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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
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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 main-
tain 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 sup-
ported 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.
v
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
vii
viii Contents
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
Contents ix
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 Principles and functions of government communications 142

Table 9.2 The public purposes of government communications—A
summary of findings from government and parliamentary
inquiries into government communication 149
Table 9.3 What’s in a Name? From GIS to GCS 150
xi
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 representa-
tive 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 insti-
tutions 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 gov-
ernments 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 inter-
est and public accountability in a democracy?
This book aims to open up the ‘black box’ of government communica-
tions 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 exis-
tential threat from a rapacious and rapidly expanding media, governing
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2021
R. Garland, Government Communications and the Crisis of Trust,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77576-6_1
2 R. GARLAND
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 ques-
tionable promotional practices, and to use their access to privileged infor-
mation 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 reveal-
ing 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 communica-
tion 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 cam-
paign 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 cleav-
age, culminating in the seven-year Chilcot Inquiry into the lead up to and
1 PROLOGUE: THE CRISIS OF TRUST 3
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 pro-
cesses that underpin civil service impartiality in the conduct of govern-
ments’ 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 informa-
tion relating to Saddam’s chemical, biological and nuclear arsenal. In prac-
tice, 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 promo-
tional campaign leading up to the 2003 war resulted in a “damaging leg-
acy, 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
4 R. GARLAND
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 consen-
sus 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 proce-
dures were neglected: “I never approved of the way Tony ran the govern-
ment. 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,
2002, p. 4), a claim which arose a few weeks before the dossier was pub-
lished 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 rela-
tively 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 pro-
cess that is documented later in this book. As is evident from Williams’
6 R. GARLAND
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 intel-
ligence. 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 uncertain-
ties.” 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 pub-
lish 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 confer-
ence 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
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 ques-
tion 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 bat-
tle being waged above him (Garnett, 2010; Kuhn, 2007).
8 R. GARLAND
The cautiously-worded yet critical Butler report of 2004 into the qual-
ity 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 fur-
ther, describing the then government as “dysfunctional,” and its “disre-
gard 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 gov-
erning 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 communica-
tions 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 transgres-
sions, blurring of boundaries, inflammatory rhetoric and contradictions of
fact that have characterised this period are so extraordinary and unprece-
dented that historians, journalists and media and political observers will be
kept busy for decades. Within a time span of 148 days between the
declaration of Boris Johnson’s leadership campaign on 12 June 2019, to

the official start of the General Election campaign on 6 November, virtu-
ally 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 communica-
tions 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 train-
ing 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 propri-
ety 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
10 R. GARLAND
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 ser-
vants, because it was against the rules preventing civil servants from par-
ticipating 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 com-
munications, 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 bureau-
cratic 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 call-
ing 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).
Early observations of the actions of the 2019 Johnson government sug-

gest that either such lessons have not been learned, or that the lessons
have proved to be too inconvenient and constraining for successive gov-
ernments 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 communica-
tion 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 pre-
senting 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 pro-
vide an in-depth, longitudinal study of the role of the ostensibly impartial
UK government information service from the point of view of those who
12 R. GARLAND
occupied key roles within it after 1997, looking at the rise of politically
appointed media strategists, and the response from bureaucrats and parlia-
mentarians. 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 commu-
nication 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 them-
selves 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 govern-
ment 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 compre-
hensive? 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 participa-
tion in a national programme of mass behaviour change. What does the
public response tell us about how to rebuild trust in democratic govern-
ment 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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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 inter-
ests) over time (Bannerman & Haggart, 2015, p. 10). The particular insti-
tutional 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 com-
munication 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 con-
troversy surrounding the ways in which modern governments communi-
cate with citizens are widespread in today’s democratic societies.

Switzerland AG 2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77576-6_2
18 R. GARLAND
As the previous chapter showed, the steady undermining of the distinc-

tion 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 institu-
tions/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 illumi-
nation 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 govern-
ment 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 citi-
zens today? As a relatively small and separate network within a huge gov-
erning 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 for-
mer 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?
2 HOW DID WE GET HERE? 19
Whitehall: Resilient Yet Fragile

Many British political institutions are known for their longevity and resil-
ience. Such institutions as Whitehall, the monarchy, the judiciary and par-
liament 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 con-
cerns 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 organiz-
ing capacities” within a given bureaucracy, helps to conceptualise the rela-
tions 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) controver-
sial 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).
20 R. GARLAND
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 port-
folio 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 ben-
efits outweighed the risks. Although “the boundaries between informa-
tion, 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 com-
munications specialists who are distinct from the rest of the civil service
but still impartial, a dual administrative and political leadership with ulti-
mate oversight resting with the minister, and the concept of the line, how-
ever 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 repre-
sents an intensification of a process which had been taking place over time:
the tendency for government presentation to move from a central com-
mon service agency headed by a civil servant, to clusters of departmental
press offices serving a ministerial team (Hood & Dixon, 2015). The sec-
ond 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 govern-
ment. Their increasingly dominant role as media intermediaries has pro-
vided 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 dis-
quiet. 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 exam-
ple, 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
22 R. GARLAND
evidence to the Parliamentary Select Committee on Public

