;)
Yesterday, the House of Lords took further evidence in its inquiry into shale gas, this time from a somewhat motley selection of people from industry majors and thinktanks.
I've skimmed the video, and most of it seems very uninformative, with platitudinous answers from the participants and some not very probing questions from the peers. But Lord May's intervention was interesting (from 16:42). It had a whiff of grandstanding about it, which is always entertaining, and suggests someone who is playing to an audience rather than engaging in truth-seeking behaviour. But it was the pop he took at Cuadrilla's Francis Egan that intrigued me:
I did find the discussion we had with the head of Cuadrillo [sic], Francis Egan...the general tone of it was "there is no problem, it's an uphill public relations battle, we have to win the public over rather than address the substance of the worries".
Having watched last week's hearing, and couldn't recall anything like this, although I could remember the reference to an uphill public relations battle. Here is the excerpt from the transcript:
Lord Rowe-Beddoe: If I were in your position, I would be taking my public relations exercise very seriously and letting the world know what I was doing, why I was doing it and what the implications are both for and against. It would appear from this correspondence that this has not been gone through.
Andrew Austin: I think it is fair to say that all of us are aware that we have an uphill public relations challenge. It is an information challenge. Maybe I can say this in a way in which Cuadrilla cannot, but an open letter was written to a number of newspapers post the activities at Balcombe once Cuadrilla had gone off-site, which actually expressed support from a number of villagers and from the parish council. I cannot remember the percentage —
Francis Egan: Sixty people signed it.
So Lord May has got the name of the company wrong, the name of the person who mentioned "uphill public relations" wrong and he has completely misrepresented the circumstances of what was said.
Whoops.