and had the job of announcing that February that mortgage rates were going up to 15.4 percent. Just two years earlier the home loan rate was just over 8 percent.

The 1980s were a golden time for home ownership in Britain. Prime minister Margaret Thatcher championed a home-owning democracy, and the proportion of people owning their own home rose from 56 percent in 1980 to 67 percent in 1990. (Source: Statista.) But the housing boom crashed after Thatcher and her chancellor Nigel Lawson allowed the economy to overheat, and interest rates almost doubled in just over 18 months, culminating in that eye-watering 15.4 percent mortgage rate.

As spokesman for Britain’s third largest mortgage lender, I was busy explaining the impact on borrowers (and savers). Fixed rate mortgages were in their infancy in the UK, with the first launched in 1989, and I can’t remember Nationwide offering one back then. Many borrowers were on annual review mortgage schemes, which fixed the monthly payment but not the interest rate for 12 months. If interest rates soared, the borrower had to pay back the extra money owed later.

Continue reading →

Mick Lynch: a text book lesson in winning the argument

Posted on by
1

Mick Lynch, the leader of the union that represents Britain’s railway workers, has become the media star of the past week. His calm, clever responses to hostile questions about the rail strikes have shown that disrupting people’s travel plans to fight for better pay needn’t be unpopular.

He brilliantly defused Sky News’ Kay Burley’s crazily over the top attempt to raise the spectre of a return to the violent picketing scenes of the 1970s and 1980s. Mick calmly turned to the tiny group of peaceful pickets behind him. ”That’s what a picket line looks like. We’ll try to persuade people not to go to work.” Outrageously Burley tweeted that Lynch was flustered – yet he was as cool as the cliched cucumber. The Sky presenter was the one losing her cool as her interview went nowhere. Lynch had the facts and the humour to defuse what could have been a tough interview.

The unions have a very good argument. So many people have had their real incomes slashed by 12 years of Tory austerity at a time when industry bosses have shown no restraint. The government may think that a summer of discontent will help it win back support. It didn’t work for Ted Heath in 1974 or Jim Callaghan in 1979. The cost of living crisis is going to get worse in the next year and Boris Johnson and his cronies have no answers. (Especially when Johnson tried to get one of those cronies to pay for a £150,000 summer house for his son in the grounds of Chequers.)

Keir Starmer should take lessons from Mick Lynch about how to win an argument. Right now, Labour’s leader is like a football manager winning 1-0 and determined to play safe and close down play at the risk of conceding a goal or two. He should be going for a convincing win.

The day I met Michael Heseltine

Posted on by
Reply
Me and Michael Heseltine

It was a tumultuous time in British politics. Prime minister John Major had just resigned as leader of the Conservative party in a desperate attempt to get his critics to put up or shut up.

All eyes were on Michael Heseltine, whose challenge to Margaret Thatcher in 1990 destroyed the Iron Lady’s premiership. Major’s fate appeared to be in Hezza’s hands. Would he slay another Tory prime minister? No – days later, he affirmed his loyalty to Major, who made him deputy prime minister.

The night I met him, he was in good spirits. The occasion was a reception at B.A.T Industries, the owner of Eagle Star, the insurance company I worked for. We had something in common: when he returned to government under Major as environment secretary he set up a competition called City Challenge. Inner city areas had to bid for funding by partnering with the private sector. I was seconded by B.A.T Industries to Lambeth Council to bid for funding for Brixton. Hezza had reportedly told Lambeth not to bother as jt had no chance. (The Tories had long memories of Lambeth’s left wing leadership in the 1980s under Red Ted Knight.) It seemed a daunting assignment.

Continue reading →

Don’t insult Wales: Iceland sacks PR chief Keith Hann

Posted on by
Reply

Welsh supermarket chain Iceland has sacked its PR director Keith Hann after he repeatedly insulted the country and its language.

Iceland said, “We would like to reiterate that these comments in no way reflect the values or philosophy of our business. We are a proud Welsh company, with a long history of investment in communities.” Iceland’s move came as many in Wales said they would boycott the store as a result of Hann’s views.

