It may not be your fault Wills that I'm an appalling hypocrite, but....
If David Blunkett is the world's worst male newspaper columnist (Tony Parsons, Richard Littlejohn, Jon Gaunt and Peter Hitchens must also be contenders) then Amanda Platell, just one of the Mail's innumerable number of Glenda's, must also be high up the worst female list, along with her partner in crime, Allison Pearson.Platell's piece today is incandescent about what she refers to as a PR exercise by Buckingham Palace involving Prince William undergoing his training on a ship.
The thing about PR operations is that no one knows about them unless news organisations report them. While the BBC, Guardian hardly bothered to report it and the Independent simply didn't, there was one newspaper that gave it far more coverage, involving over 300 words and not less than 8 photographs of this important news event. No prizes for guessing that this was... the Daily Mail. Not content with just reporting that, previously the paper and website had dedicated two reports to Williams' actual posting to the Caribbean, with far more words and a similar number of photographs.
Platell would of course know plenty about PR operations involving unpleasant and unpopular institutions. She doesn't think it's worth mentioning while she's decrying PR, but having served as William Hague's chief spin doctor during his ill-fated time as Conservative leader, she's hardly a novice when it comes to turning white into black. That and deciding it's a good idea for your young but alarmingly elderly employer to wear a baseball cap and boast in a men's magazine that he used to sink over 12 pints a day.
Labels: Amanda Platell, bullshit, Daily Mail, Daily Mail-watch, hypocrisy
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