Administration (2002):
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 actu-
ally 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 dos-
sier 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 gov-
ernment 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 informa-
tion. (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.
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 govern-
ment’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 coordi-
nated economic presentation by three parties: backbenchers, ministers
working with administrative civil servants, and the GIS, whose perfor-
mance 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)
24 R. GARLAND
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 respon-
sibility 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 abil-
ity – and enthusiasm – to communicate simply. (Ingham, 1982)
Yet, despite Ingham’s influence, and the typically close working relation-
ships 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 “inher-
ently dishonest (…) something that you use to sell dog food.” More
broadly, “there was the slight feeling that you are not proper civil ser-
vants” and were looked down on “not exactly as a necessary evil but cer-
tainly 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
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 gov-
ernment 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 gov-
ernment 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 mem-
bers 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 minis-
terial influence was preferable to a more organised, self-confident and cen-
tralised service.
Policy officials were also suspicious of government press officers because
they felt that “the complexity of their area was never properly repre-
sented,” 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
26 R. GARLAND
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 contempo-
rary 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 communica-
tions specialists to manage the influx of politically appointed special advis-
ers who increasingly occupied their turf in briefing the media, often
off-the-record and as un-named sources. From their relatively weak posi-
tion, 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 rela-
tively 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 pre-
cisely 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, identi-
fied “something approaching disdain for media and communications mat-
ters,” and a damaging ‘them and us’ mentality within the civil service
(Mountfield, 1997; Phillis, 2004). The Phillis Review found that commu-
nications 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 func-
tion 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 communica-

tions should be, with a focus on a “continuous dialogue” with the gen-
eral public:
Our central recommendation is that communications should be redefined

across government to mean a continuous dialogue with all interested par-
ties, encompassing a broader range of skills and techniques than those asso-
ciated 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 revolu-
tionary. 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 pur-
poses, 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 serv-
ing 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 citi-
zens.” In the absence of clear criteria for what makes good, or even accept-
able 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.
28 R. GARLAND
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 depart-
ments 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 minis-
ters 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 cul-
ture? The evidence presented in this chapter suggests that, beneath the
surface, significant changes have taken place since the 1980s, accelerat-
ing 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 departmen-
tal 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
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, dis-
trusted 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 govern-
ment took power after 2010. With the election of Boris Johnson in
2019 the governing Conservative party completely re-branded and re-
defined itself against the austerity narratives of its Conservative-led pre-
decessors, 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, parlia-
ment and the media hold the service accountable? The service was
founded in 1945 at the behest of politicians and with no formal mecha-
nism of accountability beyond self regulation. Changes such as the abo-
lition 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 for-
mer 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 guid-
ance. In practice though, policing the line between party political propa-
ganda 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 neg-
ative and constraining, they argue, “some of the major capabilities of
30 R. GARLAND
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 genu-
inely citizen-focused government communications service could be evalu-
ated. 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 communi-
cation is more aligned with publics and hence more accessible to demo-
cratic 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 gov-
ernment 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, meticu-
lous 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.
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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 sup-
port 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 com-
plete transformation of the party and its approach to media relations fol-
lowing 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 contra-
dicted by the fact that, unlike her successor, John Major, Mrs. Thatcher
placed great emphasis on maintaining good personal relationships with

