Theexpenses scandal was seen by man

The
expenses scandal was seen by many observers as a major contributing factor
to the Labour government’s defeat. Athough MPs of all parties were found
to have abused the archaic and lax expenses regime, the incumbent party
suffered the most at the hands of public opinion, and paid the price
electorally.
‘Pro-active’ information management
Governmental information management may have a number of functions. The
activities of a body such as the Central Office of Information are ostensibly
about informing the public in a neutral manner on matters of interest and
POLITICAL PUBLIC RELATIONS
145
concern to them, such as civil defence procedures or the activities of the British
Council abroad. In recent decades, however, the COI has been ‘co-opted’ into
a more overtly political role. In the early 1980s the Conservative government
employed it to counteract the activities of the anti-nuclear protest movement.
Later in the decade the COI’s spending on advertising tripled, largely to
publicise the government’s privatisation campaign. In so far as this communication activity was intended to inform the British public about the fact of
privatisation, it did not breach the parameters of the COI’s traditional remit.
Much of the material produced was, however, clearly promotional in
function – advertising designed to sellthe ideologically grounded policy of a
particular party and government. In 1988 the head of the COI, himself
concerned about the undermining of his agency’s neutrality, demanded a
public inquiry, which however was not granted (Harris, 1991).
Other ostensibly neutral state agencies, such as the Government
Information Service, have developed an equally ambiguous relationship to
the political process. The GIS was established in the 1950s ‘to give prompt
and accurate information and give it objectively about government
activities and government policy. It is quite definitely not the job of the
Government Information Service to try to boost the government and try to
persuade the press to’ (Lord Swinton, quoted in Harris, 1991, p. 113).
Current guidelines state that the publicity work of the GIS should be
‘relevant’ to the activities and responsibilities of the government, that it
should be ‘objective and explanatory, not tendentious or polemical’, and
‘should not be party political’ (quoted in Ingham, 1991, p. 368). That the
GIS was accused of flouting these guidelines in recent years is largely the
responsibility of Margaret Thatcher and her mould-breaking press secretary
Bernard Ingham. Tony Blair’s Labour government was 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 were sensible responses to changes in
the media environment, which no government, of whatever hue, could have
avoided. Others, such as the increased role of ‘special advisers’ appointed
from outside the civil service (whose numbers grew from 38 to 176 in Blair’s
time) and the downgraded status of traditional mandarins, have been greeted
with cries of ‘politicisation’ and many resignations. In this respect, Labour
was following the precedent established by the Tories, though adding some
new twists of its own. As noted above, New Labour’s information management apparatus came under fire in 2003 as a result of the Gilligan affair, the
death of David Kelly, and the Hutton inquiry, leading to substantial reforms.
These can be seen as acknowledgement by the government that since its
election in 1997, its information apparatus had become overly politicised.
Gordon Brown’s premiership attracted criticism over the freedom it gave
special advisers such as Damian McBride to leak, brief and lobby against
political opponents. In April 2009 Guido Fawkes’ political blog exposed a
COMMUNICATING POLITICS
146
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 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
notpart 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 government 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 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
POLITICAL PUBLIC RELATIONS
147
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:
Press officers speak as frankly as they feel able to members [of the
Lobby], either individually or collectively, on a background basis:
i.e. the journalist does not identify his source precisely in writing his
story. . . . This method of communication with journalists is
universally practised in government and other circles the world over
as a means of opening up the relationship [between government and
media].
(1991, p. 158)
Critics dispute both Ingham’s optimistic reading of the Lobby’s impact on
government–media relations, and his assertion of its ‘universality’. In Robert
Harris’s view:
by the late 1970s, most countries had a straightforward government
spokesman – a political appointee who would brief the press, appear
on radio and television, and promote the official line. But in Britain,
the spokesman was not only anonymous: he acted in accordance
with quasimasonic rules drawn up in Queen Victoria’s time. A
system which had been designed to preserve the quintessentially
English atmosphere of a gentleman’s club had been imported into
the television age.
(1991, p. 82)
The main criticism of this system of non-attributable media briefings was
that it permitted manipulation of journalists by politicians to a degree that
is unhealthy for and damaging to the democratic process. Cockerell et al.
argue that ‘its secretiveness mirrors the secrecy that surrounds so much of
government in Whitehall and allows the government of the day to present its
own unchallenged version of reality’ (1984, p. 42). This it can do simply
because journalists are forced to respect the rules, or face exclusion from the
system and the valuable information it supplies. In the extremely competitive
environment of the contemporary media industry this is not a realistic
option, although the Guardianand the Independentvoluntarily withdrew
for a period in the 1980s, in the hope that change to the system would follow.
When, for example, Margaret Thatcher wished to leak damaging information about ministerial colleagues who had fallen from favour, she frequently
employed Ingham, and the Lobby system, to do it, in the knowledge that
COMMUNICATING POLITICS
148
nothing said in briefings could be attributed to her personally. John Biffen,
Leon Brittan, and Nigel Lawson were among those ministers who in the 1980s
found their credibility and positions threatened in this way. Nigel Lawson,
indeed, went so far as to accuse Number 10 and Ingham of ‘black propaganda’
in their dealings with him (Harris, 1991, p. 176).
In his memoirs and elsewhere, Ingham denies that he ever used the Lobby
system, or any of the communication channels available to him, in an
improper way. There can be no doubt, however, that the Thatcher–