Government Communications and the Crisis of Trust: From Political Spin to Post-truth 3030775755, 9783030775759

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Government Communications and the Crisis of Trust From Political Spin to Post-truth Ruth Garland

Government Communications and the Crisis of Trust

Ruth Garland

Government Communications and the Crisis of Trust From Political Spin to Post-truth

Ruth Garland School of Media, Communications and Cultural Studies Goldsmiths, University of London London, UK

ISBN 978-3-030-77575-9    ISBN 978-3-030-77576-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77576-6 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank all my interviewees for their time and their insights, and also to the many over the years who have provided leadership for and given evidence to a range of government and parliamentary enquiries into public communication. I also thank the officials and archivists who maintain the public record, and staff at the London School of Economics (LSE) and other academic libraries. My personal thanks go to my supervisors at the LSE, Dr Nicholas Anstead and Dr Damian Tambini, and my former LSE colleague Professor Nick Couldry. I also thank the many academic colleagues who have supported me, but most especially the late Professor Jay Blumler of Leeds University, to whom this book is dedicated. Finally, thank you to my parents Ken and Wanda Garland.

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Contents

1 Prologue: The Crisis of Trust  1 The Road to the 2003 Iraq War: Blair’s Dilemma   3 ‘Let’s Get Brexit Done’: Johnson’s Campaign of 2019   8 Conclusion  10 References  13 Part I The Post-War Government Information Service  15 2 How Did We Get Here? 17 Whitehall: Resilient Yet Fragile  19 A ‘narrative of disdain’ for Government Communicators  23 Conclusion  28 References  30 3 Thatcher and Major: Covert Changes to the Rules of the Game 33 “It will be important to sell, and sell hard”  35 Major Struggles to Contain the Narrative  40 Conclusion  45 References  47

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Part II The Age of Political Spin  49 4 From Blair to Cameron and Beyond 51 The Narrative of Political Spin  53 Obscuring the Exercise of Political Power  55 1997: Pushing Out the ‘dead meat’  56 2010: “We don’t think you’re very good at your job”  61 Conclusion  64 References  65 5 The Rise of Politically-Appointed Media Strategists After 1997 69 What Changed?  71 How Journalists Saw the New “terms of trade”  74 Confusion Over Who Represents the Official Line  79 Conclusion  81 References  83 6 How Bureaucrats and Parliamentarians Pushed Back Against Spin 87 Propriety and Ethics in Government Communications  88 Resistance from Within  90 Media Activism by Ministers  97 Conclusion 100 References 102 Part III Mediatization, Impartiality and Public Trust 105 7 The Surrender to the 24/7 News Cycle107 The Interface Between Media, Politics and Bureaucracy 111 Politicians’ Pact with the Media 115 Conclusion 117 References 119 8 Impartiality and Accountability as Ingredients of Trust123 Civil Servants as Defenders of Public Values 125

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Policing the ‘line’ Between Impartial and Partisan Communication 127 Impartiality as a Contested Value 132 Conclusion 134 References 136 9 What Makes Good Government Communication?139 The Stated Purposes of Government Communications 140 The Public Role of Government Communicators 146 Conclusion 151 References 152 10 Trust in Democratic Government in a Post-­Truth Age155 Truth, Post-Truth and Spin 158 ‘Truthful spin’ and the 2002 Iraq Dossier 159 The Battle for Truth Behind the Scenes 161 Statistics as a Political Weapon 164 Conclusion 166 References 167 Part IV Coronavirus and Beyond 171 11 Coronavirus Communication: Clear, Consistent and Comprehensive?173 Building Public Confidence 177 What Went Wrong? 179 Conclusion 181 References 183 12 Conclusion: Putting the Public First187 Appendix: Interviewees in Order of Appearance193 Index195

List of Tables

Table 9.1 Table 9.2 Table 9.3

Principles and functions of government communications The public purposes of government communications—A summary of findings from government and parliamentary inquiries into government communication What’s in a Name? From GIS to GCS

142 149 150

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CHAPTER 1

Prologue: The Crisis of Trust

The ideal of the well-informed citizen, facilitated by the watchdog role of the media, is generally seen as essential to the safeguarding of representative democracy. This ideal has been progressively challenged in recent decades under the pressure of a profound media transformation known as ‘mediatization’, and by the response of political actors and political institutions to such change. Governing bureaucracies have had to face two major drivers of change during the past 40 years: a more competitive and ubiquitous media, and a political class in thrall to media power and steeped in the arts of so-called ‘political spin’. Cumulative changes in the way governments conduct public communication have been linked to a calamitous fall in public trust, and, some believe, may even threaten the foundations of liberal democracy itself. What is frequently absent in discussions about spin is the public. Where does ‘the public’ feature in discussion about government communications, and who holds the key to the public interest and public accountability in a democracy? This book aims to open up the ‘black box’ of government communications to examine the usually hidden institutions and actors that operate at the interface between mass media and the central governing bureaucracy. It uses a combination of original interviews with civil servants, journalists and other ‘insiders’, and documentary, archival and biographical sources to examine the everyday processes of government media relations. I will argue that, in the struggle to prevail against what they perceive as an existential threat from a rapacious and rapidly expanding media, governing © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 R. Garland, Government Communications and the Crisis of Trust, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77576-6_1

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politicians have progressively exploited any strategic means possible to increase their control over the mechanics of public communication within the civil service in order to control political and policy narratives. Politicians and their closest aides have been quick to adopt innovative and often questionable promotional practices, and to use their access to privileged information and the resources of the civil service to trade favours with the journalists they love to hate. While seeking greater political control over the tools of government communication, they have, perhaps inadvertently, progressively weakened the already inadequate accountability structures within government. This opening chapter identifies two pivotal moments where a crisis challenged the government communication status quo while also revealing some of the mechanics that lay behind it. These were the promotional campaign leading up to the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, and the struggle to ‘get Brexit done’ three years after the 2016 referendum vote to leave the EU. The former initially brought about a low point in public trust in government, as it became clear that Saddam’s much-publicised Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) did not exist. Hopes were raised by the recommendations of the first Independent Review of Government Communications in 2004 that were accepted by the government as a blueprint for ethical and effective public communication (Phillis 2004). As this book shows, this promise did not materialise. The second pivotal moment was when the Johnson governments of 2019 adopted a wide-­ ranging adversarial stance on the No. 10 press corps, the BBC, experts, the civil service, parliament, the judiciary and those in its own party who had fought to remain in the EU. It seemed during those few months as if the post-war structures and norms relating to government communication that had been severely challenged by New Labour after 1997 were about to be dismantled. Yet just months after Johnson’s election victory in December 2019, the government was forced to adopt a public campaign driven by consensus, where ministers stood alongside experts to successfully call for universal behaviour change to protect the most vulnerable. A key factor in the deterioration in public trust in recent decades is a much-criticised cleavage between two communication ideals—the need to present evidence and the political imperative to argue for particular policy actions. There have been numerous UK government and parliamentary inquiries over the past 25 years that have raised concerns about this cleavage, culminating in the seven-year Chilcot Inquiry into the lead up to and

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conduct of the 2003 Iraq War (Chilcot 2016). The focus in this book is not so much on governing politicians themselves but on the institutional processes and bureaucratic actors inside governments. I will argue that a growing collusion between governments and the media has facilitated a steady and largely unheralded erosion of the post-war principles and processes that underpin civil service impartiality in the conduct of governments’ relations with the public, especially through the mass media. This introductory chapter presents a snapshot of these two pivotal moments of potential change—Tony Blair’s Iraq war promotional campaign of 2002–2003, and the fall-out from Boris Johnson’s campaign of 2019–2020 to Get Brexit Done—as case studies that exemplify the deepening challenge to public values in government communications.

The Road to the 2003 Iraq War: Blair’s Dilemma The publication by the UK government of the dossier Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) on 24 September 2002, and the three major reviews that followed it, provides a massive and still largely untapped resource for uncovering otherwise hidden government processes (Butler, 2004; Hutton, 2004; Chilcot 2016). The dossier was unprecedented in that it involved the publication of previously secret intelligence information relating to Saddam’s chemical, biological and nuclear arsenal. In practice, the dossier deployed intelligence for a political purpose—to turn the tide of negative public, parliamentary and party opinion that was against war in order to achieve a higher aim, the removal of a tyrant. The failure to find WMDs is still seen as a primary cause of the loss of public trust in British governments since 1997 (Whiteley et al., 2016). What is less well known is the role of the civil servants charged with providing an impartial public information service in producing what turned out to be an inaccurate document where “more weight was placed on the intelligence than it could bear,” and where judgements “went to (although not beyond) the outer limits of the intelligence available” (Butler, 2004, p. 128, para 464). The Iraq Inquiry found that the promotional campaign leading up to the 2003 war resulted in a “damaging legacy, including undermining trust and confidence in Government statements” that in future “may make it more difficult to secure support for Government policy” (Chilcot, 2016, pp. 131, 116). In a live broadcast from Downing Street on the day New York City’s twin towers were brought down on 9/11, Tony Blair promised that

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Britain would “stand shoulder to shoulder with our American friends” (Blair, 2001a). In a letter to President Bush a month later Blair argued that a “dedicated tightly knit propaganda unit” would be needed to make the case for “deal(ing) with Saddam” (Chilcot 2016, p.  338). Inside Whitehall, close policy ties between the Prime Minister at No. 10, the Cabinet Office and the Secret Intelligence Services (SIS) were established almost immediately. A small, ad hoc group that met in the Prime Minister’s ‘study (known as the ‘den’) started working on a new policy framework centring on close alignment with the UN, and restraint in relation to US military intervention in Iraq, while slowly trying to build a public consensus for regime change by emphasising the threat posed by Saddam (Chilcot 2016, pp. 226, 231, 291, 312). Blair told the Iraq Inquiry that 28 such ad hoc meetings took place, of which only half were minuted. Those attending were those he considered to be the “right people,” namely, No. 10, the Chief of Defence Staff, the Foreign and Defence Secretaries and the Chief of the SIS (Blair, 2011). When the small War Cabinet was set up in March 2003, the ad hoc group still met privately at 8.30  am just before the War Cabinet, to consider issues such as ‘media handling’ (Blair, 2016). Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s chief press secretary, records in his diaries that he was a member of these groups (Campbell, 2013, p.  532). The Cabinet Secretary at the time, Richard Wilson, had doubts about the bypassing of the official machinery of government, telling the Iraq Inquiry that Blair “had his own team. That is, to be honest, how he liked to work” (Chilcot 2016, p. 274). The combination of political spin and ‘sofa government’ has been accused of constraining cabinet government and politicising the British civil service (Diamond, 2014; Hennessy, 1999). Jack Straw, a loyal Blairite who served as Foreign Secretary (2001–2006) throughout the Iraq War period, later told the historian Peter Hennessy that processes and procedures were neglected: “I never approved of the way Tony ran the government. Procedure is about the most important, not the least important subject in the legal system” (Straw, 2013). The interplay between due process and political imperative within the context of an increasingly mediatized political environment, is one of the constant themes in this book. The most visible component of the Iraq War promotional campaign was the widely publicised claim, as stated by Tony Blair in the dossier’s foreword, that Saddam’s “military planning allows for some of the WMDs to be ready within 45 minutes of an order to use them” (HM Government,

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2002, p. 4), a claim which arose a few weeks before the dossier was published but was “deemed unreliable” less than two years later (Herring & Robinson, 2014, p. 574). The claim appeared as the second judgement in the executive summary of the dossier, and was highlighted by Tony Blair in his statement to Parliament on 24 September. It then appeared in the London Evening Standard that afternoon under the headline ‘45 minutes from attack’ (HM Government, 2002, p.  5). Who briefed whom and when is known only to the participants. Alastair Campbell’s diary entry for 24 September, and indeed the entries leading up to the parliamentary debate, do not refer to the 45-minute claim although he acknowledged the following day that the dossier and Blair’s accompanying statement to parliament, received “massive coverage around the world” (Campbell, 2013, p. 309). He later told the veteran BBC interviewer, David Dimbleby, that he expected the 45-minute claim to make headlines and that the media coverage had achieved the government’s objective in sharing with the public why concern over Saddam was growing (Campbell, 2020). The fragility of the official record on media briefings, and the use by journalists of non-attributable government-sourced news means that much of what goes on behind the scenes is unknown and hence deniable. Media briefings are frequently conducted over the phone or in person and hence unrecorded, and documentation and archiving in media matters in general, even including press releases and the minutes of meetings is relatively sparse (Hood & Dixon, 2015). However, a detailed statement to the Iraq Inquiry by John Williams, Director of Communications at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (2000–2006) provides a rare insight into the inside workings of government communication during the lead up to the 2003 Iraq War (Williams, 2010). The statement portrays a largely marginalised, compliant and ill-informed government information service that was excluded from the central corridors of power and hence unable to perform one of its widely understood and frequently stated key functions—to challenge the holders of power. Williams succeeded Alastair Campbell as political editor at the Labour-­ leaning Daily Mirror in 1994, and his background was untypical for a Foreign Office (FCO) official. Traditionally, civil servants or diplomats had been recruited into roles in the press office, but Williams was one of the new breed of operator brought into government soon after the 1997 election. Amid great controversy, most of the incumbent Heads of Information departed after the Blair government came into power, a process that is documented later in this book. As is evident from Williams’

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submission to The Iraq Inquiry (Chilcot), his relative inexperience as a civil servant, and his background as a journalist, did not equip him to handle complex political crosswinds and spot the institutional pitfalls quickly enough to avoid them. Williams’ statement shows that although he was close to the Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, and frequently travelled with him, his knowledge was partial. He was not aware, for example, of important correspondence between 10 Downing Street and the White House, or of concerns among officials within his own department about the unconventional use of intelligence. Indeed, the Foreign Office itself was excluded from prior access to discussions between Blair and Bush in December 2001, in which Blair agreed that Saddam had WMDs and was continuing to build on them. Blair told Bush that although it was “presentationally difficult” to argue for “toppling Saddam,” there needed to be a softening up of opinion over time (Blair, 2001b). Williams’ exclusion from the flow of information led him to believe that “the Foreign Office was playing a more important role in Iraq policy than I now believe to be the case.” In his diaries, Campbell recalls a discussion with the Chair of the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), Sir John Scarlett (2001–2004) in early September 2002 in which they shared the perception that the Foreign Office was “trying to take it (the dossier) over” (Campbell, 2013, p. 297). Williams’ statement claims that he was aware of the FCO’s view that “the material available was weak on Iraq,” so was “instinctively against the idea of a dossier” because the exercise “seemed to me to rest on uncertainties.” His lack of involvement in key meetings made it difficult for him to question No. 10’s request, in March 2002, to produce a note setting out ideas for a media campaign. The first he knew about the decision to publish a dossier was when he read about it in The Independent newspaper on 5 April 2002, during the Prime Minister’s visit to President GW Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Texas. The Independent reported that “a dossier detailing alleged links between Iraq and international terrorists has been delayed, but Mr Blair’s spokesman said the information will be released in the public domain ‘at the appropriate time’.” The official announcement that a dossier would be published came five months later at a press conference held by Tony Blair on 3 September. According to Campbell, the publication of the dossier was “about beginning to turn the tide of public opinion.” He was aware that “massive expectations” had been raised by Blair’s announcement, and within a week, he was chairing a group that would agree public presentation of the

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dossier (Campbell, 2013, pp.292, 297). Having revealed the existence of a dossier it was clear that a huge amount was at stake politically—namely, the future of the government, the Prime Minister and the UK’s relations with the US. It is in the context of this pressure that decisions about the style, content and presentation of the dossier were made. The sense on the part of governing politicians that 24/7 news media posed both a unique opportunity and an existential threat—but one that must be managed—is one that recurs throughout this book. Concerned at the lack of ground-breaking or newsworthy intelligence material in the dossier, Williams warned in a memo of 4 September that “there is no ‘killer fact’ that proves that Saddam must be taken on now.” At a meeting the next day, Williams recalls being asked by Sir John Scarlett to be the ‘golden pen’; the person with the skills to produce a document fit for publication. The following day, Jack Straw and the Permanent Secretary at the FCO, Michael Jay, made clear that the document should be produced by the Foreign Office, not No. 10, and agreed that Williams should indeed be the ‘golden pen’. Williams did what he refers to as the “routine job” of producing a first draft over the weekend, a task that involved “taking the strongest points and putting them in an executive summary,” but felt “the result was underwhelming.” At this stage, there was still no reference in the document to the 45-minute claim. By 9 September, the ‘golden pen’ had been removed from Williams; he would be part of Campbell’s presentation group, but not the writer (Campbell, 2013). In his statement, Williams expresses regret at not raising his own doubts “more robustly and directly with Alastair Campbell.” Although he accepts that his role as Director of Communication was to offer the “yes, but” challenge, he felt “it would have been improper for a spokesman to question the accuracy of intelligence.” He “followed the policy laid down by the elected Prime Minister and had no objection to it other than my own instincts, which I felt were outweighed by his” (my emphasis). From his Chilcot submission, Williams appears to have been struggling to see the full picture, caught between No. 10 and the FCO over the Iraq agenda, and only intermittently involved in discussions about the communications plan leading up to the crucial House of Commons debate on 24 September, at which the Prime Minister used the dossier to make a persuasive case against Saddam. In this sense, rather than simply being part of a ‘political spin’ operation, he had become an unknowing accessory in a political battle being waged above him (Garnett, 2010; Kuhn, 2007).

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The cautiously-worded yet critical Butler report of 2004 into the quality of the intelligence leading up to the Iraq War criticised the dossier for not including sufficient caveats as to the uncertainty behind some of the claims (Butler, 2004; Wring, 2005). The report stated that the informal nature of decision-making “made it much more difficult for members of the cabinet outside the small circle directly involved to bring their political judgement and experience to bear on the major decisions for which the Cabinet as a whole must carry responsibility” (Butler, 2004, paras 609–610). Twelve years later, the Chilcot Report agreed that there were occasions when the Cabinet was not consulted when it should have been and that the dossier was presented “with a certainty that was not justified” (Chilcot, 2016). In the House of Lords debate on 12 July 2016  in response to the publication of the Chilcot report, Robin Butler went further, describing the then government as “dysfunctional,” and its “disregard for the machinery of government” as irresponsible (Foster, 2016). In their detailed analysis of the paper trail of documents leading up to the production of the dossier, Herring and Robinson concluded that the “inaccurate picture” presented, and the publicity around it, formed “the core component of deceptive, organised political persuasion which involved communication officials working closely with politicians and intelligence officials” (Herring & Robinson, 2014, pp.  579–580). Williams’ account highlights the importance of disaggregating the governing elite in order to examine the power structures that determine what is and is not placed in the public domain, when and in what form. The more recent exposure of machinations behind government communications in relation to Britain’s departure from the EU provides a further unique opportunity to observe and evaluate these power structures in play.

‘Let’s Get Brexit Done’: Johnson’s Campaign of 2019 The evidence relating to the Johnson government’s actions during the lead up to and immediately after the General Election of December 2019 is necessarily more sketchy and anecdotal than the widely documented promotional campaign leading up to the 2003 Iraq War. The catalogue of errors, distortions, legal challenges, regulatory and propriety transgressions, blurring of boundaries, inflammatory rhetoric and contradictions of fact that have characterised this period are so extraordinary and unprecedented that historians, journalists and media and political observers will be kept busy for decades. Within a time span of 148  days between the

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declaration of Boris Johnson’s leadership campaign on 12 June 2019, to the official start of the General Election campaign on 6 November, virtually all the issues that characterised the narrative of political spin after 1997, together with those additional elements identified with the notion of Trumpian ‘post-truth’, were on display. The litany of mishaps included a further centralisation of communications at No. 10; contradictory media briefings on matters of major public interest by anonymous political aides, including the Prime Minister’s chief of staff; the consistent avoidance of parliamentary scrutiny; the bypassing of norms of impartiality; the controversial failure to publish important information that was inconvenient to the government; the silencing (and dismissal or forced resignation) of dissenting voices; attempts to draw civil servants into improper party political forms of communication; and the unprecedented resignation and public claims of ministerial bullying from a senior civil servant (Prescott & Eccleston-Turner, 2020). On 4 September 2019, 21 Conservative MPs, including former senior ministers such as the Attorney General and the Chancellor, were removed from the party for voting against the decision to prorogue (close) parliament, a decision that was ruled unlawful and reversed by the UK Supreme Court in September 2019. This decision ended their political careers and removed the party’s most senior moderate and pro-EU voices from public life. One prominent example of a public transgression of impartiality norms was the televised visit by the Prime Minister to the Carr Gate police training facility in West Yorkshire on 5 September 2019 to announce a police recruitment campaign. Boris Johnson was filmed making an unexpected political speech about Brexit in front of ranks of uniformed police officers; an unprecedented act that compromised their political neutrality (Black, 2019). The Chief Constable John Robins issued a statement saying: “It was the understanding of West Yorkshire Police that any involvement of our officers was solely about police officer recruitment. We had no prior knowledge that the speech would be broadened to other issues until it was delivered.” He added “I was disappointed to see my police officers as a backdrop to the part of the speech that was not related to recruitment” (BBC News, 2019a). Other acts of public communication drew a level of criticism not seen since the Blair years. Even Facebook showed a greater concern for propriety than Whitehall when it decided on 2 November 2019 to take down a government campaign known as @MyTown, because it appeared to target voters in marginal election constituencies (BBC News, 2019b), something

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that is explicitly against the government communications propriety code (GCS 2014/2020). Three days later the Cabinet Secretary and Head of the Civil Service, Mark Sedwill, intervened to prevent the government from publishing costings of Labour Party policies developed by civil servants, because it was against the rules preventing civil servants from participating in election campaigning (Blitz & Romei, 2019). In October 2020, a Department for International Trade tweet was widely condemned for making the false claim that soy sauce “will be made cheaper thanks to our trade deal with Japan.” Experts challenged the claim saying that this would only apply in the case of a No Deal Brexit. The next day the Department’s Twitter feed was changed to read: “To clarify: thanks to the UK-Japan trade deal, soya sauce will be cheaper than it otherwise would be under WTO terms, on which we would be trading with Japan from 1 Jan if we had not secured the UK-Japan trade deal.” It was noted that since much soy sauce used in the UK is made in the EU it would probably have become more rather than less expensive under No Deal (Stone 2020). Such apparent trivia illustrate not only the vigilance of modern fact checkers, but the importance of check and challenge in government communications, even if this gets in the way of a good story. It raises concerns that an adversarial approach to long-established conventions and a cavalier attitude to facts demonstrates a further ratcheting up of ministerial powers in relation to public communication that co-opts or bypasses the bureaucratic actors charged with policing such conventions.

Conclusion There is always the risk that unique events such as the publication of the UK government dossier of September 2002 and the public information campaign about Brexit coordinated by No. 10 in 2019 reveal and obscure in equal measures since they cannot be seen as typical. On the other hand, moments of crisis such as these provide an opportunity for the exposure of government machinery that may otherwise remain hidden. Chilcot accepts that many of the lessons learned from this case were “context dependent,” but that general lessons can and should be applied in relation to the decision-­making processes in government, especially at times of national crisis. The Iraq Inquiry report agrees with the earlier Butler report in calling for a clear distinction to be drawn between the political imperative to argue for particular policy actions, and the requirement on the part of officials to present evidence (Chilcot, 2016).

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Early observations of the actions of the 2019 Johnson government suggest that either such lessons have not been learned, or that the lessons have proved to be too inconvenient and constraining for successive governments to apply. This begs the question as to whether the accountability structures in relation to government communications are too important to be left either to civil servants or political actors. The public has largely remained invisible in discussions of the crisis in government communication that began in the 1980s, intensified with the election of Tony Blair in 1997 and continued through Brexit and into the earliest days of the COVID-19 pandemic. As we see later in this book, public servants have long argued for a space within public bureaucracies that is autonomous from politicians, where strategic communication priorities are derived from an appraisal of public need and a notion of an impartial ‘public good’. Here, normative considerations apply, such as objectivity, equity, fairness, accountability and ultimately due process. This book is divided into four sections. Part I examines the immediate post-war period and the Thatcher and Major governments that preceded the arrival of New Labour in 1997 to ask, how did we get here? The first chapter in this section, Chap. 2, shows how the distinction between presenting evidence and arguing for policy became a key underlying principle of the government information service as established after the Second World War, not just in the UK, but in other liberal democracies. The undermining of this distinction is considered by critics to be a root cause of the crisis in public trust and public communication “that is sapping the vitality of democratic political culture” (Blumler & Coleman, 2010, p. 140). The post-war Government Information Service (GIS) was, by the 1980s, already facing criticism for failing to keep pace with changes in the media. Chapter 3 looks at the Thatcher and Major neoliberal governments of the 1980s to uncover subtle and covert changes to ‘the rules of the game’ that enabled an initially unpopular government to exploit a partisan press and the dominant medium of television to shift the post-war narrative. Part II focuses on the so-called age of political spin—the period from 1997 to the end of the Coalition government in 2015. Chapter 4 looks at how the growth of the 24/7 news environment coincided with a radically new and overtly promotional approach to government media relations that precipitated an enduring sense of deep crisis. Chapters 5 and 6 provide an in-depth, longitudinal study of the role of the ostensibly impartial UK government information service from the point of view of those who

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occupied key roles within it after 1997, looking at the rise of politically appointed media strategists, and the response from bureaucrats and parliamentarians. Taken together, Parts I and II do not set out to provide a comprehensive and complete historical record, but to offer a longitudinal and institutional context to the dramatic change in government communication norms and practices that took place after 1997. Part III switches perspective to explore the themes of mediatization, impartiality and public trust, and to argue that the dynamic relationship between these drivers of change underpins the development of what has come to be known as ‘political spin’ and more recently, ‘post-truth’. Chapter 7 examines how the mass media came to be seen and to see themselves as representatives of the public, and how politicians surrendered to the 24/7 news cycle. Chapter 8 analyses the concept of impartiality in government communications to ask what it means in practice and why it is such a key factor in public trust. Could this largely hidden, contested and evolving public value offer collective resistance to spiral of distrust between media, government and the public? Chapter 9 asks what good government could and should look like. What are the purposes of government communication as stated in official documents and as seen through the eyes of public servants themselves? Are these sufficient to ensure a trusted and trustworthy public communication function? Chapter 10 examines the issue of trust in democratic government in what has come to be seen as a ‘post-truth’ age where media have proliferated and become more fragmented. It finds biases in the understanding of truth that are symptomatic of wider structural problems at the government/media interface. The final section, Part IV, examines the impact of coronavirus and looks to the future. Chapter 11 asks to what extent the UK government’s COVID-19 communication campaign was clear, consistent and comprehensive? In early 2020, in response to the pandemic emergency, the Johnson government, like others, turned to widely-understood norms of impartial public communication to build public trust and drive participation in a national programme of mass behaviour change. What does the public response tell us about how to rebuild trust in democratic government in a post-truth age? Chapter 12, the Conclusion, considers how institutional arrangements can become more aligned with publics and more accessible to democratic scrutiny in order to deliver a credible and trusted public communication function that takes account of repeated communication failures in recent decades and is capable of responding to the global and local challenges ahead.

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References BBC News. (2019a, September 6). ‘PM ‘Political Stunt’ Police Speech in Yorkshire Criticized. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-­england-­leeds-­49599379 BBC News. (2019b, October 10). PM Police Speech Row: Cabinet Secretary Says ‘Lessons Learned.’ https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-­politics-­50006959 Black, M. (2019). West Yorkshire Police Chief Constable “Disappointed” About Backdrop to Boris Johnson Speech. Bradford Telegraph and Argus. https://www.thetelegraphandargus.co.uk/news/17886082.west-­yorkshire-­ police-­c hief-­c onstable-­d isappointed-­b ackdrop-­b oris-­j ohnson-­s peech/. Accessed 6 Sept. Blair, T. (2001a, September 11). Statement In Full. Live from Downing Street. BBC News. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/1538551.stm Blair, T. (2001b). Tony Blair Letter to George W Bush “The War Against Terrorism: The Second Phase”, dated 4 December. Published by The Iraq Inquiry (Chilcot 2016). Blair, T. (2011, January 21). Public Hearing, Chilcot Inquiry. See Chilcot Report (pp. 26–27). Blair, T. (2016). Minute from Tony Blair to Jonathan Powell, 30 March 2003. From Chilcot Report (p295). Blitz, J., & Romei, V. (2019, November 7). Mark Sedwill Blocks Release of Public Finance Forecasts. Financial Times. https://www.ft.com/content/ bd5d79be-­0156-­11ea-­be59-­e49b2a136b8d Blumler, J. G., & Coleman, S. (2010). Political Communication in Freefall: The British Case—And Others? International Journal of Press/Politics, 15, 139–154. Butler, L. (2004). Review of Intelligence on Weapons of Mass Destruction: Implementation of its Conclusions. HMSO. Campbell, A. (2013). The Burden of Power: Countdown to Iraq  – The Alastair Campbell Diaries (Vol. 4). Penguin. Campbell, A. (2020, November 3). Interview with David Dimbleby, ‘With You Whatever’, Series 1, Episode 6. In The Fault Line: Bush, Blair and Iraq. Producer: Somethin’ Else. Chilcot, S. J. (2016). The Report of the Iraq Inquiry. House of Commons. Diamond, P. (2014). A Crisis of Whitehall. In D.  Richards (Ed.), Institutional Crisis in 21st Century Britain. Palgrave Macmillan. Foster, M. (2016, July 12). Chilcot Fallout: Ex-cabinet Secretary Lord Butler Scolds Tony Blair Over “Irresponsible” Attitude to Whitehall. Civil Service World. Retrieved from https://www.civilserviceworld.com/professions/article/chilcot-fallout-excabinet-secretary-lord-butlerscolds-tony-blair-over-irresponsibleattitude-to-whitehall. Garnett, M. (2010). New Labour’s Literary Legacy: Institutions, Individuals and Ideology. British Politics, 5(3), 315–336.

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GCS. (2014/2020). GCS (Government Communications Service) Propriety Code. Published 2014, reissued 2020. https://gcs.civilservice.gov.uk/publications/ propriety-­guidance/ Hennessy, P. (1999, July 8). Founder’s Day Address. Hawarden Castle. Herring, E., & Robinson, N. (2014). Report X Marks the Spot: The British Government’s Deceptive Dossier on Iraq and WMD. Political Science Quarterly, 129(4), 551–584. HM Government. (2002). Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction: The Assessment of the British Government. The Stationery Office. Hood, C., & Dixon, R. (2015). A Government that Worked Better and Cost Less? : Evaluating Three Decades of Reform and Change in UK Central Government. Oxford University Press. Hutton, B. (2004). Report of the Inquiry into the Circumstances Surrounding the Death of Dr David Kelly (Vol. HC 247). House of Commons. Kuhn, R. (2007). Politics and the Media in Britain. Palgrave Macmillan. Phillis, R (2004).  An Independent Review of Government Communications. Cabinet Office. Prescott, C., & Eccleston-Turner, M. (2020, March 2). Why Sir Philip Rutman’s Resignation Matters When Considering the Response to COVID-19. LSE Politics and Policy Blog. Stone, J. (2020, October 28). Government Backtracks Over False Claim Soy Sauce will be Cheaper After Brexit. The Independent. Accessed at https://www. independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/brexit-­soy-­soya-­sauce-­cheaper-­trade-­ department-­b1394031.html Straw, J. (2013). Interview with the Constitutional Historian Professor Peter Hennessy for the Series ‘Reflections’ on BBC Radio 4, on 18 July 2013. https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/b036w394. Accessed 29 Nov 2020. Whiteley, P., Clarke, H. D., Sanders, D., & Stewart, M. (2016). Why Do Voters Lose Trust in Governments? Public Perceptions of Government Honesty and Trustworthiness in Britain 2000–2013. British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 18(1), 234–254. Williams, J. (2010). Witness Statement to the Iraq Inquiry (Chilcot). Accessed from: http://www.iraqinquiry.org.uk/media/96118/2010-­1 2-­0 6-­S tatement-­ Williams-­John-­.pdf Wring, D. (2005). Politics and the Media: The Hutton Inquiry, the Public Relations State, and Crisis at the BBC. Parliamentary Affairs, 58(2), 380–393.

PART I

The Post-War Government Information Service

CHAPTER 2

How Did We Get Here?

National governments play a dominant role as both a source of news for journalists, and as co-creators of political narratives (Cook, 1998; Graber, 2003). The quality of information provided by governments influences the conduct of day-to-day life, so any decline in public trust can have major negative impacts on public behaviour and attitudes towards the functioning of democratic institutions. We saw in Chap. 1, how the case of the 2003 Iraq War provided a conspicuous example of untrustworthy, government news management and how the 2019 Johnson governments generated controversy with the transgression of media relations norms at No. 10 Downing Street (known as No. 10). The approach taken here is one of historical institutionalism, an approach that uses a “qualitative, longitudinal deep case study method” to examine the interaction between institutions, ideas and agents (or interests) over time (Bannerman & Haggart, 2015, p. 10). The particular institutional case study examined here is the public communications apparatus within the UK’s central governing bureaucracy, or civil service, widely known as ‘Whitehall’. The focus is on the development of strategic communication processes from the 1980s onwards, a period book-ended by the launch of multi-channel television, and the rise of web-enabled media. Although Whitehall is in many ways unique, the unease, distrust and controversy surrounding the ways in which modern governments communicate with citizens are widespread in today’s democratic societies. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 R. Garland, Government Communications and the Crisis of Trust, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77576-6_2

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As the previous chapter showed, the steady undermining of the distinction between the need to argue for a particular policy action, and the requirement on the part of officials to present evidence is considered to be a root cause of the crisis of trust in recent decades. In the UK as in many other countries, this dilemma has been managed through an elite and largely self-regulating partnership between partisan and impartial institutions/agents, and the media, that was set up after WW2 to win back trust following public and media cynicism about wartime propaganda. What is most interesting is not media institutions or actors per se, but “the illumination of some of the shifting relations between and across multiple actors and the media” in historic perspective (Hoskins & O’Loughlin, 2015, p.1325). The proliferation of media forms and the consequent impact on democratic politics is theorised as the meta-process of mediatization, that is, “a historical, ongoing, long-term (meta-) process in which more and more media emerge and are institutionalized,” so that “media in the long run increasingly become relevant for the social construction of everyday life, society and culture” (Krotz, 2009, p. 24). In this chapter we go back to the post-war origins of today’s government communication service-within-a-service—known until 1997 as the Government Information Service (GIS)—to find out to what extent the institutional structures and safeguards put in place in the late 1940s have prevailed during a time of rapid and radical media change. How effectively do these structures serve and embody the public information needs of citizens today? As a relatively small and separate network within a huge governing bureaucracy, how was the GIS perceived by the wider body of civil servants, and how has this changed over time? This chapter will use official literature and archival documents to examine the establishment of the Government Information Service after 1945. Witness accounts from former government communicators will be examined to show how their work was, and continues to be, consistently undervalued and treated with disdain and even contempt by other civil servants. Given the pressures placed on it, to what extent did this service-within-a-service understand and keep faith with its core public purposes and enduring values as media change gathered pace after 1979, and most particularly after the arrival of the New Labour government after 1997?

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Whitehall: Resilient Yet Fragile Many British political institutions are known for their longevity and resilience. Such institutions as Whitehall, the monarchy, the judiciary and parliament combine elasticity, the flexibility to respond to change or threat and to spring back into shape, and toughness, the ability to recover quickly from difficulties and challenges. However, functional and structural concerns are not the only ones to consider over time. The culture, or sets of norms, customs and practices within which decisions to act are made, is also important. March and Olsen’s “logic of appropriateness,” whereby an “institutionalized capability for acting appropriately,” is determined by “the distribution and regulation of resources, competencies and organizing capacities” within a given bureaucracy, helps to conceptualise the relations between institutions like the civil service, and those with different degrees of ‘situated agency’ within them (March & Olsen, 2009, p. 10). The actions of certain key individuals, such as the Prime Ministers’ press secretaries, Bernard Ingham and Alastair Campbell, and more recently, Boris Johnson’s short-lived Chief of Staff, Dominic Cummings, are made possible and become significant within the context of certain political and institutional norms, and the possibilities which emerge during times of change and conflict. Today’s Government Communications Service (GCS) on the face of it looks very like the wartime propaganda service which, after a shaky start, was considered to have successfully mobilised the population on the ‘home front’. This comprised the Ministry of Information (MOI) to deliver and coordinate propaganda, the No.10 press office and chief press secretary based at the centre to serve the Cabinet and Prime Minister, and the departmental press offices to disseminate more specific information about government policy (Grant, 1999; Maartens, 2016; Moore, 2006). Soon after the Labour election victory was declared on 26 July 1945, a Cabinet Committee chaired by the Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, drew up plans for the post-war organisation of Government Publicity (National Archives, 1945). By 18 September, the Committee had made the (then) controversial decision to retain a single, centralised agency based on the Ministry of Information model, despite the widespread assumpion that the MOI would be dissolved after the war. This became the Central Office of Information (COI) in 1946. The Committee hoped that a centralised agency would provide a “unifying influence” over “publicity work on the home front” (National Archives, 1945).

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With the demands of post-war reconstruction and a radical agenda for change, the government felt it needed “a body of technically expert staff which knew how to conduct publicity without incurring the charge of propaganda.” This body of professionals would be “arguably depoliticized by not having a minister at its head,” and given a degree of autonomy under a civil service director but would work to a Minister without portfolio who had responsibility for the coordination of what was then referred to as the presentation of government policy (McKenna, 2018, p.60). The Committee was aware of the potential problems associated with this model and anticipated criticism from both Parliament and the press about what might be considered to be a continuation of propaganda, but felt the benefits outweighed the risks. Although “the boundaries between information, explanation and advocacy were tenuous” and there were risks of “embarrassment and misrepresentation,” governments had an obligation to provide “the material on which the public could reach an informed judgement on current affairs.” A memo dated 14 September from the Lord President Herbert Morrison, later the minister in charge of government presentation, stated in terms very similar to those used by modern politicians that “there should be no return to the old timidity and reticence in the relation between Government departments and the public and press” and that there must be “no questions of Government publicity being used to boost individual ministers” (Morrison, 1945). A House of Commons debate took place on 7 March 1946, approving the creation of the new agency, and the COI was launched in April, meeting with some press criticism. Later the same year, the Daily Express “referred to Morrison as the head of the Government’s ‘propaganda machine’ and called the COI an ‘odious’ new instrument of government” (Grant, 1999, p.66). The dual accountability of the government communicator to both political and administrative masters, and the requirement to ensure that government information is disseminated without incurring the charge of propaganda, was therefore established from the start. This was later enshrined within successive iterations of propriety guidance that called on government communicators to ensure that the boundary, or the line between party-political and public information was maintained. Here, then, was the shape of a government communications structure which in broad outline still exists today: the differentiation between central and departmental control of information, a separate cadre of in-house communications specialists who are distinct from the rest of the civil service

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but still impartial, a dual administrative and political leadership with ultimate oversight resting with the minister, and the concept of the line, however blurred, that divides public information from party political communication. The abstract notion of the line is referred to frequently by civil servants, even today, while government documents generally refer to ‘boundaries’ (The Committee on Standards in Public Life, 2012; GICS, 2000; Public Administration Select Committee, 2002). One major discontinuity is the closure of the COI and the dispersal of its functions into the government HQ at Downing Street, the Cabinet Office. This took place suddenly in 2012 without external consultation, and with little apparent criticism, either from the media, civil servants, the public or parliamentarians (Horton & Gay, 2011). The abolition represents an intensification of a process which had been taking place over time: the tendency for government presentation to move from a central common service agency headed by a civil servant, to clusters of departmental press offices serving a ministerial team (Hood & Dixon, 2015). The second discontinuity concerns the role of Special Advisers (known as ‘SpAds’), the temporary civil servants appointed by the Prime Minister on behalf of departmental ministers, who are uniquely exempt from impartiality. After a slow beginning during the 1970s, their numbers and influence grew steadily, massively expanding with the arrival of the 1997 Blair government. Their increasingly dominant role as media intermediaries has provided a focal point for criticism from civil servants and journalists that belies their relatively small numbers. It is their symbolic role as well as their specific influence over government news narratives, that arouses most disquiet. This is discussed in more detail in Chap. 5. A concern with appearances, which runs through existing propriety guidance, such as the Ministerial Code (Cabinet Office, 2019) and the Government Communication Service’s own Propriety Code (GCS 2014/2020), has resonated through the decades, but appearances may deceive. The 1980 Official Handbook for Information Officers, for example, devotes a section, ‘The Political Factor’ to how civil servants should manage politicians. It contains a revealing nugget. Information officers are advised that “the arranged Parliamentary Question is an invaluable method of putting right ill-informed criticism. It is not immediately obvious that the occasion has been ‘arranged’, and the reply is likely to receive general coverage,” (cited in Scammell, 1991, p.  16). Similarly, the Director General for Government Communications, Mike Granatt (until 2003), reiterated the importance of appearances in maintaining trust in his

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evidence to the Parliamentary Administration (2002):

Select

Committee

on

Public

If any government wanted to go down the route of having overtly politically driven management of its services they would have to think very carefully indeed about whether the audiences concerned, media or public, were actually going to invest those operations with the sort of trust that the current system does.

In typically opaque civil-service-speak, he seems to be implying that although not overtly political, the GIS in its various incarnations, was covertly politically-driven. The later controversies relating to the Iraq dossier of September 2002 and the subsequent Hutton, Butler and Chilcot inquiries (Hutton, 2004; Chilcot, 2016), should be seen in this context and are further explored in later chapters. The self-regulating nature of the Government Information Service, and the concern with appearances, were flaws built into the structure from the start, according to Moore. In his archival analysis of the 1945–1951 Labour government’s approach to communication, he concludes that although the government instituted a comprehensive and efficient method of communicating with the public, it did not provide adequate controls and so failed to make it externally accountable, perhaps because to do so would make it more difficult for politicians to control. There were no guidelines set up for how the State should, and should not, communicate. There were no constraints put on the way in which the government produced communication or worked with the independent media (over and above the insufficient civil service code of neutrality). There was no way to ensure the government was giving the news media sufficient or equal access, and no way to ensure any consistent representation of information. (Moore, 2006, p. 216)

The extent to which today’s Government Communication Service (GCS)1 defines and fulfils public purposes and democratic norms is still very much open to question, as the ensuing chapters, and especially Chaps. 8 and 9, will show.

