The political landscape in the Britain of today owes a lot to the pervasive influence of spin doctors. This particular term first appeared in print in an October 1984 editorial in the New York Times and was used to describe Donald Regan, White House Chief of Staff between 1985 and 1987. What we understand to be spin doctoring-the application of either a positive or negative spin to information-is, however not an exclusively American innovation and can be recognised in British politics from an earlier date.
Tim Bell died at his Belgravia home on August 25 2019. He was one of the earliest and most effective of all British spin doctors, with his activities dating back to the 1970s. Timothy John Leigh Bell, Baron Bell, of Belgravia in the City of Westminster, to give him his full name and title, masterminded successful campaigns that led to Conservative victories in three successive General Elections in Britain in 1979, 1983 and 1997.
Tim Bell left school at eighteen and went on to build up a career in advertising and public relations. He joined Saatchi & Saatchi, an advertising agency that was founded by brothers Charles and Maurice Saatchi in London at its inception in 1970. Bell was behind the firm’s advertising campaign for the 1979 General Election, which is best remembered for the iconic “Labour isn’t working” campaign poster. The poster depicted a long queue of unemployed people . The people in the image were actually volunteers from the Hendon Young Conservatives!
Bell left to found Lowe Bell in 1985, which became part of Chime Communications in 1994 and was renamed Bell Pottinger in 1998. He resigned as Chairman in August 2016, and Bell Pottinger went into administration in 2017. This was brought about by the company’s involvement in a racially divisive campaign orchestrated by the wealthy Gupta family in South Africa which led to its expulsion by the Public Relations and Communications Association in September 2017.
Bell’s client list included many individuals and groups who needed a positive spin on their image and activities-also known as reputation management- such as Augusto Pinochet, Boris Yeltsin and Aleksandr Lukashenko, alongside the governments of Saudi Arabia and Sri Lanka. A great favourite of Margaret Thatcher, he remained her communications adviser even after she left public office. His activities typified the wide scope of activity for spin doctors, which can transcend national borders and political persuasions.
Traditionally, electioneering has been a more restrained activity, with a focus on policies and strategies over and above images, personalities and simplistic populist messages. While the mass media have always been polarised and populist agendas have frequently emerged, there has been less dependence on a drip feed of both information and misinformation in the form of press statements, dramatic soundbites, strategic “leaks” and “exclusives.” “Fake news” is thus a more recent addition to our vocabulary. Campaigning in the past has tended to be mostly positive, rather than negative.
Today, political parties have become major brands. Electioneering can be likened to advertising campaigns in which competing brands aggressively battle it out for the public vote. To keep up with the changing times, the Labour Party was accordingly re-branded as New Labour in the run up to the 1997 General Election. Alastair Campbell and Peter Mandelson were among the most prominent spin doctors of the ten-year period of Labour government in the UK. A classic example of spin doctoring was when Jo Moore, a special adviser to the Secretary of State for Transport, sent an email on September 11 2001 to the department’s press office reading “It’s now a very good day to get out anything we want to bury. Councillors’ expenses?”
Spin doctoring retains a strong influence today. Today’s spin doctors are to be found among the ranks of political strategists, special advisers, press secretaries, public relations gurus and others who seek to influence public opinion. In a demonstration of the importance of message manipulation and presentation, the newly-appointed Prime Minister Boris Johnson appointed Dominic Cummings, former Vote Leave campaign director as Special Adviser in July 2019. Cummings was behind the “take back control” and the £350 million a week for the NHS soundbites during the 2016 EU Referendum campaign in the UK.
In a new media-dominated world, it seems unlikely that politicians will be able to manage without spin doctors, at least in the short term. A carefully crafted image, accompanied by memorable soundbites, is more important than the actual policies and strategies. Data mining, establishing who is likely to vote for a given party, and targeting potential voters with tailored campaign messages are all examples of the ways in which information technology is being harnessed to manipulate the voting public. The content and delivery of the message are thereby being controlled by spin doctors and the media, and being guided by insights from “big data” obtained by the covert surveillance of people’s activities. C’est la vie!
Ashis Banerjee (have been influenced by many spin doctors!!)