Lord Bell (above) on Newsnight last week
Last Tuesday’s Newsnight featured an interview with Lord Bell, the chairman of Chime Communications which owns Bell Pottinger Public Affairs – the subject of an undercover sting by the Bureau last year.
Bell was invited onto the high-profile BBC2 current affairs programme hours ahead of the Public Relations Consultants Association (PRCA) rejecting a complaint that Bell Pottinger Public Affairs brought the lobbying industry into disrepute.
A complaint was lodged with the PRCA against Bell Pottinger Public Affairs after undercover footage showed the firm’s executives suggesting to Bureau reporters posing as representatives of the Uzbekistan government that they could secure access to David Cameron.
The PRCA, however, judged there was no credible evidence of wrongdoing by Bell Pottinger Public Affairs even after the Bureau’s sting revealed a series of claims over how lobbyists get messages from business figures to the UK’s most senior politicians.
In the course of the Newsnight interview with Bell, presenter Jeremy Paxman suggested that Bureau reporters went undercover because it was the only way to ‘get inside your organisation’.
Bell replied this was ‘nonsense’ and used as ‘evidence’ a recent encounter he had with a Bureau journalist. He told Paxman:
‘Last week Nick Mathiason of the BIJ asked me a series of questions about financial lobbying which I accurately answered. He didn’t like the accuracy of the answers so he asked me if he could exaggerate it and I can show you all of that in emails.’
The Bureau has decided to publish the entire email exchange between Mathiason and Bell. It is happy to let readers judge for themselves whether our reporter asked Bell if he could ‘exaggerate’ his answers. Or instead whether Bell misled viewers about the integrity of Bureau reporting standards.
Let us know what you think. The results of our investigation into the power of the financial lobby will be published here shortly.
From: Nick Mathiason
Sent: 26 March 2012 10:17
To: Lord Bell
Subject: Lobby questions!
Dear Tim,
Good speaking with you last Friday and thanks for your time.
As I said, what I am looking to get confirmed is the contribution made by Financial Services sector firms to public affairs revenues accrued by Bell Pottinger Public Affairs and Pelham Bell Pottinger.
Having spoken with a director of one of the Bell Pottinger subsidiaries with good knowledge of the business, I was told (i)t would be fair to attribute a fifth of BP Public Affairs near £5m revenue to FS clients.
The same person suggested of Pelham BP revenues of just over £10m, FS clients contributed just over a tenth of that.
I appreciate what you said last week about the difficulties of stripping out income on a sector basis but the figures are rule of thumb and are there to feed a topline.
Please let me know tour (your) thoughts on this by Thursday morning. I won’t be available to talk on Wednesday as I am traveling.
with best wishes,
Nick
From: Lord Bell
Sent: 28 March 2012 15:13
To: Nick Mathiason
Subject: Lobby questions!
Nick, the answers to your questions are as follows: financial services clients of BPPA represent 12% of income. We do not publish the total income for individual company’s (sic) but your informants (sic) numbers are not correct. They are too high. The Pelham position is 15% of fee income none of which represented public affairs or lobbying work so our contribution to your overall pot is about £50 k at best. Not much help to your top line but at least more accurate than your anonymous and wrong informant
Tim Bell.
ps these are 2011 numbers
From: Nick Mathiason
Sent: 29 March 2012 15:48
To: Lord Bell
Subject: Re: Lobby questions!
Dear Tim,
Thank you very much for the information you sent yesterday. Just to clarify 12% of BPPA t/o according to its 2010 accounts = £596,141.
Also of the 24 employees, how many would be servicing FS clients, Would it be 12% of those – ie roughly 3 or more?
best wishes,
Nick
From: Lord Bell
Sent: 29 March 2012 16:05
To: Nick Mathiason
Subject: Lobby questions!No the figures are based on 2011 numbers I cannot break out the 2010 numbers. It’s to(o) long ago. As to people they are not dedicated to a particular sector sorry not to be more helpful but I cant invent things! Tim bell
From: Nick Mathiason
Sent: 29 March 2012 16:12
To: Nick Mathiason
Subject: Lobby questions!
