Public relations, according to top spin-doctor Tim Bell, is the 'use of third-party endorsement to inform and persuade'. In seeking to improve its own image, the Institute of Public Relations has reached for the ultimate in third-party endorsement, a royal charter. On 9 February it became the Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR): effectively now endorsed by the crown. The CIPR hopes that this endorsement will help it to deal with the industry's two-part image problem.

On one hand, PR practitioners are widely regarded as hopeless halfwits; indeed the Insitute of Public Relations itself was described by Chris Lewis, of UK multinational Lewis Communications, as a group of 'disorganised, scatterbrained, champagne-dependent luvvies' and by Chris Klopper, of Mulberry Marketing Communications, as 'so far up their own backsides as to be money-and time-wasting irrelevancies'. Corporate Watch has been unable to determine whether PRs are in reality absolutely fabulous or absolute idiots, but we can confirm that every industry event we have attended has involved freely flowing champagne.

On the other hand, PR is derided as machiavellian spin-doctoring; an industry that works against the public interest by manipulating and suppressing journalists and the press on behalf of its corporate masters. And unfortunately for the industry's image, a lot of PRs do spend their time doing just this.

With chartered status the CIPR hopes to gain respectability. It can protray its members as sober professionals working with integrity and ethics. In reality however nothing has changed.

The CIPR has 8,000 members, only a third of all the PR practitioners in the UK. The Institute has investigated, on average, only six complaints against its members each year and has never seen fit to expel any of them. This makes a mockery of the industry's claims to effective self-regulation. At last year's Annual General Meeting, one member pointed out that many of the top people in PR have not taken membership precisely so that they do not have to sign up to the CIPR's code of conduct.

Not that the code has any weight to it. In 2000 the voluntary code, already widely perceived as having no teeth, was rewritten as 'a document of best practice, rather than retaining a "thou shall not..." approach.' From toothless to worthless, in other words.