Status Anxiety

8 November 2008

I pity the fraudster who has to pretend to be me

On another level, though, it is not very flattering. After all, he is assuming the PRs will be anxious to co-operate with me — that I am the sort of journalist who can be relied upon to write puff pieces in return for expensive baubles — when I like to pride myself on being considered highly untrustworthy by such people. Until recently, for instance, Freud Communications had me on a blacklist, refusing to allow me to attend any of their events. Has my reputation sunk so low that PRs now consider me a safe bet?

I may be reading too much into this. According to Ahlya Fateh, the managing editor of Tatler, I am not the only writer this fraudster has impersonated. Before using my name he tried to pass himself off as Anthony Powell, the English author. It seems unlikely that the PR girls he was trying to fool would be familiar with A Dance to the Music of Time, Powell’s 12-volume magnum opus, but if they were they would probably know that he died eight years ago.

If I was him I would stop wasting my time on petty fraud and enrol on a journalism course. He will soon discover that in return for a few words of praise in a glossy magazine he will be allowed to keep all sorts of luxury goods, not just watches. Indeed, if he rises high enough up the food chain, he will not even have to write anything in order to get his hands on these trinkets. At Vanity Fair, where I worked for two and a half years, I once came across a screwed-up ball of paper outside the offices of the magazine’s fashion director. It turned out to be a letter from the Diamond Information Center politely asking when the journalist in question was planning to run something on the diamond solitaire necklace it had sent her. More recently, the fashion director of another New York glossy magazine had her wrist slapped when she was caught trying to sell a couture coat she had been sent by Chanel on eBay. The floor was $150,000.