A hamster ate my ethics

Here's a review of Max Clifford: Read All About It that will appear in Issue 12 of Behind the Spin, due out shortly.

What can PR learn from a book by a peerless practitioner who cheerfully admits to having a casual relationship with the truth?

Maybe we shouldn’t believe him, but Max Clifford has declared, “Lies are a big part of PR” (PR Week, Dec 2, 2005); certainly, plenty of the tales in Max Clifford: Read All About It won’t become CIPR best practice case studies.

Tellingly, Clifford’s big break was a story that never happened. Freddie Starr Ate My Hamster is one of the great tabloid headlines and also “the one through which Max redefined his role in the world of PR, which later changed the industry itself.

“Instead of him trying to persuade editors to write about his clients they started to come to him for gift-wrapped stories.”

Quoting from the book is tricky in that the style is an unusual third person autobiography where ‘facts’ are often delivered in extended quotes from Max while the narrative is carried forward by co-author Angela Levin’s breathless hype.  In this way we learn that the hamster episode set Max apart from other PRs: “He instinctively has the ability to boldly spin stories that no man has spun before.”

And the cast list is extraordinary, with Max firmly in control of many of the major celebrity stories of the last two decades; from Pamela Bordes and Rebecca Loos to Mandy Allwood, James Hewitt, and Simon Cowell, the cast list is a tour de force of front page performers.

Apparently, Max’s career in spin began in the early 60s, when he ran discos at the Crown in Morden and wrote a record column in the Merton and Morden News.  The first evening attracted 200 people: “It was helped by me promoting the event in the paper. Sometimes I’d write that a popular pop star would be coming. It was totally untrue but I kept the room dark so you wouldn’t have known who was standing next to you.”

So, from the outset, news was merely a means to an end.  Of course, ‘professional’ PRs don’t see their job like this. Indeed, ‘proper’ PRs don’t even regard the most famous exponent of their calling as being one of their own. The very first page of one of the better PR textbooks used in UK universities says: “Of course, everyone has heard of Max Clifford. But how to explain that he doesn’t call himself a PR practitioner but a publicist?”

If Max may once have made this subtle distinction, he clearly didn’t tell Levin so the book repeatedly refers to his work as pubic relations, and public relations, in this definition, is anything but transparent. It means boasting that he would have got David Beckham off the Rebecca Loos hook by blatant deception: “Max could have arranged for David to either lose his mobile, or lend it to a mate. The friend, who would have been single, would have owned up to having used the phone to send sexy messages for a laugh. And been paid handsomely to keep his mouth shut.”

It means having Muhammad Ali (who Max ‘particularly admires’), open a Manchester bar.  “We were all very worried that if he discovered he was promoting alcohol he’d walk out. So there was a mad rush to hide everything remotely alcoholic and redo the display to imply the bar was only selling healthy fruit juice…

“Everything passed off well and I don’t think he has ever discovered the truth.”

Although there is nothing in the book to suggest Ali opening the bar was his idea, in Max-world the important thing was to adjust the truth and make everyone happy.

It is consequentialist ethics taken to its extreme. No-one wants to know if Supersonic the Hamster really was eaten – Max gets paid, the Sun sells more copies, and people have a laugh on their way into work.
   
So providing newspapers with what they need gives Max a fearsome power, not that this worries the likes of former Mirror and News of the World editor Piers Morgan. “I don’t think it was morally wrong that (Clifford) often controlled my agenda… we wouldn’t write just anything.

“If for example, he rang me to tell me he needed to promote a device to help people with bad backs, he’d have to prove that it was genuine and been properly tested by a recognised organisation. It was something he was always happy to do.”

So for Morgan there is one set of ethics for important stuff that might affects health and another, very different, set for something as trivial as celebrity. In this looking glass world, where truth doesn’t really matter, we can all sign up to a consensual illusion.

The problem for PR is that it is very difficult to say where ethical practice ends and Clifford’s sleight of hand begins. And the problem for the wider world is that Max is as happy to work for, say, UKIP as he is for Rebecca Loos.

• Max Clifford: Read All About It, by Max Clifford and Angela Levin is published by Virgin Books at £18.99.

Comments

[Robert French]

You know, there is a part of me that wishes everytime Max Clifford is written about, the words "public relations" are never used. Instead, let us label him a publicist, and leave it at that.

The book sounds like a waste of time, except that it may become the "Tyelenol" case study which spurred on an new campaign to finally take back the term PR from those who so sully it in practice. Everyone that reads it will now know how 'not' to act.