WEDNESDAY 23 MAR 2011 12:45 PM
POWER OF PERSUSASION
Enthralled by the power of persuasion, the director of communications for the Press Complaints Commission is ushering in a new era of proactivity and transparency. Neil Gibbons reports.
Photographs by Sam Friedrich.
Noticed anything different about the Press Complaints Commission recently? Don’t worry, it’s not just you – because in growing its profile, adopting a more vocal personality, and showing a greater willingness to engage, the PCC is demonstrating a marked change of behaviour.
It’s all part of a plan to put the organisation on the front foot, initiated by director of communications Jonathan Collett.
“My brief when I came here was simple,” he says. “It was that the PCC had a great story to tell but needed to tell it.” And so drawing on a career in politics, corporate affairs and advertising, he’s helping the PCC to engage with opinion formers and improve sentiment.
Fortunately, he’s been interested in the power of argument and persuasion for as long as he can remember. He grew up in Nuneaton, attending Bablake School in Coventry. An avid cricketer and passionate Aston Villa fan, he was always politically orientated. “I’d watch the party conference and Commons debates, and was particularly interested by history and economics – they taught me how to frame arguments.”
He took his 11-plus a year early so was always a year ahead at school. It meant that he initially joined the University of Manchester at the age of just 17, the youngest person on the politics and modern history course. His peers included Liam Byrne, chief secretary to the Treasury, and Alex Cole, now managing director at Freud PR.
“It was a very small course,” he says. “There were only 50 people on it which meant that the tutorials were very intense.”
Jonathan was fortunate to be in the city during the Madchester era of The Stone Roses, Happy Mondays and Inspiral Carpets. “I really enjoyed it there,” he says. “It was culturally very inspiring.”
But for a young man fascinated by the political process, Manchester maybe wasn’t the place to be. His inevitable move to the London came about as the result of what he calls “a lucky break, something that taps through my career.”
He wrote a thesis in his third year on the Bruges Group, then at the centre of the debate over the Maastricht Treaty, and met several senior members. “I was lucky enough to be offered a job straight after graduating,” he says. “On 1 July 1993, I went straight to London to start working for them.”
It was Dr Martin Holmes who saw the potential in him. “Hiring Jonathan was the best decision I made in my nine years as co-chairman,” he recalls. “He was a brilliant campaign director who combined wisdom, energy and dedication in equal measure. The success of the Bruges Group in that period - particularly our campaign to save the pound - was largely due to Jonathan’s many talents and capacity for hard work.”
Jonathan was, in his own words, “thrown right into a maelstrom”, having to do interviews on the likes of CNN and the BBC in his first week. But in successfully negotiating this baptism of fire, he became a key player in the group’s renaissance.
One of the most active and prominent members of the group was then Shadow Defence Secretary Iain Duncan Smith. In 2001, he approached Jonathan and offered him a role in the press office of his department. Jonathan recalls IDS as a tremendous subject to work for: “He was very dogged and was making a name for himself by attacking and embarrassing Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon.”
Jonathan was tasked with handling the Opposition’s response to hot-button topics such as the mooted Euro army and the ongoing threat from rogue states. “The work was tough,” he recalls. “Iain had high expectations and was very ambitious. But it helped my career, as it meant dealing with leading journalists and political editors.”
Although the work was intense, Jonathan had extra-vocational interests. As part of the Westminster Foundation for Democracy, a charitable foundation, he spent time in countries from Tanzania to Azerbaijan, helping to train them in presidential elections, party political broadcasts and the like.
Back at the coalface, he was promoted to a wider foreign affairs brief under Michael Ancram. Afghanistan had been the major foreign affairs issue, but from 2003, Iraq became more significant.
“The PCC had a great story to tell but needed to tell it. We want to get on the front foot and make sure opinion formers, the public, and politicians understand the work that the PCC does”
With his defence and foreign affairs experience, Jonathan was able to position himself as the party’s expert on Iraq. He sat through every minute of the Hutton inquiry so was the go-to man when Michael Howard, keen to keep up the pressure on the Prime Minister, wanted a compendium of evidence and key facts. He was to produce it alongside junior MP David Cameron.
“We worked closely together,” Jonathan recalls. “You could instantly tell he had a formidable brain, very sharp. He’s probably the best politician I’ve worked with. He has a genius for listening to people’s ideas and refining them to make them easily understood.”
The compendium had a major impact – “David and I built our names on the back of it, really.” News anchor Jon Snow described it as the best researched document to come from the Conservative party in a decade. And thrust into the limelight, Jonathan was chosen to be Michael Howard’s press spokesman, working closely with the party’s director of communications Lord Black, now executive director of Telegraph Media Group.
“Jonathan has all the skills of a first class communicator,” says Lord Black. “He understands the audiences, masters his subject with a frightening degree of authority and instinctively knows the best way to deliver the message. He was a formidable spokesman for Michael Howard, and his encyclopaedic knowledge of Iraq - and his visceral understanding of how it played among journalists and opinion formers - was absolutely vital.”
It was the run up to the 2005 election and Jonathan estimates that he travelled 15,000 miles in five weeks, learning a great deal about crisis management and the media’s ability to whip up a story. On one occasion, the tax disc of the campaign bus was found to be out of date. On another, after calling for greater hygiene controls in hospital, Howard neglected to use the alcohol rub on a ward visit.
Jonathan also had to contend with the Grim Reapers, a team of Labour campaigners in fancy dress sent by Alastair Campbell to disrupt public appearances, as well as Newsnight’s gleefully intrusive Michael Crick. “I had to be very firm with him,” Jonathan laughs. “But overall the mood on the campaign trail was very good.”
