‘Operators like me oil the machines that prop up authoritarian power all over the world,” writes the Washington PR man Phil Elwood in All the Worst Humans. “I help those machines function by laundering the sins of dictators through the press.” He may be overselling himself – he’s a publicist, after all – but not by much, if we are to believe his romping memoir of a career spent manipulating the media on behalf of the bad guys.
It’s no shock that the obscenely wealthy pay large amounts of money to PR companies to “change the narrative” in their favour. What’s more surprising is who these companies will work for, and what they are prepared to do. No job, it seems, is too big or too dirty. In 2018, the Washington firm Qorvis took $18.8m from the Saudis in what Elwood calls “PR cleanup fees” after the Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi was murdered and dismembered in the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul. Up to the Sochi Olympics, New York agency Ketchum counted Vladimir Putin as one of its biggest clients, and took a reported $40m off the Kremlin and Gazprom. But the company whose machinations Elwood exposes in most detail is one he worked for, Brown Lloyd James, a boutique “strategic consultancy” founded by Peter Brown, who once managed the Beatles. It was at BLJ that Elwood performed many of his lowest tricks.
