Crushing morale, killing productivity – why do offices put up with meetings?

Simon Jenkins in The Guardian


Just off to a meeting? Stop right now. Turn back. You will be stuck in an overheated room, chained to a table for an absurd length of time and stopped from proper work. Worse, we are now told that just sitting there is a killer. It shortens life. You will die.  

According to Public Health England, we are so addicted to meetings that we don’t realise the threat they pose to ourselves and our organisations. Its chief executive, Duncan Selbie, told this week’s annual meeting that sitting in meetings “haemorrhages productivity”. It slows metabolism and affects the body’s capacity to regulate its sugar and thus blood pressure. This leads to obesity, diabetes, cancer … and death. So don’t do it. Don’t go.

The Get Britain Standing campaign agrees. It says that sedentary office activity is now as dangerous to health as smoking. It takes an hour of exercise to eliminate the toxins built up in one round-table session. Meanwhile, the Columbia University Medical Center this week produced a no less alarming statistic. After tracking 8,000 individuals in all walks of life, it concluded that inactivity for 13 hours a day (including sleep) makes “risk of death” 2.6 times more likely than it is for inactivity of less than 11 hours.

The best meeting is spent walking, like in The West Wing. (The fact that all West Wingers seem on the verge of a heart attack is apparently irrelevant.) Mike Loosemore of the Institute of Sport, Exercise and Health rather desperately advises regularly standing up and getting a glass of water. Neanderthals must be laughing themselves sick at what Homo sapiens has to do just to survive.

While we can take that with a pinch of salt, it feeds a wider meetings malaise. All the revolutions of the internet – Skype, Facebook, Twitter – have not diminished humankind’s craving to gather in tedious conclave. Executives ruthless towards workplace productivity are careless of their own offices. Meetings are the cocaine rush of the corporation. I am told there are scores of executives at the BBC, an institution famously addicted to the meetings culture, who are so high on the stuff that they spend the entire day in meetings, and return home with no one any the wiser, except those who pay their salaries.
It is half a century since C Northcote Parkinson first addressed the meeting as social anthropology, yielding his celebrated “coefficient of inefficiency”. It calculated that a meeting of just five people was “most likely to act with competence, secrecy and speed”. Few such bodies exist because five swiftly expands to nine: and two of the nine tend to be “merely ornamental”, people whom no one has the heart to exclude.

Above nine, said Parkinson, “the organism begins to perish”. Once the meeting reaches 20 people, it may as well go on to 100, since by then most of those present are not contributing. They are spectating, talking to each other, squabbling or forming lobbies. Nowadays many are peering at their phones or tablets – pretending to take notes, or frantic not to fall asleep. All are praying for “any other business”.

Management research on meetings is uniformly hostile, yet like most research it has not the slightest practical effect. A recent study by Microsoft, America Online and Salary.com found that the average person works only three days a week. The rest of working time was regarded as wasted, with “unproductive meetings” heading the list. Workers on average regard a third of any meeting as pointless.

Minnesota University’s “decisions” guru, the psychologist Kathleen Vohs, has shown that most executives have a limited stock of “cognitive resource”. It depletes over time, like physical energy. People get impatient, they tire and take worse decisions. Curiously, they leave feeling exhausted, despite hours spent doing nothing at all. Four-hour board or “strategy” meetings are probably disastrous to the firm, inducing torpor, claustrophobia and misjudgment.

Yet still recruits arrive from management schools and consultancies, brilliant zombies doped to the eyeballs in presentations “delivering strategic solutions going forward by thinking out of the box”. They are like chateau generals, kept well away from the front line, versed in the parlour games of the articulate classes. They are for coffee and biscuits, not the watercooler.

Nothing is likely to cut this flab. The meeting has become the ceremony of executive importance: who calls it, who chairs it, who presents to it, who is invited and who is not. Its status is a classic cause of office “fomo” – fear of missing out. It soon develops its Harlequinade, the bad jokesmith, the unstoppable talker, the maddening interrupter, the toadies, bad-mouthers, extroverts and those who just sit in silent despair. None is producing goods or services. In short the meeting is the office as religion. Its sacraments, creeds and acolytes are found in agendas, minutes and note-takers. Its liturgy is the canticle of the PowerPoint. The modern office even has its ritual sanctuary, the “meeting room”: 11.00 for matins, 2.30 for vespers.

