Bernard Ingham
Sir Bernard Ingham (born
June 21 1932) is a journalist best known as
Margaret Thatcher's former press secretary. [
1]
Ingham was educated at
Hebden Bridge Grammar School and joined the
Hebden Bridge Times newspaper at the age of 16. He went on to work for the
Yorkshire Evening Post,
the Yorkshire Post, latterly as Northern Industrial Correspondent, and
The Guardian. Whilst a reporter at the Yorkshire Post, Ingham was an active member of the National Union of Journalists and was vice chairman of the Leeds branch.
Ingham's father was a
Labour Party councillor and he was himself a member of the Labour Party until he joined the Civil Service. He contested the safe Conservative
Moortown ward of
Leeds City Council in the 1965 council elections.
In 1967, he joined the Civil Service. He spent 11 years as Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's Chief Press Secretary in No. 10 Downing Street. In 1989-90 he was also Head of the Government Information Service. In the course of his Civil Service career he was also press secretary to
Barbara Castle,
Robert Carr,
Maurice Macmillan,
Lord Carrington,
Eric Varley and
Tony Benn.
Although a career civil servant as opposed to a political appointee like his successor-but-three
Alastair Campbell, Ingham gained a reputation for being a highly effective propagandist for the Thatcherite cause (despite his earlier political affiliation). The phrase
spin doctor did not really enter common parlance until after his retirement and the rise of
New Labour, but he was nevertheless a gifted exponent in what came to be known as the "black arts" of spin. In those days, Downing Street briefings were "off the record," meaning that information given out by Ingham could be attributed only to "senior government sources." Occasionally he used this deniability to brief against the Government's own ministers, such as when he described the
Leader of the House of Commons John Biffen as a "semi-detached" member of the Government. Sure enough, Biffen was dropped at the next reshuffle.
However Ingham managed to stay out of the damaging
Westland helicopter crisis in
1986, correctly realising that any involvement by him would directly link Mrs Thatcher to the affair.
He was
knighted on Thatcher's resignation - and retirement - in 1990. His successor as press secretary was
Gus O'Donnell, who went on to become
Cabinet Secretary and Head of the Civil Service in 2005.
It was Ingham, not, as popularly supposed, Thatcher, who was responsible for writing the
Yes, Minister sketch which she performed in public with
Paul Eddington and
Nigel Hawthorne.
Ingham lectures in
Public Relations at
Middlesex University in London.
In
1999, Ingham was arrested and questioned by
Police after it was alleged he kicked and damaged a car belonging to a neighbour, Barry Cripps, in a dispute over a right-of-way. He later voluntarily paid money to cover the repairs to the vehicle, and agreed to be bound over to keep the peace by local magistrates.
* Routledge, Paul,
Bumper Book of British Lefties, 2003, Politicos (ISBN 1-84275-064-X) - provides further information on Ingham's early involvement with the Labour Party
