Sun lounger

This may not seem the timeliest of publications, given the UK’s recent weather, but the Chief Medical Officer has just published The Heatwave Plan for England. We may not need it now, but we live in hope. Now where’s that holiday brochure…
Read the plan here

Pumping up discontent

The Lizard is a compassionate soul and would never kick a man when he’s down, which means that when it comes to Premier Brown he is rather out of step with the rest of the electorate – not to mention many Labour MPs. All of whom seem intent on doing just that.

We had the ‘election that never was’, we had the 10 pence tax u-turn, the electorate delivered the kicking that was the Crewe and Nantwich by-election and now the truckers are getting in on the act.

The fuel protests of 2000 were Tony Blair’s first real test, but back then he was still an overwhelmingly popular PM – not something you could say about Gordon – and he effectively saw them off.

The mantra coming out of the government now is that they are listening – so will they listen to the fuel protests? The lorry drivers are demanding an ‘essential users’ reduction on the price of diesel of anything between 20 and 25 pence a litre. Will they get it?

The Lizard is not a betting reptile but he wouldn’t bank on it. Don’t all drivers feel they are essential users? From the mum living in the countryside who has to get to Tesco to the chief executive who has to get to the airport. It might be fun to support the truckers now, but if they won, wouldn’t we all want a piece of the action?

The other problem the government has is the cost of such a reduction - they just don’t have the money to play with anymore. The 10p tax fiasco is said to have cost around £2.7bn and bought them not a single vote at the recent by-election. The government will almost certainly hesitate before dipping into their depleted coffers.

On the horizon we have the 2p tax increase on fuel scheduled for April but deferred till October. Given the huge increases on a barrel of oil and the subsequent price hikes at the pumps, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to predict that this will be quietly buried.

Then there are the VED (Vehicle Excise Duty) increases on older gas guzzling cars. Drivers will start paying more when they renew their tax discs next year.

The changes are likely to affect nearly 70 per cent of Britain's 26 million motorists, who could find themselves paying up to £245 a year more for their tax disc.

There are also plans to hit drivers with a £950 ‘showroom tax’ when they buy a new car.
One Labour MP had a nice line on all this, he called it a ‘poll tax on wheels’.

So will Gordon execute another hasty u-turn and grant the truckers their wishes or will the lorries just roll right over the government?

Canada's foreign minister resigns

Canada's embattled foreign minister, Maxime Bernier, has resigned after leaving classified documents at a private residence. Prime Minister Stephen Harper called it "a serious error."

But what exactly was the serious error? Well, having a girlfriend - Julie Couillard - linked to Hells Angels motorcycle gangs, having a girlfriend who likes to dress in a provocative manner (my picture shows the pair at the minister’s swearing in ceremony), having a girlfriend who is not publicity shy, having a girlfriend who is pretty upset over the minister’s efforts to terminate the relationship and above all having a girlfriend who is about to go on television to spill the beans might have something to do with it.

Now the Lizard has nothing against colourful characters or indeed attractive women. Carla Bruni could hardly be said to be a typical politician’s wife and certainly her past is colourful but she has done nothing but enhance the diminutive Gallic whirlwind that is M. Sarkosi.

Now, we don’t know what documents the minister left lying around and whether Hells Angels are busily poring over foreign office briefings.

But that is hardly the point - newspapers and the public love kiss and tell stories and it’s not Julie’s fault if she’s a little too hot to handle – the minister should have been more careful with classified material and should have had more control over his private life.

Of course, just hours before Bernier resigned the prime minister was saying, "I have no intention to comment on a minister's former girlfriend," Harper went on, "I don't take this subject seriously."

But with Julie about to go on the box the PM was forced to take it all very seriously indeed.

So in the end it seems it was the old story of there being no fury like a woman scorned and the woman in question too much for what is after all a Conservative government.

Bird flu, pandemic flu, tamiflu

A Lounger just recently returned from propping up the bar at the Raffles Hotel in Singapore comes bearing news of Singapore’s financial sector industry-wide exercise (IWE) which will run from Thursday, Aug 28 to Friday, Sep 11, 2008.

It will be run in three sessions and the scenario is an old favourite - pandemic flu.

If you want to know more here are slides used at a recent briefing and a link to the exercise portal:

www.calamityprevention.com/blog/BCM_Briefing_Session_IWE_08.pdf
www.iwe08.com.sg/c/portal/login

Tamiflu cocktails are now on sale at The Crisis Lounge.

Monkey Business

Every week one of the Lizard’s colleagues (his name is Yasir – by the way) collates an Incident Database so we can all keep tabs on the fresh crises and calamities that are besetting the world and keeping us in business.

Now Yasir is a military type and doesn’t use two words when one will do. This is what he had to say:

50 Greenpeace protesters accessed two Unilever plants in London, in protest at the company’s use of Palm Oil, which is claimed to damage the Indonesian Rainforest. The protesters left the site after 9 hours of talks with site managers.

Clear, concise and to the point – the only thing Yasir didn’t mention was that all the protestors were dressed as Orangutans.

They swung into action and made a monkey out of Unilever.

The protests were videoed by Greenpeace who were only too delighted to hand over the footage to the press. So that evening we were treated to a lot of monkey business on the news.

Crises come in many shapes and forms, but if one of the big environmental pressure groups come after you, then you really are in trouble.

The Lizard ran a media course last year. Delegates came form right across Europe from many different companies and organisations.

