Oral evidence

Taken before the Public Administration Committee on Thursday 23 October 2003

Members present:

Tony Wright, in the Chair
Kevin Brennan
Annette Brooke
Mr Kelvin Hopkins
Mr Ian Liddell-Grainger
Mr Gordon Prentice
Mr Michael Trend
Brian White

__________

Witnesses: SIR BERNARD INGHAM, former Press Secretary to Baroness Thatcher, MR TIM ALLAN, former Deputy Press Secretary to the current Prime Minister, and PROFESSOR IVOR GABER, Professor Emeritus of Broadcast Journalism, Goldsmiths College, University of London, examined.

Q1  Chairman: Good morning. May I welcome our witnesses this morning. We are delighted to have with us Sir Bernard Ingham, former press secretary at Number 10, Tim Allan, former deputy press secretary to the Prime Minister, and Professor Ivor Gaber from Goldsmiths College. Between you, you bring a lot of experience and expertise to the Committee. As you know, we are looking at the preliminary recommendations of the Phillis Report. This was the inquiry that we asked the Government to undertake and we were glad that it did. It has now produced an interim report and obviously we will be looking at the final report when it comes. It does emphasise that what it has said so far is of a preliminary nature, and it may revisit and revise some of it, but we think we have enough to be going on with, particularly what it said in relation to the organisation at the centre. That is the context for asking you to come along and reflect upon these emerging findings. You have very kindly given us some written submissions, reflecting those that you put into the Phillis Review itself. Would any of you like to say a word before we start, or shall we just fire away?

Sir Bernard Ingham: Fire away.

Q2  Chairman: Right. It would be helpful if we could, first of all, spend a few minutes looking at the diagnosis of what is said to be the problem, and then just see whether the kind of recommendations that Phillis is coming up with reflect an attempt to get to grips with that problem. I would like to discuss this with you for a few moments. The Phillis Review tells us that all their evidence, including their own research evidence, points to "a three-way breakdown in trust between government and politicians, the media and general public." It goes on to say, "The response of the media to a rigorous and proactive government news management strategy has been to match claim with counter-claim in a challenging and adversarial way, making it difficult for any accurate communication of real achievement to pass unchallenged." It talks about this general breakdown of trust on all sides. Is that an analysis that you would share?

Sir Bernard Ingham: I have difficulty with this idea that there is a new adversarial relationship: in my view, there has always been an adversarial relationship as between media and politician. I think it is a matter of degree, of course. I think that is where the breakdown of trust has occurred. I accept that there is a breakdown of trust; but I do not accept that there is anything particularly new in an adversarial relationship. I think it is fair to say that over the last six years, or at least in the earlier part of the last six years, we had a hyperactive obsession with the media and with knocking them down and suborning them - and I think that has brought the whirlwind that I prophesied - but let's be careful about an "adversarial relationship". There has always been one, and I think in a healthy democracy we had better hope that there always will be one.

Q3  Chairman: Do you think there is a problem, as Phillis says, not just about the Government's role in all this but the media role in it too?

Sir Bernard Ingham: You see, I find it very difficult to suggest that the media make things up. I think they stretch things; they reach heroic conclusions on the basis of the flimsiest evidence which would have Sherlock Holmes lost in admiration until he saw the results; but, in the end, they do not make it up. As I said to the prime minister I served, when she went ballistic over something that she had been told had appeared - she did not read it herself - "Look at all this rather as you would look at an oil painting: close up it looks like nothing on earth, but, if you stand back, you get the drift." I think that all we can expect from the media is to get the drift. And, by and large, I think we get the drift in Britain.

Q4  Chairman: Let me bring the others in and ask whether you think there is this trilateral problem, and that government, civil servants, media all have to undergo this "culture change"(as Phillis calls it)?

Mr Allan: I think the analysis of a breakdown in trust is right. I think we need to separate the specific problem that this Government has faced from the structural problem that anybody communicating through the media faces, be they government or whatever. I think specifically there has been the perception over the last few years that the Government has played fast and loose with the media. The obsession-with-spin attack has clearly had an impact and there has been this perception that the Government uses spin in a way that it has not been used previously. The Government needs to tackle that. I think the Phillis Review is all about tackling that, and the Government needs to take action, in my view, to communicate much more openly and much more fairly, much more equally, with the media. I do not think the Government should be in the business of giving exclusive stories to particular journalists in return for favourable coverage. That sort of stuff has to end, in my view. I now make a living out of helping businesses communicate and I am struck by the way that businesses communicate at the same time to everybody much more - partly because there are actual rules that make that happen. You are not allowed to push out market-sensitive information to one journalist. It is illegal. If a business called in a bunch of journalists at 11 o'clock and four o'clock every day and gave them it-bits of new information that it was not releasing to everybody at the same time, it would find itself in trouble pretty quickly. I think that whole way of communicating has to end. I think the Government recognises that. I think the Phillis Review certainly points in that direction. The other problem is that the Government is communicating through a media that, as Bernard says, does not see itself as a medium. It does not see itself as just a conduit of information; it sees itself in an adversarial relationship, as some sort of constitutional check. That is fine, but sometimes the Government is just trying to communicate information and actually wants a medium through which to communicate simple information. It is very difficult, when the only way to do that is through a group of journalists and a group of news organisations that do not see themselves as a medium but as a check. I think the Government needs to find new ways of communicating that does allow itself direct communication with the public - and, again, I think there are lessons to be learned from business. I think business has found ways of communicating to shareholders at the same time as they are communicating to journalists and analysts. New technology allows the disintermediation of communication in a way that was not possible before. It is possible to get straight to the people you are trying to reach, rather than having to go through the media. I think the Government needs to use new technology and new ways to communicate directly. I would like to see much more webcasting and broadcasting of all their conferences; video Q and A on the department website - you know, just ways of getting their message out directly they need to take up.

Professor Gaber: A huge range of issues has already been raised. I think it is self-evident there has been a breakdown of trust, but, as Bernard says, it is a matter of degree. I think it is a matter of degree sufficient for us to sit up and do something about it. A 59 per cent turnout at the last general election says we have a problem that is probably getting worse. Although I am not suggesting the media is to blame for the turnout, full stop - life is a little more complex than that - there is clearly something going on. There is also something going on with wider society. Without roving too wide, the breakdown in trust is not just confined to a breakdown in trusting politicians; we have been witnessing for the last 10/15 years an end of deference, a breakdown, a fracturing of society, not just in this country but globally, which is making life more complicated. Having said that, I am not using that as an excuse to say: "Therefore we should do nothing." I want to make a few brief observations and then allow the Committee to come back. It is true the relationship is adversarial, but it is also collusive. That is the odd thing about the relationship between journalists and politicians, it is abusive, collusive. I forget who said it, but when Alastair Campbell was going to withdraw from the daily beating up of journalists at the 11 o'clock and four o'clock briefings at which, everybody had protested, it was outrageous how he used to behave, as soon as he said he was not going to be there any more, they said, "Oh, come back. We loved it!" So there is that strange sort of relationship - "collusive conflict" as somebody described it. It is a slightly odd, bizarre relationship, and it is slightly odd and bizarre because it all takes place within the half a mile around here. We are dealing with an oddness. It is a bit like families falling out; that is why the bitterness is so deep. If a business correspondent feels they have been poorly treated by one or two clients, life moves on; but if I feel the governing party has treated me badly, life does not move on, I am stuck here, and so these things fester. We have to try to view the situation as it is, which is unique, and try to find unique solutions. I think the media got off scot-free with Phillis, and I think it is a great pity. Because one of the big problems - and I have several - with the Phillis Report - and I am not going to go through all of them, but the first and most important, in one sense - is that it assumes the problem begins with 1997. I would make two observations on that. First, clearly, as Bernard and Tim know, this issue has been going on a long time. But also, and perhaps more importantly, New Labour's obsession with spin - it is obsession with spin - and carrying it into government was born out of the treatment that the media had given the Labour Party in the '70s and '80s and so forth. There was a ferocious attack on the Labour Party. As a media historian, you can find papers attacking parties since ... Well, not since time immemorial because papers did not exist since time immemorial, but over the last 150 years, but the ferocity and the intensity of the attack on Labour in the last decades of the last century was unprecedented, and that led to the current situation. We cannot just look at Westminster, look at Whitehall, and say the problem relates to politicians; the problem is deeply embedded - oops, that word again! - with the media, and particularly the print media, and that cannot be excluded from the solution. I mean, they have their problems as well - particularly the greater competitiveness of the media just intensifying and intensifying: more and more space to fill; fewer and fewer readers; more and more competition; 24-hour news - life is difficult. My final point is just to observe that Tim points us to look towards perhaps business as providing some ways forward, but I think I disagree. I think the essence of government should be transparency. The essence of corporate relations, frankly, is not transparency; it is communicating a particular message to your shareholders, a particular message to your employees, a particular message to your competitors, and so forth. I am not sure there are too many lessons for us to draw in that particular area. There might be technological issues that Tim has addressed, but I think essentially the relations between the government, the media and the people ought to be more transparent than that which exists between corporations and the public.

