So what do Ruby Wax and Stephen Byers have in common, apart from both being in the news as a result of their advising activities? Cant think of anything? Well, thats the answer Im looking for. You see, the thing that has struck me most about the former Labour minister, in trouble for offering himself like a sort of cab for hire for up to 5,000 a day, and the one-time comedian and talk-show presenter, who is reportedly working as a leadership and communications adviser to Home Office staff, is that their careers have seen better days.
Lets face it, the only involvement Byers might have had with government policy in recent years is at the Jobcentre. And the last time Wax was regularly gracing our TVs, Byers was a government minister. Yet it seems people are willing to pay thousands for their expert influence and advice.
And herein lies a paradox that Ive struggled with during my years as a business journalist: professional advisers are often in themselves professional failures. Almost all the coaches I have met have become coaches after some sort of career crisis. Therapists and counsellors are too often in need of therapy or counselling themselves.
Journalists in professional distress have a reputation for resorting to public relations consultancy. More general consultancy tends to tempt people when they cant think of anything else to do a tendency satirised by Joel and Ethan Coen in their 2008 comedy Burn After Reading, when the character played by John Malkovich responds to a query about what he will do for cash, now that he has quit the CIA, with the words: Ill do some consulting.
And too often people end up consulting the area in which they have failed the most (inadvertently) amusing example being Kate Hull Rodgers, a Canadian humour consultant and founder of the UK consultancy HumourUs, who, according to Personnel Today, has been spreading the message about having fun at work in the UK for the past 20 years and made the switch to consultancy after having a nervous breakdown brought on by stress.
Im all for rehabilitation, but is someone who failed to have fun at work in the most spectacular way the best person to teach us how to have a laugh in the office?
Moreover, is hiring a failed minister the best way of lobbying the Government? And is employing a fading TV comedian a positive way of enhancing communication skills?
Of course, its also a paradox that afflicts business journalists: if were so good at knowing how things should be run, why arent we running something ourselves? Im still working on an answer for that one.
Another question prompted by a recent news event: is it meow or miaow? Im not referring to the way that kids refer to the drug mephedrone, which, according to the press, includes everything from meow, to miaow miaow and MM-cat.
Frankly, I dont care what they call it and dont believe what newspapers have to say on the issue given that they cant seem to decide on why it has such a daft name, with the Daily Mail claiming recently that it is known as meow meow or just miaow on the club scene because the letters CAT make up the spelling of the chemical [cathinone], and another paper claiming that it is called meow meow or just miaow because the necessary chemical is found naturally in khat, an African shrub.
The more pertinent question for me is the linguistic one: is miaow or meow the better way of conveying the cry of a cat? The Times always opts for miaow, though last week a meow sneaked in. The Financial Times uses both, while the Oxford English Dictionary, cites miaow and meow, but goes for miaow as its headword.
Posing the question on Twitter hasnt helped: I doubt I would have encountered more disagreement if Id canvassed views on how to tackle the public sector borrowing deficit.
One respondent was insistent on miaow because a longer sequence of vowels better represents the complex drawn-out noise a cat makes. Most North Americans sided with meow, while others opted for miau, mew, mrow, and miao. There is, of course, only one way to decide: a cat, a room, a bag of mephedrone and a seven-hour debate with interested parties. Ill report back.
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