Sir Bernard Ingham
Gruff Yorkshireman who served Margaret Thatcher faithfully as Downing Street press secretary
SIR BERNARD INGHAM, who has died aged 90, was Margaret Thatcher’s press secretary for almost her entire 11 years in Downing Street, and a belligerent guardian of her flame. A bluff and volatile Yorkshireman, he accurately and loyally reflected her view at any juncture, and was essential to her success in bringing about radical change and remaining in office to do so.
Renowned for his eruptions of “bunkum and balderdash!” and “dammit!” during twice-daily meetings with Lobby journalists, the rubicund, workaholic Ingham could doom a minister with a shrug of his shoulders.
He holed Francis Pym below the waterline by comparing him with the Itma character Mona Lott; played down Sir Geoffrey Howe’s status as deputy prime minister; and branded John Biffen a “semi-detached” member of the Cabinet. Biffen got his own back by christening Ingham the “Yorkshire Rasputin”.
Ingham was generous with advice to ministers and journalists who sought it, but ready to deliver a rocket if he believed that was the lady’s wish. Behind the scenes he was trenchant in defending her interests, lambasting editors for carrying comment she regarded as unhelpful and threatening the BBC with “incalculable consequences” if it did not share its film of her arriving in the Falklands with ITN.
Yet despite repeated questioning of his integrity in the House by Tam Dalyell and others, he remained a highly professional public servant; his briefing on Mrs Thatcher’s final day in office was a model of Civil Service impartiality.
Ingham established a control over Whitehall’s information machine that his successors have envied. He required all departmental press offices to inform No 10 in advance of sensitive announcements; convened a weekly meeting of heads of information; and eviscerated any department sneaking out a controversial announcement on the day the Commons rose.
Officially Ingham only headed the Government Information Service for his final two years; it had been under the Central Office of Information, whose head was technically his boss. Yet through sheer force of personality and his appreciation as a journalist of the harm mediocre press officers could do, Ingham made the service highly professional as his former deputies fanned out across Whitehall; sadly, not all the improvement survived him.
He was robust in protecting his charges against political interference, slapping down the Conservative chairman Kenneth Baker when he tried to issue ministers with party “minders”.
It was inevitable, given his longevity in post and his high profile in briefing the media as Mrs Thatcher toured the world, that Ingham would become a story in his own right; yet this took several years.
The Prime Minister’s Tory critics resented both the effectiveness with which he put her views across and his reluctance to persuade her to moderate policies they regarded as damaging.
Ingham’s sureness of touch was not total. In 1984 he outraged liberals by jokingly suggesting the names of judges who might take a robust line during the trial of the MOD official Clive Ponting on official secrets charges stemming from the sinking of the General Belgrano. The next year he speculated to journalists that the Government would not “throw good money after bad” as the pound headed toward parity with the dollar, triggering a minor run on sterling. And in 1988 he upset the Palace by saying Mrs Thatcher would advise the Queen not to make an official visit to the Soviet Union if invited by Mikhail Gorbachev.
But it was, above all, the Westland affair that put him on the spot, over a leak to the Press Association of a note from the Attorney-general, Sir Patrick Mayhew, accusing Michael Heseltine, who had resigned as Defence Secretary, of “material inaccuracies” in a letter about the future of the helicopter company. In all probability Ingham’s difficulties were compounded because he was trying to protect the Prime Minister.
Mrs Thatcher was trying to bolster the Trade and Industry Secretary, Leon Brittan, against Heseltine’s onslaught, yet the episode forced Brittan’s resignation.
The letter was leaked by Colette Bowe, head of information at the DTI, who was loyally supporting Brittan despite her personal belief that Heseltine was right. There were strong suspicions that Ingham had put her up to it, maybe on the PM’S instructions, though an inquiry by the Cabinet Secretary found no evidence and Ingham staunchly denied it.
Ingham’s relationship with Mrs Thatcher was based on respect, not idolatry – though his devotion to her, once established, never wavered. The key lay in the circumstances of his appointment: as a former Labour candidate and purveyor of the message of two Labour governments his pedigree was uncongenial to her, but she took him on merit and never regretted the choice.
Serving her was not without its risks. In 1987 an IRA parcel bomb was delivered to Ingham’s home, which was defused by the Bomb Squad, and the next year he was winded during a skirmish with security police on a visit to Nigeria.
Inevitably, Ingham acquired the bunker mentality of an administration that judged its success by the interests ranged against it: Tory “wets”, Keynesian economists, the Church, the miners.