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A ‘narrative of disdain’ for Government Communicators The autonomy and status of the GCS is linked to its reputation among its core clients, namely, politicians, journalists and the wider civil service. If it is held in high esteem, it is likely to be given more autonomy to deliver a service in accordance with its own professional standards and purposes. In line with the growth of PR, the expansion of media and the mediatization of politics during the 1980s (Davis, 2013; Stromback, 2008) we might have expected the reputation, standing and resourcing of the government’s PR function to have increased markedly during the post-war period (Aronyczyk & Powers, 2010; Corner, 2007; Sanders, 2011; Sussman, 2011). In fact, from the early 1980s onwards, the service experienced repeated criticism from politicians, senior civil servants and even its own leadership. Between 1979 and 1990 Margaret Thatcher’s chief press secretary Bernard Ingham fought to promote and defend the work of the GIS under his leadership, but felt that the quality of the service that he inherited was “very mixed” (IV1).2 Two weeks before officially taking up the post of Chief Press Secretary on 1 November 1979, he sent the Minister in charge of presentation, Angus Maude, an 11-page paper on presentation, arguing that the challenge of radically reforming “the post-war national ethos” would be tough and painful but worth it, and would probably take at least three years. He warned that “too much should not be expected of” public relations. Instead, he suggested, attention needed to be paid to coordinated economic presentation by three parties: backbenchers, ministers working with administrative civil servants, and the GIS, whose performance and morale he agreed needed to be improved. In a memo to Maude, on 15 October, he outlined his aspirations for the future of the service: We need to introduce some of the disciplines of a newspaper office into Government Information work (…) we need to formalize the practice of telephoning into No. 10 press office by 5 p.m. a news list for the following 24 hours (…) I shall shortly have met the Information heads of all the main Departments. I am clearly indicating to them…that I am anxious to raise the reputation and status of the Government Information Service. (Ingham, 1979) (my emphasis)

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On 5 December 1979 Ingham presented the Prime Minister with an eight-page paper on economic presentation with “proposals for injecting purpose and drive into the presentation of economic policy.” In it, he argued that the government was too reactive, and that there needed to be “a broad and consistent view of Government policy (through) a series of mutually supportive campaigns aimed at different sections of the public.” To improve the resilience of the press office, and its ability to continue to think long term while dealing with short-lived media frenzies, he argued that a distinction should be made between its handling of emergencies, and the need for longer term communications planning. Again and again in the archives, we see examples where Ingham deflected the criticisms of ministers by blaming poor presentation on their failure to pull together, while trying to raise standards and gain greater central control over government messaging. In a confidential note to the Prime Minister on 19 January 1982 he argued “all the slick presentation in the world counts for little or nothing if the Government is seen to be divided among itself or unhappy with its own policies.” The basic responsibility for the presentation of economic policy “must rest with the Treasury,” but he was critical of his own profession, stating: I regard the Treasury Information Division as one of the less effective and desperately in need of some dynamic professionalism. Too much emphasis is apparently put upon economic expertise, and far too little on a robust ability – and enthusiasm – to communicate simply. (Ingham, 1982)

Yet, despite Ingham’s influence, and the typically close working relationships between Ministers and even quite junior press officers, many witness accounts reveal a steady narrative of disdain, especially from fellow civil servants. In interviews with the author, respondents refer to being seen as ‘minister’s narks’ or ‘toys for the ministers’, as being ‘below the salt’ and ‘treated with a certain amount of contempt’. Their role was considered by other civil servants to be a ‘soft option’, and yet there was also envy at their privileged access to ministers. Government PR was felt to be “inherently dishonest (…) something that you use to sell dog food.” More broadly, “there was the slight feeling that you are not proper civil servants” and were looked down on “not exactly as a necessary evil but certainly not to be taken quite as seriously” (Garland 2016). The isolated position of the GIS without a professional champion of the calibre of Bernard Ingham after 1990, led to stagnation and a failure

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to recognise and adapt to changes in the media. John Major (1990–1997), who succeeded Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister later admitted that he did not prioritise media relations sufficiently (Bale & Sanders, 2001; Hogg, 1995). Despite the increased status and resourcing devoted to government media relations after the arrival of the Blair government in 1997, the sense of ‘them and us’ within the civil service extended even to the most senior levels, and persisted even when, following the Independent Review of Government Communications (Phillis, 2004), the head of government communications was elevated to Permanent Secretary level (equivalent to Chief Executive) for the first time. One experienced Director of Communications who had previously had a successful career at No.10 during the Major and Blair governments, recalls that the first incumbent of the role, Howell James: … suffered from that when he was in name the Permanent Secretary but I think they made it pretty clear that he wasn’t a proper Permanent Secretary. It’s a ludicrous thing but that’s the way the civil service operates. Every other Permanent Secretary becomes de facto knight, dame or whatever, and Howell was appointed CBE when he left. You’d have to be in the know to know that that is really cutting but that is how they do it (anon).

This dismissive attitude suggests that little had changed in the 20  years since Peter Hennessy, then of The Times, wrote of them that “on one issue they stand united: the inadequacy of the Government Information Service”(Hennessy, 1980). The reputation of the GIS was so bad, he claimed, that the government’s “specialist press officers came within sight of disbandment as long ago as the late 1940s” and “as some of its members believe, its days may be numbered.” The article admitted, however, that such a change would meet “the resistance of ministers,” a point which links back to the politically-inspired origins of the service back in 1945. A timid and deferential communications service that was amenable to ministerial influence was preferable to a more organised, self-confident and centralised service. Policy officials were also suspicious of government press officers because they felt that “the complexity of their area was never properly represented,” and that “press offices (…) would be so close to ministers and sometimes give advice without policy people being there because of the nature of the fast moving working towards the next days’ headlines”(IV3). One long-serving Director of Communications (1991–2011) agreed that

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communications staff were often more aware of the perceptions of the public and the concerns of ministers because as a whole, most civil servants: … tend to have quite a narrow social demographic, so there were lots of presumptions about the wider public (…) and quite often therefore it was your job to be Cassandra, and say to them ‘actually our problem is not that people understand and are doing nothing, the problem is people don’t care because they’re trying to get the kids to school, pay their mortgages, keep their jobs’ (IV4).

In response to the proliferation of media from the late 1990s onwards, many major organisations upgraded their corporate communications effort and expanded their PR teams, but from the evidence of contemporary witnesses, it appears that the British civil service as a whole failed to sufficiently prioritise the resourcing and management of government communications. It was left to the relatively small cadre of communications specialists to manage the influx of politically appointed special advisers who increasingly occupied their turf in briefing the media, often off-the-record and as un-named sources. From their relatively weak position, government press officers had to find their own ways to respond, within the propriety rules, to ministers’ desires to manage the risks and opportunities of media visibility. This further widened the gulf between communications specialists and the rest of the civil service and led to some widely publicised controversies, especially after 1997. In the absence of strong and well-connected professional leadership, this left the field relatively open to a determined group of politicians and their media advisers to devote their considerable political capital to instigating the kind of modernisation of the information service which suited them. This is precisely what happened after 1997, as we see in Part 2. The sense of the government communicator as an outsider was also picked up by the various reviews and enquiries that took place in response to growing controversies in relation to government communications between 1997 and 2004. Two in particular, the 1997 Mountfield Report that was commissioned by the Cabinet Secretary in response to serious disquiet from the GIS leadership, and the Independent (Phillis) Review of Government Communications set up in 2004 to investigate a serious breakdown in trust between civil servants, ministers and the media, identified “something approaching disdain for media and communications matters,” and a damaging ‘them and us’ mentality within the civil service

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(Mountfield, 1997; Phillis, 2004). The Phillis Review found that communications professionals felt under-rated and under-supported: Compared with other specialist professional groups in the Civil Service such as lawyers, statisticians and economists, those working within the GICS often feel like the poor relations with little recognition given to the skills, competencies and professional standards they uphold. We found a culture in which communication is not seen as a core function of the mainstream Civil Service. In theory, communications staff are a part of the Civil Service like any other. But we too often found a ‘them and us’ attitude between policy civil servants and communications staff. As a whole, the Civil Service has not grasped the potential of modern communications as a service provided for citizens.

The review called for a radical rethink of what government communications should be, with a focus on a “continuous dialogue” with the general public: Our central recommendation is that communications should be redefined across government to mean a continuous dialogue with all interested parties, encompassing a broader range of skills and techniques than those associated with media relations. The focus of attention should be the general public. (Phillis, 2004, p. 3)

The idea that governments should consider the information needs of the public above the communications needs of the government was revolutionary. From its post-war inception, the government information service had not made explicit what its public principles and purposes should be, beyond a general need to inform the public. In the absence of agreed purposes, successive government and parliamentary committees have attempted to articulate this, but only in the vaguest terms. In 2002, for example, the House of Commons Public Administration Select Committee (PASC) stated that government communicators “have a vital role in serving the public interest”(p3). The House of Lords Communications Committee (2008) agreed that: “One of the most important tasks of Government is to provide clear, truthful and factual information to citizens.” In the absence of clear criteria for what makes good, or even acceptable public communication, and with no external regulation or extended scrutiny of the government’s public communication function, it is hard to see how the information needs of the public can be conceptualised within this model, let alone fulfilled.

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Conclusion This chapter does not attempt to provide a chronological account of government communications after 1945. An examination of the GIS between 1951 and 1979 is much needed, but that is beyond the scope of this book. However, the structure established after WW2 was by and large still in place in 1979. In fact, it has shown remarkable resilience in the face of not only the challenge of media change, but the political pressures arising from it. The current GCS largely retains its post-war appearance. The balance of power between the centre and the departments remains and the service operates as part of a specialist hierarchy, retaining a civil service head of profession, albeit now based at the Cabinet Office as opposed to the COI, and referred to as Executive Director rather than Permanent Secretary. Directors of Communication in the departments run professional teams that work closely with ministers and special advisers to contribute towards a coherent government narrative. In the sense that the service has shown elasticity in response to change, and the toughness to resist challenges, it can be said to be structurally resilient. However, there are two main discontinuities: the closure of the COI and the dispersal of its functions into the Cabinet Office, and the increasingly dominant role of Special Advisers as media intermediaries. The structure of the service may be resilient, but what about its culture? The evidence presented in this chapter suggests that, beneath the surface, significant changes have taken place since the 1980s, accelerating after 1997, which call into question the capacity of government communications to deliver an impartial, trusted and credible public information service. The growing involvement of special advisers in covert and unattributable media briefing may recuse civil servants from overtly politicised storytelling, but at the expense of a reduction in accountability and the displacement of the problem of untrustworthy communication. As we shall see in Chap. 5, the sudden arrival of a new class of media and political operator after 1997, and the determination of the New Labour government to seize control of media narratives, exposed the vulnerability of the head of profession and the departmental directors of communication. The subtle rules of engagement, and a code of propriety that had ensured that the service functioned without being seen to be unduly propagandist before 1997, were placed under threat after 1997, when the need to feed the increasingly hungry media

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beast combined forces with the demand from Labour politicians to use any means possible to turn their media deficit into an electoral asset (Campbell & Stott, 2007). The mainstream civil service could do little to resist the attack on that part of the service that it undervalued, distrusted and barely understood, that is, the Government Information Service. The one effort to shore up the service by introducing a set of explicit public values, the 2004 Phillis Report, was put into reverse and the report abandoned in a ‘year zero’ approach to history which solely serves the needs of the government of the day. As we shall see in Part 2, this was especially marked after the Conservative-led Coalition government took power after 2010. With the election of Boris Johnson in 2019 the governing Conservative party completely re-branded and redefined itself against the austerity narratives of its Conservative-led predecessors, presenting a dizzying volte-face for civil servants, the media and public. This raises issues that go beyond political spin into the realm of ‘post truth’. To what extent do incoming governments create their own political realities? In today’s mediated public sphere is history just a matter for the past? From what external realities do ideas of the public interest and shared public experience derive? In this book I aim to argue that without widely-­understood and shared public values, there can be no public accountability, because to what ends can the public, parliament and the media hold the service accountable? The service was founded in 1945 at the behest of politicians and with no formal mechanism of accountability beyond self regulation. Changes such as the abolition of the COI, the introduction of politically appointed special advisers, and the de facto introduction of politicised leadership within government communications have served to strengthen what one former government communications adviser has termed the ‘political grip’ over government communications (Gregory, 2012). And yet, the commitment to political neutrality on the part of Whitehall civil servants in general and government communicators in particular is regularly re-stated by civil servants and politicians and in propriety guidance. In practice though, policing the line between party political propaganda and public information is a bureaucratic function that comes into conflict with politicians’ desire to act, and to act quickly. Returning to March and Olsen, to resist such demands, bureaucrats must draw on their “institutionalized capability for acting appropriately.” Far from being negative and constraining, they argue, “some of the major capabilities of

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modern institutions come from their effectiveness in substituting rulebound behavior for individually autonomous behavior”(March & Olsen, 2009, p. 10). The Phillis Report, and those which followed, were an attempt to make explicit a set of generally accepted and applicable rules by which a genuinely citizen-focused government communications service could be evaluated. The question is the same one that faced politicians in 1945. How effective is the system of self-regulation in government communications and what institutional arrangements are needed to ensure that communication is more aligned with publics and hence more accessible to democratic scrutiny? The next chapter examines how the Conservative governments of 1979–1997 responded to media proliferation, initially with relatively subtle and largely hidden institutional changes, and then, with an attempt to turn the clock back to a less ‘politicised’ form of government communication. After losing four successive general elections, and observing the trials of Mrs. Thatcher’s successor John Major after 1990, New Labour under Tony Blair concluded that pre-emptive, meticulous and even aggressive media management would be essential to achieve power.

Notes 1. In November 1997, the GIS became the Government Information and Communication Service (GICS), later being renamed the Government Communication Network (GCN), and most recently, the Government Communication Service (GCS). 2. For a list of interviewees, see Appendix 1.

References Aronyczyk, M., & Powers, D. (2010). Blowing Up the Brand: Critical Perspectives on Promotional Culture. Peter Lang. Bale, T., & Sanders, K. (2001). Playing by the Book: Success and Failure in John Major’s Approach to Prime Ministerial Media Management. Contemporary British History, 15(4), 93–110. Bannerman, S., & Haggart, B. (2015). Historical Institutionalism in Communication Studies. Communication Theory, 25(1), 1–22. Cabinet Office. (2019). The Ministerial Code. See https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/ministerial-­code. Accessed 3 Apr 2020.

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Campbell, A., & Stott, R. (2007). The Blair Years: Extracts from the Alastair Campbell Diaries. Hutchinson. Chilcot, J. (2016). The Report of the Iraq Inquiry. House of Commons. Committee on Standards in Public Life. (2012). Political Special Advisers: Written Evidence. House of Commons. Cook, T.  E. (1998). Governing with the News: The News Media as a Political Institution. University of Chicago Press. Corner, J. (2007). Mediated Politics, Promotional Culture and the Idea of “Propaganda”. Media, Culture and Society, 29(4), 669–677. Davis, A. (2013). Promotional Cultures: The Rise and Spread of Advertising, Public Relations, Marketing and Branding. Polity. Garland, R. (2016). Between Media and Politics: Can Government Press Officers Hold the Line in the Age of ‘Political Spin’? The Case of the UK After 1997 (PhD Thesis). London School of Economics. Government Communications Service. (2014/2020). GCS Propriety Guidance. Reissued 2020. https://gcs.civilservice.gov.uk/publications/propriety-­guidance/ Government Information and Communication Service. (2000). The GICS Handbook: A Working Guide for Government Information Officers. Cabinet Office. Graber, D. (2003). The Media and Democracy: Beyond Myths and Stereotypes. Annual Review of Political Science., 6, 139–160. Grant, M. (1999). Towards a Central Office of Information: Continuity and Change in British Government Information Policy, 1939–51. Journal of Contemporary History, 34(1), 49–67. Gregory, A. (2012). UK Government Communications: Full Circle in the 21st Century? Public Relations Review., 38(3), 367–375. Hennessy, P. (1980, September 30). Government Information Service Finds Stanch Defender. The Times. Hogg, S. (1995). Too Close to Call: Power and Politics  – John Major in No. 10. Little, Brown. Hood, C., & Dixon, R. (2015). A Government that Worked Better and Cost Less? Evaluating Three Decades of Reform and Change in UK Central Government. Oxford University Press. Horton, L., & Gay, O. (2011). Abolition of the COI (House of Commons Standard Note 06050) (pp. 1–7). House of Commons. Hoskins, A., & O’Loughlin, B. (2015). Arrested War: The Third Phase of Mediatisation. Information, Communication and Society., 18(11), 1320–1338. House of Lords Select Committee on Communications. (2008). First Report: Session 2008–9. UK Parliament. Hutton, B. (2004). Report of the Inquiry into the Circumstances Surrounding the Death of Dr David Kelly (Vol. HC247). House of Commons.

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Ingham, B. (1979, October 15). Memo to Angus Maude. Ingham Archive, Margaret Thatcher Foundation: May 1979–April 1985. Ingham, B (1982). Minutes of MIO (1982) National Archives: CAB 134/4382. Krotz, F. (2009). Mediatization: A Concept with Which to Grasp Media and Societal Change. In K.  Lundby (Ed.), Mediatization: Concepts, Changes, Consequences. Peter Lang. Maartens, B. (2016). From Propaganda to ‘Information’: Reforming Government Communications in Britain. Contemporary British History., 30(4), 542–562. March, J.  G., & Olsen, J.  P. (2009). The Logic of Appropriateness (ARENA Working Papers). McKenna, A.  Z. (2018). 100 Years of Government Communication. OGL. https://gcs.civilservice.gov.uk/publications/100-­y ears-­o f-­g overnment-­ communication/ Moore, M. (2006). The Origins of Modern Spin: Democratic Government and the Media in Britain, 1945–51. Palgrave Macmillan. Morrison, H. (1945, September 14). Post-war Organization of Government Publicity. Memorandum by the Lord President of the Council. National Archives: CAB/ GEN.85/2. Mountfield, R. (1997). Report of the Working Group on the Government Information and Communications Service. Cabinet Office. National Archives. (1945, September 18). First Meeting of Cabinet Committee – Post-War Organization of Government Publicity. Cabinet Papers: 78/37. Phillis, R. (2004). An Independent Review of Government Communications. Cabinet Office. Public Administration Select Committee. (2002). Eighth Report (2001–2). These Unfortunate Events at the Former DTLR. House of Commons. Sanders, K. (2011). Political Public Relations and Government Communication. In J. Stromback & S. Kiousis (Eds.), Political Public Relations: Principles and Applications. Routledge. Scammell, M (1991). The Impact of Marketing and Public Relations on Modern British Politics: the Conservative Party and Government Under Mrs. Thatcher (PhD Thesis). London School of Economics. Stromback, J. (2008). Four Phases of Mediatisation: An Analysis of the Mediatisation of Politics. The International Journal of Press/Politics., 13(3), 228–246. Sussman, G. (2011). The Propaganda Society: Promotional Culture and Politics in Global Context. Peter Lang. Tee, M. (2011). Review of Government Direct Communications and the Role of the COI. Cabinet Office.

CHAPTER 3

Thatcher and Major: Covert Changes to the Rules of the Game

It has been claimed that Margaret Thatcher paid little attention to media coverage, leaving it to her long-serving Chief Press Secretary, Bernard Ingham (1979–1990), to present her with a daily news digest. Part of her success, it is said, is because, unlike Tony Blair and David Cameron, she paid attention to the essentials of the role of Prime Minister rather than becoming involved in media minutiae (Aitken, 2013; Moore, 2013). This is true in part—she had the good fortune of being able to rely on the support of the largely right-wing national daily press to present her narrative in the way she wanted. Throughout her 11 years as Prime Minister the Conservatives achieved 70% of support by circulation from the UK national press (Wilkes-Hegg et al., 2012). This compares with Labour’s support of 63% by circulation between 1997 and 2005, the high point of its support from the printed press. Even this was only achieved by a complete transformation of the party and its approach to media relations following the election of Tony Blair as leader in 1994. Thatcher could also rely on Ingham’s ability to represent her views faithfully, often without consulting her (Hennessy, 2001; Slocock, 2018) and on his credibility with the political lobby (that is, the group of journalists accredited to receive Downing Street and Parliamentary briefings) to maintain the flow of government news. To some extent, this claim of a lack of interest in the media is contradicted by the fact that, unlike her successor, John Major, Mrs. Thatcher placed great emphasis on maintaining good personal relationships with © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 R. Garland, Government Communications and the Crisis of Trust, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77576-6_3

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the most supportive and influential editors and proprietors of the day, especially Rupert Murdoch, owner of The Sun, News of the World, Times and Sunday Times and majority owner of the first UK satellite channel, BSkyB. She and the firmly right-wing Daily Mail editor, David English, were said to be “firm friends and political soulmates” (Addison, 2017, p. 189). Shortly after her election victory of May 1979, she wrote to Larry Lamb, editor of The Sun to thank him for his “assistance and advice” during her four years in opposition, describing him as “a valued friend and ally” (Thatcher, 1979). From the beginning of her leadership in 1975 she placed a high priority on what was then known as ‘media presentation’, especially through the increasingly powerful medium of television. In 1981 she told a BBC interviewer: “If you have got a good thing to sell, use every single capacity you can to sell it. It’s no earthly use having a good thing and no one hearing about it” (Thatcher, 1981). She also understood how to exploit news values. In her daughter Carol’s memoir of life on the road during the 1983 election, she recalls how Mrs. Thatcher’s time was dominated by media interviews, and how she made use of sound bites and human-interest storylines. She told her daughter that she considered television to be “the most powerful form of communication there is,” later claiming in terms that would be understood today, that “selective seeing is believing and in today’s world, television comes over as truth” (Thatcher, 1983, p.  123; Cockerell, 1989, p. 307). The experiences of her successor John Major (1990–1997) provide a contrast. Looking back on his time in office, he admitted that he was suspicious of ‘political spin’, telling the Leveson Inquiry into the culture, practices and ethics of the press that his “lack of a close relationship with any part of the media may have been a contributory factor to the hostile media the 1990-97 government often received” (Bale & Sanders, 2001; Hogg & Hill, 1995; Leveson, 2012). His failure to present a clear narrative to the media or the public, or to shore up his media relations apparatus sufficiently in line with contemporary developments did not signal a lack of concern with media matters, however. On the contrary, contemporary accounts suggest that he pored over negative media coverage and worried about it excessively. A ‘very senior civil servant’ told the historian Peter Hennessy that John Major

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… cares deeply about what the papers say about him. He can’t walk past a paper without picking it up. Mrs. T never read newspapers. She only read what Bernard Ingham told her was in them. (Hennessy, 2001, p. 437)

One journalist recalled how Major was not only “obsessed” with what journalists were saying about him, but was frequently given to briefing them off-the-record, against the advice of his own press secretaries and often with disastrous results (Price, 2010). Gus O’Donnell, John Major’s first Chief Press Secretary, told Leveson that “certainly, Prime Ministers – and Sir John Major was no different in that respect – care a lot about what the media say about them and get very upset when there are inaccuracies reported. He got particularly upset when they would be of a personal nature” (O’Donnell, 2012). It is clear that both Thatcher and Major cared deeply about how they and their ideas and policies were portrayed in the media and felt this was crucial to their survival in government. Neither could ignore the media, nor leave media coordination entirely to others, however distasteful it might have seemed. Their contrasting experiences played an important part in the transformation of Labour’s approach to the media after 1994, as we see in Chap. 4. Where Margaret Thatcher had entertained media owners at No. 10, John Major “lacked the skills necessary to cajole or browbeat press barons and broadcasters into putting his desired interpretation on events” (Kavanagh & Seldon, 1994, p. 414).

“It will be important to sell, and sell hard” Margaret Thatcher’s election as Conservative Prime Minister in 1979 with a controversial agenda for economic neoliberalism coincided with the advent of 24/7 media. Archived documents1 reveal a civil service influenced at the fringes rather than dominated by media considerations yet some of the changes widely characterised as ‘political spin’ and assumed to have been introduced by the Labour government after 1997, were actually taking place during the Thatcher period. The coordination of government presentation, the strategic drive for positive coverage and the demand from ministers for more hard-hitting and persuasive communication, were seen as vital in helping to challenge what Thatcher and her supporters saw as a widespread acquiescence in the narrative of the UK’s post-war decline (Hoskyns, 2000). The economy was the ground on which the battle was fought against not only the trade unions, the media and public opinion, but against political orthodoxy and even the Conservative party itself. As

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early as 1977, Margaret Thatcher and her economic advisers were embarking on a critical path that would make use of strategic communications to begin the “long process of convincing the public that radical change would have to come” (p. 40). By the middle of 1981, much of the press still saw Mrs. Thatcher “as a hate figure,” while even party members “thought she was leading the country to destruction” (p. 357). Only 25% of voters thought she was doing a good job and polls showed the Conservatives in third place by the end of the year (YouGov, 2018). The Thatcher administration’s radical view on the economy was thought to be so toxic that it was decided in late 1981 to secretly revive a little-known committee, the Liaison Committee on the Presentation of Government Policy, to counter concerns that the government was not getting its message across. The scale of the media operation at No. 10 during the 1980s was miniscule, with much of the muscle being provided by Ingham himself. He recalls in his memoirs that he had one deputy, three press officers, two secretaries and an office manager to run a seven-day-a-week operation (Ingham, 2003). There were no media special advisers. In contrast, by 2017 the No. 10 press office was staffed by 24 press officers and three support staff. The 2020 list of special advisers at No. 10 listed 51, an unknown proportion of whom were dedicated to media matters (Cabinet Office, 2020). Unlike Alastair Campbell and others who followed, Ingham was a career civil servant, not a political appointee. He was appointed six months after Thatcher took office, having been shortlisted as one of three of Whitehall’s most impressive media performers and selected after a 20-minute interview with the Prime Minister and her Private Secretary, Clive Whitmore (Hoskyns, 2000). He stayed in post for 11 years to her satisfaction and left on good terms with the political lobby, a remarkable achievement after an estimated 30,000 press lobby briefings (Ingham, 1995), but there were times when he engaged in personal advocacy, foreshadowing an overtly partisan director of government communications in the shape of Alastair Campbell after 1997 (Seymour-Ure, 2003). His loyalty to Margaret Thatcher led to accusations that he failed as a medium for properly informing the public, because he had become “too partisan” (Cockerell et  al., 1984, p.  72), an accusation later levelled at Campbell (Moran, 2005). The Liaison Committee combined Conservative party officials, the Prime Minister as Chair, selected senior ministers and a handful of civil servants, including Bernard Ingham. It was a long-standing but

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intermittent post-war body that aimed to provide an integrated approach to presentation between Conservative ministers and the Party. Given the long-standing convention that impartial civil servants do not engage with party officials or party business, its existence was seen by civil servants as ‘highly sensitive’, and even not quite ‘sanitary’ (PREM 19/720/721). The archived documents show how the Prime Minister and her closest advisers, including the minister in charge of coordinating government publicity, Francis Pym, and the Chancellor Geoffrey Howe, challenged what they saw as civil service complacency in order to develop a more compelling approach to economic presentation that would turn around media and eventually public opinion. A briefing from Pym’s private office in early February described the Committee as providing “guidance to MPs and others on the interpretation of government policy and to take such action as in their opinion is necessary to sustain public confidence in the Government.” The “sensitivity of its proceedings” was such that there were no official minutes and no circulated agenda, at least initially. Its purpose was “to identify those policy areas likely to be of key political importance in the period approaching an election” and to focus on issues identified by Conservative party HQ as being “of primary importance in electoral terms” (my emphasis). Since civil servants would be making a “significant contribution” to the Committee, it was vital that their role remain secret. Otherwise, they could be accused of engaging in partisan activities that challenged the established principle set out in the Civil Service Code that “civil servants should not engage in activities likely to call into question their political impartiality, or to give rise to criticism that people paid from public funds are being used for party political purposes” (Cabinet Office, 2000, p. 15). After its first meeting on 10 February 1982, a short note to attendees confirmed that the Committee had decided to commission work relevant to the forthcoming election on topics such as the economy, industrial and employment strategy and how the 1982 budget was to be presented, all topics that were then highly contested politically. Despite the proceedings’ sensitivity the detailed nature of the work necessitated that advance papers and an agenda be circulated after all, although “great care must be taken to preserve their confidentiality and the Party Chairman would distribute them personally.” Shortly before the second meeting on 10 March, Ingham told the PM that: “it will be important to sell – and to sell hard – the Budget’s promises.” Taking a distinctly partisan tone, he wrote that the government would be “talking up political and economic confidence”

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at a time when “the Labour Party is racked by a new Trot-induced row.” The following day, he advised Mrs. Thatcher to “sustain the momentum” and produce a comprehensive presentation plan “before the election” (PREM 19/720-1)(my emphasis). Did such activity implicate civil servants such as Bernard Ingham in partisanship? Could such activity be construed as participating in electoral campaigning, something that was explicitly against rules that still apply today? Such preparatory activity would be taking place before the official electioneering campaigning period (known as ‘purdah’ and lasting six weeks) so did not overtly break the rules, but it challenged them covertly and in spirit. One of the few contemporary commentators to register the existence, let alone the significance, of the Liaison Committee was the journalist, Hugo Young. He saw Ingham’s participation as “a testimony to the intimate linkage even beyond the bounds of Whitehall propriety, between party and government machines,” a charge that anticipates criticism of Alastair Campbell, and later, Boris Johnson’s chief adviser, Dominic Cummings (Young, 1989, p. 299). Such charges are not straightforward, given Ingham’s own ambivalence and the messy reality of government media relations. His first loyalty may have been to the Prime Minister, but he consistently fought to promote and defend the work of the Government Information Service (GIS) under his leadership from what he saw as the scapegoating tendencies of ministers. The archival record repeatedly shows him anticipating, pre-empting and resisting media activism on the part of what he saw as ill-informed ministers, and then going on the offensive by driving through a more proactive and coordinated approach. In December 1981 he rebutted complaints from a senior minister that press releases produced by civil servants were not persuasive enough and that government press officers were not “ideally deployed for the proper presentation of the overall government economic message.” Ingham dismissed the complaint, describing it as “gratuitous, so long as Ministers of the Government cut the Government to pieces.” He insisted on being included in meetings about the matter and offered to prepare a paper (PREM 19/720). Ingham also blocked a softening of the rules relating to party political bias in government communications. In July 1982, he enlisted the backing of the Prime Minister to see off a move by a Treasury minister to allow civil servants rather than the party to distribute party political speeches. The minister argued that circulating these speeches through the official government machine would secure “far more coverage” (PREM 19/720).

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This contravened the Questions of Procedures for Ministers (QPM), the forerunner to today’s Ministerial Code, which held that allowing civil servants to distribute political material would compromise its impartiality. Ingham wrote to the PM the same day insisting that she “resolutely refuse” to change the rules since these were “well-founded” and had served successive governments well by “protecting Ministers from charges of misusing Government resources for Party ends and the GIS from the charge of party-political bias.” Two days later, the Liaison Committee agreed, stating that “it would be presentationally unwise for this Government to be seen to be tinkering with the rules,” and the idea was dropped. This intervention may explain why Ingham participated in the Liaison Committee even though he risked compromising his neutrality by attending. By being there he could detect and pre-empt ministerial activism that might undermine the government’s propriety framework, and, perhaps more importantly, challenge his (and Mrs. Thatcher’s) dominance over the government story. In her analysis of the Thatcher government’s approach to media relations, Scammell concludes that, given the complexities of the role, Ingham maintained his impartiality almost until the end. However, under the 30-year rule, she did not have access to archived material, which is more incriminating (Scammell, 1991). According to Caroline Slocock, Margaret Thatcher’s only female Private Secretary, Bernard Ingham and Charles Powell, her loyal and long-serving Principal Private Secretary, were “not so much civil servants as courtiers to the most powerful woman in the world (…) sometimes working as her personal agents” (Slocock, 2018, p. 102). Hennessy agrees that, as civil servants, both Powell and Ingham were “to some degree politicized” (Hennessy, 2001, p.  407). Thatcher’s official biographer, Charles Moore, contends that it would not be “completely untrue” to suggest that “Powell and Ingham were the two most powerful people below the Prime Minister” (Moore, 2015, p. 487). Ingham’s warning that it would be unwise for the government “to be seen to be tinkering with the rules” in order to foster its own interests, and that ministers should not expose themselves to “charges of mis-using government resources for party ends,” underlines the importance of being seen to do the right thing, even as part of secret internal government strategy formation as with the Liaison Committee. By the time the Blair government of 2002–2003 came to devise the promotional plan to persuade parliament, the media and the public to join a US-led invasion of Iraq,

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such sensitivity to administrative structures, forms and rules had lessened dramatically. Not only were adequate records not kept and archived, but there was no-one with the civil service sensibility, seniority and stature of Bernard Ingham to foresee and forestall the serious and lasting damage that such deliberations could cause further down the line.

Major Struggles to Contain the Narrative Evidence from memoirs and archived documents from the Major years (1990–1997) depict a very different media-political atmosphere. Number 10 became, in the words of Christopher Meyer, Major’s second (of three) Chief Press Secretaries, “a combination of hothouse and bunker… Nothing, but nothing, prepares you for working in Downing Street in intimate relationship with the Prime Minister…the pressure of events almost suffocates in its intensity” (Meyer, 2006, p. 13). Unlike Thatcher, Major received little support or respect from the right-wing tabloids. Kelvin MacKenzie, the long-serving editor of Britain’s highest-circulating daily newspaper, The Sun, recalled how, on Black Wednesday, 16 September 1992, the day that Britain left the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM), he responded to a call from the Prime Minister with the warning that he would pour “a bucket of shit” all over him in the next day’s paper (MacKenzie, 2012). The Major period is rarely considered in discussions of mediated politics beyond an acknowledgement that the government lost control of the media agenda and went down to a historic electoral defeat in 1997. Was this period of seven years just a hiatus between two periods of intense media-political collusion, or did it play a role in defining how governing politicians navigated relationships with an increasingly intrusive, ubiquitous and 24-hour news media? After 11 years of Conservative rule, it was always going to be difficult for the party in government to renew itself, yet Major won an unexpected majority at the 1992 election against a Labour party that was still not trusted on the economy. The UK’s departure from the ERM blew the Conservative party’s reputation for effective economic management, but Major still had an important advantage—he was seen as a consensus politician. According to Siobhan Kenny, then a No. 10 press officer: It was Black Wednesday that did for John Major. What people forget is how popular John Major was when he first got in. I mean he won the election in

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1992 that he should never have won in theory but actually personally everybody really liked him, he had something anti-spin about him and he wasn’t Mrs. Thatcher. (IV2)

Major was so ‘anti-spin’ that he failed to invest in a media operation at No. 10 that could handle both media and political flak in the way that Ingham had done for his predecessor. In the process, his sufferings at the hands of the media acted as a warning to Tony Blair. Major was not comfortable schmoozing journalists or media proprietors. According to Howell James, political secretary to John Major between 1994 and 1997, and later the first Permanent Secretary, Government Communications under Tony Blair, “John Major fully rejected the notion of having a political appointee brought in” to manage the press office (IV5). Instead, he appointed a familiar face, his former press secretary at the Treasury, Gus O’Donnell, an economist who later became Cabinet Secretary to three Prime Ministers. O’Donnell was clearly able but had not been a journalist or a communications specialist and did not have the networking connections with the GIS or the gravitas with political correspondents that made Bernard Ingham so effective (Kavanagh & Seldon, 1994). Initially, John Major did not prioritise media relations, even at No.10 (Bale & Sanders, 2001; Hogg & Hill, 1995). His third and final Chief Press Secretary, Jonathan Haslam, refers to this failure to invest as ‘hair shirtism’; a reluctance to spend money on providing services for journalists. He remembers the struggle to provide toilets for female lobby correspondents, like C4’s Elinor Goodman (1988–2005), and to improve access to the lobby briefing room. The only way the 40-strong press corps could access this tiny room, which only had space for ten, was by squeezing through the Chief Press Secretary’s own office. Haslam admits that, prior to 1997: It was behind its time and there were things that I think we should have done with the benefit of hindsight (…). The media was growing like Topsy in front of us. We were running like fury to try and keep up, particularly when I was in Downing Street. It was a tiny office. It was absolutely ridiculous when you think about it. I did get No. 10 wired, so that when we were doing broadcasts in Downing Street, rather than the incredibly amateurish point of view of having a van parked outside and wires trailing through windows, we actually had the place wired upstairs, but it took forever to do. (IV6)

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A No. 10 press officer during the Major years agrees about the lack of resource devoted to the press office and offers an anecdote that illustrates the Prime Minister’s media sensitivity. As a junior press officer, she would accompany Major to his Cambridgeshire constituency on Fridays, accompanied only by a detective and his constituency secretary. The Labour opposition’s media operation run by Alastair Campbell would regularly mount media ambushes on Fridays to coincide with the weekend, priming the local press to ask ministers tricky questions so that the ‘off-the-cuff’ answers could then be relayed to the nationals. On this occasion though, it was Major’s own party that caused the problem. She was assisting the PM at a visit to a local school when Michael Howard, the Eurosceptic Home Secretary, made a controversial comment about Europe: I looked out of the window and there was the biggest scrum of media I’d ever seen. There were about 45 people out there with cameras. John Major was rather a volatile character, very thin skinned, very easily wounded and by that time things were going so badly wrong anyway, and he went absolutely crazy. The head teacher was in the room as well, so I sort of shuffled her out because I thought ‘no one else can really see you in this state’ and he said, ‘get me Michael Howard on the phone’ … so I got on the phone to the Home Office saying that the Prime Minister really wanted to speak to him, and they started flannelling. John Major snatched the phone and said: ‘get me Michael Howard on the phone now’ and gave them an almighty bollocking. John Major calmed down after talking to Michael Howard once he’d found out what he’d actually said rather than what was being reported.

Almost from the moment he won the 1992 election, John Major was assailed not only by a resurgent Labour under first John Smith (1992–1994) and then Tony Blair (after 1994), but by Euro-sceptic MPs from his own side. During the 1992 Conservative Party conference, for example, the first to follow Black Wednesday, Tory MPs were “queuing up” to give television interviews complaining about Major’s positive stance on the Maastricht treaty, the agreement signed that year that created the European Union and heralded closer integration (Fowler, 2008). A rousing and supportive speech by the pro-European, Michael Heseltine, was drowned out by an article by Margaret Thatcher in The European newspaper that day attacking Major’s stance on Europe. Major contemplated resigning, telling his Party Chairman, Norman Fowler: “if I went, we would be able to turn over a new page. Even the

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blood lust of the press would be satisfied” (Fowler, 2008, p.  167) (my emphasis). In October 1995, after three further years of dissent, falling polls and by-election losses, an exasperated Major resigned, calling on MPs to ‘back me or sack me’. He won the contest 218 to 89. Fowler, a former journalist, was sent to meet The Sun editor, Kelvin Mackenzie, whose paper was responsible for the worst personal attacks. McKenzie insisted that these attacks were not ‘personal’. On the contrary, he noted, the Prime Minister had been “rude to my staff” by once turning his back on the paper’s political editor, Trevor Kavanagh (Fowler, 2008, p. 171). Major had clearly not absorbed the lesson learned by other senior politicians—take your punishment quietly, and do not risk answering back or upsetting journalists, however unintentionally. As Major’s political position weakened, he became more susceptible to ministerial intrigue via the media. The press was only too happy to give space to ministers who openly disagreed with him, as Howell James remembers: Because of the fragile political ecology of the time, ministers … had their own different agendas and they used their special advisers very actively to brief the media…every Friday you could guarantee that John Redwood (a leading Euro-sceptic) would stand up and say something unhelpful about Europe. (IV5)

Major’s failure to placate the press left him vulnerable to attacks from the right of the party. In his autobiography, he argues that the Conservative press “enmeshed itself closely with the more active elements of the Eurosceptic cause.” Major argues that encounters between MPs and journalists created a ‘flock mentality’ in which the media “endlessly swung rebellion this way and that, behind one right-wing hustler for the leadership and then another”(Major, 1999, p. 359). He was especially critical of The Sun, saying it had “lowered the tone” of discourse in public life (Major, 2012). His visceral dislike extended to what he saw as the Labour Opposition’s pandering to the press: “I was contemptuous of the way Labour were flattering the egos of the proprietors and did not wish to compete with them” (Major, 1999, p.  709). Major told the Leveson Inquiry that Rupert Murdoch had presented him with an ultimatum at a private meeting just before the 1997 election—he disagreed with the PM’s stance on Europe and would only support him if that changed. Major refused (Major, 2012; Plunkett & C’Carroll, 2012).

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Major’s reluctance to build friendships with senior media figures contrasts with Margaret Thatcher’s strategic wooing of Murdoch and other newspaper proprietors. Most crucially, on 4 January 1981, just as Murdoch was negotiating to buy the Sunday Times and Times, and at the point where her popularity was at its lowest, Thatcher invited Murdoch, at his request, to Sunday lunch at Chequers, her official country residence. That the meeting took place at all was denied for 30 years and apart from Denis Thatcher, there was only one other person present—Bernard Ingham. His summary of the meeting was marked ‘Commercial – In Confidence’ and was eventually sent to the Margaret Thatcher archives at Churchill College, Cambridge. Concluding his note, Ingham records that the Prime Minister “did no more than wish him well in his bid” (Ingham, 1981). Murdoch wrote to Mrs. Thatcher on 15 January, thanking her for the lunch. Eleven days later the Economic Strategy Committee, chaired by Mrs. Thatcher, decided not to refer The Times’ bid to the Monopolies and Mergers Commission. By buying Times newspapers, Murdoch acquired control of nearly 40% of the British press (Evans, 2015). Although squeamish about developing strategic relationships with powerful media figures, John Major was concerned enough about his poor showing in the media to set up a committee on presentation chaired by the Chief Whip that met once or twice a week for four years. It was superseded in June 1995 by a new Economic, Domestic Coordination and Presentation Committee (EDCP), chaired daily by the new Deputy Prime Minister, the media-savvy Michael Heseltine. To judge from the minutes, these meetings progressed without any discernible input from John Major. Like the Liaison Committee under Margaret Thatcher, the Heseltine group included politicians and civil servants, such as the No. 10 press office, but unlike the Liaison Committee it was largely reactive, did not focus on policy analysis and appears to have become preoccupied with media micro-management rather than crafting a coherent long-term and politically-informed narrative (Hogg & Hill, 1995, p. 111). Major’s then Chief Press Secretary, Christopher Meyer, rarely appeared and when he did, contributed little. Hennessy quotes a cabinet minister saying at the time: “EDCP is a completely absurd thing. They don’t know what’s happening when they are sitting. They sit for quite a long time. They are out of date even before they finish” (Hennessy, 2001, p. 473). The minutes bear this out, presenting a dispiriting picture of a government without drive, direction or self-confidence. To give just a few examples, on 21 July 1995, it is suggested that on a “quiet news day,” the

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government should highlight the benefits of its proposed nursery voucher scheme using a sympathetic school that is part of the pilot. On 9 August, the Committee approves a ‘media handling plan’ for summer exam results. On 13 September, a “significant announcement” by John Major on volunteering does not achieve media pickup “due to competing announcements” and it is proposed to send the story out again. On 2 October it is suggested that the negative coverage of increases in class sizes can be mitigated by explaining the role of classroom assistants and arguing that larger classes do not necessarily mean lower standards of teaching. This smacks of desperation and the kind of low-level tactical thinking that is usually left to junior members of the press team. Yet the resources devoted to the meeting were considerable. Up to eight officials and four ministers attended each meeting, at least initially. At times, the Deputy Prime Minister acted like a press secretary, offering to call editors to cajole them into running favourable editorials, but it is notable that, over time, ministerial colleagues started to drift away (National Archives, 1995). By the mid-1990s, as 24-hour media became normalised, no single committee was capable of responding quickly and positively enough to the ebb and flow of media storylines that could emerge, magnify and mutate in an instant. Watching this at a distance, the Labour opposition concluded that the Prime Minister had been ill-served by the civil service media operation. What was needed, as politics became increasingly enmeshed with media, was a more strategic, agile, specialist and slimmed-down media operation that was sufficiently responsive to political imperatives.