Some defended Hann. Consumer journalist Harry Wallop tweeted:

Keith Hann is entitled to his views, however tedious and juvenile. He may think it clever and funny to mock the Welsh language as gibberish. Too many English people are proud of their inability to say more than a few words in another tongue. They are unwilling to see the glory of different cultures – even those in their own island.

But that’s not why Iceland sacked Hann. The simple reason is that he was not wise enough to see that mocking the country in which his company is based is not compatible with his role as the director responsible for Iceland’s reputation.

As the Western Mail said in an editorial, Iceland recognised that it didn’t make business sense for one of its most senior executives to insult an entire nation. It went on to point out how jokes that portrayed the Irish as stupid have thankfully and rightly died out. The Times also published a leader explaining why Iceland was right to sack Hann:

“Mr Hann’s comments have cost him his job. It may surprise him that there are hundreds of thousands of Welsh speakers in Britain, along with a small but thriving Welsh-speaking community in Argentina, and they are justifiably unhappy. So far from being gibberish, Welsh, like any other natural language, has a complex system of grammar and can express a full range of meanings. And it is integral to the culture of Britain. It is, in fact, in the form of its predecessor Brittonic Celtic, the oldest language of these isles and long predates English.”

Companies are under constant scrutiny. Those of us in PR have to judge our comments, far more than was the case even a decade ago. None of us is perfect, and everyone should be allowed the occasional mistake. But we also need to take the advice that we’d give to executives. If you make a mistake, say sorry. Treat others how you’d want to be treated yourself. Applaud diversity. Be open minded about other opinions. While it is sad to see someone losing their job, if Keith Hann had been a good head of PR, he’d surely have told himself that insulting Wales was bad news.

British Airways outrages Wales by backing England rugby in Llanelli clash

Posted on by
Reply

British Airways lost a lot of goodwill in Wales today by tweeting support for England in the autumn nations cup rugby international at Llanelli.

The airline may be a sponsor of the England team but a moment’s thought should have revealed that such a tweet would upset a lot of Welsh supporters – like me.

Welsh health minister Vaughan Gething put it well: “Good way to annoy 3m potential customers. BBC News at Ten presenter Huw Edwards tweeted, “I love @EasyJet.” The super-active YesCymru independence campaign was quick to draw attention to BA’s blunder.

Some have countered, saying that BA’s tweet was understandable as the airline sponsors England rugby. But that misses the point. For a UK brand to choose one nation over the others is ill-judged, especially today, when the union is under pressure and national consciousness is stronger than ever in Scotland and Wales. Nationwide Building Society was wiser, sponsoring all four UK football nations, England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, earlier this century.

Other brands have been less sensible. I got so annoyed by emails from O2 urging me to cheer on England’s rugby team that I blocked all marketing emails and then moved to EE. I should add that I have nothing against others supporting England rugby – just that brands need to understand national identity.

To end on a positive note. To its credit, British Airways quickly deleted its tweet and apologised, saying it had strayed offside. Let’s hope that it has learned its lesson.

PS: Wales lost – but it’s unlikely that BA’s support for England made any difference.

Coronavirus: explaining and balancing risks

Posted on by
Reply

Screenshot 2020-06-27 at 21.45.30

The risk question: helmet or no helmet?

The coronavirus pandemic has raised an age old question. How do we assess risk? More difficult still, how do we balance competing risks?

The COVID-19 crisis has thrown up a stack of such balancing acts. The most prominent one is where to strike the balance between health and economics. But other trade offs are apparent. Should we shut society down in the hope of killing the virus? How do we help the young, who are by all accounts much less at risk?

Yet our view of risk changes over time. My 16 year old aunt took 13 year old Dad to the cinema in London in the middle of the blitz in 1940, retreating home hours late after an air raid. Less dramatically, as a nine year old I’d venture alone across 1970s Cardiff on my bike to my aunt and uncle’s house in Rhiwbina. No one had ever heard of a bike helmet back then. Perhaps some children tragically ended up under the wheel of an Austin Maxi – but it didn’t stop us exploring on two wheels.

