The bulldog licks its final nettle

The obituaries for Bernard Ingham show how the British press buffs up its "rough draft of history" and cuts out criticisms of the media itself.

Previously: No shame in the circle jerk

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Respect for the dead is not evenly distributed. In 1996, Bernard Ingham replied to a letter about the Hillsborough disaster from Liverpool fan Graham Skinner, whose friend had died on the day, like this:

I believe that there would have been no Hillsborough disaster if tanked-up yobs had not turned up in very large numbers to try to force their way into the ground…

I have no intention of apologising for my views which are sincerely held on the basis of what I heard first-hand at Hillsborough. I have, however, one suggestion to make: for its own good, Liverpool – with the Heysel disaster in the background – should shut up about Hillsborough.

Nothing can now bring back those who died – innocent people who, by virtue of being in the ground early, had their lives crushed out of them by a mob surging in late.

To go on about it serves only to confirm in many people’s minds that Liverpool has a very bad conscience about soccer disasters. I think it a disgrace to the public service that South Yorkshire policemen have won the right to compensation. But it will do Liverpool no good whatsoever in the eyes of the nation if, egged on by ambulance-chasing lawyers, those who saw their relatives killed at Hillsborough now sue for compensation for the “trauma”. Is the pain of losing a relative to be soothed away by a fat cheque?

Take my advice, Mr Skinner: least said, soonest mended for Liverpool.

A lot has not been said to keep things mended in the obituaries of Margaret Thatcher’s former press secretary, Sir Bernard Ingham. He died on February 24, 2023, aged 90.

In 2013, Ingham told the Liverpool Echo that he had not and would not read the Hillsborough Independent Panel report which led to the conclusions of inquests held in the wake of the disaster being quashed. Three years later, when a new inquest concluded that fans did not “cause or contribute to” the horrific events at the Leppings Lane End turnstiles, Ingham declined to comment or apologise.

The Guardian obituary makes a brief reference to Ingham’s views on Hillsborough at the end, alongside a passing note on his dodgy directorships, and a 1999 legal judgement against him over conflict with a neighbour:

He relentlessly courted controversy, feuding with his next-door neighbour and being bound over to keep the peace, and taking up causes guaranteed to infuriate his political critics: a directorship of McDonald’s alongside campaigns for nuclear power and against wind farms.

He was bitterly attacked for his stance over the Hillsborough disaster when it was revealed that, in a 1996 letter, he had blamed it on “tanked-up yobs who turned up late” and defended the police. He refused to comment or apologise. In 2016 he voted for Brexit and wrote of his “joy unconfined”, describing it as “a very British coup against the elite”.

Scroll back to the top though and you’ll find paper dishing out ten-dollar words for a rather less-expensive individual:

As Margaret Thatcher’s devoted and indispensable (her words) chief press secretary for 11 years, the rumbustious Sir Bernard Ingham, who has died aged 90, was central to both the style and success of the Thatcher revolution.

Obituaries often use code words to smooth out the roughness of reality; so, as The Guardian knows ‘polite’ society cannot handle the word “arsehole” in an obit, Ingham is elevated to the status of “rumbustious”.

Ingham was a former Guardian man — albeit it relatively briefly (from 1962 to 1967) and unhappily (he left after being brutally rejected for promotion) in the era just after it expanded out of Manchester, shortened its name, and began being printed in London as well — and the paper’s conclusion on his time there shows how long the rancour of office politics can live on:

[Ingham] poured out copy, but felt overshadowed by the then Labour correspondent, Peter Jenkins. Then, when Jenkins moved up, he was passed over. Exhaustive chronicling of every dispute was not what the paper wanted.

In his astounding biography of Ingham — Good And Faithful Servant (1990) — Robert Harris shares the thoughts of one of Ingham’s Guardian contemporaries:

Another Guardian reporter describes “a terrible set-to in public” between Ingham and one of the paper’s senior editors. Around the office there was considerable sympathy for him. For he had not been simply passed over; he had been humiliated. It had been made abundantly clear to him that, as things stood, his prospects of promotion were bleak. 

