What do 5-axis machining centres, salmon fishermen and a certain Scottish actor have in common?  I’ll explain.  In July of last year I travelled to Tyneside (Team Valley Business Park to be precise) to interview the managing director of a company called Responsive Group for an article on behalf of one of my clients.  Responsive are a big user of their machine tools.

I was met by the MD, Peter Bernard, and the chairman of Responsive, Paul Torday.  Both, very patiently, led me through the history of Responsive, the company’s approach to manufacturing and their use of some very big and powerful machine tools.  As an aside, anyone who thinks British manufacturing is dead in the water needs to get out more and visit companies like Responsive.

Afterwards, while Peter was giving me a tour of the production facilities he casually observed, “Paul’s an interesting chap, he just decided on the spur of the moment to write a book a few years ago, it’s been published too!”  When I returned to the office I looked the book up on Amazon and added it to my ‘wish list’.  However, as the weeks wore on and my bedtime reading suffered due to the sheer exhaustion of having two young children, I never actually bought it.

A few days ago a bus crossed my path on the Hagley Road in Birmingham with an advert on the side for a new film called ‘Salmon Fishing in the Yemen’, starring Ewan MacGregor and Emily Blunt.  Where had I heard that that title before?  And then it occurred to me.  Salmon Fishing in the Yemen is a film based on the book written by Paul Torday, chairman of the Responsive Group.  It is, apparently, a romantic contemporary fable about an attempt to introduce salmon into the Yemeni wadis.

Yesterday, I was fortunate to bump into Peter again at MACH 2012, the machine tool expo which is a mecca for anyone turned on by metal cutting.  He had hot-footed it down to the NEC straight from the world premiere on Tuesday night.  His verdict on the new film?  “It’s very good.”

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Troubling times for the Coalition with a series of ‘presentational’ or PR gaffes that have led to the inevitable headlines that the honeymoon is well and truly over.  Pasty-gate, charitable giving, jerry cans and the Granny Tax not only provide plenty of headlines, but also give the Eds (Miliband and Balls) an opportunity for a photoshoot at Greggs.

However, it would be wrong to blame the Government’s PR for this (although one suspects the No.10 communication team has had a bit of a roasting recently).  The sense I have is that something more strategic is going wrong.  Charitable giving appears to cut directly across the Big Society programme.  Whacking pensioners threatens the “we are all in this together” reasoning behind the austerity programme (and I suspect threatens to drive a large percentage of those who actually bother to vote into the arms of UKIP).

Next up, I suspect, is the Green Deal.  According to the Sunday Telegraph there is currently a battle royal going on between the Treasury and the rest of the Coalition about the Government’s flagship environmental initiative.  The Chancellor and a number of other Conservative MPs want it scrapped.  The Deputy Prime Minister on the other hand made a major speech last week, which can be read HERE, telling us all that it would revolutionise how we heat our homes.  Scrapping it would be rather uncomfortable for a Prime Minister who came into office promising to be the “Greenest Government Ever”.

Now, the Green Deal isn’t perfect and privately many across the building sector (and many MPs) will express deep reservations.  I specifically recall one former MP telling me that even a slight move in interest rates in a northward direction will turn the scheme from a ‘Pay As You Save’ scheme into a ‘Pay As You Pay’ scheme.

The point is, this has the potential to be the latest gap between PR and policy, what the American writer Walter Lippmann would have called a ‘credibility gap’ where rhetoric fails to match reality.  Whilst I do not expect the Green Deal’s demise to bring down the Coalition, the yawning gaps that keep appearing all have a corrosive effect and can perhaps explain Labour’s current position in the polls.

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Where do you go if you want to read a stinging rebuke of this Government? Most of us would probably automatically turn to the Guardian or the Indy, but recent months have seen a torrent of invective delivered from writers at the Daily Telegraph of all places.

The last 48 hours are a classic case in point.  First Ed West, journalist and social commentator with a right leaning bent, laid into
Cameron comparing him to Ted Heath no less. In Tory-land there is no lower blow than this!