Conclusion The failure of the Major experiment in returning the No. 10 media relations operation to its more traditional form hides a larger truth that the Thatcher governments were let off lightly when it comes to the charge of political spin. The contrasting experiences of these two Conservative Prime Ministers in tackling a more demanding and challenging media environment laid the blueprint for New Labour’s approach after 1997, as we shall see in the next chapter. Labour absorbed the message that to control the media agenda, it was essential to ensure three things: the selective placing of news stories of value to the government; a reworking of facts to suit a party-political narrative; and a No. 10 press secretary who is personally and ideologically committed to the PM, understands the tabloid press and has wide influence over the GIS.

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By the late 1990s the media was believed to be so all-encompassing and powerful, and the tabloid press so apparently influential in politics, that traditional checks and balances seemed inconvenient, old-fashioned and even dangerous. To achieve control over the civil service media operation, it was crucial to redefine impartiality and find a way to involve civil servants in electorally significant party-political activity. Without constitutional change in the role of the civil service, this redefinition could never be complete or overt, so it had to remain partial and covert. To preserve the outward shape of a supposedly impartial government communication service, some politically sensitive tasks, such as media briefing, should be delegated to politically appointed officials, that is, to the group of government operatives that became known as special advisers. In the UK as in many other countries, the central contradiction between the need to argue for certain policy interventions, and the need to present evidence, has been managed through an elite and largely self-regulating partnership between partisan and impartial institutions and agents that was set up after WW2 to win back trust following public cynicism over wartime propaganda. This consensus, albeit one maintained on a ‘good chaps’ basis between and within elites, was progressively challenged by mediatization and politicians’ response to it. This accelerated after 1979 with relatively subtle and largely hidden institutional changes. Contemporary documents provide early evidence of friction between politically driven media strategists and a civil service culture which resisted overt advocacy or persuasion—a tension that surfaced publicly after 1997. In the struggle for control over the government’s media agenda, the balance of power appeared to be shifting towards ministers, accepted routines were being challenged and governing politicians were increasingly oriented towards news media cycles, routines and requirements.

Note 1. Two main tranches of archived documentary evidence have informed this chapter. These are records concerned with the presentation of government policy from 1981–1983 (PREM 19/ 720/ 721) and 1983–1986 (PREM 19/ 1775); and documents from the Ingham archive held by the Margaret Thatcher Foundation dated May 1979 to April 1985.

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References Addison, A. (2017). Mail Men: The Unauthorized Story of the Daily Mail. Atlantic Books. Aitken, J. (2013). Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality. Bloomsbury Continuum. Bale, T., & Sanders, K. (2001). Playing by the Book: Success and Failure in John Major’s Approach to Prime Ministerial Media Management. Contemporary British History., 15(4), 93–110. Cabinet Office. (2000). Directory of Civil Service Guidance (Vol. 2). Collected Guidance. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/ system/uploads/attachment_data/file/60997/guide-­civil-­service-­guidance-­ volume-­2_0.pdf Cabinet Office. (2020). Annual Report on Special Advisers. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_ data/file/944317/Annual_Report_on_Special_Advisers_2020_-­_ online_ publication__1_.pdf Cockerell, M. (1989). Live from Number 10: The Inside Story of Prime Ministers and Television. Faber and Faber. Cockerell, M., Hennessy, P., & Walker, D. (1984). Sources Close to the Prime Minister: Inside the Hidden World of the News Manipulators. Macmillan. Evans, H. (2015, April 28). How Thatcher and Murdoch Made Their Secret Deal. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-­news/2015/apr/28/ how-­margaret-­thatcher-­and-­rupert-­murdoch-­made-­secret-­deal Fowler, N. (2008). A Political Suicide. Blackwells. Hennessy, P. (2001). The Prime Minister: The Office and Its Holders Since 1945. Palgrave Macmillan. Hogg, S., & Hill, J. (1995). Too Close to Call: Power and Politics – John Major at Number 10. Warner Books. Hoskyns, J. (2000). Inside the Thatcher Revolution. Aurum Press. Ingham, B. (1981, January 4). Note for the Record - Lunch with Rupert Murdoch. Margaret Thatcher Archives: Release of MT’s private files for 1981. https:// www.margaretthatcher.org/archive/1981cac4 Ingham, B (1995, May 21). Desert Island Discs with Sue Lawley. BBC Radio 4. Ingham, B. (2003). The Wages of Spin. John Murray. Kavanagh, D., & Seldon, A. (1994). The Major Effect. Macmillan. Leveson, B. (2012). An Inquiry into the Culture, Practices and Ethics of the Press (Leveson Report). The Stationary Office. MacKenzie, K. (2012, January 9). Evidence Session: Leveson Inquiry. https:// leveson.sayit.mysociety.org/hearing-­9-­january-­2012/mr-­kelvin-­mckenzie Major, J. (1999). John Major: The Autobiography. HarperCollins.

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Major, J. (2012, June 12). Evidence Session: Leveson Inquiry. https://leveson.sayit. mysociety.org/hearing-­12-­june-­2012 Meyer, C. (2006). DC Confidential: The Controversial Memoirs of Britain’s Ambaddador to the US at the Time of 9/11 and the Run-Up to the Iraq War. Phoenix. Moore, C. (2013). Margaret Thatcher the Authorised Biography Vol. 1: Not for Turning. Penguin UK. Moore, C. (2015). Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography, Volume 2: Everything She Wants. Penguin UK. Moran, M. (2005). Politics and Governance in the UK. Palgrave Macmillan. National Archives. (1995, March 23–December 22). Ministerial Committee on the Coordination and Presentation of Government Policy (EDCP (95)). Minutes, 1–118, CAB134/5886. O’Donnell, G. (2012, May 14). Evidence Session. Leveson Inquiry. https://discoverleveson.com/evidence/Witness_Statement_of_Lord_ODonnell/9180/media Plunkett J., & O’Carroll, L. (2012, June 12). John Major Tells Leveson Inquiry Murdoch Demanded Policy Changes. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2012/jun/12/john-­major-­leveson-­inquiry-­rupert-­murdoch Price, L. (2010). The Spin doctor’s Diary: Inside Number 10 with New Labour. Hodder and Stoughton. Scammell, M. (1991). The Impact of Marketing and Public Relations on Modern British Politics: The Conservative Party and Government under Mrs.. Thatcher. PhD thesis, London School of Economics. Seymour-Ure, C. (2003). Prime Ministers and the Media: Issues of Power and Control. Blackwell. Slocock. (2018). People Like Us: Margaret Thatcher and Me. Biteback Publishing. Thatcher, M. (1979, May 24). Letter to Larry Lamb, Editor of The Sun. Thatcher Archives: THCR 2/4/1/10. Thatcher, M. (1981). Interview with Angela Rippon for, BBC Image Makers, Broadcast 15 September 1981. Thatcher Archives. See. https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/104512 Thatcher, C. (1983). With Margaret Thatcher on the Campaign Trail: Diary of an Election. Sidgwick and Jackson. Wilkes-Hegg, S., Blick, A., & Crone, S. (2012). How Democratic Is the UK? The 2012 Audit. Democratic Audit. YouGov. (2018). UK Polling Report. Available online http://ukpollingreport. co.uk/voting-­intention-­1979–1983. Accessed 9 Nov 2018. Young, H. (1989). One of Us. Pan Books.

PART II

The Age of Political Spin

CHAPTER 4

From Blair to Cameron and Beyond

One of the most effective critics of government communications during the late 1980s was the shadow Trade Secretary, Tony Blair. Towards the end of the Thatcher period, a marketing-led communication strategy became more overt, especially in relation to privatisation and the introduction of the unpopular community charge (a regressive local tax that became known as the ‘poll tax’). This enabled Blair to gain visibility for himself, the Labour party and its policies by hounding the government for running publicity campaigns that, he claimed, “strayed from the legitimate area of public information to the wholly illegitimate field of value judgements” (National Archives, 1988a). On 8 May 1988 he was interviewed on the BBC’s flagship radio news programme, Today, arguing that the body concerned with propriety, the Central Office of Information (COI), “seems to me to have been rather side stepped.” There was little evidence, he said, that the COI had been doing its job in “keeping an objective and impartial watchful eye” over the Trade Secretary’s recent jobs campaign. On 12 May Blair followed this up with a letter to the Prime Minister expressing his “deep concern about the misuse of public money for government advertising,” pointing out how the government slogans ‘Action for Jobs’ and ‘Action for Cities’ mimicked those used in the Conservatives’ local government election campaign. There are several points to make about this intervention. Firstly, Blair was guaranteed media coverage by claiming impropriety in public communication, a subject close to the hearts of journalists. Secondly, the same charge was later © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 R. Garland, Government Communications and the Crisis of Trust, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77576-6_4

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levelled against Blair himself, culminating in the Chilcot report of 2016. Thirdly, an almost identical charge could be made against the Theresa May government in its deployment of the campaigning slogan ‘A country that works for everyone’ in its Government Communications Plan of 2018–2019 (HM Government, 2018). There is another twist to Blair’s intervention. On 11 April 1988, a month before he appeared on the Today programme, the archives show that, behind the scenes in Whitehall, the Director General of the COI, Neville Taylor, was expressing the same concern at the government’s failure to maintain propriety in public communication. In an archived folder collated by Bernard Ingham that pulls together a collection of official documents and media coverage relating to a 1988 review of the COI (National Archives, 1988b), Taylor identifies a “growing pressure to ‘market’ government policies by new publicity methods at great speed.” He notes that the Government Information Service (GIS) leadership expressed concern that “the growing interest of ministers in paid publicity activities is forging relationships with policy officials and contractors outside the usual information networks of expertise.” Where once government publicity was “informative rather than persuasive,” he argues, privatisation campaigns in particular were becoming “campaigns to market policies.” A meeting of the COI review group two days later complains that government communication specialists are rarely consulted on advertising campaigns, and that even when they are “our view was only partially and gradually accepted in adversarial meetings.” The GIS and COI advice on the Community Charge booklet released in August 1987, for example, was “discarded,” and the ensuing campaign led to critical questions about its political bias being raised in parliament and in the press. As an important member of the review group, Bernard Ingham writes to the Prime Minister on 26 April 1988, warning that “currently there is a push to extend the frontiers of acceptability,” especially at the Department of Trade and Industry who are “somewhat subliminally bathing the government in a rosy vote-catching light.” Two days later he tells members of the review group that: “gratuitous image building whether explicitly or subliminally is not acceptable.” If a campaign even “appears to be engineering party political advantage the publicity would be indefensible.” Margaret Thatcher must have taken heed of the warning. On 1 June, the Cabinet Secretary, Robin Butler, writes to all Departmental Permanent Secretaries to advise that “government publicity should always be directed at informing the public” and must be relevant, objective and non-party political.

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Communications specialists in 1988 had difficulty making their voices heard, but after 1997 such resistance could be career ending. By 2019 internal dissent even by the most senior civil servants was becoming a sackable offence.

The Narrative of Political Spin As media became more influential in politics, as in society, the government communication service could have expected to see an increase in reputation, standing and resourcing, in line with developments in the corporate sector (Aronczyk & Powers, 2010; Sanders, 2011). Instead, as we saw in Chap. 2, government press officers and their leadership experienced a drip-drip of disdain from journalists, other civil servants and politicians. This made it harder for the GIS to maintain enough autonomy to uphold a public facing service in accordance with its own professional standards and purposes. At the same time, they were faced with a new class of promotional intermediary: a small but highly networked and influential cadre of politically-appointed media special advisers (SpAds). It is no coincidence that the narrative of political spin took off after 1997. Although there were some continuities, the changes that took place were radical and irreversible and impacted the machinery and culture of the governing executive. As contemporary accounts have shown, Labour took power on a landslide, determined to develop and exploit the resources of the civil service information machine in order to better arm themselves against what they saw as the default right-wing bias of the national media, especially the press, which they believed had kept the party out of power for 18  years. The personal abuse and ridicule faced by Neil Kinnock as Labour leader (1983–1992), followed by his unexpected defeat to John Major in 1992, were traumatic for Labour (Campbell & Hagerty, 2012; Macintyre, 1999). The nimble, aggressive, 24/7 strategic communications operation that Labour brought into government in 1997 had encountered the GIS, staffed by civil servants, while in opposition, and had formed a “poor opinion” of it, having “run rings around it while Major was still Prime Minister” (Seldon, 2005, p. 301). By 1999, the number of SpAds had doubled, and, contrary to custom and practice for the permanent civil service, all but two of the government communications leadership had been replaced in a move that was “completely unprecedented (Oborne, 1999). In response to internal disquiet that surfaced in the public domain, a review hastily commissioned by the

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Cabinet Secretary, Robin Butler, recommended improved professional standards among government communicators while retaining impartiality. The following year, parliament’s Public Administration Select Committee (PASC) published an inquiry which noted poor morale among government communicators and called for better co-operation between press officers, special advisers and ministers (Mountfield, 1997; Public Administration Select Committee, 1998). Much of the blame for political spin came to be laid at the door of politicians and SpAds at No. 10, the so-called ‘spin doctors’, of whom the Director of Communications at No. 10, Alastair Campbell (1997–2003), is the best known. At least as significant and far more numerous were the various media and communications specialists working at departmental level, both civil servants and SpAds, whose activities are harder to discern and who rarely discuss their roles in public. Dismissing controversy over government communication as ‘political spin’ was too simplistic. By focusing on drama and personalised story-­ telling, critics were failing to analyse the constitutional, bureaucratic and cultural dimensions of an everyday change in the ‘rules of engagement’ between the government and media at a time of intensifying mediatization. Rather than apportioning blame to particular media and/or political actors, the mediatization approach taken in this book seeks to examine higher order influences on both domains. As we saw with the case of the young Tony Blair, in recent decades, opposition politicians have colluded with journalists to attack spin by governments, yet once in power continue to extend political control over public communication. Given politicians’ preoccupation with media, this is not surprising. What is more troubling is that successive administrations have made use of extensive discretionary powers over the machinery of government to progressively and cumulatively erode checks and balances that were constructed to protect the capacity of governments to carry out credible and trustworthy public communication. To explore the impact of these changes on the everyday relations between media facing officials and journalists, the next three chapters tell the story of the period from 1997 to date through witness accounts from government communicators, journalists and special advisers. These accounts are augmented by the analysis of the many official reports and inquiries conducted at the time. They show how certain media and political elite actors engaged in what they saw as an existential power struggle over government narratives, permanently transforming the

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internal landscape of government communication and excluding any notion of ‘the public’.

Obscuring the Exercise of Political Power This chapter uses the experiences of journalists and civil servants during the periods immediately after the General Elections of 1997 and 2010 to examine how the rules of engagement between government and the media established since WW2 were transformed. Political spin was a convenient idea that deflected attention from deeper institutional and even constitutional issues. From the beginning of Blair’s first term, concerned observers were noting two forces at play: firstly, a closer alignment between government communications and the aspirations of the Prime Minister and his allies, and secondly, a focus on political news-making at the expense of broader public communication. This involves more than the communication styles of particular Prime Ministers. As a confident communicator, David Cameron, who led the 2010–2015 Coalition government, was commonly referred to as the ‘heir to Blair’ in the arts of political spin. What is less discussed is the institutional dimension whereby his government built on the internal reforms of the Blair years to draw the tools of government communication closer to the political leadership. These reforms progressively emasculated the government communications service, ultimately leading to the flawed government campaign of 2016 to remain in the EU and making it harder to activate and sustain a credible, comprehensive and coherent coronavirus public health campaign. Throughout the struggle to redefine public communication by governments, the public remained bystanders, increasingly isolated and excluded. The narrative of political spin correctly identifies troubling developments in the way governments communicate with the public through the media, but it also simplifies and demonises the process of strategic communications by governments while understating its misuse as a tool in the exercise of political power. As a symbolic marker for manipulative and distorted public communication, the term ‘spin doctor’ is a form of name-­ calling by journalists that downplays their participation in what is a mutual process. It allows them to contrast their own “utopian and fantasized view of the media” with the supposedly cynical behaviour of politicians (Savage & Riffen, 2007, p.92). By attributing spin to others, journalists “lionise themselves as protectors of the audience’s interests” (Atkinson, 2005), while obscuring the political and commercial interests served by their

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media outlets. For politicians too, deflecting blame in the name of spin conceals their own roles in manipulation, and even deceit, as a means of gaining advantage on the political battlefield. The conventional narrative holds that political spin arrived with New Labour in 1997 and that it is “always dangerous” (King & Crewe, 2013, p.301). One typical journalistic charge is that “the trade of spin doctoring” is “notorious for its flexible interpretation of the truth” (Rawnsley, 2000, p. 97), yet this charge fails to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate forms of persuasive public communication. According to Macnamara, who has carried out comparative research into government communications, this “discourse of spin” serves to “misrepresent reality in order to maintain power relations and the status quo” (Macnamara, 2014, p.143). PR scholars have argued that the “dismissive labelling” of strategic PR as ‘spin’ “fails to accurately reflect how it might actually comprise part of the legitimate information management machinery of democratic societies” (L’Etang & Pieczka, 2006, p. 7). The New Labour strategist, Philip Gould, described the term ‘spin doctor’ as a slur, arguing that spin was a neutral process, and that “putting the best progressive case to the media should not be a reason for criticism but a cause for pride” (Hewitt & Gould, 1993, p. 33). Yet in an adversarial political context, certain forms of media management pose dangers. These include the bypassing or removal of dissenting voices, a tendency to engage in symbolic policies to placate a hostile media, and the unaccountable, behind-the-scenes tweaking of rules and structures to suit the government of the day. As we shall see, the intimidation and ‘cull’ of government communicators following the elections of 1997 and 2010 created precedents that led ultimately to the more serious attacks on the civil service and especially its communication function, by the 2019 Johnson governments. 1997: Pushing Out the ‘dead meat’ A permanent career civil service requires that officials stay in post with a change of political leadership. Job insecurity, or ‘churn’, especially in sensitive or high-ranking posts, poses a risk to impartiality since fearful officials cannot speak truth to power. We saw in Chap. 3, how tough Bernard Ingham could be with Margaret Thatcher and her ministers. Alastair Campbell, Blair’s politically appointed press secretary, had a frank and honest relationship with the Prime Minister, but as a Labour loyalist did not have the professional distance or perspective to challenge or alter the

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course of what was later seen as an unethical promotional campaign to take Britain to war with Iraq. Campbell’s first step on arriving at Downing Street was to reform what was seen as a service that had failed during the Major premiership. In spite of assurances given by Campbell at his first meeting with the Information Heads on 3 May 1997, the day after the election, that no purge of civil service jobs was planned, significant ‘churn’ took place within the GIS (Sausman & Locke, 2004). In his Diary entry for 2 May Campbell writes: “The press office people were nervous. They sensed, rightly, that I had not been impressed by the John Major press operation and would want to make changes.” Describing the meeting he writes: “The press officers were a mixed bunch but gave off the sense of being terrified” (Campbell & Hagerty, 2011). Later he describes them as “a pretty dull and uninspiring lot” (13 May) and the “culture in which they had grown up” as “way behind the times” (2 June). By 9 June, he was “beginning to think the majority were useless.” This casually dismissive and disparaging tone, and the word “useless” to describe officials was similarly used by another Blairite, Alan Milburn, then Secretary of State for Health, over supper in March 2002 (Mullin & Winstone, 2010). Campbell claimed that his motivation was reform, not punishment. On 26 September, he writes: “I was trying to modernise the GIS because it needed modernising, but I was also trying to make changes that would benefit us” (my emphasis). This raises the question of what is meant by ‘us’? Is he referring to government in general or New Labour in particular, or even to Tony Blair and his close advisers? Campbell was, above all, a Labour loyalist, so it seems likely he was speaking for the Party and the Prime Minister in seeking an information service that was more responsive to steering from the centre (Negrine, 2008). If so, there was at least the risk of party politicisation, and the consequent undermining of the impartiality of civil service communications. Tony Blair’s chief of staff Jonathan Powell defended Campbell, claiming that he “was unfairly criticized for politicising the government press service. Actually, what he did was professionalise and modernise it” (Powell, 2010, pp. 193–4). Campbell drew much of the fire that should have been aimed at the Prime Minister, so Powell’s defence is reasonable. However, what it does not consider is the possibility that professionalisation or modernisation does not preclude politicisation. As we saw in the previous chapter, there was a consistent failure on the part of the Major government to recognise and respond to the expansion of media during the 1990s but the whole notion of

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‘modernisation’ is not a neutral one. For a new government trying to project an image of effectiveness it may also be “a rhetorical stance that puts effort into conveying an image of shiny modernity and purposive energy” (Hood & Dixon, 2015 p. 192). The process of reform is de facto politicised, however well-intentioned or overdue, if those driving the process are discarding those they consider to be ‘useless’, silencing through fear the voices of those that remain, and applying partisan preferences to those who are recruited to replace them. From a vantage point of 36  years in the civil service, the Cabinet Secretary in place in May 1997, Robin Butler, described the arrival of New Labour as “a watershed.” The changes were profound, he says, for three reasons. Firstly, “departmental ministers and their special advisers were very much less satisfied with the operations of their departmental press offices.” Secondly, “it was politicised” in the sense that special advisers ( …) were very much more active in dealing with press relations than their predecessors had been. Thirdly, “they had a very sophisticated media operation. Very rapid response geared to being 24/7” (IV7). Ed Balls, chief adviser to Gordon Brown at the Treasury, recalls the “disdain” directed at government press officers in 1997: We all had mobile phones and pagers and were used to being in constant touch, but the Treasury’s head of communications and her team had no pagers, and one mobile phone which was passed to whichever press officer was on duty. It was the opposite of the ‘rapid rebuttal’ approach we’d been used to in opposition. Charlie Whelan, Gordon’s press officer, couldn’t hide his disdain. (Balls, 2016, p.128)

In May 1997, Siobhan Kenny, who later became a departmental Director of Communication, was still a press officer at No.10. The small, close-knit team of civil servants had bonded after years of “fighting in a bunker” with John Major, but the arrival of the new government was exciting and refreshing. “It was amazing” she says, but it required confidence and resilience though, to pass the “little tests” set by Alastair Campbell during his first week: You’d be sitting in the press office and, say we’d briefed him for lobby that morning, (…) he would phone up and say, ‘you know that thing you told me this morning, can you come round and tell me again’, and you’d suddenly find yourself standing in front of him and Tony Blair and Tony Blair

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would be looking a bit bemused and he’d say ‘can you go through this little bit again’. I think he was just putting you through little tests. (IV2)

None of her immediate colleagues was “got rid of” she says, but it was different in other departments, where “you had the special advisers whispering into the minister’s ears saying ‘this lot are not really supporting you’, that made for an uncomfortable couple of years.” Rather than blame Campbell, she suggests that ministers were responding to a form of ‘Campbell envy’: “I’m a big fan of Alastair and I think he’s brilliant but what happened was that he spawned a lot of people who were kind of sub-­ Alastair Campbell.” To illustrate the brutality of the working environment post-1997, Steve Reardon, who lost his job as Director of Information at the Department of Social Security, was referred to as ‘dead meat’ by a special adviser to the Secretary of State, Harriet Harman, a comment which found its way into the Daily Mirror and Daily Mail (cited in Public Administration Select Committee, 1998). An article in The Times in October 1997 quoted from a leaked letter from Alastair Campbell to all Whitehall press officers, calling on the service to “raise its game.” Among the dissatisfied ministers mentioned were the Health Secretary, Frank Dobson, who “bawled out his team,” and the Defence Secretary, George Robertson, who bemoaned his status as “the forgotten man of British politics” (Anon, 1997). This atmosphere of intimidation caused widespread disquiet within the informal government communications network, as the interviews cited here show. A departmental press officer (1999–2004) refers to the heads of communication being “shuffled out”: In my department, there was a head of news that had been there for quite a while, a lovely woman, but somehow she was shuffled out against her will and they brought in a journalist who’d worked for a left wing newspaper to replace her. (IV9)

The six journalists interviewed by the author were aware of the vulnerability of government press officers after 1997 and saw the arrival of SpAds as a game changer. Nick Timmins, a broadsheet specialist correspondent (1981–2012) described the change as “a takeover by special advisers (that) happened in most departments” (IV10). Another specialist journalist on broadsheet newspapers (1991–date) sensed that resistance would have been futile, since: “if you weren’t quite New Labour enough then you

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probably didn’t last very long” (IV11). The late political journalist, Chris Moncrieff, of the Press Association (1962–1994), who retired from the lobby in 1994 but continued as a political commentator, relied mostly on unofficial sources since he considered press officers to be too “inhibited” for his purposes, but also felt that the job losses were unfair: “They dismissed lots of very senior experienced, seasoned press officers who’d worked loyally for years for Labour or Conservative, and put their own Labour party stooges into press offices.” (IV12). Jon Silverman, who spent 27 years in BBC news, described the departure of most Directors of Information in 1997 as almost “a complete clear-out.” The significance of the ‘cull’ was not just that it replaced a layer of managers, but that it brought about a permanent change in how government news was managed. David Brindle, a long-serving specialist journalist at The Guardian (1988–date), remembers the change happening “almost immediately” (…). “ Suddenly you had this new tier of semi-political operators working with chosen journalists, using the lobby, not specialists, to place stories, to influence the way a running story was being reported” (IV14). As a specialist in health and social policy, he had worked closely with departmental press officers, and was “more understanding of (their) position and the complexity of their role than perhaps my colleagues.” He recalls the humiliating experience of Romola Christopherson, the highly-­ regarded Director of Communication at the Department of Health (1986–1999), one of the few to survive the ‘cull’ of 1997. Despite nearly 40 years as a government press officer, it was reported in March 1988 that she had been “given a dressing down” by the Health Secretary after briefing a journalist using an agreed government line. The line attempted to show that the government was determined to increase the productivity of NHS surgeons by suggesting that they “will be called off the golf course to carry out more operations”: This caused a huge row with the BMA (British Medical Association), and Dobson, the Secretary of State then wrote this letter to The Times (sic) basically dumping on her and saying, ‘I’ve identified the career civil servant concerned and made clear that I repudiate her for making this claim against the hard-working doctors on which this country depends’, so she was hung out to dry. (IV14)

In the letter, Frank Dobson stated that: “I share the anger of the profession at this insulting remark and dissociate myself from it” (Golf course

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remark ‘wrong’. Daily Telegraph, 24 March 1998). Brindle sees this as “an example of a career civil servant press officer who was trying to play the special adviser game and was then dumped on from a great height.” He argues that before the changes of 1997, putting together a complex policy news story in a way that made it accessible to the public was a “collaborative role” between the specialist journalist and the government press officer. After 1997, and continuing to this day, he believes, news priorities for government were determined by the ‘news grid’. Anything that didn’t support the government’s narrative didn’t make the grid, and therefore was of lesser status. Nicholas Jones, the former BBC industrial editor who has written many books analysing the underlying mechanics of government ‘spin’, claims that the grid is “a political tool; the special advisers’ bible.” It “has the civil service stamp” and has been “accommodated within the civil service structure,” but is driven by a political agenda (IV15). 2010: “We don’t think you’re very good at your job” Frequent changes in government were common during the 1970s, but as a result of the more stable, long-serving administrations from 1979 onwards, press officers were more likely to have served, at most, just one or two governments. One long-serving departmental Director of Communications (1991–2011) who had served the Major, Blair and Cameron governments, identified three factors that he felt applied in both 1997 and 2010. First, civil servants were expected to adopt a “year zero approach” to the incoming government, thereby undermining continuity. Second, the new ministerial team were inevitably “suspicious of us because they beat us and we worked for the other people.” Thirdly, civil servants from the previous regime experienced hostility and negative briefing, both in person and through the media. Overall though, he felt that the “level of day to day hostility was much higher” in 2010. The clear out has been at least as big, and I think a bit bigger, than it was in 1997… the first thing they wanted to do was produce the austerity package and that included communications being affected, so you were dealing with lots of fearful and weeping colleagues. In 1997 the attitude was, ‘you’re all a bit rubbish and you’re going to have to improve and modernise quickly because we know how to do things’ – not entirely welcome but not completely unrealistic. In 2010, it’s ‘civil servants are useless otherwise you’d

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have a proper job, and the public sector has almost bankrupted the country and now it’s payback time.’ (IV4)

This tallies with the claim made by a civil servant in Yong and Hazell’s study of Whitehall special advisers, who concluded that, after the 2010 election, “too many special advisers see themselves engaged in Jihad against the public sector”(Yong & Hazell, 2014, p. 178). A Deputy Director of Communications and Head of News (2001–2014) felt that communications teams suffered more from cuts than other parts of the department, describing the cull as: An absolute bloodbath. What was difficult is (…) the general impression given by ministers was ‘we don’t like you, we don’t trust you’ – this was the civil service in general but it was applicable to the press office as well – ‘we don’t think you’re very good at your job and there’s too many of you’ (…). They cut everything. Everything went. Biscuits in meetings. Plant pots had to be removed and we didn’t have any pens…but because they’d come in on such an austerity drive, particularly as the Secretary of State was the figurehead of that, we had to be made an example of. It was horrible. Really horrible. (IV16)

The idea that civil servants in general were ‘blockers’ was a recurring theme among those who experienced the 2010 change of government. A Director of Communication (2001–2014) who developed good working relationships with her Secretary of State and special advisers, thinks this attack on civil servants is due to a misunderstanding of their role: I think the Conservatives or a lot of them feel that, and you get a lot of this briefing in the media, Labour did it as well, the sense that the civil service is this unwieldy bureaucracy, they’re blockers, they’re not there to enable, to facilitate, to provide fresh thinking, they’re there to just say no and are a barrier to good government and to actually getting things done, because ministers are there to get things done. And I just really deeply disagree with that because I think there needs to be an appropriate check to what ministers want to do. (IV17) (my emphasis)

The level of hostility from incoming ministerial teams in 2010 depended on the extent to which civil servants were perceived as ‘blockers’, according to this departmental press officer (2010–2013) who started just before the 2010 election:

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Some understood where ministers were coming from and the agenda they were trying to promote and were much more news savvy, and others were more, if you like, traditional civil servants and were very ‘straight bat’, and didn’t really get on board with that agenda, and I think suffered because of it. They were disliked by ministers and special advisers and would be cut out of the loop on occasions to try and circumvent them. (IV18)

In his view “politicians of all colours are after the same thing, which is positive news coverage for whatever it is they are deciding to announce that week.” He had no doubt as to who he needed to please to be seen to be doing his job well—“ultimately, success was ‘are ministers happy?’ You weren’t really working for the department as such, you were absolutely working for ministers.” The public did not even figure in this equation. The issue of ‘churn’ following the 2010 election attracted less attention than in 1997, suggesting that this was now perceived as the norm. By March 2014, of the 20 Directors in post in 2010, just two remained, a similar turnover as in 1997. If so, this is a profound change that has not been sufficiently scrutinised or discussed. The issue reappeared on the public agenda in 2019 after plans backed by the Johnson government to centralise and radically cut the government communication service were leaked to The Times and later confirmed by No. 10 (Ball, 2020). Tony Blair’s former Chief of Staff Jonathan Powell, a supporter of civil service reform, described the move as: … the beginning of a rolling coup. It starts with the civil service then moves on to the judiciary and the BBC. In the absence of a written constitution, we depend on rules and conventions to provide checks and balances on an over mighty executive. (Powell, 2020)

The insecurity felt by the government communications leaderships in 1997 and 2010 has recently extended to leadership roles within the wider civil service. The controversy unleashed by the radical plans for the GCS in 2019 intensified when Permanent Secretaries from five departments as well as the Cabinet Secretary, Whitehall’s most senior civil servant, resigned or were dismissed within nine months of Johnson’s election victory (Murphy, 2020). In an unprecedented move, the long-serving Permanent Secretary at the Home Office, Philip Rutnam, resigned after 33 years. He released a resignation statement and in an emotional interview said he had been the victim of a “vicious and orchestrated” campaign against him and

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would sue the government for constructive dismissal (Rutnam, 2020). A year later he settled for what is thought to be a six-figure sum before the case came to an employment tribunal (Dunton, 2021). The Prime Minister’s adviser on Ministerial Standards, Alex Allan, resigned in November 2020 after Johnson broke with precedent by failing to uphold charges of bullying against a senior minister that broke the Ministerial Code, a decision that called into question the current system of ministerial propriety.

Conclusion It appears that a significant level of churn amounting to an almost complete clear-out within a year took place at senior levels of the Government Communications Service after the 1997 and 2010 elections and appears to be continuing following the 2019 election. There may have been good reasons for change but as the accounts from the ‘survivors’ show, much of the hostility was personal and, at times, brutal. The so-called ‘cull’ of the government information leadership after 1997 was one of the most visible impacts of the Blair government’s drive to reform government communications and led to much negative media and political comment. Long overdue improvements to and greater investment in government communications took place after 1997 too, but these changes were implemented according to priorities set by party leaderships without consideration of the long-term impacts on the British political system as a whole. It is worth remembering the words of Steve Reardon, the Head of Information who lost his job in 1997 after 30 years in government service. Like him, many heads had been “summarily driven from their posts … so soon after the election, in a way that was undeservedly and publicly humiliating.” He told the Public Administration Committee that “the security of tenure of Heads of Information still remains dependent very much on the pleasure of ministers … in a way that would seem to apply to few if any mainstream policy officials” (Reardon, 1998). His contemporary, the former head of information at the Northern Ireland Office, Andy Wood, told the same committee how, after 23 years in the GIS, he was sent on ‘gardening leave’ a few months after the election (Wood, 1998). He feared a process of ‘Washingtonisation’ (also known as ‘the spoils system’), whereby incoming governments quickly remove incumbent officials wholesale, but was disappointed that the “top echelons” of the civil service remained “conspicuously silent about these removals.” The senior civil service

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preferred “to prepare its defences against further encroachments on its neutrality and professionalism” rather than “take a stand and decry these removals.” Wood’s veiled warning that the wider civil service might face trouble further down the line appears to have been borne out, albeit many years later. As we shall see in Chap. 6, indications of executive overreach led to institutional resistance on the part of parliament and the civil service in the form of a succession of critical reviews and enquiries that culminated in the 2016 Chilcot Report. Yet however trenchant the criticism it was always post-hoc and hence too late to make much of a difference. This indicates that a radical and cumulative shift has taken place in both frontline practice and in what has come to be seen as appropriate within the Whitehall model. Many of the changes were difficult or impossible to reverse or stop which raises the question, what are the safeguards? Among the most significant impacts was the effect on government media relations, and especially the growing influence of special advisers in media-facing roles, a situation that is discussed next.

References Anon. (1997, October 2). Whitehall Press Officers Get Lesson in Spin. The Times. Aronczyk, M., & Powers, D. (2010). Blowing Up the Brand: Critical Perspectives on Promotional Culture. Peter Lang. Atkinson, J. (2005). The Panic Over ‘Spin’: Neo-liberalism, Insider Populism, and Media Cynicism’. Paper Presented at the International Association for Media and Communications Research, Taipei. Ball, J (2020, July 21). UK Civil Servants Fear Press Office Centralisation Could ‘Undermine Democracy’. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/ politics/2020/jul/21/uk-­civil-­servants-­fear-­press-­office-­centralisation-­could-­ undermine-­democracy-­boris-­johnson Balls, E. (2016). Speaking Out: Lessons in Life and Politics. Penguin. Campbell, A., & Hagerty, B. (2011). The Alastair Campbell Diaries: Volume 2, Power and the People, 1997–1999. Hutchinson. Campbell, A., & Hagerty, B. (2012). The Alastair Campbell Diaries: Volume 4, the Burden of Power: Countdown to Iraq. Hutchinson. Dunton, J. (2021, March 4). Former Home Office Perm Sec Settles Constructive Dismissal Case. Civil Service World. Accessed https://www.civilserviceworld. com/news/article/former-­home-­office-­perm-­sec-­rutnam-­settles-­constructive-­ dismissal-­case. Hewitt, P., & Gould, P. (1993). Lessons from America. Renewal, 1, 45–51.

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HM Government. (2018). Government Communications Plan 2018/9. Building a Country that Works for Everyone. Accessed https://3x7ip91ron4ju9ehf2un qr m1-­w pengine.netdna-­s sl.com/wp-­c ontent/uploads/2020/03/ Government-­Communication-­Plan-­2018_19.pdf Hood, C., & Dixon, R. (2015). A Government that Worked Better and Cost Less?: Evaluating Three Decades of Reform and Change in UK Central Government. Oxford University Press. King, A., & Crewe, I. (2013). The Blunders of our Governments. Oneworld. L'Etang, J., & Pieczka, M. (2006). Public Relations: Critical Debates and Contemporary Practice. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Macintyre, D. (1999). Mandelson and the Making of New Labour. HarperCollins. Macnamara, J. (2014). Journalism and PR: Unpacking ‘Spin’, Stereotypes and Media Myths. Peter Lang. Mountfield, R. (1997). Report of the Working Group on the Government Information and Communications Service. Cabinet Office. Mullin, C., & Winstone, R. (2010). A View from the Foothills: The Diaries of Chris Mullin. Profile. Murphy, P. (2020, September 2). Why It Matters That so Many Civil Servants Are Quitting Under Boris Johnson. The Conversation. https://theconversation. com/why-­it-­matters-­that-­so-­many-­senior-­civil-­servants-­are-­quitting-­under-­ boris-­johnson-­145257 National Archives. (1988a). Tony Blair Quoted in Newspaper Articles in The Times, 24 April, and Daily Telegraph, 25 April). Accessed in INF 12/1540. National Archives. (1988b). Review of the COI. Accessed in INF 12/1540. Negrine, R. (2008). The Transformation of a Political Communication: The Global Context. In R.  Negrine (Ed.), The Transformation of Political Communication: Continuities and Changes in Media and Politics (pp. 143–169). Palgrave Macmillan. Oborne, P. (1999). Alastair Campbell: New Labour and the Rise of the Media Class. Aurum. Powell, J. (2010). The New Machiavelli: How to Wield Power in the Modern World. Bodley Head. Powell, J. (2020, June 29). The Johnson-Cummings War on the Civil Service Is Very Troubling. It Looks Like a Rolling Coup Against Institutions. The Independent. https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/boris-­johnson-­dominic-­ cummings-­civil-­service-­war-­mark-­sedwill-­judiciary-­a9591721.html Public Administration Select Committee. (1998). Sixth Report, Session 1997–98. House of Commons. Rawnsley, A. (2000). Servants of the People: The Inside Story of New Labour. Hamish Hamilton.

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Reardon, S. (1998). Memorandum to the Public Administration Select Committee. House of Commons. Retrieved from http://www.publications.parliament.uk/ pa/cm199798/cmselect/cmpubadm/770/77018.htm Rutnam, P. (2020, January 29). Sir Philip Rutnam: Resignation Statement in Full. BBC News. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-­politics-­51688261. Accessed 23 Oct 2020. Sanders, K. (2011). Political Public Relations and Government Communication. In J. Stromback & S. Kiousis (Eds.), Political Public Relations: Principles and Applications. Routledge. Sausman, C., & Locke, R. (2004). The British Civil Service: Examining the Question of Politicization. In B. Peters & J. Pierre (Eds.), Politicization of the Civil Service in Comparative Perspective (pp. 101–123). Routledge. Savage, S., & Riffen, R. (2007). Politicians, Journalists and ‘Spin’: Tangled Relationships and Shifted Alliances. In S.  Young (Ed.), Government Communications in Australia (pp. 79–92). Cambridge University Press. Seldon, A. (2005). Blair. Simon and Schuster. Wood, A. (1998). Appendix 6: Memorandum to the Public Administration Select Committee. House of Commons. Yong, B., & Hazell, R. (2014). Special Advisers : Who They Are, What They Do and Why They Matter. Hart Publishing.

CHAPTER 5

The Rise of Politically-Appointed Media Strategists After 1997

A series of controversies relating to the media activities of political appointees in government exposes a fault line that has run through the British political system since 1997 and continues today—the elastic role of the political operatives within government known as special advisers (‘SpAds’). To illustrate the latent anger relating to the role of SpAds with a recent example, the coronavirus communication campaign of 2020 was almost blown off course by a major controversy. On 25 May 2020, just as the Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, was preparing to ease the lockdown after two months, the conduct of his senior adviser, Dominic Cummings, in interpreting the lockdown instructions hit the headlines. It emerged that not only had he driven with his son and wife who was displaying COVID-19 symptoms, 264 miles from London to Durham at the height of the epidemic, but he had also taken his family on a 60-mile round trip to a beauty spot over the Easter weekend, and driven to a hospital while displaying symptoms himself, at a time when the instruction was ‘Stay Home, Protect the NHS, Save Lives’. The story made front page headlines for at least six days and led to an unprecedented emergency press briefing by Cummings that was broadcast live from the rose garden of No. 10 Downing Street on 25 May, reaching a peak audience of nearly six million (Griffiths, 2020). Within a week nearly 60 Conservative MPs had publicly criticised Cummings, the Prime Minister’s poll ratings had plummeted and a petition calling for his resignation was signed by one million members of the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 R. Garland, Government Communications and the Crisis of Trust, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77576-6_5

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public. Scientific experts, political commentators, academics, politicians, the media and an estimated 180,000 constituents publicly condemned Cummings’ behaviour, and Johnson’s actions in defending him, for putting in jeopardy both public trust in the government and compliance with its instructions (Procter et al., 2020). The normally restrained think-tank, the Institute for Government, warned that the government’s “hostile response” to the public outcry ignored the widespread “latent anger” and that a “loss of trust in the government makes the public question each and every decision” (Haddon, 2020). This sounds familiar. The Chilcot report into Tony Blair’s 2002 Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) campaign concluded that it had left a “damaging legacy, including undermining trust and confidence in Government statements” and warned that this “may make it more difficult to secure support for Government policy” (Chilcot, 2016, pp. 131, 116). It appears that little has been learned or perhaps much has been ignored since the Iraq War controversy. Why? What are the dynamics that prevent such abuses of public trust from taking place again and again? As we shall see in greater detail in Chap. 7, politicians feel driven to respond quickly to mediatized controversies that could arise from anywhere, at any time. They feel the need for protection from personal news management specialists who can anticipate problems and prepare for pre-­ emptive attack, deploying blame before it can be directed against them. As the secret deliberations of the Liaison Committee on Government Presentation during the 1980s showed (see Chap. 3), politicians were quick to spot the dangers and exploit the opportunities arising from the expansion of media. This intensified after 1997 and applies to all governing parties. The largely hidden organisational changes in government communications which arose from these media and political pressures privilege those who can adapt to the speeding up of the policy and news cycle. Crisis narratives have long provided a rallying cry for change. Thatcherite Conservatives during the late 1970s appealed to a sense of crisis to justify radical policies calling for the transformation of what they saw as the over-­ extended state (Richards, 2014). The Blair government inflated claims about the imminent threat of Saddam Hussain’s WMDs to win support for the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. It has been argued that in contemporary politics, we see a cheapening or devaluation of the language of crisis (Hay, 2014). Crisis, or imminent crisis, is now an accepted part of political discourse. To manage the risks, whether real or perceived,

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politicians want the freedom to select people around them that they can trust to foresee and manage a political crisis or problem (Peters & Savoie, 2012). Political aides are there not to sustain an informed public, or even inform the media, but to protect the personal and political reputation of ‘their’ minister. The Cummings controversy was not the first concerned with the role and conduct of special advisers. Between 1997 and 2020, these were numerous and damaging. Cummings was also not the first SpAd to wield enormous power. In 2002, Alastair Campbell held “unprecedented powers” for an unelected adviser, managing the Government Information and Communication Service (GICS) as well as three Downing Street departments and the Central Office of Information (COI) (Weir, 2002). It is not just a matter of ‘politicisation’, whereby ruling politicians exert greater power and control over the central bureaucracy (Eichbaum & Shaw, 2010). What concerns observers is the extent to which the ‘weaponising’ of government information diverts resources from informing the public to attacking opponents and pursuing electoral advantage. This chapter examines witness accounts from journalists, civil servants and special advisers to find out how these roles have evolved and why they attract such controversy. Despite numerous official reviews and inquiries, their role remains opaque, unaccountable and, for many members of the public, mysterious. Why did their numbers expand so quickly after 1997? What impact did they have on relationships between the government and media and what is the direction of travel?

