The Penultimate Campaigner

A somewhat diffident young Englishman called Richard Abbott is leaving the UAE. There are a number of reasons why this is significant news, not least of which is that Richard was the editor of the region’s most famous and celebrated non-magazine, Campaign Middle East.

He is also the natural winner of the UAE leg of the William Dalrymple Lookalike Contest, but that's something else entirely.

This move does not bode well for any future that the cheeky little Haymarket licensed magazine had. Richard and team, having transferred from ITP with the title, had kept the faith for months, waiting for Motivate to gain a license to publish the magazine acquired from ITP in such mysterious circumstances. Nothing has happened since and now Richard’s leaving, it looks increasingly certain that nothing, indeed, is going to happen.

I’ll miss Campaign ME, and not just because I used to write a column in it every week (and was scheduled, to the surprise of some apparently, to write one under Motivate's aegis as well). I’ll miss it because it was an intelligent and occasionally even incisive weekly magazine about the industry in which I work and because it provided a good counterpoint and foil to the excellent Communicate.

Drinks with Richard tonight will be invariably tinged with sadness. But drinks is drinks…

PS: Iain Akerman is still at Motivate and therefore is truly the Last of the Mohicans...