He’s no charlatan – there’s no dead ringer here

The Diary recently received a press release entitled Deadlines Cannot Be Met With Dead Lines, all about how PR companies must be available 24 hours a day to answer out-of-hours queries. The release was from a company called Bond PR, so, at 7.33pm on a Tuesday, the Diary phoned the company’s hotline to find out whether it lived up to its own standards.

Sure enough, poor Tom Burgess, the agency’s chief executive had to drag himself out of the parents’ evening at his child’s school in order to field a pointless call from Marketing Week.

This has given the Diary an idea: more bosses should follow Burgess’s example. And the Diary is happy to help. So if you know the number of a high-ranking executive, and also have access to their daily schedule, why not send in the details? The Diary looks forward to dragging Sir Martin Sorrell from his bath, or repeatedly interrupting Stelios Haji-Ioannou’s breakfast.