What Changed? We saw in Chap. 4, how the arrival of the 1997 Labour government proved traumatic for the Government Information Service (GIS), but it also had long-term impacts. The ‘cull’ brought about a permanent change in the way government news was managed. In interviews, journalists expressed this most clearly, describing the change as taking place “almost immediately” as the government created “a new tier of semi-political operators working with chosen journalists” (IV14). Government press officers were and are bound by their propriety code to “deal with all news media even-handedly” (GCS, 2014/2020), but SpAds could be selective about who they spoke to. According to Nicholas Jones this “changed fundamentally the rules of engagement and continues to do so” (IV15). David Brindle of The Guardian recalled how special advisers rather than

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civil servants took responsibility for the story of the day, “working with the civil service press people, but typically around them, over them, dealing with handpicked journalists who were being fed the story. The press officers who were left out of the loop would be trailing in the wake of this” (IV14). The need for trusted and hardworking political aides is understandable. The judge-led Leveson inquiry into the ethics and practices of the press following the post-2007 newspaper phone-hacking scandal revealed a consensus among leading politicians that life in the media spotlight had become almost unbearable. David Cameron justified his appointment of the disgraced former tabloid newspaper editor, Andy Coulson, as his chief press secretary in 2007 by saying that he needed “someone who could cope with the huge media pressure” (Cameron, 2012). When “a single media scandal may put an end to a lifelong career in just a few days,” it is not surprising that politicians try to “create a deep backstage in which they can trust their closest allies and friends in private” (Hjarvard, 2013, p. 68). An unstable, elite backstage that deals non-attributively with selected journalists and works to a short-term news agenda is unlikely to prioritise the longer term information needs of citizens in a democracy. The drive by politicians to protect themselves from disgrace or failure might explain at least part of the general tendency for state bureaucracies in liberal democracies to become more responsive to the will of ministers over time (Eichbaum & Shaw, 2010). In the UK the numerically small but well-networked cadre of SpAds draws its power from a proximity to ministers and a collective, yet hidden influence on government narratives. SpAds first became significant in UK politics in 1964 when the incoming Wilson government appointed five advisers to provide technical and economic expertise and overcome what Labour saw as a naturally conservative bias within the civil service. They attracted “much contemporary media interest,” but were welcomed as a means of bringing new talent into public service (Fulton Report on the Civil Service 1968, p.  74). Conservative administrations showed less interest in special advisers— Heath recorded just ten—but the Labour governments of 1974–1979 provided the “breakthrough (which) took place alongside a more general professionalization of politics” (Blick, 2004, p. 148), when numbers rose beyond 30 for the first time. The biggest rise came after 1997 when numbers grew to nearly 80 by July 2000. The most recent figure recorded for December 2020 was 102 (Cabinet Office, 2020a).

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In opposition, the Conservatives were frequently critical of New Labour’s SpAds, especially their role in briefing the media (Davis, 2003; Maude, 2010) and in their 2010 manifesto pledged to cap their numbers in government. The 2012 Ministerial Code was amended to impose an official limit of two per cabinet minister but by December 2015 numbers had risen to 114 (Cabinet Office 2015a, 2015b). The idea of the Extended Ministerial Office (EMO) was developed and piloted during the Cameron era with the intention of providing small political ‘cabinets’ in government departments. This idea was scotched as soon as Theresa May became Prime Minister in December 2016, when a newly issued version of the Ministerial Code quietly removed the facility for EMOs. This was never explained, but a concern that this could have established ministerial powerbases in the departments may have threatened the Prime Minister. Almost as soon as Johnson was elected as Prime Minister in 2019, the management of SpAds was centralised at No. 10 under the control of Dominic Cummings (Durrant et al., 2020), a decision that threatened to damage the working relationships between ministers and their aides. Since Cummings’ resignation in November 2020, it is not clear whether the status quo ante has returned. The everyday media relations practices of special advisers are little researched, although former advisers are starting to explain and reflect on their work (Hillman, 2014; Wilkes, 2014; Yong & Hazell, 2014). Far from being mere bag carriers, or the demonised ‘spin doctors’ of popular legend, SpAds may be seen as significant media and political operators who together form a ‘political civil service’ (Hood & Dixon, 2015). This has happened by stealth and beyond the control of the civil service leadership. One former Head of the Civil Service, Bob Kerslake (2011–2014), felt powerless to intervene when “information is routinely leaked by special advisers and ministers.” In his view there is now a “yawning gap between the governing and the governed” (M. Foster, 2015). This damning view of the media relations activities of ministers and their aides is corroborated by this senior information officer at the Department of Health during the early Blair years, who told the author, Nicholas Jones, that special advisers were: Obsessed with what stories would be appearing in the Sunday papers … deciding which exclusive should be leaked to which newspaper and then which minister should get the chance to do follow-up interviews on televi-

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sion and radio … we all thought this was terribly wasteful of ministerial effort. (Jones, 2006, p. 162)

How Journalists Saw the New “terms of trade” Journalists who had regular contact with government departments before and after 1997 noticed the immediate impact of special advisers on the “terms of trade” that governed interactions between governments and the media. This form of media briefing is necessarily a hidden process that is deniable by ministers. Since negotiation is conducted confidentially, it is not always clear on whose behalf special advisers are speaking to the media. They could be speaking for the minister, the department or both, and their statements may be official, semi-official or unofficial. This provides cover for ministers to attack and smear opponents anonymously, propose radical or untried policy ideas and leak privileged information to their own advantage while remaining anonymous. Much of this media firepower is centralised at No. 10 and at times of internal dissent can generate briefing and counter-briefing. These practices challenge the traditional concept of the ‘government line’, that is, the attributable, official statements delivered by the departmental spokesperson, the Director of Communication or Head of News or a member of the media team delegated by them. Official statements were traditionally brokered and placed on the record by the departmental press office after taking into account the agreed positions of the administrative and political leaderships. The advantage for ministers of allowing their personal aides to place government news on the record semi-officially is that it is their version of the story which is presented first and placed with a chosen media outlet at a time that suits them. When the responsibility for crafting and presenting the official line passes from the departmental media team to the minister’s or Prime Minister’s own office and is delivered selectively and/or off-the-record, the scope for bias and misinformation becomes greater. Privileged government information becomes a resource to be traded with selected journalists in return for favoured coverage, not a means to inform the public. In this unregulated ‘backstage’ space where unattributable ministerial aides brief the media, there is scope for activities that are not strictly consistent with already vague propriety codes. Government communications therefore becomes less an administrative function aimed at informing the public, and more a channel for political and personal advocacy. The arrival of a well-connected network of political operatives from 1997 onwards

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offered rich pickings for political and policy journalists in the form of a steady stream of newsworthy, story-led, crisis-rich understandings of the game of politics. As specialist correspondents these journalists were required by their editors to report on and analyse government news and, more importantly, to break their own stories. The ‘government line’ was traditionally the starting point for a wider and more complicated and nuanced investigation led by the journalist. The political editor at the Press Association, Chris Moncrieff (1962–1994), recalled how, until the arrival of Alastair Campbell, it was easy to meet and speak to MPs, even ministers, simply by hanging around at Westminster, where “you used to pick up an enormous amount of stuff. There were always ministers dodging in and out of the lobby and they were as keen to see us as we were to see them” (IV12). He blamed Campbell for keeping journalists and ministers apart at Westminster in order to control the flow of government news. David Brindle agreed that an official government announcement provided the “genesis of a story,” but then “the idea would be to take that version and play if off other sources to synthesise a version for the reader which in one’s own judgment was the best assessment of the situation.” According to Brindle, before 1997, senior Whitehall press officers like Romola Christopherson at the Department of Health, “had the ear of the minister” and could provide further information ‘off the record’ for background use. If you had a big story pre-97 you would go to Romola and say ‘Romola, we are going to run with this tomorrow, I’ve talked to the press office who aren’t as forthcoming as they might have been, can you give me anything further?’ Nowadays the default is to go to the special adviser.

Similarly, Nick Timmins, who reported on politics and policy for The Times, Independent and FT (1987–2012), had “relatively few great sources in the civil service because most civil servants behaved properly” but his trick was “to sit there a bit like a spider in the web working out who they’d have talked to in developing policy and then you go and talk to them (…). By and large you watched the waves once they dropped something into the pond.” This more considered approach to reporting a government story was “entirely possible” then in the age of traditional press deadlines and better staffed newspaper offices.

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Timmins also singles out the long-serving Christopherson as someone who had both the ear and trust of the minister, and could be relied on to tell the truth, if not the whole truth: Someone like Romola, you know, she was excellent at holding her minister’s hand for the media. She was just a perfect bridge between the two. She’d make judgments. I remember going to her with some story I’d got, and I’d got two thirds of it right but the third bit I hadn’t got right was probably quite damaging for the government. So she made a judgment … and made sure I got all of it right which was in the government’s interest but also mine … On the other hand, if Rom said to me ‘I wouldn’t write that if I were you’, I’d think very, very hard before writing it. She wouldn’t tell you why you shouldn’t write it. … that would be giving you the story. So that’s a relationship of trust. (IV10)

He remembers how the “terms of trade” changed in 1997, when “the media SpAds arrived in force.” He might be told by a SpAd not to pursue a certain line but rather than explaining whether the story was right or not, he would be told something like “you will look stupid in the morning.” Timmins took the refusal as confirmation that the story was right, so wrote it and was often proved right. This was a less trusting relationship because in contrast to his relationship with Christopherson, he could not take the SpAd at his or her word. Jon Silverman, home affairs correspondent for the BBC between 1989 and 2002, was in regular touch with the Home Office press office and identifies two developments that had a major impact on his work: the arrival of 24/7 media, and the rise of special advisers as primary government sources. Broadcast journalists now had to file stories at any time of the day or night, across a range of platforms. This gave them less time to develop complexity and nuance so the arrival of this new, proactive, informed and well-connected network of government media intermediaries helped journalists to ‘feed the beast’ by providing not only a news subsidy, but an authoritative comment and political narrative subsidy as well. By the time Silverman left the BBC in 2002, correspondents were expected to: File across a whole range of platforms and with 24-hour news and everything else you were under pressure to be on air an awful lot of the time and if you are actually on air, you can’t really do reporting. You can’t find out

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what’s going on with a story if you’re actually on a programme spouting off about it. (IV13)

He found that he could ring the Home Secretary Jack Straw’s special adviser, Ed Owen, as late as midnight to pick up a story for the 6.30 am ‘two-way’ on the next morning’s news programme, Today, I found that I could get 90% of what I wanted out of Ed Owen after the 97 election rather than the press office. The press office was very useful for the mechanics of how a story was going to be issued, when a minister was going to be available for interview, so the logistics, but if you really wanted the sort of thrust of it, especially to get it the day before so you could put it out in the morning and help set the agenda, then the special adviser became the main conduit.

It was in Owen’s interest to get the angle he wanted on the story, even when “sometimes that would not be exactly what the official news machine wanted, or thought was appropriate.” The more nuanced political background to this, says Silverman, was that No. 10 was putting pressure on the Home Office to crack down on asylum even to the extent of Blair making public announcements that contradicted official Home Office policy. Owen’s activities were part of the Home Office ministerial fightback against No. 10. Journalists in key positions were favoured by SpAds. One freelance business journalist described them as “very, very hierarchical … They have their pecking order in terms of who they’d really want to take a call from and get on to” (IV11). This was usually the political specialists (known as the ‘political lobby’). Over time, press officers accepted that they too were obliged to comply with the new system of priorities set from No. 10. Brindle found that even those with whom he had a good relationship became less responsive: The main media business was being transacted in a quite different sphere altogether, between my lobby correspondent colleagues and the SpAds, and where they were trying to collaborate with that, the Whitehall press officers. As a specialist I felt increasingly marginalized and ill-served; poorly served, compared to what it had been before.

The mechanics of this “different sphere,” where special advisers traded exclusive nuggets of information for targeted coverage were noted by

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Nicholas Jones, who had been the BBC’s industrial correspondent during the miners’ strike (1984–1985). He later worked for many years as weekend duty editor. The author of a series of books about New Labour’s political spin, Jones characterises the relationship as “collusion,” which, although it served both partners in the deal, was fundamentally undemocratic because it lacked transparency and failed to give parliament and the public “full and objective information about policy proposals and outcomes” (Weir, 2002). Jones’ job on Saturday nights was to identify news stories that had been trailed ahead in the early editions of the Sunday papers and to contact government departments to “find out which one had legs, which one was actually the imagination of the journalist, and which one was a real one from a briefing.” He too noticed a fundamental change after 1997: In the 80s into the 90s when you tried to get hold of someone from one of the government information offices … they would play it with a straight bat and say ‘we don’t know where that story came from. There’s an announcement coming on Wednesday and obviously we can’t pre-empt what the minister is going to say in the Commons’. Post 1997, there’s a much greater willingness on the part of the government information officers … when you said the magic words ‘well, I’ve spoken to special adviser X, Y or Z’, suddenly you’ve unlocked the door and you would get them coughing up the information. (IV15)

Now, he argues, everything is trailed ahead. This is a “change in the balance of power” where it’s “the special advisers calling the shots increasingly.” This is symbolised by the news grid, a ‘political tool,” which “has the civil service stamp. According to Jones, “this is up to civil service standards, this can be accommodated within the civil service structure, but what has driven it has been a political agenda in my opinion.” With their hunger for news, journalists are put into “an invidious position” in which they collude with the source in giving the preferred side of the story rather than presenting a critical view or explaining to the reader the true nature of the source. Since 1997, he argues, there has been a blurring of the boundary between ministerial and departmental sources. He cites the behaviour of Peter Walker, Energy Secretary during the miners’ strike, who secretly met selected correspondents in his office to brief them on the political dimension to the story. Observing proprieties, the civil service press officers would leave the room. Today, he argues:

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Even if the civil servant isn’t in the room, the special adviser is, and that is now the conduit that will ensure that the civil service is in tandem with what the whole lot is saying, so they are all singing from the same hymn sheet.

The significance of this is that government press officers become drawn into the political narratives. Brindle sees nothing wrong with SpAds “pushing their own agendas” so long as “that information that comes from them, and lines that come from them, are clearly seen as such.” This is clearly not happening. Increasingly, he argues, the civil service is failing to hold the line between official and unofficial news, and risks losing credibility. Confusion Over Who Represents the Official Line The confusion over sources and specifically the designation of who is or is not an official government source, makes it difficult or impossible for the consumers of news to work out who is speaking. Successive official inquiries have tried to establish and codify how different voices within government should be cited but propriety guidance and codes of conduct barely mention it. The GCS propriety guidance simply advises press officers, as far as possible, to speak on the record rather than non-attributively. The Code of Conduct for Special Advisers (Cabinet Office, 2020b) devotes just one third of a page in an 18-page document to issues relating to media and does not refer to attribution except to say that SpAds may “represent the views of their minister.” A succession of official reports recognised the sensitivity of this issue and by and large recommended that the government press officer should be designated as official spokesman, as follows: We recommend that Heads of Information be identified as ‘the official spokesman’ for their departments … Any special adviser who briefs the press should be described as ‘a political adviser to’ the Minister. (Mountfield, 1997) The difficulties that have emerged from time to time with special advisers since 1997 have arisen in large part with media briefing that has gone wrong. (Public Administration Select Committee, 2002) Wherever possible, (government) press officers should speak on the record as ‘the department’s spokesperson’. (Phillis, 2004)

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As their numbers have grown, special advisers are increasingly drawn from media and strategic communications backgrounds (Yong & Hazell, 2014). Bill Bush, policy adviser to Tessa Jowell at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) (2001–2005), had previously held senior roles at No. 10 and the BBC and was used to working with journalists. Although not a media SpAd, he was in frequent regular contact with journalists, some of whom knew his number and called him direct: On a quiet day, it would be two or three a day and on a busy day ten or a dozen. You’d write off two hours and you’d just sit and churn the calls through. Three minutes, four minutes, five minutes – make the call, make the call, make the call. (IV19)

Bush’s relationship with the departmental press office was good. Jowell was ‘old fashioned’ in requiring that they be kept in the loop, but in the high-pressure environment of mediatized politics a government department may appear obstructive because it “quite rightly, puts more weight on accuracy than speed” while “most government ministers and the outside world want speed. They say they want accuracy but what they really want is speed. Keep the story alive.” Attribution at DCMS was usually to the official spokesperson, but where a briefing was given by a minister or special adviser this would be cited as “sources close to.” One adviser during the Coalition period (2010–2015) came into government with little experience of reactive media relations. She too worked closely with the press office, describing their contribution as ‘critical’. It was agreed that while they would handle the specialist press, she would deal with the political lobby, an experience she described as “like having a pack of wolves at you all the time” (IV20). She spoke to political journalists every day, estimating that this took up 40% of her time. She “would never be quoted as a spokesperson for (her minister)” or a party source. She agrees that the source of much government news is not clear to the readers of newspapers. At times, this may be intentional. Deniability is important, for example, when a SpAd is acting for a minister but is in disagreement with the line at No. 10. In contrast, government press officers are required to “speak on the record as a departmental spokesperson wherever possible” and to “avoid unattributed quotes” (GCS 2014/2020, p.5). Nick Hillman, special adviser to the Conservative minister, David Willetts (2010–2013), explains that “no-one trains you to be a SpAd, so you approach the job how you and your minister want you to approach

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it.” If asked for a quote by a journalist, he would usually email it over in the name of David Willetts. He worked on the assumption that the special adviser should “never really be quoted on the record” but could be cited in various ways, for example as ‘a spokesman’, or as representing the department’s ‘view’ (IV21). Civil service communicators were also concerned about this lack of clarity. One Director of Communication (2001–2014) who worked closely and harmoniously with her minister and SpAds agreed that there was a lack of clarity about who spoke on behalf of the government, which presented an accountability gap: “It’s certainly not clear to the public. And I think its opaqueness allows … off the record briefing … Quotes would appear and it wouldn’t always be clear whether they were advisers, officials leaking, possibly No.10, possibly Treasury” (IV17). One advantage of delegating media briefing to political appointees is that it protects civil servants from accusations of political bias. However, what might once have been seen by the mainstream senior civil service as a relatively trivial and even harmless means of indulging ministers’ preoccupation with the day’s headlines, in practice actually heralded a larger cultural and institutional shift. At one time it was acceptable, even desirable, for policy civil servants to brief journalists about their own areas of expertise. This is no longer common practice. Since 2015, the Civil Service Code has required that (non-media) civil servants acquire “ministerial authorisation for any contact with the media” (Cabinet Office 2015b).1 As we see in Chap. 11, this long-term trend was challenged during the coronavirus crisis as government scientists and others were deployed as key spokespeople in support of a government that needed to build and sustain public trust.

Conclusion Since 1997 there has been a rapid injection of a small but steadily growing and increasingly coordinated number of media SpAds, ultimately reporting to the Prime Minister, while working day-to-day for the departmental Secretary of State and operating largely under the radar. Journalists valued the steady supply of ready-digested and drama-rich news but spoke regretfully of the loss of informal direct contact with politicians, and a selective, discriminatory and partial approach to briefing journalists. Those considered to be low priority, including specialist reporters who had previously had constructive, if critical, relationships with government departments,

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felt excluded. Citizens thereby lost two sources of impartial government information: a critical and independent journalism, and the departmental media team that had at least some commitment to serving the public as a whole. Successive reviews have raised concerns about these incremental but profound changes to government accountability and called for more clarity about the distinctive roles of civil service communicators and special advisers (PASC, 2002; Mountfield, 1997; Phillis, 2004; Wicks, 2003) but neither parliament, civil servants, journalists or public opinion have the power to resist such changes. Ultimately the power to change and police the codes rests with the Prime Minister. Sanders referred to the Whitehall communications structure as being a politico-administrative dual service. In reality, the working practices described here more closely resemble an integrated service, where both political and non-political operatives dovetail their working arrangements in line with ministerial priorities (Sanders et al., 2011). Even policy special advisers spend a significant amount of time on media-related activities and appear to have taken over much of the news-led agenda-setting and strategic communications work that was previously the domain of the Director of Communication. As media scrutiny intensifies, government press officers are increasingly drawn into the drama of day-to-day news management, effectively working to and providing official cover for the special advisers’ (deniable) media activities. This is a long way from the public communication ideal of “the well-­ informed citizen, facilitated by the watchdog role of the media” referred to in Chap. 1. One former senior adviser at No. 10 believes that the balance of media power has shifted in favour of ministers and their aides and away from senior Whitehall civil servants to create a “critical fault line damaging departmental effectiveness” (Taylor, 2015). The danger is that within a majoritarian system of executive dominance such as that of the UK, granting ministers (through their special advisers) the freedom to manage the media removes an important check within the system—the obligation to challenge ministerial views and inform the public. The risks of pandering to political prejudices are exemplified by a series of damaging high-profile errors that distracted the Johnson governments of 2019. The release on Twitter of an official Home Office video in August 2020 that blamed ‘activist lawyers’ for disrupting the asylum system through their advocacy work with migrants was met with a barrage of complaints and led to an apology. In his keynote speech to the Conservative conference in October 2020, Johnson stepped up the rhetoric by referring

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to those who advocated on behalf of migrants as ‘do-gooder lefty human rights lawyers’. Even the right-wing tabloid, the Daily Mail joined the chorus of protest from the press in reporting the responses of 800 legal figures who demanded an apology from the Home Secretary and Prime Minister for putting the safety of the judiciary at risk by inflaming public opinion (Cole, 2020). The civil servants responsible for releasing, then withdrawing, the offensive Home Office video had been drawn into a political debate that was not only a potential offence against impartiality but was poor and counterproductive public communication. Chap. 6 considers how civil servants resisted threats to their autonomy in 1997 and 2010 and asks whether they still have the capacity to protect ministers from charges of propaganda—the task they were set in 1945 and which underlies their propriety codes to this day.

Note 1. This led to protests from government scientists and others. See the exchange of letters between the Science Media Centre and Francis Maude in March 2015 at www.sciencemeidacentre.org/letter-­to-­francis-­maude-­regarding­changes-­to-­the-­civil-­service-­code/

References Blick, A. (2004). People Who Live in the Dark. Politico’s. Cabinet Office. (2015a). Special Adviser Data Releases: Numbers and Costs. Retrieved from https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/special­adviser-­data-­releases-­numbers-­and-­costs-­december-­2015 Cabinet Office. (2015b). Civil Service Code. https://www.gov.uk/government/ publications/civil-­service-­code/the-­civil-­service-­code Cabinet Office. (2020a). Annual Report on Special Advisers. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_ data/file/944317/Annual_Report_on_Special_Advisers_2020_-­_ online_ publication__1_.pdf Cabinet Office. (2020b, September 23). Code of Conduct for Special Advisers. Updated. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/special-­advisers-­ code-­of-­conduct Cameron, D. (2012). Evidence Session: 14 June. An Inquiry into the Culture, Practices and Ethics of the Press (Leveson Report). The Stationery Office. Chilcot, S. J. (2016). Executive Summary. The Report of the Iraq Inquiry. House of Commons.

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Cole, W. (2020, October 26). Over 800 Lawyers and Ex-judges Demand Boris Johnson and Priti Patel Apologise for Putting them in Danger. Daily Mail. Davis, D. (2003, April 11). Cut Spin Doctors’ Power Say Mandarins. Public Finance. Durrant, T, Blacklaws, N, Zodgekar, K (2020). Special Advisers and the Johnson Government. Institute for Government www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk Eichbaum, C., & Shaw, R. (2010). Partisan Appointees and Public Servants: An International Analysis of the Role of the Political Adviser. In Cheltenham. Edward Elgar. Foster, M. (2015, December 15). Lord Kerslake Steps Up Defence of Freedom of Information – And Rejects “Chilling Effect” Claims. Civil Service World. Fulton, L. (1968). Fulton Report on the Civil Service. HM Government. GCS. (2014/2020). GCS Propriety Guidance. https://gcs.civilservice.gov.uk/ publications/propriety-­guidance/ Government Communications Service. (2014). Propriety Guidance. Government. Griffiths, E.  B (2020, May 26). A Sunny Afternoon Spent Watching Dominic Cummings? Coronavirus Has Left Us with a Weird New Kind of Event TV. Radio Times. Haddon, C (2020, May 26). The Government’s Handling of the Dominic Cummings Row Has Led to a Loss of Public Trust. Institute for Government. www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk Hay, C. (2014). A Crisis of Politics or the Politics of Crisis? In D. Richards (Ed.), Institutional Crisis in 21st Century Britain. Palgrave Macmillan. Hillman, N. (2014). In Defence of Special Advisers: Lessons from Personal Experience Inside Out. Institute for Government. Hjarvard, S. (2013). Mediatization of Culture and Society. Routledge. Hood, C., & Dixon, R. (2015). A Government That Worked Better and Cost Less? : Evaluating Three Decades of Reform and Change in UK Central Government. Oxford University Press. Jones, N. (2006). Trading Information. Politico’s. Maude, F. (2010, February 7). Labour SPADs Caught Exploiting Civil Service. UK Party Political News. .Conservative Party News. Mountfield, R. (1997). Report of the Working Group on the Government Information and Communications Service. Cabinet Office. Peters, B., & Savoie, D. (2012). In Search of Good Governance. In H. Bakvis & M. Jarvis (Eds.), From New Public Management to New Political Governance. McGill-Queens University Press. Phillis, R. (2004). An Independent Review of Government Communications. Cabinet Office. Procter, K., Murray, J., & Brooks L (2020, June 29). Constituents Bombard MPs with Thousands of Emails over Dominic Cummings. The Guardian. Public Administration Select Committee. (2002). Eighth Report (2001–2): These Unfortunate Events at the Former DTLR. House of Commons.

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Richards, D. (2014). A Crisis of Expectation. In D. Richards, M. Smith, & C. Hay (Eds.), Constitutional Crisis in 21st Century Britain. Palgrave Macmillan. Sanders, K., Crespo, M.  J. C., & Holtz-Bacha, C. (2011). Communicating Governments. The International Journal of Press/Politics, 16(4), 523–547. Taylor, M. (2015). The Critical Faultline Damaging Departmental Effectiveness? The Relationship Between Politicians and Senior Officials. Civil Service World. Weir, S (2002, February 28). Memorandum by Democratic Audit. Minutes of Evidence. Select Committee on Public Administration. UK Parliament. Wicks, N. (2003). Ninth Report of the Committee: Defining the boundaries within the Executive: Ministers, Special Advisers and the Permanent Civil Service. Committee on Standards in Public Life. Wilkes, G. (2014). The Unelected Lynchpin: Why Government Needs Special Advisers. Institute for Government. Yong, B., & Hazell, R. (2014). Special Advisers: Who They Are, What They Do and Why They Matter. Hart Publishing.

CHAPTER 6

How Bureaucrats and Parliamentarians Pushed Back Against Spin

This chapter opens up the black box of government media relations to examine the deeper and more intricate consequences of ‘political spin’, drawing on the normally discreet voices of officials. As we have seen in earlier chapters, civil servants and journalists recalled how job losses after the 1997 and 2010 elections increased the vulnerability of those who remained, reducing their capacity to resist ministerial demands that crossed ‘the line’ between impartial and partisan communication. The Johnson government’s proposed civil service reforms that leaked into the public domain in early 2020 were even more draconian and hostile than the accusatory rhetoric that followed those two earlier elections (Powell, 2020). Yet, throughout the period of change that began in earnest in 1997 and is continuing, a strand of resistance remains. The views of civil servants have occasionally surfaced through witness accounts given to a stream of critical government and parliamentary reviews of government communications, through interviews, and through the influence of former senior civil servants as chairs and panel members of major enquiries like the Butler and Chilcot inquiries of 2004 and 2016. Memoirs, autobiographies, biographies and archived material add further insights. This chapter collates these sources to provide an insider consensus on what appears to be a battle for the soul of government communication. Cause for concern falls into two key areas: threats to civil service impartiality, and control by politicians over what information reaches the public domain. One study into the lead-up to the publication of the UK © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 R. Garland, Government Communications and the Crisis of Trust, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77576-6_6

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Government’s 2002 dossier, Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction, found that decisions about what information to place in the public domain were taken by a small, politically-aligned group around the Prime Minister with little resistance from officials (Herring & Robinson, 2014). A civil servant who specialised in strategy and communications across five departments during the Labour years felt that media coverage that had clearly originated from government sources showed an increasingly casual approach to the facts (IV23). Robin Butler, Cabinet Secretary until the early Blair years, maintained that “the political battle is conducted through the media on a 24/7 basis (so) ministers and politicians obviously give more attention to that battle and they put pressure on civil servants to support them in that” (IV7). This chapter examines the nitty-gritty of everyday government media relations to see what form resistance took to the prevailing ‘arms race’ between politicians’ desire to drive media narratives, and journalists’ instincts to defends themselves against ‘political spin’ while chasing the story.

Propriety and Ethics in Government Communications The conduct of Whitehall ministers, special advisers and civil servants is regulated internally according to propriety codes that, officially at least, hold government press officers responsible for ensuring that official government news is “objective and explanatory, not biased or polemical” (GCS, 2014/2020). Transgressions are monitored internally by a civil service team based in the Cabinet Office, but the codes have been progressively tweaked by successive governments, and there is no formal or systematic external scrutiny or sanction. Press officers are expected to conduct “positive presentation of government policies and achievements, not misleading spin,” but it is not clear how this is defined, how whistle blowers might be protected or what internal sanctions are in place to prevent actions that transgress the code. Issues relating to propriety and ethics in government communication are not routinely scrutinised by parliament, and when it happens, it is done post-hoc and without the power to enforce change. As we have seen, special advisers are embedded within government news management yet are not designated as official government spokespeople. The Special Advisers’ Code of Conduct (2016) says little about media management save for the injunction not to participate in “personal attacks,” not to use official resources for party political activity and not to play a public part in political controversy. There is a place for persuasive

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techniques in public communication, especially at times of crisis and in areas like public health, where behaviour change is a matter of public safety, so it is not enough to simply decry spin. McNair argues that the demonisation of persuasion is common among journalists and scholars who “view the modern practice of government communication as a perversion of what normative theory decrees the public sphere to be for.” Instead, he argues, what is needed is the “demystification and deconstruction” of something much more serious, namely forms of “potentially undemocratic communication practice” that take place “behind the closed doors of power” (McNair, 2007, p. 95). The tendency to throw all the evils of promotional culture into a disreputable black box is also seen in King and Crew’s investigation into disastrous policy-making, The Blunders of Our Governments, in which they claim that “all governments spin in some degree” and that “symbolism and spin are always dangerous, including to the symbolists and the spinners” (my emphasis). This implies that well-marshalled, targeted and persuasive messaging is essentially corrupting, leading to the illogical conclusion that poorly executed PR is more acceptable than good quality PR, and that symbolism has no place in government communication (King & Crewe, 2013, p. 304). Rhetoric and persuasion in mainstream politics are essential in engaging the public, creating political consensus and establishing a collective identity (Manin, 1997; Saward, 2010). Little is known about the mechanics of how politicians and civil servants work together at departmental level to craft government messages for public consumption, but observers agree that since most such activity takes place within Whitehall departments, it is not enough to simply focus attention on No. 10. Davis, who has interviewed hundreds of civil servants, politicians and journalists, observes that the “machinery of political publicity is driven by government departments and the competing leaderships of the main political parties” (Davis 2010, p. 32) Government communicators, and in particular press officers, work within a dual system of accountabilities, through political and civil service heads in both the departments and at the centre. This presents the Whitehall press officer with a series of competing responsibilities. They must promote government policy positively while also serving the needs of all citizens. They must resist pressure from ministers to promote themselves and their party unduly or to conceal politically damaging activity (Turnbull, 2007). Their current proprietary code requires that they “maintain professional distance from ministers” while protecting them from “accusations of using

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public resources for party political purposes” (GCS, 2014/2020). Is this really achievable in a system that lacks sanctions, protections and independent formal scrutiny? Ingham considered that the arrival of special advisers as news managers after 1997 was a “constitutional shift” that had “effectively created a hybrid system…without the consent or proper debate in Parliament” (Ingham, 2003, p. 243). The same could be argued for subsequent reforms during the Cameron period and in the Johnson administration. Looking back over 20  years of attempts by politicians to reform Whitehall by making civil servants more “responsive” to politicians, a paradox emerges. As ministers reiterate their support for Civil Service impartiality, they are increasingly critical of what they see as civil service resistance to their reform agenda (Talbot, 2013). Here, we see a power asymmetry: civil servants are duty bound to implement ministerial demands and proposals, but they neither initiate them nor, in an environment of fear, are in a position to criticise them. A discreet and compliant civil service offers substantial political capital within a power hoarding system of executive dominance (Diamond, 2014). This goes some way to explain, for example, why opposition politicians so frequently complain about the growth in the number of special advisers and the dangers of political spin, and yet when in power continue the process of increasing their numbers and bolstering their roles. Christopher Foster, a former senior official, sees the role of the civil servant as contradictory, because it has “a duty to support the government of the day” while also acting as a watchdog on behalf of citizens to “ensure that the business of government is conducted honestly and properly” (Foster, 2005, pp.  182, 1). How achievable is this expectation?

Resistance from Within The ethical and professional framework within which government press officers operate has undergone both cyclical and long-term evolutionary change as we have seen. Robin Butler described the general election of 1997 as one that posed particular difficulties for government communicators. As Cabinet Secretary he “was concerned” because “these were troubling times for the Government Information Service (GIS) and for the Head of the Government Information Service on their behalf and yes he did come to talk to me” (IV7).1 This does not quite tally with Alastair

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Campbell’s claim that the Cabinet Secretary had given him the go-ahead to “shake things up a bit” (Campbell, 2015). Butler noted that although he wasn’t directly involved in dealing with the difficulties facing departmental press offices, for example, by making the Heads of Information (as they were then called) redundant, he did refer elliptically to his role in seeking to take the heat out of the controversy as it developed during the first few months after the election: Alastair Campbell and Robin Mountfield, who was my deputy in the Cabinet Office, had a working group to discuss precisely these issues: how the government information service could be made more effective, what were the limits on the things they could do politically and where the boundary line lay and what needed to be done politically, so that was an issue that was addressed then, and I think it was addressed successfully.

The civil servant given the task of chairing the review, Robin Mountfield, made clear later that Butler was the driving force behind setting up the review: As the autumn wore on this issue became more tense; on the one hand Ministerial dissatisfaction with the GIS, on the other concern about politicization of appointments and of the things the GIS was expected to do. I was asked (not by Ministers, but by Sir Robin Butler) to chair a small working group to review the whole thing. (Mountfield, 2002)

For Jonathan Haslam the 1997 election “had very profound implications for the relationship between government and the media” but it was also a personal upheaval: There’s a great maelstrom of emotions. Your own little carefully ordered world is upset. I make no bones about this. I am personally very fond of John Major. I know his wife very well and we remain in contact. (IV6)

The combination of culture shock at the change of administration after 18  years of Conservative government, and the loss of fellowship and friendship at No. 10, made resistance from the top more difficult. Remembering the first crucial meeting at No. 10 with Labour’s communications leadership the day after the election, Haslam still wonders whether he and the rest of the senior team could have done more to protect the incoming government from its own excesses:

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We weren’t sufficiently forceful with them, to say to Alastair Campbell and Peter Mandelson on the first Monday after the election, ‘you can carry on the same way in government that you did in opposition, you can play desperately and almost all the time the exclusive card, you can play one title off against another, but ultimately you manage to piss off everybody and this will come and bite you in the bum’ and in the process of doing that you destroy quite a lot of public confidence in central government.

Another attendee recalled that “Mandelson did virtually all the talking, while Campbell watched us. There were no chairs and we all stood like a Privy Council audience of the Queen” (Reardon, 2007). As Haslam was suggesting, the ripple effect of the post-election changes in government communications went beyond 1997. Far from being the last word, the Mountfield Review (Mountfield, 1997) turned out to be the first of a series of government and parliamentary reviews of the GIS. Taken together, these reviews provided a steady critique of government actions in relation to the media and can be seen as a form of institutional resistance on the part of the civil service and parliament, to moves by governing politicians from New Labour onwards to introduce radical changes to the service that suited them (my emphasis). The Mountfield Review was quickly followed by a 1998 inquiry into serious disquiet about the 1997 job losses by the Public Administration Select Committee (PASC, 1998). This was followed in turn by two PASC inquiries into a series of high-­ profile controversies relating to special advisers that surfaced in 2000 and 2002 (PASC, 2000, 2002). The negative findings of these four inquiries led directly to the most comprehensive, independent and influential review of all, the Independent Review of Government Communications (Phillis, 2004). The Phillis Review later formed the starting point for the House of Lords’ own review into Government Communications in 2008. Howell James, who sat on the Phillis Committee and, following one of its recommendations, became the first Permanent Secretary, Government Communications in 2004, recognises that caution, on the part of government communicators, can be interpreted by incoming ministers as resistance: I think there’s often a lot of misunderstanding when a new government comes in. It’s back to the slight tendency for communications functions to be a little bit of a handbrake, to caution, and if you come in with a great majority after a great election victory it’s quite hard to hear those cautionary voices initially. (IV5)

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Steve Reardon, the former Head of Information referred to in Chap. 4 who lost his job during the early phase of the Blair administration told the PASC 1998 inquiry that: The capricious nature of pressure from incoming ministers would detract from the ability of a head of information to provide the objective service to ministers, as enshrined in the (Mountfield) report … I would expect that there are a number of senior members of the GICS (Government Information and Communication Service) who feel that they are very much on trial with Ministers and who will be concerned that giving unpalatable advice may result in them losing their jobs. I regard living under pressure of this kind as being “politicized.”

In contrast with the flurry of resistance after 1997, there was little open criticism from government communication specialists about the radical changes implemented by the first Cameron government of 2010–2015. The Blair government had been forced to accept the Phillis recommendations in 2004, but the 2010 Cameron government shelved them entirely. The Phillis recommendations were buried and the report itself removed from the public record. Instead, the newly renamed Government Communications Service (GCS) faced a 50% cut in government spending between 2010 and 2013 (Ridley, 2013), together with the abolition of the government’s direct marketing and advertising agency, the Central Office of Information (COI). Far from resisting the move, on the instruction of the cabinet office minister, Francis Maude, the second (and last) Permanent Secretary for Communications, Matt Tee, wrote a paper recommending the closure and outlining “very significant savings in departmental communications,” one of which was the loss of his own post (Cartmel, 2010; Tee, 2011). The process was repeated in 2020 when the executive director who replaced him (albeit at a lower grade), Alex Aiken, was given the task of ‘reshaping’ the GCS by rationalising and cutting the service that he had been setting up since 2012, later relinquishing his leadership role to the new Chief Executive, GCS, Simon Baugh (Owen, 2020). As with the process of churn after general elections that has now become the norm, the cycle of punitive reform symbolises the subordination of the communication service. With the prospect of cuts, and the acquiescence of the government communication leadership, resistance was risky and probably

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counterproductive for departmental leaders. One long-serving Director of Communication who left government in 2011 after a 20-year career noted a high “level of hostility through media briefings or in person from new ministers.” His advice to anxious junior members of his team who had only ever worked under one government, was to accept, adapt to and internalise the mind-set of the new government while maintaining a degree of scepticism: You have to … understand their mind-set, change it, but not swallow it whole, because it’s not your job to believe the political imperatives that the new government believe. You just have to understand where they are coming from. (IV4)

Such acquiescence on the part of government communicators in 1997 and 2010 contrasts with Bernard Ingham’s confidence in challenging ministers after 1979. Archival material from the 1980s displays what might appear today to be an astonishingly frank approach by Ingham, not only towards ministers, but with the Prime Minister herself. At one point, he even scolded Mrs. Thatcher for failing to challenge dissenting ministers, telling her in a memo that “this is no way to run a railway” (Ingham, 1981a). He used alliances with senior figures and his own government information network to resist what he saw as the scapegoating tendencies of ministers in relation to the GIS and to pre-empt moves by ministers to ‘interfere’ in publicity matters. In November 1983, he joined forces with Robin Butler to resist proposals by political advisers at No. 10 to appoint the relatively inexperienced but interventionist Party Chairman, John Gummer, as minister in charge of government presentation. In a delicately phrased memo from Butler, drafted jointly with Ingham, they proposed instead the more emollient and detached Lord Whitelaw. Later that day, Butler confirmed in a ‘note for the record’, copied to Ingham and the political advisers, that the Prime Minister had agreed not to appoint Gummer. Whitelaw would take on the task, but “would rely on the Prime Minister’s Chief Press Secretary for support.” Ingham would become chair of the weekly meetings of Chief Information Officers, previously a ministerial responsibility. Ingham had no qualms about using semi-political means to get his own way and consolidate his influence, but both he and Butler were known to be in tune with the Prime Minister’s preferences, even if she hadn’t had to state them.

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Ingham explained his views on the role of ministers in government presentation, implying that he preferred to work with people who left the important decisions to the professionals: Ministers have their agendas (…). If you could keep ministers, well a certain sort of minister, out of government information is probably a plus point … for more objectivity and less propaganda. (IV1)

He also resisted a request by a senior minister and Thatcher ally, Cecil Parkinson, to distribute a government leaflet about an unpopular measure through local Conservative party offices because it would blur the distinction between government and political information. He told Parkinson: ‘I don’t think you can justify this at all … I think you can justify a general leaflet; a popular version if you like of the legislation you’re bringing forward and you can most certainly let any interested constituency have copies, probably up to 20 copies to inform the Committee but you certainly can’t send it out wholesale’. And I wasn’t fired for being obstructive. It was accepted.

