Lies and the lying liar who told them: A former PR looks back on a career spent whitewashing 'foreign baddies'

https://www.theguardian.com/books/article/2024/jul/03/all-the-worst-humans-by-phil-elwood-review-confessions-of-a-cleanup-man

All the Worst Humans by Phil Elwood review – confessions of a cleanup man

A former PR looks back on a career spent whitewashing ‘foreign baddies’

Charlie English
Wed 3 Jul 2024 02.30 EDT

Operators like me oil the machines that prop up authoritarian power all over the world,” writes the Washington PR man Phil Elwood in All the Worst Humans. “I help those machines function by laundering the sins of dictators through the press.” He may be overselling himself – he’s a publicist, after all – but not by much, if we are to believe his romping memoir of a career spent manipulating the media on behalf of the bad guys.

It’s no shock that the obscenely wealthy pay large amounts of money to PR companies to “change the narrative” in their favour. What’s more surprising is who these companies will work for, and what they are prepared to do. No job, it seems, is too big or too dirty. In 2018, the Washington firm Qorvis took $18.8m from the Saudis in what Elwood calls “PR cleanup fees” after the Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi was murdered and dismembered in the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul. Up to the Sochi Olympics, New York agency Ketchum counted Vladimir Putin as one of its biggest clients, and took a reported $40m off the Kremlin and Gazprom. But the company whose machinations Elwood exposes in most detail is one he worked for, Brown Lloyd James, a boutique “strategic consultancy” founded by Peter Brown, who once managed the Beatles. It was at BLJ that Elwood performed many of his lowest tricks.

Brown, who, we are told, lives by the maxim “anything is possible with the right amount of money”, is close to rock royalty. He was name-checked by John Lennon in The Ballad of John and Yoko, and attended Paul and Linda McCartney’s wedding as a witness. His Rolodex contains some of the most famous names on the planet: guests at his parties have included Donald Trump, Barbara Walters and Yoko Ono. He’s also unafraid of deploying his contacts in the service of what Elwood describes as a host of “foreign baddies”.

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This is a tabloid confession of a book, an insider’s account of working in the reputation launderette, and an apology too: it is one of Elwood’s “deepest regrets”, he writes, that he helped Qatar win the World Cup. It’s a taut read, full of hyperbole. He is “one of the most dangerous people in the business”, he tells us, who has manipulated narratives – even invented them when needed – to fix problems for a client. “I’m not proud to say I’ve seen the destruction my handiwork has created,” he writes. “We live in dangerous times, and my industry helped make them so.”

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