Switzerland AG 2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77576-6_3
34 R. GARLAND
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” dur-
ing 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 under-
stood today, that “selective seeing is believing and in today’s world, televi-
sion 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 sus-
picious 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 narra-
tive to the media or the public, or to shore up his media relations appara-
tus sufficiently in line with contemporary developments did not signal a
lack of concern with media matters, however. On the contrary, contempo-
rary 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
3 THATCHER AND MAJOR: COVERT CHANGES TO THE RULES OF THE GAME 35
… 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 neces-
sary 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 influ-
enced 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
36 R. GARLAND
early as 1977, Margaret Thatcher and her economic advisers were embark-
ing 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 mes-
sage across.
The scale of the media operation at No. 10 during the 1980s was min-
iscule, 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, fore-
shadowing an overtly partisan director of government communications in
the shape of Alastair Campbell after 1997 (Seymour-Ure, 2003). His loy-
alty 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
3 THATCHER AND MAJOR: COVERT CHANGES TO THE RULES OF THE GAME 37
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 interpreta-
tion of government policy and to take such action as in their opinion is
necessary to sustain public confidence in the Government.” The “sensitiv-
ity of its proceedings” was such that there were no official minutes and no
circulated agenda, at least initially. Its purpose was “to identify those pol-
icy 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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“Lead pipin’s no go unless you’ve got a pal to work with; telephone
wires is so covered up with wood casin’ that it’s worse’n hard work to
pinch two-penn’oth. I’m goin’ to have a cut at Joneses.”
So in the pelting rain he watched “Joneses” from a convenient
doorway. He noted with satisfaction the “workmen” departing one by
one; he observed with joy the going of “Jones” himself; and when,
some few minutes afterwards, the queer-looking old man, whom he
suspected as being a sort of caretaker, came shuffling out, slamming
the gate behind him, and peering left and right, and mumbling to
himself as he squelched through the rain, the watcher regarded the
removal of this final difficulty as being an especial act of Providence.
He waited for another half-hour, because, for some reason or other,
the usually deserted street became annoyingly crowded. First came
a belated coal cart and a miserably bedraggled carman who cried his
wares dolefully. Then a small boy, escaping from the confines of his
domestic circle, came to revel in the downpour and wade ecstatically
but thoroughly through the puddles that had formed on the uneven
surface of the road. Nemesis, in the shape of a shrill-voiced mother,
overtook the boy and sent him whining and expectant to the heavy
hand of maternal authority. With the coast clear Mr. Lane lost no
time. In effecting an entrance to the headquarters of the “Borough
Lot,” Mr. Lane’s method lacked subtlety. He climbed over the gate
leading to the yard, trusting inwardly that he was not observed, but
taking his chance. Had he been an accomplished burglar, with the
experience of any exploits behind him, he would have begun by
making a very thorough inspection of likely windows. Certainly he
would never have tried the “office” door. Being the veriest tyro, and
being conscious, moreover, that his greatest feats had connection
with doors carelessly left ajar, he tried the door, and to his delight it
opened.
Again the skilled craftsman would have suspected some sort of
treachery, and might have withdrawn; but Mr. Lane, recognizing in
the fact that the old man had forgotten to fasten the door behind him
only yet another proof of that benevolent Providence which exerts
itself for the express service of men “in luck,” entered boldly. He lit a
candle stump and looked around.
The evidence of that wealth which is the particular possession of
“master-men” was not evident. Indeed, the floor of the passage was
uncarpeted, and the walls bare of picture or ornament. Nor was the
“office,” a little room leading from the “passage,” any more prolific of
result. Such fixtures as there were had apparently been left behind
by the previous tenant, and these were thick with dust.
“Bah!” said the inquisitive Mr. Lane scornfully, and his words echoed
hollowly as in an empty house.
With the barren possibilities of his exploit before him, Mr. Lane’s
spirits fell.
He was of the class, to whom reference has already been made, that
looked in awe and reverence toward the “Borough Lot” in the same
spirit as the youthful curate might regard the consistory of bishops. In
his cups—pewter cups they were with frothing heads a-top—he was
wont to boast that his connection with the “Borough Lot” was both
close and intimate. A rumor that went around to the effect that the
“mouthpiece” who defended him at the closing of the unsatisfactory
horsehair episode had been paid for by the “Borough Lot” he did not
trouble to contradict.
If he had known any of them, even by sight, he would not at that
moment have been effecting a burglarious entry into their premises.
Room after room he searched. He found the ill-furnished bedroom of
Connor, and the room where old George slept on an uncleanly
mattress. He found, too, the big room where the “Lot” held their
informal meetings, but nothing portable. Nothing that a man might
slip under his coat, and walk boldly out of the front door with. No little
article of jewelry that your wife might carry to a pawnbroker’s with a
long face and a longer story of a penury that forced you to part with
her dear mother’s last gift. None of these, noted Mr. Lane bitterly,
and with every fresh disappointment he breathed the harder.
For apart from the commercial aspect of this, his burglary, there was
the sickening humiliation of failure. An imaginative man, he had
already invented the story he was to tell to a few select cronies in
sneak-thief division. He had rehearsed mentally a scene where, with
an air of nonchalance, he drew a handful of golden sovereigns from
his pocket and ordered drinks round. And whilst they were sipping
his drinks, smirking respectfully, he would have confided to them the
fact that he had been duly, and with all ceremony, installed a full-
fledged member of the “Borough Lot.” Of the irony of the situation he
was ignorant. A qualified burglar would have completed a systematic
examination of the premises in ten minutes, but Mr. Lane was not so
qualified. In consequence he dawdled from room to room, going
back to this room to make sure, and returning to that room to be
absolutely certain that nothing had been overlooked. Oblivious of the
flight of time, he stood irresolutely in the topmost room of the house
when the real adventure of the evening began. He heard the click of
a lock—he had thoughtfully closed the office door behind him—and a
voice, and his heart leapt into his throat. He heard a voice, a voice
hoarse with rage, and another, and yet another.
Mr. Lane realized, from the stamping of feet on the stairs, that half a
dozen men had come into the house; from their language he
gathered they were annoyed.
Then he heard something that froze his blood and turned his marrow
to water.
It had begun in a rumble of hoarse, undistinguishable words, and
ended in the phrase that caught his ear.
“... he’s sold us, I tell ye! Put spies on us! He led us into the trap,
curse him....”
He heard another voice speaking in a lower tone.
“What are we worth? You’re a fool! What d’ye think we’re worth?
Ain’t we the ‘Borough Lot’? Don’t he know enough to hang two or
three of us.... It’s Connor and his pal the lawyer....”
The “Borough Lot”!
The paralyzing intelligence came to Mr. Lane, and he held on to the
bare mantelshelf for support. Spies! Suppose they discovered him,
and mistook him for a spy! His hair rose at the thought. He knew
them well enough by repute. Overmuch hero-worship had invested
them with qualities for evil which they may or may not have
possessed.
There might be a chance of escape. The tumult below continued.
Scraps of angry talk came floating up.
Mr. Lane looked out of the window; the drop into the street was too
long, and there was no sign of rope in the house.
Cautiously he opened the door of the room. The men were in the
room beneath that in which he stood. The staircase that led to the
street must take him past their door.
Mr. Lane was very anxious to leave the house. He had unwittingly
stepped into a hornets’ nest, and wanted to make his escape without
disturbing the inmates. Now was the time—or never. Whilst the
angry argument continued a creaking stair board or so might not
attract attention. But he made no allowance for the gifts of these men
—gifts of sight and hearing. Bat Sands, in the midst of his tirade, saw
the uplifted finger and head-jerk of Goyle. He did not check his flow
of invective, but edged toward the door; then he stopped short, and
flinging the door open, he caught the scared Mr. Lane by the throat,
