YES I have just come back from a month away and, gosh, it was a surprise to see that Kai Tak wasn't beseiged by people desperate to flee the impending doom which every British newspaper is forecasting. Did you know that we're jittery, panicking citizens living our lives in the lengthening shadow of fear? I read that in three newspapers a couple of weeks ago while I waited for a plane. I had plenty of time for media perusal that particular morning, of course, as four airports, five railway stations and the Underground in London were all closed because of IRA bomb scares.
So I can understand why Ted Thomas, public relations expert, feels it's time to do something. Last week, he announced plans to offset this deluge of negative overseas press. I'm not entirely convinced that vetting and then paying journalists to tell a positive news story upholds the finest tenets of the fourth estate (some paradox, surely?) but I wish him luck. Especially as he's doomed to failure.
Let's look at the facts. There are 6,000 journalists arriving here in June, and that's not counting the ones already in situ filing the gloomy copy their editors want to read. The much-quoted line is that June 30 is the biggest story since the D-Day landings. Tanks, cameras, action - well, you can see the thrilling parallel, and it's even better if this time the baddies are the ones landing on the beaches. Sunshine doesn't sell. Setting suns, however, sinking into blood-red seas as poor unfortunates stand around wailing and rending garments while Britannia sails off, now that's a story.
While I was away, I considered getting a T-shirt printed which said, 'No, I Don't Know What's Going To Happen Either' because people suddenly thought I'd become psychic. I don't know what's going to happen. You don't know. But all those journalists zipping in and out for about 15 minutes will be endowed with uncanny powers of prediction and they will all be saying the same negative things. Journalists have a pack mentality and whether it's the Princess of Wales or the loss of a colony (a word still extensively - and inaccurately - used by the British media), they trot out the current party line as blithely as any cadre in Beijing.
Ted Thomas won't make much difference although I wish he'd pass on the news that we don't speak Japanese here so that no one else asks me how well I speak it. Perhaps he could also try and stem the use of the word 'takeover'. (When a tenant moves out of my flat in London because the lease has ended, is this a heinous takeover?) And I've found that a potted history of the Opium Wars does a great deal to offset weeping over sunsets in the diminishing British Empire.
NO.