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. Crisis management 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." In 2001 Granatt was asked to set up the Civil Contingencies Secretariat, to reform Whitehall's civil emergencies arrangements and carry out "horizon scanning" after the earlier failures in the government's communication responses to crises. CCS was established in July 2001, and replaced the Home Office's Emergency Planning Division, which had replaced the Home Defence and Emergency Services Division of Cold War days, 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 reverted to the sole job of leading the GICS and was promoted to director-general, at the second highest rank in the civil service. At the end of December 2003, 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. He resigned saying he had been misled over a scandal involving the Speaker's expenses. 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.