and dragging him into the room, threw him upon the ground and
knelt on him.
“What are ye doing here?” he whispered fiercely.
Mr. Lane, with protruding eyes, saw the pitiless faces about him, saw
Goyle lift a life-preserver from the table and turn half-round the better
to strike, and fainted.
“Stop that!” growled Bat, with outstretched hand. “The little swine has
fainted. Who is he? Do any of you fellers know him?”
It was the wizened-faced man whom Angel had addressed as Lamby
who furnished the identification.
“He’s a little crook—name of Lane.”
“Where does he come from?”
“Oh, hereabouts. He was in the Scrubbs in my time,” said Lamby.
They regarded the unconscious burglar in perplexity.
“Go through his pockets,” suggested Goyle.
It happened—and this was the most providential happening of the
day from Mr. Lane’s point of view—that when he had decided upon
embarking on his career of high-class crime he had thoughtfully
provided himself with a few homemade instruments. It was the little
poker with flattened end to form a jemmy and the center-bit that was
found in his pocket that in all probability saved Mr. Lane’s life.
Lombroso and other great criminologists have given it out that your
true degenerate has no sense of humor, but on two faces at least
there was a broad grin when the object of the little man’s visit was
revealed.
“He came to burgle Connor,” said Bat admiringly. “Here, pass over
the whisky, one of ye!”
He forced a little down the man’s throat, and Mr. Lane blinked and
opened his eyes in a frightened stare.
“Stand up,” commanded Bat, “an’ give an account of yourself, young
feller. What d’ye mean by breaking into——”
“Never mind about that,” Goyle interrupted savagely. “What has he
heard when he was sneaking outside?—that’s the question.”
“Nothin’, gentlemen!” gasped the unfortunate Mr. Lane, “on me word,
gentlemen! I’ve been in trouble like yourselves, an’——”
He realized he had blundered.
“Oh,” said Goyle with ominous calm, “so you’ve been in trouble like
us, have you?”
“I mean——”
“I know what you mean,” hissed the other; “you mean you’ve been
listenin’ to what we’ve been saying, you little skunk, and you’re ready
to bleat to the first copper.”
It might have gone hard with Mr. Lane but for the opportune arrival of
the messenger. Bat went downstairs at the knock, and the rest stood
quietly listening. They expected Connor, and when his voice did not
sound on the stairs they looked at one another questioningly. Bat
came into the room with a yellow envelope in his hand. He passed it
to Goyle. Reading was not an accomplishment of his. Goyle read it
with difficulty.
“Do the best you can,” he read. “I’m lying ‘doggo.’”
“What does that mean?” snarled Goyle, holding the message in his
hand and looking at Bat. “Hidin’, is he—and we’ve got to do the best
we can?”
Bat reached for his overcoat. He did not speak as he struggled into
it, nor until he had buttoned it deliberately.
“It means—git,” he said shortly. “It means run, or else it means time,
an’ worse than time.”
He swung round to the door.
“Connor’s hidin’,” he stopped to say. “When Connor starts hiding the
place is getting hot. There’s nothing against me so far as I know,
except——”
His eyes fell on the form of Mr. Lane. He had raised himself to a
sitting position on the floor, and now, with disheveled hair and
outstretched legs, he sat the picture of despair.
Goyle intercepted the glance.
“What about him?” he asked.
“Leave him,” said Bat; “we’ve got no time for fooling with him.”
A motor-car came buzzing down Cawdor Street, which was unusual.
They heard the grind of its brakes outside the door, and that in itself
was sufficiently alarming. Bat extinguished the light, and cautiously
opened the shutters. He drew back with an oath.
“What’s that?” Goyle whispered.
Bat made no reply, and they heard him open his matchbox.
“What are you doing?” whispered Goyle fiercely.
“Light the lamp,” said the other.
The tinkle of glass followed as he removed the chimney, and in the
yellow light Bat faced the “Borough Lot.”
“U—P spells ‘up,’ an’ that’s what the game is,” he said calmly. He
was searching his pockets as he spoke. “I want a light because
there’s one or two things in my pocket that I’ve got to burn—quick!”
After some fumbling he found a paper. He gave it a swift
examination, then he struck a match and carefully lit the corner.
“It’s the fairest cop,” he went on. “The street’s full of police, and
Angel ain’t playing ‘gamblin’ raids’ this time.”
There was a heavy knock on the door, but nobody moved. Goyle’s
face had gone livid. He knew better than any man there how
impossible escape was. That had been one of the drawbacks to the
house—the ease with which it could be surrounded. He had pointed
out the fact to Connor before.
Again the knock.
“Let ’em open it,” said Bat grimly, and as though the people outside
had heard the invitation, the door crashed in, and there came a
patter as of men running on the stairs.
First to enter the room was Angel. He nodded to Bat coolly, then
stepped aside to allow the policemen to follow.
“I want you,” he said briefly.
“What for?” asked Sands.
“Breaking and entering,” said the detective. “Put out your hands!”
Bat obeyed. As the steel stirrup-shaped irons snapped on his wrists
he asked—
“Have you got Connor?”
Angel smiled.
“Connor lives to fight another day,” he said quietly.
The policemen who attended him were busy with the other
occupants of the room.
“Bit of a field-day for you, Mr. Angel,” said the thin-faced Lamby
pleasantly. “Thought you was goin’ to let us off?”
“Jumping at conclusions hastily is a habit to be deplored,” said Angel
sententiously. Then he saw the panic-stricken Mr. Lane.
“Hullo, what’s this?” he demanded.
Mr. Lane had at that moment the inspiration of his life. Since he was
by fortuitous circumstances involved in this matter, and since it could
make very little difference one way or the other what he said, he
seized the fame that lay to his hand.
“I am one of the ‘Borough Lot,’” he said, and was led out proud and
handcuffed with the knowledge that he had established beyond
dispute his title to consideration as a desperate criminal.
Mr. Spedding was a man who thought quickly. Ideas and plans came
to him as dross and diamonds come to the man at the sorting table,
and he had the faculty of selection. He saw the police system of
England as only the police themselves saw it, and he had an open
mind upon Angel’s action. It was within the bounds of possibility that
Angel had acted with full authority; it was equally possible that Angel
was bluffing.
Mr. Spedding had two courses before him, and they were both
desperate; but he must be sure in how, so far, his immediate liberty
depended upon the whim of a deputy-assistant-commissioner of
police.
Angel had mentioned a supreme authority. It was characteristic of
Spedding that he should walk into a mine to see how far the fuse
had burned. In other words, he hailed the first cab, and drove to the
House of Commons.
The Right Honorable George Chandler Middleborough, His Majesty’s
Secretary of State for Home Affairs, is a notoriously inaccessible
man; but he makes exceptions, and such an exception he made in
favor of Spedding. For eminent solicitors do not come down to the
House at ten o’clock in the evening to gratify an idle curiosity, or to
be shown over the House, or beg patronage and interest; and when
a business card is marked “most urgent,” and that card stands for a
staple representative of an important profession, the request for an
interview is not easily refused.
Spedding was shown into the minister’s room, and the Home
Secretary rose with a smile. He knew Mr. Spedding by sight, and had
once dined in his company.
“Er—” he began, looking at the card in his hand, “what can I do for
you—at this hour?” he smiled again.
“I have called to see you in the matter of the late—er—Mr. Reale.”
He saw and watched the minister’s face. Beyond looking a little
puzzled, the Home Secretary made no sign.
“Good!” thought Spedding, and breathed with more freedom.
“I’m afraid——” said the minister. He got no further, for Spedding
was at once humility, apology, and embarrassment.
What! had the Home Secretary not received his letter? A letter
dealing with the estate of Reale? You can imagine the distress and
vexation on Mr. Spedding’s face as he spoke of the criminal
carelessness of his clerk, his attitude of helplessness, his recognition
of the absolute impossibility of discussing the matter until the
Secretary had received the letter, and his withdrawal, leaving behind
him a sympathetic minister of State who would have been pleased—
would have been delighted, my dear sir, to have helped Mr.
Spedding if he’d received the letter in time to consider its contents.
Mr. Spedding was an inventive genius, and it might have been in
reference to him that the motherhood of invention was first identified
with dire necessity.
Out again in the courtyard, Spedding found a cab that carried him to
his club.
“Angel bluffed!” he reflected with an inward smile. “My friend, you are
risking that nice appointment of yours.”
He smiled again, for it occurred to him that his risk was the greater.
“Two millions!” he murmured. “It is worth it: I could do a great deal
with two millions.”
He got down at his club, and tendered the cabman the legal fare to a
penny.
CHAPTER XI
THE QUEST OF THE BOOK
When Piccadilly Circus, a blaze of light, was thronged with the

