Louise Mensch in PR blunder?

July 21, 2011
Louise Mensch

Who is doing Louise Mensch’s PR? The MP for Corby (and, under her maiden name of Bagshawe, famed chick-lit author) has become ubiquitous as Hackgate rumbles on. It is all but impossible to turn the television on and avoid her, and the reasons for her ubiquity would appear to be obvious, displayed for all to see during the select committee grilling of Messrs Murdoch and Brooks. Mensch is uber-bright, remarkably articulate, pleasing on the eye and, as her startled reaction to Rupert Murdoch’s attacker demonstrated, compassionate and caring, too.

No wonder that Swordplay has encountered more than a few voices proclaiming that Mensch might even be a Prime Minister one day, but a cautionary note needs to be sounded. Mensch seems to have got her facts about Piers Morgan badly wrong, using parliamentary privilege to accuse him, as she questioned Rebekah Brooks, of being a kind of phone hacking svengali who boasted of his prowess in these darkest of dark arts. Her claims were based on material purportedly in Morgan’s book.

Challenged by CNN – for whom Morgan now works – to substantiate her claims, Mensch smiled amiably at the camera but refused to say anything, saying that Morgan was a rich man who might sue her for libel. In other words, she either knew or suspected that she’d made a mistake and wasn’t about to add to it by repeating it in circumstances not covered by privilege.

But Mensch made a simple PR error here. As this footage shows, she came across as smug and tending to arrogance, qualities which might, if left unchecked, render her less than appealing both to her constituents and television producers. And if Hackgate has taught us anything, it is that an early apology goes a long way.

If Mensch knew, by the time of the CNN interview, that she’d got her facts wrong, she would have got a better press by holding her hands up and saying sorry to Morgan.

Image courtesy of CNN.


 

Comments

Please submit comments to Swordplay below.

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.