Contemporary papers relating to the governments of 1997, 2010 and 2019 have not yet been released, so it is difficult to compare them with the 1979–1997 governments, but nothing like Ingham’s plain speaking has yet come to light. That does not mean that government press officers did not stand up to ministers. Many consider this as an essential part of their role, but it is done individually and discreetly, rather than collectively, and largely concerns day-to-day operational rather than strategic matters. Campbell’s assertiveness with Tony Blair is well-known, but the difference is that although technically a temporary civil servant, he did not work in the interests of the civil service, but of the party, and specifically the party leader. A departmental press officer working for the Cameron government (2010–2014) provides a fairly typical example of how civil servants negotiate the content of press releases with special advisers: One of the special advisers wanted to insert some text about the Somali community – and it just sat uncomfortably with me as a reputational issue, because it was going to go out in the name of the minister, and I thought, ‘really you’re overstepping the line here and it’s going to cause issues for us as a department’, and so I checked it with senior colleagues and my head of

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news and they agreed and we put a submission in to the ministers’ office, saying, ‘this is what you are being given by your special advisers, but our advice from comms is that it should be removed and these are the reasons why’. And the ministers agreed. Relations were a touch frosty between the two offices for a couple of days, but it was fine after that. (IV18)

Siobhan Kenny, a former Director of Communications and No. 10 press officer (1994–2005) remembers Heads of News removing ministers’ quotes from press releases, and leaving it up to those with the closest relationships with ministers, usually senior information officers, to negotiate new quotes: If you’ve got a good relationship you just negotiate the words that will work and if the minister concerned really wants to issue something else that’s a bit more crunchy then that can go through Conservative Central Office or his special adviser or whatever it is so you can kind of work out a deal like that. (IV2)

For civil servants who didn’t feel able or in a strong enough position to challenge ministers, being unhelpful to special advisers was a way of achieving the same thing by stealth. One departmental special adviser (2010–2013), became close to the Director of Communication in her Department, describing her, and the Head of News as “critical to me, to how I was able to perform in the role.” However, she also experienced “obstruction” from other civil servants who “disagreed and thought they knew better”: … not replying to your emails; not giving you advice; not providing the data you want; going behind your back, briefing people; saying things that are supposed to be internal, part of a departmental negotiating position, to other departments, undermining negotiations. (IV20)

Such passive aggression suggests an unequal relationship between powerful and subordinate agents rather than an honest and constructive partnership between two groups of professionals, both dedicated to meeting the needs of citizens.

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Media Activism by Ministers Government press officers are required to respond effectively to the daily demands of the news media, while serving ministers, maintaining credibility and fulfilling the information needs of the public. At times, these objectives are contradictory. A focus on short-term news management that prioritises the immediate needs of ministers rather than citizens, is de facto, ineffective public communication. In their review of the implementation of the Phillis Report, the House of Lords Communications Committee felt that too little progress had been made on one of the seven main principles underpinning government communications, namely: “Use of all relevant channels of communication, not excessive emphasis on national press and broadcasters.” They concluded that the government “concentrated its time and resources too much on the national media” (2008). The government’s own independent capability review of Cabinet Office communications in 2013 also identified a preoccupation with short-term media handling at the expense of “audience driven” communications and evaluation. The Review praised some of the integrated campaigns such as GREAT Britain, but concluded that there was too much focus “on the daily and weekly news cycle”: • Many of the professional communicators interviewed were from a media handling background. As a group their natural focus is shortterm reputation-­management. This has resulted in a modus-operandi which is focused on the day to day. • There is insufficient systematically-planned communication of the kind intended to have a lasting, cumulative, impact over time. As a result, the government’s key messages do not land effectively. (Government Communications Network, 2013, pp. 4, 3) A long-serving Director of Communication (1991–2011) agrees that the focus on the national daily press was seen as disproportionately important: The level of scrutiny and the speed with which problems are created for you that distract ministers from their day job is huge, so actually the centrality of the print media even as the population move away from it, which it is doing, they are still … overwhelmingly more important than anything else. They are the people who make or break individual careers and can guide policy decisions just by sheer muscle. (IV4)

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Nick Hillman, special adviser to the Conservative Minister of State for Universities (2010–2013), noticed a difference in priorities between ministers and departmental press officers: The minister wants to get as much press coverage as possible so long as it’s not negative. The interest of the department is to have a more controlled approach. You know, turn down. There were moments when my minister would be asked to do an interview, and the firm advice from the press office would be ‘don’t do this interview’ and we would think that was overly cautious. (IV21)

The Labour departmental special adviser, Bill Bush (2001–2005), explains why ministers are so concerned with the daily news: “the danger always is that the reactive, because it’s urgent and unexpected, takes over from the important.” But although this ‘space’ must be managed, a balance can and must be achieved, however difficult: You cannot be Olympian and Utopian and not police this space. It is very very dangerous because at some point the chief whip or the Prime Minister or very senior advisers at No. 10 will just say ‘I’m sorry, we can take three or four of these hits under the waterline, but this is the sixth or seventh or eighth.’ They may all be explainable and unfair, but it doesn’t matter. Because each hit takes away a lump of credibility, and there’s a limit to how much credibility you can chip off. So ministers are absolutely right to be concerned but they shouldn’t let it take over their lives, and some do. (my emphasis) (IV19)

Much of the criticism directed at New Labour’s approach to government communications focused on the supposed centralisation and control through Alastair Campbell at No. 10. His capacity to achieve this in a departmental system like Whitehall was linked to the leadership style, political capital and personal qualities of the Prime Minister (Heffernan, 2006). This was potentially open to challenge by powerful ministers who could make use of their own departmental news management resources to influence public narratives, as was the case with Blair’s powerful rival, the Chancellor, Gordon Brown (Foley, 2009). The use of taxpayers’ money to fund political factional rivalry is often criticised but as we saw in Chap. 5, there appears to be little that civil servants can do about it. Bernard Ingham complained constantly about ministers’ “malicious leaking” (Ingham, 1981b), frequently taking his complaints straight to

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Margaret Thatcher, as we saw in Chap. 3. As Private Secretary to five Prime Ministers and Cabinet Secretary to three, Robin Butler agrees that ministerial resistance to and envy of the media management resources at the disposal of No. 10 is almost inevitable: There were certainly occasions when ministers, secretaries of state, felt things were being driven too much from No. 10 and that their story was being told from No. 10 when they would have preferred to tell it themselves. (IV7)

He noticed how special advisers working personally to departmental ministers could and did present alternative narratives through selective briefing: They may not just act on behalf of the government or even the party but on behalf of their minister individually and that can lead to their briefing against other ministers … this may help their ministers but damage the government because it causes the government to be divided against itself. And it gives an opportunity to shrewd media correspondents to play off special advisers against each other.

Departmental press officers also found that when No. 10 decided to pursue a news agenda, there was little that press officers could do to resist unless they had the support of their Secretary of State. A departmental press officer (1999–2004) says that although No. 10 had no formal power to instruct departmental press officers, “if the minister wanted it done then probably you had to go with it.” She recalls a request from No. 10 that was seen to be “news generation for the sake of news generation”: We got a call from Lance Price (Alastair Campbell’s deputy) at No. 10 saying ‘right it’s the UEFA Cup  – how are we going to compete with it in terms of generating news? We’ve had this idea that you should maybe say that people who are claiming Job Seekers Allowance who knock over to Bulgaria or whatever it was if we find that they’ve not signed on because they’ve gone to the footie we’ll get them for benefit fraud.’ (IV9)

This blatant attempt at what she referred to as “cooking up the story” about supposedly “clamping down on benefit cheats” was thought by civil servants to be “appalling and wrong,” yet, they still felt obliged to comply. Such gratuitous news-making contributed further to claims by journalists of political spin.

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Conclusion Resistance by government press officers and their leaders to mediatization and politicisation appears in various forms, from passive resistance and obstruction, to day-to-day ‘push back’ and administrative interventions like reviews and enquiries. Overall, however, resistance appears to be lessening, especially when comparing reactions to the incoming governments of 1997 and 2010, and possibly also 2019. Bernard Ingham’s confidence in criticising ministers, in which he pits the Government Information Service against ministerial rivalry and political intrigue, are not replicated by other leaders. Indeed, the last Permanent Secretary appeared to acquiesce in his own loss of position in 2011, while the incoming government of 2019 placed similar pressures on the Executive Director of the government communications to streamline the service he had spent years developing (Rea, 2020). Where resistance does happen, it is more likely to be tactical than strategic, with the onus on the individual press officer to identify issues and stand up to ministers and their aides, if necessary invoking support from senior colleagues. As the most recent propriety guidance states, it is not simply a case of saying ‘no’ to ministers. Discussion should be tactful and take the form of ‘negotiation’, ‘compromise’, ‘finding a deal’ or at most ‘polite refusal’ (GCS, 2014/2020). The notion of the dividing line between party political and impartial communication, or between informing the public about government policy and ministerial ‘image making’, appears frequently in parliamentary and government documents and in the recollections of civil servants. The propriety guidance is imprecise and yet consistent, even repetitive over the years, requiring government communicators to be ‘objective and explanatory’ not ‘biased or polemical’ (GCS, 2014/2020, 2015, 2020; GICS, 2000), as if to state it is enough to bring it into being. Interviewees describe the ‘the line’ as being obvious to those in the know, and yet refer to it as a ‘deliberately grey area’. This is logically inconsistent. How can a line be a deliberately grey area? This illustrates the ambiguity and contingency of the concept of ‘crossing the line’, a key aspect of impartiality. Civil servants talk about a sense of ‘discomfort’ or ‘unease’ when ‘tricky’ or ‘crunchy’ media issues arise, requiring them to have ‘difficult conversations’, and possibly refer higher up the command chain. Decision-making takes place quickly and is based on individual sensibility and implicit internal collective wisdom around what is acceptable

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or appropriate. Under the pressure of greater political and media scrutiny, judgements about what is proper or appropriate are taken in seconds and on instinct. Career survival may depend on it, but without clearly expressed and externally validated criteria, established forms of challenge and redress, or sanctions for misconduct, the process of applying propriety rules within this setting seems fragile. What is to stop the line from moving imperceptibly over time to the extent that what was once unacceptable, becomes commonplace, as some of the interviewees seemed to be suggesting? Robin Butler acknowledged that the growing importance of media in politics exposed government press officers to more pressure to ‘cross the line’. The 2004 Butler inquiry examined the difficulties facing officials who tried to resist the dominant political narrative from No. 10 that supported the need for the 2003 Iraq invasion. The report recommended that, in future, the Chair of the Joint Intelligence Committee should be “someone with experience of dealing with Ministers in a very senior role, and who is demonstrably beyond influence, and thus probably in his last post”; in other words, someone who was not afraid to speak truth to power (Butler, 2004). This acknowledges the extreme sensitivity of government communications, and the career-threatening risk of challenging a ministerial narrative. And yet, on day-to-day reputational matters which could be of existential significance to ministers, it is the most junior members of the communications team—press officers—who are expected to challenge them, albeit with support from above. In this unequal relationship, they face pressure from politicians who “are engaged in a ruthless zero-sum competition for power and, while in office, face constant incentives to cut legal and ethical corners in order to main their hold on power” (Mulgan, 2008, p.  350). Under these conditions, how realistic is it to expect press officers to fulfil the ethical and political obligations expected of them? In the next section, Part 3, we look at the wider dynamic processes of media proliferation and scrutiny and how these placed growing and seemingly irresistible pressures on political actors and institutions.

Note 1. This was probably Mike Granatt, Head of Profession for the GIS, who made way for Howell James, the first Permanent Secretary, Communications, from 2004, following the Phillis Report.

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References Butler, L. (2004). Review of Intelligence on Weapons of Mass Destruction: Implementation of Its Conclusions. HMSO. Cabinet Office. (2016). Special Advisers Code of Conduct. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/special-­advisers-­code-­of-­conduct. Accessed 14 Dec 2020. Campbell, A (2015, July 9). Alastair Campbell: Media Masters Podcast. https:// www.mediamasters.fm/wp-­c ontent/uploads/2017/09/Media-­F ocus-­ Alastair-­Campbell-­Podcast-­Transcript.pdf Cartmel, M. (2010, November 26). Permanent Secretary for Government Comms at Cabinet Office Matt Tee Quits Role. PR Week. Diamond, P. (2014). Governing Britain: Power, Politics and the Prime Minister. IB Taurus and Co. Foley, M. (2009). Gordon Brown and the Role of Compounded Crisis in the Pathology of Leadership Decline. British Politics, 4(4), 498–513. Foster, C.  D. (2005). British Government in Crisis, or, The Third English Revolution. Hart. Government Communication Service (GCS). (2014/reissued 2020). Propriety Guidance: Politicians and the Press. https://gcs.civilservice.gov.uk/publications/ propriety-­guidance/#Politicians-­and-­the-­press-­office. Accessed 14 Dec 2020. Government Communications Network. (2013). Cabinet Office Capability Review. HM Government. https://gcs.civilservice.gov.uk/wp-­content/ uploads/2015/09/Cabinet-­Office.pdf Government Communications Service. (2015). GCS Handbook. Cabinet Office. Government Information and Communications Service. (2000). The GICS Handbook: A Working Guide for Government Information Officers. Cabinet Office. Heffernan, R. (2006). The Prime Minister and the News Media: Political Communication as a Leadership Resource. Parliamentary Affairs, 59(4), 582–598. Herring, E., & Robinson, P. (2014). Report X Marks the Spot: The British Government’s Deceptive Dossier on Iraq and WMD. Political Science Quarterly, 129(4), 551–584. House of Lords Select Committee on Communications. (2008). First Report: Session 2008–9. UK Parliament. Ingham, B. (1981a, November 9). Memo from Bernard Ingham to Margaret Thatcher. Ingham Archive/Margaret Thatcher Foundation. Ingham, B. (1981b, December 16). Presentation: where we are Failing. Note to the Prime Minister’s Private Secretary. Ingham Archive/Margaret Thatcher Foundation. Ingham, B. (2003). The Wages of Spin. John Murray. King, A., & Crewe, I. (2013). The Blunders of our Governments. Oneworld.

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Manin, B. (1997). The Principles of Representative Government. Cambridge University Press. McNair, B. (2007). Theories of Government Communication and Trends in the UK.  In S.  Young (Ed.), Government Communications in Australia (pp. 93–109). Cambridge University Press. Mountfield, R. (1997). Report of the Working Group on the Government Information and Communications Service. Cabinet Office. Mountfield, R. (2002). Content of A Civil Service Act. Civil Servant. Mulgan, R. (2008). How Much Responsiveness Is Too Much or Too Little? Australian Journal of Public Administration, 67(3), 345–356. Owen, J. (2020). Less Media Relations and Fewer Campaigns. PR Week. https:// w w w. p r w e e k . c o m / a r t i c l e / 1 7 0 0 9 6 2 / l e s s -­m e d i a -­r e l a t i o n s -­f e w e r-­ campaigns-­gcs-­chief-­reveals-­vision-­government-­comms Phillis, R. (2004). An Independent Review of Government Communications. Cabinet Office. Powell, J. (2020, June 29). The Johnson-Cummings War on the Civil Service is Very Troubling. It Looks Like the Start of a Rolling Coup Against Institutions. The Independent. Public Administration Select Committee. (2000). Fourth Report: Special Advisers – Boon or Bane? House of Commons. Public Administration Select Committee. (2002). Eighth report (2001–2): These Unfortunate Events at the Former DTLR. House of Commons. Public Administration Select Committees. (1998). Sixth Report, Session 1997–98. House of Commons. Rea, A. (2020, July 21). Here’s the Problem With Dominic Cummings’ Plan to Shake of Government Communications. New Statesman. https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2020/07/here-­s-­problem-­dominic-­cummings-­plan­shake-­government-­comms Reardon, S. (2007, June 16). If the Media is Feral. Tony Blair Only Has His Craven Manipulation of the Civil Service to Blame. Daily Mail. Ridley, L. (2013, October 15). The Government Plans to Extend Relationships with Agencies and Rigorously Evaluate Campaign Spending Under the New Centralized Government Communications Servic’. Campaign. https://www. campaignlive.co.uk/article/government-­cut-­48-­comms-­staff-­2010/1216246 Saward, M. (2010). The Representative Claim. Oxford University Press. Talbot, C. (2013). The UK in 2013: A failing Economy or a Failing State? Manchester University blog. Whitehall Watch. Tee, M. (2011). Review of Government Direct Communications and the Role of the COI. Cabinet Office. Turnbull, N. (2007). Perspectives on Government PR.  In S.  Young (Ed.), Government Communications in Australia (pp.  113–129). Cambridge University Press.

PART III

Mediatization, Impartiality and Public Trust

CHAPTER 7

The Surrender to the 24/7 News Cycle

British political and journalistic memoirs from the late 1980s onwards vividly describe the increasingly jumpy atmosphere around ministers coping with life on the media frontline (Blair, 2010; Campbell & Hagerty, 2011, 2013; Fowler, 1991; Major, 2003; Mullin & Winstone, 2010; Powell, 2010; Price, 2005). Especially revealing are the testimonies under oath of current and former ministers at the public inquiry (known as ‘the Leveson Inquiry’ after its chair) into the ethics and standards of the British press following the News International phone-hacking scandals of 2005–2007 (Leveson, 2012). These portray the existential fears and consequent actions of a political class grappling with media transformation. Their palpable dislike of journalists sits uncomfortably with their attempts to appease the most powerful media barons and their operatives. Senior politicians from all sides of the political spectrum seem convinced that the mass media, and especially the national tabloid newspapers, are a source of power which they must at least accommodate, if not control and exploit. The Leveson Inquiry finds that former ministers such as the Conservative Kenneth Clarke, recall politicians being “driven away” from politics by the fear of exposure (Evidence session: 30/5/2012). His former colleague, Chris Patten, refers to politicians being unable to sleep through stress (Evidence session: 23/1/2011). The Labour media strategist and former minister, Peter Mandelson, describes the “relentless hostility” of certain newspapers as “horrible and bloody” (Witness statement: 21/5/2012), and fellow Labour minister, Alan Johnson, refers to senior politicians as © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 R. Garland, Government Communications and the Crisis of Trust, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77576-6_7

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being “pilloried” and subjected to “fictitious stories” which can “damage your life forever” (Evidence session: 22/5/2012). Most pejorative is the contribution from Tony Blair, an adept media performer who nonetheless describes the behaviour of the media as “an abuse of power.” Journalists are “these people” who are “all out against you,” and who will engage in “long and sustained,” “full on, full frontal, day in day out,” “relentless and unremitting” attack that can “literally wash a government away” (Evidence session: 28/5/2012). Yet, despite this powerful dislike, or perhaps because of it, we see in Alastair Campbell’s diaries how Blair recounts “a good meeting” with Rupert Murdoch, his daughter Elisabeth, and two Murdoch executives, while he was on holiday in the Caribbean in 2003 (Campbell & Hagerty, 2013, p. 689). Campbell himself, a former tabloid journalist, consistently describes tabloid news reporting as “ghastly” and even “absolute shit,” but finds himself “dragged out … to Langan’s (restaurant)” with Murdoch’s senior executive, Les Hinton, and The Sun editor, Rebekah Wade (Campbell & Hagerty, 2013, p. 594), while on a visit to New York the same year. On this two-day visit to New York he meets Wade twice. Aware of this love-hate relationship with journalists, politicians giving evidence to the Leveson inquiry express distaste for their own “crude and sometimes debasing but nonetheless unavoidable … transactional” relationship with journalists (Peter Mandelson). Tony Blair considers the apparent “closeness” between politicians and the media as “unhealthy” and built on fear. Jack Straw warns: “if you get too close, your own position becomes compromised” (Evidence session: 16/5/2012). Alastair Campbell accepts that “at times we were probably too controlling” (Written statement: 30/4/2012), while his former deputy at No. 10, another ex-journalist Lance Price is critical of his own role as “part of the process whereby No. 10 would ask for announcements before departments had a policy that was ready to announce” (Evidence session: 12/4/2012). The two leading Conservative politicians of the day explain why they were so determined to employ the controversial former News of the World editor, Andy Coulson, as the Government’s Director of Communications in 2010. Coulson was already tainted by association after the dismissal and jailing in 2007 of the newspaper’s royal correspondent, Clive Goodman, for intercepting mobile phone messages of members of the Royal Household. Coulson, as editor at the time, was later found guilty and jailed for phone hacking in 2014. Justifying Coulson’s appointment, the

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(then) Prime Minister David Cameron said he wanted “someone tough and robust” who could handle “the huge media pressure” and “help you through what can be an absolute storm,” where even the innocent are “thrown to the wolves” (Evidence session: 14/6/2012). Cameron’s close ally and Finance Minister (the Chancellor), George Osborne, told Leveson that he valued Coulson because he had the experience to cope when things are “thrown at you very quickly” (Written statement: 4/5/2012). Leveson concluded that politicians’ conduct in relation to the press: “contributed to a lessening of public confidence … by giving rise to legitimate … concerns that politicians and the press have traded power and influence in ways which are contrary to the public interest and out of public sight” (Leveson, 2012, III Press and Politicians, para 120). It is clear from contemporary witness accounts that there were growing, and seemingly irresistible pressures being brought to bear on post-­ war government public communication as media proliferated and became more critical and challenging. Since the rise of popular democracy along with the popular press during the 1920s, politicians, and more importantly, their media aides, had become adept at manipulating information in their favour, whether directly or through specialist intermediaries. Such practices were often covert and traditionally subject to institutional and journalistic constraints. During the 1980s, and especially after the Blair governments of 1997, it became commonplace for commentators to accuse politicians and their aides of the ill-defined charge of ‘political spin’. The reality was more profound and damaging. This chapter contends that political institutions were drawn into a larger and more powerful dynamic—the process known as mediatization. This historic meta-process that began with the rise of printing and newspapers from the seventeenth century onwards, and later the rise of photography, film and broadcasting, intensified with the development of multi-channel TV and the proliferation of news across a 24-hour news cycle. The dynamic process continues today with what Couldry and Hepp have termed ‘deep mediatization’, namely, the digitally grounded “integration of media-based processes and relations into the very elements from which the self sustains its project as a self,” (2017, p. 167). Mediatization is defined here as the dynamic global process by which media proliferate and are institutionalised and normalised, to the extent that they increasingly contribute towards “the social construction of everyday life, society and culture as a whole” (Krotz, 2009, p. 24). It is not simply a question of the media ‘colonising’ other fields. Rather, “the

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horizon of our practices is a social world for which media are fundamental reference-points and resources” (Couldry & Hepp, 2017, p. 15). Such a dynamic may impact on government media engagement in several ways. Firstly, a higher premium is placed on persuasive forms of communication by journalists and politicians as they battle for attention in an increasingly competitive promotional environment (Kunelius & Reunanen, 2012). Secondly, political actors increasingly deploy media-led strategic communications as a defence against potentially career-ending media scrutiny that privileges and personalises blame and personal integrity over policy or political considerations (Hood, 2011). Thirdly, as an institutionalised response to the dynamics of mediatization, the growth in the scale, scope and status of ‘promotional intermediaries’ within a range of sectors, including government, contributes towards a pervasive ‘promotional culture’ (Davis, 2013; Miller & Dinan, 2007) where selling, or persuasion, become paramount. This chapter will examine how, by surrendering to the news cycle, and entering into a pact with the media, governing politicians and those who worked closely with them (particularly special advisers, the so-called SpAds) engaged in increasingly personalised, short-term, self-advantaging and highly politicised forms of mediated public communication. Although this was initially resisted by civil servants in the battle for hearts and minds that came to a head during and after the 2003 Iraq War, institutional changes that made governments more responsive to media demands were progressively implemented. The piecemeal blurring of boundaries between persuasion and information-giving, and between partisan and impartial government actors that characterised the post-1997 period, played a part in the constitutional and public crisis that followed the 2016 EU referendum. A quickening cycle of blame, public suspicion of ‘political spin’ and, more recently, ‘post-truth’, have further undermined public trust in governments, leading to a decline in their capacity to engage with citizens with any degree of credibility or authenticity. Into this communication vacuum have come populist political parties and factions that deploy social media and word-of-mouth to bypass mainstream journalism and parliaments. Using the concept of mediatization, this chapter explores the nature of the collusive relationship between media and political actors that came to be known as political spin.

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The Interface Between Media, Politics and Bureaucracy Political spin is more than media management or the integration of PR and marketing techniques into politics. More fundamentally, it is the pursuit of politics using the latest communications tools in order to exploit media power in a political battlefield context. This battlefield has long been identified as the arena in which elections are fought, but with the rise of the permanent campaign, the field of battle has extended into the executive (Blumenthal, 1982; Norris, 2000). As a matter of survival, governing politicians demand that all available tools in the media armoury are deployed in their interests, both personal and political. As we saw from the Leveson evidence, this imperative is behind the dynamic whereby media cultures and considerations become increasingly embedded within political institutions. This dynamic itself becomes a primary driver of political behaviour, both within and outside government. Studies of the media activities of serving politicians in a number of countries have shown that they actively court media attention, and believe that the mass media, especially national press and broadcast news, can determine their futures (Elmelund-Præstekær et  al., 2011; Strömbäck, 2011; Van Aelst et al., 2010). Davis’ interview study with 60 British MPs found that most talked to journalists every day, to the extent that the relationship had become one of mutual dependence between “quasi-­ colleagues” (Davis, 2007, p.  76). Politicians are dominant suppliers of news (Barnett & Gaber, 2001, McNair, 2007), while journalists are the gatekeepers to public attention that “confers political legitimacy on those already in power” (Davis, 2007, p.  83), with the result that media and political elites have become mutually dependent. It has been argued that the development of strategic political communications in Britain since the 1990s has been led by increasingly centralised political parties and hence influenced by party ideology (Harrop, 2001). By 1997, it was politicians within the main political parties who were driving the communications agenda, not so-called ‘spin doctors’ (Brandenburg, 2002). Such ‘media activism’ on the part of leading politicians led to a drive for institutional and cultural change within governing bureaucracies that focused on the media relations function. Government press officers faced an increasingly complex, demanding and risky field of operations. They had to accommodate not only the ubiquity of media but the drive by politicians to manage the risks to their own personal and political reputations.

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Within a majoritarian system of executive dominance such as the UK, the constitutional, albeit uncodified, role of the UK civil service has been to provide “restraints” or “checks and balances” however ill-defined, on political power within the executive. In other words, the civil service is supposed to present “an institutional counterbalance to the majoritarian concentration of power in the executive” (Eichbaum & Shaw, 2010, p. 7). Earlier chapters examined some of the institutional weaknesses in the post-­ war civil service communications function whereby government communicators had the responsibility but not the power to deliver a service that would not incur charges of propaganda. As time went on did they have the capacity to resist the growing pressure to manage the news for party political purposes? Any reduction in the ability of civil servants to speak truth to power presents not only a communication problem, but a constitutional one. Loyalty to ministers is a key determinant of behaviour on the part of senior officials, according to the few observational studies of the UK’s central governing bureaucracy. In his analysis of everyday policymaking within six jurisdictions, Page found that political control over policy making rarely takes the form of direct commands, but proceeds through “the anticipation or indirect divination of the wishes of the minister” (Page, 2012, p.  47). Similarly, Rhodes concluded from his ethnographic study within a UK government department that, “loyalty is a core belief and practice socialised into the newest recruit to the senior civil service. And that loyalty can spill over into, literally, devotion” (Rhodes, 2011, pp. 129–130). Dedication to serving ministers is built into UK civil service culture and is at least as important an article of faith as the doctrine of impartiality, which in principle at least, enshrines the possibility, even the necessity, of resistance or challenge (Foster, 2005; Page, 2007). Even relatively junior government press officers are required by their own propriety codes to resist attempts by ministers to ‘politicise’ the government communications machinery. As we saw in the previous section, Part 2, the contradiction between loyalty to ministers and the requirement to speak truth to power led to career-ending clashes between officials and politicians that burst out into the public arena after 1997 and continue today. One of the UK’s longest-serving post-war senior civil servants, Robert Armstrong, who was Cabinet Secretary to Margaret Thatcher from 1979–1987 implied in his submission to a parliamentary committee in 2008 that obstruction, or resistance, was inherent in the exercise of impartiality by government communicators: “The professional civil service

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communicator is one of the bulwarks against a blurring of the distinction between party political and government communications” (House of Lords, 2008). As a ‘bulwark’ the government press officer had a duty to obstruct attempts by ministers to exploit the government communications machine for party political purposes. As the media environment becomes, or is perceived to be, more complex, demanding, and unforgiving, and news cycles speed up, we would expect bulwarks to become less tolerable, possibly even unsustainable, to politicians and their aides, desperate to get their message across and living with existential anxiety. Many accounts in recent decades contend that the balance of power has tilted in favour of ministers as public bureaucracies in all liberal democracies experience a decline in their autonomy and status (Eichbaum & Shaw, 2010; Hustedt & Salomonsen, 2014; Meer 2011; Page, 2007). It is claimed that there has been an increase in “top-down politicization” since the 1950s, and that the “principal agents of this phenomenon (are) the political parties” (Peters & Pierre, 2004, p.  287). Bureaucratic reforms have targeted the communications functions, the area where “the more egregious failings on the part of political operatives … have been made manifest.” To avoid conflict, civil servants respond to the pressure to “best serve their political masters” by surrendering some of the distance or autonomy implied in the practice of impartiality (Eichbaum & Shaw, 2010, pp. 205, 9). One study examined political responsiveness since the 1960s within four ministerial bureaucracies, Germany, Belgium, Denmark and the UK (Hustedt & Salomonsen, 2014). It found that all bureaucracies accommodated the drive for political responsiveness in different ways: Germany by extending the removal of senior civil servants after a change of government, Belgium by more than doubling the size of ministerial ‘cabinets’, and the UK by employing politically aligned special advisers. Danish ministers also employ party political advisers to manage the media, but, in contrast to the UK, they have the authority to instruct civil servants on media matters. The authors argue that what is exceptional about Whitehall is the extent to which the civil service has managed to ‘push back’ and retain its impartiality, at least in some areas. The roles of Bernard Ingham and Alastair Campbell as No. 10 Chief Press Secretaries for Thatcher and Blair respectively have been subjected to much scrutiny and both have written extensively about their activities in government. Less documented but at least as important is the relationship between Secretaries of State and Directors of Communication at departmental level. Given that the Whitehall department is “the key unit where

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legal powers are generally held, political action assumed, and legal loyalties focused” (Daintith, 2001, p. 604), it is here that most operational interactions between media and government take place. This is where the constraints, codes, norms and learned behaviours of civil service communicators and their managers are most commonly enacted, behind the scenes and beyond the scrutiny of the public, parliament or the media. It is here where the government press officer seeking to challenge a politically inspired narrative has to work against the grain of an adversarial political and media culture that routinely utilises information as a political weapon rather than a source of public insight. Yet, as the potential for conflict became greater, it became harder for individual civil servants tasked with media relations to “stand up to ministers without paying a price” (Greer, 2008, p. 123). Greer argues that in recent decades public services have been re-shaped by politicians of all parties who expect the civil service to “be more of a tool than a guardian.” The most visible manifestation of this within Westminster-style systems has been the growing influence of special advisers in media management. Hood and Dixon consider the rise of special advisers from the 1990s onwards as a formal recognition of a political civil service (Hood & Dixon, 2015, p. 29), while others argue that the power and influence of political appointees in Westminster-style systems is far greater than many realise (Eichbaum & Shaw, 2014). As media influence over politics grew, a new breed of special adviser who managed the media without the conflicting loyalties or public service obligations faced by government press officers increasingly came to serve the personal and political interests of ministers. This carries the risk of tribalism, whereby political appointees serve their political masters by attacking political opponents, often within their own party. Suspicion that SpAds routinely trade privileged insider information in exchange for media coverage that benefits their political masters is a major element behind the charge of ‘political spin’, but little is known in practice about what media special advisers actually do, since their news management work is largely anonymous and unregulated (Jones, 2006). What is clear is that those who operate at the interface between media and politics, whether government press officers or media SpAds, are disproportionately implicated in, and affected by, the speeding up and proliferation of media, the growing competition for public attention and the increasing tendency for political storytelling to incorporate blame, challenges to personal integrity and factional conflict.

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Politicians’ Pact with the Media Scholars examining the relationship between politicians and journalists in liberal democracies differ in who they consider to be in charge. As we saw with the evidence from Leveson, leading politicians feel powerless in the face of the capacity of media to attack and destroy. Some scholars have argued that, in the light of such pressures, politicians have surrendered unconditionally “to the logic of the media system,” even though they are “by nature unsuited to this sort of thing” (Meyer & Hinchman, 2002, p.  107–8). Stromback and Van Aelst, who have conducted many cross-­ national comparisons of European politicians and their responses to media change, argue that it is political actors that have had to “adjust their perceptions and behaviour to news media logic” (2013, p. 344). It appears, though, that politicians can’t win. When they put strategic communication mechanisms in place in an attempt to defend themselves and influence media-constructed narratives, they are accused of engaging in political spin. When they don’t they are seen to lack political depth and leadership skills. Esser argues that the term ‘spin doctor’ is used by “autonomous and powerful” journalists to discredit a perfectly legitimate process—the means by which elected governments seek to communicate policy to citizens (Esser, 2001, p. 39). Conversely, a preoccupation with media presentation can lead to hyperactive or reactive decision-making that can foreclose deliberation and ultimately reduce public trust. Moss and O’Loughlin found that a news-driven policy cycle that is mutually reinforced between political and media elites results in an increase in resistance, antagonism and disbelief on the part of the public (Moss & O’Loughlin, 2008). This instigates a vicious cycle whereby increasingly mediatized forms of political discourse elicit a further loss in public trust. From a mediatization perspective, rather than asking who is to blame for ‘political spin’, it makes more sense to consider the process whereby media become institutionalised, reified and domesticated in political settings (Hepp, 2013). Much political communications research focuses on the most spectacular and observable aspects such as electoral campaigning, the relationship between politicians and journalists, and the activities of political PR consultants. The activities of government press officers within the huge, influential and secretive central state bureaucracies remain largely uncharted. Some commentators argue that the daily drip-drip effect of political messaging is more important than episodic moments of

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transition such as elections (Norris, 2001). Much of the negotiation about what becomes news takes place behind the scenes between political and government sources and journalists, as Cook found in his examination of the relations between US government officials and beat reporters during the 1980s and 1990s (Cook, 1998). There is limited empirical evidence relating to insider media operations in Whitehall. Rhodes’ Everyday Life in British Government (2011) observed the apex of three middle-ranking government departments at various points between 2001 and 2005. Access was subject to careful negotiation, and was, in part at least, facilitated by Rhodes’ previous position as director of the large-scale Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Whitehall programme. This was a £2.1  m research programme brokered in 1993 with the support of the then Cabinet Secretary, Robin Butler, which ran until 1999 and involved 23 projects (Rhodes, 2000). Unfortunately, Rhodes’ account excluded observations of the press office and did not refer to press officers in any detail, even during his account of the media-frenzy that led up to the 2002 resignation of the Secretary of State for Education, Estelle Morris. The official government archive itself is partial. Information relating to government PR practices, such as press releases, minutes of meetings, memos and media plans, is often categorised as trivial and ephemeral and is therefore only partially recorded or quickly discarded. Despite these difficulties, the diffusion of media-related norms within public bureaucracies is a growing area of interest for northern European mediatization scholars, who have used observational methods to penetrate the discreet corridors of power and ask how, in everyday practice, officials reconcile the ethical norms of impartiality and due process, with politicians’ growing appetite for media attention. In their ethnographic study from within a PR team in a Norwegian government department, Thorbjornsrud et  al. observed a struggle between backstage and public facing officials to uphold “legitimate bureaucratic governance” against politically inspired “arbitrary rule.” They conclude that media norms were driving civil servants away from rule-based actions in favour of the “diffuse, porous and informal” infiltrating rationale of mediatization (Thorbjornsrud et al., 2014, p. 7). The traditional norm that “bureaucrats have a rationale of their own,” is being challenged by the more recent idea promoted by governing politicians that public bureaucracies are an “extension of politics,” serving the government of the day rather than an abstract notion of ‘the public’. The same team’s interview with this senior

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communications official suggests, at the very least, a decline in professional autonomy and public purposes: Today, in contrast to previous years, one puts way more emphasis on the fact that the ministry is a secretariat of the political leadership. Earlier one claimed to be a general information and communication umbrella, independent of the political executives. (Figenschou & Thorbjornsrud, 2015, pp. 1955–1956)

In their observational study of a Swedish executive agency, Pallas et al. similarly noted a change in the practices of public officials as media logic competed with bureaucratic logic, leading to three main outcomes: a speeding up of the policy cycle, attempts on the part of officials to anticipate media reaction, and a simplification of policy presentation. This appeared to be driving a wedge between public-facing and backstage officials. Their finding that communication officials “struggle to strike the right balance between providing correct, neutral and comprehensive information, and promoting what political leaders need and journalists want” (Pallas et al., 2014, p. 4), is borne out in the interviews discussed in earlier chapters. These studies highlight the importance of disaggregating government communications when considering media dynamics as they relate to governments. The roles of various actors differ, as does their capacity for autonomy and decision-making. Officials may be politically appointed or appointed solely on merit within the rules of impartiality. They may be backstage—that is, largely policy or delivery officials—or public facing. Among those who are public facing, they may be accountable solely to governing politicians or internally through senior civil servants, or both. They may be formally acknowledged media spokespeople (government press officers) with a particular professional orientation as PR specialists, or they may operate informally, trading government news with influential political journalists (media SpAds). Any account of how governments communicate with their publics must take account of all these dimensions.

Conclusion The extent to which media, political and bureaucratic elites concoct the news through an opaque process of negotiation poses a challenge for democracy and public trust. From the 1980s onwards, dominant mass

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media came to be seen and to see themselves as, representatives of the public will, yet played no official part in formal public accountability structures. Esser cites the warning from Mazzoleni and Schulz that such “absence of accountability” on the part of the media “violates the classic rule of balances of power in the democratic game, making the media (the fourth branch of government) an influential and uncontrollable force that is protected from the sanction of public will” (Esser, 2013, p. 169). This self-advantaging perception on the part of the media, together with Ministers’ hyper-sensitivity to news, and their fear of media scrutiny, generates a spiral of distrust that bewilders, confuses, excludes and angers the public. Politicians attempt to distance themselves by delegating to others the task of the daily battle over the news agenda, but this runs the risk of rebounding on them. Journalists react to what they see as the collusion and manipulation inherent in non-attributable selective briefing, by accusing politicians and their aides of political spin and perpetuating the steady narrative of the untrustworthy politician. At the core of this distrust is the popular assumption that politicians always act in self-interest or in the interests of their party, rather than the interests of the public, an erroneous assumption that leads to Cappella and Jamieson’s corrosive ‘spiral of cynicism’ (Cappella & Jamieson, 1997). In their own accounts and those of observers, politicians appear to be caught in an “autonomous dynamic” of a media and political arms-race that is beyond their control, from which they cannot escape and in which they are always in the wrong, whether they seek media attention or avoid it (Farrell & Schmitt-Back, 2002). In recognition of its self-sustaining nature, scholars depict the lure of media attention for politicians in almost sexual terms as a form of ‘temptation’; a powerful force that they are unable to ‘resist’. Yeung, for example, in her analysis of the regulation of UK government communications, refers to “the irresistible pressure on ministers to clothe their policy choices in the most attractive media-receptive wrapping,” adding that: “the temptation to engage in spin becomes almost irresistible” (Yeung, 2006, pp. 55–56). Where politicians do resist the temptation it seems unusual, even quirky, and the consequences can be disastrous and career defining.

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Farrell, D. M., & Schmitt-Back, R. D. (2002). Do Political Campaigns Matter?: Campaign Effects in Elections and Referendums. In London. European Consortium for Political Research/Routledge. Figenschou, T. U., & Thorbjornsrud, K. (2015). Backstage Media-Government Negotiations: The Failures and Success of a Government Pitch. International Journal of Communication, 9, 1947–1965. Foster, C.  D. (2005). British Government in Crisis, or, the Third English revolution. Hart. Fowler, N. (1991). Ministers Decide: A Personal Memoir of the Thatcher Years. Chapmans. Greer, S. (2008). Whitehall. In R. Hazell (Ed.), Constitutional Futures Revisited: Britain’s Constitution to 2020. Palgrave Macmillan. Harrop, M. (2001). The Rise of Campaign Professionalism. In J.  Bartle & D. Griffiths (Eds.), Political Communications Transformed (pp. 53–70). Palgrave. Hepp, A. (2013). Cultures of Mediatization. Polity. Hood, C. (2011). The Blame Game: Spin, Bureaucracy, and Self-preservation in Government. Princeton University Press. Hood, C., & Dixon, R. (2015). A Government that Worked Better and Cost Less? : Evaluating Three Decades of Reform and Change in UK Central Government. Oxford University Press. House of Lords Select Committee on Communications. (2008). First Report: Session 2008–9. UK Parliament. Hustedt, T., & Salomonsen, H.  H. (2014). Ensuring Political Responsiveness: Politicization Mechanisms in Ministerial Bureaucracies. International Review of Administrative Sciences, 80(4), 746–765. Jones, N. (2006). Trading Information. Politico’s. Krotz, F. (2009). Mediatization: A Concept with which to Grasp Media and Societal Change. In K.  Lundby (Ed.), Mediatization: Concepts, Changes, Consequences. Peter Lang. Kunelius, R., & Reunanen, E. (2012). The Medium of the Media: Journalism, Politics and the Theory of ’Mediatisation’. Javnost – The Public, 19(4), 5–24. Leveson, B. (2012). An Inquiry into the Culture, Practices and Ethics of the Press (Leveson Report). (ISBN 9780102981063). The Stationary Office (TSO). Major, J. (2003). The Erosion of Parliamentary Government. Centre for Policy Studies. McNair, B. (2007). An Introduction to Political Communication. Routledge. Meer, F. M. v. d. (2011). Civil Service Systems in Western Europe. Edward Elgar. Meyer, T., & Hinchman, L. P. (2002). Media Democracy: How the Media Colonize Politics. Polity. Miller, D., & Dinan, W. (2007). A Century of Spin: How Public Relations Became the Cutting Edge of Corporate Power. Pluto Press. Moss, G., & O’Loughlin, B. (2008). Convincing Claims? Democracy and Representation in Post-9/11 [2001] Britain. Political Studies, 56(3), 75–725.

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Mullin, C., & Winstone, R. (2010). A View from the Foothills: The Diaries of Chris Mullin. Profile. Norris, P. (2000). A Virtuous Circle: Political Communications in Postindustrial Societies. Cambridge University Press. Norris, P. (2001). Political Communications and Democratic Politics. In J. Bartle & D.  Griffiths (Eds.), Political Communications Transformed (pp. 163–180). Palgrave. Page, E. (2007). Where Have All the Powers Gone? The UK Top Civil Service in Comparative Perspective. Paper presented at the American Political Science Association Annual Meeting, Chicago, USA. Page, E. (2012). Policy without Politicians: Bureaucratic Influence in Comparative Perspective. Oxford University Press. Pallas, J., Strannegård, L., & Jonsson, S. (2014). Organizations and the Media: Organizing in a Mediatized World. Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group. Peters, B., & Pierre, J. (2004). Politicization of the Civil Service in Comparative Perspective: The Quest for Control. Routledge. Powell, J. (2010). The New Machiavelli: How to Wield Power in the Modern World. Bodley Head. Price, L. (2005). The Spin Doctor’s Diary: Inside Number 10 with New Labour. Hodder and Stoughton. Rhodes, R. A. W. (2000). Transforming British Government. Macmillan. Rhodes, R.  A. W. (2011). Everyday Life in British Government. Oxford University Press. Strömbäck, J. (2011). Mediatization and Perceptions of the Media’s Political Influence. Journalism Studies, 12(4), 423–439. Strömbäck, J., & Van Aelst, P. (2013). Why Political Parties Adapt to the Media. International Communication Gazette, 75(4), 341–358. Thorbjornsrud, K., Ihlen, Ø., & Figenschou, T. U. (2014). Mediatization in New Areas: The Changed Role of Public Bureaucracies. In J. Pallas & L. Strannegård (Eds.), Organizing in Mediatized World. Routledge. Van Aelst, P., Shehata, A., & van Dalen, A. (2010). Members of Parliament, Equal Competitors for Media Attention?: An Analysis of Personal Contacts Between MPs and Political Journalists in Five Countries. Political Communication, 27(3), 310–325. Yeung, K. (2006). Regulating Government Communications. The Cambridge Law Journal, 65(01), 53–91.