Q5  Chairman: Okay. I have a couple of points I want to take us down before I hand over to colleagues. To take the analysis a bit further, Phillis goes on to say that there are all kinds of problems with the way that government communication works at the moment. This was one of the charges that the New Labour Government made, when it came in in 1997, to justify some of its activities on the communications front, that it found basically a dozy, unreconstructed, unprofessional communications system. Bernard, you have said some fairly critical things about aspects of it too. Phillis Report says, "We have found no common approach to communications within government and little evidence of joined-up communications across government." Is that analysis right?

Sir Bernard Ingham: Yes. Not merely is it right, it is intended. I think we have approached this entirely wrongly. We ought to look at what the constitutional position, the Convention's position is. The position is that when the Government Information Service was established in 1945 there was great sucking of teeth, real concern among MPs, as to whether this would damage their power, their position in the system - and certainly the opposition then, the Conservative Opposition, was extremely worried, although they accepted it when they came to office in 1951. There was, I think, a very considerable difficulty of principle for the politicians in arming a government with an information apparatus. They thought it would distort the whole system. But they did it - but they did it in a very careful way. Herbert Morrison was put in charge of coordinating this lot - not exactly an unpowerful person, if not a popular person necessarily. He had to move very carefully because the way in which it was established was that the primacy for policy should be the individual Cabinet minister. I inherited the 1945 system when I went to Number 10. I knew exactly what the position was: the position was that I, as chief press secretary, to a pretty powerful prime minister, had no power over any individual press secretary in Whitehall. They owed their first allegiance and their loyalty and their responsibility to their individual Cabinet ministers and I had a power of persuasion. And I could not get anywhere if, indeed, individual Cabinet ministers, through their press secretaries, did not want to do it or did not want to fall in line or quarrelled with it or whatever. It is deliberately difficult, it has been made deliberately difficult, for government to coordinate the presentation of their policies because of the primacy of Cabinet ministers in what we are supposed to have, and that is a Cabinet system of government in a parliamentary democracy. I think that a lot of the solutions which have been brought forward totally ignore this diffusion, deliberate diffusion, of power. I think also that we get into the position where we ignore another constitutional fact; that is, that we have an impartial civil service. One of the solutions which Ivor is bringing forward is to have a wholesale turnover when we change government complexion. If we do that, then we are going down the very slippery slope of the American spoil system, where about 7,000 or 8,000 jobs change, and I do not believe that it is admissible constitutionally to make that change by having disposable, if you like, press secretaries in departments and in Number 10, because that I think creates a precedent for a change in the system. We are, I think, playing around in a fog at the moment and we do not understand why our system was created in the way it is and why it is deliberately difficult to coordinate.

Q6  Chairman: The Committee will want to come back to that last issue later, I am sure. I want to stay, just for a second, with the first part of what you were saying there, which was the way in which government is deliberately diffused through departments here and the problems that this causes - if, indeed, it is a problem - for central communications. Phillis has accepted the analysis that there is a problem about central communication, and, despite the general charge that this Government has concentrated power at the centre and concentrated communications power at the centre, here we have Phillis saying that the real problem is the lack of coordination from the centre. Indeed, they say the communications function at Number 10 is under-resourced. Someone reading the evidence going to Hutton at the moment and watching what was clearly central control of the communications function in government - which Phillis says should happen, and particularly needed at times of crisis - how do you match the analysis of the problem from Phillis with what seems to be happening now, which, whatever else seems to be happening, does not seem to be an absence of clout at the centre?

Mr Allan: It was part of the political programme of the Labour Opposition in the run-up to 1997 that there was a very weak centre and that there was drift and poor leadership of the government and that the whole thing was a shower. That was part of the programme of the Government as it came in in 1997, to strengthen the centre and to run the government in a more coordinated way. That was part of Tony Blair's programme. To that extent, I think he had a mandate to strengthen the centre, to ensure that the type of anarchy in communications that we had had in the run-up to 1997 did not continue. That said, you are right and Bernard is right, the myth of central communications is rather overblown under the New Labour Government: individual departments do have their own fiefdoms; the press secretaries do represent the views of the Cabinet ministers rather than the views of the Prime Minister; and it is the Cabinet ministers to whom they owe their loyalty. But there have been measures to make things more coordinated. There are attempts to have a central grid of government announcements. It does not seem to me too unreasonable that they should plan exactly, so that you are not having a whole series of clashing announcements. I think that level of coordination is fine. But I think a lot of it is this myth around Alastair Campbell, that nothing happened in government at all for six years unless Alastair Campbell personally signed off on it. It was all rubbish, but it was allowed to build up. The central function in Number 10 is more than it was under the last Conservative Government but it is hardly, as it is made out to be, this huge ministry of information being run from a couple of rooms at Number 10.

Q7  Chairman: I am really asking all of you this: The analysis which says the central communications function has to be strengthened further, is that the analysis to which you would sign up? Bernard seems to be saying, "Yes, that is a feature of the system, but that is constitutionally how it is."

Mr Allan: Yes. Certainly I would not be opposed to ensuring that there is better coordination from the centre. That would not particularly worry me, if that were to happen. I think the Phillis recommendation of a permanent secretary overseeing quality of communication across government, because it is very patchy ... In my experience, the Treasury and the Foreign Office, where fast-track, high-flying civil servants all spent time in the press office, had very good quality people. That quality was not uniform across different departments. If there are ways of improving both the quality of communicators in the departments and the level of coordination of the communication for the Government, I think that would be a good thing.

Q8  Chairman: On the Kelly case, just to give the example, the centre was not prepared to say, was it, "Oh, well" - you know, on Bernard's analysis - "we have a system of Cabinet government run by individual ministers. This is clearly a communications information issue for that department." This was a key issue of central government, management and direction, and it was grabbed by the centre and centre determined the policy. How could it be different?

Mr Allan: I am not sure that is factually true. The evidence was that the Prime Minister said, "This is a decision for Kevin Tebbit and David Omand."

Sir Bernard Ingham: A decision on how to handle it rather than what you do.

Mr Allan: Alastair Campbell may have said, "I want to do this and I want to get the name out," but that actually did not happen because the Prime Minister said, "No, this has got to be MoD procedures down the line."

Q9  Chairman: Phillis is telling us that, in moments of crisis, of course the centre should exercise authority.

Mr Allan: Absolutely. This was a huge story, dominating political debate. My view is that if the Director General of the BBC had gripped the issue, actually gone through the details and arguments and got hold of the actual transcripts and actually taken a grip of a huge issue, then we would not be in the situation that we got ourselves into. But the Prime Minister, certainly - in an issue of huge importance for the Government, which was dominating political news - my God, he would make sure that he is across it, across every single piece of paper and across every single document in the news, and making sure that every argument is being tested. If the Director General of the BBC had done the same, we would be in a lot better position.

Q10  Chairman: I do not want to go too wide on this but ----

Professor Gaber: There is a problem going on here. We keep talking about coordination from the centre. I think coordination is very important; I question whether it needs to be from the centre (that is, from Downing Street). I think that is the fundamental problem. I think Bernard makes an interesting case about the need to strengthen, if you like, communication from government departments; at the same time, there is maintaining coordination. I was absolutely amazed to read in Phillis that the centre is weak. I spent time doing a communications audit in a Whitehall department: a phone call from the Strategic Communications Unit in Downing Street sent terror through the press office; and the daily briefing that the head of the media office attended at Downing Street was not to be debated in the press office: That Was What We Do Today. How they can say coordination is weak. I want to stress this point: the coordination does not have to come from the prime minister's office. In fact, I am proposing - and I know that I will be shot down from a glorious height - that actually one needs another minister, another secretary of state responsible, so that at least (a) we separate it from the prime minister; (b) we have some sort of democratic accountability, committees like yours, in parliament. At the moment, if we appoint ... I forget the title, the person in the Cabinet Office, somebody who is responsible for government communications, he or she is the prime minister's creature. At least if we have somebody in the Cabinet, okay they have been appointed by the prime minister, but there are other lines. I think the whole problem is that there is a great deal of centralisation and Phillis recommends even more. I am saying: No, we do want coordination but we do not want centralisation.

Chairman: Okay, that is a good start.

Q11  Mr Trend: Could I talk to Tim Allan for a while about when the Labour Party came to power. You said that the Labour Government made major mistakes in bringing the communication techniques that had worked in opposition into government. It seems to me there is a real problem here for any opposition coming into government, that its mind-set and perhaps lack of experience is going to mean that it only has its own resources to fall back on initially. What were those mistakes? - and I mean in a more structural and specific sense.