crowds that the theaters were discharging, a motor-car came
gingerly through the traffic, passed down Regent Street, and
swinging along Pall Mall, headed southward across Westminster
Bridge.
The rain had ceased, but underfoot the roads were sodden, and the
car bespattered its occupants with black mud.
The chauffeur at the wheel turned as the car ran smoothly along the
tramway lines in the Old Kent Road and asked a question, and one
of the two men in the back of the car consulted the other.
“We will go to Cramer’s first,” said the man.
Old Kent Road was a fleeting vision of closed shops, of little knots of
men emerging from public-houses at the potman’s strident
command; Lewisham High Road, as befits that very respectable
thoroughfare, was decorously sleeping; Lea, where the hedges
begin, was silent; and Chislehurst was a place of the dead.
Near the common the car pulled up at a big house standing in black
quietude, and the two occupants of the car descended and passed
through the stiff gate, along the graveled path, and came to a stop at
the broad porch.
“I don’t know what old Mauder will say,” said Angel as he fumbled for
the bell; “he’s a methodical old chap.”
In the silence they could hear the thrill of the electric bell. They
waited a few minutes, and rang again. Then they heard a window
opened and a sleepy voice demand—
“Who is there?”
Angel stepped back from the porch and looked up.
“Hullo, Mauder! I want you. I’m Angel.”
“The devil!” said a surprised voice. “Wait a bit. I’ll be down in a jiffy.”
The pleasant-faced man who in dressing-gown and pajamas opened
the door to them and conducted them to a cozy library was Mr.
Ernest Mauder himself. It is unnecessary to introduce that world-
famous publisher to the reader, the more particularly in view of the
storm of controversy that burst about his robust figure in regard to
the recent publication of Count Lehoff’s embarrassing “Memoirs.” He
made a sign to the two men to be seated, nodding to Jimmy as to an
old friend.
“I am awfully sorry to disturb you at this rotten hour,” Angel
commenced, and the other arrested his apology with a gesture.
“You detective people are so fond of springing surprises on us
unintelligent outsiders,” he said, with a twinkle in his eye, “that I am
almost tempted to startle you.”
“It takes a lot to startle me,” said Angel complacently.
“You’ve brought it on your own head,” warned the publisher, wagging
a forefinger at the smiling Angel. “Now let me tell you why you have
motored down from London on this miserable night on a fairly
fruitless errand.”
“Eh?” The smile left Angel’s face.
“Ah, I thought that would startle you! You’ve come about a book?”
“Yes,” said Jimmy wonderingly.
“A book published by our people nine years ago?”
“Yes,” the wonderment deepening on the faces of the two men.
“The title,” said the publisher impressively, “is A Short Study on the
Origin of the Alphabet, and the author is a half-mad old don, who
was subsequently turned out of Oxford for drunkenness.”
“Mauder,” said Jimmy, gazing at his host in bewilderment, “you’ve hit
it—but——”
“Ah,” said the publisher, triumphant, “I thought that was it. Well, your
search is fruitless. We only printed five hundred copies; the book
was a failure—the same ground was more effectively covered by
better books. I found a dusty old copy a few years ago, and gave it to
my secretary. So far as I know, that is the only copy in existence.”
“But your secretary?” said Angel eagerly. “What is his name? Where
does he live?”
“It’s not a ‘he,’” said Mauder, “but a ‘she.’”
“Her name?”
“If you had asked that question earlier in the evening I could not
have told you,” said Mauder, obviously enjoying the mystery he had
created, “but since then my memory has been refreshed. The girl—
and a most charming lady too—was my secretary for two years. I do
not know what induced her to work, but I rather think she supported
an invalid father.”
“What is her name?” asked Angel impatiently.
“Kathleen Kent,” replied the publisher, “and her address is——”
“Kathleen Kent!” repeated Jimmy in wide-eyed astonishment.
“Angels and Ministers of Grace defend us!”
“Kathleen Kent!” repeated Angel with a gasp. “Well, that takes the
everlasting biscuit! But,” he added quickly, “how did you come to
know of our errand?”
“Well,” drawled the elder man, wrapping his dressing-gown round
him more snugly, “it was a guess to an extent. You see, Angel, when
a man has been already awakened out of a sound sleep to answer
mysterious inquiries about an out-of-date book——”
“What,” cried Jimmy, jumping up, “somebody has already been
here?”
“It is only natural,” the publisher went on, “to connect his errand with
that of the second midnight intruder.”
“Who has been here? For Heaven’s sake, don’t be funny; this is a
serious business.”
“Nobody has been here,” said Mauder, “but an hour ago a man
called me up on the telephone——”
Jimmy looked at Angel, and Angel looked at Jimmy.
“Jimmy,” said Angel penitently, “write me down as a fool. Telephone!
Heavens, I didn’t know you were connected.”
“Nor was I till last week,” said the publisher, “nor will I be after to-
morrow. Sleep is too precious a gift to be dissipated——”
“Who was the man?” demanded Angel.
“I couldn’t quite catch his name. He was very apologetic. I gathered
that he was a newspaper man, and wanted particulars in connection
with the death of the author.”
Angel smiled.
“The author’s alive all right,” he said grimly. “How did the voice sound
—a little pompous, with a clearing of the throat before each
sentence?”
The other nodded.
“Spedding!” said Angel, rising. “We haven’t any time to lose, Jimmy.”
Mauder accompanied them into the hall.
“One question,” said Jimmy, as he fastened the collar of his motor-
coat. “Can you give us any idea of the contents of the book?”
“I can’t,” was the reply. “I have a dim recollection that much of it was
purely conventional, that there were some rough drawings, and the
earlier forms of the alphabet were illustrated—the sort of thing you
find in encyclopædias or in the back pages of teachers’ Bibles.”