Describing meetings as “secret killers of productivity”, Forbes magazine recently suggested they be simply banned, or held “only on Wednesdays” – all other decisions to be taken in absentia. Anyone who needs to be consulted – the “coordination” role of meetings – will find out soon enough. If not they don’t really need to know. The few brave organisations that have experimented with this drastic step report phenomenal improvements in workrate. One worker who said that if he missed a meeting, “my boss would probably kill me”, was told: “In that case he probably should.”

The number, length and size of meetings must be a sound Parkinsonian indicator of an organisation’s productivity or decay. The FTSE or the government should publish an annual league table of meetings per employee per week. It would illustrate the thesis by economist Joseph Schumpeter that all organisations have a natural lifecycle: they grow, they fatten, they ossify into meetings, and they die – unless funded by the state.

I bet Apple had few meetings in the early Steve Jobs days, but I bet it has thousands now. If so, as Parkinson warned of all who broke his laws, sell the shares. As for that meeting, skip it – and live.

How Warren Buffett broke American capitalism

Robin Harding in the Financial Times

Growing up, I admired nobody more than Warren Buffett, the greatest investor ever. His achievement is towering. The market is an implacable opponent but here was a man who beat it year after year, making $75bn out of nothing but wisdom and charm. There was moral purity in his modesty, his ethics and his quiet attachment to home in Omaha, Nebraska. What footballer, politician or thinker could compare?

Now 87, Mr Buffett wields huge influence over US business and finance, usually positive. He pushed companies to expense stock options, warned of danger in derivatives and taught the public to invest long term in low-cost index funds. 

But how ever much you admire the man, his influence has a dark side because the beating heart of Buffettism, celebrated in a thousand investment books, is to avoid competition and minimise capital investment in the real economy. 

 A torrent of recent studies show how exactly those forces — diminished competition, rising profits and lower investment — afflict the US. Economists Jan de Loecker and Jan Eeckhout chart a rise in corporate mark-ups, a measure linked to profit margins, from 18 per cent in 1980 to 67 per cent today. In a paper presented at the Brookings Institution last week, Germán Gutiérrez and Thomas Philippon show how investment has fallen relative to profitability. Mr Buffett did not cause these trends. However, they are central to his fortune. When you celebrate him, you celebrate them. 

If he had found a few truly unusual companies and bought them on the cheap there would be no issue. But acolytes are taking his methods economy-wide Mr Buffett is completely honest about his desire to reduce competition. He just calls it by a folksy name — “widening the moat”. “I don’t want a business that’s easy for competitors. I want a business with a moat around it with a very valuable castle in the middle,” he said in 2007. 

He tells Berkshire Hathaway managers to widen their moat every year. The Buffett definition of good management is therefore clear. If you have effective competitors, you are doing it wrong. 

As with many aspects of his career, Mr Buffett used to act more visibly. An example is his 1977 purchase of the Buffalo Evening News. He bought this newspaper for $32.5m, a high multiple of its $1.7m operating profit, then launched a Sunday edition and drove the competing Buffalo Courier-Express out of business. By 1986, the renamed Buffalo News was a local monopoly making $35m in pre-tax profit. At the time, it was Mr Buffett’s largest single investment. 

His concept of a moat is linked to his views on capital investment: the beauty of one is you do not need the other. One of his most celebrated purchases is See’s Candies, a company he bought for $25m in 1972. Every year, Mr Buffett raised prices. So strong was its brand that despite sales growing little, profits grew mightily, with barely any need for capital investment. “The ideal business is one that takes no capital, and yet grows,” he said last year. 

His statement is unquestionably true for an investor. For an economy, it produces the pattern above: low investment relative to higher profits. A line attributed to business partner Charlie Munger in Alice Schroeder’s biography of Mr Buffett, The Snowball, is revealing: “Munger had always kidded Buffett that his management technique was to take out all the cash from a company and raise prices.” That does sum it up. 

