Ertblog

The Falklands war, 30 years on

Above: HMS Antelope explodes, San Carlos Water, Falklands, 1982

Thirty years ago Britain found itself unexpectedly at war when Argentina invaded the Falkland islands. It was a profound shock - not least to millions who had no idea where the Falklands were. 

According to my 1982 diary, I heard the news at 1.05pm on 2 April on Radio 4, but the British government only confirmed the news at 6pm. Yet that morning in my slumber I distinctly heard an armchair general telling Radio 4's Today programme about the possibility of attacking Buenos Aires with nuclear weapons. That was just the start of an open season for armchair generals, admirals and air vice marshals. 

I wrote a lengthy post about the Falklands conflict on the 25th anniversary in 2007. I recalled how challenging the war was for the media - it took days and weeks for film to reach Britain. (I even delayed going into school one morning in May to watch the first BBC film report from the South Atlantic.)

Reclaiming the Falklands was an extraordinary feat of arms by Britain. The first ships of the famous task force set sail just three days after the invasion. The Royal Navy suffered grievous blows, losing HMS Sheffield, HMS Coventry, HMS Antelope and HMS Ardent, while many of the navy's other ships were badly damaged. The army successfully 'yomped' across forbidding terrain to capture Darwin and Goose Green and later the island capital, Stanley. (It also supplied a hero from central casting in the form of Colonel H Jones, killed in the attack on Goose Green.)

But in many ways the RAF's contribution was the most remarkable, if not the most decisive. The Vulcan raids on Port Stanley's airport were the most extraordinary British air attacks since Guy Gibson led the Dambuster raid on Nazi Germany 39 years earlier. To get to the Falklands, the Avro Vulcan would need to fly 4,000 miles beyond its maximum range. That would take 15 tanker aircraft and 17 in-flight refuellings - for just one bomber.

If that wasn't enough, there was a bigger challenge: the Vulcans had not been refuelled in air since the 1960s. As Roland White recounts in his enthralling book, Vulcan 607, RAF engineers visited aviation museums around the world to grab vital refuelling probes to replace those removed from the Vulcans over 15 years earlier. As White says, the curator of the Castle air force base museum in California turned a blind eye as an RAF team removed a probe from an exhibit, covered the hole with a blanking plate and made off with an item that could help Britain reclaim the Falklands.

The cunning didn't end there. The ancient Vulcans were horribly vulnerable to modern air defences. The RAF wanted to give them a better chance with the Dash 10 system fitted to its Buccaneers. But there was nowhere to fit it on the V bombers. Or was there? Someone with a long memory remembered that the Vulcan was meant to carry the huge Skybolt missiles. Skybolt was cancelled, but perhaps the Skybolt fitting points were still there. After much prodding, the engineers found them.

One more piece of British ingenuity was still needed to fit the Dash 10. RAF Honington's  engineers found a perfect way to create a pressure tight seal for the wires from the Dash 10: a home brew cork with a hole in the middle. Happily, one of Honington's crews brewed their own beer, and supplied the corks.

The Falklands war carried many echoes of the second world war. The 1938 Argentinian cruiser General Belgrano, sunk by the British in 1982, had survived Pearl Harbor as USS Phoenix. The media reporting was closer to that of 1940 than 2012. And those Vulcan bombers carried an updated version of the H2S radar sets used by Bomber Command's Lancasters in the raids on Berlin. The version of H2S used in 1982 was far better than its 1940s predecessor, but it was still an antique, over six foot across and producing an image of the target that its operators described as green porridge. But it proved its worth: the moment Mount Usborne showed up on the H2S was the confirmation that Vulcan 607 was within a mile of its plotted path after its 4,000 mile flight from Ascension to the Falklands. Minutes later, Martin Withers' crew placed two 1,000 pound bombs on Stanley's vital Argentinian-held airfield. The occupiers now knew they had a battle on their hands. And little hope of using Stanley as a base for fast jets to attack Britain's capital ships.

As I said in my 2007 post, war represents a tragic failure of politics and diplomacy. The idea of Britain and Argentina flighting was extraordinary, given the links between the two countries. (Not least the Welsh-speaking community in Patagonia.) I cherished those links, with an Argentinian brother-in-law. And Britain's most famous Falklands veteran, Simon Weston, has movingly described on Desert Island Discs how he met and embraced the Argentinian pilot who bombed him and his comrades.  So many British and Argentinian lives were needlessly lost during that tragic south Atlantic autumn. Yet it had one positive outcome: a brutal fascist dictatorship was overthrown. 