Screenshot 2020-06-27 at 22.25.46

Don’t get me wrong. We were right to make work and life safer. Too many people died unnecessarily. The Great Western Railway introduced ‘automatic train control’ in 1906 to warn drivers when they were passing a ‘distant’ caution signal. Later, the GWR system applied the brakes if the driver didn’t slow down. It saved countless lives. It took half a century and the catastrophic Harrow & Wealdstone and Lewisham disasters before nationalised British Railways introduced the same safeguards on the rest of the network.

Similarly, once controversial measures to tackle drink driving and smoking now seem like common sense.

Yet human beings are not good at understanding and assessing risk. Take cycling. I have had a cycling helmet for almost 30 years. I usually wear one. (Though I didn’t in the photo opening this post – climbing a very steep hill to Todi in Umbria in 2004.) Most parents today would be horrified by the idea of not putting a helmet on their children as they pedal up a deserted road.

But helmet use should be a choice. We need to get children into active lifestyles, such as cycling, walking and sport, to reduce the risk of obesity. A report in 2017 suggested that 35% of children were overweight or obese at 11. Yet MP Bill Grant demanded that children be forced to wear helmets, so criminalising a child pedalling down a quiet cul-de-sac without a helmet. This shows a complete inability to assess risk. Banning McDonalds and fizzy drinks would be far more effective.

Screenshot 2020-06-27 at 23.19.55

Lesley Whittle

It’s a similar story with child abduction. The tragic story of Madeleine McCann, still front page news 13 years after the three year old disappeared in 2007, heightened fears that children were at much greater danger than during our childhood. Five years earlier, the murders of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman in Soham, Cambridgeshire shocked the country. Yet child murders are remarkably rare, and are at historically low rates. Most are committed by parents or others known to the child. The difference is that today’s saturation media coverage and social media interest raises the prominence of tragedies. (Although I vividly remember the media frenzy about the awful ordeal of Lesley Whittle, a 17 year old kidnapped and killed by Donald Neilson in 1975.) We need to remember that such appalling cases are vanishingly rare. Be sensible, and teach children how to spot risks. (The age old advice about not taking treats from strangers remains relevant today.)

The communications lessons

Back to 2020, and the coronavirus conundrum. Global companies face a dilemma: do you take the same approach everywhere, or tailor policy and advice by region? Should you keep working from home globally, or allow countries like Australia and New Zealand to return to (close to) normal?

There’s no one answer. But whatever you decide, explain your approach.

Communication is key. It’s striking that the leaders who are natural communicators and educators like Jacinda Ardern have shone in this crisis. Leadership isn’t about bullshit and bluster. The greatest leaders educate the public. This hadn’t struck me until I read Steve Richards’ wonderful study of British prime ministers of the past 40 years. The greatest failures, like Theresa May, don’t even bother. Thatcher famously used her experience as a housewife to explain why the nation needed to spend no more than it earned. (Though the parallel was arguably misconceived.) And Tony Blair – at least before the historic blunder of the Iraq war – was the great communicator, bridging the then gap between traditional Labour and aspiring middle class voters.

Boris Johnson should have all the advantages. He has a vivid turn of phrase, when he remembers to speak English rather than Latin. He’s a larger than life character and people have in the past forgiven him a lot because of that. (Except in Liverpool.)

But the prime minister seems to lack any sensible advice in government. Dominic Cummings may have helped win the Brexit referendum, but so far has proved a disaster as Johnson’s chief adviser. The prime minister has a majority of 80. He should ditch partisan campaigning in favour of statecraft. Ditch the vengeance against people perceived not to be ‘one of us’. Learn a lesson from Roosevelt in the 1930s. Take the public into your confidence. Admit there is no simple answer: that we have to balance health and economics. After all, mass unemployment kills people as well as viruses. Children’s life chances are being damaged by lockdown. Start a conversation.

