There has never been much of a dividing line between effective public relations and the spread of religious fervour, and for 25 days in April 2020 the good news of Captain Tom sounded a lot like The Greatest Story Ever Told. The essence of PR is to take the local and the particular and make it universal; marketeers like to talk about the “toothbrush test” in regard to new product lines, the implied question being: “does everyone need one?” In the early lockdown days of the pandemic, twinkly 99-year-old war veteran Tom Moore walking lengths of his garden on a Zimmer frame in support of NHS Charities Together passed that toothbrush test with flying colours: everybody needed him. The trick lay in recognising that fact.
Hannah Ingram-Moore, Captain Tom’s daughter, with a background in retail branding, understood something of that trick. The chain of events that led to her father’s sudden and unlikely global stardom was set out in one of his several hastily ghosted books – the gospel according to Tom – Tomorrow Will Be a Good Day (the £800,000 proceeds from which books the family eventually took to be their own).