Apparently, Ed, who is widely regarded as a ‘one-to-watch’ up and coming political commentator, says Cameron will lose the 2015 General
Election (he’s willing to put money on it) as he refuses to come up with a coherent policy on all manner of issues from immigration through to
crime.

Within minutes of Ed’s rant, James Delingpole, another up and comer, laid into Dave & Co quoting the following. “The problem is that policy is being run by two public school boys who don’t know what it’s like to go to the supermarket and have to put things back on the shelves because they can’t afford it for their children’s lunchboxes. What’s worse, they don’t care either.”

As James noted, this quote doesn’t come from Vince Cable, as you might expect, but from Nadine Dorries, Tory MP for Mid-Bedfordshire.

It gets worse for Dave. Yesterday, one of the big commentator beasts, namely Peter Oborne piled in. Whilst making a number of brilliant points (the Coalition won’t last until 2015 is the key one) he comes out in support of Vince Cable and against George Osborne.

“The fact is,” he says, “Mr Cable has a reasonably worked-out and coherent grasp of political economy, whether one agrees with it or not, and Mr Osborne does not. A large number of Tories want Mr Cable out. They are very stupid.”

So what is going on? I was fortunate to chat with Mike Foster, former Labour MP for Worcester last night and his feeling is that the Conservative Party remains furious at Cameron for not winning the last Election outright and forcing them into a coalition.

True or not (I think it is true just to get off the fence for a moment) this sort of coverage (and many of the comments posted underneath which are in broad agreement with the writers) spell trouble for Project Cameron. Not least because the latestpolls show the Labour Party has a steadily widening lead in the polls.

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Amid the hilarity contained in the news that the Metropolitan Police had lent Rebekah Brooks a horse, which led to the term #horsegate trending on Twitter, is a more serious point.

Well, actually there are multiple serious points, not least why the Metropolitan Police was lending livestock to the Chief Executive of a company it was supposed to be investigating? However, I intend, for the purpose of this blog, to concentrate on the media aspects.

There has been an orchestrated counter-attack over the last 10 days by the media establishment in the form of Michael Gove, current Education Secretary and former Times columnist; Trevor Kavanagh, former political editor of The Sun and Lord Hunt of the Press Complaints Commission. All have waded into the phone hacking debate and on-going Leveson Inquiry to criticise the Met’ for heavy handedness; accuse politicians of wanting a compliant media and Gove, in particular, accusing Leveson of creating a “chilling atmosphere” for the media to operate in.

I was privileged to be able to listen to Tom Watson MP at the Botanical Gardens in Birmingham last week and, in the course of a fascinating evening, he gave some insight into what is going on at the moment. “The danger, “ he said “is not that the public will get bored of phone hacking, but that the media will.”

In other words, there is nothing News International and others in the national media would like more than for phone hacking to go away and leave the status quo, including a rebadged but still compliant Press Complaints Commission, intact. Hence the articles talking about ‘over-reaction’ and the potential ‘threat’ to a free press.

The national media though has form in this area. When the Guardian was the only newspaper running with phone hacking stories prior to the Milly Dowler furore, Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian, was forced, according to Watson, to call in a favour from the editor of the New York Times to get the paper to investigate phone hacking in the UK. The result was the mammoth investigative reporting piece that ran in the ‘Paper of Record’ in 2010.

Is the same happening again? I believe the public remains interested in this story, aghast at the journalistic tactics used by News International and deeply worried about its relationship with the Met. Don’t believe me? Why else would #horsegate start trending?

If the nationals try to sit on this story again however, Watson plans a different tactic. In his own words, “we’ll use social media to get the story out to the wider public.” In the modern media age the national press is no longer the only source of supply.

PS: Watson remains convinced that “there is a lot more to come” in relation to phone hacking, payment of public officials and computer hacking, as events this week at Leveson have demonstrated. The one to watch though is the Tommy Sheridan perjury conviction appeal. I won’t go into the details here, but Watson is convinced that Sheridan will win his appeal which has potentially serious implications for a certain former News of the World editor who subsequently went on to work as Head of Communications for the current Prime Minister!