Tim, I would never dream of asking you to invent things. But as a rough rule of thumb (bearing in mind BP will not be part of our news lines – merely feeding toplines) would it be fair to input those figures? From my perspective it would seem a reasonable way to proceed.
best wishes,
N
From: Lord Bell
Sent: 29 March 2012 16:14
To: Nick Mathiason
Subject: Lobby questions!Ok minus 10% cos revenue different to your source. Tim
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April 10th, 2012 at 5:31 pm (#)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tb7EDIhl8B4
April 11th, 2012 at 4:59 pm (#)
The difficulty of dealing with PRs! They NEVER give you the full story. They are there to deflect not to flesh out stories. I don’t think Nick asked if he could exaggerate the answers. He merely wanted some clarity. Clarity from a PR is a needle in a haystack.
April 13th, 2012 at 5:38 pm (#)
I tend not to take much interest in paid lobbyists, regarding them as verminous scum. Still, when people I talk to on stalls mention something, I take an interest and it just so happened yesterday that one ex-Lib Dem (left because of leadership treason) brought up the subject of Lord Bell’s “attack” on lobbyists.
Apparently the ex-owner of Bell Pottinger made a speech the other day in which he admitted that they were “a lightning rod for mistrust”. It says something about the type of wet drips who join the Lib-Dems that this guy thought Lord Bell was making an attack on his own profession; far from it. He was in full throated defence.
“The fact remains that, taking on a client good or bad, it is our reputation at stake,” says Bell, and “everybody has the right to representation”. Defending Bell Pottinger’s PR work for the repressive dictatorship of Belarus, Bell says that “Good PR needs substance”, intimating that his firm only held up real good things that were happening there.
Let’s deconstruct this a bit. Not everybody has the right to representation; only those who can pay have the right to representation. Hence it’s the dictatorship of Belarus and not its starved, oppressed people who hired Bell Pottinger. Likewise, it’s capitalist firms and not their workers who hire PR firms, political “leaders” and not activists and so on.
The essence of paid political lobbying is the elevation of those who exist at points where money is concentrated – i.e. the already institutionally powerful and wealthy. So the whole edifice is biased from the beginning. More than that, whilst lobbyists don’t have to lie, the nature of their job is to distort the truth, holding up the good things and explaining away the bad things. Amusingly, Lord Bell actually gets indignant over Belarus, “No attempt was made to understand what we were doing”. Quite the opposite; surely the problem was that everyone knew precisely what Bell Pottinger were doing?
Asked why he thought he was being attacked, Lord Bell’s giant ego moved to obscure the sunlight;
I have absolutely no idea. I think I’m absolutely lovely. But some people don’t think I am, so they attack me. The answer is because I’m at the top of the tree. I say that immodestly, I’m somewhere near the top of the tree and I have been for some time. Tall poppy syndrome applies to our industry the same as everything else. What’s the point of attacking somebody nobody’s ever heard of? It’s much more fun to attack me, or the Saatchi brothers, or Matthew Freud, or Max Clifford. Attack somebody who’s visible.
Attacking somebody who’s visible…and supports murderous dictatorships, oppressive Thatcherite governments and the like, perhaps?
There’s a nugget in all of this which shows that paid lobbying is not to blame for the ills of our political system. There are parallels which exist between people like Lord Bell (i.e. smug rich arseholes) and, say, David Cameron. They occupy a similar ideological universe.
Bell seems to suggest a democracy of the marketplace with his “everyone has the right to representation” spiel. This is hardly different to the Tory equation of corporate donations to their party with union donations to the Labour Party.
Both stories are about attempts to buy power by interest groups. Both treat potential funders as individuals, the better to make all potential funders look like equals and obscure the very real differences in wealth, power and numbers.
The Bell/Cameron model favours small cliques who can more easily use wealth and power over mass organisations of millions (e.g. the people of Belarus or the 7 million workers in unions). Implying any equivalence is ridiculous. Numerous figures in the Labour heirarchy are no strangers to this model, nor are the Lib-Dems. And this is my point. It is natural for them to think this way, to favour the wealthy and still see some balance in their views.
It doesn’t require lobbying. It simply requires that we workers lie down and take it, over and over and over again.
This article was first shown at: http://thoughcowardsflinch.com/2012/04/07/lord-bell-and-why-lobbyists-really-arent-to-blame