Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, Amy Winehouse, Pete Doherty, Paul Gascoigne, and Alexander Bell all have one thing in common - what is it? Well they've all been caught misbehaving in public in one way or another and faced censure in the popular press
Only Mr Bell faced a little more than that. What was it?
Well he was said to be the man behind the Great London Underground booze-up last weekend, after notices on social network sites informed the lager drinking classes that Saturday May 31 was bender time on the London tube system to mark the last day drinking alcohol was allowed on the network. Borik O'Barmey - aka Boris Johnson - banned it as from June 1.
Bell's case will have had the emloyment lawyers scratching their heads as to where he stood with his employer the Royal Bank of Scotland. Mind you I was wondering what the man who invented the telephone in 1876 was doining having a few pops on the Circle Line in 2008.
I digress. I guess it will come down to Bell's employment contract and whether he has signed up to some cheerless code of conduct outside work that many HR departments are fond of nowadays. Or, according to a more Machievellian interpretation, whether there was code of conduct that it was assumed you had agreed to unless you'd opted out of it by signing something else - if you see what I mean/
I too have read these "you will not disgrace yourself outside the company" documents and wondered why anyone would sign them. After all if a man can't let his hair down once in a while what's the point? Did Oliver Reed or Richard Burton sign them when in their hell-raising pomp? I should cocoa.
Nevertheless I guess Bell's case will come down to some point such as was he recognisably a RBS employee at the time of the tube stramash. I would argue that he showed the organisational; skills and mastery of web networking technology that the bank surely needs in this time of travail that it finds itself in.
Come to think of it, surely the RBS board has brought more disrepute to the grand old Edinburgh bank by losing billions in sub-prime investments? At least Mr Bell could organise a piss-up at a tube-ery.