The two men took their seats in the car as it swung round and turned
its bright head-lamps toward London.
“‘I found this puzzle in a book
From which some mighty truths were took,’”
murmured Angel in his companion’s ear, and Jimmy nodded. He was
at that moment utterly oblivious and careless of the fortune that
awaited them in the great safe at Lombard Street. His mind was filled
with anxiety concerning the girl who unconsciously held the book
which might to-morrow make her an heiress. Spedding had moved
promptly, and he would be aided, he did not doubt, by Connor and
the ruffians of the “Borough Lot.” If the book was still in the girl’s
possession they would have it, and they would make their attempt at
once.
His mind was full of dark forebodings, and although the car bounded
through the night at full speed, and the rain which had commenced
to fall again cut his face, and the momentum of the powerful machine
took his breath away, it went all too slowly for his mood.
One incident relieved the monotony of the journey. As the car flew
round a corner in an exceptionally narrow lane it almost crashed into
another car, which, driven at breakneck speed, was coming in the
opposite direction. A fleeting exchange of curses between the
chauffeurs, and the cars passed.
By common consent, they had headed for Kathleen’s home.
Streatham was deserted. As they turned the corner of the quiet road
in which the girl lived, Angel stopped the car and alighted. He lifted
one of the huge lamps from the socket and examined the road.
“There has been a car here less than half an hour ago,” he said,
pointing to the unmistakable track of wheels. They led to the door of
the house.
He rang the bell, and it was almost immediately answered by an
elderly lady, who, wrapped in a loose dressing-gown, bade him
enter.
“Nobody seems to be surprised to see us to-night,” thought Angel
with bitter humor.
“I am Detective Angel from Scotland Yard,” he announced himself,
and the elderly lady seemed unimpressed.
“Kathleen has gone,” she informed him cheerfully.
Jimmy heard her with a sinking at his heart.
“Yes,” said the old lady, “Mr. Spedding, the eminent solicitor, called
for her an hour ago, and”—she grew confidential—“as I know you
gentlemen are very much interested in the case, I may say that there
is every hope that before to-morrow my niece will be in possession
of her fortune.”
Jimmy groaned.
“Please, go on,” said Angel.
“It came about over a book which Kathleen had given her some
years ago, and which most assuredly would have been lost but for
my carefulness.”
Jimmy cursed her “carefulness” under his breath.
“When we moved here after the death of Kathleen’s poor father I had
a great number of things stored. There were amongst these an
immense quantity of books, which Kathleen would have sold, but
which I thought——”
“Where are these stored?” asked Angel quickly.
“At an old property of ours—the only property that my poor brother
had remaining,” she replied sadly, “and that because it was in too
dilapidated a condition to attract buyers.”
“Where, where?” Angel realized the rudeness of his impatience.
“Forgive me, madam,” he said, “but it is absolutely necessary that I
should follow your niece at once.”
“It is on the Tonbridge Road,” she answered stiffly. “So far as I can
remember, it is somewhere between Crawley and Tonbridge, but I
am not sure. Kathleen knows the place well; that is why she has
gone.”
“Somewhere on the Tonbridge Road!” repeated Angel helplessly.
“We could follow the car’s tracks,” said Jimmy.
Angel shook his head.
“If this rain is general, they will be obliterated,” he replied.
They stood a minute, Jimmy biting the sodden finger of his glove,
and Angel staring into vacancy. Then Jimmy demanded
unexpectedly—
“Have you a Bible?”
The old lady allowed the astonishment she felt at the question to be
apparent.
“I have several.”
“A teacher’s Bible, with notes?” he asked.
She thought.
“Yes, there is such an one in the house. Will you wait?”
She left the room.
“We should have told the girl about Spedding—we should have told
her,” said Angel in despair.
“It’s no use crying over spilt milk,” said Jimmy quietly. “The thing to
do now is to frustrate Spedding and rescue the girl.”
“Will he dare——?”
“He’ll dare. Oh, yes, he’ll dare,” said Jimmy. “He’s worse than you
think, Angel.”
“But he is already a ruined man.”
“The more reason why he should go a step further. He’s been on the
verge of ruin for months, I’ve found that out. I made inquiries the
other day, and discovered he’s in a hole that the dome of St. Paul’s
wouldn’t fill. He’s a trustee or something of the sort for an association
that has been pressing him for money. Spedding will dare
anything”—he paused then—“but if he dares to harm that girl he’s a
dead man.”
The old lady came in at that moment with the book, and Jimmy
hastily turned over the pages.
Near the end he came upon something that brought a gleam to his
eye.
He thrust his hand into his pocket and drew out a notebook. He did
not wait to pull up a chair, but sank on his knees by the side of the
table and wrote rapidly, comparing the text with the drawings in the
book.
Angel, leaning over, followed the work breathlessly.
“There—and there—and there!” cried Angel exultantly. “What fools
we were, Jimmy, what fools we were.”
Jimmy turned to the lady.
“May I borrow this book?” he asked. “It will be returned. Thank you.
Now, Angel,” he looked at his watch and made a move for the door,
“we have two hours. We will take the Tonbridge Road by daybreak.”
Only one other person did they disturb on that eventful night, and
that was a peppery old Colonel of Marines, who lived at Blackheath.
There, before the hastily-attired old officer, as the dawn broke, Angel
explained his mission, and writing with feverish haste, subscribed to
the written statement by oath. Whereupon the Justice of the Peace
issued a warrant for the arrest of Joseph James Spedding, Solicitor,
on a charge of felony.
CHAPTER XII
WHAT HAPPENED AT FLAIRBY MILL
Kathleen very naturally regarded the lawyer in the light of a

