The credibility of those who are paid and used to promote products and services to their willing followers on social media has taken a significant nosedive.

Ten of the world’s models, including the likes of Kendall Jenner and Bella Hadid were used along with another 400 influencers by organiser Billy McFarland, who is now in jail for fraud, to promote his Fyre Festival, puffed up as a luxury music festival in the Bahamas with five-star accommodation, private jets and limos for transport and gourmet cuisine. All this, and the paid endorsements of models that their followers trusted, persuaded 5,000 aspirants to pay up to £9,000 for a ticket to the event in 2017.

Those organisers and PR types who think they are being awfully clever arranging for planted question at their events should know that they are very easy for an intelligent audience to spot and that they are really nothing new.

One former orator and advocate of the deception once boasted “At all our meetings I had party members in the audience with orders to interrupt, along carefully prepared lines, to give the impression of a spontaneous expression of public opinion. These interruptions strengthened the force of my argument”.

The clever orator who orchestrated his own heckling? Adolf Hitler, in 1921.

Fine dining for up to 50 people with views over the Liverpool waterfront will be offered from next month on a new balcony at the 7th floor Carpathia restaurant at the 30, James Street hotel. The building was originally the offices of the White Star Line, owners of the tragic Titanic, which hit an iceberg and sank in 1914, killing more than 1,500 passengers in the freezing seas; 1,352 men, half of which were crew, 109 women and 53 children.

On a happier note the restaurant menu offers such starters as pan-fried sea-bream with salt baked beetroot, lemon balm and olive oil (£9.50), and confit duck leg terrine with orange gel, baby onions, beetroot puree and sourdough (£7.50). Main courses are such as fillet of red mullet with a citrus and peanut crust, chilli and garlic greens and minted pea puree (£17.50) and 8 oz fillet steak, short beef rib and potato lattice with white onion puree, baby vegetables and roasting jus (£28.50). Desserts include sticky toffee pudding with vanilla bean ice cream, and almond brittle and baked rhubarb and custard cheesecake with set rhubarb jelly and stem ginger, both at £6.50.

International Confex, the Event Production Show and the PA Show are all moving from Olympia in 2020 and relocating at Excel in Docklands.

The events have been at Olympia since 2013 but the organisers, Mash Media, now feel that Excel is a better venue in which to grow the shows, which will take place Tuesday February 25 and Wednesday February 26, 2020.

Now all they have to do is to get the visitors out there.

A new 88-bedroom boutique hotel is to be created by 2021 in Coventry city centre, in the former offices of the Coventry Evening Telegraph. (The Business Desk)

There will be a 1950’s theme to the unit, which will be operated by Bespoke Hotels, and there will be conference rooms, a restaurant, a roof-top bar and a range of loft-style two-storey bedrooms in the former print room.

Behind the hotel, and part of the deal agreed, there will be student accommodation with 833 rooms opening as phase one in September 2020.

Charles Laughton, 1999-1962, was the brilliant, bisexual and tortured actor who appeared in more than 50 films, most from 1933, after giving up a career as a manager at his parent’s Scarborough hotel, the Pavilion, now demolished.

Laughton graced a number of memorable roles as a monster or misfit which included Captain Bligh in Mutiny on the Bounty, Quasimodo in the Hunchback of Notre Dame, Doctor Moreau in The Island of Lost Souls and Henry VIII in The Private Life of Henry VIII. Another memorable role was as crusty and eccentric lawyer, Sir Wilfrid Robarts in Witness For The Prosecution, based on an Agatha Christie play and directed by Billy Wilder in 1957.