Open Road

Thursday Dec 13th 2007

“I have nothing to declare except my celebrity …”

I have a guilty secret.

Well, perhaps it’s not that secret – not to my close friends and family. And not that guilty either actually – I see the towering piles of glossy mags in my flat as a charming idiosyncrasy rather than the funeral pyres of my critical faculties.

So yes, I admit it, I am a Celebophile.

But much as I love those (mostly) under-talented, overpaid, overhyped individuals, it’s a brave PR professional that jumps into the world of celebrity endorsements without carefully looking at the graveyard of past failures.

Wednesday Dec 12th 2007

Fifteen Predictions for 2008 - some serious, some not

Gordon Brown will remain unpopular.  He will be 6-8 points behind the Conservatives at the end of 2008

The credit crunch will hang around for the whole of 2008

The UK economy will grow by 1.9 per cent

Alistair Darling, if he is still Chancellor and hasn’t been replaced by Ed Balls, will raise taxes further, largely by stealth, in the Budget as the Treasury will be running out of cash

We will all get immensely bored by the Bill to ratify the European Reform Treaty

Monday Dec 3rd 2007

The Trade Mag Drag

Once upon a time, before hanging up my soft-soled journalistic shoes for tighter fitting consultancy brogues, I was a features editor. And this week I’ve found myself trawling through some of the more – how shall I put it? – technical trade publications to see what they have planned in the features department for the year ahead.