Mr Allan: I think you are right that any opposition would face that. Obviously an opposition which has not been in government for 18 years faces it particularly acutely. I think the structural mistakes were not recognising the difference in techniques of government communication and opposition communication. In opposition, all you have is words. You cannot affect anybody's life, you cannot take any decision that impacts on people. All you can do is to present an image of what you would do and an image of what you stand for through words. That means you are constantly looking to get your key messages across through news stories, and you are chasing news stories all the time to try to get in them because you cannot do things that create news other than by getting into new stories. You are lightening quick to jump on any breaking story, you are making sure you have a view and you are up there and you are trying to change it and get your message across through breaking news. I think in government we started off with those similar techniques. Just to use one specific, I remember dealing with the issue very early on in government about the Camelot directors. There was a news story that broke that the Camelot directors had paid themselves a big bonus. In opposition, one of our key messages was: The many not the few: "This is a great story for us, let's get in there. Let's get our opposition spokesman up and say how terrible it is and that it would not happen under a Labour government." If in government, you then put someone up and say, "This is terrible, this is outrageous. We stand for the many not the few," the immediate question is: "You are the Government, what are you going to do about it? Are you going to fire them? Are you going to take back their licence?" Those are questions which you do not really face as an opposition party when you are making those sort of statements. We tried to get into every news story in a way that you do not have to in government, when you need a much more considered, sedate approach which comes from policy making, which you then communicate, rather than using communications ahead of policy, which is what you have to do in opposition.

Q12  Chairman: If that was a strategic blunder, as you are describing it, who was responsible for such a strategic blunder?

Mr Allan: I think it just came from inexperience. It simply came from the fact that we -

Q13  Chairman: Inexperience?

Mr Allan: Yes.

Q14  Chairman: This was the most professional media-handling operation the world had ever seen.

Mr Allan: Inexperience of government. We had never been in government and nobody involved in it had been in government. I do not think the Labour Government in the early years was an unmitigated disaster in terms of communication, but there were some mistakes that were made that came from a lack of experience, and I think lessons were learned pretty quickly. You then had the situation, once the communication style had been branded as an obsession with spin, that it became completely impossible to get out of that cycle. Any attempt to say, "Look, we are not doing that any more," is branded as more spin, so you are locked in a cycle that it is very difficult to get out of.

Q15  Chairman: It is not just the branding. I have a quote from you here which says, "Our obsession with trying to control the news agenda in itself came to dominate political news." You are signing up to this analysis; you are not saying that it is a branding that you were given.

Mr Allan: Yes, I think in the early phase, as I have said, mistakes were made. We were trying to control the news agenda and get in the news agenda, in the way that we were in opposition.

Q16  Chairman: That was a big, strategic communications mistake.

Sir Bernard Ingham: It was cultural, surely.

Mr Allan: I think it was relatively short-term, born from inexperience. I think huge strides were then made with Alastair Campbell to do things which actually opened up communications in a way that they had not been opened up at all when Bernard Ingham was running it. The lobby was opened up to more people; the lobby was on the record; specialist correspondents could go. All those things were innovations in direct communications and more formal communications that were good. I think the Government did learn very quickly that the techniques of opposition did not work in government, but that did not stop vast numbers of newspaper articles and TV journalists talking about the "obsession with spin" that increasingly came to be, in my view, their obsession rather than the Government's obsession.

Q17  Mr Trend: Going back to when you first came to power, you immediately encountered a government information service which, I suppose, had been under siege for a couple of years along with its government, and you identified, I imagine, certain shortcomings with the way in which the way it received you - so that it worked both ways. What were they? What had the civil service lot done right, in your view, to work out what you wanted?

Mr Allan: It is a long time ago now. Media monitoring is an example I would use. In opposition, we had a media brief which told you what was in the newspapers on everybody's desk by 7 am. During the election I think we had four of those produced a day, so that all the politicians and the press officers knew what was being said, which was a good start when you are hoping to communicate. We were a bit surprised to see that the Government was not doing something similar, and that there was no sort of attempt to find out actually what was being said on the media when you are handling it on a day-to-day basis. There was no media monitoring unit, which seemed a bit odd. I think that not just in the communications side but across the civil service there was a lot of pretty disgruntled, disheartened people after the last couple of years of the Major Government. Having said that, I was in Number 10 for a year, and only a year, and my experience of the civil servants in the press office was a very good one. I thought they were very competent people and relations were very good.

Q18  Mr Trend: Yet in the early years of the Labour Government there was a surprising degree of change at the top, of departmental and senior positions in the Government and professional service. That surely represents a fundamental problem which could easily repeat itself upon another change of government. How do we try to get round that?

Professor Gaber: Do we want to get round it? Chief press officers of government departments are really crucial adjuncts, really crucial people. Clearly what happened - maybe willy-nilly, maybe planned - was that over a relatively short period of time ministers eased out those people who they did not feel were enthusiastic or whatever, or they did not feel they could work with, and brought in people they preferred. I am not suggesting, as Bernard suggested, a wholesale change, but I think it is perfectly right and proper to seek to surround yourself in terms of your information effort with people who are sympathetic to what you are trying to do. I think that change of chief press officers - it happened in a messy way - should be formalised.

Q19  Mr Trend: Does Tim agree about that?

Mr Allan: No. I totally do not agree with that. I think it is completely bizarre to say that, if you have a permanent civil service, the people devising policy (you know, people working out policy on extremely controversial matters, leading big policy departments) they can stay, they can stay between one government and another, and yet a press officer should immediately be fired as soon as the government changes. I think that would be completely ridiculous and it elevates the status of press officers and politicises them in a way that is completely unnecessary. I have found that there are effective civil servant press officers who are good communicators, able to take the Government policy and communicate it to the media for both sides of the political divide, and I think that is absolutely fine. If you look at some extremely competent people under John Major - Chris Mayor, who then went off and became Ambassador to Washington, a first-class guy; Nigel Sheinwald in the Foreign Office, able to put the case for both sides - I think there is no reason at all why there should be this firing of people who are communicating and leaving in place of people who are actually working on the policy.

Q20  Mr Trend: In this fairly wholesale change of senior people, was the main problem that they were not sympathetic to the aims and objectives, perhaps the values to that or whatever, or that they just did not seem to be proficient and professional in the sense that the Labour Party's press officers have become?

Mr Allan: I do not actually know about the specific examples. I think it was probably much more the latter than the former. I do not think you could say ... After all, most of them were replaced by other civil servants in advertised posts, so I do not think it was a huge politicisation; it was simply that ... I mean, it is difficult to comment on specific cases, but there were some who lost their jobs and people thought they could not do it. But that is what happens.

Q21  Mr Trend: I am really concerned with trying to look forward as well. Do you think that at that time - and, indeed, the recent appointments in Downing Street suggest that the Government may not continue with this - it was right to have what we call the Order in Council special advisers? Was that a sensible thing to do in retrospect?

Mr Allan: I think it has certainly led to a huge amount of stories about spin, and the fact that it was being run by Alastair Campbell, a political figure, did undermine some of the feelings of legitimacy of communication. That was a problem. To balance that, it did mean that there was strong leadership from the centre, which was what we were intending to achieve. I think it is a difficult judgment. They have decided not to go with it now. I do not think you particularly need it if you have an effective civil servant head of the Downing Street press office

Q22  Chairman: Would Alastair Campbell have had an ounce less authority inside the system if he had not had Executive powers?

Mr Allan: It comes down to personalities. I think we can be obsessed by structures and talk about the Phillis structures and other structures endlessly, but your power in Whitehall does not come entirely from your job title and whether you have an Order in Council; it comes from who you are, your closeness to the prime minister.

Q23  Chairman: It was unnecessary, was it not?

Mr Allan: It starts off with him actually doing the briefing. He was specifically ordering around civil servants to get him the information for the briefings, so I think in that specific managerial sense he was literally ordering civil servants to give him stuff for the ll o'clock briefing. If he had not had the power to do that, that may have caused difficulty. However, he stopped the briefings after a couple of years.

Sir Bernard Ingham: But the Order in Council is nothing new. Previous press secretaries who had been recruited politically had to have an Order in Council in order that they may direct civil servants. There was nothing new in that. It was the way it was done.

Q24  Mr Trend: To go back, the idea now that there might be a permanent secretary, I think somehow this is probably replicating the position which occurred, certainly under John Major, where there was a civil servant in charge of this, and the suggestion is much more that a senior civil servant again begs the question of what happens when you change government, because there is going to be somebody relatively exposed then, is there not?

Mr Allan: They are going to be no more exposed than the head of criminal justice policy at the Home Office is exposed when there is a change to a Labour home secretary, I would not have thought.

Q25  Mr Trend: Is there any way in which the civil service, the government ... Well, the information service - perhaps one ought not to say government here. ... the civil service could work with opposition parties?

Mr Allan: I hope not. No. Why? I do not understand actually.

Q26  Mr Trend: Because the fundamental distinction is between policy statement and party politics - and governments have to do that, of course, they do.

Mr Allan: Yes.

Q27  Mr Trend: And I think special advisers play a very valuable role here in keeping the two apart. Policy advice, by convention, is available to opposition parties in the run-up to an election. Is there any way in which an incoming government could get some sort of relationship then, with, as it were, the party aspects of government? I think what you are saying is the inexperience of the Government in coming to power caused a lot of the trouble.