Thirty years on, the controversy over the Falklands remains. Democratic Argentina's president, Cristina Kirchner, has taken a tough stance on the Falklands issue. Yet she, like so many in South America, seem to have difficulty understanding a basic concept: self determination. The simple fact is that the Falkland islanders don't want to be Argentinian citizens. And they never will as long as politicians like Kirchner regard them as pawns in their political games.

Britain may have been foolish to provoke south American sensitivities by sending Prince William on a tour of duty in the Falklands. But after the events of 1982, we won't sell out the interests of the Falkland islanders. If anyone in Argentina feels upset about it, they should reflect on the fact that Britain was about to agree a settlement before its brutal junta made its fatal mistake 30 years ago. 

Osborne's budget: so wrong, so wrong

Yet another year's budget proves the pointlessness of this annual exercise in politics over prudence.

This year's edition cut the 50% top rate of income tax. but inevitably the Chancellor had to show that he wasn't rewarding the rich. So he took back the rich people's budget dividend with the other hand. Or dd he?

I was against Labour's imposition of the 50% rate. It seemed wrong to take half of anyone's income in tax. Far better to have a universal rate of income tax, and make it the main way of raising money for public services. (By contrast, regressive VAT is little short of evil, as it steals from the poor and benefits the rich.) 

But at a time when the coalition government is making the plight of the poor worse with its aggressive spending cuts it seems criminal to reward the rich. But what would you expect from a cabinet of millionaires?

The theatre of the annual budget is hugely overplayed. Back in 2007, Gordon Brown's cut in the basic tax won the plaudits. I couldn't understand how no one had noticed that the cut had been bought by axing Brown's own 10% tax rate, punishing the poor. I pointed this out in an Ertblog post - Gordon Brown's trick or treat budget. But the political storm only battered Brown a year later. 

We'll see how George Osborne fares in the months to come. 

Is outrage driving out reasoned debate?

The Guardian's Julian Glover today raised an interesting question. Is outrage the common currency of political debate? He pointed out that commentators and columnist deal in absolute opinions. Yet real life is more uncertain. 

As Glover said, "Uncertainty comes over as weakness. Tribalism thrives. On these pages over the last few years I have sometimes expressed ideas in categorical terms about which I could never really be sure. The greater challenge for any writer is mounting a defence of compromise. It is, perversely, sometimes feeble to sound bold and bold to sound feeble."

He's right. It's ironic that the death of ideology in British politics has coincided with a far more aggressive approach to political debate. That's partly down to the 24 hours media - their short attention span and need for drama polarises modest differences. (In more ideological times, current affairs programmes like ITV's hour-long Weekend World tried to explain rather than create controversy.) The media demands instant answers, instant judgements. Reallife is not so simple. Yet a politician who says he or she doesn't have all the answers is seen as weak. (That said, wouldn't we respect an honest politician who admitted the truth more than a blustering one?)

Glover's article prompted a stream of critical comments, not least because he's leaving the Guardian to become a speechwriter for David Cameron. It's hard to think of anything more likely to inflame the passions of the Guardian readers. 

That, in one sense, proves Glover's point. I'm no fan of David Cameron, and am horrified by many of his government's policies (that broken promise not to lay waste to the NHS by yet more destructive reorganisations is high on the list). But like most voters I don't see him as the devil. I'm capable of making my own judgements about his actions and policies. 

It's not just political debate that suffers from this mock outrage. Just look at any story about Apple on the BBC or Guardian technology web pages. Critics of Apple insist that anyone who buys an iPhone or iPad has more money than sense. Apple fans claim that rival products don't work. Needless to say, neither claim is right. We all make choices. That doesn't make other people idiots because they've chosen another type of phone or computer. 

Live and let live...

 

A promise: my letter in The Guardian

Today's Guardian includes a short letter from me on one of my favourite topics: how simple phrases are being replaced by ugly, longer ones.

It was prompted by a letter from Mary Williams about a query in the paper's Notes & Queries column asking why many people now say train station instead of railway station. In my letter I asked what fool decided to replace the lovely expression 'keeping a promise' with the horrible 'delivering on a promise'. 

Politicians and business leaders are the worst offenders. (The founder of BlackBerry-maker RIM, Mike Lazaridis, used a variation, 'deliver on a goal', in a RIM YouTube video saying sorry to customers whose smartphones had been out of action for days.) 

I've never understood why business people and politicians use gobbledegook. The simple way to get a message across is to use plain English. But as I've said many times on Ertblog, too many think simple language is somehow inadequate or unimpressive. The opposite is true.

