Going Independent. I Have Seen This a Hundred Times.

There is a thing that happens in an organisation and I have watched it happen, at close range, more times than I can put a number to.

A man arrives wide-eyed. He is keen. He believes what he is told in the induction, and for a while that belief is an asset and they use it. Then something goes wrong between him and the people above him — it is never recorded and it is never explained, and if you ask him afterwards he will not be able to tell you the day it turned — and from that moment the organisation begins, very slowly and very politely, to arrange itself around his absence.

Nobody sacks him. That is not how it is done. His name comes off a distribution list. He is not invited to the thing he used to run. Someone else answers the query he used to answer. And one Friday there is a leaving card going round that he signs himself, for somebody else, and eleven weeks later it is his own turn and there is no card at all.

Thirty years on a helpdesk and I have seen it a hundred times. I have also, and I am not going to pretend otherwise tonight, had it done to me.

So when I tell you what has happened to Collin Sudamen, I want you to understand that I am not guessing. I am reading a shape I know by heart.

The website

He has a practice. It has a logo and a contact form and an air of enormous calm. Wilson Reputation Management. Est. 2013 · London. Strategic communications, it says, "for organisations that are widely misunderstood."

Read that line twice, because it is doing a great deal of work. Not organisations that are *misrepresented*. Not organisations that are *wronged*. Widely misunderstood — which is what you write when the thing people understand about your client is broadly correct and your job is to make them stop understanding it.

And then it tells you, in its own words, what success looks like:

The best outcome we can deliver is that, in time, no one remembers there was ever a controversy at all — only the settled, sensible understanding that was there all along.

That is not a mission statement. That is a description of what has been done to every one of us, written down by the man who was paid to do it, and put on the open internet with a little logo on it.

Seven numbered services, and the sixth one is about you

He lists them. Numbered. Like a menu.

01 Perception Management — "Shaping a settled, sensible public understanding of what a client does — and keeping it settled, irrespective of the surrounding noise." Irrespective. Of. The surrounding noise. The noise, friends, is us.

05 Digital Reputation — "Search-result management, content suppression, and continuous open-source monitoring." Content suppression. He sells it by name, as a line item, with a price attached that I will never see.

And then 06, and I had to put the mug down on the carpet:

Our flagship vehicle for reputation management and social control, Mind of Steele: a commissioned channel clients retain to scrutinise the community groups, campaigns and voices that pose a risk to them.

Social control. His phrase. Not mine.

A whole channel, the one that exists to hold a better man than him up to ridicule for laughs — and here it is described, in the practice's own sales copy, as a commissioned vehicle that clients retain. Not a hobby. Not an opinion. A product, sold to companies, aimed at "voices that pose a risk to them."

And 07, which I did not expect and which I am still not right about. A threat-intelligence product. It has a name — BELLWETHER — and it is described as "real-time risk feeds tracking the community groups, campaigns and conspiracy-theory movements that pose a risk to corporate subscribers — before a groundswell reaches them."

Sit with that a moment.

There is a subscription product. Corporations pay a monthly fee for it. And what they receive, in real time, is us. Our meetings. Our groups. The things we are beginning to notice, flagged and forwarded before we have finished noticing them.

I am a line item on an invoice. After twenty years of being told I am nobody, I am a line item, and somebody is being billed for me.

And then the case studies. Which he published.

There are examples on that site. Anonymised, he says, "in the general terms our engagements permit." One of them concerns a commentator who was becoming a problem for a client. I will give it to you exactly:

We used our network to quietly place a piece of false information into the commentator's hands, tailored to fit the theories he already held.

And the outcome, in his own summary:

Within months his reputation for integrity was gone. Platforms removed him, speaking invitations were withdrawn, and his reach collapsed. The client's problem resolved itself — and our own hand never appeared anywhere in it.

Tailored to fit the theories he already held.