disinterested friend. There was no reason why she should not do so;
and if there had been any act needed to kindle a kindly feeling for
the distant legal adviser it was this last act of his, for no sooner, as
he told her, had he discovered by the merest accident a clue to the
hidden word, than he had rushed off post-haste to put her in
possession of his information. He had naturally advised immediate
action, and when she demurred at the lateness of the hour at which
to begin a hunt for the book, he had hinted vaguely at difficulties
which would beset her if she delayed. She wanted to let Angel know,
and Jimmy, but this the lawyer would not hear of, and she accounted
for the insistence of his objection by the cautiousness of the legal
mind.
Then the excitement of the midnight adventure appealed to her—the
swift run in the motor-car through the wild night, and the wonderful
possibilities of the search at the end of the ride.
So she went, and her appetite for adventure was all but satisfied by
a narrowly-averted collision with another car speeding in the
opposite direction. She did not see the occupants of the other car,
but she hoped they had had as great a fright as she.
As a matter of fact, neither of the two men had given a second
thought to their danger; one’s mind was entirely and completely filled
with her image, and the other was brooding on telephones.
She had no time to tire of the excitement of the night—the run across
soaking heaths and through dead villages, where little cottages
showed up for a moment in the glare of the headlights, then faded
into the darkness. Too soon she came to a familiar stretch of the
road, and the car slowed down so that they might not pass the tiny
grass lane that led to Flairby Mill. They came to it at last, and the car
bumped cautiously over deep cart ruts, over loose stones, and
through long drenched grasses till there loomed out of the night the
squat outlines of Flairby Mill.
Once upon a time, before the coming of cheap machinery, Flairby
Mill had been famous in the district, and the rumble of its big stones
went on incessantly, night and day; but the wheel had long since
broken, its wreck lay in the bed of the little stream that had so
faithfully served it; its machinery was rust and scrap iron, and only
the tiny dwelling-house that adjoined was of value. With little or no
repair the homestead had remained watertight and weatherproof,
and herein had Kathleen stored the odds and ends of her father’s
household. The saddles, shields, spears, and oddments he had
collected in his travels, and the modest library that had consoled the
embittered years of his passing, were all stored here. Valueless as
the world assesses value, but in the eyes of the girl precious things
associated with her dead father.
The tears rose to her eyes as Spedding, taking the key from her
hand, fitted it into the lock of a seventeenth-century door, but she
wiped them away furtively.
Spedding utilized the acetylene lamp of the car to show him the way
into the house. “You must direct me, Miss Kent,” he said, and
Kathleen pointed the way. Up the oaken stairs, covered with dust,
their footsteps resounding hollowly through the deserted homestead,
the two passed. At the head of the stairs was a heavy door, and
acting under the girl’s instructions, the lawyer opened this.
It was a big room, almost like a barn, with a timbered ceiling sloping
downward. There were three shuttered windows, and another door
at the farther end of the room that led to a smaller room.
“This was the miller’s living room,” she said sadly. She could just
remember when a miller lived in the homestead, and when she had
ridden up to the door of the mill accompanied by her father, and the
miller, white and jovial, had lifted her down and taken her through a
mysterious chamber where great stones turned laboriously and
noisily, and the air was filled with a fine white dust.

