The PR exercise Max Clifford daren’t contemplate

Image via Wikipedia

I could feel the lip beginning to curl yesterday, as Max Clifford talked Radio 5 Live through the implications of the topic du jour, super-injunctions, in the light of revelations over a BBC journalist’s affair.

“The best form of stopping these stories used to be anticipation; to make sure it never came out,” he opined. “To make sure that no-one found out or became aware.”

At first hearing, it sounded like the craven call of amorality, edging around the elephant in the room. Surely a far simpler form of stopping such stories is not having affairs in the first place? You either live up to your vows or bring a dignified end to a moribund marriage but you avoid at all costs becoming one of the wretched in-betweeners who opts to have his cake and eat it.

Then it occurred to me that I was being harsh, expecting Max Clifford to shoot himself in the foot. For isn’t there just a chance that if more people focused on doing the right thing over the expedient thing, he would be out of a job?

Friendship and the pursuit of a proper job

While I haven’t seen him for years, I remember him as a lovely bloke. Good company and seemingly a decent person.

So part of me hopes we never meet again. Rather that than being reunited and having to wait with glum resignation for the conversation to turn to the subject of what we’re doing with ourselves these days.

Will I be able to hold it back, I wonder? That curl of my lip or arching of the eyebrow as he confirms what I already know from his website; that his career has ventured into one of those innumerable, vague niches of corporate life that executives have the happy knack of carving out for themselves whenever they feel the need to justify their existence.

The layman knows such niches by the grandiose job titles that tend to accompany them and the question they invariably stir up in his mind. “Do we really need those?”

There’s a woman currently extolling her former tarted-up polytechnic university in a series of radio ads in my area, for example. Without that noble seat of learning, she insists, she could never have dreamed of becoming a brand communication executive.

Do we really need brand communication executives? Didn’t we somehow survive without them for centuries?

Second-guessing strangers like this is one thing but to have to do it to a friend is a deeply uncomfortable prospect.

So much so, that I think if it hasn’t already been written, a self-help/confessional feature in one of our consumer magazines is long overdue.

Working title: I think the world of my mate but he’s just become a performance optimisation consultant.

Official: divorce no big deal

Image via Wikipedia

It is the scariest statistic I’ve read for some time.

In a survey on family time, one of the questions asks – is it important that children grow up with both their mother and father?

Three-quarters of children polled said yes.

The adults? Just over half.

Only one in two people old enough to vote and drive cars think there may be certain repercussions if either Mum or Dad isn’t around to help bring up their children.

By extension, that’s one in two people, presumably, who won’t tax themselves too much with thinking about the kids when deciding how divorce factors into their ‘life plan goal setting’.

The best spin I can put on this is that it represents denial.

The worst, that it represents an arrogance that makes me fear for this country. Although some would argue that I worry too much…

Dating agencies and a social experiment

And to think I feel guilty about dallying on Facebook…

N tells me he’s having some fun with online dating agencies, where you can post your picture and supporting text.

N cuts and pastes photos of wholesome boy-next-door types that he’s plucked from elsewhere on the Internet, embellishes their images with saintly and completely fabricated pen pictures and then nods knowingly as they arouse barely a flicker of a response.

This leads to phase two of his delve into the twisted corners of the human psyche. He plants a photograph of a convicted sex offender (“a study in raw perversion” N assures me) alongside the same words and watches the the clicks from ‘Interested of Des Moines/Duluth/Droitwich’ stack up like there’s no tomorrow, before deleting his creation and planning the next one.

His findings, no matter how ad hoc, undoubtedly raise a question. Were he to present them to a psychologist, however, I suspect I know what the answer would be.

“I’ll take a peek later, Mr ***. Let’s talk a little bit about you, first, shall we…?”

Nice guys: the penny drops

Image via Wikipedia

After three children by three different partners of variable calibre, she finally has an engagement ring on her finger.

“The silly thing is, he and I went out with each other when we were teenagers,” she says of her new beau.

“I split up with him because he seemed too nice.”