Mr Allan: Yes. At the risk of being too flippant, I think at the moment the Prime Minister would certainly sanction civil servants giving as PR help to the leader of the Opposition as he wants. That said, no, I do not see a specific role where they can really help out opposition parties. I think having a civil servant head does allow the information to be put out, will perhaps be more trusted by opposition parties, and the debate between parties will take place hopefully on a higher level when the information that is being disseminated is seen as properly sanctioned civil servant information that a reputable permanent secretary has put his name to.

Q28  Brian White: Over the last few years the whole media environment has changed. We have 24-7 news, we have many more outlets. You have had the Daily Mail saying to the Puttenham Committee that they are proud of the fact that you cannot tell where fact ends and opinion begins; you have had the case in America with Fox News where the court ruled that it was okay to rely on because it was only an FCC policy not a legal requirement. In that whole environment, does government communications not have to change its way radically? - as opposed to two news channels and half a dozen newspapers with set deadlines.

Sir Bernard Ingham: It does if you are obsessive about it. But, I mean, I do not see what is new about 24-hour news. I had 24-hour news; the people before me had 24-hour news, if there was something happening. It is not the function of government to fill newspapers; it is the function of government to govern. Let the newspapers get on with it. And if they invent things, well, too bad. Tell them off. It does not matter. That does not matter; what seems to matter is what the government is doing; what the government stands for; what its policies are; and how it is working them out. That is what matters. The rest? Well, if the politicians want to court the media for their own particular political ends, that is another matter. But, so far as government is concerned, it should concentrate on its policies and their working out and should not see that its role every day - and this is where I think they got it absolutely wrong - is to fill newspapers. I used to think that the most perfect lobby that I had - and I had very few, but I had one or two of them - was where they said, "Is there anything doing today?" and I said, "No," and they did not ask any questions and they went away. They did, once or twice, and they laughed.

Professor Gaber: That is a nightmare scenario for people involved in 24-hour news. You say, Bernard, you had it ----

Sir Bernard Ingham: That is not my problem.

Professor Gaber: I know it is not your problem, but it becomes your problem. This is what happens. I set up the political coverage on Five Live, which was the fist 24-hour news station. You might have had calls at 24 hours - although I would have been extremely reluctant to call you at one o'clock in the morning!

Sir Bernard Ingham: Thank you.

Professor Gaber: You might have had calls, but there was not this machine - and I think it has made a political change and it has impacted upon politicians and they would have to be saints to ignore it. A story runs on the Today programme - which occasionally dabbles in politics! Then - forget 24-hour news, even in the news cycle you are used to - the editors of the lunchtime news slots are asking, "How are we going to react to it? Where are we going to take the story?" The Evening Standard meanwhile plops on everybody's desk and they have taken the story on; the six o'clock editors are thinking where do they go; the national editors are thinking where they are going; and so on and so forth. You have to be some sort of saint, if you are the minister about to make a speech about an important change in disability law or whatever and you are surrounded by 20 or 30 hacks demanding to know what is your reaction to the interview they have just heard on the Today programme or lunchtime news. You are going to be turning to your press officers or your spin doctors - I do not see a huge distinction - and asking, "What's the line? What do I say?" I think the media environment to which Mr White has referred has made a difference and you have to be in the real world. I love the picture of politicians carrying on governing irrespective of what is going on around them, but we have human beings doing the job and they react. That is the issue. I do think it has raised big problems.

Q29  Brian White: One of the things I liked in your submission, Professor Gaber, was the Ministry of Information, but I thought your analysis was only partial. Is it not a problem of delivery as well? One of the things that you have just identified was communication, whereas the same analysis applies actually to delivery on the ground. One of the problems we have with "departmentalitis" and the "silo" mentality is that you do not get the cross-cutting delivery that is required - or not enough of it.

Professor Gaber: I accept anything I said is partial. I am just sketching out some thoughts in reaction to Phillis. I do not have a well-worked plan and "partial" would suit me at this stage. But if I could answer the issue and, you know, tell you: "This is how you do delivery for government," I probably would not be sitting here, I would be doing it. I agree that it is very easy to sit here and make plans, but I do think you draw attention to a key weakness - and I will come back to the point Tim made. I think one of the fundamental misconceptions of this Government and of Phillis is that communications is an equal pillar amongst policy development and policy implementation. Phillis actually makes that statement; I am sure you have seen it. It is an equal one of the three pillars of government: delivering policy development, policy implementation and communications. I think that is the fundamental error. Communication is not an afterthought - it is certainly not an afterthought: it is there, it is important - but it is not as important. I find myself in sympathy with Bernard here, that it is the government's job to govern and if the communication is right, fantastic, but the first priority must be the governing and then the communications is subsidiary to the governing. In terms of delivery, I think one follows the other. If you are delivering the policies, the communications works well. You cannot make a bad policy good by spinning it well, because people on the ground who are receiving the policy know it does not work. One of the issues is the different types of communications that government has to do. We saw BSE, we have seen Foot and Mouth, we have seen health scares - and there is a contradictory health scare every day, it seems, on the news. How do you actually get the factual communications separate from the policy communications? Should you try to do that?

Mr Allan: Is that to me?

Q30  Brian White: Whoever wishes to answer it.

Professor Gaber: It is a difficult one. You take it!

Mr Allan: Yes, how to solve the BSE communications problem. I think BSE was a huge moment in government communications, when ministers said things that turned out later to be rather questionable on health grounds. I think that moment made it very difficult for future health issues to be discussed by ministers or anybody in government and be believed. I think it was extremely sad. I just think about the MMR issue, where it is so difficult to communicate in a way that is properly believed and we are seeing the absolutely tragic consequences of it as the proportion of people vaccinated goes down. I think the Government needs to think very hard about how, specifically, major matters of public health are communicated in a believable way, when you do have a very sceptical public and a very sceptical media for whom the health scare over MMR is a better story than "Government Says There is Nothing to Worry About" again. To my mind it is again to do with this horrible world "disintermediating". I think it has to try as much as possible to appeal directly to people rather than ... The media is not prepared to act as a medium for simple communication about something like MMR. They will not allow the Government to put its case as it wants to effectively; they would much rather confuse the picture, cloud the picture, by interviewing all sorts of talking heads who may or may not have authority and who may or may not know what they are talking about and give them the same weight as the Chief Medical Officer. Therefore, you need to find a way somehow of communicating directly, through, over, under the media.

Q31  Chairman: Let's not say "disintermediating" again, shall we? Nobody understands it and also it is very hard for the notetaker to write it down.

Mr Allan: I think the concept is something that we should understand.

Q32  Chairman: The concept. We will do the concept instead.

Mr Allan: The concept, okay.

Sir Bernard Ingham: I am a little confused by the question. I do not want to divorce, I think, policy from facts. I want my policies to be based upon facts. Otherwise I am in trouble. I am going to look very foolish, as a spokesman, if I am spouting nonsense. Then the policy falls apart. But I thought you were meaning something else: How do you get over this problem of a media with its own view of a particular issue? I think that specific cases will give different answers. But I do believe that if you are talking about BSE or Foot and Mouth or whatever, you are talking predominantly to a farming community - initially, at any rate - and then I think there are ways of reaching them. And, what is more, in those circumstances of national crises, as they are, you are permitted, in the interests of the nation, to advertise, so you can then get away from this interference by the media. You can communicate directly with people there because it is necessary to do so and you can justify it under the rules that exist about governing the use of taxpayers' money for advertising. So I think there are ways in which you can cope with all these.

Q33  Chairman: Do people believe adverts any more than they believe statements in the press?

Sir Bernard Ingham: Not necessarily because you cannot divorce your advertising as a company or as a government from your general credibility. That is why I think it is terribly important to maintain your credibility from the beginning, not set out to wreck it.

Professor Gabor: The key issue is the trust factor. That is the difficulty of communicating in a crisis. You know for the last five years that you have been subjected to a lot of spin, all of a sudden how do you discriminate between a message that is "political" and a message that is "information"?

Chairman: Kevin Brennan may want to ask you if the trust factor can endure and if you want to say there is no difference between spin doctors and civil servants, but maybe that is not going to be his question.

Q34  Kevin Brennan: You can answer that as well while you are at it but should Civil Service press officers be briefing journalists off the record?

Sir Bernard Ingham: All the time they do otherwise they cannot communicate.

Q35  Kevin Brennan: What is the point of off-the-record briefings?

Sir Bernard Ingham: First of all, to convey a great deal more information and to explain and give the background to and insights to but there is an enormous amount of nonsense talked about being on the record and unattributable.

Q36  Kevin Brennan: What are the rules about briefing off the record?

Sir Bernard Ingham: There are no rules. The lobby used to be that you spoke to them unattributably but if you gave them a stunning quote they would immediately attribute it to you. They break their rules instantly if it serves their story purpose so you tended to be fairly dull until you were provoked!

