We truly live in an Information Age and the daily risk of drowning in the stuff, losing focus and not being able to pick the wheat of ideas and insights from the chaff.

I was asked by one of my team,  in an internal company online q&a, what the essential traits of a PR professional are.

I offered these three;

Listening – the ability to listen as well as talk and offer an informed point of view

Creativity – innovative thinking with real business or other impact

Curiosity – an interest in the world around us, an enquiring and analytical mind.

In an information overload age, the curiosity bit is more essential than ever but so is the analytics.

I thought back to yesterday. I probably consumed the same, including the epic horrors of news from court cases, Oxford, Syria and beyond.

But the three most enjoyable experiences at work yesterday were in person, face to face. Lunch with a digital rising star with a music PR background, meeting one of our most awarded and fearless investigative journalists, meeting a pioneer of newspapers moving into the digital space who had reinvented himself as a niche content creator.

Amid all the digital and other media and information we consume, in our admirable curiosity, it is important we create space for talking and listening the people. The art of conversation.

UKIP benefited from the classic mid term blues and absence of the LibDems as the protest vote vehicle. Whist they remain an issue for both Tories and Labour in terms of their disaffected voters, they are not a Parliamentary electoral force, not least because of our voting system. They wont win a single seat, but will screw with Tory, and some Labour, heads in close run seats. They will increasingly focus on immigration to cement in those disaffected voters. But Farage will melt down in the intense glare of media and political scrutiny in a general election campaign where people will be voting for him against the other main party leaders, not for a local representative to manage the street lights in Lower Bogwallup. Many currently disaffected Tories who may have a “give ‘em a bloody nose” flutter in a local mid term election will not want to see Miliband in No10 and will vote Tory again.

The Tories have not done as badly as they could have given the economy. But UKIP related panic is already opening up the schism that damages the Tories most – on Europe.

Labour did not do as well as they should have. Ed M is still not connecting with the entire core vote or the winnable middle as Blair did. Neither has he established a clear and distinct policy platform as Blair did and we all had handily printed on our “pledge cards”, or convinced that he is a statesman and leader.

The Lib-Dems are pretty screwed.

Likely outcome of the next election is either a Lib-Lab coalition or Lib-Tory coalition.

But given yesterday’s blog on pundits, I am only 50% likely to be right!

 His basic thesis is that a lot of punditry is near worthless and the more credible and persuasive a pundit sounds, the more we should be sceptical. He pointed to a track record of UK punditry on everything from politics and elections to economic predictions, and that fifty per cent were wrong. So tossing a coin would be just as effective. He talked of “foxes” and “hedgehogs” in punditry, the former ferreting through many scraps of info and the latter just coming out with one big, newsworthy, prediction, often wrong but making for better copy and soundbites.

 Newsworthy but shallow is something Eric Hobsbawm addresses in his last book, Fractured Times. He writes about manifestos, great declarations of principles, policies or intentions, which he contrasts with what he saw as the many vapid “have a nice day” mission statements of today. He highlights The Communist Manifesto, but also Vivienne Westwood’s  art manifesto, as examples of great, thought through and often beautifully written works, more about inspiring collective action than generating headlines.

Of course what drives the more effective of our punditry today is technology and advances in data analysis. I met an entrepreneur this week who has created an app that lets you scan in clothing and can tell you where you can buy it. Some of the better research firms are driven by more effective technology as well as a more engaged way of digging below the surface of day to day fluctuations in public opinion.

 A few weeks ago our Science of Engagement planning tool, created by my excellent London based strategic planning team, working  with neuroscientists, anthropologists and psychologists, was named PR Product of the Year in the Sabre Awards. Briefly – and to do it full justice check it out at www.webershandwick.co.uk – it breaks how we engage with a brand or issue or idea into nearly forty measurable “drivers of engagement”. It is the “science” that sits alongside the creative “art” in my business.