If Mr Buffett in his brilliance had found a few truly unusual companies and bought them on the cheap there would be no issue. But acolytes are taking his methods economy-wide.

These days, Mr Buffett has two main ways of putting his money to work. On one hand, he is finally investing in physical assets, although only in regulated industries such as electricity and railroads where returns are largely guaranteed. On the other, he is working with Brazilian private equity firm 3G as it slashes costs to the bone and drives up margins at Burger King and food company Kraft Heinz. 

Kraft now makes a 23 per cent operating margin and an enormous return on tangible capital. In a competitive market, those high margins ought to present an opportunity for rivals to invest and steal market share. Instead, Kraft competitors such as Unilever and Nestlé are under pressure from their owners — a mixture of index funds and Buffett-like activists — to match those sky-high margins. If rivals also cut, rather than invest and compete, Kraft can cut even more. A kind of Buffett equilibrium is taking hold. 

To be clear, this is not the only reason for declining investment and higher profits in the US. Nor is there a simple solution. Better antitrust enforcement would help, but recent proposals for a complete revamp of competition policy are not well founded. Although research linking lack of competition to cross-ownership by institutional funds is interesting, it does not capture the reality of private equity operators such as 3G. 

We can decide who to admire. Mr Buffett is brilliant at buying into monopoly profits, but he does not start companies or gamble on new ideas. America is full of entrepreneurs who do. Elon Musk is investing in two wildly risky and competitive sectors: automobiles and space. Even the much-reviled Koch brothers built most of their fortune on investment in the real economy. Celebrate that kind of business. It is the kind America needs.

Only those obsessed with sex bring their religion to politics or What the pope should tell Jacob Rees-Mogg: ‘You ain’t no Catholic, bruv’

Politicians use their faith to defend misogynist, homophobic views. Co-religionists shouldn’t let them get away with it

Zoe Williams in The Guardian

The problem with people who bring religion to their politics is that they’re obsessed with sex. It’s never “I’m a devout Anglican, therefore I couldn’t possibly vote for a cap on social security payments (Acts 4:34).” When a politician’s potted history starts “a committed Christian”, you can bet this isn’t a prelude to a CV full of redistributive tax policies. It’s all sodomy and foetuses, Tim Farron on a brightly lit TV sofa explaining why the adamantine but immeasurable quality of his “conscience” prevents him from according some people’s sexuality the same dignity as other people’s, or Jacob Rees-Mogg informing the pregnant victims of rape or incest that abortion is not an option, for, unlikely as it seems, this is what his Lord had in mind.

Then everyone disappears down the rabbit hole of church versus state, and what accommodations a reasonable political system can make to an immovable set of beliefs that are part of our cultural history and must not be erased. It’s a basic category error: the principle is not that religion has no place in politics; it’s that sex has no place in politics. If this assertion means we also have to stop going into a moral panic every time a minister has an affair, I’m OK with that.

The irreligious conservative bystander tends to respond with a shrug and wonder what the fuss is all about. Gay rights are well enough established that, even had the Liberal Democrats not been a spent electoral force, Farron’s reservations were unlikely to result in any concrete change. If Rees-Mogg were to become prime minister tomorrow, the unwanted pregnancies of rape victims would be the least of our problems. This is chalked up to the relatively new concept of “liberal intolerance”; we liberals have had our own way for so long that we no longer allow our opponents even to think a thing we disapprove of.

The hitch in that insouciance is that, when your sexuality is deplored by your political system, you are brutalised by the institutions that surround it. You effectively operate outside the protection of the law. We know this from the way gay-bashing was investigated by police in the 50s and 60s (short version; it wasn’t), we know this from the deaths of gay rights activists from Bangladesh to Jamaica to Cameroon. Homophobia has a curious, expansionist tendency: it is never enough to simply think less of a person for their sexual preferences. There is always an undercurrent of wanting to prove that disapproval with violence, or the turning-a-blind-eye thereto.

