Poster girl for amoral, harmful PR

Victoria Geoghegan, the face of Bell Pottinger, is among the greatest villains and most offensive personalities to have spread their influence throughout the world

reputation for embracing the seediest of well-paying clients, from Oscar Pistorius and Rolf Harris to the Pinochet Foundation and the wife of Bashar al-Assad. Its confidential client list was, one imagines, a stolen photocopy of the Devil’s Rolodex.

Last year Bell Pottinger took on one client too many, however: the Gupta brothers, “influential businessmen” of Indian origin who maintained a convenient friendship with President Jacob Zuma of South Africa and his immediate family.

The full extent of that relationship was being incrementally revealed in the South African and international press at the time, with undesirable results for the brothers. In short, they were being painted as criminals and corrupters who influenced the highest political decisions in the land, plundered the South African Treasury and economy at will, and really belonged in jail.

The court of public opinion was becoming increasingly hostile, equating Zuma and the Guptas with the new concept of “state capture”, and important banks and financial institutions were refusing to do business with them. The “Zuptas” needed a PR makeover – or, at least, something to distract their critics from their shameless appropriation of state resources.

Enter Bell Pottinger, apparently introduced to the Guptas by two men intimately involved in the global arms trade: Fana Hlongwane, notorious for his role in South Africa’s corrupt and wasteful arms deal, and Christopher Geoghegan, the former chief operating officer of BAE Systems, one of the chief beneficiaries of said deal.

Fast-forward through the relevant meetings and strategy discussions and a fee agreement of £100 000 a month, and his daughter Victoria found herself heading the account of Oakbay Capital, the Guptas’ holding company. All very cosy up to this point.

Having joined Bell Pottinger at 21, Geoghegan clearly had no qualms about dealing with the odd ropey client – with her father happy to sell overpriced fighter trainers to the South African government, sleeping peacefully after a hard day’s unconscionable work presumably runs in the family.

Rather, this was a fast route up the career ladder and under her guidance, Bell Pottinger orchestrated the dissemination of a new narrative for the South African public to consume: that of “white monopoly capital”.

Essentially a childlike no-you-are! response to the criticisms of state capture, claims of white monopoly capital dumped the blame for South Africa’s increasingly dire economic situation into the laps of white-owned businesses that were supposedly running the country and reaping the spoils of apartheid.

The briefest moment of lucid thought on the matter would reveal what bunk this idea was, but the ambitious and apparently amoral Geoghegan knew, as any vaguely competent PR minion does, that it’s hearts, not minds, that matter in such campaigns.

Led by an army of fake Twitter accounts – Twitterbots – the message went out: it’s all about race. This is a powerful method of distraction just about anywhere in the world these days, but in South Africa, a country literally defined by its history of racial division, this was as cynical and reprehensible a move as could be imagined. It was a campaign that would later be described by the UK’s Public Relations and Communications Association (PRCA), the largest PR association in Europe, as “by any reasonable standard of judgement likely to inflame racial discord” and “beyond the pale”.

In this instance, it was also a campaign that was easily identified. The Twitterbots gave themselves away with a predilection for transmitting Gupta propaganda at exactly the same time, geolocators that revealed they were created in India, and laughably unlikely spreadsheet generated names such as Bongi Vorster, Dlamini Louw and Imin- athi Junior. There was a sense of shamelessness to it all that might fly in South Africa, where the Zuptas are used to doing what they want and getting away with it.

But once the UK press picked up on the story, Geoghegan, her campaign and Bell Pottinger were doomed. Major clients departed, and the (non-Twitterbot) social media response was vehement and determined: this was unacceptable and it had to be stopped.

Geoghegan had committed the fatal PR crime of becoming the story and, with flaming irony, social media rage would ensure she was fired.

In December last year, at the age of just 33, Geoghegan had been appointed managing director of Bell Pottinger’s financial and corporate division, reward for her work on the Gupta account.

In July this year, she was forced to resign, along with others who had worked with her. Two months later Bell Pottinger was expelled from the PRCA for five years for inciting racial hatred, acting against the public interest and generally bringing the industry into disrepute, and a week after that the company went into administration.

It is worth pointing out that the destruction of Bell Pottinger was a rare instance in which mass social media rage became a force for good. For those who might be tempted to overstate the case, however, let’s not forget how it all began. Geoghegan had harnessed the destructive powers of social media and her weapon of choice eventually backfired and sunk her. No one who knows the story could ever again mistake her for a good, decent human being.

And yet, as we mentioned at the outset, Victoria Geoghegan is merely a cipher, a way of understanding how the PR industry works in its most pernicious and amoral form. Over the course of a year or so, she became the demon in the average South African’s ear, a disseminator of social poison who cared nought for the damage she was wreaking on an entire country. Yes, she was vile, someone who proudly displayed her charitable credentials as a supporter of schoolchildren in Nigeria, while being intimately involved in undermining the future of schoolchildren in South Africa.

But she was merely the person carrying the can when it all went down. How many like her had done this type of damage before and how many after her will do the same and worse? Who is more culpable: she or her father? Or, what about two other players in this dirty and destructive episode, Timothy Bell and James Henderson?

As Margaret Thatcher’s top spin doctor and then the founder of Bell Pottinger, Baron Bell is essentially British PR aristocracy, which might sound rather fancy but should not, we’d suggest, be considered an aspirational status unless being a self-inflated arse of dubious morality correlates with your vision of greatness. Bell was intimately involved in, and excited by, the early negotiations with his company’s new clients, the Guptas, but with the self-preservation instincts of a gutter weasel on garbage day, he soon spotted the impending disaster and skittered into disaffected and condescending aginous otter in an oil slick, lacked such foresight. After pushing the how-should-I-knowwhat-my- employees-were-up-to? defence as far as it could go, he was forced to take a fall just days before the PRCA ruling in September this year. His resignation proved futile. His fiancée, Heather Kerzner, the socialite ex-wife of Sol Kerzner, had invested millions of pounds in Bell Pottinger only months before the Gupta scandal started playing out and together the two owned 37% of the company, a share that quickly became worthless. A few days after Henderson’s resignation, the Henderson-Kerzner wedding was put on indefinite hold.

There’s only so much schadenfreude to be extracted in the circumstances, but South African observers took what they could. Bell and Henderson were industry heavyweights who had built up Bell Pottinger into an enormously effective company that employed hundreds of people and influenced millions. To suggest that this isn’t a case in isolation, and that the two men and their Geoghegan-esque minions are part of a greater problem, is an understatement of some magnitude.

50 People who Stuffed up the World is published by Burnet Media, Distributed by Jacana Media. RRP: R250. Available at all good bookstores.