On the subject of language, I discovered Tim Phillips' Talk Normal blog today. I loved the post about the nonsense spoken by sports commentators. Tim confirms the suspicion that politicians use obscure language to make unpalatable messages unintelligible - take this example from the HS2 high speed rail proposals. 

 

 

 

Guardian's iPad app: good news

The Guardian's iPad app

The Guardian finally released an iPad app this week. It was worth the wait.

The paper has been a digital pioneer, but (apart from the brilliant Eyewitness photojournalism app) has been left behind as the Daily Telegraph, The Times and Sunday Times have launched apps for Apple's hugely successful iPad. 

But the Guardian's effort is the most stylish of them all. The design is gorgeous, with big photos, and clear text on white background. Navigation is straightforward.

The app also takes advantage of Apple's Newsstand app, which automatically deivers new editions as they become available. That's good news: no need to wait for an edition to download before racing out of the door to catch your morning train.

Editor in chief Alan Rusbridger acknowledged in a blog post that not everyone will be happy. As he says, it's a 'reflexive, once a day Guardian', rather than the website. Many commenters complained that the app won't include comments on articles. But that reflects the fact it's a digital newspaper, not a live website. The printed paper doesn't include comments, apart from the daily letters to the editor, which also appear in the app. The criticisms show we now have different views on what a newspaper is. Traditionalist see it as a printed product, and like the apps that provide a digital version. Others think the old idea of a paper as a once a day snapshot of news is hopelessly out of date. (They'd point out that the app makes no mention of Liam Fox's resignation, which happened five hours ago.) 

The app doesn't include everything - the excellent Weekend magazne isn't included, for example. I'm sure this will follow. (The Times app's Saturday edition originally missed most of the Saturday print content, which appeared a few months later.)

But I still like the idea of the reflexive Guardian, as Rusbridger describes it. I know all about Fox's departure - I read about it on Twitter, confirmed it on the BBC news site and heard more on Radio 4's PM. I'm a Gaurdian print subscriber, and welcome the chance to download a version to read on the train on my days in London. In time, I'm sure newspaper apps will be updated more often - The Times brought out an app update to mark Steve Jobs' death last week. 

I also like Rusbridger's view of the changing Guardian: "The Guardian is many other things. You can now watch, listen to and join in with the Guardian. You can literally follow it minute by minute around the clock as it reports, mirrors, analyses and gives context to the shifting patterns and rhythms of the world's news. It's Android when it wants to be, Kindle when it chooses." He's right. The same principle applies to many aspects of modern life: we want to connext to Facebook on different devices; we want to check our diary in the same way; we're increasingly looking to shop online and on the high street, on a mobile and a PC. Companies need to change the way they offer services to customers in this ever-flexible world.

The bigger question is whether the Guardian's iPad app move will revive the Guardian's finances. The group has faced a couple of torrid years, as print sales and ad revenues fall, and the GMG invests heavily in digital. The iPad app will cost £9.99 a month, while web access will remain free, unlike at News International's titles. Will the Grauniad follow NI's example? If it doesn't, it's hard to see how the losses will be reduced significantly. A growing number of readers don't buy the print edition, and won't pay for an app while they can get all the web content for free. Yet I share the view of a few commenters on Rusbridger's blogpost: I want to contribute to the Guardian's quality journalism, and like the idea of the app. Time will tell if enough of us cough up. 

Below: photos come to life on the Guardian app

 

A strange revolution: Ryan Giggs, the celebrity, Twitter and the law

It's a crying shame that Britain's clash over the respective rights of privacy and freedom of speech focuses on a footballer's affair. It's hard to imagine a cause less likely to justify a public interest case - as opposed to the interest of tabloid papers. As the Guardian's Michael White put it, it's not exactly Tahrir Square, the centre of Egypt's revolt against tyranny. 

Yet it was obvious days ago that Ryan Giggs' injunction preventing him from being named was a futile exercise. Twitter users knew what newspaper readers weren't allowed to. Yesterday, a Scottish newspaper became the first to name Giggs - and this afternoon Liberal Democrat MP John Hemming relied on the protection of parliamentary privilege to follow suit. Within minutes, Sky News and other major news outlets decided to ignore the legal order. Despite this, Tugendhat J this evening became the second judge today to reject News Group's attempt to lift the injunction. The legal establishment is understandably reluctant to abandon the rule of law to what has been described as Britain's biggest act of civil disobedience. Yet the longer this goes on, the less respect the law will enjoy.

The biggest lesson in this saga is that a cover up often ends up creating a bigger story. Anyone wanting to minimise bad headlines should think very seriously before going to law to try to stop it. Ryan Giggs isn't the first person to find that managing the story might have been a far better tactic. 