Of course, the campaign ended in defeat. The immediate aftermath saw inevitable discussions about Howard’s future as leader, and he responded by quickly announcing he would stand down – but only once his successor had been chosen. With Howard remaining as caretaker leader until December 2005, Jonathan agreed to stay too – a period that called for constant diplomacy.
The 2005 party conference for example was a hotbed of campaigning by the leadership contenders. As Howard wasn’t involved, Jonathan could enjoy a spectator’s view of proceedings. “At the same time, I had to be incredibly responsible and ensure that Howard was seen to be scrupulously neutral.”
As the battle approached its conclusion, Jonathan considered his options. His Conservative party role had given him decent profile and he was recommended to media group News International.
He was named public affairs manager on the same day that David Cameron was appointed leader of the Conservative Party.With a new challenge to look forward to, Jonathan took a few weeks off allowing him to start his new job fully recharged.
The News International role saw him working for the corporate entity rather than for the individual newspaper brands. In this corporate affairs role, working closely with Les Hinton, he liaised with key decision-makers in the political parties, while managing the company’s response to key issues such as the Gower Review of Intellectual Property – “It was a chance for me to use the skills I had learnt during the Hutton Inquiry.”
As a former party insider, he was able to advise News International on emerging characters in the Conservative party. However, engaging with the Labour government meant forming relationships with people from across the political divide. “I found that easy though,” he says. “Politics is such a bubble that even in a political party, you’re closer to the opposition than to the public.”
More interesting was the transition from a political environment to a corporate one. What were the main differences? “Apart from better pay and conditions? I’d say it’s that people are more inclined to take risks and consider the short term in politics – because of the political cycle. In the corporate world, things have to be done very carefully done – there are shareholders to consider.”
It wasn’t a reactive role by any means. In the year that he was there, he helped News International to make the transition into a carbon neutral company, working with the Carbon Trust and telling this story to the wider world.
In 2007, Jonathan was approached by Baroness Buscombe, who persuaded him to come back to Westminster to head up the comms function for the Advertising Association. “I’d always been fascinated by advertising. It was similar to politics in that it’s all about persuasion. But I’d thought about crossing over for a while. I thought it would broaden my career.”
The AA was a fascinating place. It didn’t just comprise advertising agencies, but also media owners and advertisers, bringing them all round the table to talk to the government with a single voice. “It was a real battle. There’s a lot of hostility to advertising – from alcohol and junk food advertising to rules on advertising to children.”
Jonathan’s job was to make the industry’s stance understood. “Our point was that it’s better to use persuasion than compulsion. We wanted to make change in a positive way.”
The biggest manifestation of that idea was the Change for Life campaign. Under threat of a 9pm watershed on advertising junk food, the AA was able to “virtually turn that on its head”. Instead, it threw its weight behind a campaign to get the public fit for 2012. “The way to tackle obesity wasn’t to ban advertising; that has no effect. It’s to encourage people to eat healthily and exercise more.”
In concrete terms, the AA formed a partnership with the Department of Health while the industry agreed to contribute £200 million to a Business for Life scheme. “Responsibility deals like this were early manifestations of the Big Society,” he says.
While he enjoyed working as a champion for the industry, an intriguing role came along. The director of the Press Complaints Commission approached Jonathan, after a recommendation from Baroness Buscombe who’d become its chairman in April 2009.
Jonathan joined as director of communications later that year, excited by a simple but engaging brief: “It has a reputation for high professionalism but much of its work – such as in complaints pre-publication [it has a 24-hour advice line where complainants can seek advice about articles they think might appear] – goes unseen.”
Jonathan’s challenge was to show that the PCC isn’t a top-down body issuing edicts, but a collaborative organisation that mediates between parties and brings resolutions much quicker than law could ever hope to. It’s also cost free, paid for entirely by the industry.
“At the same time, we’ve had to explain that we’re independent. Of our 17 committee members, 10 are drawn from the public.”
For an industry as maligned as the press, Jonathan’s brief has been to make the Commission much more proactive. “We want to get on the front foot and make sure opinion formers, the public, and politicians understand the work that the PCC does.”
In practical terms, this has seen Jonathan initiate a full revamp of the Commission’s annual review, its web presence and how it engages with stakeholders. It has begun to use Twitter, enabling it to explain what it does “in a clear and coherent way”. And last year, for the first time, the Commission hosted a parliamentary reception – to help create lines of dialogue. “We’re now in constant dialogue with government officials and departments, and are really trying to make sure the front bench understands our role.”
And in the name of transparency, Jonathan and his four-strong comms team regularly publicise specific adjudications “to give us the hook to show how we operate”.
So it’s an exciting time for the PCC. Being a voluntary body not constrained by legislation, it is showing itself to be agile, an ingredient crucial to its success.
“Our speediness to evolve is a key strength,” says Jonathan. “For instance, there’s a huge technological change occurring. Just recently, the commission gave a landmark ruling regarding the republication of tweets by a civil servant which would generally - with some exceptions - justify the press using tweets. We’re able to quickly react to developments in society and evolve.”
Curriculum Vitae: Jonathan Collett
2009 – present Director of communications, Press Complaints Commission
2007 – 09 Director of communications, Advertising Association
2006 – 07 Public affairs manager, News International
2004 – 06 Press spokesman, Leader of the Opposition, Conservative Party
2001 – 04 Senior press officer, Foreign Affairs, Conservative Party
1994 – 2001 Director, The Bruges Group
Education: University of Manchester, Politics & Modern History
Bablake School, Coventry
Personal Interests: Cricket, football
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