Posts by Angus

Motoring news The announcement has not been made public yet, but you now have a new Secretary of State for Transport. It will come as something of a surprise to Insight readers to learn that the new man for the job is me. I appreciate that this will be somewhat shocking news to the incumbent,…

Does the rise of the chatbots threaten the nation’s poets? Not for the first time, Insight has arrived somewhat late to the party, in this instance, the rave that is ChatGPT. Depending on your point of view, this latest bit of artificial intelligence, (full name, Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer) will either debase the art of…

Did the Lancashire Constabulary get it right? This blog was originally written before the discovery of a body on the River Wyre over the weekend. Sadly, it seems inevitable that it will turn out to be that of missing mother, Nicola Bulley. In the week prior to this, the British media had gone into one…

Even the keenest observers of health news might be surprised to learn that there is another ambulance strike today, Friday. The BBC homepage affords the news with little more than a “Strikes Update: How Friday 10 February’s walkouts will affect you”.  The ambulance strike has slipped from front page news, and the nurses and physios…

At last, a piece of good news that will, quite literally, cheer us all up. In a consummate bit of PR, the Royal Society for Protection of Birds made the headlines with news that listening to birdsong boosts mental wellbeing in 90% of adults.  The YouGov poll commissioned by the RSPB found that 88% of…

In a great example of how to do PR well, a letter appeared in the Times last week, urging the government “to consider the value of self-care” – and reassuring us that “self-care does not mean no care”.  The letter, which comes from “a coalition of leading health and pharmacy organisations” highlights their “blueprint for…

Visit Qatar’s shiny new website and it states that every visit to Qatar starts with a feeling. Boy, have they got that right.  Feelings have been somewhat on public display since the World Cup circus rolled into the Emirate last week. While diehard travelling soccer fans will no doubt be enjoying the glow of warmth the State…

The BBC has just launched a new drama, SAS: Rogue Heroes. It’s the (almost) true story of the formation of the Special Air Service, and is based on a terrific book by Ben Macintyre. In many ways, it’s a salutary lesson in how it takes real disruptors to do things differently, make change and above all,…