Press Secretary To Margaret Thatcher
Ingham spent 11 years as Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's chief press secretary in No. 10 Downing Street. In 1989–90 he was also head of the Government Information Service. 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 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 apologist and promoter of Margaret Thatcher's policies led the late Christopher Hitchens to characterise Ingham as "a nugatory individual" and to criticise what he saw as the negative consequences of Ingham's time as Thatchers press secretary: "During his time in office, Fleet Street took several steps towards an American system of Presidentially-managed coverage and sound-bite deference, without acquiring any of the American constitutional protection in return."
Ingham's book, Kill the Messenger was not well received, Paul Foot commenting that "... there is no information in this book. I picked it up eagerly, refusing to believe that someone so close to the top for so long could fail to reveal, even by mistake, a single interesting piece of information" and he was particularly scathing about Ingham's prose style, offering the following quotation from Kill the Messenger as representative of Ingham's use of English: "Like a mighty oak, it took more than one axe to bring Mrs Thatcher down. In November 1990 they were cutting into this solid timber from all angles. The frenzy was fearsome to behold. Heaven preserve us from political axe-men in a state of panic. They would cut off their grandmas in their prime if they thought it would serve their interests. And so they cut off a grandma in her international prime by the stocking tops, to borrow one of Denis’s phrases, which Mrs Thatcher often used."
Ingham managed to stay out of the damaging Westland helicopter scandal in 1986, correctly realising that any involvement by him would directly link Thatcher to the affair.
He was knighted on Thatcher's resignation – and retirement – in 1990. His successor as press secretary was Sir Gus O'Donnell, who went on to become cabinet secretary and head of the civil service in 2005.
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