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Probably not. 'Big Phil' Scolari has been offered the job of England football manager but turned it down (as of today anyway) because of opposition in Portugal (where he's team manager). According to Jonathan Ledyard, BBC Radio's rather excitable football correspondent, this is because Scolari's family have 'received death threats.'

Well, Jonathan may be right but anyone can text a 'death threat' to a radio station. I'm sure people do it about Alan Green the whole time. The reality is that the Football Association in the UK have dealt with this whole matter like a particularly incompetent bull in a china shop and Scolari, if he's to suffer this hassle, wants as least as much money as Sven is getting (the current England manager, yes, it's easy to forget).

Anyone looking at DDB in London today and comparing it to the (fairly) recently great Boase Massimi Pollitt (which it used to be) would probably have to say yes.

This thought is prompted by former BMP creative director John Webster's memorial service in London this week (and by Francesca Newland's interesting comments in Campaign's leader, fair's fair).

DDB London has been reeling since CEO Paul Hammersley upped sticks to join Sir Frank Lowe's Red Brick Road but that's a bit of a red herring. Everyone has known that Hammersley has been bursting to set up his own agency for years and DDB and its owner Omnicom could hardly have been unaware of this. So he was a short term fix at best.

Spectator political editor Peter Oborne is on his way from the Telegraph-owned weekly to the Daily Mail for a rumoured £200,000, somewhat more than he was trousering at the Spectator one assumes. He follows hard on the heels of Telegraph columnist Tom Utley.

Mail supremo Paul Dacre clearly became annoyed when his old colleague Murdoch MacLennan, now ceo of the Telegraph group, nicked his features exec Liz Hunt and then tried to entice away highly-regarded deputy editor Jon Steafel. MacLennan had already lured former Mail managing editor Lawrence Sear out of retirement and installed one-time Mail exec John Bryant as editor in chief.

Come off it, you say, but consider: an ICM poll in the Guardian newspaper the other day gave the Lib Dems 24 per cent against the Labour Party's 32 per cent and the Tories' 34 per cent.

The next General Election is a long way away and, in the meantime, Tony Blair and Cherie need to be levered out of Downing Street, a job that seems beyond the ability of Gordon Brown, the supposed heir apparent.

The longer Blair stays on the worse it is for Brown. Because of the vagaries of the electoral system it's almost impossible for the Tories to win an outright majority in 2010, or whenever the next election is (how did the Tories, the consummate election professionals, ever allow this to happen?) but there's a strong likelihood of a hung Parliament. And by the time the election happens, Brown, if he's leader, will be hoist by his own petard of a stagnating economy and widespread fury about the inadequacies of the NHS and the pensions system.

France Telecom, the new-ish owners of Orange have just scrapped their latest ad campaign through UK agency Mother because it doesn't look like the campaign they're planning through new agency Fallon (owned by les francais, Publicis, strangely enough).

Now I don't mind the French being French, and it's a jolly good thing that they try to keep their film industry afloat (we can all remember the wonderful 'Le Cop' surely), their language and their culture. And good luck to Maurice Levy if he can take on Omnicom and WPP.

But ever since France Telecom took on Orange it's gone from bad to worse. Their prices are rubbish, the marketing's all over the place: it's a bit like the NHS trying to run a mobile company. This used to be the coolest brand in the business with wonderful marketing through their agency WCRS and mad ceo Hans Snook. Now the likes of O2, until recently BT's unregarded Cellnet, are knocking them into a cocked hat (see old pictures of Napoleon).

Online is taking about $12.5bn in the States and it's overtaking radio and posters and, perhaps, national press in the UK. So that's that then, sit back and enjoy it.

But life isn't quite that simple. It has yet to be proven that online can build brands and create communities of buyers via the internet. Internet surfers are notoriously brand-free, even brand-hostile although they still sign up in numbers to Google, Amazon and Ebay.

Online is like yesterday's direct marketing, you can see the see the results and even if they aren't very good at least you've got a score. So online will soar away as other less quantifiable media struggle.

We only ask because each new development seems to leave it worse off than before.

First we have the England manager scenario where, as of Monday evening, 'Big Phil' Scolari from Brazil is apparently the new favourite because David Dein of Arsenal has been lobbying hard for him. Dein, of course, was the guiding light behind the appointment of Sven, fair do's, he's done OK, and also, apparently, artfully blocked off any approach to Arsenal's manager Arsene Wenger.

It should also be noted that Arsenal don't have any English players in their first team. So why is Dein so influential?

One reason is that new Football Association supremo Brian Barwick doesn't seem to have the clout he would wish for. Let's face it his previous job was head of ITV sport, which roughly amounts, in the pecking order, to being the owner of the Arrows Formula One team. So Brian has been hemmed in.

Two more old Capital hands, managing director Keith Pringle and programme director Nik Goodman have walked the plank as GWR struggles to make sense of its takeover of the once all-powerful London radio station.

Capital boss Ralph Bernard has now brought in one Scott Muller from Sydney station Nova to be the new programme director. Scott aparrently developed stations like Core in his previous guise at GWR. What was Core you ask? I don't know either.

Capital used to be a big player in the life of the capital but since the hicks from the sticks, aka GWR, took it over it has been a complete disaster. Bernard, who's just a provincial businessman with an obsession with digital radio, has made a complete pig's ear of the merged company and should be booted out by his shareholders forthwith. The trouble is that it was the shareholders who put him in there in the first place. Which just goes to show that the likes of Fidelity know sod-all about media businesses.

There just aren't any in this ghastly line-up of Britain's, and Europe's, fat cats. The Rothermeres, who own Associated, are in at about 30 and thereafter you have to get down to the footnotes to find anyone in advertising or media.

Even Sir Martin Sorrell is propping up proceedings with a measly £85m. And who believes these figures anyway? It was very smart of Philip Beresford, a Management Today journalist I believe, to come up with this format a decade or so ago but some of his computations make you wonder. Is Mick Jagger, who with co-author with Keith Richard wrote some pretty durable tunes, only worth £30m more than Welsh crooner Tom Jones (who never wrote anything as far as I can recall). And can the creepy Sting be worth £300m?

Old-style media moguls are fed up with with consumers and (some) money flowing into the internet so we have another version of the dotcom boom; they're not sinking money into projects but into successful internet properties.

So News Corporation has shelled out $649m for MySpace and another site Intermix and ITV has bought Friends Reunited for about £175m ($220m). These are similar products designed to get people who've lost touch in touch via the internet. And they're astonishingly popular with millions of regular users.

They generate pretty respectable amounts of ad revenue but nothing to write home about. MySpace does about $200m. But this won't be enough for Rupert Murdoch and Friend's Reunited's take won't be enough for ITV either.