Mike Granatt

Mike Granatt is a public relations and communications professional, formerly a senior British civil servant, and the first head of the Civil Contingencies Secretariat of the Cabinet Office in 2001, the same year he was appointed a Companion of the Order of the Bath for "exceptional public service." then Queen Mary College, University of London where he ran the students' union newspaper for two years. He briefly appeared in what its members considered the legendary folk/rock band Pig Rider penning some of the lyrics for the curiously mis-titled Paeolithic Transport Blues.

Career After working as a trade and local news journalist,

While at the Home Office he was appointed head of profession for the Government Information Service, becoming full-time in that post on transfer to the Cabinet Office in 1998. This move, to provide direct support to Sir Richard Wilson (now Lord Wilson of Dinton), then cabinet secretary, was made to help deliver changes facing the renamed Government Information and Communication Service (GICS) after Labour won power in 1997. He was also the central adviser on the ethics and guidance governing the work of the GICS and other government communication staff. He wrote guidelines for the general election period in 2001 advising press officers to "Stay paranoid, stay boring, stay safe". Granatt describes Alastair Campbell, who was Tony Blair's special advisor at the time, as "an extraordinarily good operator", though he thought he was given too much power.

Granatt took a leading role in co-ordinating public information from government in the run up to the Millennium, during the nationwide fuel protests of 2000, and the foot and mouth disease outbreak in 2001. Granatt said of the existing systems that "we've got a system that was put in place for nuclear war."

quote="Believe it might happen." — Granatt's maxim for crisis management. but its mission to update the UK's emergency planning arrangements was swept up in the counterterrorist reforms following 11 September 2001.

Having established CCS, in late 2002 Granatt took early retirement following a review into the GICS led by Sir Bob Phillis that abolished his post.

Consulting and PR Granatt then joined George Pitcher's city consultancy Luther Pendragon in 2004. In this role he was Michael Martin's media advisor when Martin was Speaker of the House of Commons from 2005 until February 2008. One of his clients in 2007 was the BBC Trust.

Currently he is senior associate fellow at the Advanced Research and Assessment Group of the Defence Academy of the UK, a fellow of the Chartered Institute of Public Relations, a past master of the City of London Guild of Public Relations Practitioners, chair of the governors and trustees of Mary Hare School, and chairman of the UK Press Card Authority. The IPR awarded him the Sir Stephen Tallents medal in 2002. He was previously a visiting professor at the University of Westminster. In 2007, he was the author of Luther Pendragon's code of conduct, which formed part of their submission to the House of Commons Public Administration Select Committee inquiry into lobbying in 2008.

Mike Granatt is also National Advisor to Community Resilience UK.