Famously barged away BBC reporter as Mrs Thatcher made a press statement in Paris.ALASTAIR CAMPBELLAge: 38Education: City of Leicester Boys’ School; Caius College, Cambridge.Job: chief spin doctor for Tony Blair, day-to-day briefer of journalists.Previous occupation: political editor of the Daily and Sunday Mirror, political commentator for Today newspaper.Telephone manner: direct, occasionally abrasive.Charm rating: 5Big claim: spotting that John Major tucks his shirt into his underpants.Biggest setback: giving the Guardian political editor, Michael White, a black eye following a disagreement over Robert Maxwell’s death in 1992.ALAN PARKERAge: 39Education: Bryanston, Holland Park School, Central London PolytechnicJob: runs Brunswick PR agency, which he set up in 1987.Previous employment: worked at the PR firm Broadstreet, learning the trade from the top City PR man Brian Basham. In such a situation, everything will depend upon sleights of hand and tricks with mirrors. The closer the parties run together on substance, the more the spin doctors will be needed to create an illusion of difference.”Don’t say you weren’t warned.SIR BERNARD INGHAMAge: 63Education: Hebden Bridge Grammar School.Current jobs: chairman, Bernard Ingham Communications; columnist, Daily Express.Previous employment: chief press secretary to Margaret Thatcher when she was prime minister; reporter for the Guardian.Telephone manner: “Don’t mess with me, I’ll crush you.”Charm rating: 5Big claim: acted as Mrs Thatcher’s press bulldog for 11 years.Biggest setback: described by John Biffen as “the sewer, not the sewage”. Whether the Conservatives can pull back from the abyss, he believes, will rest more on the skills of the spin doctors than on the politicians they are supposed to serve.”Perception is everything in politics,” Shea insists, “particularly so when there is so little between the Tory and Labour party on so many issues, such as education. They frame the decisions that others then purport to take.”It is this interference with the political process by shadowy figures who are unelected and accountable to no one that is the most unpalatable aspect of the phenomenon. For all that, spin doctors, according to Michael Shea, are going to become ever more influential, especially in politics.
They will go in to people at the top of the political tree every day and say: here is what you should say and do today And they do it. To put out something at the right time, in the right way, through the right person will win friends, where the same information at the wrong time, in the wrong way, through the wrong person, will make enemies Such spin doctors set the agenda They are not just PR people. In the case of the top operators, such as Bell, Ingham and Mandelson, it is clear that the intimacy is real and that they can gave a major input in formulating policy.Michael Shea remarks: “They are really key figures. Allow me to use you to plant our stories, he implies, and I will keep you well supplied with exclusives which will further bolster your reputation as a journalist in the know.Dave Hill, the chief media spokesperson for the Labour Party, explained: “You’ve got to know where to place stories and where to develop them. You also have to know how to kill stories, how to divert people on to another story and how to minimise the damage when you have to admit something It’s also about not lying.
I never lie, which is not to say I don’t know how to dampen a story down or twist it. But I never lie.”To do this effectively, and discreetly, a spin doctor must have a detailed knowledge of the hierarchies of television news departments and newspapers to identify the right journalist to call to influence an editorial, a business story or a political report.But their most detailed acquaintance has to be with their own client. He was always on hand to “help” should anyone need anything “clarifying” or putting “in context”.But spin doctors are at their most effective when they are setting the news agenda by feeding a journalist with an exclusive story favourable to their client. Every spin doctor has favoured journalists with whom he forms a Faustian pact. Peter Mandelson used to hover in the journalists’ writing room at the end of the day at the Labour Party conference like a friendly form-master checking everyone was getting on with their homework as they wrote up their accounts of the day. “They perform an advocacy function,” said one seasoned political editor “They make a case You make a judgement You take account of it.”Others are more candid. “He feeds you his line without you even realising what he is doing,” says one former financial journalist about Sir Tim Bell, who usually comes on the telephone with a manner which is relaxed, chatty and confidential.Charm is a vital part of the repertoire.
Political editors claim that they are immune to their seductive techniques. “Journalists are often desperate to speak to authoritative sources capable of giving them an instant interpretation of what has happened, and also background guidance on the likely consequences,” says Jones. “And in the years to come – with the growth of television news, and as print journalists compete more fiercely as circulation pressures increase – politicians, increasingly aware of how the media will determine their chances of success, will seek to control still further the information to which those journalists have access.”Few journalists will admit to being swayed by a spin doctor. That is why journalists go to spin doctors – to get information from the inside track. He must be so close to the people he works for that they trust him to speak for them. While most self-respecting publicists can dream up a story and imagine how they would like to see it presented, a far harder task is to calculate in advance what might be the worst-case scenario should the news media decide to put the least favourable interpretation on what has happened.”There is more to it than that A spin doctor must be part of an inner circle.
In Soundbites and Spin Doctors he writes: “An essential qualification is an ability to understand and predict how reporters might think and react in any given set of circumstances. Alan Parker is not exactly a household name, but financial journalists testify that he is one of business’s top placers and fixers, who can command more than pounds 500 an hour for his services. He has more than 100 prestigious clients, including ICI and Trust House Forte and, City scribblers say, one day he will eclipse Sir Tim Bell, PR’s most famous son and another of Margaret Thatcher’s spin doctors.The true spin doctor relentlessly spins his line trying to persuade people to see things from their client’s point of view.”They are extremely good at thinking at our level,” acknowledges the BBC political correspondent Nicholas Jones, who has recently published a book on the subject. “A good spin doctor never gets his name in the papers,” he insists.Certainly that is true of the top City spinners. He likes to think that the best spin doctors are, by definition, people you have never heard of. They do not just organise press conferences, issue press releases and field phone calls from the media.Michael Shea, who has just written a book entitled Spin Doctor, is positively protective of the term: there is, he insists, no question of admitting to the fold the likes of Lynne Franks, the role model for Edina in Absolutely Fabulous, or notorious servicers of the tabloids such as Max Clifford.”Max Clifford is not a spin doctor, he’s just a publicist who takes someone like David Mellor’s mistress and runs her across the front pages of the tabloids and then takes money from both the client and the papers He’s obviously good at it But it’s something quite different,” Shea says.
