Bernard Ingham on Dominic Cummings, Piers Morgan doing his nut and Brexit

Sir Bernard Ingham was the forthright Yorkshireman who was Margaret Thatcher’s chief press secretary from 1979 until 1990.

With his magnificent eyebrows and a pugnacious face perfectly suited to scowling, Sir Bernard became the public face of Thatcher’s rumbustious relations with the press.

A former Guardian labour reporter who stood for election as a Labour councillor in Leeds – but was heavily defeated – he first met Mrs T while working in the then Department of Energy soon after she was elected in 1979. At the meeting, she asked officials how was she going to live with Arthur Scargill and the miners. She did not receive an answer but she did ask Ingham what he was doing, to which he replied “energy conservation”. Not long after, he got the call from No 10: would he be her press secretary?

Speaking to Reaction, Sir Bernard explained how Thatcher – who seemingly never read the newspapers and rarely watched TV – told him when he accepted the job that she “couldn’t care less about his political ideas but wanted someone to explain her policies to the public.” Which he did, through the good and the bad times from the explosive bust-up with Arthur Scargill during the miners strike to the poll tax and Lady Thatcher’s handbagging of Europe. Often taking the repercussions on the chin himself, he had more than his fair share of scrapes with the press.

Incarcerated at home during lockdown – which he is enjoying – the  87 year-old is now writing down the almost hour-by-hour record of his time at No 10 from the years 1983 to 1985. He has already written up his diaries into three other books, and this latest one is provisionally entitled “Banana skins and the NUM”. He also writes a weekly column for the Yorkshire Post.

What better person to ask about the government’s banana skin moment surrounding Conservative Prime Minister, Boris Johnson and his chief consigliere, Dominic Cummings?

Maggie Pagano: Do you think the Prime Minster was right to stick by his adviser ?

Bernard Ingham:  Well, Boris Johnson is right if he gets away with it but he is not right if the affair continues to hound him. There does seem to be a willingness now to excuse Cummings – if that’s my reading of letters to the press and the general atmosphere. But frankly it all depends on his behaviour. I don’t think he’s got another shocker in his locker. If Cummings does something else daft the next time will be fatal, as it were. I don’t have a quarrel with what he has done, and the police have found that he did not break the law. I can see why Boris wants to keep him after Brexit vote and the election but I am not sure he is the genius that everyone makes him out to be. But if he keeps him, he must put him in his place.

MP: What advice would you have given the Prime Minister if asked ?   

BI: Loyalty in a leader is good. But what I would say to Boris is that he should only keep Cummings on condition that he promises in future to not cause any more trouble, to behave himself and stop doing daft things. Otherwise he may well regret keeping him. Cummings needs to stop being rude to people. I would have also have said if you keep him you will be haunted by him, as I said to Mrs T in the Nicholas Ridley affair. Curiously, and you may think me eccentric, but I said she shouldn’t fire Heseltine during the Westland affair because if she did send him a letter threatening the sack, he might call her bluff and then she would look weak. He was left on a string for a few weeks before he resigned. I do think you have to look at all the evidence around you and all that you are hearing and my simple advice to Boris if you think can get away with it, keep him but I have warn you that you may be in trouble. Has to be his decision. You and I can’t fire him. The affair reminds me of the (Nick) Ridley case. Mrs T phoned me up to ask what she should do about Ridley, then industry secretary, after a Spectator interview in which he said the single currency was a German racket to take over the whole of Europe, and that giving sovereignty to the EU was as bad as giving it to Hitler. She told me she wanted to keep him but I said if she did, she would be haunted for ever. It didn’t take long before Ridley resigned.

MP:  Do you think the government messed up the communications in the affair, and allowed it to become bigger than it should have been ? The way Cabinet members and MPs were wielded to go out and defend Cummings without knowing the full facts was clumsy. 

BI: Lets face it no one has been pretty sharp handling this. The government let it linger for a few days. I don’t feel like criticising the police but if they knew the facts then they should have said whether Cummings had done right or wrong. And quickly. The problem for all press officers is getting the machine to get its act together. Agreeing on a strategy is diffuse and involves a lot of people and there is always a prejudice in government against saying anything.  At least it was in my time. I was often excused of being too forthright. My approach was always to lance the boil and not to hesitate, which is why I was frequently accused of being forthright.

