New spokesman for the PM could be a breath of fresh air in helping clear up virus confusion
The latest news that Boris Johnson wishes to appoint a spokesperson specifically for the Covid crisis, at a salary of around £100,000 a year, has brought a predictable round of sneers and jeers from the media commentariat. Critics are saying that this is another case of the Prime Minister stepping away from announcing bad news, and warning of tough times ahead for the next months at least of the Covid-19 emergency. However, the misgivings of BBC Radio 4 – both PM and Today have been predictably snarky – plus the Guardian, should not be taken at face value.
With the onset of Phase Two of Covid, the appointment of a new information team and spokesperson is a necessary part of a national strategy for a public health emergency which is likely to be with us for years.
The government should now also be considering a separate ministry to coordinate relief efforts for the coronavirus emergency between national departments, regional authorities and their health and welfare departments. The latter seem vital to the maintenance and success of the ITTI – Identify, Track, Trace and Isolate scheme – which is now beginning to show results.
On Thursday morning’s Today programme health secretary, Matt Hancock, sounded weary as he batted away Nick Robinson’s accusations of government mismanagement in imposing quarantine on returnees from Spain, with the simple observation that there is a new surge of Covid across Europe. He said the government was still learning about the behaviour of the virus – which has taken both the German and Israel authorities by surprise, despite having about the most efficient and pervasive tracking systems anywhere in the world.
By some accounts, the return of ten air passengers from Spain testing positive for Covid in the space of a few hours last Friday evening was the trigger which alerted the authorities, and for them to slam on the brakes.
The fact that some top tourist destinations, such as the Balearics, are relatively Covid free at present seems scarcely relevant, given how much travel there is within Spain. Which is why the Health Secrerary Hancock looks to be following the precept of New Zealand’s prime minister Jacinda Ardern to “go early, go hard,” with lockdowns and quarantine. New Zealand still has one of the best records on mitigation and prevention worldwide.
The pattern of the new phase of the pandemic seems based on sudden flareups in quite tight locations so the only way to deal with such outbreaks is to require quarantine and lockdown. So far we have seen the new ‘spikes’ in Leicester, Blackburn and Oldham. Much of the public health strategy will depend on local initiatives from professional bodies, and volunteer and charity organisations. The care homes must be supported as much as the hospitals – an enormously costly and lengthy proposition in itself.
There are signs that resources are being marshalled and organized for a rise on Covid cases. Whole sections of major hospitals have been prepared and isolated. Non-essential surgery has been postponed. The Nightingale hospitals – glibly written off by the chaterati as ‘white elephants’ – are being stood up for the main effort for which they were intended: seeing the NHS and us through a long and difficult winter.
In a stretched out emergency such as we now face, empathic leadership is not so much desirable as essential. This is why Jacinda Ardern, Angela Merkel, and surprisingly, Giuseppe Conte , the Italian Prime Minister, appear to have been successful. This also requires a spokesperson and information team with the right touch and where the priority is reassurance and social engagement, rather than government propaganda or political spin.
In a recent webinar discussion on leadership in a Public Health Emergency, James P Phillips assistant professor at Washington University’s Section of Disaster Operational Medicine, recalled the critical role of a Fire Department spokesman, Jon Hansen, in the bombing of the FBI HQ in Oklahoma City, that killed 168 in the spring of 1995. “I was 16 at the time; I recall that every night we would come home and there on TV was the excellent Oklahoma Fire Dept Information Officer, named Jon Hansen. Hansen was on TV every single night at the same time telling us what they knew, and what they didn’t know, and how they were going to find out. When he was on the air, we all felt that things were going to be okay, because the people in charge were honest and informed.” Phillips added: “That’s what America needs now.”
Boris Johnson is said to want his spokesperson to ‘to have held roles as a senior spokesperson or a journalist.’ Memo to Downing Street: I wouldn’t look at the label, so much as the quality for personal engagement , empathy and ability to listen. Such women and men have qualities born and not made. Wit, charm, irony and self-deprecation would be assets. Such rare people can be found, if you look hard enough.
There are interesting lessons to be learned from the military. They have not managed their media relations right, to put it mildly, over the past forty or fifty years. Think back to the Falklands campaign of 1982, when the MoD decided in its wisdom to appoint its own media spokesman, one Ian McDonald, a career civil servant whose main credential was to announce information in the sepulchral tones of one of those old machines on promenades and piers that boomed, ‘I speak your weight.’
McDonald was a disaster, because the overall effect was less than reassuring. When the destroyer Sheffield was hit by an Exocet missile, he explained that one of the Navy’s ships had been struck, but for security reasons couldn’t say which one. The result was panic and fear in hundreds of families whose relations and friends were in the Task Force thundering south towards the Falklands.
Ashore things weren’t much better. With one or two outstanding exceptions, the government information officers were less than effective and helpful. Once near the fighting, though, the men and women close or in the frontline were no end informative and enlightening.
