This week I have been rummaging around in my memory to find examples of where I did some good media interviews, and where things went awry for some reason or another.

As if by magic, one high-profile but short-lived mess returned to my life today. I find South African journalist Peter Fabricius recalling just a few days ago what happened on the fateful day Margaret Thatcher resigned as Prime Minister, when John Sawers (now stepping down as Chief of MI6) and I were First Secretaries in Johannesburg:

I was The Star’s political correspondent, in Parliament, and the paper’s ever-pesky news editor called me for a quick comment from the British side. I called Charles Crawford, the first secretary, political, at the embassy who gave me some quite juicy quotes about how Thatcher was rather like PW Botha, who had also recently been forced into retirement by his National Party. Neither of them, Crawford aptly suggested, knew when their time was up so both had had to be pushed out.

Crawford understandably didn’t  want his name put to this observation.

His boss, the ambassador Robin Renwick, had been handpicked by Thatcher a couple of years before, to go to South Africa and try to resolve what seemed like an insoluble political logjam.

Renwick (now Lord Renwick) took with him two sharp young diplomats, Sawers and Crawford himself.

I attributed Crawford’s remarks to something like “official British sources” in my story, thinking, possibly too hastily because of the looming deadline, that that would be sufficient cover.

Evidently not. Renwick hit the roof, obviously alarmed that Thatcher would regard the remark as a sign of disloyalty emanating from his embassy.

Sawers called me up and politely but very firmly demanded to know where the quote had come from. I naturally refused to say.

He then turned his attention inwards, to the embassy staff. The upshot was that Crawford called me the next day to say he had confessed to being the source of the comments. I wondered whether he had been given the third degree but I suspect he was just too much of a gentleman to lie.

After some awkwardness, it all ended quite amicably. I had always got on well with all three of the British diplomats and continued to do so.

The problem, as I dimly recall this episode, was that I tried to make the point that after all the excitement and glory of the Thatcher years it was incongruous if not stupid that she fell because of what looked from a great distance like small Parliamentary procedural manoeuvres. (This was before the Internet, so following the whole drama from thousands of miles away to see exactly what those manoeuvres meant was next to impossible.)

The Johannesburg Star interpreted this rather prosaic thought with some latitude, perhaps as Peter F says for sheer time pressure reasons. It splashed across the front page of its late afternoon edition “Thatcher resignation ‘stupid’, says British Embassy!” or something rather like that.

Aaaaaiiieeeee.

HM Ambassador was, indeed, not amused. But as often happens, the embarrassment whizzed like a meteor across the local media firmament for just a few hours, then quickly burned out in the wider global noise surrounding Mrs T’s departure. No-one in London knew or cared. Probably no-one in South Africa cared either.

Moral of this story for your dealings with print journalists?

You never have any real control over what they say you said. But their job is to sell newspapers, so they need a ‘story’. You may have no idea where anything you say fits into that emerging story. Their story may change for them too, when they talk to someone else. Often they record you faithfully and fairly (enough). Sometimes you get burned. But unless you have been catastrophically foolish, it all blows over.

That said, it never does any harm to establish the rules as far as possible. Ask directly before the interview gets going how they plan to refer to you. NB it’s no use trying to establish the rules after the interview/conversation. Horse – bolted.

When I was doing print media interviews as a UK official I always (if I remembered haha) started by asking how the print journo expected to describe me in print, and getting that clearly agreed. Senior UK diplomatic source; senior British official; senior Western diplomat; British diplomat; someone close to the discussions. Basically, the more ‘remote’ and unattributable the agreed final description of myself, the more I’d be ready to talk freely. If the journo then at the end asked for a specific quote or two ‘on the record’, that was then easy to give too once she/he had a sense of what you were saying overall. Print journos found this easy to deal with: it usually suited them to build a relationship with you, and that meant some friendly professional give-and-take and mutual trust/respect. Hence in this S Africa case we all stayed friendly with Peter Fabricius and he with us, despite this ghastly headline.

None of this applies to TV/radio work by definition, as it’s you qua you appearing: it’s next to impossible to agree in advance any ‘rules’, or to expect them to be respected if you do agree them. The presenters really have to focus on lot on themselves, and the technical challenges of getting through programmes smoothly and seemingly effortlessly. You are often there merely as filler.

It’s fine by them if you talk coherently for a couple of minutes in more or less answering their questions, as they listen through their headphones to the producer teeing up the next slot. Even better if you say something obviously insane, to which they can respond cleverly and thereby show off to the viewers/listeners. But broadly speaking, they don’t care a jot about you or the subject or about their relationship with you: they’re too busy thinking about the next segment, and which camera to look at.

So much for the mainstream media. These days there is the Internet too.

A dizzyingly insane and more recent example of how your overall Internet reputation has nothing much to do with you or with Reality comes in the form of this Polish piece from 2011, asserting that I have been controlling Polish Foreign Policy from my elite machinations as a former member of the FCO Planning Staff, a secret cabal of ultimate manipulators whose tentacles of influence writhe deep down the decades.

Hmm. The Planners. That does sound austere, dark and omnipotent. Maybe I should write a movie about my exploits…

Remember that footling occasion in late 2011 when my name appeared on the document properties of a speech by Radek Sikorski after I helped his team with polishing the language? Dotty MonitorPolski cleverly spots a direct line of British control over Poland and the European Union and everything else stretching back via Lord Mountbatten and the Rothschilds to David, since the Brits are Lost Tribe of Israel.

QED.

Successful media work? Establish the rules. But accept that even then there may be none.