2011: not a vintage year

Never mind the Arab Spring, the summer riots, the autumn anti-capitalist occupations and the looming winter of discontent. Forget about the deaths of bin Laden and Gadaffi, and the birth of Southern Sudan.

Ignore the tsunamis, earthquakes, mudslides, potential nuclear meltdowns and the relentless retreat of glaciers and polar ice caps.

Put from your mind, if you can, even the happy images of the royal wedding, including that arresting rear view of the bride’s sister.

Because none of those was the key event of 2011. That took place all the way back on January 1, when Estonia joined the euro. The first instance in recorded history of a rat commissioning a fast launch to get it on board a rapidly sinking ship.

The political class of Estonia are thus elevated to that pantheon of geniuses who can be relied upon to show the rest of us what not to do, alongside the Financial Times, the European Commission, the Labour and Liberal Democrat front benches, and virtually anyone called Bercow.

A quick internet search confirms this with the telling headline “Estonian wind power sector faces rapid growth”.

My top tip: keep a close eye on Tallinn to determine your business and investment strategies for 2012 and beyond.

Keith Hann is a financial PR from Northumberland, a regular Journal columnist and a born optimist: www.keithhann.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

The Hann Perspective: Ducks in a Row

Many years ago, when I was new to my present calling, a wise old gent told me that the second rule of public relations is always to get your ducks in a row.

Naturally I did not have the foggiest idea what he was talking about. I thought I had gone into an advisory business, not some feathered branch of agriculture. (In those days, incidentally, I naively believed that ducks were humanely reared on outdoor ponds where caring attendants fattened them up on a diet of only slightly stale bread.)

Over time, though, aligning the aforementioned ducks came to be one of those meaningless phrases, like “thinking outside the box” and “centres of excellence”, that I accepted as part of my daily verbal armoury.

Bullshit Bingo

People nodded when I said it, as though I had imparted some valuable piece of wisdom. All I ever meant was that it might be a good idea, before embarking on some corporate activity or announcement, for those involved to think through what they were trying to achieve and how they were going to explain it to the outside world.

The message did not always get across. I wasted one memorable Sunday trying to persuade the two parties to a particularly ill-starred retail merger to come up with a more convincing strategic rationale than the real one, which was that it had generated lots of lovely fees for the bankers who had conceived the idea of sticking the two businesses together, and who would soon double their money by taking them apart again.

Come the next morning’s press conference, a journalist duly asked the obvious first question: “Why?” And received the less than convincing response: “Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it?” Followed by a long silence during which I could swear I saw tumbleweed.

Similarly, I have spent countless man hours trawling through the results announcements of my clients and thinking up the nastiest and most devious questions anyone could possibly raise about them. After more than a decade of doing this, one finance director rang me as his train was approaching King’s Cross to say that he and his CEO had read them and were rather impressed.

“We’ve never bothered to look at them before,” he added, disarmingly, which at least explained why they had spent so many previous analysts’ conferences looking vaguely nonplussed. Fortunately the similar lack of attention to rehearsing their presentation meant that the time left for questions was always minimal.

I am glad to say that things have moved on in the business world, while in politics the task of duck alignment has become such an obsession that it is impossible to get a straight answer to any question, as opposed to the carefully prepared and rehearsed answer to the question that the minister or his shadow wanted to be asked.

This lack of spontaneity and, for want of a better word, honesty, is one of the many reasons for the current widespread disillusionment with our political class.

But consider the alternative of the White House, and their vivid accounts of US military operations. Whether it is the sadly botched rescue of a hostage or the elimination of the world’s most wanted terrorist, there never seems to be any delay in blurting out an incredible story of derring-do, apparently concocted by a small boy who has been allowed to spend too long leafing through his grandpa’s stash of 1960s war comics.

But then, like the small boy’s account of how that pane of glass in the greenhouse was broken by a probe from an alien spacecraft, an altogether more prosaic story comes to light.

Almost every detail of the original epic firefight with bin Laden, and how he was subsequently shot while cowering behind his wife, proved to be what Hillary Clinton likes to call “misspoken”. So much so that I did not even feel particularly surprised when I saw a billboard proclaiming “Osama unharmed”, though it turned out when I bought a paper on the strength of it that I had misread “unarmed”.

Now why, when you are dealing with issues so sensitive that people are prepared to blow themselves to pieces to demonstrate the strength of their feelings, would you not think it worth taking a little time and trouble to get your story straight before giving your account of events?

It made me realise, for the first time, the true genius of Ian McDonald, the Ministry of Defence spokesman in the Falklands war, who not only took ages to release a story but then read it at a funereal pace to assist the easy taking of dictation by any hard-of-hearing octogenarian reporters in the vicinity.

And it also reminded me of what that wise old gent I mentioned at the outset told me was the first rule of public relations: “If in doubt, say nowt.”

Keith Hann is a PR consultant who knows all the rules, but does not always obey them – www.keithhann.com

Originally published in nebusiness magazine, The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Once again the big winner is apathy

It is always a delight to see any political idea favoured by Eddie Izzard being decisively punted into oblivion, so last week saw the Hann household rejoicing for the second Friday in succession.

No

And who could resist a little surge of local pride on discovering that the North East had led the field in saying no to AV, with a majority of 71.9%?

A mere handful of places said “yes”: Oxford, Cambridge, a few smug inner London boroughs and their Edinburgh and Glasgow counterparts. Tempting me to the conclusion that we need never go to the trouble and expense of a national referendum ever again. Just obtain the newspaper wholesalers’ data on where The Guardian sells most strongly, hold local polls there, then do precisely the opposite of whatever they vote for. We won’t go too far wrong.