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I note my learned colleague’s blog from yesterday on the main WPR blog and his cautious optimism for the Sun on Sunday’s success, but I think it is worth taking a rather more sceptical view. Veteran Fleet Street watchers, like Roy Greenslade, have declared that Rupert Murdoch has pulled a rabbit out of the hat, simultaneously getting Sun journalists back on board after talk of mutiny in the ranks and reinforcing his commitment to UK newspapers.

I’m not so sure. It could equally argued that this is a short-term fix designed to appease the Sun mutineers rather than a real commitment. However, I can see the business logic in narrow UK terms, in that the new paper has the potential to do ‘massive numbers’ (as media planners are quick to tell us) and Murdoch needs a big selling ‘Sunday’ to bankroll his other loss-making UK newspapers.

But, and this is the crux, strong interest from advertisers does not always turn into strong sales and readership. Despite lots of positive vibes coming from media planners and News International, I still think it is going to be an uphill battle to get the British public to go out and buy in big numbers.

Firstly, it is going to be very difficult to get back all of the NOTW’s 2.6 million readers in an overall market for Sunday newspaper reading which is in decline. In August 1991 national Sunday newspapers collectively sold an average of 16.2 million copies. By August 2001 this number had reduced to 13.6 million. By August of last year it had fallen it had fallen off a cliff to a mere 8.3 million.

What’s more, circulation figures from last year suggest that, as my learned colleague notes, that more than a million NOTW buyers appear to have vanished into thin air. They did not switch allegiance to the Sunday Mirror or The People or The Mail – they just left the market entirely.

Secondly, reaction from competitors is likely to be brutal in terms of price-cutting and other incentives, as those titles which benefited from the closure of the NOTW attempt to hang onto their gains. News International will launch with huge promotional activity, but all of this eats into profits and cannot be sustained over the long-term.

Finally, there is one other issue which is going to make life difficult for this successor to the ‘Screws’. The NOTW made its name exposing the antics of the rich and famous, but we now live in an era of super-injunctions which can stop an invasion of privacy in its tracks. What’s more, the newspaper industry is fully aware that the Leveson Inquiry is on-going and is on its best behaviour. It will take a very brave editor indeed to splash a typical NOTW scandal story, of the type that made its predecessors name, in the opening weeks of this new venture.

News International will be very gung-ho about this weekend’s circulation figures regardless of what happens, but the real proof will come in March, April and May as the market begins to settle down again. I’m no media buyer, but I suspect with a print run of three million, News International will be hoping for an opening weekend north of NOTW’s final circulation figure of 2.6 million. That is an awfully tall order to sustain once the initial excitement wears off.

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For those who didn’t get around to reading the Guardian’s excellent article on Saturday about the phenomenal job done by the blog ‘rangerstaxcase.com’, I would urge you to make time to give it a read.

Even if you are not a football supporter, there is much to ponder on from the perspective of the performance of traditional media sources and in terms of the impact of social media.

It is a story with multiple themes; alienation of the traditional football fan; a perceived failure on the part of traditional media and the use of social media as a catalyst for the sharing of vital information amongst stakeholders.

For those who don’t have the time let me summarise the story for you here. An anonymous football supporter, ironically not a Rangers supporter, got wind of the tax trouble that Glasgow Rangers was in, but could find no mention of it amongst traditional media outlets.

Instead, traditional media fed its readers, namely the club’s supporters, the usual stories including the building of a super casino and transfer gossip, including, apparently, a ‘link’ to the signing of Cristiano Ronaldo. The result was that many Rangers supporters had little clue that their club owed £70 million to HMRC until last week when it went bust.

In frustration, our anonymous hero set up a blog, ‘rangerstaxcase.com’, and started digging deeper. The blog has ‘broken’ a whole host of stories in relation to the case and now has a daily traffic of over 100,000 views with reader comments coming in at a rate of about 1,500 per day. Bear in mind that these people are not discussing football, they are discussing accounting conventions and insolvency law!