But we should also pause before accepting that a Twitter storm is somehow more legitimate than a reasoned legal judgment. Alastair Campbell made the point well in an interview on BBC Radio 5's Drive show.  The media, he suggested, were relying on a 'useful idiot' like John Hemming MP breaking cover so they could name Giggs. He added that something that interests the public isn't the same thing as the public interest. News Group itself struggled to claim a public interest in naming Giggs. 

The prime minister weighed in again today, arguing that Britain's privacy rules were unsustainable. But he repeated his concern about judge-made law, rather than legislation passed by parliament. This is facile. Much of our law is case law - an act of parliament is never the final word. It's the job of judges to interpret the law and - in the higher courts - establish precedent. If parliament doesn't like the results it can legislate to change them, but parliament has a far from unblemished record - as anyone who remembers the Dangerous Dogs Act of the 1980s will recognise. That was a classic example of the adage that hard cases make bad law. 

The greatest irony is that Britain had no general right to privacy until the 1998 Human Rights Act incorporated the European Convention of Human Rights into UK law.  How curious that this new right should almost immediately be eroded by the explosive growth of social media and the new power of the crowd.  

 

 

Deep Horizon a year on: BP PR lessons

A year ago this week, an explosion ripped through BP's Deep Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico, killing eleven people. The three month battle to cap the well and stop the spill shattered BP's reputation. A year on from the disaster, Lansons Communications held a debate about how BP handled one of the biggest PR challenges ever faced by a British company.

BP made an early, disastrous decision: to deflect responsibility for the disaster to the operator of the rig, Transocean. That may have been technically correct (and this week BP sued Transocean for £24 billion) but meant that BP didn't express a word of sympathy for the victims for four days after the explosion. As a result, BP was on the backfoot from the start.

The other key factor in the PR battle was chief executive Tony Hayward's decision to front the company's media response. Hayward was simply the wrong man to do this. His series of disastrous PR blunders - notably a catastrophic plea that he wanted his life back, after 11 men had lost theirs - fed American anger. And his insistence on going yachting just days after Congress grilled him over BP's performance was an act of immature stupidity.

But BP's biggest problem was reality. Oil gushed into the Gulf of Mexico for almost three months. The greatest communicators in the world wouldn't have changed that stark fact. Oil spills are toxic reputationally as well as chemically: the world remembers the Torrey Canyon, Exxon Valdez and Amoco Cadiz disasters. During the crisis, a quarter of total US media coverage was about Deepwater Horizon. The intensity and duration of that media scrutiny was greater than the coverage of the 9/11 atrocities. Small wonder BP felt beleagured and unloved. 

Speaking at the Lansons event, American body language expert Joe Navarro was dismissive of Tony Hayward's media performance. "You don't ask engineers to do performance", he argued. Yet Ian King, business editor at The Times, took a different view. He applauded the very human response of another technician chief executive, Centrica boss Sam Laidlaw, who cut short a Christmas holiday to respond to a tragedy. Hayward may have done better had he concentrated on leading BP's response, leaving the media and community response to Bob Dudley, the BP executive who grew up on the Gulf coast - and who succeeded Hayward after the crisis was over.

Navarro argued that BP should have built an alliance of the organisations involved, rather than standing alone. I pointed out in the debate that this would have been impossible. Few outside the oil industry had heard of Transocean. And as events proved, the media and politicians were only interested in BP's role: big oil makes an easy target. President Obama shamelessly played fast and loose with reality - theatrically insisting on calling BP by its historic title of British Petroleum. Lansons chief executive Tony Langham said Obama demeaned his office by doing this, but recognised that 'politicians do what politicians do'. 

Ian King was very critical of BP chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg's role in the crisis. He asked why Svanberg didn't more actively support his beleagured chief executive, adding that it was a scandal that the chairman was still in office.

King was generally sympathetic to BP. he admitted that The Times initially treated the crisis as a foreign story, only later recognising its impact. He reflected on BP's dilemma over calls to suspend its dividend in a Times column in June. (At Wednesday's event, he explained how a generation of BP executives including Hayward were seared by the experience of BP's 1990s dividend cut.) And he rightly pointed out that oil companies do dirty and dangerous things so we can run our cars and enjoy our lifestyle. The oil business will never be risk free. Ian added that he never understood why British companies were always so keen to do business in America, given the litigious and protectionist instincts of the land of the free. 

Late in the debate, I pointed out that no one had mentioned social media. This was one of the biggest crises of the social media era. It led Tony Langham to praise BP's use of social media, including a reasonable apology on Facebook for Hayward's disastrous 'I want my life back' plea. Another participant said BP did an amazing internal communications job, keeping BP people informed and reassured. And BP has published a moving film called A year of change, introduced by new boss Bob Dudley, on the first anniversary of the tragedy. 

