Ronald Stevens

The Sophie and Rebekah show

Only inveterate royalists failed to see the joke when Sophie Wessex made a monumental fool of herself But there was also a serious aspect to the episode: it showed how bogus and incompetent some PR practitioners are.

Sliding standards at the Telegraph

one was reported at some length by The Daily Telegraph and with a noticeable lack of detachment and judiciousness. Clearly, the paper could not properly apportion blame before the police investigation and, in particular, before the inquest. Equally, however, it had no business trying to arouse its readers’ sympathy for some of the people involved but not for the others. But that, indefensibly, is what it did. Two brothers, aged 19 and 22, were in the BIVIW, and an elderly couple were in the Nissan. According to Thames Valley Police the BMW was spinning out of control when it hit the Nissan and this, together with the fact that the Nissan was propelled backwards for 20 metres, clearly suggests that the BMW was being driven dangerously So does its ricochet into the

Forgotten despatches from Tribulation-on-Sea

A distinguished former industrial corespondent offers his highly personal, and utterly unsentimental, image of an epoch in the newspaper trade that seems to have disappeared- totally from view ...

Wanted (urgently): skilful PR for Cedric

CEDRIC BROWN HAS undoubtedly managed to scramble ~ aboard the gravy train, but he is still only a standing passenger in the second class. The chief executive though it should perhaps be chief executor of British Gas probably felt a surge of pride when the tethered sheep of the corporation’s remuneration committee awarded him his £492,000 a year basic salary. Not bad, he might have said to himself, for an ordinary lad who started off as a pipe fitter or was it a meter reader? It may seem churlish to quibble about the magnitude of Cedric’s achievement. But the truth is that he is still outside the

Hubris at the court of St Birt

MR JOHN BIRT has made a lot of enemies since he arrived at the BBC, and much of the hostility is deserved. His tax-avoiding strategem, for example, raised serious questions about the sense of responsibility of a man who, as chief executive of a public corporation, receives his salary from the proceeds of a legally-enforceable levy on people who may have no desire whatever to watch its programmes. It is easy to imagine the moral indignation which Panorama, say, would generate if it discovered that Mr Birt’s counterparts in British Coal or the Post Office had made similarly self-serving arrangements. Nor does the shameless adulation of some of his subordinates do either him, or them, any credit. Good chief executives deserve, and usually win, their subordinates’ critical respect. As a general rule, sycophancy is a sign that the man in charge relies for his authority not on talent but on intimidation.