CHAPTER 8

Impartiality and Accountability as Ingredients of Trust

This chapter switches attention to ‘the public’, a dimension that has been marginalised in discussions of the crisis in government communication. The quality of information emanating from governments is a crucial ingredient in public opinion and public debate, given the dominance of governments and their executive agencies in the creation and dissemination of news and other forms of public information (Cook, 1998; Graber, 2003). Public opinion research indicates a decline in trust in British governments over time and an increase in the perception that governments place party needs above wider needs. The 31st British Social Attitudes Survey found that the proportion of citizens who thought that governments almost never “place the needs of the nation above the interests of their own political party” rose from 11% in 1986 to 32% in 2013 (Park et al., 2014). A longitudinal analysis of responses to the question ‘Do you think the (British) government is honest?’ found a consistent and marked long-term decline in perceptions of honesty between 1997 and 2013 that were associated with key events such as the 2003 Iraq War and the MPs expenses scandal of 2009 (Whiteley et  al., 2016). However, distrust in political institutions is not universal. There are indications that in recent decades civil servants are increasingly trusted to tell the truth (Ipsos MORI, 2020). This chapter contends that impartiality should be reinterpreted and reinvigorated as an important cultural value and practice that underpins representative democracy. It brings together the voices of civil servants and journalists to consider impartiality as a defining feature and rallying © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 R. Garland, Government Communications and the Crisis of Trust, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77576-6_8

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call for public servants and a key ingredient in public trust. Although difficult to define, and often misunderstood, impartiality can be seen as a largely hidden, contested and evolving public value and practice that can and does offer collective resistance to the threats of ‘political spin’ and more recently, regimes of ‘post-truth’. Political theorists and commentators have argued that governments in many liberal democracies have downgraded impartiality, redefining it as neutrality—a concept that offers a blank slate on which successive governments may imprint their own ambitions and aspirations (Aucoin, 2012). Civil servants rarely express opinions in public but when they do, they invariably uphold a notion of impartiality that goes beyond mere neutrality. It is argued here that the everyday bureaucratic dimension of public communication is crucial to the exercise of citizenship in today’s mediated democracies. Executive government in liberal democracies is underpinned by a dual form of legitimacy, where two elite dimensions, the administrative and the political, operate within a form of ‘dynamic equilibrium’ (Bovens, 2007 p. 463). This model of public representation is conceived as a balance between the administrative and the political that is historically contingent and subject to periodic crisis, often in response to social change (Manin, 1997). Rosanvallon suggests that the most complete form of public representation is achieved when partisan rule by democratic mandate is countered, or checked, by “non-partisan, bureaucratic rationality” (Rosanvallon, 2011, p. 45). Manin argues that, with the rise of 24/7 mass media, the balance of public accountability has shifted away from legislatures and towards the media. Here “the electorate appears above all as an audience which responds to the terms that have been presented on the political stage” (Manin, 1997, p. 16). As we saw in Chap. 7, public administration scholars have argued that civil servants in a range of democracies have experienced a decline in autonomy and status in recent decades, while the balance of power has tilted towards politicians (Eichbaum & Shaw, 2010; Meer, 2011; Page, 2007). A more politically aligned public administration facilitates a “corrupt form of politicization,” where impartiality is undermined by the misuse of public service resources to secure ‘partisan advantage’ (Aucoin, 2012, pp. 178, 183). For Aucoin, today’s public servant has become a ‘promiscuous partisan’ who must be seen to enthusiastically serve the needs of ministers at all times and, most crucially, to actively promote the government agenda. Of all specialist functions of government, he argues, the communications function is most at risk.

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The central governing executive in a democracy is therefore an institution with both administrative (or nominally impartial) and political (nominally partisan) dimensions (Bovens, 2007; Manin, 1997). The question is how have mediatization and politicians’ response to it impacted over time on the role of impartiality and public trust? The decline in public trust in governments within liberal democracies is widely supported by evidence from academic and public opinion research (Blumler, 2018; Blumler & Coleman, 2015). An aggregation of annual trust scores for a range of 30 professions between 1983 and 2020, for example, found that government ministers consistently scored among the lowest at around 16%, with journalists at 23%. In contrast, civil servants’ scores rose from 25% in 1983 to 60% in 2020, a rise of 45 percentage points, the biggest increase in trust across all professions monitored (IpsosMORI, 2020). This suggests that claims that the public has become increasingly anti-government per se are simplistic; it may be that partiality, or the political process itself, are increasingly negatively associated in the public mind with the likelihood of truth-­ telling (Barr, 2009; Flinders, 2015; Serazio, 2016). This may also explain why nurses, doctors, professors and scientists consistently score above 80%, and why, to an unprecedented extent, many governments all over the world have shared the public stage with experts during the coronavirus pandemic.

Civil Servants as Defenders of Public Values The UK government, although majoritarian, rarely rules with more than 40% of the popular vote. This has implications for the way in which civil service communications professionals perceive their public purposes. They are guided not only by the norms of public service, but by the professional PR norm that requires them to consider all interests, and the belief that an informed public is a prerequisite to democratic citizenship (Pieczka, 2019). Their starting point for public communication is therefore different to that of their elected or politically appointed colleagues. According to Howell James, the Permanent Secretary for government communication between 2004 and 2008: There’s a chunk of people out there who did not necessarily vote for the government of the day but are impacted by it and are owed a professional comms function … I think the civil service communications function fulfils that in a rather honourable way. (IV5)

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This view holds that government communicators have obligations that go beyond the needs of ministers and the government of the day, or the agendas set by the media, to a notional wider public. Giving evidence to a parliamentary committee, James contrasted the rights of “individual ministers (…) about whom they choose to do business with,” with the need for civil servants to “‘ensure that we are offering a fair service to all players” (Public Administration Select Committee, 2006). This acknowledges the possibility of a space within the public bureaucracy that is autonomous from politicians, where strategic communication priorities are derived from a notion, however ill-defined, of an impartial ‘public good’. Here, ethical and normative considerations apply, such as equity, fairness, impartiality, accountability, and, as a precondition for these, due process (Du Gay, 2005; Mendus, 2008). Both the journalists and civil servants interviewed for this study saw sticking to the facts as essential to the role of the civil service communicator, but there was a ‘constant tension’, as this press officer (1999–2004) explained: Researchers might have been commissioned to go away and review a policy … something that the minister really likes, and actually the policy is found to be ineffective or not very effective (…) ministers didn’t necessarily want the information out there. (IV9)

News stories have surfaced about such omissions (C.  Cook, 2014; Perry, 2014; Travis, 1994), while further evidence has emerged of unexplained delays in the publication of government-funded research into food banks, and immigration and the labour market (Sedley, 2016). This suggests that whatever ideals civil servants may aspire to, in practice it is difficult or impossible for them to resist internal political pressures to break the rules and publish information selectively. In the case of the 2003 Iraq war, successive government inquiries have shown that when faced with a powerful government’s influence on the news agenda, neither journalists nor civil servants can prevent the abuse of communicative power at the centre, and indeed, may become accomplices, albeit inadvertently (Herring & Robinson, 2014). Conversely, during the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020, as part of its bridge-building with the public, the government consistently sought legitimacy and objective support for its actions by regularly referring to independently sourced data, statistics and the deliberations around them.

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Policing the ‘line’ Between Impartial and Partisan Communication A consistent challenge in government communications is how to promote the policy objectives of the ministerial team without engaging in party political publicity, a balancing act that is frequently depicted by respondents as the line. The idea of the ‘line’ also appears in propriety guidance and parliamentary and government reviews that conceive of impropriety as a failure to observe appropriate boundaries between objective and party-­ political communication. The wording of propriety guidance on government communications over the years alludes to the propensity for ministers to challenge the boundaries between the government and the party but guidance on how to prevent this appear to have been watered down between 1997 and 2020 (Cabinet Office, 1997, 2014/2020). In 1997 the guidance stated that personal image making “should be avoided” and “government information or publicity activities should always be directed at informing the public.” In 2020, the guidance noted that “ministers don’t always acknowledge the distinction between government communicators and their own party-political spokespeople” and may mistakenly ask the press office to issue “through departmental channels speeches or statements that cross the border of propriety.” The onus is on the press officer to find a compromise but if this can’t be reached, they must protect ministers from themselves by giving a “polite refusal.” In practice, most civil servant interviewees felt confident about policing the boundary, or line, between impartial and partisan communication, with comments such as “it’s in the DNA,” “anyone who’s in there knows what it is,” “I never had any difficulty,” and “I don’t remember that ever being a problem.” All those interviewed said they knew where the line was and how to operate within it. If the line was put under pressure, it was almost always by ministers or special advisers. Jonathan Haslam described the line as: the old elephant, you know it when you see it … I don’t ever feel I was asked to do anything which strayed beyond what I understood to be the boundaries of the civil service role … you certainly had the strength of the civil service to stand up for you if you were asked by politicians to do the wrong thing. (IV6)

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According to Robin Butler, maintaining impartiality is “part of the job; it’s in the genes; there are professional lines which you know you shouldn’t cross.” The Butler Review (Butler, 2004) identified such “dividing lines” as the key to winning public trust, concluding that: If intelligence is to be used more widely by governments in public debate in future, those doing so must be careful to explain its uses and limitations. It will be essential that clearer and more effective dividing lines between assessment and advocacy are established when doing so.

Changes in departmental leadership of the Government Information Service after 1997 made it harder for those newly recruited into these roles from journalism to spot the risks and pitfalls in what was expected of them, let alone resist them. As we saw in Chap. 1, the newly-appointed Director of Communications at the Foreign Office, John Williams, was asked to produce an early draft of the dossier, something he didn’t feel was especially significant at the time, but which later came back to haunt him (Williams, 2010). Similarly, the Public Administration Select Committee’s report on an earlier controversy, the so-called Jo Moore affair at the Department of Transport (2002), in which a special adviser sent a memo suggesting that 9/11 was a “good day to bury bad news” (BBC News, 2001), blamed the error on the department’s failure to recognise and maintain boundaries: In the absence of a clearer lead from the top, and of any training, Ms. Moore crossed over a number of boundaries, but they were not clearly drawn boundaries and the signposting was poor.

A press officer (1999–2004) who watched the controversy unfolding from another department, said that press officers needed to know where the boundaries were and that there would be senior backup in case of improper demands: It shouldn’t be a problem. They should be able to resist special advisers’ demands if they are inappropriate and also resist demands from other civil servants and know that someone down the line will back them up for it. (IV9)

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A Director of Communications (1991–2011) who had plenty of experience advising junior colleagues on propriety issues used the notion of ‘discomfort’ as an indication of when a line was in danger of being crossed: It is a deliberately grey area. Actually, in the vast majority of cases, you know when a line is crossed, and you know what to do about it. It does involve you taking a deep breath and having a difficult conversation, but everyone knows when their level of discomfort has moved from ‘I haven’t done this before’ to ‘actually, I’m not doing this.’ (IV4)

A departmental press officer (2010–2014) saw “a clear dividing line between what you should and shouldn’t be doing as a government press officer,” but also felt it was “quite a grey area because of the nature of the job being slightly political, presenting the agenda of the government of the day.” It was up to the communications team leadership to maintain the balance. Good leaders “were always very good at that balancing act of making sure that ministers were content and not running roughshod over propriety guidelines” (IV18). For Nadine Smith, a Chief Press Secretary based in the Cabinet Office who worked for several ministers during the New Labour period (1998–2009), maintaining impartiality required the individual press officer, to ‘push back’ on day-to-day issues: There were times when I had to say to a minister ‘that’s putting me in a very difficult situation now. That’s something that you are going to have to get your special advisers to do’. It was a daily judgement as to how much of this is supporting the minister and how much do I have to push back on the minister because we are in a situation that’s untenable, that the public now had the right to know? (IV22)

This is consistent with propriety advice in use at the time, that “press officers have individually to establish a position with the media whereby it is understood that they stand apart from the party-political battle” (Government Information and Communication Service, 2000). However, is handing the problem over to a special adviser the answer to the problem, or a way of masking it? Although most civil servants did not see policing the line as a problem, many felt that it had become more difficult over time as ministers became more anxious about the potentially career-defining role played by media

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coverage. According to a departmental media manager with 12  years’ experience, who left a year after the 2010 election: A lot of pressure was exerted on Directors of Communication to just do what ministers wanted, some of which was pushed back against more effectively and some of which not, but I do feel that over the course of the time that I was in government there was an erosion of those standards. (IV24)

A Director with experience of strategy and communications across five departments during the Blair/Brown years, and who left government in 2010, had the same feeling: I remember Cabinet Office civil servants changing stuff that couldn’t go out – press releases, speeches, saying ‘as a government minister you can’t say that’ … I don’t know where that is now. I just feel … that sense of the line has shifted a bit in the last couple of years. (IV23)

When asked to give examples, he referred to media coverage of stories which, to his practised eye, had clearly originated from within government and which showed an increasingly casual approach to the facts: I see statistical briefings going out from comms staff into newspapers that are not true, and I know they’re not true and that would not have been tolerated when I was a civil servant … . whatever the kind of spin and what was going on in pubs and all the handling of journalists under the table, you didn’t brief incorrect statistics. You told the true story.

These concerns are echoed from an unexpected quarter—journalists. Nicholas Jones, the former BBC industrial correspondent who became a critic of government ‘spin’, noticed an increasing number of stories about ‘benefit scroungers’ during the Cameron years, which he believes cannot have come from reporters: There aren’t the journalists in the courts – we’re not calling the shots anymore. To me it’s the government machine that is feeding the stories. Perhaps I’m wrong but the more I look at it … they’ve got the story about this latest benefit thing, they’ve put a picture out and now all the papers have got it, it must have been given to PA (The Press Association) or something. (IV15)

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A business journalist with 22 years’ experience believes that there was “more spin” during the Blair, Brown and Cameron years, especially from the Treasury that: … had the reputation for re-announcing things. For presenting things as news that weren’t. One of those questions journalists always have to ask ministers is ‘is this new money?’ … The Government has always done that to some extent, but I think there’s a general feeling that it has got worse and under both the last two governments. (IV11)

Some journalists have even taken to policing propriety boundaries themselves, as this departmental press officer (2010–2014) recalls: Journalists would phone up and say, ‘look, some of the stuff you are putting out as a department is pretty close to Tory party propaganda’ and our Head of News would always look at it and take it on board and there’d be discussions as to whether this would be appropriate to go on civil service documents and you win some and you lose some. Sometimes it would stay in and sometimes it would be amended. (IV18)

The ultimate constraint on government communications, whether on the part of ministers, civil servants or special advisers, is a concern with “fact and reality” as the key ingredient of “credibility,” as Bernard Ingham told the Public Administration Select Committee in 2003: People wish to put the best possible gloss on their policy, their statements, their positions, their actions and themselves—of course they do. The constraint upon the civil servant … is that it must always be that his gloss must not lose touch with fact and reality because if he does, he ceases to become a credible informer and he is in the long-term business, have no doubt about it, of communication and he does not want to become an incredible communicator, he wants to retain credibility with the media. (Ingham, 2003)

We see in Chap. 11 that facts are indeed a prime consideration, even in the exercise of political spin.

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Impartiality as a Contested Value At its simplest, impartiality is defined as neutrality, whereby a body of permanent officials serve successive governments. The current Civil Service Code takes this approach, requiring officials to “act in a way which deserves and retains the confidence of ministers,” while ensuring that they can “establish the same relationship with those whom you may be required to serve in some future government” (Cabinet Office, 2015). In contrast, the 2006 Civil Service Code acknowledged a public interest element within the notion of impartiality in its requirement that civil servants must ensure fair, just and equal treatment of citizens when implementing public policy (Burnham, 2008). Such subtle and unheralded changes in the wording of propriety codes limits the scope for an independent role for civil servants in determining what might be in the public interest. Yet independence is still widely espoused by civil servants. In a speech in March 2014, one of the UK’s most respected senior civil servants, Martin Donnelly, put his head above the parapet, claiming that “independence offers a promising starting point. It limits the attractions of telling ministers what they might like to hear and provides a framework to offer a more objective assessment of options” (Donnelly, 2014). Thus, in his view, independent impartial advice from permanent officials is the key to effective decision-making and therefore good government (my emphasis). Donnelly sees impartiality as being enacted in three distinctive ways: through neutrality, as described above, through challenging ministers’ bias towards optimism, and through the capacity to provide opposing viewpoints, however unwelcome. Ministers have the “last word,” but a fundamental responsibility of the senior civil servant is the “honest management of public money.” This acknowledges that, far from delivering a blank sheet to ministers, impartiality is a public good that requires some autonomy on the part of officials to put public welfare above special interests (Hood, 1991; Scott, 1996). Such values as effective decision-making, good government, public welfare and honest management of public money are traditionally negotiated behind closed doors by political and administrative elites, so even subtle changes in common understandings over time can lead to changes in how impartiality is exercised. In other words, impartiality is both a (largely hidden) living practice and an abstract ideal. Mendus argues that since impartiality rests on the widespread commitment to equality in public service, citizens need assurance from those placed in positions of power

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over them that the principles governing society are defendable, even to those who do least well under them (Mendus, 2008). This raises the issues of accountability, compliance and to what extent partisan concerns can be permitted to override impartial ones, a question that has run like a thread through most of the critiques of UK government communications since 1997. These statements about impartiality from two powerful Conservative politicians show how elastic and contingent the concept can be, even between colleagues: Governments come and go and in the absence of a codified constitution or formal separation of powers, it is this body of permanent officials that underpins the constitutional stability of our country. That is why a permanent and impartial civil service was established (Jenkin, 2014). The essence of impartiality is not indifference to the government of the day but the ability to be equally passionate and committed to implementing a future government’s priorities and programme. (Maude, 2014)

As (the then) Chair of the Public Administration Committee that holds the executive to account, Jenkin saw impartiality as rising above the aspirations of individual governments. As the (then) minister for the Cabinet Office in charge of civil service reform and government communications, Maude saw impartiality as subservient to the needs of the government of the day. It is on this ground that many of the debates about the credibility of government communications continue to be fought. A series of essays on impartiality published by the Smith Institute in 2019 included contributions from former ministers, special advisers and civil servants. From the perspective of 42 years as a senior Whitehall official, David Normington concludes that although the principle of impartiality is subject to regular “skirmishes,” it is not under “serious attack.” He adds, however, that relations between politicians and civil servants have become “less trusting and more fractious” as anonymous media briefing against civil servants becomes more common, especially over the past ten years (Barwick, 2019, p. 15). Another contributor, the former Head of the Civil Service, Bob Kerslake, argues that the undermining of civil service impartiality during the Brexit period (2016–2019) was so damaging that a public campaign is now needed “to recognise and celebrate the enduring importance of having an impartial civil service” (Barwick, 2019, p. 23).

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Yet, despite such “skirmishes,” impartiality is still such an article of faith that politicians almost never publicly condemn it wholesale, whatever their real feelings. The discrepancy between ministerial pronouncements in favour of civil service impartiality, and their actions in undermining it, can be seen as a form of “symbolic behaviour … a strategic element in political competition,” where “individuals and groups are frequently hypocritical, reciting sacred myths without believing them and while violating their implications”(March & Olsen, 1984, p. 744). Within what remains predominantly a two-party political cartel, the UK’s official Opposition may complain at violations of impartiality, but in practice knows that, once in power, it will reap the benefits of incumbency and continue the violation (Katz & Mair, 2009). Furthermore, Parliament is compromised by the growing number of MPs who are on the government payroll and are therefore obliged to vote with it. There has been a steady increase in the number of MPs acting as ministers and parliamentary private secretaries in recent decades, from 101  in January 1960 to 132  in June 2020. This means that a fifth of all MPs are now on the government payroll (Benwell & Gay, 2011; Institute for Government, 2020).

Conclusion So far, this book has identified a gradual change in conceptualisations of impartiality that favours governing political actors. Although frequently publicly upheld by politicians and journalists, impartiality is a value that is rarely delineated, evaluated or analysed, especially in relation to modern public communication. A culture of mediatization and politicisation has permeated central governing bureaucracies since the rise of 24/7 media, challenging the autonomy of public servants to enact the value and practice of impartiality in communicating with the public (Garland, 2016). Meanwhile, a steady decline in public trust in what governments say has deepened the crisis in public communication. Political imperatives to ‘manage’ the news have brought about an integrated and centralised government communications service, where impartial and partisan norms have become blurred. Some political theorists argue that governments in many liberal democracies have downgraded impartiality to the extent that public servants are increasingly becoming ‘promiscuous partisans’. That is, they practice a form of neutrality that offers a blank slate on which ministers imprint their own ambitions and aspirations (Aucoin, 2012).

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The now buried Phillis Report of 2004 identified three minimum requirements if impartiality is to be realised in government communication: 1. Directors of Communication must feel able to stand back and object if Ministers’ personal agendas ever lead them to press for communications that would be politically biased or misleading. 2. We would not expect to see senior communications staff changing simply as a consequence of a ministerial change. 3. The interests of the general public should be paramount in any programme to modernise government communications. Senior civil servants have occasionally broken cover to express concern (sometimes overtly, but often discreetly) at what they see as an unhealthy relationship between ministers and the media. These interventions uphold a notion of impartiality that goes beyond mere neutrality. Impartiality is seen as integral to the democratic process, and a key ingredient in public trust. Public servants believe that a failure to uphold impartiality has led to an abuse of government communication power in the age of increasingly mediated politics. Impartiality is a lodestone of Western democracy but in practice it is taken for granted and neglected rather than nurtured and discussed. Yet despite its centrality to democratic governance, the practice of impartiality within government communications faces four main historical developments in the relationship between the media and political institutions. First, government communications are regulated internally and do not have specific or transparent purposes that can be held to public account. Second, there is an on-going political struggle for control over the definition of impartiality that is largely under the control of serving politicians. Third, the information needs of the public are marginal to the mediated attempts by governments to control political narratives. Finally, these processes are so embedded and institutionalised that there will be no change unless the system itself is restructured.

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CHAPTER 9

What Makes Good Government Communication?

We have seen how the process of mediatization, interacting with politicisation, undermined the autonomy and resilience of government communications, challenging the capacity of civil service communicators to extend public values into government news making. A series of cumulative organisational changes and tweaks to propriety guidance undermined that part of the role that was not solely dedicated to serving the government of the day. The real-world impacts of a politicised government communications regime were seen with the unprecedented publication of intelligence information in the now-discredited 2002 dossier, Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction. The government’s own independent inquiry into government communications (Phillis, 2004), together with a series of parliamentary inquiries, found that government press officers felt less able to challenge ministers, while special advisers increasingly occupied the domain that had previously been theirs—the management of official government news. A lack of transparency about the source of news emanating from the UK government made it difficult for citizens to distinguish between public information and politically inspired news making. The government’s preoccupation with news management over other forms of public communication narrowed the range of channels through which citizens could be reached (Hood & Dixon, 2015). This chapter attempts to define the public purposes of government communications by drawing on two main sources of evidence—first, the stated purposes of government communications as declared in official documents, and second, the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 R. Garland, Government Communications and the Crisis of Trust, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77576-6_9

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perceptions of government communicators about their public role and how this has changed over time.

The Stated Purposes of Government Communications When considering the extent to which the citizen is being adequately served, the totality of government communications should be taken into account, not just the activities and outputs of the civil service side of the exercise, the Government Communications Service (GCS). What is at stake here is more than the performance or professionalism of the GCS. We need to examine the government’s public communication efforts overall, through ministers, special advisers and civil servants, and how these are signalled and work together to meet the communications needs of the public. Successive governments have upheld civil service impartiality in public while privately delegating non-transparent forms of partisan government communication, such as selective media briefing and news management, to political appointees. We have seen how official channels were bypassed during the production of the 2002 Iraq dossier and the ensuing publicity campaign to present it to the public, the media and parliament. It difficult to divine the public purposes of UK government communications, since they have rarely, if ever, been explicitly stated except in the most general terms. From its inception, the government information service did not make explicit what its public principles and purposes should be, beyond the general need to inform the public (Moore, 2006). In the absence of clear and widely understood purposes, successive government and parliamentary inquiries have reacted to repeated controversies over public communication by attempting to articulate a vision, albeit in general terms. The ideal of the informed citizen is one that frequently appears in official pronouncements but with little or no explanation or recognition of the difficulties and challenges of achieving this. In 1998, the Cabinet Secretary Richard Wilson told a parliamentary committee that it was the duty of every government to “communicate its policies and its themes effectively to the public so that they understand it and so that the electoral process, the democratic process, can take place” (Public Administration Select Committee, 1998). Four years later, the same Committee similarly referred to “the need for the Government to provide honest, reliable, accurate information at all times” (2002). The House of Lords Communications Committee (2008) concluded that “one of the most important tasks of government is to provide clear,

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truthful and factual information to citizens,” stating that “accurate and impartial communication of information” is “critical to the democratic process.” The report added that if government communications were to be truly ‘citizen-focused’, it had to provide a “continuous dialogue with all interested parties.” This aspiration for seamless, two-way communication with all audiences contrasts with the messy reality of the selective, top-down, news-led approach to media management that has emerged from the findings described in this book, with its episodic discontinuity and repeated cycles of churn and controversy following changes of government. The fullest exposition of the public purposes of government communications appeared in the Phillis Report of 2004, the first (and to date, the last) independent review into government communications. The report was commissioned in the wake of the controversy over the 2002 Iraq dossier and the death of the UK weapons expert, Dr. David Kelly, in 2003 following his exposure as a ‘source’ of negative comments about the government’s communication style. Phillis was the first to propose a comprehensive set of founding principles for government communications, and as such, formed the starting point for Engage, a three-year programme launched in 2007 that sought to provide a “common framework for strategic communication” (HM Government, 2007). It was not until the arrival in 2012 of the current Executive Director, Government Communications, Alex Aiken, that the government communication service published an annual communications plan, something it has done since 2013. However, the post-2012 documents make no reference to foundation documents like the Phillis Review or the Engage programme (Ramsey, 2015). There is now no official way to access the Phillis Report, except through the UK Government Web Archive.1 The Mountfield Report and information about the Engage programme is even harder to access. Mike Granatt, the head of profession between 1998 and 2003, described the launch of the Government Communication Service in 2013 as “a vivid example of how central government communication has shamelessly taken on the political habit of rewriting the past as well as the present … almost all traces of the (the GCS’ predecessor) GICS and its well-developed professional and ethical guidance has been wiped, particularly from the National Archives web archive” (Granatt, 2019). This ‘year zero’ approach to government communications deprives each new government of the collective institutional memory and continuity achieved through difficult

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battles over the years. This helps to explain why repeated findings and recommendations are consistently ignored. The Phillis Review outlined seven principles of good government communications that were accepted in full by all parties in 2004. These are presented in Table  9.1, presented for comparison together with the six primary functions outlined in the first UK Government’s Communications Plan of 2013/4. It is clear that the latter document has not drawn on the former, and makes no reference to it. The differences between the seven Phillis principles from 2004 and the six primary functions from 2013 tell us something about the positioning of the communications service at different points in time. The Phillis principles represent a high point for public-facing values in government communications, coming as they did at a time when the Labour government was facing the consequences of a series of public and media scandals arising from its over-zealous approach to the management of public communication. Most serious was the discovery that the Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) claimed by the 2002 dossier, widely proclaimed by Tony Blair and extensively covered in the world’s media, did not exist. These seven principles were an attempt to establish an achievable ideal for open and democratic communication in the public interest in order to rebuild trust. This was to be achieved by offsetting some of the communication biases such as a preoccupation with the daily news media, and the Table 9.1  Principles and functions of government communications Seven principles of good government communications (Phillis, 2004)

Six primary functions of government communications (Government Communications Service, 2013)

1. Openness, not secrecy 2. More direct, unmediated communications to the public 3. Genuine agreement with the public 4. Positive presentation of government policies and achievements, not misleading spin 5. Use of all relevant channels of communication, not excessive emphasis on national press and broadcasters 6. Coordinated communication of issues that cut across departments 7. Political neutrality, rather than a blurring of government and party communications

1. To provide information in order to fulfil specific legal or statutory requirements 2. Help the public understand the government’s programme 3. Influence attitudes and behaviours 4. Enable the effective operation of services 5. Inform and support the public in times of crisis 6. Enhance the reputation of the UK

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blurring of government and party-oriented communication. These principles are universal and non-partisan and therefore could and should apply to any government, and in all circumstances. The new (and first) Permanent Secretary for Government Communications, Howell James, clarified this in a speech in 2005 when he described his aim “in line with Phillis’s recommendations” as being “to adopt a strategic approach, to better inform and respond to the requirements of citizens and people who use and work in public services” (James, 2005). In contrast, the six primary functions in the 2013–2014 plan set out the ways in which the main objectives of the government can be operationalised through the communications function. These are not a statement of abstract values, purposes or principles. Rather than responding to the requirements of citizens these were top-down—aimed at transmitting information that would help the public to understand the government’s programme, and influence their attitudes and behaviours. According to a recent comparative study of 36 organisations in Australia, the UK and the USA, much government communication was predominantly top-down and one-way, driven mainly by the transmission of information and use of persuasion. Consultation and stakeholder engagement was found to be limited and narrowly framed, took place periodically when it suited the government, and prioritised traditional media in the misplaced belief that “these channels both influence and reflect the views of stakeholders and citizens” (Macnamara, 2017, p. 14). If governing politicians dominate the determination of priorities and resourcing for the government communication service based on their own considerations, there is little incentive for, or likelihood of, change in a more public-focused direction. The 2015–2016 GCS Communications Plan, published just after the 2015 election, is explicit about the need for government communicators to represent the campaigning narrative of the government of the day. In its summary of “core themes” and priorities for government communications, the plan states: At the heart of the plan is the Government’s One Nation narrative, which gives us a clear focus for the year ahead. As communicators, we need to demonstrate how our work furthers the four main themes within the narrative: helping working people, spreading hope and opportunity, bringing the country together and Britain in the world. (GCS, 2015a, p. 4)

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The use of the term ‘One Nation’ places the plan firmly within the ambit of Conservatism, giving the document the feel of a party manifesto. The term ‘One Nation’ originated with the nineteenth-century Conservative leader, Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881), and is still so widely used that one commentator described it as “one of the most overworked in the British political lexicon” (Anonymous, 2016). Modern Conservative leaders from Major to Johnson have made use of the term to distance themselves from some of the less public-spirited aspects of Thatcherism. The substantive function of the 2015 plan appears to be to place government communication priorities within the Conservative brand and to demonstrate how the latest strategic communications techniques can and should be used to construct a single coherent government narrative. Another subsidiary function is to construct a collective identity among the dispersed communications teams, not only in government departments, but in the many executive agencies that report to departments. A third, less visible purpose, is to raise the profile and reputation of the new GCS among politicians, and as a secondary audience, other civil servants. In this sense, its professionalising and centralising objectives are similar to those of Bernard Ingham and Alastair Campbell. However, in contrast to Ingham’s approach to coordinating the presentation of government policy, and Campbell’s concern to build and defend the government’s reputation through a strategic and proactive approach to the mass media, the plan focuses on professionalism. It calls on communications specialists to utilise the latest customer insight techniques to “understand the audience’s attitudes, habits and preferences” so that “our communications are suitable, relevant and meaningful.” For example, it asks them to apply the following set of techniques as recommended by the Cabinet Office’s Customer Insight Team (GCS, 2015b): 1. Use “the power of storytelling to create an engaging, emotional connection with audiences” 2. Ensure “that content is relevant, personalised and delivered at the right time to maximise interest” 3. Create “shareable, ‘snackable’ content to encourage audiences to re-transmit” 4. Harness “the influence of digital influencers, such as online vloggers, to build trust and reach” 5. Build “emotional connections with our audiences to maximise the impact of our campaigns” 6. Communicate “a clear social purpose in our Government messaging for audiences to identify with.”

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The emphasis is less on principles or purposes, and more on the means by which messages can be most effectively conveyed to audiences, rather in the way that brands are communicated to consumers. Such insights do not include other agents responsible for government messaging. The role of ministers and special advisers in managing government news is left out of the equation. There is no inbuilt opportunity for achieving the third Phillis principle, “genuine agreement with the public” since accountability for the government’s communications plan is purely internal. Since the abolition of the Central Office of Information (COI) in 2012, the GCS has been held to account and its vision and priorities agreed by a GCS Board chaired by the Minister for the Cabinet Office. Information about the membership of the board, when it meets and what is discussed is not publicly accessible. In her critique of the structural changes in government communications after 2010, Anne Gregory, a professor of corporate communications and a former government communications adviser, identifies two major changes as a cause for concern. These are the redundancy of the post of the Permanent Secretary, Government Communications in January 2011, and its replacement by the less senior position of Executive Director; and the closure of the COI and the reallocation of its core functions into the Cabinet Office under the direction of a politically-led system of governance. She argues that the GCS Board has “strong political representation,” so it follows that “there is clearly the potential for political pressure on civil servant communicators akin to and possibly even stronger than that exerted by special advisers, in which case government communications will not only have come full circle but also come under a tighter political grip” (Gregory, 2012, p. 374). She predicts that the communications service will become a more focused service “prioritised on delivering government objectives (…) a function that can help drive its political agenda forward by heavily directed communication activity.” For the political communications theorist, John Corner, this approach to government communications is akin to the idea of the permanent campaign. It represents a deeper embedding and naturalisation within government institutions of a “competitive, interparty framework for discourse” that now takes place “outside of electoral periods” (Corner, 2010, p. 59). As if to prove these points, the Government Communication Plan for 2019–2020, while celebrating the 47 major campaigns undertaken the previous year, took as its starting theme, ‘a country that works for everyone’ (GCS, 2019). This is a repeat of the phrase first used by Theresa May

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outside No. 10 Downing Street on 13 July 2016 on the day she took office as Prime Minister. The Minister for the Constitution, Chloe Smith perhaps overstates her influence when she claims in her foreword that: “I oversee GCS,” while Alex Aiken’s introduction concludes that “we are in a strong position as this financial year starts but we have a big year ahead.” Boris Johnson became Prime Minister three months later, ushering in a new and disruptive era for the GCS that includes a more centralised framework for special advisers, cuts and further centralisation of the communication service and the appointment for the first time of a Prime Minister’s spokesperson who will present daily televised news press conferences from No. 10, (Ball, 2020; Rutter, 2020; Smith, 2020).

The Public Role of Government Communicators As we saw, Howell James’ 2005 speech re-stated the Phillis principles of good government communication. He declared that the new Government Communications Network (GCN) would “put the public at the centre of government communication activity” and would be “driven by the views and needs of the public” (James, 2005). In 2006, James called on government departments to represent the “wider public interest” and serve “all people who come to us whether the public or the media” (Public Administration Select Committee, 2006). This would call into question many of the activities outlined in the previous chapters, where specific journalists are targeted according to the potential political gain accrued by coverage in particular media outlets. James’ concept of the public role of government communications is derived from the same notion of impartiality as that outlined by his fellow senior civil servant, Martin Donnelly, who saw the independence of the official as the starting point for impartiality and good government, as discussed in Chap. 8. The former Cabinet Secretary, Robin Butler (IV7), similarly described the public role of the government press officer as being “to inform the public through the media,” a task which sounds straightforward, but in practice is fraught with difficulty, since the media do not merely transmit government information but are active, political and sometimes disruptive participants in the process of public communication. For Bernard Ingham, the public duty of the government communicator required that, among journalists: “you don’t have favourites. You are there to serve all equally” (IV1). John Major’s Chief Communications Director Jonathan Haslam (1996–7) agreed that journalists should expect civil service

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communicators to provide “a non-party political steer on things – more factual – making the minister’s case but making it in a way that is balanced and objective” (IV6). Siobhan Kenny, who served the Major and Blair governments, added that there was “a duty to the public (…) because you are working for the taxpayer after all” that required public information to be clear, comprehensive and accessible (IV2). This former Director of Communication (2001–2014) warned against giving in to ministers too readily: Having a partisan civil service that is essentially there to do exactly the minister’s bidding, who are politically sympathetic to that minister, you would not get that scrutiny; you wouldn’t get that challenge, and that’s where, still, bad decisions get made…wasteful things happen. (IV17)

She felt that the public role of government communicators, and the trust and credibility that underpinned it, were threatened by a combination of ‘noisy media’ applying blame, and frightened ministers. This had become so overwhelming, and politicians so hyper-sensitive to media criticism that “it just spirals into this huge gulf between the public and government and ministers” leading the public to “disengage from politics” and conclude that “you can’t trust anything they say.” A former Director of Communication who joined in 1991 and continued into the early years of the 2010 government saw the role as one that serves and tries to reconcile two powerful and sometimes conflicting client groups—ministers and ‘the department’. Officials must therefore be “wholly loyal to the whole department and wholly loyal to what an individual minister of Secretary of State wants, which is rarely the same thing” (IV4). This sets up a dichotomy between what the department wants, and what the minister wants, and begs the question, how can you be “wholly loyal” to two masters, especially when they come into conflict? Given a conflict between the two, many expressed a primary responsibility to the general public, rather than solely to ministers, albeit a distant public whose needs, whether stated or unstated, were best met through the administration of ‘good government’: It’s about the role of government communications to communicate for the government, not for individual ministers, not to play party politics, and also to be a reasonable use of government money. (IV8)

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The administration of ‘good government’ required a form of public guardianship in order to provide “an appropriate check on what ministers want to do” (IV17). A press officer during the Blair years agreed that ministers “need to be challenged, they need to have it pointed out to them when they may not be doing the best thing, from the government point of view, not the party-political point of view” (IV9). Another press officer who left government in 2011 after 12 years’ service saw the role as trying to balance the needs of at least four client groups simultaneously—the department’s policy makers, ministers, the public and journalists: You want to do justice to the policies that are being developed in the department and by extension the people who are developing them. You want to do justice to the ministers’ vision of how he or she wants to deliver on the part of his or her department. You want to ensure that you are informing the public of the information that they need in order to be equipped to make decisions. You also need to deal with the journalists fairly and honestly and openly and professionally. (IV24)

Loyalty to the minister was important, but you also had a public duty in that: “in your heart, you enter the career because you want to do the best job you can to explain what the government is doing to the public.” A former Director of Communication who left government for a leadership role in an executive agency in 2014 felt that the public responsibilities of government communicators were subverted by ministers’ media hyper-sensitivity: Ministers are just terrified of the U-turn, of being pilloried by the media for making errors, or for changing their mind, and they lose sight of the folk out there who are not in the Westminster bubble, who are not journalists who can see through some of the rubbish in the papers. There would be so much more to be gained by just fronting it out and saying, ‘I’m going to level with you.’ (IV17)

Taking decisions about how and when to place ‘inconvenient’ information within the public domain is not straightforward. The former joint Head of the Civil Service, Douglas Wass, argued in his 1983 BBC Reith Lecture series Opening-Up Government that governments should strive “on a systematic basis to publish the information that they possess that will contribute to public understanding on those issues.” Who, though, is to ensure that this happens, even at times when it could be inconvenient?

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Such decisions should not be left to ministers as this would make them “judges in their own court” (Wass, 1984). If this was difficult enough in 1984, this may, by now, be almost impossible. In as far as a set of consistent public purposes can be discerned through the public statements of politicians, official inquiries and successive Heads of Service, UK government communications has, over the years, been expected to fulfil the basic criteria as outlined in Table 9.2. The limited internal accountability established after 1945 offered no recognition of the specific requirements and potential risks of media communication, and no commitment on the part of governments to give news media “sufficient or equal access” to information (Moore, 2006). This deficit becomes increasingly significant as government communication becomes more focused on media communications and more subject to political control. The efforts of Bernard Ingham to improve discipline and coordination in civil service communications, the ‘modernisation’ programme led by Alastair Campbell, and Alex Aiken’s drive to introduce strategic campaign planning, are all in their different ways, a response to the politically-driven tendencies of the structure inherited from the 1945–1951 Labour government. Many of the key features of this structure remain, such as the dual accountability to an administrative and political leadership, the differentiation between central and departmental communication, the concept of ‘a line’ that delineates impartial and partisan communication, and a separate cadre of in-house communication specialists who operate within a system of self-regulation.

Table 9.2  The public purposes of government communications—A summary of findings from government and parliamentary inquiries into government communication 1. To inform citizens about government policy to help them reach informed judgements on public affairs 2. To use specialist technical and professional skills to conduct publicity without incurring charges of propaganda 3. To provide clear, truthful and factual information 4. To maintain the dividing line between party political and public information 5. To plan centrally in order to provide a unified and coherent public information service 6. To provide information in a way that serves the public interest 7. To ensure both administrative management and political oversight Garland (2016)

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A major discontinuity was the closure of the COI and the dispersal of its functions into the Cabinet Office that took place suddenly in 2012. This was done without external consultation, and with little apparent criticism, either from the media, civil servants, the public or parliamentarians (Horton & Gay, 2011).2 The COI may have outlived its usefulness as it became increasingly side-lined by government departments. Its loss deprived government communications of part of an accountability system that tried to balance administrative and political considerations in a power-­ hoarding central executive, leading to unforeseen effects on power relations in government communication that favour governing politicians. If so, the change represents an intensification of a process that had already been taking place over time: the tendency for government presentation to move “from a common service agency,” to a “pattern of ‘spinners’ clustered in central agencies and around ministers in departments” (Hood & Dixon, 2015, p. 174). In 1945, as we saw earlier, politicians expressed the need for “a body of technically expert staff which knew how to conduct publicity without incurring the charge of propaganda” (National Archives, 1945). As the concerns of Anne Gregory demonstrate, it is difficult to claim that, as in 1945, the body of communications professionals currently known as the Government Communications Service, still has a degree of autonomy under a civil service director (Gregory, 2012). The civil servants interviewed here argued that public considerations were paramount and that that public servants needed the power to challenge ministers in the interests of ‘good government’. Along with incremental changes in the structure of the service comes a regular change of name. An apparently superficial name change may be unimportant, but could there be significance in the substitution over time of the word ‘information’ by the word ‘communication’ (see Table 9.3)?