And I have to say there has been a remarkable lack of control in its messaging as we emerge from the worst of the pandemic. Maybe it’s because both the PM and Cummings have been ill ?

MP: What was your worst scrape ? And did you ever come close to resigning over an altercation with either the press or government?

BI: Westland was undoubtedly the worst one. I got into it because people frankly lied. I didn’t known anything about any plan to leak the Solicitor General’s letter and when the Department of Trade and Industry said they wanted me to do so, I said, after earlier making it clear I did not like the idea of leaking the letter, that: “I am not going to do that. I have to keep the PM above that sort of thing.’

But the facts of the case didn’t stop the machine hunting for my blood because i had been judged regardless of what had happened. It got so bad that I asked Robert Armstrong, the Cabinet Secretary, if they wanted a scapegoat. He said by no means should I offer myself and that so long as PM has confidence in me, I should stay. This was good of him as I knew he was trying to move me along from No 10. I know what it is like to have ministerial resentment when they feel officials are too close to the boss.

MP: What do you think about the behaviour of the press, particularly the broadcast media, since the beginning of the lockdown and over the Cummings affair ?

The plain fact is that the media generally as distinct from individually thinks it can run the country better than the government. And the BBC, in particular, has always felt it was the alternative government and frequently, a better government. Whether you like it or not, they think they can do better and the extent to which they think they are superior also depends on their political motivation. But by jove if they think they can do better,  then they they are merciless. People are entitled to their opinions but they had better been based on fact or political prejudice. My rows with the BBC were because they were unable to reflect the facts properly and not because I objected to opinions. I do think, leave aside the latest fuss with Emily Maitlis, that most TV commentators would do well to show a certain humility. That man Piers Morgan appears on my iPad every day doing his nut about something. In my view, he should stick to gossip columns, which is what he used to do.

MP: Do you think Cummings is right to want to put a bomb under the Civil Service and reform the machinery of government ? 

Everywhere he goes, he does seem to manufacture tension. There is enough of that around as the government wrestles with the virus and the economy is in a dreadful state. He needs to try a different approach if he wants to defeat the defeatists. I know first hand how maddeningly elitist and secretive the Civil Service can be. But instead of declaring war on the system and the people, as Cummings has done, he should be working with them as a team. Either he or the Prime Minister should explain what it is they want to do rather than all this fuss about employing ‘weirdos’ and bringing in whizz kids. There’s no question that you get groupthink in organisations like the Civil Service and it can be maddening as it is often slow. There is enough of that around as the government wrestles with the virus and the economy is in a dreadful state.

MP: As a long-time Brexiteer – before the word Brexit was even devised –   how do you think Boris Johnson is doing with the EU negotiations?

BI: It’s all a test of will. And so far, so good. Boris has now got to negotiate and must not stand for any nonsense. he’s got to hold firm, because the whole movement of Remainers in this country and the Commission is to play the game for as long as possible in the hope there will be a change of mind. Boris will have to stand firm. All this talk about the Red Wall being lost is silly but if he gives way on Europe it will disappear. I have frequently been described by implication as a thick Northerner for voting Brexit. In fact, the people of the North are much wiser than the metros of London because they understand politics better. The EU has rendered itself relatively useless over the years by trying to gallop before it can crawl. Its determination to set in place a federal Europe – without electoral support – has had a direct effect on our democracy. What is the point of voting for a Westminster Parliament when Brussels makes the laws. I hope election turnouts will improve from December 31.

MP: How do you see Britain’s future role in the world post-civid and post-Brexit ? 

BI: It’s very complicated situation. We are free traders and the EU is protectionist. I will never forget being with Margaret Thatcher at lunch in Rome with President Mitterrand. She was protesting that the Common Agricultural Policy was protectionist. Mitterrand replied: “Ma Cherie, zat is ze purpose of ze CAP.” The world is in a dangerous state: Putin in Russia wants to destabilise the West while China is behaving badly. Trump is protectionist, when he is not trying to start World War 3. Russia and China are expansionist so we face a very considerable problem of international trading. The EU is a contradiction: it has a single currency but no central financial Treasury but it wants an army. Once virus the virus is over everyone will want to be selling their goods again. Here in the UK we had better be careful about the unions because according to Frances O’Grady, head of the TUC, they are back.