As Margaret Thatcher’s devoted and indispensable (her words) chief press secretary for 11 years, the rumbustious Sir Bernard Ingham, who has died aged 90, was central to both the style and success of the Thatcher revolution. Acknowledged as the strongest figure to have done the job since the 1930s, Ingham moved to centralise the direction of government information, often to the discomfort of departmental ministers. This change, inevitable with the growth in electronic communications, was built on by the Blair government, although Ingham would claim that he was never involved in policymaking like Tony Blair’s director of communications and strategy, Alastair Campbell.
The clue to Ingham’s bond with Thatcher was that both saw themselves as outsiders against the establishment and, as she put it, “neither of us are smooth people”. He was well known for his choleric temperament, which could turn an already ruddy face bright red, for his almost blind loyalty to those he worked for (and to some degree those he picked to work under him) plus a capacity to undertake – and create – huge amounts of work.
The son of Labour-supporting Yorkshire weavers, Garnet and Alice Ingham, Bernard was born in Halifax, West Yorkshire, and brought up in Hebden Bridge, the town, he claimed, closest to heaven. His father became its first Labour councillor and the young Bernard was secretary of the League of Labour Youth. After the trauma of his unexpected failure at his 11-plus, his parents paid for a place at the local grammar. At 16, he answered an advertisement for a reporter on the local weekly newspaper, the Hebden Bridge Times.
For 11 years he lived the life of a small-town reporter, in 1952 becoming district correspondent for the Yorkshire Post group in Halifax. He met his future wife, Nancy Hoyle, a police officer, while court reporting – they married in 1956. In his autobiography, Kill the Messenger (1991), he wrote of the need for the “still small voice” of the reporter. “I have shared with him his perishing funerals, his sodden agricultural shows, his grisly murders, his endless doorsteps … But I cannot help noticing that no one these days wants to be a hard-news reporter … reporters are out; commentators, interpreters and analysts are in.” It moulded him. Facts, accuracy, thoroughness remained the Ingham holy grail.
In 1959, he moved to the paper’s Leeds headquarters, soon becoming northern industrial correspondent. In 1962, he joined the Guardian’s Leeds office, reporting largely on business and politics. But while prolific, he was never a fluent writer on a paper where stylish writing was prized. He confessed to being overawed. When the rising tide of Labour disputes found the Guardian’s London office short in 1965, Ingham was the obvious candidate. An active trade unionist and Labour supporter, in 1964 he had begun a column in a local Labour paper, the Leeds Weekly Citizen, and stood as a Labour candidate in a hopeless council seat.
Ingham’s move to London began his progressive disaffection with the unions. Reporting the Donovan commission in 1968, he began to view them as an entrenched conservative interest with strikes selfishly sabotaging the ambitions of the new Labour government. He was soured by the high living of some union leaders and offended by the tight cabal of reporters around the TUC hierarchy. Approached by Keith McDowall of the Daily Mail to join it – provided he traded his own information – he angrily rejected the offer.
He poured out copy, but felt overshadowed by the then Labour correspondent, Peter Jenkins. Then, when Jenkins moved up, he was passed over. Exhaustive chronicling of every dispute was not what the paper wanted.
Shortly after, in 1967, he became a temporary press adviser at the National Board for Prices and Incomes. He believed in incomes policy but the chair, Aubrey Jones, found him “zealous to the point of excess”. In 1968, he joined Barbara Castle’s new Department of Employment and Productivity, initially as No 2, where he busied himself with nitty-gritty such as health and safety, before later taking charge. Wary of Castle’s leftwing credentials, he admired her energy and “guts”, which he would compare with Thatcher’s. But it was never a warm relationship. She noted in her diary soon after he arrived: “I wouldn’t say I have got myself a Kennedy-type speechmaker.”
The election of the Heath government, with its planned Industrial Relations Act of 1971, placed the department at the centre of politics. By now established as a civil servant and with a confidence that forthright views won respect, Ingham survived careful scrutiny by the Conservatives. He was soon taking his impeccable shorthand notes throughout the interminable tripartite negotiations on an incomes settlement, where he despaired as much at industrialists’ inability to argue their case as at the trade unions’ intransigence.
He forged good relationships with his ministers, Robert Carr and Maurice Macmillan. He was respected by journalists in a confrontational atmosphere, patiently explaining the departmental line, suggesting story ideas, and encouraging his own team. But it came to an end when the looming miners’ strike brought the emollient Willie Whitelaw back from Northern Ireland to the department. Whitelaw insisted on his own director of information, Ingham’s old sparring partner McDowall.
Eventually, Ingham was found a place in the new Department of Energy, soon under Labour’s Eric Varley and then Tony Benn who, at first exasperated, devised a new division of energy conservation to get him out of the way before Ingham won his confidence enough for Benn to record: “I miss Bernard.”