Table 9.3  What’s in a Name? From GIS to GCS 1946

1997

2005

2013

Government Information Service (GIS)

Government Communications and Information Service (GICS)

Government Communications Network (GCN)

Government Communications Service (GCS)

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Conclusion The one effort to shore up government communications by introducing a set of explicit public values, the 2004 Phillis Report, was put into reverse and the report abandoned in a ‘year zero’ approach to history. Without widely-understood and shared public values, there can be no public accountability, because to what ends can the public, parliament and the media hold the service accountable? The service was founded in 1945 at the behest of politicians and with no built-in accountability mechanism. Changes that have taken place since then such as the abolition of the COI, the introduction of special advisers, and the de facto introduction of politicised leadership within government communications have served to strengthen the ‘political grip’ over government communications (Gregory, 2012). And yet the commitment to political neutrality is regularly re-stated by politicians and in propriety guidance, and is depicted as a vital ingredient in maintaining impartiality and hence public trust. Policing the line between party political propaganda and public information is a bureaucratic function which is at odds with politicians’ desire to act, and to act quickly. March and Olsen refer to “the institutionalized capability for acting appropriately” and consider that, far from being negative and constraining, “some of the major capabilities of modern institutions come from their effectiveness in substituting rule-bound behavior for individually autonomous behavior”(March & Olsen, 2009, p.  10). The Phillis Report, and those which followed, were an attempt to make explicit a set of generally accepted and applicable rules by which a citizen-focused government communications service could be evaluated. As we saw in the previous chapter, impartiality is more than a value; it is a guide to practice. According to the Phillis Report, there are three minimum requirements if impartiality is to be realised: 1. Directors of Communication must feel able to stand back and object if Ministers’ personal agendas ever lead them to press for communications that would be politically biased or misleading. 2. We would not expect to see senior communications staff changing simply as a consequence of a ministerial change. 3. The interests of the general public should be paramount in any programme to modernise government communications.

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The evidence presented in this chapter suggests that the autonomy available to government communicators to behave appropriately in relation to their own codes of propriety, and their own public purposes, minimal as they are, has been depleted in a process of mediatization and politicisation which accelerated after 1997 and is continuing. This raises serious concerns about the capacity of the government communication service to fulfill even the limited requirements outlined above.

Notes 1. The Phillis Report is available in the Government archives at https:// webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20100407175617/http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/reports/communications_review.aspx 2. It is puzzling that a House of Commons Library Standard Note (SN/ PC/06050) Abolition of the COI (2011), which is mildly critical of some of the processes (or possibly the lack of them) behind the closure, has been removed from circulation and is no longer available—with no reason given. My query to the Library went unanswered.

References Anonymous. (2016, July 18). The Origin of “One Nation” Politics. The Economist. See https://www.economist.com/the-­economist-­explains/2016/07/17/the-­ origin-­of-­one-­nation-­politics Ball, J. (2020, July 21). UK Civil Servants Fear Press Office Centralisation Could ‘Undermine Democracy’. The Guardian. Corner, J. (2010). Promotion as Institutionalised Deception: Some Coordinates of Political Publicity. In M.  Aronczyk & D.  Powers (Eds.), Blowing Up the Brand: Critical Perspectives on Promotional Culture. Peter Lang. Garland, R. (2016). Between Media and Politics: Can Government Press Officers Hold the Line in the Age of ‘Political Spin’? The Case of the UK After 1997. PhD Thesis, The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). GCS. (2013). Government Communications Plan 2013/14. HM Government. GCS. (2015a). Government Communications Plan 1015/16. Cabinet Office. GCS. (2015b, April). 7 Trends in Leading-edge Communications Report, Produced with Ipsos MORI and Google. https://gcn.civilservice.gov.uk/wp-­content/ uploads/2015/05/7-­trends-­in-­leading-­edge-­communications.pdf. Accessed 18 Nov 2015. GCS. (2019). Government Communication Plan 2019/20. https:// communication-­plan.gcs.civilservice.gov.uk

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Granatt, M. (2019). Response to Institute for Government Blog The New Government Communication Service  – Back to the Future? (2013), uploaded 2 February. https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/blog/ new-­government-­communication-­service-­back-­future Gregory, A. (2012). UK Government Communications: Full Circle in the 21st Century? Public Relations Review, 38(3), 367–375. HM Government. (2007). Making Government Work Better. TSO. Hood, C., & Dixon, R. (2015). A Government that Worked Better and Cost Less?: Evaluating Three Decades of Reform and Change in UK Central Government. Oxford University Press. Horton, L., & Gay, O. (2011). Abolition of the COI(SN/PC/06050). House of Commons Standard Note (pp. 1–7). House of Commons Library. House of Lords Select Committee on Communications. (2008). First Report: Session 2008–9. UK Parliament. James, H. (2005, January 20). Speech: What Future for Government Communications? Centre for Public Policy seminar. Centre for Public Policy. Macnamara, J. (2017). Creating A ‘Democracy for Everyone’: Strategies for Increasing Listening and Engagement by Government. The London School of Press Economics and Political Science and University of Technology Sydney. March, J. G., & Olsen, J. P. (2009). The Logic of Appropriateness (ARENA Working Papers). Oslo. Moore, M. (2006). The Origins of Modern Spin: Democratic Government and the Media in Britain, 1945–51. Palgrave Macmillan. National Archives. (1945). Cabinet Papers CAB 78/37. Phillis, R. (2004). An Independent Review of Government Communications. Cabinet Office. Public Administration Select Committee. (1998). Sixth Report, Session 1997–98. House of Commons. Public Administration Select Committee. (2002). Eighth Report (2001–2): These Unfortunate Events at the Former DTLR. P.  A. S.  Committee (Ed.). House of Commons. Public Administration Select Committee. (2006). Session on Government Communications. House of Commons. Ramsey, P (2015). The Engage programme and the Government Communication Network in the UK, 2006-2010. Journal of Public Affairs. 15 (4): 377–386. Rutter, J. (2020, July 3). The Dangers of No.10s Attempt to Take Back Control of Government Communications. Institute for Government. Smith, B. (2020, October 22). Boris Johnson’s Spad Reforms ‘Disempowering Ministers and Weakening Government’. Civil Service World. Wass, D. (1984). Government and the Governed: BBC Reith Lectures 1983. Routledge and Kegan Paul.

CHAPTER 10

Trust in Democratic Government in a Post-­Truth Age

We have seen how facts were manipulated and selected to suit certain media and political ends, and how major breaches like the misuse of intelligence in the lead up to the 2003 Iraq War had a lasting impact on public trust. Accusations of political spin pursued the Blair government throughout its term of office and still hang over Tony Blair. Meanwhile, political control over the government’s media management apparatus has continued to strengthen. If anything, the Conservative-led government of 2010 intensified the attack on the autonomy of civil servants. Indeed, a prominent former senior civil servant, David Normington, has claimed that the minister responsible for civil service reform,1 was “frequently … publicly critical of the senior civil service,” yet was not “reined in by the then Prime Minister.” This broke with a long-established convention that ministers are responsible through parliament and do not publicly blame civil servants, and led to an erosion of trust among civil servants (Normington, 2019, p. 16). The Johnson government of 2019 saw a further deterioration in working relationships between senior civil servants and governing politicians, as it embarked on a centralising project aimed at extending the centre’s already broad scope for determining the shape of the machinery of government (Durrant et al., 2020). The Government Communication Service (GCS) was again singled out for special treatment, with leaked proposals that the service would be substantially cut and all staff based in the departments would now be employed directly by the Cabinet Office. As in 1997 © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 R. Garland, Government Communications and the Crisis of Trust, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77576-6_10

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and 2010, one of the opening salvos of the new government was the denigration of the communication service, often through unattributable media briefings. A civil servant who experienced the ‘cull’ of 1997, Jill Rutter, predicted that recent plans to centralise departmental government communicators “would see No. 10 tighten its grip on the service.” The move also calls into question the role of departmental permanent secretaries in monitoring the propriety of government communication: “an important (though weakening) bulwark against the over politicization of government communications” (Rutter, 2020). The importance of perceptions of impartiality was built into the government communications framework from the beginning, when the Atlee government established what they intended would be “a body of technically expert staff which knew how to conduct publicity without incurring the charge of propaganda” (National Archives, 1945). This framework endured into the 1980s when, in 1982, Bernard Ingham was able to warn the Prime Minister not to accede to an action that would have blurred the distinction between the Conservative party and the Government Information Service (GIS) because this would risk accusations of “misusing Government resources for Party ends” (Ingham, 1982). In 2002, Tony Blair felt compelled to demonstrate a secure evidence base for the planned attack on Iraq, going to extreme lengths to identify facts that had the stamp of reliability. Today, at a time when people struggle to identify reliable sources of information from incorrect or untruthful ones, and when politicians seem immune to the embarrassment of being caught contradicting themselves or misusing facts to their own advantage, are governments discarding previous regimes of truth and moving towards a post-truth position? The term ‘post-truth’ was coined in the 1990s, but the idea had already been circulating in academic discussions relating to the contextual nature of truth (Calcutt, 2016). It was first used by the political writer, Joseph Heath, in connection with the 2014 Ontario election campaign. The Progressive Conservative candidate, Tim Hudak, commissioned an advertisement called Truth that deployed simple factual claims but these were quickly debunked by opponents. Heath’s concern was not simply that individual politicians lied strategically but that systemic lying was becoming integral to the plans of political strategists (Heath, 2014). The term post-truth burst into public consciousness in 2016 with the election of Donald Trump as US President, when documented usage of the term supposedly rose by 2000% (Flood, 2016).

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If political spin has come to mean a biased and self-advantaging form of public communication practiced by media and political actors, post-truth politics is a more serious charge. Here, facts are deemed to be malleable, dispensable and subservient to beliefs and emotions, and can or should be deployed to personal or political ends. Indeed, the visible manipulation of widely accepted facts can be framed as an anti-establishment act in itself. Post-truth represents an intensification of the process that delivered political spin during the 1990s and can therefore be seen as a deeper adaption to the mediatization and even ‘celebrification’ of politics. But it is more than an adaptation. In the sense that post-truth rhetoric exploits, even celebrates, public distrust in the gatekeeping functions of the media/ political establishment, it constitutes a paradigm shift. This chapter draws together the findings from previous chapters to argue that what goes on day-to-day inside the corridors of power is of crucial importance to the operation of government communications and hence the functioning of democracy. The practice described as post-truth politics circumvents the possibility that there is such a thing as the public interest or that a shared operational understanding of truth is possible or even desirable. Yet the idea of a single truth is in itself simplistic. By necessity, different standards of truth operate across and within different domains and as facts or evidence cross these domains, precision and meaning may be lost in translation (Garland, 2018). In large and complex organisations like governments, there may be many versions of the truth. In the case of the promotional campaign for the US-led 2003 invasion of Iraq, for example, the assumptions of politicians, the media and the intelligence community diverged over how to interpret and present intelligence data. To accommodate the possibility that actors from different domains can and do speak with different priorities and purposes in mind, post-war regulatory systems of propriety and mutually understood ‘good practice’ were established in the UK and other liberal democracies. We have seen how, in recent decades, such systems of self-regulation have come under threat from new political, social and media pressures. The ethical response is not to ignore or bypass such systems but to strengthen them by opening them up to democratic scrutiny and formal accountability to create a government communication system that, in its ideal form at least, puts citizens at its heart. This chapter examines the notions of political spin and post-truth and considers how such concepts may help or hinder our understanding of the sometimes discreet, sometimes overt, institutional

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and cultural changes in how governments have related to the media over time. Much of the focus on spin and post-truth is on electoral politics and campaigning. Here, we look at the everyday processes of government communication to see how evidence and truth influence practices and norms in the relationship between governments and the media. We examine witness accounts to consider whether the accusation of post-truth signals a troubling step-change in governments’ relations with the public over time.

Truth, Post-Truth and Spin It has been claimed that the idea of post-truth politics is flawed, because it combines moral panic with cynicism (Calcutt, 2016; Lilleker, 2017). The term implies that there was a golden age where politics operated within a regime of truth, and that, for more and more people, shared truth in the abstract is now less important than their own truth. Furthermore, the use of the term as a noun, as in post-truth politics, suggests that this mode of discourse is the defining feature of modern politics. This plays into the views of those who routinely demonise politicians, politics and political institutions, in the same way that the charge of ‘fake news’ was first used to discredit social media and then all journalism (Happer et  al., 2019). The charge of post-truth politics is a symptom of the breakdown in trust between much of the media and Donald Trump’s presidency, but it did not arise de novo with him, and there are continuities with the political spin era. Trump’s portrayal of himself as a media victim was foreshadowed by the complaints of UK politicians at the Leveson inquiry about their mauling at the hands of journalists (Leveson, 2012). Bill Clinton believed that “the press was engaged in a ‘global conspiracy’ to ruin his life” (Kurtz, 1998, p. 69). Trump believed he could bypass the ‘liberal media’ and set the agenda himself rather than negotiating it with others. He dispensed with traditional media accountability and set out to demonstrate that the truth was what he wanted it to be. Defiant, even rebellious lying was integral to the running commentary aimed at his equally rebellious fan base. It was also integral to what Joe Biden termed Trump’s “virulent political dialogue” with the mainstream media and his personal and political opponents (Biden, 2020). This does not mean, however, that such behaviour defined his times, or even the attitudes of those who voted for him. The driver for political spin comes from the same source as governing politicians seek to take control of an otherwise debilitating media agenda

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through persuasive and media friendly storytelling. This includes deploying facts for their own political ends by any means possible short of lying. Spin undermines but does not defy public assumptions that “official sources of information are likely to be more reliable than unofficial sources” (Yeung, 2006, p. 54). It accepts the obligation on governments to “provide clear, truthful and factual information to citizens” (House of Lords, 2008). This is not necessarily straightforward in the insider world of national government news-making, where bureaucracy, politics and media interact to form a particular ‘culture of mediatization’ (Hepp, 2013). Here, issues and ‘hot topics’ are defined and solutions negotiated against a tide of seemingly intractable real-world problems and media frenzies. The mediatization of politics in general and government in particular favours two particular approaches to the handling of information that are common to political spin and post-truth: the simplification of complex socio-political issues into stories and slogans, and the integration of campaigning into the everyday process of governing. Both approaches require the transmission of information from one domain to another, a process whereby meaning may be lost in translation. Political spin bears the additional burden of having to deal with real-world facts against the backdrop of reduced time and capacity within the governing bureaucracy for the scrutiny of verifiable facts and truths. ‘Truthful spin’ and the 2002 Iraq Dossier One of the most controversial claims in the UK government’s September 2002 dossier Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction was the one highlighted in Tony Blair’s foreword that Saddam’s “military planning allows for some of the WMDs to be ready within 45 minutes of an order to use them” (HM Government, 2002, p. 4). The source turned out to be unreliable and the claim unfounded but the stated intention behind the dossier was to place apparently credible and substantiated facts in the public domain. As Blair told the Hutton Inquiry, he wanted to be sure that “we could say, hand on heart, this is the assessment of the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC)” and claim that the evidence derived from “an objective source” (Herring & Robinson, 2014, p. 565; Blair, 2003). The assessments of the JIC became a talisman of truth for a Prime Minister under pressure who had staked his future and reputation on his ability to win over the media and public to a widely disputed fact—that Saddam was linked to global terrorism. However, he could not hide behind the JIC in the overblown

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claims of his own foreword and statement to parliament on 24 September 2002. The public row that followed the failure to find WMDs in Iraq, and the suicide of the weapons expert Dr David Kelly, on 17 July 2003 centred on Blair’s truth claims. He has consistently claimed that he did not set out to mislead parliament or the public but has not denied the charge of exaggeration. When he told parliament that Saddam “has existing and active military plans for the use of chemical and biological weapons which could be activated within 45 minutes” (Blair, 2002), it is a fair assumption that he knew, or had been told, that this would make headlines around the world, as it did. To what extent, then, can the government be held responsible for the media misrepresentation of the 45-minute claim, as in headlines like ‘Brits 45 mins from doom’ in The Sun (Pascoe-Watson, 2002)? The intentional placing of a selective fact in the public domain that will almost certainly be misinterpreted (wilfully or not) can be described as ‘truthful spin’ and is routine practice in PR. The PR intermediary can claim to be telling the truth, the media can claim they are reporting what was said and the client (or brand) gains the visibility that they are paying for. Journalists, PRs and their clients collude in co-producing the desired story but most of the negotiation remains secret. The storytelling must be compelling while also “serve(ing) the advantage of the client.” It may be “damaging to public trust” because it is inherently “unethical and deceitful” (Manson, 2010) but falls short of lying. It is not always clear who the client is in the case of the government’s communicator. Is it the immediate client, the ministerial team, or the more distant client, the public? In the case of those responsible for the production of the 2002 dossier, a case can be made that the dominant client was Tony Blair and his promise to stand by George W. Bush after 9/11, not the public. We saw in the previous chapter how civil servants valued loyalty to their political masters but maintained the conviction that they were ultimately responsible to a wider public, not just the elected officials they served. As norms, practices and structures changed, this was becoming harder to sustain, and clearly failed in this case. We have seen how the post-1997 Labour government was accused of developing a form of “aggressive political public relations” as they entered government (Moloney, 2001, p.128). Creativity and storytelling had been part of the government propagandists’ toolbox since wartime (Grant, 1999; L’Etang, 2009), but the post-war construction of government communication had created a series of internally-regulated checks and balances in how, when and with whom government information was

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exchanged. By 2002, these checks had been so severely weakened that they were no match for a determined and powerful Prime Minister facing a potentially career-ending challenge. Journalists from popular newspapers, like John Williams at the Foreign Office, were appointed to leading positions in the GICS, and charged with presenting government policy in an engaging and user-friendly way. This required creativity. PR theorists have argued that a creative approach to truth is a core component of PR’s ‘added value’ that is its raison d’etre (Green, 2010). Cropley contends that although promotional arts such as advertising and PR are driven by the “application of creativity” this is done “with the conscious and deliberate intention of doing harm to others” (2010, p. 4), where harm is deliberate misrepresentation. This promotional orientation contrasts with a more deliberative and rule-based orientation that is expected to demonstrate accuracy, fairness and transparency in the service of a notional public good. All actors, whether civil servants, politicians, PRs or journalists may at certain times prioritise either orientation, but they exist in a state of creative tension. This is the source of the clash between the restraining influence of the need to present evidence and the political drive to persuade that was identified by Chilcot, as discussed in Chap. 1. In contrast to political spin, which upholds the possibility and desirability of truth, post-truth holds that facts are not worth striving for and there is no virtue in logic or consistency. When President Trump tweeted in the early hours of 16 November 2020: ‘I WON THE ELECTION!’ he was speaking to the estimated 70% of Republican voters who believed that the election had been ‘rigged’ in favour of his opponent, Joe Biden. For four years, Trump had displayed his determination to “bend reality towards his word” (Churchwell, 2020, p.  8). Turning back to the UK case, to what extent and in what way have ideas of truth influenced the struggle for control over what constitutes official UK government news in recent decades and what is the direction of travel? The Battle for Truth Behind the Scenes Truth and verifiable facts are not always easy to discern at times of media frenzy, especially when governments are struggling to rebut negative perceptions while tackling complex, ‘wicked’ problems. Marianne Taylor, a former government press officer, gave a vivid description of life on the media frontline at No. 10 during the period when Theresa May’s

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government (2016–2019) was trying and repeatedly failing to pass the EU Withdrawal Bill: Your main task, day in day out, is to defend the indefensible – cuts to policing, terrible immigration decisions – while simultaneously trying to avoid the ire of the ‘SpAds’, the special advisors (aka spin doctors) who run the show at big government departments. (Taylor, 2017)

Within this fraught environment, media advisers, whether government press officers or SpAds, are charged with satisfying the demands of political and media clients while remaining on the right side of propriety. Recalling his experiences in the lead up to the 2003 Iraq War, the Foreign Office Director of Communications, John Williams, told the Chilcot Inquiry that in failing to check and challenge all facts vigorously “at times to the point of cussedness,” as had been his approach as a journalist, he had “failed the Iraq test.” In his view, “media advisers must always strive to be honest, basing their advice on what indisputable facts they can find,” but he acknowledges that truth is ambiguous and open to interpretation. Even “sincere people,” he says, may “disagree honestly about what they regard as the truth” (Williams, 2010). The 2004 Butler report was the first official investigation into the government’s failure to manage intelligence in relation to Iraq’s WMDs (Butler, 2004). Butler’s remit did not include the role of politicians, but in concluding that “more weight was placed on the intelligence than it could bear,” and which stretched available intelligence “to the outer limits” (para 35), the report implied that, as the principal agents, political decision-makers were at least partially culpable. Butler also raised concern at “the informality and circumscribed character of the Government’s procedures” in an area “where hard facts are inherently difficult to come by” (para 67). The dossier’s publication was the first time intelligence information had been released to the public and was the outcome of a less formal style of government that came to be known as ‘sofa’ government, where ‘due process’ was bypassed and boundaries between separate domains could become blurred or unclear, increasing the risk of misinterpretation and misuse. As the Butler report concluded, although “strenuous efforts” were made to comply with the strictures of the JIC, “in translating material from JIC assessments into the dossier, warnings were lost about the limited intelligence base” (para 464). Furthermore, although those writing

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the dossier would have taken into account the caveats in the intelligence information, “the public, through reading the dossier, would not have known of them” (para 331). There were two additional points of translation that made misrepresentation more likely: the summary of the dossier produced for briefing the press, and the presentation of this pre-digested information by media outlets. Thus, information was steadily degraded through a four-step translation process: from intelligence information to dossier, from dossier to press release, from press release to news story, and news story to reader. It is likely that this was further complicated by secretive non-attributable briefings from government sources. Williams explained in his statement to Chilcot that he lacked the institutional strength or access to key participants that might have enabled him to challenge the claims of the dossier. This comment from a departmental senior economist during the Cameron years (2010–15) illustrates how difficult it can be to resist the pressure to conform to a dominant government narrative: As a macro economist you to an extent have to parrot the government’s line on the macro economy, which is not necessarily a balanced view. (My department) wanted something that was more firmly rooted in the economics and that was less weighted by a political view. There was a punch up about that which we won but the prime Minister brushed it away and put his own narrative in. (IV25)

This respondent felt that keeping abreast of alternative perspectives was “absolutely vital.” He did this by being open to “how other people look at things,” where ‘other people’ were ‘externals’, a civil service term for journalists, or in this case, journalists who specialised in economics. It was not just their perspective that mattered but their clout as sticks with which to challenge the arguments of over-zealous ministers. Here, truth exists and is acknowledged to be important but is multi-faceted and becomes a strategic weapon in a battle over who defines problems and solutions. Journalists have questioned their own ability to provide an alternative informed perspective, given their lack of access to information. According to this former journalist of 20 years’ standing who moved into government as a communications adviser in 2008, the journalists’ perspective as an outsider is inevitably limited:

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What you realize is the amount that journalists see is only a tiny, tiny part of the work that’s going on in the department …. When you’re in the department you see it all and at a very senior level … so your knowledge expands enormously. (IV26)

From this, it is clear that information handling in government is of a different order than in journalism. Even with goodwill and trust on both sides, it is inevitable that simplification and misinterpretation will occur as actors from both domains work together to craft stories that can engage the public. Yet however flawed a concept, both parties accept a common truth value: that verifiable facts exist and that persuasion most ultimately be backed up by them. Statistics as a Political Weapon Government autonomy in the way statistics are handled has progressively diminished as new checks and balances are put into place to assuage public concerns over their misuse. In 2005, a survey carried out by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) found that 59% of respondents thought the government used statistics dishonestly (ONS, 2005). In 2007 parliament set up the UK Statistics Authority (UKSA) as an independent body under statute to promote and safeguard the publication of official statistics that “serve the public good” (Treasury Select Committee, 2005; UK Statistics Authority, 2020). This recognised that the public would only accept government statistics if they were removed from the direct influence of government departments. Since then, the UKSA has regularly taken governments to task for the misleading use of statistics, especially in news statements and press releases. In 2013, for example, the UKSA judged that statistics used in a statement from the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions contradicted the official statistics released by the same department earlier in the year (Dilnot, 2011). In 2016, the authority criticised ‘misleading’ claims in a government tweet about the benefits of selective schools. Another media release was found to have ‘overstated’ Treasury claims of the costs to households of leaving the EU. The following year the government was criticised for overstating the building of new homes. Most notably, in 2017, the Chair of the UKSA, Sir David Norgrove, wrote to Boris Johnson accusing the Vote Leave campaign of misusing official statistics by exaggerating the amount of money that would be saved by leaving the EU

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(Norgrove, 2017). Johnson did not accept the judgment, claiming in one interview that the figure was “grossly underestimated” and could have been even higher (Ashmore, 2018). Public confidence became critical during the COVID-19 pandemic. In the early stages of the crisis, Sir David reported that “the UK’s statistical system is continuing to serve the public good in the face of the challenges posed by the new coronavirus” (Norgrove, 2020a), but as pressure on the government grew over low rates of testing, errors started to creep in. Having set himself a challenging target of 100,000 tests a day by the end of April 2020, the Health Secretary Matt Hancock told a televised briefing on 1 May that: “we have met our goal.” He claimed that the number of tests had exceeded the target by reaching 122,347. This figure was questioned by statisticians and journalists, since a substantial number related to testing kits sent out rather than tests conducted. Sir David wrote to Hancock on 11 May saying that this figure did not meet “the standards set by the Code of Practice for Statistics,” because the government had not been clear about how the tests were defined. He urged the government to “show more clearly how targets are being defined, measured and reported” (Norgrove, 2020b). Hancock publicly accepted the rebuke and agreed to discuss better ways of handling such statistics in future. Much misuse of statistics is related to political expediency and aimed at defending controversial government policy in the face of existing or anticipated media and public criticism. However, it should be acknowledged that the UK Statistics Authority was set up by democratically elected politicians who promised and felt bound to accept its judgements, however uncomfortable. A post-truth politician like Donald Trump would either ignore or deny adjudications, dismiss officials responsible for challenging his or her version of the truth, or close down the offending agency. By upholding the misleading £350 m claim made during the Leave campaign, Boris Johnson operated within a similar post-truth paradigm. He reacted similarly in November 2020 when he broke with precedent and refused to accept an official judgement of bullying by a senior minister after an investigation by his own independent adviser, Alex Allan (BBC News, 2020). Allan was left with no choice but to resign. Two months previously, the government’s senior legal official, Sir Jonathan Jones, had resigned over the extension of the government’s powers to override part of the legally binding EU withdrawal agreement relating to Northern Ireland. Hancock’s acceptance of Norgrove’s criticism represents a return to the norm, perhaps in recognition of the need to maintain credibility at a time of national emergency.

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Conclusion The common practice in public relations, politics and journalism of presenting the public with selective information in the knowledge that it is incomplete or exaggerated, knowing that it will be misinterpreted, falls short of lying. Such practices, which can collectively be described as ‘spin’, uphold the possibility, even the desirability, of truth. Professional codes of ethics agree with the need to scrutinise and verify facts and truths before they are placed in the public domain. This is complicated by the fact that different standards of truth operate across different domains meaning that such information may be ‘lost in translation’. This necessitates a formal means of assessing and questioning truth claims, especially where they are driven by political expediency. Like ‘spin’, the charge of ‘post-truth’ asserts that there has been a decline in standards of public communication that undermines credibility and trust. Although they are indicators of disquiet, such charges are not analytical terms but rather forms of name calling that ascribe blame to ‘the other’. Journalists blame spin-doctors, politicians blame the media or social media, and the public despair of both (Ipsos MORI, 2016). This chapter finds biases in the understanding of truth that are symptomatic of wider structural problems in the government/media interface, engendered by the response of liberal democracies to the challenges of 24/7 media. Spin and post-truth are both symptoms of the ‘culture of mediatization’ that has developed over recent decades. The systems of self-regulation in how governments communicate that were developed after 1945 have become subject to increasing pressures and despite adjustments over the years may no longer work effectively. Unlike political spin, the idea of ‘post-truth’ does not attempt to accommodate evidence-based truth to this new, more demanding and hostile media environment but seeks to bypass them. There are signs that recent governments, such as the Trump administration of 2016–2020 and the Johnson governments of 2019, are prepared to openly override bureaucratic safeguards and threaten or terminate the careers of those employed to administer them. Such a post-truth interpretation of politics does not accept the ideals, principles or even the possibility of shared understandings of what good and trustworthy public communication could and should be. To what extent were the weaknesses of this paradigm exposed by the demands of the COVID-19 public health emergency?

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Note 1. This was presumably Francis Maude, Cabinet Office minister (2010–2015).

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PART IV

Coronavirus and Beyond

CHAPTER 11

Coronavirus Communication: Clear, Consistent and Comprehensive?

Three people stand in front of lecterns labelled ‘Stay at Home, Protect the NHS, Save Lives’. At the centre is the newly-elected UK Prime Minister, Boris Johnson. On either side are the medical and scientific experts upon whose advice the public communication campaign against the spread of COVID-19 is framed. Public servants are praised and the needs of the vulnerable are presented as paramount. Members of Parliament are briefed in advance of major announcements, and are permitted to vote on changes in legislation that affect the freedom of every person and organisation in the country. Statistics on the pandemic and the deliberations of the official scientific committees appear regularly on the government website. These live televised news conferences take place daily from March to June 2020, throughout the first wave of the Coronavirus pandemic. They are broadcast to audiences of millions, and feature questions from journalists that challenge the senior figures behind the campaign. The UK’s public service broadcaster, the BBC, plays a key role in transmitting and explaining the content of these briefings. As a process at least, this was a complete volte face in government public communication and on the face of it represented official accountability by the book. Just weeks earlier, the same Prime Minister and his aides were condemned for excluding journalists they didn’t like from the Westminster political briefings (known as ‘the lobby’) (Mayhew, 2020; Mail Online 2020); for refusing to allow ministers to appear on certain programmes, including the BBC’s flagship radio news programme, Today, and for threatening to © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 R. Garland, Government Communications and the Crisis of Trust, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77576-6_11

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‘whack’ the BBC by undermining its unique funding model (the licence fee) (Shipman, 2020). Public servants, especially those working in the UK’s central governing bureaucracy were held in contempt, blamed and shamed, regularly briefed against and threatened with punitive ‘efficiency savings’ and reforms. In early 2020, a political adviser to the Chancellor of the Exchequer was sacked on the spot by Johnson’s chief aide, Dominic Cummings, and a long-serving Permanent Secretary resigned after allegations of bullying by the Secretary of State, telling the media that, in an unprecedented move for a senior civil servant, he would be seeking redress for constructive dismissal (Smith 2020a). A year later, this was settled for a reported six-figure sum before it could reach an employment tribunal. For scholars and media commentators, this volte face is fascinating and surely unprecedented. How might the Johnson government’s sudden pivot, however brief, and however extraordinary the circumstances, help us to identify a possible pathway out of the apparent deterioration in the media-political environment in many liberal democracies that goes back decades? We have seen how civil servants working within the Government Communication Service (GCS) struggled to achieve their own admittedly understated public purposes. Politicians from successive governments admitted to the Leveson Inquiry that they had developed unhealthy relationships with journalists to protect themselves from what they saw as damaging scrutiny by the news media (Leveson, 2012). The Government Information Service (GIS), later known as the Government Information and Communications Service (GICS), the Government Communication Network (GCN) and most latterly the Government Communications Service (GCS), faced regular challenges to its claims to autonomy and its resourcing as incoming governments restructured it, cut jobs, created others and over time succeeded in bringing the service under greater political control (Ball, 2020; Rutter, 2020). This pattern re-emerged with a vengeance after the 2019 election as sources close to the Prime Minister revealed the government’s intention to unleash a ‘hard rain’ on the civil service, and specifically, to centralise and cut government communication teams (Powell, 2020). At the same time, the ties of special advisers to their ministers were loosened as No. 10 took control over Treasury advisers and empowered its own advisers to direct those in departments more closely. Even the most senior echelons of the civil service received shock treatment. The Cabinet Secretary Mark Sedwill left his job prematurely seven months after the election. The Permanent Secretary at the Department for Education, Jonathan Slater, found out through an article in The Times that he would be leaving the department following a backlash against the

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government’s handling of school-leaving exams (A levels) because the PM wanted “fresh official leadership” (CSW, 2020). The Education Secretary, Gavin Williamson though, remained in post, despite “a long series of misjudgments about schools” that were described by the Institute for Government as not only avoidable but as being among the most damaging of any decisions made during the pandemic (Maddox, 2020). A weakened civil service leadership, and a disruptive presence at No. 10 in the form of the PM’s chief adviser, Dominic Cummings, were augmented by a deteriorating relationship with the national media. From the beginning it was clear that this government would be even more assiduous than its predecessors in pushing against propriety codes, norms and rules, changing internal structures and seeking to dominate the daily news by any means possible. There were also concerns at the new administration’s attitude towards expertise, evidence and scrutiny. As we saw in the previous chapter, as leader of Vote Leave Johnson was accused by the country’s chief statistician of misusing official statistics when exaggerated claims about the money that would be saved as a result of Brexit were plastered over the campaign bus (Norgrove, 2017). His fellow Brexiteer, Michael Gove, like Johnson, a former journalist, famously stated during the campaign that “people in this country have had enough of experts” (Gove, 2016). Gove later became a senior minister in the 2019 administrations. Johnson had consistently avoided parliamentary scrutiny, again breaking with tradition by refusing three times to appear at its main scrutiny committee. He also refused requests to meet his opponents by participating in TV election debates. On becoming PM, he was known to be popular with the grass roots, but was also seen as the least trusted leader in recent history, even among his own parliamentary party (Curtis, 2019; Jankowitz, 2019). During the first two months of the year, as coronavirus took hold in China and started to spread through Europe, Johnson failed to attend five meetings of the emergency planning meeting, known as COBRA (named after the committee meeting room in which it traditionally took place), and spent ten days at his country home, prompting the outgoing leader of the opposition, Jeremy Corbyn, to label him a “part-time Prime Minister” (Walker, 2020). It was not until 2 March after his first COBRA meeting that Johnson publicly acknowledged the seriousness of the epidemic, telling a BBC interviewer that the country should “prepare against a possible very significant expansion of coronavirus” (Johnson, 2020a). Yet even at this point, he broke with scientific consensus. The next day, at his first live daily televised press briefing at No. 10 to launch the government’s Coronavirus

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Action Plan, he stated that he was happy to shake the hands of coronavirus patients, adding that “people should continue to make up their own minds.” It later emerged that, on the same day, the behavioural science subgroup of the government’s own scientific advisory committee, SAGE, had advised against handshakes. In preparing to mobilise the nation, the Johnson government also had to contend with three troublesome legacies: ten years of austerity cuts to local government, a social care system that had been described in an official report as “inadequate, unfair and unsustainable” (Dilnot, 2011) and nearly four years of conflict with the three devolved nations over the UK’s exit from the EU. Given these personal, political and institutional weaknesses, it seemed unlikely in March 2020 that the government would have the capacity to deliver the kind of clear, comprehensive, consistent and trustworthy public messaging that was needed to prepare the country to change its behaviour. Yet on 16 March, the Prime Minister performed a volte-face. He led the first of 92 live daily press conferences at which journalists were treated with polite respect and allowed to ask unseen questions, where scientific and medical advice was seen as paramount, and public servants were praised for their hard work and dedication, even heroism. Experts were listened and deferred to, the BBC was welcomed back into the fold as the trusted national broadcaster and key workers from doctors and nurses to teachers and bus drivers were thanked and praised. Tacitly acknowledging the UK’s lack of preparedness, the first eight weeks of the public communication campaign focused on the need to prevent the NHS from being overwhelmed, as summarised by the slogan, Stay At Home, Protect the NHS, Save Lives. These daily 60–90-minute briefings were broadcast live and formed the focal point for an integrated, inclusive and well-resourced public campaign that conveyed short and memorable messages and distinctive graphics through print, broadcast, social and outdoor media. How did the government ‘change its story’ so quickly, and what was its impact (Garland, 2021)? After decades of toxic debate and political spin, what techniques did governing politicians deploy in the drive to persuade the public to consent to an unprecedented deprivation of liberty and later to participate in a national vaccination programme? What does this tell us about the long-term connection between impartiality and trust? This chapter examines the content and style of four months of daily news conferences during the first six months of the pandemic. It places this analysis within the context of the developing crisis and the response of the public

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and media, as well as the larger longitudinal study of UK government communications that forms the basis for this book.

Building Public Confidence Chapter 9 drew on the seven principles of the Phillis report, and the deliberations of successive inquiries into government communications to set out a list of basic criteria for good public communication. To further structure the analysis of the Johnson government’s coronavirus communications, Garland and Lilleker identified four public communication norms that drew on the work of Blumler and colleagues (Blumler, 2018; Garland & Lilleker, 2021). These are: . Coherent, factual and unified messaging for all citizens 1 2. Transparency and accountability in public communication 3. A commitment to serving the public interest 4. Maintaining the dividing line between partisan and impartial communications. To achieve these norms, a government would need to demonstrate six capabilities: leadership in the national interest rather than or in addition to party or personal interest; the capacity to deliver accurate and timely information that is accessible to all; to accept and respond to public scrutiny; be aware of and recognise a range of voices; to show commitment to the needs of the most vulnerable; and establish a clear evidence base for its public statements and actions. This would have required a turnaround in the approach of any post-1997 British government. For the Johnson government, it needed a transformation. Remarkably, in large part, it succeeded, if only for the first eight weeks of the first wave—four of which Johnson missed due to absence with coronavirus. How did it change, what went wrong after eight weeks, and what does this tell us about government’s capacity for communication in the public interest? The commitment to public communication on the part of the government was considerable and probably unprecedented in peacetime. The briefings took place each evening at the same time and from the same neutral wood-panelled room with the three wooden lecterns in No. 10 Downing Street. The BBC devoted at least 30 minutes before and after each briefing to explaining and responding to the latest developments and always asked the first question. Briefings were broadcast live on the main

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channel, BBC1, while a signed version appeared on the BBC news channel. Parallel briefings from the devolved nations were broadcast on regional TV.  The format did not vary. There was an opening statement by the Chair of the panel with a brief update on key facts, followed by condolences, acknowledgements and announcements. The senior adviser on the panel then provided a statistical update displayed as slides and the briefing ended with questions from the public (after 27 April), followed by the media. The slides and other forms of data were made available each day on the government website, together with some of the background material from expert committees such as Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE). Concern for the 1.5  m most vulnerable citizens (the so-­called clinically ‘shielding’ group) was demonstrated on 22 March, when Johnson announced that the NHS would write to them all with advice on how to isolate. Parcels of food and essential medicines would be delivered to the homes of those who had no one else to provide for them. At the same briefing, Johnson stated that, in the fight to save jobs, the government would stand behind “British businesses and British workers”—a rare acknowledgement of workers as a group by a Conservative Prime Minister. The campaign achieved high levels of political consensus, media cooperation, public approval and compliance. Audience figures for the daily briefings were significantly higher than average performance for the slot, at one point reaching 27 million across three terrestrial channels, BBC1, ITV and Channel 4, and two digital news channels, BBC News and Sky News (BBC News, 2020). A daily tracker poll found that half those questioned had watched the broadcast by Boris Johnson on 23 March when lockdown was announced, and awareness of the briefings remained above 80% (Statista, 2020). Polls showed that approval ratings for the government’s handling of the pandemic stood at 72% in late March (Opinium, 2020), and this remained high throughout April despite Johnson’s sickness absence after 26 March (Recchia, 2020). In common with other countries that demonstrated strong state action during the pandemic, the UK government appeared to have benefitted from a “non-partisan status-­ quo bias” that had the “positive spill-over effect” of increasing support for democracy and its institutions (Blais et al., 2020). Yet, despite Johnson’s well-known penchant for imitating the wartime Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, and his regular use of wartime metaphors, his leadership during the coronavirus was episodic, even

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considering his absence for a month through illness. Before his absence, Johnson chaired seven of the ten daily briefings (70%). During his absence, the ministers deputising for him at the briefings constantly reinforced his on-going leadership role, and the policy set by him continued. The briefings were discontinued after 23 June as the country started to move out of lockdown,1 perhaps on the assumption that the worst of the pandemic was over. They were then scheduled on an ad hoc basis depending on government requirements, often with very short notice. After Johnson’s return on 27 April, he attended just nine of the briefings (17%), sharing the role with ten other cabinet ministers, of whom only one was female. The health secretary, Matt Hancock, made the most appearances overall with 41 (33%), frequently fielding difficult questions about the failure to source Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) for frontline staff, a lack of control over the epidemic in care homes, and an inadequate test, trace and isolate programme (Garland & Lilleker, 2021). Media critics suggested that the daily briefings ended because the government had tired of the incessant scrutiny, especially once the initial glow of the “rally around the flag” moment gave way to questions about government competence. It is notable that Scotland’s First Minister, the Scottish Nationalist Party (SNP) leader, Nicola Sturgeon, continued her daily briefings into 2021, chairing all but two of the 107 briefings (98%) between 20 March to the end of August 2020. Approval for Sturgeon’s handling of the crisis were consistently higher than Johnson’s as the pandemic progressed (YouGov, 2020).

What Went Wrong? There was a noticeable decline in political consensus, public confidence and media cooperation once the Stay at Home campaign came to an end on 10 May. Government thinking behind the coronavirus campaign in general and the ending of the daily briefings in particular is unclear since such deliberations have remained private, but there was a sudden change of tone at his first broadcast statement on the day Johnson returned to work on 27 April when he told the nation that “we are now beginning to turn the tide.” The country was coming to the end of the first phase and it would soon be time to “fire up the engines of this vast UK economy” (Johnson, 2020b). Favoured newspapers began to talk about a forthcoming broadcast on 10 May when the PM would present a ‘bounce back’ plan for opening up the economy. The broadcast on 10 May announced

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the replacement of Stay at Home with a new slogan, Stay Alert, Control the Virus, Save Lives and presented an early sketch of a ‘roadmap’ for a phased re-opening of schools from 1 June. People who couldn’t work from home were told to return to workplaces. Disagreements over the plan emerged immediately. Polls showed that it was out of step with the public, opposition parties and the media, and there were complaints that it had not been discussed with the devolved administrations or presented to parliament. An opinion poll a week earlier had shown that fewer than one in five people felt that it was safe to reopen schools, restaurants and pubs (Helm et  al., 2020). On 5 May, the UK recorded the largest number of deaths from coronavirus in Europe, at more than 29,000, second globally only to the US. In contrast to Johnson’s claim on 10 May that he had “consulted across the political spectrum, across all four nations of the UK,” the broadcast heralded a rapid deterioration in consensus that was not resolved until the UK and its devolved governments met to agree a joint plan for Christmas 2020. Teaching unions, parents and school authorities too felt excluded from discussions about school re-opening and on 9 June the Education Secretary, Gavin Williamson, had to admit that schools would not open to most pupils as planned until the autumn. The biggest threat to government messaging came with the revelation on 23 May that the PM’s chief adviser, Dominic Cummings, had broken lockdown rules by driving 264  miles from London to Durham at the height of the pandemic together with his wife, who had symptoms of coronavirus, and their young son. No. 10 insisted that his actions were ‘in line’ with government advice. Johnson stoutly defended his chief adviser at a rescheduled appearance at the daily briefing on 24 May, but hostile questions still dominated, and the adviser himself presided over a 90-­minute press briefing in the Downing Street garden on 25 May. A negative media frenzy continued for five days while a minister resigned in protest, more than 40 Conservative MPs called for Cummings to resign, a million people signed a petition for him to be sacked and 180,000 constituents contacted Conservative MPs to complain (Procter et al., 2020). Opinion surveys suggested that this was a turning point in public confidence in the Prime Minister personally but also in the government’s capacity to handle the pandemic (Smith 2020b; Armstrong, 2020; Cartwright, 2020; Fletcher et al., 2020). By the end of September 2020, despite his unassailable 80-seat majority, Johnson was facing unrest and rebellion

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from his own parliamentary party following a series of blunders, policy reversals and contradictory health messages. It was always going to be a greater communication challenge to persuade people to come out of lockdown carefully than to go into it in the first place but a series of over-optimistic campaigns running over the summer exhorting people to ‘Enjoy Summer Safely’, ‘Eat Out, to Help Out and ‘Let’s Get Back’ combined with regional divergences in messaging to cause confusion (Ormesher, 2020). As cases started to climb again from September, the anti-UK government rhetoric presented at the daily briefings in Wales and Scotland found resonance in the north of England, especially in large cities like Liverpool and Manchester, where local government leaders felt overlooked. It was not until the threat to the NHS posed by the new variant and the launch of the mass vaccination programme in December 2020 that the UK government regained the initiative by firmly demonstrating its partnership with the NHS, the vaccine delivery regulator and the scientific community. The public again responded positively—Boris Johnson’s approval rating rose steadily from 34% in mid-November 2020 to 46% by 12 April 2021 (YouGov, 2021).