Q37  Kevin Brennan: This is what happened to the other Mr Kelly, is it not? He thought he was discussing something on a speculative basis off the record - Tom Kelly I am talking about, the press officer - and then found himself having to apologise to the nation for his disgraceful slur on Dr David Kelly. What is the point of all that? What is the point of that sort of exchange? If there are no rules or if the rules are likely to be broken and there is no honour between Civil Service spokespeople and journalists, should there not be some sort of standards and rules applied to this?

Sir Bernard Ingham: This concept of rules is admirable but who is going to enforce them? I do not know who is going to enforce them.

Q38  Kevin Brennan: There could be a Civil Service Code as to what a Civil Service press officer can or cannot do in engaging with a journalist.

Professor Gabor: It is a market relationship. In one sense the rules are the rules of supply and demand for information. If this person proves to be a good customer of the information I give him and he uses it in a way I like - I am not saying this is good - I will continue to give him good information both on and off the record. If he is not a good user of my information I am going to read the press release and have no more to do with him. It is a human relationship governed by the rules of supply and demand. That was the genius, as somebody described it, of New Labour, working out that information was a scarce good and they could dole it out in such a way as to create dependency among journalists. So there are no rules, it is the rules of supply and demand.

Q39  Kevin Brennan: That genius, as you described it, has now become a big burden, has it not?

Professor Gabor: I think so. When you are in Opposition, as Tim says, all you have got to do is spin. There are other things to do as we are seeing but in general in terms of your public face all you have got to do is spin and sell your policies as best you can and attack the Opposition. When you are in government you have got a job to do. When you are in Opposition although occasionally there will be a big story like Gordon Brown's announcement that there would be no income tax increases under a Labour Government, and that was a valuable piece of information which Charlie Whelan doled out as he saw fit, in government there are lots of valuable pieces of information and a much stronger public good need to make sure the information is dealt with more fairly. What I am suggesting is a greater transparency. I know I am not talking about all government press officers because there are thousands of them, I am just talking about the top echelons, and I know when I am dealing with this person they are a political appointee whether it is a press officer or spin doctor, and the information they are giving me on the one hand - and this happens now and I am just trying to regularise what currently happens - is information the government wants me to have, but within that there has to be a broad sense of right and wrong and controls at the end of the day.

Q40  Kevin Brennan: So what is the boundary then between so-called spin doctors, special advisers and government press officers in doling out information on a preferential basis to journalists on and off the record, not to be attributed unless it is an extremely exciting basis? There is not one, is there?

Professor Gabor: I do not know the Civil Service grades well enough to tell you exactly but it comes at a very junior level. There is a point of interaction between journalists and press officers where you phone up and say, "Have you got the latest trade figures" and you are simply asking for a piece of information (and even that is political because the junior press officer might be told by a senior press officer not to give it to you) nonetheless there are a lot of people in the government communications and information service who are involved in the relatively straightforward business of information dissemination, above a certain level, above a certain pay grade.

Q41  Kevin Brennan: Above a certain pay grade is there any valid distinction between special advisers?

Professor Gabor: Not in my view.

Q42  Kevin Brennan: Can I ask Tim that.

Mr Allan: I disagree with both the other panellists on this. I think there is a fetish-isation of off-the-record dealings amongst journalists and press officers and that has to stop. Should Civil Service press officers brief journalists off the record? I would ask why would they need to? If they are disseminating government information, saying what the government thinks and what the government is doing, then why on earth would you not want to say that is what you are doing and put your name to it or at least put the government's name to it. I think there should be a much more formal way of communicating, so the skill of communicators should come in in working out what to say, not this personal relationship with journalists and doing deals with them. I think that has got to stop. You should work out what you want to say and say it on the record.

Q43  Kevin Brennan: Would special advisers still do that sort of thing?

Mr Allan: Of course there can be no real policing of it because journalists do deals and speak to MPs or whoever, and of course there will be off-the-record sources, but should the Government routinely offer an off-the-record, bespoke briefing service to anybody who calls up, which is the Tom Kelly affair and, as Bernard said, journalists will burn their contacts like that if it is in their interests to do so, as happened then. Should they be doing that and offering a bespoke, off-the-record briefing service to anybody who calls up and wants to talk about an issue? I do not see why. They should work out what they want to say on a particular issue and be saying it in public to a group of journalists and broadcasters at the same time and then say to anybody else who calls up the same thing: "This is the Government's position."

Q44  Kevin Brennan: You leave the dirty work to special advisers?

Mr Allan: I think there will always be off-the-record conversations with MPs and with ministers.

Q45  Kevin Brennan: But there should not be with senior civil servants who are not special advisers?

Mr Allan: I do not think that it should be part of a civil servant's job to speak off the record to journalists. The government - going back to my point about business and I was not saying that we need to import wholesale every single way of business communication because government clearly operates on a higher scale with much greater volumes - should not brief ministers off the record about new policy with the equivalent of market-sensitive information before an announcement. The work should be about getting the announcement right and giving it to everyone at the same time. But, no, I really do not think that there should be off-the-record briefings about policy matters from special advisers and ministers if they have not previously been announced.

Q46  Kevin Brennan: Sir Bernard, you were chuckling there.

Sir Bernard Ingham: We are not living in the real world, frankly. What happens in the United States and the White House? The Chief Press Secretary goes on for five minutes for the television channels and then what happens? They all meet him and talk off the record.

Q47  Kevin Brennan: You were not a special adviser when you were working at Number 10.

Sir Bernard Ingham: I was what?

Q48  Kevin Brennan: You were not a special adviser when you were working at Number 10. Is there any point to special advisers in the communications area? What difference would their role be from yours?

Sir Bernard Ingham: All that special advisers really are these days is a means of getting your hands on public money to finance a party political post. That is all it is.

Q49  Kevin Brennan: Sure.

Sir Bernard Ingham: It started under Harold Wilson and every government has exploited it and it is a very good training ground for young politicians. I think it ought to be formalised as such and I suggested in my book The Wages of Spin how to do it.

Q50  Chairman: We were waiting for that!

Sir Bernard Ingham: Leave that on one side. There is a difference in the sense that civil servants can brief on policy. A civil servant is supposed to know what his Prime Minister or minister is thinking. He is supposed to be able to anticipate their views and get inside their minds and understand them, but he does not enter into the party political argument and this is where special advisers (special advisers employed in my view sparsely not wholesale) can be very valuable because they can communicate the political force and the political context and they can communicate things that certainly a civil servant should not enter and would not wish to enter, therefore they have a role, but it has to be practised fairly carefully and circumspectly in order that you can justify paying for them through the public purse. Alongside special advisers we used to have an institution called the parliamentary private secretary. They still exist and I do not know what they do, but one of their functions ought to be to act on behalf of ministers to present their party political views. We are mob-handing, in my view, this whole political communications side, bearing in mind you have parliamentary private secretaries and you have your party headquarters presumably with somebody there concentrating on your particular aspect of policy, and some of them have political secretaries and then we have this host of special advisers. I think they can be of use but they have got to be properly employed and they have got to operate totally within the Code of Practice for special advisers.

Q51  Chairman: There is no Code of Practice for the Conservative Party and Liberal Democrat Party and over 60 per cent of their funding now comes from the taxpayer in the form of Short money. There is no Code of Conduct for their political people so why should there be for special advisers simply because they are embedded within the Civil Service?

Sir Bernard Ingham: Because they are in government and if they are temporary civil servants they are doing a government job and there should be control over people employed by the government of the country. You probably put your finger on the stupidity of financing parties from taxpayers, but leave that on one side.

Q52  Chairman: I suspect you find a world full of stupidities.

Sir Bernard Ingham: I do, yes.

Q53  Chairman: Could I just stay with this for one second before I bring Gordon in so that we do not lose the point. I am not sure, Bernard, whether you are agreeing with Ivor Gabor's proposition. You say, Ivor, in your submission on Phillis: "I believe that the attempt to distinguish press officers - as neutral purveyors of information - from spin doctors is fallacious." Therefore you say that this is a distinction without a difference and therefore the Phillis construct is completely flawed because their proposals are entirely founded on trying to separate out these two strands. I have heard in the past, Bernard - you have said it widely - that you thought your job as a civil servant was quite properly to give what you have called a "positive gloss" to what the government was doing. Does this mean that Ivor's analysis is right that civil servants giving positive gloss is just the same as spin doctors giving positive gloss?

Sir Bernard Ingham: I am supposed to give a negative gloss every time I open my mouth? I would soon be fired. Let us face it, everybody in the business of presentation, as spin used to be called before the Americans corrupted the whole language, knows that presentation has been with us since the year dot. People wish to put the best possible gloss on their policy, their statements, their positions, their actions and themselves - of course they do. The constraint upon the civil servant, certainly I would argue, and actually it is also a constraint on the political adviser if you are going to carry credibility, is that it must always be that his gloss must not lose touch with fact and reality because if he does he ceases to become a credible informer and he is in the long-term business, have no doubt about it, of communication and he does not want to become an incredible communicator, he wants to retain credibility with the media. In my experience that is an extremely powerful constraint in what you do in putting a positive gloss on it.

Q54  Chairman: So you are a boundary line man?

