Kenneth Roy
The last embargo

In the opening hours of our inquiry into the policies and conduct of NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde, we were given an educational insight into the world of public sector PR. As soon as our original expose appeared on 26 January, the director of communications – for that is his title – circulated all the board members with a memo beginning:
     An online newsletter by the name of Scottish Review has issued with an article relating to the Blawarthill development and the board's decision on patient transfer from St Margaret's Hospice. It makes for sensational reading but actually presents no new factual information.
     The memo continues in this fashion for a few paragraphs and concludes:
     On a more positive note the GlasGoals campaign which we have championed with the Evening Times and will run for the whole of 2010 kicked off today with five full pages...we can expect some really positive and forward thinking health improvement coverage during the year.
     The contrast is striking.
     On the one hand we have the online newsletter by the name of Scottish Review issuing with its sensational rehashing. There is, needless to say, no mention of the newsletter's editor, publisher, or financial supporters (a list of whom is updated daily in the interests of that transparency we expect of others). Nor is there any mention of the fact that the Scottish Review has been appearing in print, latterly as the official publication of the Institute of Contemporary Scotland, continuously for 15 years. The board members reading the director of communications' email would have been entitled to conclude – perhaps were being invited to conclude – that this online newsletter was a thing of no consequence whatever.
     On the other hand, there is the mighty Evening Times with its more positive view of matters, its five pages of editorial devoted to the inspiring work of NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde, its forward thinking, its promise of more of the same all year long...how nice for all concerned.
     Alas, the online newsletter continues to issue with fairly regular sensational rehashes of distinctly non-positive, non-forward looking, non-inspiring material and, in the absence of any significant movement from the board, it looks as if it will go on doing so.
     For example, we have just discovered by re-visiting the email in question that, in the view of the director of communications, the board has decided to 'transfer' patients from St Margaret's Hospice to the new development at Blawarthill. Yet, only a week ago, the chairman of the board wrote to us with a categorical assurance – in bold type – that there was no relationship, no connection whatsoever, between the Blawarthill development and the hospice. How can these two statements, five weeks apart, be reconciled? One or the other may represent the board's policy. But not both.

An experienced Scottish journalist has pointed out that, by contacting the chairman and his board colleagues directly, bypassing the PR department, we broke one of the cardinal rules of the game. 'These people, used to the formulaic intercourse between press officers and health correspondents, must wonder what has hit them,' he writes.
     We contacted the board directly for a serious reason: we wanted to remind them, individually, of their obligations under their personal code of conduct to be accountable for their actions. Whatever the explanation, the result was an extraordinary lack of finesse in handling the SR inquiry. A week elapsed before a letter addressed to each member was passed on; three more weeks before the chairman replied. Even now, we have received no contact from the director of communications or his staff. Yet the PR department of NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde costs the public more than £1 million a year – not much less than it would cost to keep St Margaret of Scotland Hospice alive with its ethos intact.
     The same lack of finesse is now more widely transparent. The recent debacle at Strathclyde Partnership for Transport – the starting point of Mr Purcell's downfall – was a public relations disaster in which the director of communications himself – the same overblown title applies even to this small outfit – found himself, rightly or wrongly, the subject of unfavourable publicity over his expenses claim for a trip to Manchester. All the individuals, non-executive as well as executive, whose claims have been challenged are confident they will be exonerated by the current audit investigation, but that is rather beside the point – the damage to the credibility of the organisation has been done; SPT is unlikely to survive much beyond the next Scottish parliamentary election.
     There is, then, the Purcell affair itself, in which the main salient fact – the fact that he was visited by two police officers in May last year and apparently advised that he had made himself vulnerable – was not divulged until late in the week. Was this good PR? It had the inevitable effect of making the complaint to the Press Complaints Commission about the alleged breach of Mr Purcell's privacy look more than a little ridiculous. If ever the public interest was paramount, it was paramount in the case of a senior politician who ought to have resigned from public office as soon as the police left the premises.
     Suddenly, the hitherto unknown and protected world of public sector PR in Scotland has been exposed; and it ain't a pretty sight. To put it at its lowest, the 'formulaic intercourse' between the media and the public relations industry has gone too far. They are too close to each other. If the integrity of the press has not already been fatally undermined, it is in imminent danger. But, in an odd way, the events of the last few weeks may have lessened the all too obvious risks to a free press. Now that the shadowy world of the official spokesperson, backed by his phalanx of consultants and lawyers, has been revealed to the unflattering light, we see a surprisingly large number of people looking surprisingly naked.