Ingham moved into the civil service and began to nurture a grudge for his former profession, an aspect of his character for which I’ve more than a little sympathy.

It was Harris who revealed that while he was writing turgid industrial coverage at The Guardian, Ingham had a more fluent and passionate alter-ego as ‘Albion’, a columnist for The Leeds Weekly Citizen, the journal of the city’s Labour Party. It was in that role that Ingham wrote so perceptively about the press’ role as a handmaid for the Tories:

… [it is] part of the Tory election machine … [if it] can convince us that the Tories are going to win then it will have done its job. 

Ingham’s ideological journey covered such distance and at such speed that he went from a trade union-defending pseudonymous Labour columnist in the late-60s, whose father was a Labour member of the first local council he reported on as a trainee journalist for the Hebden Bridge Times in 1948, to — in the words of a senior Tory source — a “fully paid-up member of the Thatcher Party” in 1979.

The top line of the Telegraph’s Ingham obit calls him “a highly-professional public servant” while The Times’ effort dispatches with the detail that he’d “blacklist journalists” by immediately paraphrasing his defence that he did so “not for hostile coverage, but for what he perceived to be blatantly dishonest journalism or breaches of trust.” The Guardian offers him a white-washed performance review which would delight any spin doctor:

For all the actor-manager bluster, Ingham remained a blunt and straightforward operator, largely incapable of deception and chained to facts.

These are toothless assessments from a trade that retracts its fangs whenever a former member dies; Ingham gets an easy ride from the explicitly right-wing papers because he was on their team and from The Guardian partly because he once sheltered under its masthead and partly because it is so committed to a kind of wet trousered faux-politeness.

In his LRB review of Good and Faithful Servant, Christopher Hitchens said that Ingham was a “bulldog-visaged, anti-intellectual, aggressive, insecure, class-conscious reactionary tyke” whose influence pushed “Fleet Street… several steps towards an American system of Presidentially-managed coverage and sound-bite deference”. He accused Ingham — and there’s no shortage of evidence — of engaging in “simple blackmail” to trade access for docility.

Interviewed by Charles Moore, Thatcher’s official biographer, Ingram said that he “[regarded] the Lobby system as a logical response to the constitution” and admitted that he stood “guilty as charged” for three occasions of briefing against ministers: An off-the-record briefing about Francis Pym (“It’s being so cheerful th’ keeps him going…”); a briefing against John Biffen (“The Lobby came at me like the Chinese Army…”; and Geoffrey Howe (where he ‘corrected’ Howe’s claims about what he’d be responsible for as Deputy PM).

About the second example, the (in)famous occasion in 1986 when Ingham briefed against Biffen, the Lord Privy Seal and Leader of the House, after a Weekend World interview where he said “no one seriously [supposed] that the Prime Minister would be Prime Minister throughout the entire period of the next Parliament,” Hitchens writes:

Ingham summoned the Lobby and instructed them that Biffen, then Leader of the House of Commons, was an un-person. The phrase employed was ‘semi-detached’. In the next day’s Times: ‘The sources said that Mr Biffen was a “semi-detached member of the Cabinet”.’ The same day’s Guardian had him as ‘a “semi-detached member of the Government” whose views were of little consequence’. In the Financial Times, ‘Biffen was yesterday being authoritatively described as “a well-known semi-detached member of the Government”.’ The Sun was, if anything, more honest than the pack, writing that ‘in an unprecedented bid to discredit Mr Biffen, Downing Street sources made it clear ...’ before going on to repeat the ipsissima verba. But then Bernard Ingham always loved the Sun, because as well as getting his and her wishes down at dictation speed, it also behaved so disgustingly on occasion as to license his frequent attacks on press ‘irresponsibility’. This leak-hate relationship between Thatcher and Murdoch, which gives the Tories two birds with no stone, would be a study in itself.