Anti-abortion rhetoric has a similar creeping quality, never confining itself to the rights of the unborn, always veering into women’s lives generally, how healthy they should stay, how much they should be paid, what their status should be on an operating table, or in a court of law. The sharp edge of the social violence is that when women don’t have access to legal abortion they die. So that’s why, when sex enters politics, we all make such a fuss. It may all be a lovable pose from the person with the conscience, but to those against whom their consciences recoil, it is a matter of life and death. Plus, there’s a simple hygiene issue: no consensual sex act is anybody else’s business. Nobody wants Rees-Mogg in their bedroom, even if only in his imagination.

It is in the interests of the homophobic and the misogynistic to cleave to the idea that this is a matter of religion, since it dignifies what would otherwise be a seedy and base diversion from the proper business of politics.

Less straightforward is why the others of their faith do so little to critique them. It is striking that actual religious figures in public life – rather than public figures who declaim their religion but hold it distinct from their office – tend to be much more interested in the pro-social aspects of their faith. The archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, last week put forward a radical plan for economic equality, not radical enough for my tastes, but situating him plainly in the territory of social justice.

Pope Francis is an ardent environmentalist and seeker after peace, positions that – at least in the first instance – would be anachronistic to find Biblical grounds for, but I think we can easily enough imagine having God’s approval. History has no shortage of religious movements for peace, equality and universal rights, and arguably, it is within church structures that warriors for social justice – the Oscar Romeros, the Desmond Tutus – are likely to be found, while hard-right authoritarians, the Mike Pences, exist outside it, enabling them to appropriate the energy and respectability of their faith without having to go back and check that closing down Planned Parenthood is the stated priority of the synod.

The mistake – also made with Islam – is to present all this on a sliding scale: Welby, with his bleeding-heart liberalism is a “moderate”, while Farron, unable to embrace sexual diversity even when his career depended on it, is “committed”. A Muslim whose religion spurred her to work for peace in the Middle East would be a “moderate”, while a Muslim who sought the immediate instatement of sharia law would be “extreme”.

Yet these positions are not gradations on the same scale: they are completely different world views, as different as pluralism and absolutism, as different as tolerance and authoritarianism, hanging on the same godhead not by ideological commonality but by historical coincidence. The pope, were he aware of him, would be compelled by this debate’s frame to defend Rees-Mogg, on the grounds that to do otherwise would be to allow religious conviction to be erased from the public sphere. What the pope ought to be able to do instead is to say: “Your conception of our religion, as a means of denigration and control, is not one I share or recognise.” Or, more succinctly: “You ain’t no Catholic, bruv.”

After Irma, let those who use our tax havens contribute to the repairs

The Caribbean poor might have been devastated by disaster, but their islands also host huge global wealth

Mariana Mazzucato in The Guardian

Did you see the image of Richard Branson, hiding with his friends and family in his expensive wine cellar on his private Caribbean island, tweeting that it felt like a fun slumber party from his youth? This while Hurricane Irma tore through the houses and lives of others in the region, offering a stark illustration of the way so-called natural events affect people of different socioeconomic classes in radically different ways.

Architects and urban planners call this “spatial inequality”. People living close to each other, whether in New York, London or on a Caribbean island, will experience life completely differently depending on the resources and opportunities they have available to them, determined principally by their economic and class background. 

Indeed, modern inequality increasingly reveals itself through the divergence of income and opportunities at a local level: the inequality between people living across London postcodes can be almost as large as those between average incomes in developed and developing countries. So a “natural” disaster (worsened by climate change factors) becomes a socioeconomic one, in the same way that the banking crisis, a manmade disaster, affected people differently.

Last week, after Hurricane Irma stormed the Caribbean, Gaston Browne, the prime minister of Antigua and Barbuda, appealed to the world, saying that 90% of buildings had been destroyed and 50% of the population was homeless. He criticised those “irresponsible leaders” denying climate change, when it was obvious to him that it was a key factor in the severity of the recent hurricanes. Now a second hurricane, Jose, is coming his way and he is trying to force residents of Barbuda to evacuate. Similarly, the French part of Saint Martin has been virtually destroyed, while two-thirds of the population of Puerto Rico is without power and 17% without water. Although it was slow to respond, the UK government has contributed £12m to the relief effort in the Caribbean, including a naval ship.