Langham pointed out the irony of criticising Hayward for insisting on taking the media flak. He asked how many times people slammed company bosses for hiding from journalists when the going got tough. (Remember how invisible bank bosses were during the early stages of the credit crunch?) Yet it takes a formidable comms chief to tell a CEO he or she's not the person to front interviews. And as Navarro said, external advisers are often better placed to do so. 

BP's experience will be studied for years to come. Last month I chaired a CIPR Corporate & Financial Group talk by Andrew Gowers, BP's head of communications during the Deepwater Horizon crisis. I said at the time that many PR people would have been partly relieved, partly disappointed, not to have been involved in this enormous story. We crave big stories - but this was a story that would have devoured almost anyone. 

I'll end with a recent comment from one of our best friends, who works for BP. She said that many BP people were frustrated that the company seemed unable to get its message across during the crisis. I'm sure the company's PR people felt the same way: BP was a company under siege. That siege only lifted when the well was capped. It's easy to look to PR people to solve problems. Sometimes we can achieve that, but reality is always our greatest resource - or weakness. 

Wednesday's event was held by Lansons Communications. It was chaired by Louise Cooper, head of Lansons Live. I was invited as head of PR of a Lansons client. 

(What's the narrative) morning glory?

(With apologies to Oasis...)

Why do people feel simple words aren't good enough? This question has featured before in Ertblog. I called it word inflation in a January 2008 post asking if we need a language policy committee. 

My current gripe is the way the lovely word 'story' is being replaced by 'narrative'. Columnists seem the worst offenders, as regularly seen in The Guardian's comment pages:

"Privately, they know human tragedy is a raw material ready to be forged into facile tabloid narratives.." Richard Peppiatt

Why do they do it? Surely journalists of all people should know better than replace simple words with overblown buzzwords? 

If you can't beat them, join them. Here are a few suggestions:

Bedtime narrative

Rags to riches narrative

Tell us a narrative

Narrative time

Same old narrative

Narrative teller

Love narrative

Never ending narrative (sorry, Limahl...)

Multi-narrative car park (oops, wrong storey...)

 

Remembering Grampy

This is my grandfather. The photo captures him at his trade: a linotype operator at the Western Mail & Echo in Cardiff who turned journalists' words into the magic of print. His trade has long vanished, along with the steam train fireman and lamp lighter. 

Grampy died 44 years ago in December 1966, some five years after he retired. I was just three at the time, so I have just one clear memory of him. But it's a precious one: we were sitting in front of the fire in my grandparents' home in Penarth, Glamorgan, and Grampy was showing me how to shell peas. 

I was thrilled last week to find this photo of me (and my sister) with Grampy. I reckon I was between two and three years old, which means it dates from the spring or summer of 1966. (Was it taken the same day that I watched Grampy shelling peas?) I like to think it captures Grampy's pride in his two grandchildren. It's strange to think that my son Owen is the same age as I was on that far-ago day in the 1960s.

BBC strike: who'll speak for the poor licence fee payers?

This week's BBC NUJ journalists' strike was yet another own goal by the corporation. The BBC has made a habit of destroying its own reputation - a dangerous indulgence when Rupert Murdoch and the Conservative-Lib Dem coalition appear intent on cutting the Beeb down to size.

It was hardly surprising that BBC stars Huw Edwards, Nicky Campbell and Fiona Bruce decided to look after their own rather than the people who pay their impressive salaries through the licence fee. It was horribly depressing on Friday morning to hear Radio 4's Today programme and Radio 5 Live Breakfast struck down by the self-indulgent strikers. At 7.40, Today was replaced by a discussion about Churchill and 1940 - if in doubt, talk about the war... And Newsnight's usually sensible Michael Crick said "I regard listening to or watching the BBC as strike breaking." What planet is this man on? Does he realise that we poor licence fee payers get no refund as a result of his self indulgence? I trust he won't be paid while he is on strike.

That's not to say that the BBC's management deserves any sympathy. They have lined their own pockets and utterly mishandled almost every challenge they have faced, from Jonathan Ross's enormous salary to the appalling Ross-Brand call to Andrew Sachs. I have some sympathy for the poor bloody infantry in the BBC. But the days of generous final salary pension schemes are over. The message to BBC journalists is clear. Strike if you must. But don't be surprised if you end up helping to destroy the greatest cultural institution Britain has ever created. And don't expect any sympathy if that's the result. We'll be the victims, not you.