Harris writes in Good and Faithful Servant that:

Most of the sins which Ingham detected in the British media — invention, distortion, misquotation, wilful refusal to check facts, persistent failure to apologise, bias in news coverage — found thier ultimate refinement in The Sun. With a readership of over 12 million, one in four of the adult population, it was the journalistic phenomenon of the Thatcher age. 

Yet [Ingham] never mentioned it in his strictures — presumably because it was not guilty of the only sin which really mattered: it did not believe the government to be “chronically up to no good”. 

In his biography Alastair Campbell: New Labour and the Rise of the Media Class, Peter Oborne rightly identifies Ingham as the “neanderthal” without whom the evolution of the even more aggressive “homo sapien” Campbell era of government press management would not have been possible. The distinction between Ingram as a civil servant and Campbell as a political appointee is often made by commentators but it’s ludicrous; look at Ingham’s actions and his own justifications for them and it’s clear that his ‘impartiality’ is at best an accepted fantasy and at worst a mirthless decade-long joke in search of a punchline. `

The critical difference between Ingham and Campbell is that the latter allowed the disintegration of false anonymity, of what Guardian editor Peter Preston had called “threadbare circumlocutions” in a 1986 letter to Ingram announcing his paper would follow The Independent in not abiding by such fictions any longer. Ingram was able to hide behind “Downing Street argues…” and assurances that “Downing Street made clear last night…”

The obsessive oddness of Ingham’s commitment to Thatcher is treated with a maddening respect in the obituaries. The Times — seemingly lifting lazily and inaccurately from Harris’ book¹ — writes:

Ingham was certainly committed. He left his Purley bungalow at 6 am each day, was at his desk in No 10 by 7 am, and often stayed there for 14 hours. He reckoned he travelled 500,000 miles with the prime minister, and attended 51 summits of European, G7, Commonwealth and Nato leaders. In the middle of the Falklands war, his wife was seriously injured by a runaway lorry in Croydon and spent ten weeks in hospital, but he refused to take time off.

The almost venerating tone applied to the detail that Ingham continued to work when his wife was almost killed is from the same school of thinking that treats Thatcher’s mad-eyed commitment/claim to have slept only four hours a night (four less than the eight hours actual humans are advised to get).

The Telegraph obituary denies Ingham’s wife Nancy her starring role in a dramatic anecdote I suspect it has also lifted from Harris’ book:

Serving [Thatcher] was not without its risks. In 1987 an IRA parcel bomb was delivered to Ingham’s home, to be defused by the Bomb Squad; and the next year he was winded during a skirmish with security police on a visit to Nigeria.

Harris writes:

Nancy made the headlines only one, in April 1987, when the IRA sent a letter bomb to the Inghams’ home address: it arrived at lunchtime, she took one look at its Ulster postmark and, with admirable coolness, placed it on the front step and dialled 999. 

The Telegraph also indulges in euphemism to discuss Ingham’s anti-LGBT views and specifically his lesbophobia:

At any opportunity he headed home to help with the cows on his brother’s farm despite their triggering asthma attacks, and on his 10th anniversary at Downing Street generously invited the Lobby to Hebden Bridge to celebrate. He was, however, vocally unhappy at the town latterly becoming a home of alternative lifestyles.

In 2001, Ingham used his column in the Hebden Bridge Times — he was still a resident of Purley, South London — to reminisce about “life before lesbians” and conclude that “the town’s supposed status as the Lesbian Capital of Great Britain does not say much for the men of Hebden Bridge”.

Ingham continued to write for the Hebden Bridge Times until 2013, when his refusal to apologise for his comments about Hillsborough finally brought his 65-year relationship with the paper to an end. He was a Daily Express and Yorkshire Post columnist to the very end though, giving readers the ‘benefit’ of his views on things like pronouns, the unions, what he would have said if he was an MP, and how “we’ve never had it so good” (a great topic to be lectured on by a nonagenarian with a knighthood).