 Another thing Silver urges us to reject are pundits who try to bedazzle us with jargon and overcomplicate things to impress us with their supposed credibility. I was pleased yesterday to sponsor CorpComms Magazine’s digital communications conference. Considering the amount of technical detail and algorithms, not to mention jargon and bullshit, around digital and social media commentary, it was refreshingly bullshit-free and focussed not on the shiny, but the solid. My key takeaway, and the guiding principle of my firm’s approach to digital, was: don’t talk social media strategy, talk social media strategy + content creation strategy + measurement and evaluation strategy, all driven by overall business or campaign strategy.

 Another nice moment of my week – other than the ducks if you follow me on Twitter – was hosting a talk, in aid of Comic Relief, by the brilliant and lovely Sasha Wilkins a.k.a LibertyLondonGirl. Sasha is one of our most influential fashion, food and lifestyle bloggers, a true entrepreneur and social media genius. She briefly explained her mastery of the technology, but focussed mainly on the beauty of her art, the highly visual and engaging way she showcases brands and ideas through creative content, across a range of social media channels.

LibertyLondonGirl

 All in all it has been an inspiring week. And it’s only Thursday morning.

I made the point that starting this year-long journey through creative and digital leadership, innovation etc in Berlin was not an accident of logistics. Here we were at a crucial point of positive change in their careers, our firm, and the PR and wider media and marketing industries. So the backdrop of Europe’s most culturally and creatively relevant city was apt.

I love Berlin. If I could live anywhere outside the UK, and certainly if I was younger and freer of responsibility, it would be Berlin.

I guess I fell in love with it from afar in the 1970s when Bowie moved there and Lou Reed recorded an album dedicated to the city. Bowie’s “Heroes”was the soundtrack to that unrequited love affair of my mid teens.

Even further back, with Cold War spy thrillers like Michael Caine’s ” Funeral in Berlin”,  and the nuclear paranoias of the blockade, the city held a twin fascination for me. Dark romance and annihilation dread.

Then there was “Cabaret”, my first X rated movie and still my favourite piece of musical theatre. Whatever your sexual orientation in the 1970s, Lisa Minnelli in heavy mascara, bowler hat, stockings and suspenders, and a jump suited David Bowie with his arm draped round Mick Ronson’s shoulders on TOTP, were the twin images burned into your over stimulated brain. 

My first visit was a couple of years after the Wall came down. Actually a lot of it still remained and the deep tissue scars of its partial removal were plainly evident in their pain and ugliness. I bought a rabbit fur hat of an East German soldier selling off his kit at the Brandenburg Gate. He offered me his Kalashnikov. I passed.

During a break in my day yesterday I walked for an hour and a half across the city, from east to west in the warm spring sunshine, on a pilgrimage to find the house Bowie shared with Iggy Pop in during his Berlin exile. The stay that produced the trio of creative projects “Low”, “Heroes” and  (less significant in my view) “The Lodger”.

I crossed Potsdamer Platz, referred to in the opening lines of “Where are we now”, the haunting and nostalgic highlight of Bowie’s latest album, now a rather bog standard modern European glass and steel urban development. Down into the Turkish quarter whose citizens Bowie empathised with on several songs. There, amongst the Turkish cafes  and next to a tattoo parlour,  was 155 Haupstrasse. Not much to see but I photographed it anyway. Evidence.

Why was this important to me?

Why at Christmas was it important to me to drag my thirteen year old son around streets and graveyards in Drogheda, Ireland, where my family hailed from and which I hadn’t visited for decades. Photographing doorways, streets, gravestones.

Evidence. Artefacts.  History.

In another life, assuming I was reincarnated with the patience I lack in this one, I would want to be an archeologist/historian.

From my fascination with Bowie’s brief time here (itself a reflection of the post sixties musical world of creative, cultural and sexual experimentation), the significance- laden names (Zoo, Neukolln, Potsdamer Platz, etc), the pre-war artistic and sexual “Cabaret” culture,  the wartime and post war fate of the city, the terrible nerve centre of Naziism, the anti-freedom symbolism of the Wall, liberation, reunification, healing,  to the current raging creativity and artistic expression. The  city is a multi-layered cultural and historical swirl, all that is great and awful  about Europe’s contemporary artistic and political history. The essential backdrop for this boy growing up in the Brave New World.

Berlin. Europe’s dark heart and brightest light rolled into one. A rare city whose future is as big as its past.