Sir Bernard Ingham: Yes, and I am certainly not going to go down the route of formalising this politicisation of civil servants because I think it is an unconstitutional thing to do without the taxpayer knowing what he is doing. He can consult the taxpayer and say this is what we want to do, we want to end the concept of an independent, impartial Civil Service and we want, at least in part, to substitute it with party political people who are paid by the taxpayer and they will change. I think that is an issue of principle because it sets a precedent for the rest.

Mr Allan: There is an awful lot of talk about this distinction but I think there is also wide agreement. We have the British political system where the Prime Minister is both the head of the government/the head of the executive and the leader of the largest party in the legislature and that is where this whole thing comes from. He fulfills that dual role in the British political system and therefore sometimes he is acting purely as head of the government (and there is a permanent Civil Service to reflect and promote his views in that capacity) and sometimes he is acting as a party politician. He is more of a party politician than the head of government in other systems, and therefore he employs other people to reflect his political views. Maybe we should go to the American system of a separation of powers but until we do that, it strikes me that he is going to need people who reflect both his role in government and his role as a party politician. I think a special adviser does fulfil a valuable role in keeping the pressure off civil servants in making sure they do not get dragged into party political issues. I think that is a very valuable role. There is an issue about the funding of them and the fact it is funding from the state but, as has been remarked, there is effectively political funding for all parties to fulfil similar roles.

Chairman: I am sure we will come back to this because we have not done with this, but let me bring Gordon in for a moment.

Q55  Mr Prentice: I am interested in the ethics of all this. This Government famously had an ethical foreign policy. Listening to you all I am wondering whether it is possible to construct an ethical communications and information policy; is it?

Professor Gabor: We are working towards it. I think the precedent of the success of the ethical foreign policy is not one that fills me with encouragement to try and create one for communications policy.

Q56  Mr Prentice: That is why I mentioned it!

Professor Gabor: This is a dirty business. What we are trying to do is to create frameworks to make the dirty business a little more transparent. That is the way I see it. Politics is about power. This is a slight aside but I did some research for the Electoral Commission looking at what local authorities could do to encourage people to vote. There were some wonderful schemes being promoted by local authorities but the bottom line was that virtually every electoral registration officer said to me off the record, "But, of course, if my leader of the council thought this was going to endanger his majority he would not approve it." We have got to recognise that this is about power and retaining it.

Q57  Mr Prentice: Politics is a dirty business but can we not clean up certain aspects? Tim talked earlier about the grid and it was important that announcements made by government departments did not clash, and we all accept that, but there are other aspects of news management that must be or might be less acceptable, for example making a major policy announcement on the last day of the parliamentary session before we rise for three months. Is that acceptable?

Mr Allan: I think that is entirely a matter for political debate. I do not understand that ethics come into it. You can make a political point against doing that and politicians can get up and say that is a bad thing and make a political point that the government has done something bad. I do not think it has done something unethical. I think ethical communication is important. As Bernard said, you have got to develop a long-term relationship. You do not last long if you develop a reputation for lying to people as a communicator so maintaining a high standard of ethics is extremely important. I think that is why there should be this much more formal, fair, open way of communicating to everybody at the same time.

Q58  Mr Prentice: What about floating ideas in the press? There was a story a few days ago that capital gains tax was going to be levied on the sale of first homes rather than second homes and I remember hearing Michael Howard on the Today programme saying this was obviously a story that had been put in the media just to test the water. There are lots of other examples. Is that ethical?

Mr Allan: I am glad that you accept the views of the Shadow Chancellor at face value. Do you know that? Did you know that is how it happened?

Professor Gabor: I think it is perfectly acceptable.

Mr Allan: You are assuming that happened but you have got no evidence.

Professor Gabor: Tim, you are not saying that does not happen?

Mr Allan: If we are going to use a specific example give me the evidence that that actually happened.

Professor Gabor: You are saying that a government has never floated an idea in the media to see how it going to play? I am talking about the real world and I think that is a perfectly legitimate activity.

Q59  Chairman: Can I play the role of Chairman and ask if we can have one person speaking at a time. That is very helpful all round really.

Mr Allan: Those accusations that are made by the Shadow Chancellor are perfectly valid to make but unless there is evidence to back them up then I do not see where it gets us. People will always assume the worst of the government and say it is definitely the evil spin doctors in Number 10 doing this. I have lost count of the times, working there, that it was written that "Number 10's hand is evident in this" and "clearly Alastair Campbell leaked this". The mass of intricate conspiracy theories were complete nonsense and a lot of what is written about this incredible Machiavellian power of Number 10 spin doctors is purely invented.

Professor Gabor: I was going to quote back to Tim since he wants evidence. Lance Price who was Alastair Campbell's deputy, writing last month in The Independent was admitting, if you like, that: "I lost count of the number of times when journalists, who would freely join the pack in criticising us for spin, would call me at Number 10 asking if their newspaper could not get a few more juicy stories which they thought were being handed out elsewhere. This relentless demand for stories did cause us problems. I have no doubt they felt under pressure to constantly come up with new announcements and equally I have no doubt that as a result some "news" that was not quite as new as it seemed was passed on to papers. It may have been demand-led but it was clearly counter productive in the end." In other words, he is saying they did that sort of thing.

Mr Allan: That was not floating a story.

Professor Gabor: That was just different techniques using the media to exploit a political situation.

Mr Allan: As I have said already, I do not think that should be the case. I think new policy should be announced to everybody at the same time.

Sir Bernard Ingham: I think there is a real difficulty with the use of the word "ethics" because I personally cannot see anything wrong in a political world of a minister seeking to test the water about policy. That seems to me to be fairly reasonable. Whether he is wise to do so is entirely a different matter but I cannot see there is much wrong in that. What I think you can say is there are certain things that press officers should not do and I think that that is where we get to the word ethics, as it were, and this is the way in which the Government Information Service was really established. You shall be impartial in your treatment of politicians you work for. If they are Labour you work just as hard for them and as honestly as you do for a Conservative, within certain parameters. However, you do not recycle stories endlessly, as has occurred. When I was in Number 10 the first question whenever we announced anything was: "Is this new money?" ie is it money over and above that already allocated for a particular policy? If it was not ---

Q60  Mr Prentice: So how would that work then? If you were the top communications man and the Chancellor of the Exchequer or someone working in the Treasury wanted to repackage a policy giving the impression this was new money and a new initiative but it was just recycled garbage that is maybe two or three months old, how would you deal with that?

Sir Bernard Ingham: I would try not to get involved.

Q61  Mr Prentice: Not get involved?

Sir Bernard Ingham: Yes because I have to maintain my credibility. Do not underestimate - and this is what this Government simply did not understand when it came in - this lousy, lazy, dumb, uncommunicative Government Information Service that they talked about had an enormous virtue. It was not hyperactive (although some of them did fall asleep a bit too much!) and it had a certain judgment and played it carefully and steadily.

Q62  Mr Prentice: This is like something from a different age though.

Sir Bernard Ingham: Hang on a minute. It did not destroy trust and it worked and we are all trying to re-invent the wheel when we had one that worked.

Q63  Brian White: BSE did not destroy trust?

Sir Bernard Ingham: The Government Information Service certainly did not destroy trust.

Somebody did. I do not know who did it. Then there was double and treble counting. The harsh reality in dissemination of news has become quite vicious, as Tim said, and I think that that is wrong. A civil servant disseminating news should give everybody an equal opportunity with that story - how they build on that story is an entirely different matter - and then look after the individual journalist as he builds on it because you have to recognise they operate in a competitive environment, and you should not seek to destroy the competition, in my view, and you should certainly not try to get journalists sacked who do not help you.

Q64  Mr Prentice: I smiled at the idea of a somnolent information service when Ivor talks about one of the defining characteristics of the New Labour Government being momentum, they have got to keep the impression going at all times of activity and new initiatives.

Sir Bernard Ingham: That is how they were viewed by the incoming government.

Q65  Mr Prentice: Can I ask one or two questions based on the paper you left with us about communications information and policy making. Do you have any examples of where policy making has been subverted in some shape or form by the communications information people, that there is a demand to say something or do something about asylum or ID cards or what have you?

Professor Gabor: I hesitate to answer a question like that orally given Tim's expressed views for every dot and comma of the evidence to be delivered here and now because I will have to look up references and so forth but I would say it is difficult to believe. One has Tony Blair's famous "we are looking for eye-catching initiatives" statement which was leaked just before the last election, looking for law and order announcements, sending criminals along to cash point machines and so on and so forth. That was a well-documented issue. I have no doubt that the issue of how is it going to play out, how is the media going to report it in the papers, particularly as I said (and I think is true) in the Sun and Mail has become an obsession for this Government. It was an obsession for New Labour in Opposition and remains an obsession as to how it is going to play. It comes in at a very early stage of the policy-making process. I have had informal conversations with both politicians and civil servants who told me, maybe not in exactly those words, the way the issue is going to be presented to the media comes in at a very early stage of policy formulation. Certainly I have heard this told to me in criminal justice policy. If you want specific examples it is something I would have to research and send you. I think there is a general acceptance that this Government has placed the presentation of policy on an equal par with its development, and Phillis accepts it, and I think that is very dangerous.

