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Friends & Friction: Know when you have lost and walk away

It always ends badly for the spin doctor.

Loyal to the end, and probably waiting to spin the obituary itself when the king finally falls, the opponents bay for his blood.

They want his head for display, stuffed and encased in glass in a museum for generations to spit at.

A spin doctor is like a man who works at the back end of a sewage treatment factory. He knows the unpolished truth, and then he has to turn it into something palatable.

He sees cut off fingers and aborted babies.

The good men will often save the tiny corpse before it is pulverised, pray and send it for cremation, and depending on the season, pick a wild flower to make the whole ceremony a little human.

No matter how you look at it, the sewage worker’s job is s***.

The spin doctor’s job is thankless, dirty and unforgivable, which is why when the peace pipe is smoked, they are always discarded with the stompies.

FW de Klerk dumped Stoffel van der Merwe, his minister of broadcasting services and the film industry, when he realised that he was no longer useful. He died a lonely death.

Saddam Hussein’s spin doctor, Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf, generally known in the West as Comical Ali, is reported to have died a lonely death too in the United Arab Emirates.

Al-Sahhaf made bold statements.

“Our initial assessment is that they will all die,” he said, referring to the American soldiers invading Iraq.

Alastair Campbell is the infamous spin doctor who worked for Tony Blair, and prepared the dossiers that supported the war against Iraq under a false claim that the country possessed weapons of mass destruction.

He resigned in ignominy.

Donald Trump’s spin doctor, Sean Spicer, has made many gaffes, including saying that Hitler didn’t “gas his own people”, for which he later apologised.

It’s a question of time before he too goes down the pipes.

A family portrait hangs on the wall. It is a mother, father, five girls and a boy. The boy is from the mother’s previous marriage.

The look on his face suggests he has a degree of disdain for his stepfather who has tried at least four times to replace him with his own son but failed.

The girls look angelic in their white dresses.

The dentist arrives, the children are a little apprehensive, but the dentist, Dr Helmut Kunz, knows how to make them feel at ease.

He is here to inspect their teeth – a clean-up, nothing major, he tells them, and then injects them with an anaesthetic, morphine, and they fall asleep.

The door opens, it is Dr Ludwig Stumpfegger.

He opens the carefully measured ampoules of cyanide, and empties them into the mouths of the little children.

When the father and mother are sure that the children are dead, they walk out into the garden, and take their ampoules of cyanide.

They gasp for air, struggling to die, and the guards who witness the event shoot them.

No one knows exactly what happened there, some say that Adolf Hitler’s spin doctor, Joseph Goebbels, shot his wife, Magda, himself, others believe the former story.

Whatever the truth is, he knew that the game was up, and the Germans had lost.

Even in business there are battles you must never get into, and if your competitors draw you into them, you must recognise when the game is up, otherwise it will be too costly.

Kuzwayo is the founder of Ignitive, an advertising agency

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