I never met Mrs T. However I own a signed copy of her collection of speeches and I did actually work for the Labour Opposition (press officer on 1987 election campaign – the one Campaign magazine commented on that Labour won the campaign but lost the election – and then Chief Press Officer) during her time in power.

In fact I joined the Labour Party in response to her 1979 election win.

So I got political with her coming to power as backdrop – though in truth it was racism and opposition to the NF that got me into politics.

But I never despised her, which was the popular Left idiom of the time (and judging by the outpouring on Twitter yesterday, still is). No. I admired her. I wanted Labour to have its own version. I even worked with him in the early days. Tony Blair.

Unlike a lot of the middle class lefties poking fun at Mrs T on Twitter yesterday, I grew up in Salford in the seventies. The backdrop was the decline and fall of the docks and Trafford Park industrial estate. My Dad was an Irish Republican and Trade unionist Labour supporter. But the decline of our city and his employment prospects were nothing to do with Mrs T, who was years away from power. He and many of his working class friends blamed the Labour government and the unions. Labour had become out of touch with them and their lives.

So he became one of the people who brought her to power. Working class, ex Labour voters, turned off by Labour’s inward focus and union paymasters, not natural Tories but rallied by Thatcher’s personal appeal and articulation of their ambition.  We argued like cat and dog, but with hindsight just a few years later, I understood.

Cut to the early 1980s. I am a Labour activist in trendy, leafy Putney. Part of Wandsworth, one of the testing grounds for the “right to buy” council house policy. I am accused of political heresy for saying the policy is popular with disenchanted Labour voters we should support it with reservations. Largely by middle class Labour Party members who owned their own Victorian semis.

Then I went to work for Labour. I helped design and fight  campaigns against the Thatcher Government. I thought most of her senior people were tossers. But apparently so did she. But I never despised her. I wanted a Thatcher of my own.

I remember the day she announced her resignation. Labour HQ was cock a hoop. They thought her passing meant a watered down and beatable version of her as replacement. They were wrong.

Cut to 1993. I am working with a business led charity, part  of The Prince’s Trusts, promoting sustainable capitalism in places like Central Europe only a few years after the Wall came down. In most budding entrepreneurs’ offices I see a common feature. A picture of them with Mrs Thatcher in pride of place.

Mrs Thatcher was the most divisive figure of her time in the UK. She was wrong on many issues, most notably The Poll Tax and her destruction of the mining industry and many communities in an almost personal political war with Scargill. The Falklands War remains a divisive issue decades later. She was wrong on Europe.

But reading the comments yesterday, often from people who were in nappies in the 1970s, you would think that Britain’s problems began with Thatcher. They didn’t. Britain under Labour and Tory governments in the ’70s was a mess. The unions were out of control.  Working class politics had not caught up with post-war working class aspiration. Unpalatable truth or not, Thatcher was the harsh, kill or cure medicine to the sickly British body politic.

Tony Blair is the first to accept that without some of the changes Thatcher made, New Labour would not have been the successful force it was for a time.

 (Footnote to my personal story,; much missed Dad returned to being a Labour supporter after Tony Blair became leader.)

For me, Mrs Thatcher – for right or wrong – is the most significant British woman leader, along with Elizabeth 1st, ever. Indeed they shared some positive and negative traits. And both were woman trying to run things in a man’s world, taking men on and usually beating them at their own game.

I am sure plenty of fashionistas sport and champion brown and it is one of my wife’s favourite colours for clothes. With her skin tone and hair colour she looks good in it. But I have an aversion bordering on allergic for brown clothes which is entirely irrational.

Let me explain the root.

We didn’t have much money when I was a kid. When I moved from junior school – where the uniform was grey shorts – to grammar school, I had to keep wearing the shorts until we could afford my first pair of long trousers. I was the only kid in the year still in shorts. I got the piss ripped out of me mercifully and would go home and nag my mum. Wanting to make it up to me, she decided not just to get me long trousers, oh no, but to get me what she thought I would see as cool trousers. Flares (it was the early 70s). They turned out to be brown flares.

