Bryan Biggs, the man at the centre of the superinjunction storm

May 24, 2011
invisible-man

So now we know. The married footballer who had an affair with Imogen Thomas is none other than the Manchester Town star centre-half, Bryan Biggs.

The news that Biggs was the man at the centre of the superinjunction storm came as a surprise to no one save the man himself.

Said Biggs: “Ever since I became the proud owner of a superinjunction, I thought my alleged secret was safe. But on the weekend, when fans in football stadia up and down the land started chanting my name in a rather derogatory fashion, I thought to myself: ‘Something is up’. I rang the superinjunction people and they said the same thing. Then along came that blasted Lib Dem MP and his outrageous usurpation of the rule of law. The cat was out of the bag, the horse had bolted, the penny had dropped and the writing was on the wall, not to mention every single website in the world. Next thing I knew Mark Stephens was on TV giving an interview.”

Ron Lemming, the Liberal Democrat loner with a history of scrapes with the ancient notion of parliamentary privilege, avowed that he had acted in the public interest. Speaking unexclusively to Newsnight, he cast a vision of a Britain in which hundreds of thousands of innocent people are locked up on a daily basis for contempt of court. “They are, you know,” said Lemming, “and that’s why I did as I did – to save them,” but his averrals cut little ice with Sir Charles Gray, the doyen of the libel bar and a former High Court judge.

“That is not true,” said Gray.

Meanwhile, in the Manchester Town dressing room, Biggs’ tight-knit team of advisors sharpened their hairdryers.

“Do you think we are living through the end of an era?” asked one.

“Yes,” said the other. “Brilliant though he is, and perhaps pilloried out of all proportion to his apparent misdemeanours, Bryan can’t go on much longer. At this rate his slightly greying hair will turn snow white.”

“Like his family man image used to be, you mean?”

“Er, let’s not talk about that.”

Pictured: Bryan Biggs in a recent post-match interview, in the days when a superinjunction was as good as the intangible paper it was written upon.

 

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If you’re Joey Barton, attack is not the best form of defence

May 17, 2012

Interesting times, these, in the life of Joey Barton.

If the violence displayed by the QPR captain at Manchester City last Sunday was remarkable, his subsequent conduct on Twitter has been astonishing. Barton appears to have radically reinterpreted the notion that attack is the best form of defence, lashing out at all and sundry via a series of tweets whose ultimate effect is entirely self-destructive.

In the past 24 hours, Barton has accepted one charge of violent conduct at the Etihad Stadium but denied another. The FA seems set to throw the book at him, and his club has declared that it will deal with the matter after the result of the FA investigation. Conspiracy theorists might conclude that QPR’s management team and board hope that the FA ban Barton for so long a period (four months and more) that their reported desire to rip up his contract can only be bolstered.

What, then, should Barton do? Should he:

(a) Keep his head down and say nothing, or

(b) Issue a sensible statement in which he acknowledges that both his conduct at the Etihad and subsequent tweets have brought QPR into disrepute, and

(c) Add an apology to said statement, or

(d) Go to Portugal, log onto Twitter and tweet that the world is against him but that he doesn’t care because everyone is a moron and he’s worked really hard to get where he is and if anyone is nasty to him again he is going to expose their secrets.

The answer is not (d).

The moral of the story is that if you’re a loose cannon, when you turn attack into defence there is a danger that you will blow yourself up.

Gunning foglessly for clarity

May 15, 2012

A fine piece, this, on Winston Churchill’s gift for language and the obscurantism that goes with so much corporate communication.

But wait, what’s this? Could this injunction have been phrased rather more successfully:

Be concrete, not abstract. Use metaphors to get your message across.

Metaphors are, by definition, not exactly concrete. But be that as it may: there is a lot of sound advice in Clare Lynch’s piece and a revelation, too. We had never heard of the Gunning Fog Index.  But it exists, and reveals the age at which someone would have to leave full-time education to understand given text.

We’re pleased to display our own Gunning Fog rating for the above words. That of the Churchill speech cited by Ms Lynch was 9.698.

The Gunning Fog index is 9.585

Spin at the Leveson Inquiry

May 9, 2012
Leveson witch hunt

The idea that Lord Justice Leveson and his Inquiry’s QC, Robert Jay, are in need of PR advice is intriguing.

Surely their respective tasks ought to be immune from spin? Then again, perhaps the way in which they execute them is deserving of some communications advice. Either way, times have changed. A similar inquiry from yesteryear (and such do exist) would surely not have been accompanied, albeit informally, by communications advice.

Pictured courtesy of this Flickr user: a portrait of the Leveson Inquiry.