Q66  Mr Prentice: Can you comment on that, Tim?

Mr Allan: I think there is a distinction with how is it going to play in the country amongst the electorate, which is a perfectly reasonable question for any elected politician to ask and indeed is the very basis of democracy and is perfectly legitimate and I think politicians will always be politicians and they will always look for eye-catching initiatives that are going to have a particular resonance amongst the electorate. I do not think we should aim to do anything against that. Indeed, it is a perfectly healthy thing. I would draw a distinction between that and "let's not do something because the Daily Mail will not like it" because that is elevating newspapers above the electorate in terms of the importance that we give them. Again, politicians are real people, they do not like picking up the papers and finding horrible things written about them, so you are probably never going to get rid of that entirely but I want to live in a culture where politicians are concerned about what the electorate as a whole is going to think about rather than what a specific newspaper is going to think about it. All the evidence now is that the Government have given up on the Daily Mail ever giving them positive coverage on anything so I think we are past those days but there was a time certainly in Opposition where the views of specific newspapers were pandered to, yes, and you like to think that should not be the case in government. I actually think in government the media is so big, there are so many vast outlets now, there has been such an explosion of media and each individual title gets less and less important in terms of the whole panoply of media available to the public, so technology and development will mean we move beyond that policy formulation with specific media outlets in mind.

Q67  Mr Hopkins: I must say I agree very much with Ivor's paper and what Ivor has been saying. I am surprised therefore to find a lot of sympathy with what Bernard was saying as well. It is very strange! Tim, I have some serious concerns about. It is the politicians that lose trust not the media spinners doing their job. Would they not agree that a major piece of damage to the last government was actually the collapse of the ERM in 1992 when people had been told it was wonderful policy and then it collapsed? At the same time belief and support for the Conservative Government dropped like a stone and Labour were elected several years later almost as a result of this act. I may say in my own constituency there were more people in negative equity and repossessed than anywhere else in the country and I think I had one of the biggest swings to Labour. I think there was a direct connection. Is it not because of political decisions that people were told were wonderful and then it turned out not to be? It is not really politicians that lost the trust?

Sir Bernard Ingham: It is the failure of the policy. If policy fails then just as if a product fails you do not buy it again. Therefore if a fundamental policy fails then you begin to have reservations about the government and you may change your vote at the end of it. This is why I put policy as absolutely crucial, I agree with Ivor. I do not agree with Ivor that delivery is second. I think that you communicate it in order to help deliver it, I think communication is part of delivery and I think communication is important. I just want to get this in before it may be wrapped up. I think we are thrashing around a great deal bearing in mind we do not know (well, we do know because they removed the whole top echelon of the Government Information Service inside Parliament) so until 1997 we did not have to reinvent the wheel, we had to do one very important thing in government and to be fair to this Government they did it. They had an inquiry in 1998 chaired by Robin Mountfield which came forward with the very important point that the bureaucracy and especially the top 3,000 bureaucrats in Britain are not disposed to communication. All bureaucracies were secretive and, by Jove, they are secretive I can tell you from even having worked in Number 10, and I believe that their secretiveness and their anti-communication has contributed towards the development of what is described as "spin" because if there had been more of a communications culture in the senior Civil Service we would have had a better Government Information Service. Therefore I do think that it is very important in all your considerations not to ignore the culture of the Civil Service which is essentially secretive. Whether it is as secretive as it was before this Government came in is another matter, I am not qualified to judge. I rather suspect it might be more secretive when this Government goes because the policy makers have lost out to the politicians and special advisers and they will seek to grab back power and they will treat communications with disdain. They will say, "When you were in charge look what happened."

Q68  Mr Hopkins: Many of the things Tim has said have deeply worried me, I may say. It is said that from the beginning New Labour tried to control the media agenda and that you wanted to speak directly to the people. This suggests to me that you would like the media to disappear and to have a direct personal relationship so you could tell them the real truth and not have it filtered through this awkward and difficult media.

Mr Allan: What is your point?

Q69  Mr Hopkins: You would like the media not to be there effectively and the government to control information directly to the people. Is it not a fact that countries that have done that have been rather unpleasant and authoritarian?

Mr Allan: No, I am not saying the media should in any way cease to exist. I am saying if you are a government trying to communicate what you are doing then you should also look to communicate directly. Technology allows you to do that in the way businesses are now able to communicate directly with shareholders whereas they used to have to go through journalists. Of course in a matter of great political controversy the media does have a role in asking the difficult questions and holding politicians to account in some way. My point is that to some extent they do not see their role at all as also being the medium to allow other people to communicate through them. Given that is the case, the Government does need to look at ways of communicating directly. There is absolutely nothing wrong having both better ways of communicating directly but also communicating through the media. Media has changed in the way it really does not allow people to communicate through it. I was doing something with Nick Jones who has written several books on spin doctors (as I said to him all of them in green ink) and he was saying when he started at the BBC 80 per cent of the stuff was scripted and 20 per cent of it was chit-chat and now 80 per cent is chit-chat two ways and very little of it is scripted. That really elevates journalists. Often you turn on the telly and you will see journalists talking about politics and they cut out the politicians all the time. So what you get is a media trying to put its own journalists up to talk about politics rather than using politicians to use the medium to communicate to the public. If I left an inaccurate impression I would like to correct that with you. I am not saying that we need to clamp down on the media and get rid of it, of course the media is important. I am simply saying the government in addition to communicating through the media needs to communicate directly. I find absolutely nothing wrong with that and I do not think anybody should.

Q70  Mr Hopkins: It is interesting that in the early days of New Labour the New Statesman was bought and the Left-wing journalists sacked and it almost disappeared as a newspaper and later they had to bring the good journalists back. So a small critical paper of the Left was targeted by the media specialists from Downing Street. Was this not deep worrying? I know also from journalists who tell me the Guardian was bullied by Downing Street. Left of centre newspapers were being bullied and controlled and manipulated and even threatened with sackings.

Mr Allan: Again what is your evidence for that? Who was sacked as a result of Labour bullying?

Q71  Mr Hopkins: John Pilger was removed from the New Statesman.

Mr Allan: Who was sacked at the Guardian?

Q72  Mr Hopkins: Nobody was sacked at the Guardian.

Mr Allan: That is what you said.

Mr Hopkins: I have information from journalists which I could give to you privately that in the early days there was an attempt to bully the Guardian, not the Daily Mail but the Guardian.

Q73  Chairman: As we are not going to get any further on that I suggest we leave it.

Mr Allan: Journalists complaining about bullying is like politicians complaining about the media. There is an interaction and politicians will try and put their case.

Q74  Mr Hopkins: We are not going to get very far on that. May I ask one more question.

Sir Bernard Ingham: There is actually nothing new in this idea of cutting out the media, these pesky people who will distort and interpret, if you possibly can. I shall never forget during the Heath Government Donald Maitland, who was then Chief Press Secretary, came to us all in a solemn conclave, the heads of information, and said we ought to put out a Government newspaper and we looked at him and said, "Who the hell is going to read that?" It was the most boring stuff you can ever imagine. People buy newspapers because they find them interesting, enjoyable and exciting. If you can find a way in this excitable and enjoyable way of communicating so much the better. It is nothing new, they have always tried to cut out the media if they possibly can and if they are horrible and nasty dictatorial regimes they do.

Q75  Mr Hopkins: Mr Berlusconi is doing that in Italy at the moment. The point that Bernard and Ivor have been emphasising is what we are really saying is in a healthy democracy there must be some effective pluralism, there must be some countervailing voices which test the policies and ideas and actions and they must always be debated. The governments that go wrong are those that try to eliminate those countervailing forces or control them.

Mr Allan: I am not suggesting in any way elimination or control of the media, not even slightly. There will always be a role for that. My point is simply the media use increasingly their own journalists rather than allowing politicians to communicate through them. I am not saying their only role should be to put politicians to air and not analyse, there is clearly a role for analysis, but the trend has been away from letting politicians speak to people through the media towards putting journalists up to tell the country what is happening. That is a dangerous phenomenon and the government needs to counteract it to some extent by finding new ways and using new technology like business does of communicating directly with the people who are electing them, in addition to the media, not in any way as a replacement of it.

Chairman: Let's move on. We have got 10 minutes or so left before the bells for the session start.

Q76  Mr Liddell-Grainger: Just on something Kelvin said there, Tim, you on the Today programme said: "The BBC is quite happy to publish things that they have no idea if it is true or not." Tim was in a radio interview with John Humphries when he said that. Do you actually believe that?

Mr Allan: I think the actual point of Gilligan report ---

Q77  Mr Liddell-Grainger: Yes, it was to do with Hutton.

