David Cameron at QPR

September 26, 2011
dcameron_thumbsup

Exclusive: all QPR fans on the appearance of David Cameron, prime minister, at Loftus Road for yesterday’s 1-1 draw with Aston Villa

Well, it was exciting initially, wasn’t it? I mean, it’s not every day that the leader of a country turns up at a football match, but who knows, Stan Bowles might have had a tenner on it and suddenly there he was, Dave, the Great One, even though with the recent signing of Shaun Wright-Phillips we’ve already got a right-winger. Me and the lads were thrilled. Only thing that would’ve made our day was if Boris the Broom had come along as well. Then again, the manager’s already wielded a broom of his own, and if we had another one there’s no way we’d recognise the team, and let’s face it, Dave didn’t either because it turns out he’s a Villa fan. This didn’t go down so well with me and the lads, so far from welcoming the Great One we slung a few chants his way, the best of which was when QPR got their equaliser in the third minute of stoppage time.

Modesty prevents us from revealing said chant. However, suffice to say that Richard Dunne, the Aston Villa player who inadvertently put the ball in his own net, has scored an awful lot of OGs in the course of his otherwise illustrious career. In this, as the QPR faithful pointed out, he bears no relation to Mr Cameron.

Image of David Cameron prior to the Dunne moment courtesy of this site.

 

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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.