Sports Direct’s wideboy boss will get his own chapter in my forthcoming book, Great PR Cock-ups of Our Time

THIS was the week billionaire Mike Ashley of Sports Direct added yet another chapter to my unwritten best-seller, Great PR Cockups Of Our Time. Provisionally, this never-to-be- started masterpiece will be subtitled: ‘What Could Possibly Go Wrong?’

The story begins with our anti-hero Mike under fire from all sides over his abominable treatment of staff at his company’s warehouse in Shirebrook, Derbyshire.

MPs are castigating him over his company’s ‘six strikes in six months and you’re out’ rule, under which employees who chat too much or call in sick too often are fired, with one woman said to be so terrified of the sack that she gave birth in a company toilet.

To add to his woes, the people at Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs are after him for paying less than the statutory minimum wage, demanding back-payments to staff and threatening hefty fines.

Meanwhile, the unions want his guts for garters over his zero-hours contracts, his rip- off practice of remunerating workers through pre-paid cards, which he charges them a fortune to use, and his policy of docking 15 minutes’ pay from anyone who clocks in one minute late.

Frisked

Oh, and everyone is attacking him for submitting staff to lengthy, humiliating searches every time they leave the company’s premises, while paying them nothing for the time they spend queuing to be frisked.

So the scene is set for Mr Ashley’s PR brainwave. This Wednesday’s AGM, he told himself, would be the perfect opportunity to win a bit of good publicity for a change.

With a pack of TV cameramen and reporters in tow, he would show the world that he is not the corrupt, money-grubbing wideboy and ruthless exploiter of the poor his critics like to portray. This would be his chance to show that he is just an ordinary, decent bloke, content to be treated exactly as he treats his staff.

And what better way to prove it to the watching media, thought this budding PR maestro, than to submit cheerfully to one of those ‘humiliating’ searches about which his tormentors have made such a fuss? What could possibly go wrong? As the whole world now knows, the oneword answer is: everything.

With a burly Sports Direct security guard standing over him, first Mr Ashley dug into his left-hand trouser pocket, pulling out its contents to place in the airport-style tray in front of him.

Whoops! Out came a wad of £50 notes — about £1,000 — the sort of money it would take his worst-paid employees more than 150 hours’ work to earn.

Forcing a smile, though with beads of sweat forming on his brow, he plunged his hand into his other pocket, producing a few scraps of paper and another fistful of crumpled notes, including several more fifties and a couple of tenners.

While the security guard stared, dumbstruck, at the king’s ransom sitting in the tray, a woman broke the stunned silence with the somewhat superfluous observation: ‘Got a lot of cash there.’

‘Lot of cash,’ agreed someone else. Well, what else was there to be said?

Smile fast fading as the horror of the situation dawned on him, Mr Ashley attempted to laugh it off, saying: ‘Yes, I’ve been to the casino,’ before adding matily to the Press: ‘Now, don’t please write that.’ But nobody seemed in the mood for feeble jokes.

Here was the real-life incarnation of the odious Loadsamoney, with the single difference that, unlike Harry Enfield’s boastful comic character, Mr Ashley would clearly have been much happier if his pockets had contained nothing more than an old bus ticket and 37p.

Indeed, it is hard to imagine how the stunt could have backfired more spectacularly. Yes, we all knew Mr Ashley was vastly rich. But if you’re under attack for being a thoroughly dodgy character, who mercilessly exploits his employees, what better way to illustrate the fact than producing wads of £50 notes from your pockets when you’re surrounded by underpaid staff?

Hapless

How many of us, anyway — no matter how rich — carry around quite so much cash in such an unwieldy denomination, which must cause endless problems with change?

Enough to say that he couldn’t have earned a worse press — ‘Wad a Moron’ shrieked one of the red-tops from yesterday’s front page — if he’d sat down to a ten- course banquet in the middle of a refugee camp full of starving children.

But he’s hardly alone among prominent public figures who have been hoist by their own petard when they’ve staged publicity stunts that have gone hideously wrong.

In my unwritten best- seller, you’ll find chapters devoted to politicians of every hue whose efforts to present themselves in a good light have blown up in their faces. Take poor, hapless, Ed Miliband, who correctly identified his image problem as a millionaire metropolitan geek, leading the party of the downtrodden workers. What better way to present himself as a man of the people, or so his advisers thought, than posing for photographs with his wife in his decidedly modest little kitchen? What could possibly go wrong? Just one thing, as most will recall. The galley in question turned out to be reserved for the use of the nanny, while the Milibands themselves were revealed to have a palatial kitchen downstairs, straight out of the glossy pages of House & Garden.

Cue endless embarrassing Press investigations of the hard-Left family’s wealth, property dealings and tax affairs.

Or take David Cameron, who felt similarly burdened by the public’s perception of him as an out-of-touch toff.

How better to show that he shared the tastes of the man in the street than by posing as an avid football fan and loyal supporter of Aston Villa? What could possibly go wrong? Nothing at all — apart from that all-toomemorable occasion when the team he supported momentarily slipped his mind and he came out instead for West Ham. Oh, well, similar colours, I suppose, but a devastating own goal, nevertheless.

Meanwhile, Mr Cameron earns a separate chapter in my book for his effort to present himself as leader of Britain’s ‘ greenest Government ever’, rubbing the point home by riding his bicycle to the Commons for the benefit of the waiting photographers.

Posing

What could possibly go wrong, he surely thought, except that those pesky photographers lingered for long enough to capture the Prime Minister’s chauffeurdriven, gas-guzzling limousine following his bike at a discreet distance, with just his red boxes aboard.

Or consider Jeremy Corbyn, who grew up in a seven-bedroom manor house in rural Shropshire and attended private and grammar schools (while topping up his income these days with appearances on Iranian state-controlled TV, at £5,000 a time).

What more effective way to show that he shares the daily frustrations of less fortunate Britons than by posing for the cameras, sitting on the floor in an allegedly ‘ram-packed’ Virgin train? What could possibly go wrong? But readers will be well aware of the answer to that one, too.

So let me end with a revolutionary suggestion to politicians and public figures everywhere. If your PR teams dream up stunts to present you as something you’re not, tell them to get lost.

Otherwise, nine times out of ten, you’ll get caught and you’ll focus attention ever more sharply on the very image problem you’re trying to solve.

In short, let the public take you and judge you for exactly what you are, warts and all. In Mr Ashley’s case, I fear this means being judged as a bone-headed, money-grubbing brute, who treats employees contemptibly. But we knew that before he earned his chapter in Great PR Cock-ups Of Our Time.