The Wages of Spin

In this wonderfully entertaining book, Sir Bernard Ingham, doyen of media relations, dissects the curse of modern politics.

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In The Wages of Spin we hear first hand how spin-doctoring developed, from the man who is wrongly attributed with its invention. Only in 1990 did spin-doctors appear on the horizon. But, within a few years, they came to dominate and discredit the British political scene. They became an addiction which the body politic found difficult to break. No-one is better qualified to explain how British politics came to be blighted by this phenomenon than Bernard Ingham, who spent 24 years as a press officer for Labour and Conservative governments, the last 11 of them as Margaret Thatcher's chief press secretary. He is also a former head of the Government Information Service. Here, he traces the glacially slow evolution of relations between government and journalists from the invention of the printing press to the dramatic events of 1997 when the Blair Government brought a new obsession with hyperactive presentation to British politics.He gives an insider's view of spin-doctoring and the contributions of politicians, civil servants and journalists to its brief flowering, showing how rules laid down at the end of World War II for the conduct of government relations with the media were changed and abused, and how journalists colluded in their own corruption.