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Government Communications and The Crisis of Trust From Political Spin To Post Truth 1St Edition Ruth Garland Full Chapter

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Government Communications and the

Crisis of Trust: From Political Spin to

ISBN 978-3-030-77575-9 ISBN 978-3-030-77576-6 (eBook)

1 Prologue: The Crisis of Trust 1

Part I The Post-War Government Information Service 15

2 How Did We Get Here? 17

3 Thatcher and Major: Covert Changes to the Rules of the

Part II The Age of Political Spin 49

4 From Blair to Cameron and Beyond 51

5 The Rise of Politically-Appointed Media Strategists After

6 How Bureaucrats and Parliamentarians Pushed Back

Part III Mediatization, Impartiality and Public Trust 105

7 The Surrender to the 24/7 News Cycle107

8 Impartiality and Accountability as Ingredients of Trust123

Policing the ‘line’ Between Impartial and Partisan

9 What Makes Good Government Communication?139

10 Trust in Democratic Government in a Post-­Truth Age155

Part IV Coronavirus and Beyond 171

11 Coronavirus Communication: Clear, Consistent and

12 Conclusion: Putting the Public First187

Appendix: Interviewees in Order of Appearance193

Table 9.1 Principles and functions of government communications 142

Prologue: The Crisis of Trust

The ideal of the well-informed citizen, facilitated by the watchdog role of

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

politicians have progressively exploited any strategic means possible to

The Road to the 2003 Iraq War: Blair’s Dilemma

Britain would “stand shoulder to shoulder with our American friends”

submission to The Iraq Inquiry (Chilcot), his relative inexperience as a

dossier (Campbell, 2013, pp.292, 297). Having revealed the existence of

‘Let’s Get Brexit Done’: Johnson’s Campaign of 2019

declaration of Boris Johnson’s leadership campaign on 12 June 2019, to

that is explicitly against the government communications propriety code

Early observations of the actions of the 2019 Johnson government sug-

GCS. (2014/2020). GCS (Government Communications Service) Propriety Code.

The Post-War Government

How Did We Get Here?

National governments play a dominant role as both a source of news for

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 17

As the previous chapter showed, the steady undermining of the distinc-

Whitehall: Resilient Yet Fragile

With the demands of post-war reconstruction and a radical agenda for

evidence to the Parliamentary Select Committee on Public

If any government wanted to go down the route of having overtly politically

In typically opaque civil-service-speak, he seems to be implying that

The extent to which today’s Government Communication Service (GCS)1

We need to introduce some of the disciplines of a newspaper office into

On 5 December 1979 Ingham presented the Prime Minister with an

to recognise and adapt to changes in the media. John Major (1990–1997),

communications staff were often more aware of the perceptions of the

… tend to have quite a narrow social demographic, so there were lots of

In response to the proliferation of media from the late 1990s onwards,

The review called for a radical rethink of what government communica-

Our central recommendation is that communications should be redefined

modern institutions come from their effectiveness in substituting rule-

Ingham, B. (1979, October 15). Memo to Angus Maude. Ingham Archive,

Thatcher and Major: Covert Changes

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 33

“It will be important to sell, and sell hard”

intermittent post-war body that aimed to provide an integrated approach

When Piccadilly Circus, a blaze of light, was thronged with the

Kathleen very naturally regarded the lawyer in the light of a

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1 Prologue: The Crisis of Trust 1

Part I The Post-War Government Information Service 15

2 How Did We Get Here? 17

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

Part II The Age of Political Spin 49

4 From Blair to Cameron and Beyond 51

5 The Rise of Politically-Appointed Media Strategists After

6 How Bureaucrats and Parliamentarians Pushed Back

Part III Mediatization, Impartiality and Public Trust 105

7 The Surrender to the 24/7 News Cycle107

8 Impartiality and Accountability as Ingredients of Trust123

9 What Makes Good Government Communication?139

10 Trust in Democratic Government in a Post-Truth Age155

Part IV Coronavirus and Beyond 171

11 Coronavirus Communication: Clear, Consistent and

12 Conclusion: Putting the Public First187

Appendix: Interviewees in Order of Appearance193

Table 9.1 Principles and functions of government communications 142