Though perhaps we should have one last national referendum on Scottish independence first. And I do mean a national referendum. How can you dissolve a marriage without consulting both of the contracting parties? Allowing Scotland alone to vote on its future would be like letting the children decide on their party guest list and entertainment without consulting the adults who actually have to pay for it.

But I am ignoring the pachyderm in the living quarters, which is this. Although pundits assure us that turnout in the AV referendum exceeded expectations, apathy was once again the big winner on polling day. A thumping 58% of my compatriots still found something more important to do than pootling down to their local school or village hall, and marking an “X” on a bit of paper.

How could this lot fail to inspire?

All right, it’s not very intellectually challenging and it doesn’t promise the same sort of returns as filling in a lottery slip, but in the Middle East people are currently dying for the right to do just this. How can you possibly conclude that it is more important to be scratching yourself on the sofa in front of Loose Women or The Jeremy Kyle Show?

Politics matter. Which celebrity is shagging which lady of easy virtue who previously enjoyed relations with which Premiership footballer does not.

Another thing that matters is our ability to hold our heads up in the world by adhering to certain standards of decency and fair play. From the invention of concentration camps in the Boer War to the recent revelations about our treatment of Mau Mau prisoners in Kenya, the reputation of the British Empire is certainly not an unsullied one.

But have the Americans, who worked so hard to bring our Empire to a conclusion, led us onto the broad sunlit uplands of probity and transparency?

Their support of assorted murderous tyrannies around the world, and their use of “extraordinary rendition”, extra-territorial detention camps, the extraction of information by torture and – yes, their ham-fisted inability to get their story straight about the cold-blooded killing of their public enemy number one in Abbotabad last week – all lead me to the conclusion that the world was a rather better and safer place when those chaps from Whitehall were in charge of it.

It’s not that I have any sympathy for Osama bin Laden, though his “command and control centre” looked to me rather more like a teenager’s bedroom that had been handed over to an OAP as part of a Channel 4 reality life swap show. But why would anyone conceive and execute the operation against him in a way that seems specifically designed to give conspiracy theorists a field day?

Latest version of events: the White House execution team hold their breath as the UK AV referendum results come in

The only thing that troubles me about my misgivings is that I have already found them shared by the Archbishop of Canterbury, and will no doubt soon find myself allied with the entire readership of The Guardian, including Eddie Izzard. So as you were, Mr President. Most reluctantly, Operation Geronimo gets my vote.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Obama gets Osama, but the war goes on

How would the global media have coped if Obama had finally caught up with Osama on Friday rather than Sunday?

I reached page 24 of my broadsheet newspaper on Saturday before I found a single mention of anything other than the royal nuptials. That was a story about the need for larger than expected hospital cuts, released by some strange oversight when all eyes were on Westminster Abbey. Even an ardent monarchist like myself could not help wondering whether a sense of proportion was being lost.

For me, the most remarkable thing was not that dress, or the maid of honour’s striking figure, or even the alleged billions who watched the ceremony on TV. It was the hundreds of thousands who turned out in person to snatch a passing glimpse of this piece of history and to roar their approval of those kisses on the palace balcony, even though they could have seen far more in much greater comfort on their sofas at home.

I am glad to live in a country where huge crowds turn out to rejoice in a royal love match. The hatred that motivated the flag-waving crowds celebrating the death of bin Laden in Washington and New York yesterday was entirely understandable, but still demeans those taking part. Just as the footage of Palestinians whooping in the streets at the fall of the Twin Towers provides one of the most revolting memories of 9/11.

I have friends who are currently climbing Mount Everest. It sounds like hell on earth. Still, at least I had been consoling myself with the thought that bin Laden and his sidekicks must be enduring similar discomforts in a filthy Stone Age hiding place high in the Hindu Kush. Instead it turns out that he had been living comfortably about 800 yards from the Pakistani equivalent of Sandhurst, and presumably receiving regular deliveries from their version of Ocado (as he would surely have raised an eyebrow or two if he had been regularly pushing a trolley around the local answer to Tesco).

Clearly the solution for William and Catherine, in their quest for privacy, is not a remote cottage on Anglesey but a floodlit palace in the centre of London with soldiers marching up and down outside.

No doubt we will find out in due course what contribution Britain made to this belated triumph against al-Qaeda, whether through the intelligence services of GCHQ or the lessons Northumbria Police were able to provide from the search for Raoul Moat. And perhaps the question may also be asked why our forces are in action in Afghanistan when the chief instigator of the terrorism we are supposedly fighting was holed up a completely different country.

If President Obama had acted 24 hours earlier, he could have claimed the scalp of his public enemy number one on the anniversary of the suicide of Adolf Hitler. But that truly was an ending. The demise of bin Laden is just another act in a saga of death and destruction to which no one can see a conclusion.

We can be sure that cruel retribution will follow, and the victims are unlikely to be well-protected heads of state. It could be me. It could be you. We can do nothing but be vigilant. The traditional way of ending terrorist campaigns, like the IRA’s, is to give in to their major demands. But the Islamist movement, fuelled by perverted religion, has no rational goals that the secular and materialist western world can even begin to comprehend, let alone discuss.

The bottom line is this: love is good, hate is bad. That is why we were right to celebrate on Friday, and the Americans wrong to rejoice on Sunday. Not least because, like the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge’s marriage, the war with terror has only just begun.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.