Dominic Cummings: the lies that shame Boris Johnson’s government

Posted on by
Reply

Screenshot 2020-05-23 at 19.46.31

Dominic Cummings: shameless

Boris Johnson’s failing government was on the ropes tonight after the prime minister’s chief adviser refused to resign after breaking England’s lockdown rules. Dominic Cummings travelled 260 miles to Durham when his wife developed COVID-19 symptoms.

The government had already been fiercely criticised for its car crash response to coronavirus – see my previous blog posts here and here.

The government’s response to Cummings’ disastrous mistake will make it far more likely that others will decide to ignore the rules. After all, if the rules don’t apply to the PM’s chief adviser, then logically they don’t apply to anyone else. It’s just the latest example of the government’s PR own goals. And on the day that The Times published an editorial asking ‘Where is Boris Johnson?”:

“The government is … paying the penalty for its poor communications. This risks undermining public confidence at a vital stage in the fight against the pandemic. For this much of the blame lies with Mr Johnson. It is the prime minister’s job to provide leadership. Yet he has been largely missing in action and not only when he was in hospital. Since his televised address two weeks ago, he has made one statement to the House of Commons, which remarkably was his first since the crisis began, and he has turned up twice to prime minister’s questions. Apart from that he has attended no press conferences and given no interviews. Instead he has left the communication of public policy to a succession of ministers, whose uneven performances have often added to the confusion.”

It was pitiful tonight to see an array of cabinet ministers sycophantically tweeting support for Cummings:

Screenshot 2020-05-23 at 19.36.14

Screenshot 2020-05-23 at 19.34.21

Screenshot 2020-05-23 at 19.32.43

Screenshot 2020-05-23 at 19.37.37

It is beneath contempt to claim that criticising an unelected official for breaking the law is politicising the matter. Cummings will surely be gone in 48 hours.

Cummings has been regarded as a political and communications genius by many after his role campaigning for Britain to leave the EU. It is clear tonight that his reputation as a messiah has been overstated. In reality, he’s just a very naughty boy.

Covid carelessness: UK government’s PR failures continue

Posted on by
6

I blogged in March how the UK government’s confused communications about coronavirus were risking lives. (Careless talk costs lives.) Sadly, things have not improved.

E34297E0-51BE-4327-AC8F-9E3DD9F8A618_1_101_o

False hopes

These were the headlines in the UK national press on Thursday. A nation straining under lockdown got a clear signal that freedom was beckoning. The hope raised is likely to be cruelly dashed when Boris Johnson announces whether the government is to make significant changes to lockdown rules for England. That seems unlikely with COVID-19 still far from contained.

Those headlines didn’t happen by accident. They would have been based on briefings from the government’s PR teams. This was carelessness – recklessness even – ahead of a warm bank holiday weekend marking the 75th anniversary of VE Day. Caution was needed. Sure enough, the following day’s headlines marked a gut-wrenching handbrake turn:

34ED25DF-8FA3-48B6-8454-0786507F9390_1_201_a

How could Boris Johnson have allowed this to happen? In a health crisis, words matter. The UK government has failed to apply the basic rules of crisis communications. What a contrast to the way the Scottish and Welsh governments have done things. They have been clear and consistent. You can sense the frustration in Holyrood and Cardiff Bay at the failures in London.

Matthew Parris in The Times (paywall) today brilliantly summed up the prime minister’s failure to lead and communicate. In his column, he captured the bumbling prime minister in the Commons as he struggled to string a thought together, never mind a sentence:

“The prime minister: “A-a-as I think is readily apparent, Mr Speaker, to everybody who has studied the, er, the situation, and I think the scientists would, er, confirm, the difficulty in mid-March was that, er, the, er, tracing capacity that we had — it had been useful … in the containment phase of the epidemic er, that capacity was no longer useful or relevant, since the, er, transmission from individuals within the UK um meant that it exceeded our capacity. … [A]as we get the new cases down, er, we will have a team that will genuinely be able to track and, er, trace hundreds of thousands of people across the country, and thereby to drive down the epidemic. And so, er, I mean, to put it in a nutshell, it is easier, er, to do now — now that we have built up the team on the, on the way out — than it was as er, the epidemic took off …”

Cruel but accurate. Johnson long ago perfected his persona as a bumbling, rather chaotic player. This seemed to provide a front for a man who was actually ruthlessly ambitious. Yet, now, we wonder whether it’s not an act after all – that, to quote Gertrude Stein, “There’s no there there”. Matthew Parris asks in The Times today whether Johnson is actually up to the job. He says:

“We need to be persuaded that the leader is leading: in charge, across his brief, able to bang heads together and when key decisions loom, equipped and ready to take them.”