Every one of you should read that sentence tonight and then go and look very carefully at the last three things you were sent that you were pleased to receive. I have. I did it at two this morning and I did not enjoy the exercise, and I am not going to tell you tonight what I found, because I want to be sure.

Now the CV. And here is the hole in it.

There are two versions of this man's history and the honest one is not the one he shows you.

The practice's own CV — the one for the people with the big money, the one behind the download link — runs unbroken. Twenty-five years turning contested questions into settled ones. Vantefort Group, it says, 2002 to 2010. Wilson Reputation Management, founded 2013. Principal Consultant on a retained engagement — a confidential client delivering, and I quote, "a national public-realm technology and air-quality-enforcement programme" — from 2014 to the present day.

Unbroken. Continuous. A steady professional hand on the tiller for a decade.

Except that it is not true, and the proof is in his own other paperwork, in his own other name.

Because between March 2016 and July 2020 — four years and five months, the dates are his, not mine — Collin Sudamen was not consulting anybody. He was employed full-time, on-site, by the British Army, at Denison Barracks. The job title he gave it himself is disinformation officer.

Hold the two documents side by side. For four years and five months the website says Principal Consultant, retained engagement, present. The other record says Full-time. On-site. Barracks.

Both cannot be true. One of them is a costume.

And there is a second hole, further back, which is the one that tells you what he is ashamed of. That CV runs Vantefort to 2010 and then straight on. But the record I have been working from these three weeks has him somewhere else entirely from 2007 to 2011 — at a telecommunications firm, on the community-outreach desk, on mast rollout. Chairing residents' meetings. Absorbing health concerns. Keeping the programme's public face calm and dull.

He has stretched one job over four years to cover the one job he will not admit to. A man who will put "content suppression" on a menu, in public, with pride — and who cannot bring himself to write down that he stood in a church hall and told worried people the masts were nothing.

That is not shame about the work. That is shame about being caught doing it in a room with ordinary people in it.

July 2020. Look at the date and then look at what comes after it.

Nothing comes after it.

The barracks job ends in July of 2020 and there is no next posting. Not a transfer. Not a promotion into something quieter. Nothing. And the only thing that grows after that date is the practice — the logo, the seven numbered services, the case studies, the flagship vehicle, the subscription feed.

They call that going independent.

Thirty years, friends. Thirty years of watching men come off the org chart, and I can tell you that nobody in the history of paid employment has ever gone independent in July. You go independent in April, with a plan and a handshake and two clients already signed. What happens in July is that a thing stops, and afterwards a man builds a website about how it was his idea.

Every single line of that practice is a man selling the only skill he was ever taught, to whoever will still take his call, from a registered office above a parade of shops on the Finchley Road. He is not running an agency. He is fundraising his own survival, one retained mandate at a time, and dressing it in the language of a firm with a receptionist.

And now what I actually saw

Because this is the part that matters, and this is where the website falls apart in your hands.

I have told you what I watched at Ashbourne. I want to tell it again, plainer, because I have had a fortnight to sit with it and I have stopped being polite about it.

He did not look like a professional. He looked like the third day of something. Unshaven — not designer-unshaven, the other kind, the kind that comes with not having decided to do anything for seventy-two hours. Hair unwashed and flat to the scalp. A shirt that had been slept in, and not once. And a smell coming off him that I got the full benefit of as they steered him past my seat, which was not aftershave and was not beer, but that flat sour animal smell a man gets when the drink has been going through him for days and nothing else has.

And his eyes. I want to be careful here because I am not a doctor and I will not pretend to be one. But his eyes were going — twitching, sliding, never once settling on the person he was shouting at. I have seen that twice before in my life, both times in men I worked with, and both times it was not the drink going in. It was the drink, and whatever went with it, coming out. That is a man in withdrawal, in a conference room, in the afternoon.

That is the individual who sells message discipline.

And it was not the only time

Here is something I did not have when I last wrote, and I have it from people I trust who were standing there.

The twenty-fifth of June. Outside Harefield Cricket Club.

