By Joe Cooper Downing Street was rocked this afternoon by the news that Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Chancellor Rishi Sunak are both to be issued fines by the police for breaking lockdown laws. Earlier today, officials confirmed that the pair, along with the Prime Minister’s wife Carrie Johnson, had received notification of the fines…
Category: Crisis management
It’s time to scrap the August Bank Holiday
By Giles Croot, Managing Partner Final weekend of August, final Bank Holiday of the spring-summer run… cold, wet, miserable. And are we surprised? Of course not. August Bank Holidays are almost always a wash out. Last year being the exception – so remarkable that we were all shocked by the warm sunny weather. So why…
Batten down the hatches: lessons for the next mega-crisis
By Ian Morris, Partner No-one really expected the Covid-19 pandemic. Even the world’s most crisis-ready organisations and communications teams will have been tested by it. But those who had invested time and effort in proactively preparing for the worst will have negotiated the last few months with a lot more success than their under-prepared counterparts….
China, Leicester, Switzerland and mixed messages
By Simon Gentry, Managing Partner As break-ups go, the UK China split is looking as messy as they come – and its set to get much worse. Only five short years ago the then Chancellor, George Osborne, was talking of a golden period in Sino-British relations and claiming that the UK was China’s best friend…
Focussing the attention of the public on Leicester is potentially fraught with problems
By Paul Kelly, Managing Partner “Why do you want to live in Leicester?” Back in the early 1980s when, I was considering going to university in the city this was the question my friends all asked. Most of them had never heard of it. My stock response was I liked both the university and the…
Cummings roadtrip didn’t need to become the only story in town
By Giles Croot, Managing Partner How did the Government machine so spectacularly fail to manage the story about Dominic Cummings trip to Durham? It’s said that “a lie is half way around the world before the truth has got its shoes on”… but in this case the “truth” – or to be more accurate Dominic…
Going concern or concerned about going: why director’s communications have never been more important
By Charlie Ansdell, Managing Partner Who’d be a company director at a time like this? 70% of British companies have furloughed staff according to the British Chamber of Commerce; research from SME bank Tide in early April showed that 37% of small businesses would run out of cash in just six weeks. To cap it off, the…
The government moves on to a ‘test, track and trace’ strategy to contain the virus
By Simon Gentry Health Secretary Matt Hancock lead today’s press conference by saying that the social distancing rules are working. He added that lifting the restrictions too soon would risk a second peak. The main focus of the conference was on testing capacity. He said that testing capacity is currently at 51,000 a day, still…
Preparing for the new normal – Webinar
This webinar will take place at 11am on Wednesday 29 April. The Covid-19 pandemic has profoundly changed the way we live and work. As we plan for our emergence from lockdown, how do we motivate staff to return to the workplace, re-engage our customers and communicate with our investors in the post-pandemic world? While going…
Raab states that PM remains “very much in charge of the government”
By Tim Le Couilliard In the first Downing Street briefing since Prime Minister Boris Johnson was admitted to hospital, the Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab delivered an update on the government’s response to the coronavirus. It was a welcome sight to see the Chief Medical Officer, Professor Chris Whitty, back at the podium, having recently recovered…