Yet while he remonstrated with journalists who raised awkward questions – such as why Mrs Thatcher rejected sanctions against South Africa because of their impact on black workers there, when apparently untroubled by unemployment at home – he seldom got personal. He would simply bemoan reporters’ inability to distinguish between facts and comment.
Even when his old paper The Guardian, and The Independent, quit the Lobby in protest against its briefings being off the record, he remained courteous to most of the correspondents involved. He knew better than anyone the hypocrisy of the boycott: the editor of The Independent on Sunday, having instructed its political editor to miss the briefings, told its leader writer, the future Lib Dem Energy Secretary Chris Huhne, to open a private line of communication.
Ingham was, unashamedly, a professional Yorkshireman. Though he had moved south in the 1960s, his heart was on the moors above Hebden Bridge; as the train passed through he would exclaim: “Lower the window, take a good sniff of the air, because you’re nearer to Heaven now than you will ever be on Earth.”
At any opportunity he headed home to help with the cows on his brother’s farm, and on his 10th anniversary at Downing Street invited the Lobby to Hebden Bridge to celebrate. He was, however, vocally unhappy at the town latterly becoming a home of alternative lifestyles.
Though a loyal friend, Ingham could be a prickly neighbour. Determined not to trade up from his bungalow in Purley, he became embroiled in an acrimonious dispute with the builder next door; starting with disagreements over a loft extension, it culminated in 1999 in his being bound over on charges of causing criminal damage.
Bernard Ingham was born at Hebden Bridge on June 21 1932; his father, Garnet Ingham, was a weaver and Labour activist. He left grammar school at 16 to join the Hebden Bridge Times, becoming its editor at 19 and acquiring a reputation as a prodigious worker. In 1952 he moved to the Yorkshire Post, initially in Halifax; he became its industrial correspondent in 1961. The next year he joined The Guardian, then still based in Manchester, as its Northern industrial correspondent and in 1965, after standing for Leeds council, moved to London.
Passed over as too rough a diamond and too vociferous a socialist to be The Guardian’s chief industrial correspondent, he left in 1967 to become public relations adviser to the National Board for Prices and Incomes, moving the next year to Barbara Castle’s new Department of Employment and Productivity as chief information officer, and being promoted to director of information in 1973. When Edward Heath created the Department of Energy in 1974, Ingham took a similar post there.
In 1975, Harold Wilson made Tony Benn Energy Secretary after his Left-wing adventures made the Industry portfolio too hot for him. Benn found Ingham “very difficult”, and Ingham reciprocated. Eventually he told John Smith, one of Benn’s junior ministers, that his position was untenable. Smith advised him to confront Benn, who apologised profusely, saying he had no idea he had behaved so boorishly.
In 1978 Ingham moved into the mainstream Civil Service as under-secretary in charge of energy conservation, running the “Save It” campaign. Then in the autumn of 1979, six months after Mrs Thatcher’s election, he was unexpectedly appointed her press secretary.
That he stayed 11 years was his choice as much as the Prime Minister’s. In 1984 he turned down a nominal promotion to head the Central Office of Information, and later Newcastle University wooed him to head its Centre for Government Communications; he declined, but became a visiting fellow.
Mrs Thatcher had Ingham knighted in her resignation honours. Staying on at Downing Street was inconceivable, even though his relations with John Major were cordial, and he left the Civil Service.
He went into public affairs, starting Bernard Ingham Communications and – with the former ITN newsreader Pamela Armstrong – a media training consultancy. He became a director of Hill & Knowlton Strategies and a consultant to British Nuclear Fuels, a trenchant columnist for the Daily Express (and later the Yorkshire Post), and a popular lecturer and after-dinner speaker.
He also became a director of Mcdonald’s. He served customers at Victoria Station for them and visited Iceland for the opening of their first drive-through.
Ingham continued to lionise Lady Thatcher, voice a healthy Euroscepticism, and rail against wind farms in the Pennines. In the dying months of Major’s government, Labour blocked a move to nominate him to the Press Complaints Commission. When Alastair Campbell took his old job on Tony Blair’s victory in 1997, Ingham said: “So, lad, what are you going to do about Mandelson? The answer is simple: slit his throat.”
He wrote four books about Yorkshire, an autobiography, Kill The Messenger (1991), and in 2019 published his diaries of Mrs Thatcher’s final months in No 10.
Bernard Ingham married, in 1956, Nancy Hoyle; she died in 2017. They had a son, John, who became a senior journalist on the