Page 180 - An Introduction to Political Communication Third Edition

POLITICAL PUBLIC RELATIONS

breaking press secretary Bernard Ingham. Tony Blair’s Labour
government has been even more controversial, however, subjecting
the service to radical overhaul (including modifying its name to the
Government Information and Communication Service (GICS)).
Many of the changes can be defended as sensible responses to
changes in the media environment, which no government, of what-
ever hue, could have avoided. Others, such as the increased role of
‘special advisers’ appointed from outside the civil service (whose
numbers have grown from 38 to 176 in recent years) and the down-
graded status of traditional mandarins, have been greeted with cries
of ‘politicisation’ and many resignations. In this respect, Labour is
following the precedent established by the Tories, though adding
some new twists of its own.

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
involves managing government–media relations as a whole:
enabling journalists’ access to information; communicating govern-
mental 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 (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

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