The piss ripping only grew. With the cruelty of children, they became known in my class as my “biz flares”, biz being northern kid slang in those  days at least for poo. I then had to re-nag for a whole term for a pair of boring, conformist grey school trousers.

Clearly such things influence us for a lifetime. To this day the only brown clothes I own is a Duck & Cover fleecy jacket for country walks and a body warmer a mate gave me which I wear for mucking out the chickens.  And I still shudder when I see guys in brown trousers. No pun intended.

Déjà vu because about fifteen years ago I was involved in a similar exercise, with almost the same cast of characters.

That was called Britain in Europe, which I helped create. There was Tory warhorse Ken Clarke, my old friend, mentor and former boss Peter Mandelson and Danny Alexander, now a top cabinet minister but back then BiE’s press officer. The mission was slightly different then – make the case for Europe AND the European Single Currency – but the thrust was the same; make the positive case for Britain’s active role in Europe, because nobody else was.

Listening to Ken Clarke on The Today Programme this morning, his interview went to the heart of the Pro Europeans’ political and PR problem. Despite the fact that a referendum is a people’s vote, rather than a politicians’, most of the interview focussed on how many MPs actually wanted Britain out of the EU and the prospects for a Tory split. Clarke was sniffy about referenda vs what he saw as the superior form of parliamentary democracy and skirted around the fact that his own leader actually put the case and commitment to an “in-out” vote. (Literary footnote – “in-out” is how A Clockwork Orange’s anti-hero Alex refers to sex.)

The Pro-European side has always looked like a conspiracy of the political, business and social elite against the populist many. On its first outing, it still does. At its launch BiE was fronted by big characters – Clarke, Howe, Heseltine, Mandelson, FTSE 100 chairmen and CEOs. A leading light today is top City spinner Roland Rudd. Ordinary folk, community leaders, were harder to find and engage.

The arguments were difficult too. I remember watching polling research presentations on how our arguments were complex and often about benefits that were seemingly distant from ordinary people’s lives, whereas the anti’s just wrapped themselves in the flag, told jokes about bent bananas and chanted “Save the £”.

A referendum will be a public vote, in the wake of a debate that will be led by opposing political camps and tabloid media yelling. Indeed the public are so off the  political class right now, any hint of this being about political elites vs the masses will be counter productive for all sides.

I am a passionate European. I love European culture and creativity, not to mention the food and red wine. Half the business I run is on continental Europe. Many of our clients run EMEA regions of European and American firms. Like  many Brits I would love an economy like Germany’s over here right now (FT headline yesterday – German consumer confidence rises). I believe we should play a strong role in Europe, for a range of reasons including it is good for business and its UK employees.

But referenda tend to be simple affairs (look at the slimmed down Scottish independence question) and the public are an independent lot, much to the dismay I suspect of Ken Clarke.

UKIP’s current 15 minutes of fame (though if the referendum goes wrong for the Pro European’s and potentially the PM, their fame might be considerably more than 15 minutes) , the main driver behind the Tory leadership’s new stance, is based partly on the mid-term need for a protest vote vehicle, but mainly that they tap into a recession weary public’s negative emotions on Europe and that twin political hot potato immigration (witness today’s headlines on Polish now being Britain’s second language).

The Pro Europeans have a real communications challenge. Complex arguments vs negative populist sentiment. Media focus for years on the negatives of EU  regulations vs positive arguments about influence and business. Concern at high unemployment and immigration from an expanded Eurozone. A potential tsunami of hostile tabloid campaigning. The image of political and business mates vs the emotional appeal of those claiming to speak for the little people and small business.

The Pro Europeans are right to start campaigning early. But the train has already felt the station.

 But I have a problem with chuggers.

 In an age of engagement they are the logo jacket equivalent of the foot-in-the-door salesmen who used to try and smarmily sell my mum tea towels or life insurance while my dad shouted ‘tell them to bugger off’ from the kitchen.

Near my office on High Holborn they are endemic. The colour of the waterproof jackets change. The awful patter doesn’t.

Firstly, I have no idea who these people work for. Do they really work for these charities whose brands I know and in some cases already support and admire? Are they some third party freelance outfit? Are they happy smiley con merchants?

