Bell Pottinger has fallen over its own slop bucket

IN A PREVIOUS era, night soil wagons would trundle through the back alleys of the world. Their task was to empty, tidily and discretely, the slop buckets containing cities’ accumulated urine and excrement.

Eventually came water-borne sewage and the slop-bucket empties had to find new work. That’s when the modern public relations industry came into being.

That, metaphorically speaking, is what PR practitioners do. They empty the slop-buckets of capitalism as tidily and discretely as possible.

And mostly they are very good at it. With glitz and glamour, they blind and bedazzle a media that, increasingly, lacks the resources and energy to examine critically the glossy tales they spin on behalf of their clients. With adroit sleight of hand they promote the celebrities, rather than issues, that obsess the collective public mind.

But, just occasionally, even the best of them stumble and kick over a slop bucket. That’s what happened to Bell Pottinger, the British PR agency that has moved from being the world’s number one, straight on to the scrapheap.

The kiss of death was the campaign Bell Pottinger ran on behalf of Oakbay, owned by the Gupta family, controversial cronies of President Jacob Zuma.

Mired in allegations of state capture – subverting national institutions to personal benefit – they turned to Bell Pottinger.

This was not Bell Pottinger’s first walk on the dark side. Over the years, it built a reputation for being willing to represent anyone who could afford its eye-watering fees.

They acted for the family foundation of Augusto Pinochet, the Chilean dictator whose junta murdered thousands of people, tortured tens of thousands and looted the nation’s wealth.

They acted for the Dutch oil company Trafigura, which had solved its problem of a cargo of toxic waste that no European port would allow it to offload, by dumping it on the Ivory Coast. At least 17 people died and 30 000 became very ill. Trafigura paid $198 million in fines, without admitting culpability, and settled the class action instituted by the victims with a $42m payout.

What made their campaign for the Guptas different was not only that it was direct interference by a foreign company in the daily politics of another independent, friendly nation. It was also that the campaign was perhaps the first time all the negative aspects of our modern online lives – fake news, trolling, smears, harassment and abuse – were deliberately consolidated by a supposedly reputable firm to cause maximum damage.

Thousands of fake Facebook and Twitter accounts were set up. Over a year, 220 000 fake tweets were sent out, defaming individual South Africans and threatening them with injury, rape and death.

It backfired spectacularly. This week the appeal committee of the British PR industry oversight body suspended Bell Pottinger’s accreditation for “at least” five years for actions it found to be unethical and responsible for sowing racial discord.

The firm’s chief executive has resigned, as have other executives. Its blue chip clients, belatedly fearing reputational contagion, are bailing out.

Lord Tim Bell, who founded Bell Pottinger almost 30 years ago but departed from it last year after warning against the “smelly” activities undertaken for the Guptas, thinks the firm is unlikely to survive. A major shareholder, who holds 27% of the firm, has simply walked away, writing off its £5 million (R84m) stake as irretrievable.

But while Bell Pottinger may sink, the major protagonists in this dirty saga will not suffer overly. The temporarily disgraced toffs who ran the campaign and the firm will be rehabilitated soon enough. The British upper classes are endlessly tolerant of the peccadillos of their own.

And in South Africa, the initiators of the campaign remain untouched and apparently untouchable. As Justice Malala points out in an angry analysis in The Guardian: “If Bell Pottinger is so sorry, why hasn’t it disclosed who briefed it? What the briefs were? How they operated with these organisations?”

That might still happen. One reason Bell Pottinger was routed is that South Africans are not easily taken in. Social media fundis quickly put together the cookie trail that exposed its machinations, and social activists quickly brought political pressure to bear.

There are still questions to be asked, leads to be followed. There might be a few more slop-buckets of steaming scandal that will be upended.

● Follow WSM on Twitter @ TheJaundicedEye