Public relations is a vast and sometimes murky world. It stretches from the promotion of new shampoos to the election of presidents, but all of it is concerned with a simple aim: to get the best or most effective coverage possible for the client.
That doesn’t require much cunning or imagination if the client is, say, David Attenborough or Taylor Swift. But what if you represent the Gaddafi family, the Assads, or the Qatari government? All of these people paid the PR agency BLJ Worldwide to clean up their global image.
BLJ was founded by Peter Brown, who started out working for the Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein, was a board member of the group’s record company Apple Corps, and best man at the wedding of John Lennon and Yoko Ono. If Brown is the charming, well-connected face of BLJ, behind the scenes the dirty work of laundering dictators’ public profiles has gone to people such as Phil Elwood, a one-time Washington DC political operative, who has written a memoir about his career shilling for, as the title neatly puts it, All the Worst Humans.
Elwood is a familiar archetype from American film and fiction – the frenetic, morally flexible, self-dramatising Gonzo guy who thinks rules are for breaking and breakfast is when you add orange juice to your vodka. He tells his tale of feeding the media upbeat stories about lowdown megalomaniacs in a breathless present tense that does an effective job of turning office work into drama. His philosophy is not complex and he outlines it in sharp, unadorned prose.
“Every client, large and small, faces an inflection point. Some you create. Some are created for you. An inflection point usually comes after your client has shit the bed. Personally, I consider every crisis a golden opportunity. If my client lights their house on fire, you can be damn sure I’ll get the press to blame outdated fire codes. I tell clients: ‘Don’t be a hero. Always work to find a better villain.’”
If Elwood isn’t trying to push positive stories about his clients, he’s seeking to get his press contacts to run compromising stories about his clients’ rivals. So he runs a black-ops campaign against the US World Cup bid for 2022 to increase the chances of his client Qatar’s success. There are many reasons why a nation that had such a poor human rights record, and a history of appalling treatment of migrant workers, won the bid, and most of them are to do with Fifa delegates’ openness to people with bottomless bank accounts.
It’s doubtful that Elwood’s role won the day, but every little helps, and like all good PR people, he’s keen to lay claim to making the difference. Throughout, while boasting of his triumphs, the author reminds us of how bad the people are for whom he works, and also of how little guilt he felt for helping them.
Yet although he continually, if retrospectively, slaps his own wrist, his most searing criticism is for other PR companies, such as Qorvis, whch did Saudi Arabia’s PR following 9/11 and again after the murder of Jamal Khashoggi. Or Ketchum, which was in receipt of Vladimir Putin’s largesse for almost a decade leading up to 2015, and has also done work for the US Department of Education and Internal Revenue. “If you work for Russia,” writes Elwood sternly, “you should not have a US government contract.”
The most eventful sequence of the book is when Elwood is charged with babysitting Mutassim Gaddafi, favoured son of the dictator, on an excursion to Las Vegas, which involves securing cocaine for the spoilt childman, a private jet for his girlfriend and tickets to see Cher. The episode is recounted in a feverish, paranoid tone, as if Elwood sees himself as PR’s answer to Hunter S Thompson.
It all ends with Gaddafi senior arriving in America for a disastrous speech at the UN. The Libyan dictator pitches his tent, for a handsome price, on Donald Trump’s estate north of New York, where a goat is taken to be slaughtered. Reflecting on the blistering media coverage, Elwood is reminded of a friend’s saying about managing trouble: “You can’t unfuck a goat.” Although, of course, that’s exactly what PR companies pride themselves on.
Elwood loses one job and walks out on another, is investigated by the FBI, treated for depression and suicidal ideation, and ends back in PR, excited by the prospect of pulling the strings again.
For anyone interested in the dark arts of media manipulation, this is an entertaining glimpse into a largely hidden business. But that manipulation extends to book writing too, and Elwood writes as if he has one eye on a possible Hollywood adaptation and the other on his own, blowhard self-promotion.
• All the Worst Humans: How I Made News for Dictators, Tycoons and Politicians is published by Atlantic (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