How did this happen? Our hero blames an unholy triangle of trade in which traditional media sources have got too close to the club and felt unable to cover the story for risk of losing their ‘access’.

For the record, I am fully aware of the role that PR has probably played in all of this. PR people at Rangers, let’s assume they were in the know, have been feeding these stories to traditional media outlets, in the guise of ‘doing their job’.

So what can we learn from all of this? Media owners from Rupert Murdoch down have blamed the internet for their woes, but this case begs the question whether certain sections of traditional media are giving readers the information they need and perhaps explains why so many are turning to alternative sources of information.

It must also be remembered that not all traditional media is scared of questioning itself. After all, I read this story in The Guardian. Kudos to them for running it!

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The Prime Minister just got slapped down on the BBC.

It’s something I suspect we are going to have to get used to over the coming years.

Gordon Brown made a lot of mistakes, but he also got a lot right, bailing out the banks in October 2008 and not allowing Blair to join the Euro immediately spring to mind, but there is also another trap which he had the wiles never to fall into. He never, ever went up to Scotland and publicly took on Alex Salmond, Scotland’s First Minister, toe to toe!

The current Prime Minister is a confident man and the Number 10 Press Office has obviously felt able to trail his speech in Edinburgh today on the future of the United Kingdom and the Scottish Referendum on Independence with plenty of leaked soundbites.

He will say we are “stronger and richer together”. He will go on: “I think we have a fairer country, a better country, a richer country with all of us together. But I wouldn’t ever threaten people in Scotland or say they can’t do what they want to do. I’ll just be appealing as someone who loves the United Kingdom, who loves our shared home.”

All very nice, but then he makes a huge mistake that Salmond has already leapt on. “We’re stronger, because together we count for more in the world, with a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council, real clout in NATO and Europe and unique influence with allies all over the world.”

Oh dear, oh dear. This is Salmond’s response, the words of a consummate politician who understands his electorate and their concerns. Read on or watch it HERE. I warn you from abourt 46 seconds in it is men against boys stuff!

“I was arguing about progressive policies, to bring jobs to the people and prosperity, he’s talking about being on the Security Council of the United Nations. Now no doubt that is important but believe me that doesn’t mean much to someone with disability or someone fearing the loss of benefits; a young person looking for a job in Scotland. I think the Prime Minister had better understand that Scottish politics is about a positive vision for the future; it’s about people not prestige.”

One nil to Salmond. At this rate it will all be over by half time.

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The Capo has gone. His critics in the media have got what they’ve wanted all along. I woke up this morning to Dan Roan on the BBC telling me that his tenure as England manager will be judged a failure. Arch critic Henry Winter in the Telegraph can barely contain his excitement.

Various reasons are put forward for what, in the eyes of many in the football media pack, should be a moment of national rejoicing. His grasp of English wasn’t good enough (presumably to give them better quotes); he was always on holiday!

Facts are not allowed to get in the way of a good story. Only this week Sir Alex Ferguson came out and said he would never allow such interference in the dressing room as the FA has perpetrated in the last week. The fact that Capello’s win percentage is better than any other England manager, including Sir Alf Ramsey, is glossed over. Presumably too inconvenient to merit valuable column inches .

His resignation caps a fabulous afternoon and early evening for ‘the pack’. Yesterday, Harry Redknapp (“our ‘Arry”) was cleared of tax evasion charges leaving him free to take charge of “the biggest job in football”. The fact that he is a self-confessed semi-illiterate who has never sent an email is irrelevant. He played at West Ham with the Heroes of ’66, Bobby, Geoff and Martin, don’t you know!

Unfortunately, ‘the pack’ is even worse at picking the next England manager than the FA. Only 18 months ago Liverpool fans were being told that we were lucky to have Roy Hodgson and that we would have to hand him back to the nation when the England job next became vacant. Multiple internet statto nerds pointed out Hodgson’s shocking away game record at every club he’s ever managed but their cries went unheard until the Kop, with its team only just outside the relegation zone, started ironically chanting “Hodgson for England.”