Browne called me in 2016 because he had read my book, The Entrepreneurial State, and wanted to know more about the various instruments that might be used to get back some value from investments that the Antigua and Barbuda government had made in the tourism industry. And would it be possible, he asked, for such future public investments to be conditional on the tourism industry ploughing back profits into public funds used for development? In this way, the taxpayers who propped up tourism could also benefit from reinvestments into areas such as health, education and transport for all.

While some may cynically dismiss this question, raising concerns about corruption of public finances in poor countries, the question Browne asked, even before the hurricane hit, was a good one: how should those extracting value from a place contribute to it?

But the questions are complicated and perhaps even uncomfortable for those asking them. The relief efforts needed are larger than they should be due to how these countries have been starved of tax revenue precisely because they have chosen to be tax havens.

The simpler question is to ask those “elites” who save billions by using tax shelters in the Caribbean, and the Big 4 accounting firms that enable their transactions, to contribute to the relief funds. The more difficult question is how to change the status quo and make sure that these companies actually contribute to the resources they take advantage of, both at home and abroad.

It’s more difficult because it requires admitting that the governments offering tax shelters, which today might be appealing for relief, are also extracting value from the governments of the foreign companies they host. So, for example, the UK taxpayers pay for infrastructure and education in the UK. British-based companies benefit from that. If they then benefit from havens to avoid paying tax to the UK, the tax shelters are, of course, a key part of the problem.

Clearly, a priority should be for companies, operating in countries offering tax havens in British Overseas Territories and the Commonwealth (or, indeed, elsewhere, such as Switzerland or Monte Carlo), to be more transparent. As argued by the Tax Justice Network, this would mean that countries in the Overseas Territories should “provide free, online and publicly accessible registers of all companies and trusts” located there.

In particular, it argues that this information should include which individuals own more than 10% of the shares in each company registered in the location; the names of the directors and the various locations where the companies have offices. The Network also argues that the cost of UK aid should be matched by revenue from the companies benefiting from the tax shelters and that full annual accounts should be prepared in accordance with a recognisable set of accounting standards. A modest proposal would be for the countries to raise money from the companies by increasing, for example, the charges they make for offshore services, or by charging tax on the companies based in these places.

But if the whole point was to avoid tax, would this cause the companies to leave? This gets us to the core of the problem. It is impossible to have real growth, and a reduction in inequality, through policies that are in the end just part of what we might call the “global value extraction business”. The real questions are exactly those that Browne asked me.

Governments need to make critical investments that transform their societies in ways that create capacity, knowledge and long-run growth. This will be expensive, but possible, if arrangements are put in place so that those benefiting from the common resources also plough their profits back into those very resources. This, however, requires moving away from the “us v them” mentality and recognising that the problem rests just as much on the forces causing inequality at home as on the tensions between the rich and poor countries. It’s more than just an argument about who has to pick up the bill for the mess, disaster after disaster.

Muslim 'solidarity'

Aasim Sajjad Akhtar in The Dawn


THE Rohingyas of Myanmar are back on the front pages, their desperate plight confirming that the ‘civilised’ world of the 21st century is still a living hell for what the legendary anti-imperialist Frantz Fanon’s called “the wretched of the earth”. The spectre of hundreds of thousands of Rohingyas fleeing Myanmar into neighbouring Bangla­desh is history repeating itself for the umpteenth time — evicted from their homes time and again, these permanent refugees have no place in a global order centred around exclusionary nation-states.

We Pakistanis have been bred on the notion that Muslims constitute an extra-territorial community of sorts; hence our solidarity with the Rohingyas and lament of their neglect by the rest of the (infidel) world. Our sentiments vis-à-vis other disenfranchised ‘Muslim’ communities are similar — Kashmiris top the list, but Bosnians, Pales­tinians and Chechens are also beneficiaries of our ‘Muslim’ solidarity. Standing with the oppressed is an entirely laudable endeavour. But in picking some instances of suffering and remaining shamefully silent on others, we demonstrate only how much hypocrisy supposedly civilised ‘nations’ are capable of.

