Page 168 - An Introduction to Political Communication Fifth Edition

Intro to Politics Communication (5th edn)-p.qxp 9/2/11 10:55 Page 147

POLITICAL PUBLIC RELATIONS
series of e-mails written by McBride and associates, appearing to show plans
for a Labour smear campaign against the Conservatives as the 2010 election
approached. As a result of the scandal which followed, ‘Mad Dog’ McBride,
as he was nicknamed, resigned.

Prime-ministerial public relations
All prime ministers, noted a former political reporter of the Sunday Times,
seek to ‘dominate the press, radio and television as the vital precondition to
their domination of Parliament, parties and public opinion. They [desire] to
control and exploit the media as an arm of government’ (James Margach,
quoted in Cockerell et al., 1984, p. 8). The principal means by which this
domination can be secured is through the figure of the chief press secretary.
The post of Prime Minister’s Press Secretary was first created by Ramsay
MacDonald in 1929, in order to assist him in his dealings with the media.
The work of a contemporary press secretary or communications diretor
involves managing government–media relations as a whole: enabling jour-
nalists’ access to information; communicating governmental views and
decisions to the media; and ‘feeding back’ media reportage of, and com-
mentary on, governmental performance.
Although a civil service appointment paid for from public funds (and thus
not part of the party apparatus), the press secretary has frequently been
strongly identified with the politics of his or her prime ministerial employer.
Harold Wilson’s press secretary, Joe Haines, was politically close to the
Labour leader. But it was Margaret Thatcher’s press secretary (now Sir)
Bernard Ingham who is perceived to have truly politicised the post.
Ironically, when appointed Ingham was not an obvious political ally of
the Thatcher premiership but an ex-Labour-supporting career civil servant
who found himself, by his own admission, entranced and seduced by his
employer’s iconoclastic radicalism (1991). As press secretary Bernard
Ingham was, like each of his predecessors, at the heart of the British
government’s information management system. He chaired the Meeting of
Information Officers, a committee comprising the senior public relations
officials in Whitehall; co-ordinated the news management work of govern-
ment departments, including relations with ‘the Lobby’ (see below); and in
1989 was appointed to head the GIS (and with it, the COI). In Robert
Harris’s view, by the close of the Thatcher era Ingham had become a de facto
‘Minister of Information’ rather than a neutral public servant (1991). In this
capacity he orchestrated and directed governmental communication in con-
formity with the interests, not of the public as a whole but of his government
and, in particular, of his Prime Minister.
A key instrument of Ingham’s communicative work was the ‘Lobby’
system, identified by Cockerell et al. as ‘the Prime Minister’s most useful tool
for the political management of the news’ (1984, p. 33). The Lobby was

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