It is strange, then, to suggest that the nearest thing I ever came to in the performance of Jon Hansen at Oklahoma, was the media interface of the beleaguered UN Sarajevo command of the then Lt General Rupert Smith in the last bleak months of the war in Bosnia in 1995. The lottery of Army appointments found him a spokesman of genius, Lt Colonel Gary Coward. Through Coward and his colleagues, the general explained what he thought was going on , how he saw matters developing, and what he thought he could do – albeit in a near-hopeless situation.
“I made sure everyone knew what was in my mind about what we could do,” Smith told me this week. By that summer , the siege of Sarajevo had gone on longer than the siege of Leningrad in World War II, though the numbers involved were much , much smaller. Even so, football pitches and parks had to be ploughed up to make cemeteries for Sarajevo’s civilian dead.
“I had to make sure there was a constant flow of information – words for the press, and pictures for the broadcasters. And it had to be real information.” There was only deception at one crucial stage in manoeuvring to lift the siege by omission , rather than commission. He couldn’t say that an international force was being readied for the Bosnian Serbs’ grip on Sarajevo, and lift the siege.
The general didn’t speak to the media himself publicly, though gave assiduous briefs to journalists on background, winning huge admiration not least from the sceptics of the American and international media. “I could let Gary speak. He knew my mind, and I knew his. I made sure he was present at every critical staff meeting.” The same went for the chief civilian spokesman, Alex Ivanko a native Russian, and a team of military spokesmen. “I needed the Pakistan officer, for example, to speak to the Pakistan UN Force contingent in their own language, Urdu.”
“We used to game it all through,” says Gary Coward, who himself later became a Lieutenant General. “Sometimes we disagreed in private. In the end it all worked on trust. And at all times we thought about what the second and third line political and tactical consequences would be of what we said, or didn’t say.”
It all succeeded as that September the Serbian forces lifted the siege of Sarajevo. It was a near-run thing that hellish summer. That July the Serbs had smashed their way into the UN protected enclave of Srebrenica, culminating in the murder of seven to eight thousand unarmed Bosnian Muslim men and boys – this, despite Smith calling on the UN and the sponsor governments to reinforce or relieve the enclave four months before.
The Bosnian Serb forces pulled back from Sarajevo that September, not before Smith, in one of the very rare episodes in which he spoke on television that summer, told them to quit or take the consequences from Nato airstrikes and artillery bombardment. He had pushed them into a corner – in a brilliant ploy in which use of brilliant public information, and a group of savvy and peculiarly empathic spokespeople played a critical role.
When they appoint the new spokesperson for Covid, they might take a leaf from Smith and Coward in Sarajevo, and Jon Hansen in Oklahoma.
No doubt, Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings will be offered copious advice from former front people like Alistair Campbell, the master of Tony Blair’s spin. “You have to be clear ,” Rupert Smith says, “ you are looking for a spokesperson, not a (politically driven) public relations exercise.” The spinning and political briefing would be left to the usual channels of political briefers from Downing Street.
The woman or man leading the public information team would coordinate information operations and briefings at the local level. The NHS needs to return to its robust structure of governance by regional boards and bodies, dismantled by the Lansley reforms of 2012/13. Those reforms ushered in the contracting body of Public Health England, with the initial lack of PPE and haphazhard tracking and tracing capability suggesting it is currently less than fit for purpose. This regional governance of the NHS and the PHE support agency now need urgent overhaul – but it will take time and patience.
In the meantime, some aspects of local public health and government are working. Regional task forces, professional and volunteer, are plugging the gap, and local health authorities are being given the prominence they require. When the number of positive Covid-19 cases began to rise in Oldham, lockdown was enforced. Katrina Stephens, public health director for Oldham, explained: “We know that effective testing is at the heart of tackling the spread of the virus. We are therefore urging anyone who shows symptoms that may be coronavirus to book a test online.” As Stephens put it, “If we all do our bit and stick to the restrictions now, we can help stop the spread of coronavirus and protect our loved ones.”
Such empathy is the clue to the perceived success of Angela Merkel, Jacinda Ardern, Jon Hansen, and, dare one suggest, Rupert Smith and Gary Coward in besieged Sarajevo. It is very likely the clue to the astonishing success of Italy of holding down the resurgence of the virus.
After the disaster from the sudden onset of the virus in the early part of the year, through a combination of political candour and foresight, and real community spirit, Italy is now faring better than Israel , Spain and even parts of Germany. The candour of clear communication comes from the top: Conte, prime minister recently went on national television to admit mistakes and underline the lessons needed to be learned.
There is no complacency nor blame shifting, another lesson for Downing Street as it appoints the new spokesperson. “We are in a state of limbo,” said Fabrizio Pregliasco, virologist at Milan University. “For now things are going well, but we are walking a fine line. This stable situation could either end badly or carry on the same, and that would depend on two things: the continued capacity to identify clusters and the behaviour of the majority of Italians.”