Bernard Ingham
Sir Bernard Ingham (21 June 1932 – 24 February 2023) was a British journalist and civil servant. He was Margaret Thatcher's chief press secretary throughout her time as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990. Background Ingham was born in Halifax and was raised in Hebden Bridge, in the West Riding of Yorkshire. He left school at the age of 16 to join the Hebden Bridge Times newspaper, for whom he continued to write until 2013. He attended Bradford Technical College on day release as part of the studies required to qualify for the Certificate of Training for Junior Journalists, which he described as being "taken rather seriously in early post-war Britain". Ingham worked for the Yorkshire Evening Post, the Yorkshire Post, latterly as Northern industrial correspondent (1952–1961), and The Guardian (1962–1967). While a reporter at the Yorkshire Post, Ingham was an active member of the National Union of Journalists and vice-chairman of its Leeds branch. He is also likely to have been the anonymous and aggressively anti-Conservative columnist "Albion" for the Leeds Weekly Citizen, a Labour Party publication, from 1964 to 1967. In 1967, Ingham joined the Civil Service, working as a press and public relations officer and director of Information in various Government departments, including the National Board For Prices and Incomes (1967) and the Department of Energy, 1974–77, where he also served as Under-Secretary in the Energy Conservation Division, 1978–79. Ingham's father was a Labour Party councillor for Hebden Royd Town Council, and he was himself a member of the Labour Party until he joined the Civil Service. Ingham contested the then safe Conservative Moortown ward of Leeds City Council in the 1965 council elections for the Labour Party, having been nominated by the Fabian Society. Press secretary to Margaret Thatcher Ingham spent 11 years as Margaret Thatcher's chief press secretary in No. 10 Downing Street when she was Prime Minister. In 1979–90 he was also head of the Government Information Office. In the course of his civil service career, he was also press secretary to Barbara Castle, Robert Carr, Maurice Macmillan, Lord Carrington, Eric Varley and Tony Benn. Although a career civil servant, Ingham gained a reputation for being a highly effective propagandist for the Thatcherite cause. The phrase spin doctor did not enter common parlance until after his retirement, but he was nevertheless considered a gifted exponent in what came to be known as the "black arts" of spin. In those days, Downing Street briefings were "off the record", meaning that information given out by Ingham could be attributed only to "senior government sources". Occasionally he used this deniability to brief against the government's own ministers, such as when he described the leader of the House of Commons John Biffen as a "semi-detached" member of the government. Biffen was dropped at the next reshuffle. This blurring of the distinction between his nominally neutral role as a civil servant and a more partisan role as an apologist and promoter of Margaret Thatcher's policies