It is like Apple trying to sell you a new generation iPad through some scruffy smirky bugger on a street corner pretending they fancy you or want to be your best mate.

Then there is the stock flirting. Call me a prude but is a charity into saving tigers or helping poverty stricken children best served by young women clearly told to wear short shirts and smile flirtatiously, and  who could just as easily be handing out samples of a new drinks brand? Or young guys giving the whole ‘check out the size of my clipboard baby’ vibe.

Unless you are totally deluded, no.

And who trains these people. They constantly pounce on poor young Gen Ys trying to find a sandwich they can affording central London, who I assume they think will be floored by their big smiles and hiya mate banter, while people of my age who are fortunately not burdened by massive student debt and London rents are let by, presumably on the grounds we are selfish old capitalists. Heard of the LiveAid generation you guys? Probably not.

What other area of sales & marketing, in a world of strategic insights and analysis, works on the basis of the hunch of some Gen Y for rent on a busy street corner.

I can’t complain, though I am a digital immigrant in extremis and they are digital natives to the point of building this social media city with their bare hands.

Blogging is a pain in the ass. I mean, who has the time? Indeed, is time to blog – unless you run a think tank or a journalism school or you pay someone to write it for you – a sign of too much time on your hands (which in some areas of business means you will be out of a job come Xmas).

Don’t get me wrong. I would love to blog like I did in the old days. But I don’t have time to write it. People don’t have time to read it. And of the few who do, someone somewhere is going to object and I am in, er, PR.

I really admire people who do.

But I don’t. Shoot me.

My favourite social media platform for some time has been Twitter. I effing love it. So much live news and comment and insights and funnies and real engagement. So little time. Breaking news? Done. Garden gnome mugging an old lady? Snapped and tweeted.

But how much time do those of us brought up reading poetry and aspiring to be the new Ian McEwan spend editing our thoughts, insights and literary brilliance down to 140 characters. I remember writing haikus  in my youth and struggling  - they were a doddle compared to trying to sum up the state of the world in a few terse phrases.

So there has to be a happy medium. A place between snappy tweets and long opinionated blogs or pic festooned Pinterest. A place between the short and the blog. I am going to call it Slogging.

I am restarting here.

“Closer”, their second and last studio album, was the album that closed the “long 1970s” as dramatically and brilliantly as “Ziggy Stardust” had opened them. Creatively and artistically, this really is an astonishing album from a bunch of young Mancs who only a couple of years before were playing Gothic punk as Warsaw and fighting off neo-fascist skinheads at pub gigs. Along with the peerless, jagged production of mad but brilliant Martin Hannett – a sort of northern George Martin on drugs and donuts – “Closer” is a dark, despairing “Sgt Pepper” in terms of innovation and impact.

Like Bowie’s greatest work of the time – in fact, greatest work full stop – (Ziggy, Diamond Dogs, Station to Station, Low, Heroes) it defied genre, dominant counter-culture and expectation.

In his recent book on Bowie and the 1970s, “The man who sold the world”, cultural historian Peter Doggett recalled Tom Wolfe’s branding of the period as “The Me Decade”, when counter-culture moved from “collective energy” to individualism. The utopianism of the 60′s was realised to be too lofty an ideal to be realised, the dominant culture was seen as “too corrupt and diseased to survive”. Counter-culture moved from Utopia to apocalypse. “Diamond Dogs” portrayed this through Bowie showbiz, “Closer” through despair, melancholy, horror and high musical art.

From the portentous classical tomb cover, to Hannett’s production, from Curtis’ lyrics and vocals, to the astonishing mix of music and the mirror it held up to the face of the turbulent, fearful decade it ended, this is one of the most important and incredible albums ever. 

I must have seen Joy Division about ten times across the last few years of the 70s, in London and Manchester. They attracted the most eclectic mix of fans and devotees, from boozed up right wing boot boys to sensitive lefty wannabee underground poets like, er, me.

At one of their gigs I walked straight into Ian Curtis, prowling around the fringes of the basement venue with frightened eyes. We looked at each other, nodded and moved on. Bit like me and the 1970s really.