Millennium benefits from old boys’ club

Where Marketing Week leads others follow: one investigation into the backroom deals between The New Millennium Experience Company, which is organising the Millennium celebrations at Greenwich, and the advertising agency it hired, M&C Saatchi, led to coverage on the front pages of national newspapers and much of one edition of Channel 4 News.

We revealed that M&C partner Bill Muirhead had worked as acting communications director, advising on advertising policy, for the NMEC before his agency was hired to the 16m account.

It is with great distress that the Diary now discovers that Muirhead, and Michael Grade, the former Channel 4 boss who led the NMEC’s team selecting the agency, went to public school together.

The toffs’ institution in question was St Dunstan’s College, in south London. The Diary’s distress deepened on remembering his own school days, filled in true Tom Brown-style with whackings and bullying at the very same school. Of course, had the Diary known the subjects of his investigation were fellow Dunstonians, undoubtedly an arrangement could have been reached…