There is no better news story to lift the nation’s spirits than the birth of a royal baby, enhanced shortly after with the wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. This double whammy of feel-good blanket editorial coverage will gather pace in the coming days and weeks, and many brands out there will be thinking of creative ways to become part of these celebrated national occasions…

EMBARGOED TO 0001 FRIDAY MARCH 11 Special commemorative cups of coffee featuring the faces of Prince William and Kate Middleton, which have been created for the International Food and Drink Exhibition 2011 (IFE11) – the UK’s leading food and drink event – which is hosting the UK Barista Championships, at London’s ExCeL exhibition centre, from Sunday 13-16th of March.

Facebook’s response to the Cambridge Analytica data harvesting scandal is proving remarkably inept. The dynamite revelation by a whistleblower, that the data of 50 million users was mined without their consent and used by a political consultancy, threatens the very future of the social network.  Yet it has taken five days for Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg to issue a statement.  The story broke on Saturday, by Wednesday Facebook shares fell by more than 2 per cent and were down more than 11 per cent on Thursday.  At the time of writing, $57 billion has been wiped off the market value of Facebook in less than a week (whilst Twitter’s share price has risen 3%). Only after all this fallout has Zuckerberg belatedly admitted that the company has “made mistakes” and that there has been “a breach of trust”.

Sport is in the headlines for all the wrong reasons as professional cycling gets its head around the conclusion by MPs that Sir Bradley Wiggins abused drugs to enhance his performance. Clearly it’s a distressing and frustrating moment for all clean athletes and their representatives. So much more than individual reputations is at stake: trust in whole sports, sporting associations and federations, agents and competitions is vulnerable, not to mention commercial interests such as sponsorship deals.