Tim Bell is charming, amiable and universally liked. Pity about his PR
FRANK JOHNSON
Lord Bell — that is, Tim Bell, the publicrelations man — said in a Financial Times interview this week that it was wrong to think of PR as 'being about 19and 20-year-old girls with earpieces and pagers and mobile telephones'. This will disappoint many, and surprise some. Many of us assume that PR is entirely about 19and 20-year-old girls with earpieces and pagers and mobile telephones.
It was as if Lord Bell was saying that cricket is not about 22 men in white playing with a bat and a ball. To say that about cricket is strictly true. There is indeed more to the game than that. There is the pavilion. There is tea. There are intrigues on the Test and County Cricket Board. But as far as most of us are concerned, cricket is about the 22 men in white with the bat and ball. Likewise PR is about the girls with the earpieces, etc.
Lord Bell went on to say what he thought it was truly about: 'It's about serious people sitting at the tops of large businesses talking about how they can make a difference to something in the marketplace.'
But the two assumptions as to what PR is — Lord Bell's serious one, and the commonalty's jolly one — are not incompatible. PR could well be both. The serious people sitting at the tops of businesses talking about how they can make a difference in the marketplace could decide that the way to do it is to employ the 19and 20-year-olds with the earpieces, etc. It is reasonable to assume that that is what happens. Why else, at corporate early-evening drinks parties at the autumn party conferences and elsewhere, employ the earpiece girls who are always there?
There is little evidence that anyone buys something, or votes for someone, because of PR. But there is much evidence that the people who employ PR firms think they do. If enough people think something is true, that something becomes interesting or important, not because it thereby becomes true, but because of those people who think it is.
Belief in PR seems to be one of the most deeply held beliefs of the age. Not because the belief is shared by many people, but because of the kind of people who share it. They are a tiny minority; but they consist of the people and institutions which make the most noise: governments, political parties, corporate businesses, television channels, film companies. Their belief in PR took hold in the 1990s. PR seemed to be to the 1990s what City trading was to the 1980s: the occupation that somehow embodied the values of the decade. Since the early 2000s appear so far to be more or less the same in look and feel as the 1990s, it still does.
Why PR? Some of us have pondered that question, without arriving at a completely satisfactory answer. One reason must be economic. The 1990s were prosperous, and in Britain so are the early 2000s. PR is the sort of thing, like much of advertising, that companies can afford when they are doing well. If there is a recession, they will economise on PR, and the earpiece girls will then be gone.
But there may be another, deeper reason. Ours is an age in which many of the people in charge of things avoid taking blame or responsibility. A company 'launches' a product. It does not make a profit. 'We did all we could,' the executive in charge explains to his superiors or shareholders. 'We hired the best PR outfit. We got Lord Bell.' The implication is that it is not the executive's or the product's fault that enough people did not buy it. It was Lord Bell's.
It is the same with management consultancy. If executives want to do something that involves sacking staff, or making staff work differently, they employ management consultants to produce reports recommending that this is what should be done. The executives are then able to tell staff that it is the recommendation of outside experts. Later it is often a case of: 'We did all we could. We hired McKinsey's.'
PR and management consultancy are two occupations which prosper as a result of what common observation suggests is a tendency of modern man, and increasingly of modern woman. That is, the tendency to be rather than to do. People want to cut a dash with the outside world by holding important-seeming jobs, such as Cabinet minister or chief executive. But they do not want to endanger their possession of such jobs by incurring the frequent unpopularity which comes with doing them properly. Therefore they want someone else to take the blame for doing them. The more pretentious PR people claim that almost anyone who became admired or famous was a PR person, or 'had great PR'. Thus Pericles was a PR man; or Napoleon, or Churchill. There is a flaw in this reasoning. Pericles and Churchill made great speeches, or speeches which came to be thought of as great. People did not think they were great because an earpiece girl went around trying to persuade newspapers or 'opinion-formers' that they were great. Humankind decided it without assistance or advice. No one needed to spin a Churchill wartime speech, or the victory at Austerlitz.
Lord Bell became famous as Mrs Thatcher's PR man. But perhaps it was Mrs Thatcher who proved to be 'great PR' for Lord Bell. Useful though he doubtless was to her, he may have profited more from her than she did from him. She was likely to be elected and re-elected prime minister anyway. The winter of discontent, and the subsequent opposition split, saw to that. Despite his talents, it was not inevitable that Lard Bell should have become the most famous PR man. There must have been others whom Mrs Thatcher could have chosen who, by being chosen, would have become just as famous.
It must by now be obvious that my observations are motivated by sheer envy of Lord Bell, as well as by an interest in the extraordinary phenomenon that PR is in our time. From my few meetings with him — and more importantly in the opinion of others — he is charming, amiable and universally liked. That always momentarily infuriates the rest of us. Envy is so ugly that I should try to purge myself of it by saying that, if anyone important thinks they need a PR man — as most important people now do — they should send for him. But if I were in PR, I would worry about PR's effectiveness. The FT interview was preceded by the writer's observation that 'PR's name is mud. It's the preserve of tabloid fixers and vacuous young things toting mobile phones.'
If PR is so essential, how is it that its name is mud? There must be something wrong with PR's PR. The FT interviewer wrote that last month 'the Institute of Public Relations awarded Bell the president's medal for distinguished service to public relations'. So it is not the industry's fault that its product's name is 'mud'. After all, it sent for the top man, Lord Bell.
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