Articles

I was speaking at a dinner last night to businessmen and women who know a lot more about how the economy works than I do. So I was a bit alarmed to see how many were nodding along when I suggested that what was happening in the eurozone was, frankly, downright scary. Most situations described [...]

With thanks to The Guardian for asking me to pen a tribute to Philip for today’s paper, and thanks also for the headline, below is the piece I wrote. Yesterday was a pretty wretched day for his many friends, but the reactions of so many people to his passing were wonderful, and brought a lot [...]

Even when he entered what he called ‘the death zone’, Philip Gould brought hope and happiness to others – not accidentally, but deliberately, as one of his final, and selfless, acts of strategy. He was constantly asking himself not just how to make things easier for his wife Gail, and their daughters Georgia and Grace, [...]

The mood music out of the eurozone crisis summit was pretty good, the reactions not bad, and so the sense is of disaster averted. The problem is that further difficult steps now have to be taken, and what happens when they are is far from certain. Europe’s leaders have laid down what should happen, but [...]

To the PR Week awards last night, to present 31 trophies, the first of which received one of the loudest cheers of the night. Some of the judges were worried that their peers would not quite understand why football manager Ian Holloway was being so honoured – indeed Mr Holloway himself felt the same – [...]

Just back from a run round still dark but very clean and pretty Oslo. My hotel is opposite the government buildings where on July 22 a bomb ripped through the heart of the city, in part as a decoy for the even bigger massacre to come at the Labour Party summer camp in Utoya. You [...]

Greetings from Tirana where this morning I met the Opposition leader before doing a seminar for companies on strategic communications, and this afternoon will see the Prime Minister after doing a session on crisis management. Nobody was talking about Liam Fox, it has to be said. But as I burbled away to my Balkan audience, [...]

At the risk of offending my extremely hospitable hosts in Skopje (capital of Republic on Macedonia or The Former Yuglosav Republic of Macedonia, depending which side of the long and bitter name dispute you’re on)’ I wish I had been in London last night. Because Newsnight asked me to go on to discuss Paul Dacre’s [...]

In addition to phone-hacking and all the other dubious practices employed by newspapers, one of the worst developments in our media over recent years has been the near total fusion of news and comment. I pointed out recently Polly Toynbee’s description of the media herd in the press room after Ed Miliband’s conference speech, all [...]

I have never felt I have that much in common with David Cameron, but today we share a modest traducement by The Sunday Times. The Prime Minister’s comes in the form of a headline saying ‘Cameron says sorry to women’. What? All of them? What on earth has he done? It turned out to be [...]