The Bloomsbury Festival, George Orwell, 1984 and my nephew: an amazing sponsorship opportunity!

The government don't want us helping our family to get a job, so they appointed the celebrated businessman (and Dragon's Den judge) James Caan as social mobility tsar to lecture us on the shortcomings of giving internships or jobs to friends and family. But then it turned out he employed his daughter in one of his own companies – practice and preach come to mind.

There we go again, dumb 'professional' politicians with lack of real world experience, who might just have thought about checking this out before parading him in front of the media.

Over the years I have helped out many friends, family and clients with internships and work experience for their offspring: my taxi driver's son, an office cleaner's daughter and the sons and daughters of countless CEO's – quite a bit of social diversity there then! But I have never taken on anyone as a full time employee unless they earned it on merit.  

I gave my nephew Alex Beeching work experience when he was doing his film degree and he has gone on to be an outstanding and successful artist. Alex is half Iranian and brings all sorts of cultural and social influences to his art and his latest piece is an installation work at the Bloomsbury Festival. 

If you don't know about the Bloomsbury Festival, it really is worth getting to know. A creative explosion of performance, art, music and storytelling taking place throughout the streets, parks, museums, libraries and laboratories of Bloomsbury every October.

Bloomsbury has been a catalyst for ideas that have changed the way we live around the world and one of those catalysts was George Orwell; it was at the imposing Senate House whilst working for the Ministry of Information during the war that he conceived the idea for '1984'.
 With this in mind Alex is creating an outdoor, 'Ministry of Truth', office complete with  desks, typewriters, filing cabinets, angle-poise lamps, oil paintings and gramophones, all of which will be covered in a living blanket of vegetation and turf.

Which brings me back to my helping hand. Alex is an artist and not a commercially minded soul. The garden is happening but I think it's a sponsorship opportunity for someone who wants to get in front of a lot of influential people, be on the Bloomsbury Festival website and programme, and take their clients down to the garden for entertainment and enlightenment.

You may be Google (with your head office just around the corner), thinking that allusion to George Orwell ties in nicely to your, 'Don't be Evil' ethos, or you may be a publisher who likes the literary and academic associations. I can think of many brands and companies who would benefit from the sponsorship.





So if you're interested, best you drop commercially minded me a line, rather than Alex, at philipbeeching@me.com