Mr Allan: I think that was an absolutely terrible dereliction of the BBC's duties. I think what they allowed themselves to do was to broadcast an anonymous attack, an attack made by an anonymous source, very ad hominem, to attack someone's professionalism and integrity. They used the BBC's airwaves to publicise that attack. The source was not prepared to put his name to it. The source had absolutely no evidence to back up the claim. There was no document, no leaked e-mail, nothing at that stage. I think the issue of using an anonymous source to make an attack on someone else without putting the claim to the person being attacked without any evidence to back it up was very bad and effectively meant the BBC broadcasting extremely serious allegation without any evidence of that being true. American news organisations, for example the New York Times, have specific codes about that specific point saying it should not allow itself to use anonymous sources to make attacks on other people.

Q78  Mr Liddell-Grainger: I cannot say the middle word for obvious reasons but Jeremy Paxman rather famously said: "Why is the lying ... lying to me?" That is another BBC reporter saying exactly the opposite thing. They are saying he is lying to me. I think this is fundamental because it is the British Broadcasting Company paid for by us, the taxpayer. Has the BBC gone down or is it going down? Is it something that needs to be looked at. This is something which as public administration is part of the government in this country and this country has relied on the BBC to be impartial reporters of the news within this country. Here we have got one senior journalist saying they are lying, you are saying they are not getting it right. What is the truth?

Mr Allan: I think the BBC as a result of Hutton have already said that they are going to examine the way they source things and make sure they have a much higher standard of accuracy. The point you make about funding is absolutely crucial. I was struck by the letter - I am sorry, I am a Hutton anorak - to Alastair Campbell from Mr Sambrook of 27 June which refuted all the claims made and said, "Why are you going after us?" by quoting lots of other journalists who made similar accusations in the Guardian and The Times." My reaction to that is if I do not buy The Times I do not go to prison. The BBC gets its funding from us and you go to prison if you do not pay the licence fee. I think that funding mechanism does mean that the BBC has to have a higher standard of trust and a higher standard of accuracy than is available in the commercial market place otherwise what is the point of it. I do think that the Hutton procedure did show that the standards had certainly slipped. They were putting things to air without any evidence to back them up, very serious accusations. It also showed that the way they dealt with complaints was extremely poor, and that certainly chimes with any time that I was involved in making complaints to the BBC. The BBC is terrible at confusing impartiality with infallability. They are forever saying, "How dare you complain, have you not heard we are impartial?" when you are actually making a very specific complaint that their standards had slipped.

Q79  Chairman: Let me ask very quickly before Mr Liddle-Grainger continues, why did Alastair Campbell not simply sue Andrew Gilligan because that would have had the effect of either bringing the source out or having the story collapse?

Mr Allan: I am not a spokesman for Alastair Campbell but most people who get involved in politics at that level take the view that if you really want to start suing you are never going to stop because there is always stuff.

Q80  Chairman: Given his strong, indeed obsessive sense.

Mr Allan: He maintained all the way along the story was wrong, he knew it was wrong, and he felt it was only a matter of time before the BBC accepted it was wrong and he thought the BBC would accept that it was wrong. As it happens, one month after the slur was broadcast Sambrook is writing to Alistair saying our source told us "that you probably knew that it was wrong". We now know that was untrue. This is the head of the BBC news department saying in a letter one month after the broadcast something that was totally untrue and then going on the radio and saying the source was a member of the intelligence services, something else that was totally untrue. I do not think Alastair Campbell recognised that the head of BBC news would be guilty of such untruths.

Q81  Chairman: He could have attached the BBC and indeed the Mail on Sunday to any action that he took.

Mr Allan: He thought it was a matter of political debate and he would win the argument in the normal course of political debate rather than going down the legal route which he never has done, and you just do not when you are being attacked like that or you would spend your time doing nothing else.

Q82  Mr Liddell-Grainger: I am looking at these things pre-Mandelson days when you were advising the Labour party before it came into power and Campbell, Mandelson and Gould all came from a journalistic background process. Do you think that there was a concerted effort then to ensure that the BBC had to be tamed?

Professor Gabor: No, and I find it very worrying that the tenor of Tim's remarks is reflecting a feeling that I picked up from Downing Street. I do not want to sound pretentious but I think the BBC is precious and we are in danger of damaging a very, very valuable resource. Let me just make a couple of quick points. Firstly - and this may sound like splitting hairs but it is fundamentally important - it is not taxpayers' money that funds the BBC, it is licence payers' money. It is the public service broadcaster, it is not the government's broadcaster, it is not even the nation's broadcaster, it is the people's broadcaster. That is a phrase that Alastair might have used. I think it is really important that we preserve it and we accept that part of its duty is to be bloody awkward to government.

Mr Allan: Accurately.

Professor Gabor: I am not a Hutton anorak, I am just an ordinary human being and I do not want to rehearse the details but if you go out into the street - not that street because it is full of Westminster but go out into a normal street and say: "Broadly, do you think the BBC were right about weapons of mass destruction or do you think the Government is right?" I think you will only get one answer. These anoraks might pick up the odd details but the BBC's role in the war in Iraq and now is an important role. They got some things wrong, I totally agree, there were some inaccuracies, the way they investigated complaints was wrong, but the big issue really worries me if we lose the BBC - and as an aside I fear the Communications Act is putting it in danger but that is another issue - we lose something important.

Chairman: I think I will wave the Hutton card now so we can move on.

Q83  Mr Liddell-Grainger: Can I briefly ask Sir Bernard, and I am not the Hutton card, when we had another war in 1982 the BBC played a crucial role in that as well. Have you seen the change - and there were a lot of ITV companies in those days, there is one now basically - in the way the media such as the Beeb has been used or abused in times of national crisis more than anything else?

Sir Bernard Ingham: It was a very specialised circumstance in 1982. We had absolute control over where the media could go, at least until they got on the island, and therefore all my troubles with the media then were getting them there and getting pictures back. My observation of the change in broadcasting is that it has greatly increased in quantity and as a consequence it has substantially reduced in quality. There is far too much of it and there are bulletins every half an hour, which is boring if you listen. It is pressurised and it is arrogant and I think that Paxman reveals some of the arrogance there: "These bastards are lying to us, you know." I think that there is an arrogance on the part of the media which reflects itself in the way in which they pursue politicians. I think Sir Robin Day, who was no slouch when it came to interviewing politicians, was complaining before he died about the lack of respect, about the arrogance and the nastiness of the way in which they pursued politicians. I think that is a worry. I found over my 25 years in government that the media became much more difficult to deal with because they acquired much greater self-confidence, they acquired much more arrogance, they were infinitely more demanding, and they were nastier and they have got nastier since I left.

Mr Liddell-Grainger: Interesting, thank you.

Chairman: I think we all agree with this.

Annette Brooke: I hope I am allowed to be slightly flippant. Tim did use the term "panel" so I wonder whether I could ask a typical end of Question Time question and ask you which would you cite as the most effective spin from the point of view of this Government before it all got out of control?

Q84  Chairman: I have to repeat the question now, this is what happens in these kind of things, I am repeating the question to give you a bit of thinking time and then I will have to decide who will be the first victim. The question was what was the most effective bit of spin before we abolished spinning.

Professor Gabor: I will volunteer and I will return flippancy with flippancy on a serious issue. When Tony Blair went to Northern Ireland to sign the Belfast Agreement when he landed at Aldergrove Airport he said to the waiting masses: "This is no time for spin, I feel the hand of history upon my shoulder"!

Mr Allan: My fondest memory from the glory days of spin was before government where we had some advertising done to show John Major as very weak and we commissioned it and we came up with these pictures of the Mr Men and we had this picture of Mr Weak with very weak arms looking like John Major. We thought, "This is good, how are we going to get an impact with this?" and we decided that we would leak the pictures of it to a couple of Sunday newspapers with a story "the ads Blair banned because they were too personal". And so we got the advantage of Blair standing down this negative campaigning whilst also getting good stories about the pictures.

Q85  Annette Brooke: May I just say you have just spun again. I want you to tell us about an example when you were there, I do not want the Opposition, I want the Government when you were in the job.

Mr Allan: In Government there was no spin!

Q86  Chairman: You did not get to where you got by giving the real examples. Bernard, you do not do spin, you do positive gloss. Tell us a bit of the positive gloss.

Sir Bernard Ingham: During my time?

Q87  Chairman: I think that is what we are asking.

Sir Bernard Ingham: That is very difficult, it is such a long time ago and in any case I do not tend to look at it as spin and I do not accept that spin is over. I cannot honestly say that I can remember. I think my best piece of spin was always when I went to the European Community, which was a most pleasurable event, and they were always after us because we were always the

dissidents and it really was spin when they said, "What is it like to always be in a minority of one?" and I said, "It is absolutely wonderful when you are in the right." The reality behind the scenes of being in a minority of one was clearly a very difficult situation but I sought to dismiss the whole thing as of no account whatsoever.

Chairman: That will do splendidly. Thank you for that, thank you for a very enjoyable and enlightening session. I think you have got different approaches to these emerging findings of Phillis. It has been very interesting to hear you reflect upon them. We are very, very grateful for your time this morning. Thank you very much indeed.