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	Conflict of Interest 07 Feb 00

I will never forget the eight words which changed my career - and my life. I was working late one summer evening when the phone rang. As soon as I heard the ebullient voice at the other end, I wondered how to cut short the call. A high-pressure PR head-hunter, whom I shall call Brewster, had been hounding me about a job for which he thought I was ideally suited, with a pay packet well above what I was getting. I had already said no. While the money was enormously attractive, the job didn't take my career in the direction I had planned.
But Brewster was back, and making a virtue of his persistence. He didn't want to change my mind, he declared, it was just that he'd be doing me the greatest disservice if he didn't urge me to keep an open mind. Wasn't it worth at least an initial meeting?
It was then I'd made my tactical error. 'It might be' I weakened, 'but right now I don't have time to run all over town.'
'You wouldn't have to!' Brewster was triumphant, 'They're just around the corner from you.'
I was wondering how to counter this when he came out with those eight, life-changing words. Eight words to which I've often returned, marveling at the perverse logic of them. For they came in the form of a question to which there was only one possible answer.
'Isn't your career worth a hundred yard walk?'
Like Chris Treiger, the main protagonist of my novel Conflict Of Interest, who is head-hunted in precisely this way, I took the hundred yard walk in real life - and found myself caught up in the world of financial spin. Unlike Chris, however, having spent my whole career in PR. I didn't think City spinning would hold any great surprises for me. As it turned out, I couldn't have been more wrong.

First Edition Simon Schuster (2000)

Up until then, like many of my PR colleagues, I'd always thought the term 'spin doctor' was rather silly. Of course we put a positive spin on things when sending out media releases - but we did so in the full knowledge that journalists are a cynical bunch and view most of the output of PR agencies with hardened scepticism. The idea of spin doctors pulling journalist's strings, making bland, un-newsworthy stories appear and bad news stories disappear was, as far as I was concerned, cloud cuckoo land. Only the most deluded conspiracy theorist could believe that PR people had that kind of power.
But I was soon to discover that the high octane game of City spinning plays to a very different set of rules. When fortunes are to be made - or lost - on a rumour, and when a single power breakfast at the Savoy can determine the fate of a hostile takeover bid, public relations takes on a very different complexion indeed.
Even at the most practical level, I soon found City-spinning to be a life apart. Within days of joining my new employer, I was rising at 5.30 am to be ferried in a succession of sleek, silent Mercedes, through deserted City streets in order to deliver bid and defence documents. These would have only come off the press in the early hours of the morning and contained information of such critical import that their delivery was not to be entrusted to any mere courier. Once in the hands of different brokerages, where early morning War Councils were soon underway, there followed a grueling marathon of phone-banging, analyst audits and media releases which rarely ended before 7 pm and frequently went on till much later.
As if all this wasn't exhausting enough, one of my colleagues had a two hour train commute, followed by a 20 minute car journey into the depths of rural Warwickshire. Dinner, like breakfast, was courtesy of British Rail, and it wasn't in any way unusual for him to return home after midnight, only to leave again before six. I thought him mad - but he was by no means alone. There were others in the industry who were known, during the heights of company results seasons, to catch their few hours sleep on reception sofas, or even under the desk. I couldn't help being struck by the paradox of this particular sub-group of the Porsche-driving classes having the same quality of sleep as the occupants of cardboard city across Waterloo Bridge.
While money fuels the frenetic, City merry-go-round, more alluring still is the adrenalin-inducing kick which comes from exercising control - a control that is pervasive as it is disturbing. As I worked at close quarters with a number of different PR firms, I discovered that spin doctors of the invisible, string-pulling variety not only exist - they are hired precisely because of their proven capabilities in media manipulation. Gatekeepers to the country's most powerful corporate warriors, they and their storm-troopers exert a control over journalists I wouldn't have imagined possible - even though I'd worked in PR for over ten years.
I vividly remember my first experience of seeing a negative story killed stone dead. Adam, to give the PR man a name, received a 7 pm call from Eve, a business journalist on a national newspaper. Eve wasn't very senior, and in the competitive atmosphere of City newsrooms, was keen to make her mark. A nasty rumour about a client had been doing the rounds and she had written up a piece for the next day's paper. Now phoning for a client response, Adam instantly realised that however vigorously contested, once published, the story would gain credibility. But how to make ambitious Eve drop it?
As it happened one of Adam's clients had just fallen victim to a hostile takeover. During the final days of a titanic battle, the generous pay-out to be made to the Finance Director had been a subject of feverish media speculation - but a subject on which the client, with Adam's help, had kept firmly under wraps. Now no longer a client, or likely, at his age, to become one again, the former Finance Director's pay-out had evidently become fair game. A short exchange between Adam and Eve resulted in Eve dropping the nasty rumour story with alacrity, and writing, instead, an exclusive revelation on just how much Adam's one-time client - and erstwhile tennis-partner - had been paid.
If I was startled to discover that ethics, in certain quarters, were as much a luxury as a good night's sleep, there were other far greater surprises in store. Some City spinners go to quite extraordinary lengths not only to promote their own clients, but to denigrate their clients' corporate enemies. 'Negative PR' isn't just a figment of an over-heated imagination - it really does go on. Financial PR firms have been known to employ corporate detectives, specifically to dig up as much dirt as they can on client competitors. Some of these detectives operate literally at the rubbish-bin level, sifting through corporate and domestic garbage for evidence if not of financial irregularities, then at least of something that can be construed as such. But others, highly-educated policy wonks operate in an altogether different stratosphere. I'll never forget my encounters with one who, like so many of the Mensa-intelligent, had the emotional age of a twelve year old. Regaling me with gleeful stories of yet another brown envelope packed with damning statistics heading across town to a business editor's office, he would rub his hands together with adolescent pleasure while whooping, 'Dirty tricks! Dirty tricks!'
As things turned out, I didn't spend long in head-hunter Brewster' promised land. One of the directors at the new agency took such an instant and aggressive dislike to me that my position there became rapidly untenable. Not that I was sorry to go. By then I'd seen enough of financial PR to realise that, ethical issues notwithstanding, the industry affords about as much scope for personal creativity as managing a McDonalds outlet - without any of the job satisfaction.
Returning to corporate PR, I observed the leaks, lapses and plain, old-fashioned bribery of the business with continuing interest. But it was only after yet another long night in a Broadgate wine-bar, where a journalist friend and I discussed the inexplicable suicide of a City analyst - was murder ever a PR tool, he demanded, his question only partly rhetorical - it dawned on me that a novelist need look no further than City PR for all the necessary ingredients of a high-wire, block-busting thriller. What more conducive environment can one find for 'media management' of the smear campaign and corporate cover-up variety, than in the testosterone-charged Square mile? In the world of multi-billion pound takeovers and alpha male power plays, the rewards for high-risk duplicity are of a magnitude to make Midas weep.
And so was born Conflict Of Interest, the PR thriller. While characters have been made composite to protect the guilty, many of the events related are very much grist to the mill of your real-life City spinner - toned down, naturally, to make them believable. While, to my very great relief, in real life I was able to walk away from City PR virtually unscathed, in my novel, Chris Treiger doesn't have it quite so easy, finding himself trapped in a situation not of his own making as events spiral out of control.
But like Chris, I often find myself wondering, in the small, sleepless hours of the night, how very different my life would have turned out, had it not been for that fateful hundred yard walk.
David Michie, March 2000

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