One of them is the head of press for WWF (no, not the World Wrestling Federation).

During proceedings the Lizard was banging on about how important it is to control press conferences and not let anyone in who might disrupt proceedings.

One way of doing this is to check the journalists’ press credentials. At which point the gentleman from the World Wildlife Fund said well I used to be a journo and I like to keep an up to date press card and here it is.

Another of their tactics is to buy a few shares in a company they want to target thus allowing them to wreak havoc during the AGM.

It’s enough to make you go ape.

Competition Time

The Lizard and his wife were out hobnobbing with the good and the great at the British Embassy ball last night.

All was going well until her Ladyship decided to get stuck into the charity auction - suffice it to say, it’s the Lizard’s bank account that could do with a charity donation right now.

However that’s by the by because it’s competition time and there’s a bottle of champagne on offer to the first Lounger to come up with the right answer to this question.

What country was this British Embassy ball held in? The only clue is that our man is the splendidly named Quinton Quayle.

Answers to information@crisis-solutions.com

Lounging in front of the TV

The Lizard isn’t usually given to watching daytime television, but the opportunity to see our PM cosying up to Fern Britton on ITV’s This Morning was too good to miss. And what a different Gordon we saw – there he was talking about his kids even touching on the fact his son Fraser has cystic fibrosis.

Now for such a private man this seemed unusual, but given the drubbing he’s recently been given by the electorate it seemed his spin-doctors felt a new, touchy-feely Gordon was required.

Well apparently not a bit of it. Nick Robinson, the Beeb’s political editor, has broken the story on his blog (www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/nickrobinson) that this was not how the interview was meant to go at all.

Over to Nick: Far from wanting to discuss his family, in particular his son Fraser's cystic fibrosis, Gordon Brown thought that there was an agreement that he would not be asked such questions. Indeed, reports reach me of furious members of Team Brown complaining that the pre-interview agreement had been broken.

Now at Crisis Solutions, we offer media training and this is an interesting case in point. What could be better than for the PM to go on a fairly light and fluffy TV show to start the uphill struggle of connecting with the public?

His media people would have set up and agreed the areas he wanted to address only to have the presenter ask all the questions he didn’t want to answer.

So how do you handle a situation like that when you are on live TV? The Crisis Solutions media team has some answers.

Actually this reminds the Lizard of a story regarding the former Defence Secretary Sir John Nott, who at the time of the Falkland crisis was interviewed by Robin Day who called him a ‘here today, gone tomorrow politician’.

Sir John took offence, tugged the microphone from his lapel and stormed out. Not something our media team would suggest.

But the story had a happy ending as rather bizarrely when he came to write his memoirs Nott called them ‘Here today gone tomorrow’.

Crisis? What crisis?

The Lounge Lizard, on behalf of Crisis Solutions, has been keeping himself busy lately, putting together a book that will be published shortly by the British Standards Institute.

It’s called Exercising for Excellence and tells you everything you need to know about running successful crisis simulations.

Well that’s what I thought it was about until the BSI said oh! no! you can’t use the word CRISIS – there is no such thing as a crisis anymore there are just INCIDENTS. Spooky huh?

So when The Lizard’s wife rams her ladyship’s car into a controversially located wall, is that an incident or a crisis?

Personally I like the word crisis, the dictionary on my computer describes it like this: a situation or period in which things are very uncertain, difficult, or painful, especially a time when action must be taken to avoid complete disaster or breakdown.

It describes an incident as: something that happens, especially a single event.

Now The Lounge Lizard and his cohorts at Crisis Solutions work in business continuity and crisis readiness and I know which definition describes what we get involved in.

Plus we are called Crisis Solutions so we like the word crisis – Incident Solutions seems a little flaccid. And where are you now, if not in The Crisis Lounge?

But of course we didn’t want to irritate our friends at the BSI as they are kindly publishing our book so in an attempt at not allowing an incident to turn into a crisis we immediately climbed down and removed all trace of the word crisis.

Actually we got away with one - a direct quote from Dr Henry Kissinger who memorably said, “Next week there can't be any crisis. My schedule is already full.”

Anybody got any thoughts on this? Perhaps we need to get our definitions sorted out. What is a crisis? What is an incident and how do they differ?

The Lounge Lizard – cyber investigator

The Lounge Lizard was interested to see that personal bank account details are apparently for sale over the Internet for as little as £5.

So says Symantec, the Internet security firm, who also report that UK bank account details were the most advertised items on black-market forums used to trade stolen information.

Now, The Lizard is neither a criminal nor is he tremendously adept with the laptop but he decided to do a little investigative reporting and tried looking for these elusive bank details on the net – to see how easy they are to find. He didn’t get very far.

At one point things were looking up as someone was offering all the child benefit details the government had lost, and The Lizard thought he could perform a public service - retrieve the information and hand it back to a tearful and grateful government.

He then considered that awkward questions might be asked as to what he was doing with the stuff in the first place at which point The Lounge Lizard’s career as a razor sharp investigative hack came to an abrupt end.

Of course it’s much easier if you just publish your bank account details in your weekly column as the petrol head funster Jeremy Clarkson decided to do.

The Top Gear host revealed his account numbers after rubbishing the furore over the loss of the above mentioned child benefit disks.

Unwisely, he wanted to prove it was all a fuss about nothing.

Next thing he knew he had unexpectedly donated £500 to charity.

“I was wrong and I have been punished” was his unusually mild response.