A two-paragraph Yorkshire Post leader column — which cost me 50p to read — tells readers that:

[Ingham’s] association with The Yorkshire Post went beyond just his time as a columnist. He was esteemed Labour Correspondent for The Yorkshire Post, covering trade unions, in his early career as a journalist, and was also approached to become editor of the title twice in 1989. The Yorkshire Post would like to extend its condolences to Sir Bernard’s family. The forthright views of the man, described as a “journalist to his bones” by his family, will be missed dearly.

There is an irregular verb in action: I am a prick, you are a prick, someone that hacks like has “forthright views”.

Inevitably, Ingham’s perspective criticisms of the press do not make the obits and tributes; insert The Worst Person You Know Just Made A Great Point meme. In an address to the International Press Institute, which he claimed was in the spirit of “a candid friend”, he said:

Can you honestly say that British journalism, even acknowledging its right to take a particular political standpoint, strives to be fair? Of course, you can’t. And the reason you can’t is that it doesn’t strike me any more that there is a driving compulsion to be fair. 

But as Harris points out, “this particular point, unfortunately, was not one which he developed to its logical conclusion… the overwhelming beneficiary of any political bias and unfairness in the British press was… his own employer.” Harris quotes from a 1990 Independent profile of Ingham by Mark Lawson:

Lawson: When the Sun runs a story, as it does, which may or may not have come out of your briefings: MARVELLOUS MAGGIE SAVES THE WORLD. By the terms you’ve set out, that’s bad journalism, but in terms of the government, it does a lot of good. 

Ingham: But what about the Mirror ignoring it totally…? 

Lawson: Yes, but that Sun story. They’d never give the other side. Is that bad journalism? 

Ingham: Well, the short answer is, I don’t know because I haven’t got the facts…

It’s a perfect example of the extent to which “plain spokeness” in politics is just branding. The obits take Ingham at face value — red-faced, bluff, professionally ‘Northern’, and ‘direct’ — but look at his actions and his quotes for even a short time and you’ll find he’s as evasive, tricky, and self-serving as any other political flack. Just as columnists and analysts insist on talking about how Keir Starmer increasingly “looks like a Prime Minister”, Ingham looked like a simple Northern bloke and that’s what they took him for to a considerable extent; but he was as much of a hack-turned-headbasher as Campbell who came after him.

When Ingham delivered another lecture in February 1986, this time to the Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers, it came in the wake of the Westland Affair in which he played a significant and significantly disputed role. His speech, ‘The Reporter: An Endangered Species”, was delivered with a significant number of hacks in attendance (“half of the British media”, according to Harris) and features few pulled punches:

[The press has] a cavalier approach to facts especially if inconvenient … a readiness to make deductions which are as creative in their approach to logic as some accounting is to sound finance … and excess of malice … insinuation [is] the branding iron of contemporary journalism.  

While Ingham could have been reciting these accusations in a mirror, as well as to The Mirror, he claims were true then and they’re true now. The problem is that he applied that criticism so selectively and that it will be buried with him, buffed away by the innuendo-heavy, fact-light style of the establishment obituary.

Journalists frequently lean on the Philip L. Graham quip about their output being “the rough draft of history”. But there’s enough actual history around the actions of Bernard Ingham in life to show that their obits are partial drafts sketched out to spare the feelings of not just his family but of hacks and politicians alike.

We can all dream of having our worst behaviour recast as “robust”; our most arseholic outbursts as “strident defences”; and our most unconscionable claims buffed up to “forthright views”. But then again, maybe we’d simply not say or do those things in the first place.

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Bibliography:
This edition relies heavily on two books:

The Media Trilogy, Robert Harris, Faber & Faber (1994)
Kill The Messenger, Bernard Ingham, Harper Collins (1991)

1. Harris, writing more contemporaneously, reported that Ingham woke before 6 am, left home at 7 am, and was usually at his desk by 7.30 am.