• On Twitter, FT editor Lionel Barber has had a radical makeover. If you access the @barberlionel account, you find an album cover-like image of a doll-faced young woman with a tangled mane of red hair against a backdrop of sea and clouds, and tweets in Russian that when translated announce odd, not very Lionel things like: “24-year-old model marries an 81-year-old billionaire” and “Honda launches the new crossover XH-R”. This is probably an example of the way Russian nationalist trolls create clone accounts posing as western journalists, according to Monkey’s man with his ear pressed up against the Kremlin, though it’s more usual for the journalist’s own face to be used alongside fake pro-Putin tweets. What sinister propaganda purpose is served by trying to convince Twitter users that the Pink ’Un’ editor – who used to be @barberlionel, but can now be found, still in cricket gear, at @lionelbarber – is a Russian version of Lorde or Ella Eyre remains for the moment obscure.
• After making a sane and important intervention in the recent row over Hilary Mantel’s short story about Margaret Thatcher – he said the novelist should be investigated by the police – Sir Tim Bell displayed equally combative form in an interview promoting his autobiography in Friday’s Financial Times. Though mostly sounding like a combination of Simon Heffer, Victor Meldrew and Ed Reardon – he avoids Twitter because it’s “the end of civilisation”, and smartphones because “I want a mobile phone, not a mobile computer” – Maggie’s former spin doctor turned into someone closer to Tony Benn or Jeremy Hardy on the subject of bankers, dismissing them as “all complete criminals. The whole bloody lot”. Might such views not unnerve the financial sector clients of Bell Pottinger (the PR firm he founded and chairs) such as Investec and TPG, his interviewer mildly wondered. “That’s the problem, you see, you’re not allowed to tell the truth. Isn’t that disgusting?”
• In the same piece, Bell snarls again at a mention of Sir Alan Parker, the younger man whose rival PR company Brunswick now enjoys heftier revenues than Bell Pottinger. “Brunswick were never anywhere. They’ve tried to do government relations and failed. They’ve tried to go to America and failed.” And, worst of all, Parker “befriended all the banks, the advisers and the parasites who lived in the middle of these transactions, I didn’t – I worked for the client”. Good to see a feud said to have begun 23 years ago, when ICI (advised by Parker) saw off a takeover bid in 1991 by Hanson (advised by Bell), is still rumbling on.
• Possibly because minds were on last week’s launch of female-focused ITVBe – or maybe it was welcoming Johnny Rotten that made them lose focus – things have become even looser than usual at ITV’s lunchtime offering Loose Women. On the “guests” section of the programme’s website, trailing who’s booked for forthcoming shows so viewers remember to tune in, the most recent guest listed on Friday was Gareth Malone, who met the panellists on 25 September, over a fortnight ago. Yes, that was tumbleweed you spotted passing behind Janet Street-Porter, Jane Moore, Jamelia & co.
• Jon Snow’s secret is out, in a New Statesman survey (in a special issue on the “Great White Male” edited by Grayson Perry) of celebrities’ suggested survival techniques for men. Many of his recommendations are predictable, for Snow-watchers at least – “bike to work”, cry and laugh a lot, spend more time with women and less with men, listen to music – but one is less familiar: “Stand on the head to fertilise the blood corpuscles to prevent baldness.” A photo of him doing this, possibly snapped and tweeted by a colleague, is surely called for, if only to find out if the trademark snazzy socks are removed or kept on.
• Jason Seiken, the Telegraph titles’ American editor in chief, has recently been briefing staff on an in-house upheaval that will inter alia transform the production system, inculcate digital-led thinking and (according to MediaGuardian’s report) ask them to embrace “four key skills for each journalist: social, video, analytics and search engine optimisation”. But surely staying awake, not to mention, er ... getting stories, is pretty important too? With Torygraph toilers no doubt distracted by all this heady blue-sky thinking, the daily paper’s business supplement ran an Alex cartoon strip on Thursday in which the eponymous banker spent all of an international conference networking – the sessions are only useful to “provide a handy excuse for avoiding getting stuck with a bore”, was the concluding gag – and then ran exactly the same strip in the paper on Friday (although there was a new one online). Are the business hacks already so “digital-led”, Monkey can’t help wondering, that they no longer bother to read their own section and so can’t remember what was in it yesterday?