Conclusion The first stage of the coronavirus information campaign ran for eight weeks from 16 March–10 May 2020 under the slogan, Stay At Home, Protect the NHS, Save Lives. Despite the absence of the Prime Minister for four of those weeks the public health messages were coherent, factual and unified for all citizens in the UK. Through ministers and its chief scientific and medical advisers the government demonstrated a performative commitment to transparency and accountability on a daily basis at the live briefings, fielding difficult questions from the public and media that went to the heart of government competence. Data was presented both at the briefings, through the Public Health England dashboard and online at www.gov.uk, where some of the background advice from the scientific advisory group, SAGE was also provided in response to demand from journalists and members of the public. Care for all sectors of society was displayed, including key workers, rough sleepers, people in care homes, vulnerable children and the most clinically vulnerable (the ‘shielding’ group). Advertising leaders judged the Stay at Home campaign as “one of the most effective messages in the history of government communications,” noting that it achieved awareness levels of 92% (Lee & Spanier,

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2020). This places it on a par with the ground-breaking, Don’t Die of Ignorance HIV campaign of 1987 (Garland, 2019). The early Spring 2020 public information campaign facilitated a successful lockdown that achieved the objectives set out for it, namely, to flatten the curve of the disease and prevent the NHS from becoming overwhelmed. In this sense, the public interest and the interests of the government converged—the public needed clear advice and a place where credible advocates could regularly challenge those in power, and the government needed to demonstrate leadership in the national interest. The fact that the government quickly implemented a public information campaign that went against the grain of its previously adversarial communication practices suggests that this can be achieved if the will is there. The public support for the government’s action, and its approval of the communication approach, suggest that the public responds well to this kind of approach, albeit during a crisis. The government’s campaign was far from flawed but key to the winning of public confidence was clear and consistent explanation, a commitment to the needs of all citizens, and the suspension of partisan or selective forms of communication management. As news on the economy worsened, and stories emerged about the sacrifices people were making, for example, by staying away from loved ones who were sick and dying, journalists began to dig deeper into some of the government’s claims. A crucial article by investigative journalists at The Sunday Times on 19 April examined the internal goings on at No. 10 during the 38 days leading up to the government’s decision to institute the lockdown, accusing Johnson of avoiding and delaying crucial decisions (Calvert et al., 2020). The on-going decline in cases from mid-April onwards and the return of Johnson later in the month offered a tempting opportunity to move the story into more positive territory—the so-called ‘bounce-back’. This is where the UK government began to diverge from the devolved governments, the opposition and the public. If it had held its nerve and remained cautious, worked with the devolved governments to agree to a date for the easing of lockdown and responded more positively to feedback, whether negative or positive, the damage to its reputation, and that of the Prime Minister, would have been mitigated. The experience of Nicola Sturgeon, First Minister for Scotland, who showed consistent leadership, responded quickly to incidents that threatened government messaging, and was not afraid to apologise when things went wrong, presents a salutary contrast to what went wrong after 10 May for the UK government (Garland & Lilleker, 2021).

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After 10 May 2010, the government in general and the Prime Minister in particular gave in to the temptation to break with consensus and change the story. As soon as Johnson returned from his life-threatening bout of coronavirus there was a change in tenor as the approach became both personalised and politicised. The objective was to demonstrate that the PM was back in charge and able to present a positive agenda for recovery. To achieve this, the government reverted to habitual bad practices— extravagant rhetoric, blame attribution, partisan briefing of selected news sources and the placing of ministers’ political and personal needs above the needs of the public. As we have seen in earlier chapters, this approach has been evolving for decades and has become institutionalised. As the new COVID variant threatened to overwhelm the NHS in December 2020, the danger to life and limb tempered the government’s fixation not just with political spin, but a post-truth world in which reality is malleable. Political and public goals came together, allowing Johnson to present himself as a national leader using clear, simple and inclusive messaging and drawing on the support of leading scientific and medical authorities. The NHS-led delivery of the vaccine is demonstrably a world-­ beating programme that can be framed as a British scientific and logistical achievement. Public opinion is moving in a direction that should satisfy a government that was seriously under siege in late autumn. However, in the light of previous experience, it seems likely that, without concerted pressure and an externally driven call for systemic reform, the government, like its predecessors, will return to self-serving communications practices once the crisis is over.

Note 1. After the final daily briefing on 23 June, a No. 10 spokesman announced that: “We’ll continue to hold press conferences to coincide with significant announcements, including with the PM.” See https://www.civilserviceworld.com/professions/article/daily-­coronavirus-­press-­conferences-­scrapped-­ after-­pm-­unveils-­easing-­of-­lockdown-­rules

References Armstrong, M. (2020, April 21). The Coronavirus and Leader Approval Ratings. Statista. https://www.statista.com/chart/21437/coronavirus-­and-­leader-­ approval-­ratings/. Accessed 12 June. Ball, J. (2020, July 21). UK Civil Servants Fear Press Office Centralisation Could ‘Undermine Democracy’. The Guardian. Accessed online. https://www.the-

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guardian.com/politics/2020/jul/21/uk-civil-servants-fear-press-officecentralisation-couldundermine-democracy-boris-johnson BBC News. (2020, March 24). Coronavirus: 27.1 Million Watch PM Boris Johnson’s TV Address. Accessed at https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment­arts-­52018502 Blais, J., Bol, D., Giani, M., & Loewen, P. (2020, May 8). COVID-19 Lockdowns Have Increased Support for Incumbent Parties and Trust in Government. LSE Blog. London School of Economics. Accessed at https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/covid19-­lockdowns-­democracy/ Blumler, J. (2018). The Crisis of Public Communication, 1995–2017. Javnost – The Public, 25(1), 83–92. Calvert, J., Arbuthnot, G., & Leake, J. (2020, April 19). 38 Days when Britain Sleepwalked into Disaster. Sunday Times. https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/coronavirus-­38-­days-­when-­britain-­sleepwalked-­into-­disaster-­hq3b9tlgh. Accessed 15 June 2020. Cartwright, E. (2020, June 3). We Asked People If They Were Breaking Lockdown Rules Before and After the Dominic Cummings Scandal – Here’s What They Told Us. The Conversation. Available at https://theconversation.com CSW. (2020, October 29). Jonathan Slater: I Learned PM Wanted me to Leave DfE Via the Press. Civil Service World. https://www.civilserviceworld.com/news/ article/exdfe-perm-sec-jonathanslater-i-learned-pm-wanted-fresh-official-leadershipvia-the-press Curtis, C. (2019). Everything We Know About What the Public Think of Boris Johnson. YouGov., 23. https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articlesreports/2019/07/23/everything-we-know-about-whatpublic-think-boris-j Dilnot, A. (2011, July 4). Fair Funding for All – The Commission’s Recommendations to Government (Dilnot Commission Report). Department for Health. Fletcher, R., Kalogeropoulos, A., & Neilsen, R. K. (2020, June 1). Trust in UK Government COVID-19 Information Down, Concerns over Misinformation from Government and Politicians Up. Reuters Institute. https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/trust-­u k-­g overnment-­a nd-­n ews-­m edia-­c ovid-­1 9-­ information-­down-­concerns-­over-­misinformation. Accessed 4 June. Garland, R. (2019). Chapter 10: Anticipating the Age of ‘Political Spin’? An Historical Analysis of 1980s Government Communications. In I. Somerville, L.  Edwards, & Ø. Ihlen (Eds.), Public Relations, Society and the Generative Power of History (1st ed.). Routledge. Garland, R. (2021, forthcoming). How the UK Government ‘Turned on a Sixpence’ to Change Its Story  – A Discourse Analysis of the No.10 Daily Coronavirus News Conferences. In Stuart Price & Ben Harbisher (Eds.), Forthcoming Book Power, Media and the Covid-19 Pandemic: Framing Public Discourse. Routledge.

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Garland, R., & Lilleker, D. (2021). UK Government Communication During the Coronavirus: Scotland’s Challenge to the One-nation Narrative. In Peter Van Aelst & Jay Blumler (Eds.), Political Communication in the Time of Coronavirus. Routledge. Gove, M. (2016, June 12). Gove: ‘Britons Have Had Enough of Experts’, on EU: In or Out? Sky News. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGgiGtJk7MA Helm, T., McKie, R., & Jenkins, L. (2020, May 3). Fearful Britons Remain Strongly Opposed to Lifting Coronavirus Lockdown. The Observer. Accessed at https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/02/fearful-­b ritons-­ oppose-­lifting-­lockdown-­schools-­pubs-­restaurants-­opinium-­poll Jankowicz, M. (2019, November 14). Boris Johnson Is ‘Astonishingly Elastic with Truth’, Says Dominic Grieve. The New European. https://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/brexit-news-dominic-grieve-who-would-he-vote-for-61892/ Johnson, B. (2020a, March 2). Boris Johnson Interviewed by Laura Kuenssberg at 10 Downing Street. BBC News. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-51708550 Johnson, B. (2020b, April 27). PM Statement in Downing Street. Accessed at https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/pm-­s tatement-­i n-­d owning-­ street-­27-­april-­2020 Lee, J., & Spanier, G. (2020, May 11). Single-minded and Unavoidable’: How the Government Honed ‘Stay Home’ Message. Campaign. https://www.campaignlive.co.uk/article/single-­minded-­unavoidable-­government-­honed-­stay-­ home-­message/1682448. Accessed 9 Oct 2020. Leveson, B. (2012). An Inquiry into the Culture, Practices and Ethics of the Press (Leveson Report). The Stationary Office (TSO). Maddox, B. (2020, August 27). Gavin Williamson Should Go Too. Institute for Government. https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/blog/gavinwilliamson-should-go-too Mayhew, F. (2020, February 3). Lobby Journalists in Walkout Over Selective Government Briefings Barring Some Titles. Press Gazette. https://www.pressgazette.co.uk/lobby-journalists-walkout-selective-governmentbriefingsbarred-titles/ Norgrove, D. (2017, September 17). Letter to Boris Johnson, Foreign Secretary. UK Statistics Authority. Opinium. (2020, April 27). The Political Report: From the Opinium/Observer Polling Series. Opinium Research. https://www.opinium.com/wp-content/ uploads/2020/05/Opinium-Political-Report-27th-April.pdf Ormesher, E. (2020, September 14). How the UK Government’s Coronavirus Messaging Has Developed Over the Summer. Red G Consultancy. http://redg.co/ how-the-uk-governments-coronavirus-messaging-has-developed-over-the-summer/ Powell, J. (2020, June 29). The Johnson-Cummings War on the Civil Service Is Very Troubling It Looks Like the Start of a Rolling Coup Against Institutions. The Independent. https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/boris-johnsondominic-cummings-civil-servicewar-mark-sedwill-judiciary-a9591721.html

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Procter, K., Murray, J., & Brooks, L. (2020). Constituents Bombard MPs with Thousands of Emails Over Dominic Cummings. The Guardian. June 29. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/may/29/constituents-bombardmps-with-180000-emails-about-dominiccummings Recchia, G. (2020, April 21). Coronavirus: New Survey Suggests UK Public Supports a Long Lockdown. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/ coronavirus-new-survey-suggests-uk-public-supports-along-lockdown-136767 Rutter, J. (2020, July 3). The Dangers of No.10s Attempt to Take Back Control of Government Communications. Institute for Government. https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/blog/no10-control-governmentcommunications Shipman, T. (2020, February 16). No 10 Tells BBC Licence Fee Will be Scrapped. The Times. https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/no-10-tells-bbc-licence-feewill-be-scrappedhzwb9bzsx Smith, B. (2020a, October 22). Boris Johnson’s Spad Reforms ‘Disempowering Ministers and Weakening Government’. Civil Service World. https://www. civilserviceworld.com/news/article/boris-johnsons-spad-reformsdisempoweringministers-and-weakening-decision-making Smith, M. (2020b). Approval of Government Handling of COVID-19 Hits New Low. YouGov. Available at https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-­ reports/2020/09/17/approval-­government-­handling-­coronavirus-­sinks-­low Statista. (2020, July 20). Did You Watch the UK Government’s Daily Coronavirus Briefing? Statista Research Department. Accessed at https://www.statista. com/statistics/1111869/government-­coronavirus-­briefing-­audience-­uk/ Walker, B. (2020, February 26). ‘Part-time PM’: Corbyn Criticises Johnson’s Response to Floods. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/ world/2020/apr/19/michael-gove-fails-to-deny-pm-missedfive-coronaviruscobra-meetings YouGov. (2020, July 27). Which Country Do You Think Has Handled the Coronavirus Outbreak Better Between England and Scotland?. YouGov. h t t p s : / / y o u g o v. c o . u k / t o p i c s / p o l i t i c s / s u r v e y -­r e s u l t s / d a i l y / 2020/07/23/29884/2 YouGov. (2021, April 12). Boris Johnson Approval Rating. YouGov. https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/trackers/boris-­johnson-­approval-­rating

CHAPTER 12

Conclusion: Putting the Public First

This book has used the testimony of insiders concerned with government’s relations with media to argue that the post-war checks and balances put in place to maintain trust in government communication, however minimal, were increasingly bypassed and ignored as elected and unelected officials in political institutions responded to the pressures of mediatization. The prologue established the problem today as one of a serious and progressive loss of public trust in governments, taking the Iraq War and the demands of Brexit as case studies. The problem was identified as a cleavage between two driving factors—the need to present evidence and the desire to argue for particular policy actions. The imperative to deploy selective government information for short-term political and personal ends has until recently appeared unassailable, but evidence from the coronavirus crisis has suggested that, in extremis, an inclusive and public-­ facing communication process that draws on facts and evidence is capable of building credibility and public trust. However, once the immediate crisis has passed, is it inevitable that lessons learned will be conveniently forgotten, as happened after the dust settled on the disastrous campaign to promote the 2003 invasion of Iraq? In the UK as in other liberal democracies, the challenge of public communication by governments has been managed through an elite and largely self-regulating partnership between partisan and impartial institutions and agents that was set up after WW2 to win back public trust following public cynicism at wartime propaganda. Yet, this was never an © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 R. Garland, Government Communications and the Crisis of Trust, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77576-6_12

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equal partnership. A small and relatively weak cadre of information professionals was given the task of keeping government communication ‘honest’, just as mass media were becoming less deferential and more powerful. This consensus, albeit one maintained on a ‘good chaps’ basis between and within elites, was progressively challenged by media proliferation and politicians’ response to it. This gathered steam after 1979 with relatively subtle and largely hidden institutional changes that recognised and responded to the expanding media environment, but was rapidly accelerated by the post-1997 Blair governments. A deep sense of crisis developed in the relations between governments, media and the public. The rise of political spin led to resistance from civil servants who still held to post-war notions of impartiality, in theory at least. Further criticism of this move to a more promotional orientation towards government news management emanated from parliament and the media. In the ensuing power struggle governing politicians won the internal battle, insidiously and cumulatively restructuring the bureaucratic landscape in their favour to ensure greater responsiveness from civil servants to their personal and partisan needs. Parliamentary oppositions complained but once in government, continued the process. The senior civil service watched these developments with concern but seemed powerless to intervene effectively. Having been traditionally disdained as a separate service-­ within-­a-service, the Government’s public communication function was permitted by the mainstream senior civil service to ‘fall into the hands’ of governing politicians. The moment that resistance began to bear fruit and change became possible was in 2004, with the publication of the Independent Review of Government Communications (Phillis Report). The review established a set of principles that enshrined impartiality, accepted the professional autonomy of government communications as a discipline and called for an explicit recognition of the public interest as a priority. Its findings were accepted at the time but taking a ‘year zero’ approach to history, the post-2010 governments shelved the report and put some of the reforms arising from it into reverse. It plays no observable part in the regulation of or discussion about government communication today. While parliament, ministers, civil servants and the media fought for what they saw as ‘the soul’ of government communication, the public remained bystanders, becoming increasingly disillusioned with media, political and government elites. Public trust in governments has demonstrably declined in recent decades, but evidence suggests that distrust of

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elites is not universal. The public increasingly value what they see as impartial sources of public information, such as scientists, lawyers, doctors and other experts, including civil servants. In this sense, public trust continues to be linked to impartiality. It follows then, that some degree of impartiality on the part of all public servants, both elected and unelected, is essential to the flow of information within a liberal democracy. This was demonstrated during the US election crisis of November 2020–January 2021 when the actions of individuals who held key positions within the public administration managed to successfully resist demands from the outgoing President Trump to overturn a legitimate election result. Whitehall has been shown to be both resilient and fragile—it can bend and shape to the will of governing politicians—but in a majoritarian system where a team of ministers is led by an increasingly powerful Prime Minister, it can also be manipulated and permanently restructured to suit the interests of the government of the day. It has been argued throughout this book that the post-war government information system lacked formal public accountability and transparency, that those in senior positions within the information system are vulnerable and easily suppressed and that a new semi-official layer of media relations operatives has been introduced without sufficient on-going scrutiny or effective sanction. The service is now a de facto integrated service that includes but does not officially recognise the news management role of ministers through their special advisers. During a period of intense mediatization over the past three decades, the government communication service has not demonstrated enough resilience to deliver a public communications function consistent with even its own very limited stated purposes. The findings here suggest that government’s communications with the media, taken as a whole and including the contribution of special advisers, now over-serves the needs of ministers, especially the Prime Minister, and under-services the needs of the public. Much of the government’s news management now takes place ‘under the radar’ and has become so normalised and institutionalised that it even threatened to undermine the achievements of the government’s coronavirus campaign. These developments go far beyond accusations of political spin by politicians and media relations practitioners, or collusion by journalists. It is clear that the status quo is unsatisfactory because it does not fulfil public needs. If the system itself is not refreshed a drift towards further politicisation and untrustworthiness is likely to continue. There are at least three main options for

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change: to return to the post-war settlement, to accept the drift towards a politicised communications service but make this explicit or to restate the importance of public values in government communication and update these to take account of the new media/political environment. I would argue that the latter is preferable since it builds on the strengths of the current system, involves a recognition of both political and administrative dimensions and is broadly understood by the public. To reinvigorate public values in government communication is not straightforward. It will require both a restatement of principles and the introduction of new institutional machinery. The Phillis Report identified the former as they applied in 2004 but did not instigate sufficient institutional machinery, and although still relevant today, its findings would need to be refreshed to take account of political and media developments in the interim. As a first step, a public understanding of the principles underlying government communication is required at three levels: the public, parliament and the governing bureaucracy. The Phillis Report stated that, as one of three minimum requirements, the interests of the general public should be paramount in any programme to modernise government communications. This would require a transparent consultative mechanism for genuinely identifying public concerns, wishes and demands. The second minimum requirement was the strengthening of communications leadership within the central governing bureaucracy that would enable Directors of Communications and Permanent Secretaries to intervene in the case of Ministers pursuing personal agendas that are likely to lead to politically biased or misleading use of information. The third requirement stated that senior communicators should be protected from losing their jobs when governments change. This calls for a strengthened communication leadership both at No. 10 and in departments that draw on civil service impartiality and professional principles of public communication as they now apply in today’s digitised and datafied media environment. A publicly unaccountable and politically-­ led body such as the Government Communications Board based at the Cabinet Office does not fulfil these functions. At the very least, communications professionals within government must be given the autonomy to ensure that they can use professional judgment to deploy the full range of modern communications tools, techniques and approaches aimed at reaching all citizens, not just the channels that seem expedient for short-­ term political survival. There should be an acknowledgement that informing the public and being accountable to citizens requires significant

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resources and the setting out of publicly sourced and framed priorities rather than the ritual denigration of public communication by new governments as a way of symbolising a ‘get tough’ approach to political spin. Parliament must be seen to publicly hold governments to account for their custodianship of this most politically-sensitive of public goods—the public communications function. It could also potentially offer a bridge between public concerns and governments. The Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Select Committee is responsible for overseeing the work of the civil service and has been vociferous in its concern in relation to government communications since its first report in 1998. It should be given the explicit task of firstly restating and updating a public framework for government communications along the lines of the Phillis Report, and incorporating a widespread public consultation exercise, that acknowledges and incorporates the media and communications responsibilities of special advisers and the transformation in the media environment during the past 20 years. This new framework should establish clear and externally-validated criteria for regularly and routinely assessing the propriety of government communications, as well as a transparent internal system for overseeing complaints, including public complaints, and providing redress, and, if necessary, sanctions. The Committee should also undertake a review of the composition, deliberations and decisions of a newly constituted strategic government communications board that would have the power of scrutiny over changes to propriety codes, approval of the annual communications plan, and the appointment of the Head of Profession and other senior officials within the Government Communications Service. Such deliberations should be reported back and discussed at least annually by the Committee. The House of Lords Communications and Digital Committee is the only parliamentary body that focuses on the communications function and it could be argued that a similar House of Commons Committee should be constituted. Chilcot warned that lasting damage to public trust in government statements had resulted from “a widespread perception” that argument had been presented as fact. Changing times will bring new pressures, but the answer is surely not to abandon any notion of a place of common interests or allow it to shrink and decay through cynicism or lack of attention, but to constantly refresh and replenish it. This is not the task of governing politicians or public servants alone although they have a legitimate part to play. It is one that must also be embraced by parliament on behalf of all citizens.



Appendix: Interviewees in Order of Appearance

IV1  – Bernard Ingham. Prime Minister’s Press Secretary, 1979–1990. Served 1967–1990. Interviewed 14/11/2013. IV2  – Siobhan Kenny, Director of Communications, Department for Culture, Media and Sport, 2000–2005. Served 1994–2005. Interviewed 18/11/2013. IV3 – Senior leadership role. Served 1975–2008. Interviewed 17/6/2014. IV4  – Director of Communications until 2011. Served 1991–2011. Interviewed 6/8/2014. IV5  – Howell James, first Permanent Secretary, Government Communications. Served between 1985–2008. Interviewed 7/1/2014. IV6  – Jonathan Haslam, Chief Press Secretary to John Major. Served 1978–1998. Interviewed 6/12/2013. IV7 – Robin Butler, Cabinet Secretary. Served 1961–1998. Interviewed 12/11/2013. IV8  – Senior official, Cabinet Office. Served 1986–2008. Interviewed 3/2/2015. IV9 – Departmental press officer (1999–2004). Interviewed 2/12/2013. IV10 – Nick Timmins, specialist correspondent, Times, Independent and FT (1981–2012). Interviewed 14/4/2014. IV11 – Freelance business journalist (1991-date). Interviewed 9/4/2014. IV12 – Chris Moncrieff, Political reporter, then editor, Press Association (1962–1994). Interviewed 27/1/2014. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 R. Garland, Government Communications and the Crisis of Trust, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77576-6

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Appendix: Interviewees in Order of Appearance

IV13  – Jon Silverman, BBC reporter then Home Affairs/Legal Affairs correspondent (1972–2002). Interviewed 9/11/2014. IV14  – David Brindle, Public Services Editor, Guardian (1988  – date). Interviewed 14/8/2014. IV15 – Nicholas Jones, BBC industrial and senior political correspondent (1968–2002). Interviewed 31/7/2014. IV16  – Departmental Deputy Director and Head of News. Served 2001–2014. Interviewed 2/2/2015. IV17  – Departmental Director of Communication. Served 2001–2014. Interviewed 10/9/2015. IV18  – Departmental Press Officer (2010–2014). Interviewed 6/11/2014. IV19  – Bill Bush, Labour Special Adviser (1999–2005). Interviewed 26/6/2015. IV20 – Special adviser (2010–2013). Interviewed 15/7/2015. IV21  – Nick Hillman, Conservative Special Adviser (2006–2013). Interviewed 20/5/2015. IV22  – Nadine Smith, Chief Press Secretary, Cabinet Office. Served 1998–2009. Interviewed 10/9/2014. IV23 – Strategy Director (1998–2010). Interviewed 3/12/2013. IV24 – Departmental press officer (1999–2011). Interviewed 25/9/2013. IV25 – Senior Economist, Business Department. Interviewed 13/2/2015. IV26  – Strategic Communications Adviser (2008–10). Interviewed 10/9/2014.

Index1

A Accountability media, 158 structures, 2, 11, 118 Advisers, see Special advisers (SpAds) Aiken, Alex, 93, 141, 146, 149 Allan, Sir Alex, 64, 165 Archives/archiving, 5, 24, 44, 46n1, 52, 116, 141, 152n1 Armstrong, Robert, 112 Atlee, Clement, 156 Aucoin, Peter, 124, 134 Autonomy, of civil servants, see Civil servants, autonomy B BBC, 2, 5, 34, 51, 60, 61, 63, 76, 78, 80, 130, 148, 173–178 Blair, Tony, 3–9, 11, 21, 25, 30, 33, 39, 41, 42, 51–65, 70, 73, 77,

88, 93, 95, 98, 107–109, 113, 130, 131, 142, 147, 148, 155, 156, 159, 160, 188 Iraq War (2003), 3–8, 155 as shadow Trade Secretary, 51 sofa government, 4 Blame, 54, 56, 59, 70, 110, 114, 115, 147, 155, 166, 183 Blumler, Jay, 11, 125, 177 Boundary/boundaries, 8, 20, 21, 78, 91, 110, 127, 128, 131, 162 Brexit (the process of the UK leaving the European Union), 2, 8–11, 133, 175, 187 Brindle, David, 60, 61, 71, 75, 77, 79 Brooks, Rebekah (nee Wade), 108 Bureaucracy, 1, 11, 17–19, 62, 71, 72, 111–116, 126, 134, 159, 174, 190 bureaucratic rationality, 124 Bush, Bill, 80, 98

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1

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196 

INDEX

Bush, G.W. (President), see United States (media/politics of), Bush, George W. Butler report, the, 8, 10, 162 Butler, Robin, 3, 8, 22, 52, 54, 58, 87, 88, 90, 91, 94, 99, 101, 116, 128, 146, 162 C Cabinet Office, The, 4, 21, 28, 36, 37, 72, 73, 79, 81, 88, 91, 93, 97, 127, 129, 130, 132, 133, 144, 145, 150, 155, 190 Cabinet Secretary/Secretaries, see Armstrong, Robert; Butler, Robin; Kerslake, Bob; Sedwill, Mark; Wilson, Richard Cameron, David, 33, 51–65, 72, 73, 90, 93, 95, 109, 130, 131, 163 Campbell, Alastair, 4–7, 19, 29, 36, 38, 42, 53, 54, 56–59, 71, 75, 91, 92, 95, 98, 99, 107, 108, 113, 144, 149 Central Office of Information (COI) closure, 21, 28, 93, 145, 150, 152n2 Taylor, Neville, 52 Chilcot report conclusions of, 70 John Chilcot, 8, 70 Christopherson, Romola, 60, 75, 76 Churn, see Civil servants Civil servants autonomy, 83, 155 briefing against, 133 bullying of, 9 churn, 56, 60, 62, 64, 71, 156 disdain/contempt for, 18, 24, 53 dismissal/sacking, 9, 174 increasingly trusted, 123 loyalty, 160 relations with ministers, 114, 135

resignation, 9 resistance, 53, 88, 90, 112, 188 Civil service change of government, preparation for/response to, 62, 113 code, 22, 37, 64, 81, 132 communications (see Government communications) leadership, 73, 175 neutrality (see Impartiality) reform, 87, 90, 133, 155 senior, 64, 81, 112, 155, 188 Collusion, 3, 40, 54, 78, 110, 118, 189 Conservative Party/Conservatives, the, 9, 29, 30, 33, 35–37, 40, 42, 43, 45, 51, 60, 62, 69, 70, 72, 73, 80, 82, 91, 95, 107, 108, 133, 144, 156, 178, 180 Cook, Timothy, 17, 116, 123 Couldry, Nick, 109, 110 Coulson, Andy, 72, 108, 109 Covid-19, 11, 12, 125, 126, 165, 173, 175, 176, 178–180 daily government briefings, 175, 179 ‘Stay At Home’ message, 179–181 U-turns, 148 vaccination, 176, 181 vaccine, 181, 183 Crisis, 1–12, 18, 70, 71, 81, 89, 110, 123, 124, 134, 165, 176, 179, 182, 183, 187–189 in public communication, 134 Cull, see Civil servants, churn Cummings, Dominic, 19, 38, 69–71, 73, 174, 175, 180 D Daily Mail, The, 34, 59, 83 Daily Telegraph, The, 61

 INDEX 

Davis, Aeron, 23, 110, 111 Democracy, 1, 11, 72, 109, 113, 115, 117, 123–125, 134, 135, 157, 166, 174, 178, 187, 189 Democratic scrutiny/accountability, 1, 2, 11, 12, 20, 28–30, 81, 82, 89, 118, 123–135, 145, 149–151, 157, 158, 173, 177, 181, 189 Departments (government), 20, 73, 74, 78, 80, 81, 89, 112, 116, 144, 146, 150, 162, 164 Directors (or Heads) of Information, see Directors of Communication Directors of Communication relations with ministers, 28 vulnerability, 28 Discourse/s, 43, 56, 70, 115, 145, 158 Dobson, Frank, 59, 60 Donnelly, Martin, 132, 146 Dossier, see Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction, Report on E Elections, see General elections Elite/s, 8, 18, 46, 54, 72, 111, 115, 117, 124, 132, 187–189 European Union (EU), 2, 8, 10, 42, 55, 110, 162, 164, 165, 176 F Facts, 7, 8, 10, 23, 28, 33, 45, 88, 117, 126, 130, 131, 155–157, 159–162, 164, 166, 178, 182, 187, 191 Fake news, see News Foreign Office (FCO), 5–7, 128, 161, 162 Foster, Christopher, 90, 112

197

G General Elections, 2, 5, 8–11, 19, 29, 30, 33–35, 37, 38, 40, 42, 43, 51, 55–57, 62–64, 77, 87, 90–93, 111, 116, 130, 143, 156, 161, 174, 175, 189 Gould, Philip, 56 Government communications Government Communication Network (GCN), 30n1, 146, 174 Government Communication Service (GCS), 18, 19, 21–23, 28, 30n1, 46, 53, 63, 71, 79, 80, 88, 90, 93, 100, 140, 141, 143–146, 150, 152, 155, 174, 189–191 (see also Government Communications Board (GCS Board)) Government Communications Plans, 52 Government Information and Communication Service (GICS), 27, 30n1, 71, 93, 100, 129, 141, 161, 174 Government Information Service (GIS), 2, 3, 5, 6, 9–11, 17–29, 30n1, 38, 39, 41, 45, 51–53, 56, 57, 64, 71–75, 77–79, 82, 87, 88, 90–97, 100, 101n1, 109, 114, 116, 117, 123, 126–129, 135, 139–141, 143, 145–151, 156, 159, 160, 162–164, 166, 174, 177, 181, 182, 187–190 Government Communications Board (GCS Board), 145, 190 Government propriety and ethics, see Propriety and ethics Granatt, Mike, 21, 101n1, 141 Gregory, Anne, 29, 145, 150, 151

198 

INDEX

H Hancock, Matt, 165, 179 Haslam, Jonathan, 41, 91, 92, 127, 146 Hennessy, Peter, 4, 25, 33–35, 39, 44 Hepp, Andreas, 109, 110, 115, 159 Heseltine, Michael, 42, 44 Hillman, Nick, 73, 80, 98 Historical institutionalism, 17 Home Office, The, 42, 63, 76, 77 Hood, Christopher, 5, 21, 58, 73, 110, 114, 132, 139, 150 House of Lords Communication Committee, The/House of Lords Communication and Digital Committee, 27, 97, 140, 191 Hussain, Saddam, 2–7, 70, 159, 160 Hutton (report), 3, 22 I Impartiality ingredient in public trust, 123, 124, 135 the line, 127–130 threats to (downgrading of), 83, 87 Independent Review of Government Communications, see Phillis Report Information, see Government communications, Government Information Service (GIS) Ingham, Bernard, 19, 23, 24, 33, 35–41, 44, 46n1, 52, 56, 90, 94, 95, 98, 100, 113, 131, 144, 146, 149, 156 Institute for Government (IFG), 70, 134, 175 Iraq dossier, 2002, see Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Iraq Inquiry, see Chilcot Report Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction, 22, 140, 141, 159–161

Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction, Report on, 3–8, 10, 22, 88, 128, 139–142, 159–163 J James, Howell, 25, 41, 43, 92, 101n1, 125, 126, 143, 146 Jenkin, Bernard, 133 Johnson, Boris, 2, 3, 8–12, 17, 19, 29, 38, 56, 63, 64, 69, 70, 73, 82, 87, 90, 107, 144, 146, 155, 164–166, 173–183 Jones, Nicholas, 61, 71, 73, 74, 78, 114, 130, 165 Journalism, 82, 110, 128, 158, 164, 166 Journalists, 116, 130 journalist-source relations, 1, 5, 17, 26, 60, 75, 76, 78–80, 82, 87, 88, 107, 114, 116, 139, 141, 156, 158, 159, 161, 163, 174, 179, 183, 189 political correspondents/’the lobby, 41, 173 relations with politicians, 2, 23, 43, 54, 60, 74, 75, 80, 89, 99, 107, 108, 110, 115, 117, 134 unattributable/selective briefing, 118 K Kelly, David, 141, 160 Kenny, Siobhan, 40, 58, 96, 147 Kerslake, Bob, 73, 133 L Labour Party, 2, 10, 11, 18, 28, 30, 38, 40, 45, 51, 56–60, 73, 78, 92, 98, 129

 INDEX 

Leveson Inquiry, The, 34, 43, 72, 107, 108, 158, 174 Liaison Committee on the Presentation of Government Policy, The/ Liaison Committee, 36, 38, 39, 44, 70 Liberal democracy, see Democracy Logic of appropriateness, 19 M Mackenzie, Kelvin, 40, 43 Macnamara, Jim, 56, 143 Majoritarian government, 125, 189 Major, John, 11, 25, 30, 33–46, 53, 57, 58, 61, 91, 107, 144, 146, 147 dislike of press, 43 Economic, Domestic Coordination and Presentation. Committee (EDCP), 44 resignation, ‘back me or sack me,’ 43 Mandelson, Peter, 92, 107, 108 Maude, Francis, 83n1, 93, 133, 167n1 May, Theresa, 52, 69, 73, 145, 161, 165 Media accountability, 124, 158 expansion, 23, 57, 70 frenzy, 116, 161, 180 hostility, 61, 94 scrutiny, 82, 101, 110, 118, 189 24 hour, 45, 76, 109 (see also News, 24/7) Media relations rules of engagement/terms of trade, 54, 55, 76 storytelling, 28, 159 Mediatization culture of, 134, 159, 166 impact of, 125 meta-process, 18, 109

199

Meyer, Christoper, 40, 44, 115 Ministerial Code, The, formerly Questions of Procedure for Ministers (QPM), 21, 39, 64, 73 Ministers, 2, 20, 35, 54, 71, 82, 88, 107, 124, 139, 155, 173, 188 fear of media, 118 relations with civil servants (see Civil servants) Ministry of Information (MOI), 19 MIO, see Meeting of Information Officers Moncrieff, Chris, 60, 75 Moore, Jo, 128 Moore, Martin, 19, 22, 128, 140, 149 Mountfield Review, The, 92 Murdoch, Rupert, 34, 43, 44, 108 private meeting with John Major, 43 N New Labour, see Labour Party News fake, 158 grid, 61, 78 management, 17, 70, 82, 88, 97, 98, 114, 139, 140, 188, 189 24/7, 7, 11, 12, 107–118 No.10 (Number 10 Downing Street), 6, 7, 9, 10, 17, 19, 23, 25, 36, 40–42, 44, 45, 54, 58, 69, 73, 74, 77, 80–82, 89, 91, 94, 96, 98, 99, 101, 108, 113, 146, 156, 161, 174, 175, 177, 180, 182, 183n1, 190 O O’Donnell, Gus, 35, 41 Official statements/the official line, 74, 79–81 Officials, see Civil Servants

200 

INDEX

P Page, Edward, 112, 113, 124 Pandemic, see Covid-19 Parliament committees (see Public Administration Select Committee (PASC), The/ Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee (PACAC)) Permanent campaign, 145 brought into government, 5, 53 Permanent Secretary, Government Communications, see James, Howell; Tee, Matt Persuasion/persuasive, 7, 8, 35, 38, 46, 52, 56, 88, 89, 110, 143, 159, 164 Phillis Report, 25, 188 principles of good government communications, 177 suppression of, 190 Political bias, 38, 39, 52, 81 Political communication, 21, 53, 111, 115, 145 Political parties, 89, 110, 111, 113, 123 Political spin, 1, 4, 7, 9, 11, 12, 29, 34, 35, 45, 53–56, 61, 78, 87–101, 109–111, 114, 115, 118, 124, 130, 131, 155, 157–166, 176, 183, 188, 189, 191 Politicians fear of media, 118 relations with journalists, 6, 108, 115, 116 Politicisation, 57, 71, 91, 100, 124, 134, 139, 152, 156, 189 Popular/tabloid press, 45, 46, 109 Post-truth, 9, 12, 29, 110, 124, 155–166, 183

Powell, Jonathan, 57, 63, 87, 107, 174 Power abuse of, 108 balance of, 28, 46, 78, 113, 124 communicative, 126 of media/newspapers, 1, 82, 111 Presentation of government policy, 20, 46n1, 88, 144 See also Liaison Committee on the Presentation of Government Policy, The/ Liaison Committee Press/newspapers phone hacking, 107, 108 political bias, 38, 39, 52, 81 Press office, departmental, 19, 21, 58, 74, 80, 91 Press office, No.10, 7, 9, 10, 17, 19, 23, 25, 36, 40–42, 44, 45, 54, 58, 63, 73, 74, 77, 80–82, 89, 91, 94, 96, 98, 99, 101, 108, 113, 146, 156, 161, 174, 175, 177, 180, 182, 183n1, 190 Press officers, government relations with journalists, 54, 59 relations with ministers, 54 relations with special advisers, 54 Press Secretary, Prime Minister’s, see Campbell, Alastair; Coulson, Andy; Haslam, Jonathan; Ingham, Bernard; O’Donnell, Gus; Meyer, Christopher Promotional, 2–4, 8, 57, 89, 110, 157, 161, 188 Propaganda, 4, 18–20, 29, 46, 83, 95, 112, 131, 149–151, 156, 187 Propriety and ethics code of Conduct for special advisers, 79 GCS propriety code, 21 impropriety, 51, 127

 INDEX 

the line, 127 Ministerial code, 21, 39, 73 Public communication/information, 1–3, 9–12, 17, 18, 20, 27–29, 51, 52, 54–56, 82, 83, 97, 109, 110, 123–125, 134, 139, 140, 142, 146, 147, 149, 151, 157, 166, 173, 176, 177, 182, 187–191 interest, 1, 9, 27, 29, 109, 132, 142, 149, 157, 177, 182, 188 invisible/marginalized, 11, 77 opinion, 6, 35, 37, 82, 83, 123, 125, 183 purposes of government communication, 139, 141, 149 sphere, 29, 89 trust, 1–3, 11, 12, 17, 70, 81, 110, 115, 117, 124, 125, 128, 134, 135, 151, 155, 160, 187–189, 191 values, 3, 12, 29, 124–126, 139, 151, 190 Public Administration Select Committee (PASC), The/Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee (PACAC), 21, 27, 54, 59, 79, 82, 92, 93, 128, 131, 140, 146 Public relations (PR), see Strategic Communication Public servant, see Civil servants R Reardon, Steve, 59, 64, 92, 93 Reporters, see Journalists Resilience, 19, 24, 28, 58, 139, 189 Resistance, 12, 25, 53, 59, 65, 87, 88, 90–96, 99, 100, 112, 115, 124, 188

201

Responsiveness, 113, 188 Rhodes, Roderick, 112, 116 Rosanvallon, Pierre, 124 Rutnam, Philip, 63, 64 Rutter, Jill, 146, 156, 174 S Saddam, see Hussain, Saddam Sanders, Karen, 23, 25, 34, 41, 53, 82 Scammell, Margaret, 21, 39 Scarlett, Sir John, 6, 7 Secretary of State, 57, 59, 60, 62, 81, 99, 116, 147, 164, 174 Sedwill, Mark, 10, 174 Self-regulation, 29, 30, 149, 157, 166 Silverman, Jon, 60, 76, 77 Smith, Nadine, 129 Sources, see Journalist-source relations Special advisers (SpAds) media briefing/media intermediaries, 5, 9, 21, 28, 46, 74, 76, 79, 81, 94, 133, 140, 156 role and influence, 21, 28, 65, 114 under Blair, 73 under Cameron, 90, 95 under Johnson, 69, 90, 146 See also Blair, Tony; Cameron, David; Johnson, Boris Spin, see Political spin Statistics, 126, 130, 164–165, 173, 175 Strategic communication, 11, 17, 23, 24, 26, 36, 53, 55, 56, 80, 82, 89, 110, 111, 115–117, 125, 126, 141, 144, 160, 161, 166 Straw, Jack, 4, 6, 7, 77, 108 Stromback, Jesper, 23, 111, 115 Sun newspaper, The, 34, 40, 43, 108, 160

202 

INDEX

T Tee, Matt, 93 Thatcher, Margaret, 11, 23, 25, 30, 33–46, 51, 52, 56, 94, 95, 99, 112, 113 Chief press secretary (see Ingham, Bernard) meeting with Murdoch (see Murdoch, Rupert) neoliberalism, 35 relations with newspaper editors and owners, 34 television, 34, 42 Thorbjornsrud, Kiersti, 116, 117 Times/Sunday Times, The, 25, 34, 44, 59, 60, 63, 75, 174, 182 Timmins, Nick, 59, 75, 76 Transparency, 78, 139, 161, 177, 181, 189 Trump, Donald, see United States (media/politics of) Truth ambiguous, 162 battle for, 161–164 claims, 160, 166 creative approach to, 161 multi-faceted, 163 Truthful spin, 159–161

U UK Statistics Authority (UKSA), see Statistics United States (media/politics of) Bush, George W., 4, 6, 160 Trump, Donald, 156, 158, 161, 165, 166, 189 White House, the, 6 W Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs), 2–4, 6, 70, 142, 159, 160, 162 45-minute claim, 5, 7, 160 See also Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction, Report on Whitehall, 4, 9, 17, 19–22, 29, 36, 38, 52, 59, 62, 63, 65, 75, 77, 82, 88–90, 98, 113, 116, 133, 189 Whitelaw, Willie, 94 Whiteley, Paul, 3, 123 Williams, John, 5–8, 128, 161–163 Wilson, Richard, 4, 72, 140 Witness accounts, 18, 24, 54, 71, 87, 109, 158 Wood, Andy, 64, 65 Y Yeung, Karen, 118, 159