It was as the civil servant in charge of energy-saving that he received the offer, in 1979, to return to the information service as the new prime minister’s chief press secretary. He said he had immediate rapport with Thatcher, sharing her wish to “do something”; to shake Britain out of decline and curb the influence of the trade unions.
Passionate about policy, Thatcher was less interested in its presentation. Provided Ingham followed her general line, she left matters to his judgment. She had little time for journalists and read no daily papers. She relied on his personal summary of media news and issues that was on her desk every morning.
For all the actor-manager bluster, Ingham remained a blunt and straightforward operator, largely incapable of deception and chained to facts. He once reflected: “I fought perception with fact every inch of the way and it was an uphill struggle.” He defined his role as maintaining a bridge between No 10 and journalists and managing overall relations with the media. Previously the system had creaked. Those of us reporting on the industrial crises of the 1970s were struck by successive governments’ difficulties with coordination and consistency. Announcements were spread between departments but there was a lack of professionalism. Ingham changed that.
Plugging into the high voltage of the prime minister, he demanded information from ministries and gave his staff specific liaison tasks. He revitalised the weekly meeting of information officers and soon took over its chair from a minister. Secondments brought promising information officers into No 10, while his deputies were regularly posted as departmental information heads. He demanded civil service recognition of their professionalism, and resisted political PR advisers. More controversially, he took over leadership of the government information service from a diminished Central Office of Information, centralising control at No 10.
He clashed with the defence ministry over the Falklands, insisting that the numbers of journalists with the fleet be substantially increased, and getting the PM to inquire why only junior staff were sent to his briefings.
Relations with the parliamentary lobby of political journalists were frequently explosive, with stage-managed outrage and his favourite dismissal of “bunkum and balderdash”. No one doubted that he knew Thatcher’s mind.
Lobby briefings planted ideas and phrases without open attribution to himself or the prime minister. He was outraged when the Independent and the Guardian began a lobby boycott, insisting that briefings should be on the record. He played hardball, banning them from the prime-ministerial plane, and deftly passing the decision back to the lobby. To his satisfaction, it voted narrowly to retain the system.
His views of journalists became increasingly harsh, particularly of what he saw as conspiracy theories and what he dubbed “separatitis” – a belief that journalists were separate from society’s responsibilities. But behind the huff and puff there was extensive direct briefing of senior political journalists, and he remained accessible to reporters outside the Westminster circle and the provincial press.
It was politicians, in particular Conservative ministers, who found the Thatcher-Ingham axis particularly hard to take and to be trespassing on cabinet conventions. John Biffen was marked down as “semi-detached” and Francis Pym teased as “it’s being so cheerful that keeps you going”, before being sacked. Ministers became terrified of the Ingham “black spot”. John Nott spoke of Machiavelli and Michael Heseltine of Ingham’s “insidious undermining”. Nigel Lawson had a more subtle take: “outstandingly competent” as Ingham was, he presented an unhelpful chauvinistic caricature of Thatcher’s views to which she then started to live up.
In 11 years, he nearly came unstuck twice. Once when he broke the unwritten rule not to comment on the currency and suggested a sinking pound would not be supported, he was carpeted by Lawson, the chancellor, but protected by the prime minister. And in the Westland affair, over the future of Britain’s last helicopter manufacturer, he connived at – or did not dissuade – the leaking of a legal letter, as a result of which Leon Brittan, then trade and industry secretary, resigned.
After Downing Street, which he left in 1990 (with a knighthood) alongside his boss, he parlayed his experience into books – Kill the Messenger and The Wages of Spin (2003) – and after-dinner speeches. He became almost a professional Yorkshireman, producing a series of books on Yorkshire topics. Newspaper columns included a Hebden Bridge Times offering improbably complaining that the town had become the lesbian capital of Britain and a Yorkshire Post piece attacking the “pretentious intellectuals and totalitarians who have colonised my home town”.
He relentlessly courted controversy, feuding with his next-door neighbour and being bound over to keep the peace, and taking up causes guaranteed to infuriate his political critics: a directorship of McDonald’s alongside campaigns for nuclear power and against wind farms.
He was bitterly attacked for his stance over the Hillsborough disaster when it was revealed that, in a 1996 letter, he had blamed it on “tanked-up yobs who turned up late” and defended the police. He refused to comment or apologise. In 2016 he voted for Brexit and wrote of his “joy unconfined”, describing it as “a very British coup against the elite”.
Nancy died in 2017. He is survived by their son, John, two grandchildren and a great-grandchild.
• Bernard Ingham, journalist and government press officer, born 21 June 1932; died 24 February 2023
