Christopher Moorsom

PR man from a more gentlemanly age

Christopher Stewart Moorsom, public relations executive: born Harting, Sussex 26 June 1927; married 1957 Pilar Sánchez y de Betancourt (three daughters; marriage dissolved 1967), 1987 Cherry Leigh (née Long Price); died London 14 September 2002.

Christopher Moorsom was an uncommonly tall, blue-eyed, blond man who oozed charm from every pore. As his parents refused to tidy up their affairs before their deaths in the 1960s, and left him with not much more than a death-duty bill for £160,000, he had nothing to live on but his wits and charm. Public relations, with its fringe benefits of meals, flights and accommodation at the clients's expense, proved the ideal career.

Moorsom was born in Sussex in 1927 (though he altered his passport to 1925 so that he could join the Royal Navy as an able seaman in 1944). Because his father had enjoyed his own schooling at Bedales, he was sent there as well, and after the Second World War he followed him to King's College, Cambridge, to read English. There he was the contemporary of Simon Raven and Mark Boxer, and was remarkable at King's in the 1950s not just for his great height (6ft 4in) but for his pronounced heterosexuality.

He profited from his education. Though he gave the impression of never working too hard at anything, indeed of being idle, he impressed friends, clients and journalists alike with his fund of information on a surprisingly wide variety of subjects. A business associate described him as "a relaxed polymath". One of his talents was languages, and he could make amusing conversation in most of the tongues of Western Europe.

His father declined to help him financially, and Moorsom's first job was as a stringer for the Daily Mail in Madrid, following which he went to Athens as a translator for the British Council. In the mid-Fifties he went to New York and managed to get a job with the doyen of PR, Ben Sonnenberg, who refreshingly described his own calling as a "fly-by-night, flim-flam business". None the less, an invitation to one of Sonnenberg's parties was prized by the people to whom his clients wished to sell products or policies, and Moorsom learned well the lesson that the chief asset of the PR man was his address book. In the words of one associate, Moorsom was "Mr Fix-It" – Christopher always knew somebody everywhere in the world. And it was never bullshit."

Moorsom's address book bulged with the names and phone numbers of not just the clever and the well-informed, but also of the rich, powerful and fashionable. In 1957 he married his first wife, the stunningly beautiful Cuban heiress Pilar Sánchez y de Betancourt, though she was more or less engaged to a French duke at the time. As a PR man, he wasn't a snob – he viewed titles, like academic distinctions, or celebrity, as things that could be useful to him professionally. (Though I once heard him put down a boringly proud Spanish aristocrat by saying that his three daughters by Pilar could boast more quarterings than the Spaniard.) Her family had stopped her allowance because of the unsuitable marriage, but the couple went to live in Cuba, and welcomed Fulgencio Batista's downfall, as Pilar's family counted Fidel Castro as part of their own social set, and the Moorsoms hoped to profit from the revolution.

They realised their mistake swiftly, and departed for London, but the marriage was over by 1967, leaving Christopher a penurious single parent with three sets of school fees to pay. With his only asset his flat in Chelsea, he still managed to live the life of an amorous bachelor for 20 years until in 1987 he married Cherry Leigh, a successful businesswoman who had been a model and a celebrated beauty of the Sixties.

Moorsom loved to entertain and was a good cook. An early associate taught him to make the then exotic dish spaghetti bolognese, explaining that the goals of taking a girl out were to get her back to your flat and into bed. If you could cook and got her to accept a dinner invitation, you had already accomplished your first object. When he married Cherry, they continued his tradition of good food and long Sunday lunch parties. He got involved with a few restaurants, not always successfully. I remember telling him once that he had a real star cooking for him at Chelsea Wharf – he blushed to admit that he had sacked him since I'd lunched there. His name was Marco Pierre White.

In 1993 Moorsom had his biggest PR coup when he organised the coronation of the 36th Kabaka of Buganda. But he was a transition figure in public relations. It was still an honourable profession for gentlemen, but it changed completely in his own lifetime. At first, well-connected men such as Toby O'Brien moved fluidly from the Peterborough column in The Daily Telegraph to organising wartime propaganda and on to Conservative Central Office. Moorsom worked with him (the E.D. O'Brien Organisation) and with Yuri Galitzine (Galitzine and Partners), men who saw their jobs as serving their clients by enhancing their cachet – not by reasoning with the potential buyers of goods, services or policies, but by giving them a good time. Little distinction was made between clients who were selling drink, such as the Sherry Shippers Association, or lobbying on behalf of the Saudi Arabian Ministry of Information – both accounts worked on by Moorsom.

The notion that PR had an ethical dimension was an idea whose time had not yet come. Moorsom had plenty of left-wing friends, from the Spanish poet, dropping whose name alarmed Franco's security police when Moorsom was once stopped for failing to carry his identity papers, to Labour politicians. It probably never occurred to him (or to his friends of the left) that there was something wrong in acting for the Saudi autocrats or for the tourist authority of Portugal under the Salazar dictatorship.

Moorsom, like his PR peers, operated as did barristers on the taxi-rank principle, making the best case possible even when the case was not entirely an admirable one. His finest moment came in 1975, when he came into his office and announced, "Our client has been killed" – his take on the assassination of King Faisal. His worst, probably, was having to defend the Saudis (never good payers, anyway, as he had often to go to Riyadh to collect his fee), who could not understand the fuss being made in Britain over the LWT Death of a Princess episode, when the young woman accused of adultery was stoned to death in a car park.

But PR was then still a matter of gentlemen trying to convince other gentlemen, and a PR's value to his client was proportional to the size of his contacts book. With a champagne account, for example (Moorsom once had the Charles Heidsieck account), the PR saw his job as ensuring brand loyalty, perhaps nothing more radical than convincing the younger generation to drink the marque favoured by their fathers; and not, as now, vulgarising the product by encouraging the unlettered rich to spray it over each other rather than drink it.

Moorsom had been a journalist and knew, as did most of his generation of PRs, that telling lies to the press was useless and bound to backfire; and that what all but the most indolent writers required was accurate information and sometimes a timely peg, not the "story angles" or "ideas for features" today's young (usually under-educated female) PRs peddle to lazy journos. True, this was often accompanied by a bribe, in the form of a press trip abroad (a necessary form of fact-finding for travel or wine and drink journalists, pure payola for all others) or a good lunch. Moorsom, seriously underpaid like many a PR before him, depended on these perks to keep up his own standard of living.

Unlike so many of the present generation of pushy PRs, Moorsom exploited his acquaintances only with their agreement and often to their amusement, armed with nothing but his charm, intelligence, generosity and a little guile.

Paul Levy