My advice to Harry Redknapp is don’t go near the job with a barge pole. The ‘pack’ is fickle and it will turn on you when things go badly, and things will go badly. As I sat in front of the TV last night marvelling at another England football crisis I recalled the words of one of Don Revie’s assistants at Leeds United when Revie was considering taking the England job in the mid-1970s. “They [the England players] are not as good and not as dedicated as what you have here.”

There are multiple problems with English football from the way it is administered through to individual players. Unfortunately, the events of yesterdays allow us to gloss over the problems once more.

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The backlash against the backlash has truly begun. Fred, formerly Sir Fred, mustn’t be able to believe his luck as the great and good pile in to tell us all that it is terribly unfair. Even Alistair Darling who savaged him in his memoirs has come out for Sir Fred!

Most worrying though is the concern of a number of industry leaders who have voiced the opinion that the ‘stripping’ of Fred (apologies for that little mental image) could be perceived as anti-business. I think there are a number of points to make on this one.

Firstly, this story and the anti-business claims need to be seen in their party political context. The Government was bounced into this following Stephen Hester’s bonus fiasco. It needed a sacrificial lamb to give the voters some raw meat and try and claw back the initiative from Ed Miliband who is gaining some traction with the ‘fairness’ line of attack. Fred was the lamb and the anti-business claims are a natural follow-on to try and discredit the Opposition’s motives and convince voters that Labour is vacating the centre ground of politics.

Secondly, the City of London is not UK business. It is a part of UK business (admittedly quite a large part) but there are other parts of the economy beyond financial services. The national media’s almost exclusive obsession with the City and publicly quoted companies obscures the fact that there is business beyond the Square Mile.

Finally, the most vociferous voices I have heard on the subject of bank lending and bonuses have come from business, particularly SMEs who continue to struggle with raising bank finance.

So despite what you may read, the answer to the question is ‘no’ the UK is not anti-business, but if the great and the good continue with this line of attack it could become a self-fulfilling prophecy!

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I listened to Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Rachel Reeves, speak at a lunchtime meeting at KPMG in Birmingham on Friday on the state of the British economy (she thinks George, as you would expect, needs a Plan B).

Anyway, amidst some interesting perspectives on the economy and the UK’s relationships with the rest of Europe, she made a very interesting point about the current travails of the Labour Party. “It is” she said “very difficult to get your case heard when all the media talks about is potential splits in the Coalition.”

This got me thinking, because there appears, at the moment, to be very little downside for the Coalition when a split story appears. Firstly, split stories highlight the separate identity of the Liberal Democrats. What’s more these stories play into the hands of the Tory leadership who are able to say to their more radical parliamentary colleagues “look, we’d like to be more radical but the LibDems won’t let us!”

Furthermore, the Westminster lobby loves a good story about rows and tantrum throwing, much more than a story about policy (yawn!). Finally, and most importantly, from a Coalition point of view, talk of potential splits drowns out what the Opposition has to say on any given issue. Why go looking for a contrarian view when a good row is served up to you on a plate!

So, I ask the question, are these splits factual or are they part of an overall media strategy? I’m beginning to err on the side of the latter. Last week the Deputy Prime Minister basked in good headlines for his championing of the abolition of the £10,000 tax band, which provoked much ‘analysis’ from Westminster commentators suggesting that the Chancellor would not be best pleased. By Friday, it turned out that the Treasury had approved the Deputy Prime Minister’s speech in advance.

I’ll let you decide for yourself!

PS: a quick take on Stephen Hester’s bonus. The big political issue here is not whether Stephen deserves it or whether he feels sufficiently incentivised by his £1.2 million base salary. No, the big issue is that the Prime Minister talked of ‘moral markets’ and giving power back to shareholders over remuneration whilst allowing Stephen to pocket a £963,000 bonus whilst in charge of a nationalised bank. That is a credibility gap!

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