Page 169 - An Introduction to Political Communication Second Edition

AN INTRODUCTION TO POLITICAL COMMUNICATION

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 involves
managing government-media relations as a whole: enabling
journalists’ access to information, communicating governmental
views and decisions to the media, and ‘feeding back’ media reportage
of, and commentary 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 Bernard Ingham (now Sir) who is perceived
to have truly politicised the post.
Ironically, Ingham when appointed 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
governmental departments, including relations with ‘the Lobby’
(see below); and in 1989 was appointed to head the Government
Information Service (and with it, the Central Office of Information).
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 conformity 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 established in 1884 as a means of enabling
parliamentary correspondents to gain access to authoritative
information about political events and governmental business. So
called because journalists originally assembled in the lobby of the
House of Commons, the system was institutionalised in 1921 and
persists to the present day. Bernard Ingham describes the workings
of the Lobby thus:

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