LONDON — Many years ago, Tim Bell harangued me at a party over someone else’s champagne for being industrial editor of the Observer, a newspaper that was unduly influenced, in his view, by the interests of Lonrho, the conglomerate that owned the paper in those days.
To be lectured by Bell on media ethics was worrying — a bit like being told by Oliver Reed that you drank too much. Fast forward to today and Bell’s PR conglomerate, Bell Pottinger, is collapsing amid revelations that it campaigned for the continued “existence of economic apartheid” in South Africa, on the payroll of the billionaire Gupta family, to keep President Jacob Zuma and his family in power.
But schadenfreude isn’t enough. The bigger question here is how, in 2017, a U.K. PR firm can be charging £100,000 a month for, among other things, inciting racial hatred in a foreign sovereignty.
Bell may not have been directly involved in the South African campaign that has finally sunk the firm that has his name over the door. But he created the corporate climate in which it prospered.
And that raises serious questions about the way Britain does business, especially at a time when we apparently want to open our own trading channels to the world, independent of the regulation of the European Union.
We need to decide what we’re doing, why we’re doing it and for whom it’s beneficial. If the answer to the last of those is self-enrichment, then it’s not enough.
For the past two decades, Bell made a seven-figure income out of the political-influence game. Clients famously included Margaret Thatcher and despots from Chile’s Augusto Pinochet to Belarus’ Alexander Lukashenko. Not to mention the wife of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, Asma, and arms dealer BAE, embroiled in a scandal over its dealings with the loathsome Saudi Arabian regime.
The PR industry has long operated on the taxi-rank principle, similar to the legal profession, that you take the next available client — however odious they may be — because everyone deserves professional representation, right? Well, no, as it turns out.
To my shame, I’ve operated on that principle in the past (and I kept the money).
But here’s the thing: As political regulation in the U.K. has tightened and as the media have atomized in the digital era, with the internal economies of newspaper groups collapsing as social media suck out the advertising revenues, the offer of consultative influence on behalf of clients becomes ever thinner. It has driven PR consultants to ever more desperate business wherever they can find it.
So it’s a bit rich, frankly, for regulators at the PR Consultants Association to expel Bell Pottinger.
Now, many of these people are my friends. I drink their wine in their country homes. I’m a chaplain, if not father confessor, to some of them. But I hope they won’t mind me saying that they look like a bunch of pimps throwing up their hands in horror at the moral turpitude of their highest-earning whore.
The flogging of influence is the same whether you’re burnishing the reputation of a U.K. corporate client or that of Jacob Zuma — making boring people marginally less tedious happens to be a working definition for most of PR. But the financial rewards can be greater on Bell’s side of the business. To coin an old phrase, we’ve established what you are, we’re just negotiating the price.
It’s why, after all, Bell Pottinger survived and prospered for so long, precisely because that’s the professional model. It’s just a question of degree.
Collapsing industries always reveal the worst in themselves. But it’s a governance issue, not one of regulation. We need to decide what we’re doing, why we’re doing it and for whom it’s beneficial. If the answer to the last of those is self-enrichment, then it’s not enough.
If the PR industry can’t ask those questions of itself and receive the right answers, then — as in journalism — the state will step in. In his memoirs, published in 2014, Bell wrote: “…with each day that passes the state seems to take more control of our lives … [for some people] this may be desirable, but for me it is nothing short of catastrophic.”
How right he has turned out to be, but not in the way he anticipated.
George Pitcher is a writer, Anglican priest and former spin doctor. His novel “A Dark Nativity” is published this autumn.