The Kurds have been on the receiving end of Turkish and Iraqi state violence, but I can’t think of many Pakistanis whose hearts cry out for them (let alone state functionaries issuing press statements and civil society activists organising protests). West African communities like the Yoruba and Igbo too have been victims of state-sponsored pogroms across the territorial boundaries of Nigeria, Togo and Benin. Most Pakistanis have probably never even heard these names.

Closer to home, the (predominantly Hindu) Tamils of Sri Lanka are amongst the most oppressed minority communities in the world. But Pakistani officialdom’s close ties to the Sri Lankan state means there has always been silence when the latter has undertaken pogroms against Tamil populations. In 2008-9, a series of military operations in the north of Sri Lanka undertaken in the name of crushing the Tamil separatist movement — during which many humanitarian experts alleged war crimes took place — was actively supported by the Pakistani establishment and met with no ‘resistance’ from our ‘civil society’. Bred on standard Pakistani nationalist narratives, we justify silence over all these examples of state terror by serving up the religion card: they aren’t Muslims, so why should we care?

It’s better to support the ‘wretched of the earth’.

Cue more damning examples. Our ‘higher than the Himalayas, deeper than the deepest ocean’ friendship with China has mandated that we remain completely silent on the treatment of the Uighur ethnic minority that occupies the vast Xinjiang region bordering Pakistan to the north — and, which, even more significantly, China seeks to transform by building CPEC. The Uighur are Muslim, but there isn’t a hue and cry at the manner in which the Chinese state has suppressed their basic freedoms, and is now steadily facilitating the influx of ethnic Han Chinese into Xinjiang to fundamentally transform the region’s social mores.

In theory, a primary reason for Pakistan’s silence vis-à-vis the Uighurs is that there is a right-wing separatist movement raging in Xinjiang, and all ‘civilised’ states in today’s world ostensibly share the same position with regards to ‘terrorism’. But a separatist movement with deep historical roots within the Rohingya people is also active in the Rakhine state of Myanmar, and it is under the guise of defanging the ‘terrorists’ that the state has initiated its latest military incursion. The question, as ever, is why some forms of (armed) resistance to state persecution are considered ‘terrorism’ and others are not? As the example of the Uighur confirms, a certain community’s ‘Muslim’ credentials are not always enough for us to stand up for them.

Which brings me to the final — and most damning — point: what of state persecution within Pakistan? No one can deny the manner in which the state has usurped the freedoms of ethnic communities who have asserted their identity, claimed resources, and demanded a democratic power-sharing arrangement. Even today military ‘solutions’ are employed liberally within Pakistan to address what are clearly long-standing political conflicts. And the truth is that most of the Baloch, Sindhi, Pakhtun and other ethnic communities that demand their rights and are criminalised in exchange are very much Muslim.

So are the Afghans and at least 200 million of the Indians with whom we cultivate perennial enmity. So let us be clear that, rhetoric aside, we do not stand with Muslims everywhere — our expressions of solidarity are opportunistic and contradictory. It would be much better to stand with the ‘wretched of the earth’ everywhere, and stop victimising the most vulnerable ourselves — look no further than the way we treat Christians, Hindus and other ‘non-Muslims’.

Malala Yousafzai went on record to question why Aung San Suu Kyi was silent over the treatment of the Rohingyas. I say people in glass houses should not throw stones.

Tarek Fatah

'Reputation laundering' is lucrative business for London PR firms

Oppressive foreign regimes are often such valuable accounts that they are considered worth the risk of a backlash


Mark Sweney in The Guardian


From foreign governments of dubious repute and dictators looking for an image overhaul to propaganda videos and fake Wikipedia entries – if there is a PR brief of dubious ethical nature that needs a fix then more often than not it is one of London’s big-name agencies that gets the call.

