Journalism: If one of the talents of good press relations or spin doctoring is timing, which Sir Bernard Ingham had in abundance when he was Margaret Thatcher's press secretary, then it would appear he has lost it. Reviewed by Michael Foley.
The central theme of this book is that spin doctoring, or the manipulation of the media, began in 1997 with the election of Tony Blair. New Labour's reliance on spin was inevitable because, Ingham says, Blair had nothing else - no philosophy, no dogma, no political principles and no beliefs.
Oh dear, just as Ingham's analysis of Blair is published, the same prime minister, who would hardly get up in the morning without consulting a focus group, has embarked on an unpopular war that has split his own party, divided Europe and allied him to a US president who is anathema to everything that is New Labour. One can only assume, whether one agrees with him or not, that Blair is acting with conviction.
Ingham became a legend during the Thatcher years. He was the blunt Yorkshireman who gave Thatcher undying loyalty. He was accused of using the weapon of the off-the-record briefing to break the reputation of ministers. Through crisis after crisis Ingham was there, whispering advice into Thatcher's ear and using the rules of the so-called lobby system to ensure Thatcher's control of her cabinet.
So notorious did this anonymous source become that the London Independent, the Guardian and the Scotsman withdrew from the briefings. They returned after Thatcher was deposed and Ingham retired to write columns for conservative newspapers and appear on late-night discussion programmes.
All this is dealt with in this book. Michael Heseltine; Thatcher's parliamentary private secretary, Archie Hamilton; Sir John Nott; John Redwood; and Edward Heath, who called for Ingham's dismissal, are all taken to task for any criticism they may have made of Ingham.
Despite the huge amount of self- justification he includes, correcting the minutiae is not what Ingham is trying to do. The Wages of Spin aims to show that he is not responsible for government by spin. That honour, he claims, belongs to New Labour.
To show this, he offers us a history of the British Government Information Service, the relationship between the press and politics, and an assessment of 20th-century prime ministers and their dealings with the media. Such an analysis is needed, but maybe Ingham is not the man to write it - and he clearly has not done so in this book.
By his own reckoning he was simply an impartial civil service press officer, willing to serve loyally any elected government without ever straying into the political areas where no civil servant should ever go. The Blair government, says Ingham, has an "arrogant contempt for parliament, party, press and people". This may even be correct, but it is also the sort of thing that was said about Sir Bernard and Lady Thatcher.
Despite Ingham's protestations, what comes out of this work is that he was, in reality, the first generation of a new type of government press secretary, from whom the Peter Mandelsons and Alistair Campbells learnt so much.
Ingham's task was made easy because of a system of anonymous briefings given to a select group of political journalists known as the lobby correspondents. During the Thatcher years their number grew as the media found that news and the drip, drip, drip of information was more likely to come from "an anonymous source" or "a source close to Number 10" or any other number of circumlocutions, rather than from the floor of the House of Commons. The prime minister might be saying one thing to her fellow MPs, but journalists knew that what her press secretary was saying, off the record, was much more interesting. What he said, of course, could, if necessary, be denied, because the briefings officially did not exist. The lobby system was at the centre of Ingham's power, which he exercised with remarkable effectiveness on behalf of his prime minister.
A similar system exists in Leinster House. It might not be cloaked in the secrecy and the codes (Margaret Thatcher was know only by her code name of Blue Mantle), but a select group of journalists - the political correspondents - receive special, off-the-record briefings, from which other journalists are excluded. They get information that they do not have to confirm elsewhere; they simply take it and attribute it to an unnamed source. Journalists say it allows a free flow of information that would otherwise not be possible. If that is the case then it is a good thing. However, the Ingham years and those that have followed under Blair should beg a question: who gets most out of the deal?
Michael Foley is a journalist and a lecturer in journalism in the School of Media at Dublin Institute of Technology
The Wages of Spin: A Clear Case of Communications Gone Wrong,
By Bernard Ingham, John Murray, 261pp, £18.99