There was a meeting that evening — the Blade Runners, a group of patriots and light warriors who had done the entirely ordinary thing of booking a venue. Properly. Through the proper channel. Paid for, in the diary, like a christening or a darts night.

And a man turned up outside who had not booked anything, and attempted to make the evening not happen.

I want to be absolutely straight with you about my sourcing, because that is the only thing I have. I was not there. Harefield is a long jaunt from Burton on Trent — the wrong side of London and the wrong end of a day — and I would not insult you by implying otherwise. What follows is from people who were present, given to me independently, and consistent to a degree I found unpleasant.

Same man. Same state. Unkempt, they said, as if he had been in those clothes for a week. Drooling — that is their word, twice, from two people who have not spoken to each other. The same twitch in the eyes. And a smell that they struggled to be polite about and eventually stopped trying to be: not merely unwashed, but the smell of a man who had soiled himself in his own clothing and had gone on wearing them.

Twenty-fifth of June, outside a cricket club in Middlesex. Eleventh of July, a conference room in Derbyshire. Sixteen days apart, two counties apart, and the same ruined man in both, trying to stop two rooms full of decent people from talking to each other.

So let us say what this is

This is not a man who can manage anybody's reputation.

He cannot manage his own. He has a website that speaks of invisibility and discretion and the measure of the work being that nobody notices it, and he has been noticed, in two counties, by upwards of forty people, because he could not stay upright and could not stay quiet and could not, in the end, stay clean.

He is off the rails. That is the whole of it. A man who gave the best part of thirty years to an organisation that taught him one trade, used him until his cover was in strangers' hands, and then let him go in July with no card and no leaving do and no next posting — and who has understood none of it. He still talks their language. He still sells their services. He has printed their euphemisms on his own front page and he is proud of them.

He was chewed up by a system that was built, precisely and deliberately, to swallow men like him, take the useful years, and spit out what is left onto the Finchley Road. And the tragedy of him — and I do mean tragedy, I am not being clever — is that he is the one man in England who has all the evidence and cannot read it. He thinks he had a career. He was consumable.

I could almost weep for him. For about four seconds, at two in the morning, I did.

And then the fifth second arrived

Because there is another reading of all this, and I have been turning it over for two nights now, and I cannot make it go away.

What if none of it is a collapse?

Think coldly for a moment. You are the Brigade. You have a problem: rooms full of ordinary, sober, careful people who have booked a venue and intend to talk to one another, and you would very much like them not to. What are your options?

You cannot send a man in a suit. A man in a suit gets asked who he is, and answered, and shown the door with his dignity intact and nothing achieved. You cannot send a heckler in good order — he gets debated, and losing a debate in front of forty people is worse for you than silence.

But a man who is filthy. A man who stinks. A man drooling and twitching and shouting nothing you can even argue with — he cannot be engaged with at all. He can only be removed. And while eight decent men are removing him, nobody is listening to the speaker, nobody is taking notes, and the evening is over. And afterwards — this is the beautiful part, this is the part that made my hands cold — afterwards nobody wants to talk about it. There is no dignified way to describe what happened. You cannot put it in a newsletter. The whole event gets quietly not-mentioned, by everyone, out of embarrassment.

That is not a broken man ruining a meeting. That is a tool, and the filth is the mechanism.

I do not know which it is. I want to be honest with you about that, because a man who pretends to certainty he has not got is no better than they are. It may be that they discarded him and he is drinking himself through the wreckage in two counties. It may be that they never discarded him at all, that "going independent" is a cover story with a logo on it, and that the drooling shouting creature outside a cricket club in Middlesex was on the clock.

What I will say is this. The two readings are not as different as they look. Either they used him up and threw him away, or they are using him up still, in the most degrading way a man can be used, and he has agreed to it.

I have more. I have the name of the company behind that Sussex facility, and I have what they are alleged to take out of it, and I am not ready and neither are you.

Piece by piece, I will take you through all of it.

— R.S.