Bell Pottinger’s public vilification and expulsion from its own trade body for running a social media campaign to stir up racial tension in South Africa for the wealthy Gupta family has lifted the lid on the secretive and highly lucrative business of representing controversial clients.

Over more than three decades in the business Tim Bell, Margaret Thatcher’s favourite PR man, who left Bell Pottinger last summer, has amassed something of a who’s who of what could charitably be called sensitive clients.

These have included the Pinochet Foundation and the governments of Bahrain and Egypt, and there was a $500m (£384m) contract to make fake al-Qaida videos in Iraq for the US government.

“You say words like Pinochet and ‘oh my god that is bad news’, but I don’t accept that,” Lord Bell said. “There are two sides to every story and you have to handle it so your side is prevalent. I don’t know why they are [considered] risky clients. They are only risky if what you are trying to promote an idea that isn’t sound.”

He cited Alexander Lukashenko, the Belarusian president who has been called Europe’s last dictator, as an example of when taking on such clients went wrong. “There are lots of people I regret having got involved with. Lukashenko went well for six months then changed his mind [about the strategy], behaved differently and I resigned the account.”

Foreign governments with oppressive regimes are often such valuable accounts that they are considered worth the risk of a potential PR backlash.

The Portland agency, founded by Tony Blair’s former adviser Tim Allan, has previously advised Vladimir Putin and worked with Kazakhstan, Jordan and Morocco.

A contract with Qatar, which has been heavily criticised for its record on human rights, is focused on building a government affairs function. Portland declined to comment but Allan has previously said such work is about “openness and engagement” and that opening up secretive nations is “not an affront to democracy”.

Late last year the PR guru Matthew Freud picked up a hugely valuable brief from Saudi Arabia, which has executed more than 150 people in each of the last two years.

The account, led by deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, was pitched to a number of corporate PR firms in London. The PR agency Freuds declined to comment but at the time of winning the business said it was focused on a “programme of economic, educational and cultural modernisation to help diversify the economy and create a sustainable and prosperous future for Saudi’s young people.”

A senior PR executive said: “Tyrants, dictatorships and governments that may not be democratic, or are sliding into one-party states, tend to come to places like London, New York and Washington effectively for reputation laundering. If you are cynical about it, that is what it is.”

A number of senior PR executives agree that Bell Pottinger working for the Gupta family, which has been accused of benefiting financially from its close links to the South African president, Jacob Zuma, is not in itself a PR crime.

But stoking racial tension in a country that has struggled to achieve balance in a post-apartheid era is a particularly egregious strategy to have pursued, and not one that is rife among the dark arts employed by UK agencies.

“I think that Bell Pottinger’s work is an outlier,” said Danny Rogers, editor-in-chief of PR Week. “They are accused of creating fake news and blogs, a serious transgression. It is not typical of what the British PR industry does. Work varies from what you would consider to be institution-building and opening communications by governments to the extreme end of the sort of work Bell Pottinger was doing for the Guptas.”

Francis Ingham, director general of the trade body PRCA for the last decade, said the UK industry was “overwhelmingly ethical and professional”.

“There is always the occasional rogue element and our role is to punish them,” he said.

Ever the risk-taker, Lord Bell, after leaving the agency he co-founded, immediately looked for more of the same, setting up Sans Frontières, the same name as the arm of Bell Pottinger that handled sometimes controversial geo-political work.

Bell, who has also represented clients including the News UK chief Rebekah Brooks and the entertainer Rolf Harris, said the Bell Pottinger scandal would prompt the industry to take cover for a while but then it would be business as usual.

“There will be a lull for a while, then people will forget the controversy and people will come back,” he said.

Yet, even the hard-bitten Bell admitted there were some clients beyond the pale even for him. He turned down representing Zimbabwe’s president, Robert Mugabe, as well as the Labour party (“I wouldn’t have done a good job”).

“I wish we hadn’t taken the Guptas,” he said. “And I would like to have worked for BP, to have handled the Deepwater Horizon incident. As long as there is controversy about things there will be controversial characters. You can’t spend your life regretting what you do.”