Avoiding party politics

When the IRA attempted to assassinate Margaret Thatcher by blowing up the Grand Hotel in Brighton during the 1984 Tory conference, her press secretary, Bernard Ingham, was on holiday near Bristol. He is proud of his absence, not remorseful. Not for him the taint of party politics: he was demonstrating his political impartiality. Personally, I think it demonstrated his unreality. We saw the same job differently.

When I was Harold Wilson's press secretary, I went with him to Labour conferences. He was Prime Minister every day of the year and couldn't step down to be party leader for one week in 52. In any case, other senior civil servants were with Mrs Thatcher at Brighton in a non-political role and survived with their reputations untarnished.

As a journalist, standing opposite the Grand in the early hours of that morning, watching the first bodies being brought out, I wanted to know the fate of Mrs Thatcher and would have welcomed Ingham's presence.

The reason for Ingham's holiday goes to the heart of his book: today's alleged politicisation of civil service information officers for party purposes. He fails, though, to recognise that many were willing to be politicised. In my time, civil servants anxious to tell me of their pro-Labour leanings were never in short supply.

But for Ingham, party politics are to be avoided at all costs, even at the cost of efficient government. His strongest argument about New Labour is about the proliferation of the special advisers who, publicly at least, have done more harm than good to the Government. One need say no more than "Jo Moore".

Over the years, Ingham moved across the political landscape from Guardian reporter and Labour activist to Thatcherite and Right-wing columnist - and it shows. In the latter mood, he doesn't argue, he fulminates. Alastair Campbell, he declaims, is Stalin to Peter Mandelson's Lenin.

Campbell is a political commissar, a ventriloquist whose dummy is Tony Blair - who, in turn, is an anarchist heading a Government whose ministers are Bourbons and Tsarists. It is a breathtaking confection most historians would find hard to comprehend.

His book traces an improbable history of spin doctors - a phrase which obsesses him - from a Chinese emperor in 200BC to the present day, but denies ever being one himself. His machine-gun approach to Campbell, the worst of them all, means an occasional bullet hits the target, not least when he criticises Blair's communications chief for too often being the story.

It is a pity Ingham's obsession with Campbell and his hatred of the Government obscures his constructive criticisms drawn from his long experience in Whitehall. When reason gives way to rant, it is the more thoughtful parts of his book which suffer. Still, his "false" reputation as a spin doctor "has been a nice little earner", he says. Hence, I suppose, the title of his book.