Screenshot 2020-05-04 at 09.29.05

Wales takes the lead

It’s clear that the first ministers of Wales and Scotland have decided they cannot afford to allow London to lead coronavirus communications. True, Mark Drakeford and Nicola Sturgeon come from rival parties with little time for Old Etonian bluster. And Sturgeon in particular has an agenda to show that Scotland is better going its own way. But they have their own responsibilities in their respective nations. Drakeford announced on Friday only “modest” changes to the coronavirus lockdown in Wales, warning it was “too soon” to go further. That has to be right. Why did London not do the same? Why did Johnson delay his announcement until Sunday? It’s hard to imagine any new trends or data emerging over the weekend to justify a major change.

As Matthew Parris concludes, “This crisis is a flight into the unknown and we need the captain to stop the blustering and talk to us like grown-ups”.

Testing, testing

It’s clear now that the government seriously blundered over its target of providing 100,000 COVID-19 tests a day. At the end of April, it triumphantly trumpeted that it had reached that target on the last day of the month. But suspiciously, it then failed to meet the target on every single day of the following week. It’s hard not to conclude that the government was playing games. That’s the last way to govern and communicate during the greatest health crisis for a century.

The failures to keep promises to provide tests and personal protective equipment for NHS staff and carers recall an episode early in Churchill’s wartime premiership, recounted in Erik Larson’s superb new book The Splendid and the Vile.

Talking to a general recently evacuated from Dunkirk in 1940, the prime minister commented, “I assume then that your Corps is now ready to take the field?” The reply: “Very far from it sir. Our re-equipment is not nearly complete…” Churchill, taken aback, checked the reports that claimed that the general’s division had been replenished. The general gave a devastating retort: “That may refer to the weapons that the depots are preparing to issue to my units, but they have not yet reached the troops in anything like those quantities”. At that, according to Larson, Churchill was almost speechless with rage and threw the misleading reports across the table towards the chief of the imperial general staff. Winston wasn’t interested in massaging figures; he was outraged that the troops hadn’t got the equipment that the reports claimed had reached them. If only Churchill was in charge in 2020.

Boris Johnson could learn a lot from his hero, who became prime minister 80 years ago today. As I blogged on the anniversary 10 years ago, our greatest premier reflected:

“As he returned from Buckingham Palace as prime minister, Churchill had tears in his eyes as he told his detective that he was very much afraid it was too late. “We can only do our best.” But as we went to bed at 3am the following day, he reflected a profound sense of relief. “I felt as if I were walking with destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and this trial.”

Coronavirus: do we have right to know facts about Prime Minister’s health?

Posted on by
4

 

Britain was shocked last night by the news that Boris Johnson had been admitted to intensive care after the prime minister’s coronavirus symptoms worsened. The news raised the important question: how open should the government be about the prime minister’s health?

The dramatic news followed intense speculation that Number 10 had not been open about Johnson’s true condition. The PM released a video (above) on Friday in which he claimed to be feeling better, yet needed to stay isolated as he still had a high temperature. Johnson’s appearance and voice raised concerns rather than calming them. Speculation grew after Boris was admitted to hospital on Sunday night. Why was he still working? Dominic Raab, the PM’s deputy in all but name, admitted at Monday’s daily Number 10 news conference that he had not spoken to Johnson since Saturday, despite continuous claims the PM was still in charge. Within hours, all that had changed as the PM moved to intensive care. Twitter was flooded with goodwill messages from across the political spectrum.

Screenshot 2020-04-07 at 11.16.01

Continue reading →