Newspaper coverage in the wake of Gordon Brown’s hammering at the polls will have had Labour Party strategists choking on their low-salt muesli.
And nothing will have alarmed them more than the verdict from The Sun, whose switch of allegiance from the Tories to New Labour in the run-up to the 1997 election was a huge PR coup for Tony Blair.
“We were watching a dead man drowning,” was The Sun’s veteran associate editor Trevor Kavanagh’s opinion of Gordon Brown’s tour of the TV studios after his ballot box rout.
Placing the sting in the tail, he added: “I give him six months.” Read the rest of this entry »
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The dairy industry are intending to reduce the impact of milk production on the environment; an excellent PR move.
Industry officials and environment ministers will shortly release information detailing how they propose going about this eco-friendly task.
Plans include sourcing half of all packaging from recycled materials by 2020 and cutting greenhouse gas emissions from dairy farms by 20-30 percent.
As the elections draw to a close for the mayor of London, figures have been released which state Conservative Boris Johnson is in the lead polling at 44% compared with Labour’s Ken Livingstone a close-second at 40%.
The Sun published that Boris thinks the reason Livingstone is struggling is because he is too out-of-date and sleazy. But the Labour candidate lashed out saying “It’s not an election for Have I Got News For You or Celebrity Mayor; it’s about who is best placed to run an £11billion budget every year.”
Livingstone said he thinks of his rival, Johnson, as a “joke”.
Prime Minister Gordon Brown has admitted that the local election results are “bad” and “disappointing” given that they are the worst results the Labour party have suffered in 40 years.
Labour has lost 160 seats, while the Conservatives have gained 147 and it is now believed Conservative Boris Johnson will be elected as the mayor of London.
Unsurprisingly Conservative party leader David Cameron has called this “a big moment” for the party.
So what does this mean for the Brown administration?
Here’s a lesson in how not to act when promotion your mayoral campaign – the day before the election!
There was a Boris-shaped absence on Jeremy Vine (Radio 2) yesterday. While Ken Livingstone and Brian Paddick were ready to talk, the other leading mayoral candidate had gone awol. “Where are you, Boris?” cried Vine, all fidgety. “We’ve got an all points bulletin out on Boris,” he explained over the end of a track. “That’s Blondie,” he added, with a chuckle. “How about that? Coincidence.” Read the rest of this entry »
The Telegraph reports that Wal-Mart is facing a potential public relations disaster – set to plunge the global giant into the same category as the infamous Mr. Ratner – after a batch of videos documenting the company’s meetings for the last 30 years was put up for sale.
Clips of male store managers parading in drag in front of thousands of colleagues as they all sing the corporate song, employees mocking dangerous uses of a product sold in its stores, and even founder Sam Walton referring to then non-executive director Hillary Clinton as “one of us”. Read the rest of this entry »
After scenes of BA execs literally running away from camera crews The Guardian’s Maggie Brown asks the very good question: Is it ever ok to run away from the media while you’re dealing with a crisis? Here’s what the experts say…note the response from the head of corporate comms at BA. Read the rest of this entry »
Suddenly, Hillary Clinton is all the rage in the US media. Newspapers appear to have switched their enthusiasm from Barack Obama to Clinton. It’s happened “in the blink of an eye”, writes seasoned political commentator Thomas Edsall in Huffington Post article.
He argues that the media are now “pressing just the message” that Obama would be a likely loser against the Republican candidate, John McCain, which is just the message that Clinton has been promoting for the past six weeks.
He points to switches of direction at Time, The New Republic, the Washington Post and the New York Times. Read the rest of this entry »
An electronics factory in East Kilbride is set to close and move to Poland, losing the jobs of 300 people.
Workers are said to be “stunned” by the news, and so far no-one from JVC has been available for comment.
Jim Farrely at the East Kilbride factory told the BBC “This is extremely disappointing for the workforce and loyal team there, and I’m very disappointed to hear that such a well-respected workforce is being treated in such a way.”
Hollywood actor Wesley Snipes has been sentenced to three years behind bars for tax evasion.
He was issued with the maximum sentence for dodging federal income taxes on earnings of £7 million from the peak of his career.
The actor was also convicted in February of three counts of failing to file tax returns from 1999 to 2001 but was acquitted of felony fraud and conspiracy charges.
Both of Snipes’ tax advisors, if you can call them that have been jailed too.
