David Hill was an essential part of the New Labour machine
Tony Blair's long stint in power was in large part down to his excellent Downing Street staff. Hill is a case in point.
Amidst the solemnity of Remembrance Sunday at the Cenotaph, there was a twinge of national embarrassment. There were no less than nine surviving prime ministers in a row, some sporting hats and hairstyles which made the late Michael Foot in his alleged donkey jacket look like Beau Brummell.
The presence of John Major, Tony Blair and David Cameron was a reminder that once Prime Ministers could be expected to last seven or ten years, longer than a single parliamentary term or a supermarket lettuce.
They owed their longevity to the economic circumstances, the loyalty of their parties, their own qualities of leadership and one other factor: surrounding themselves with a high-quality team. Tony Blair lasted longest, undefeated, retiring more or less in his own time after a decade. In large part because he had the best Downing Street staff of the nine laying their wreaths.
David Hill was a key member of Blair’s team. He died last week aged 76 after six years with severe Parkinson’s. In his tribute, Blair wrote: “He was highly intelligent, insightful and had a wonderfully unruffled manner and was deeply respected by everyone he worked with. He was a natural pick to succeed Alastair Campbell”.
David Hill was actually Tony Blair’s chief spokesman both before and after Alastair Campbell. He took over the job in government in 2003 in the aftermath of the Iraq invasion in what Blair calls “a moment of real difficulty for the government”. Hill’s old boss Roy Hattersley was pleased, commenting pointedly that Hill finds it “pathologically impossible to dissemble or deceive. That is why he is the right man to establish trust between Downing Street and the press”.
By then, Hill was already a veteran servant of the party. He began working for Labour in his twenties in 1976 when he was hired as an aide to Roy Hattersley, the MP for Birmingham Sparkbrook. He had attended King Edward VI School and Brasenose College Oxford but, according to an old friend, he was a bit of a tearaway mainly interested in rock music, which remained a lifelong passion. His parents were worthies in the local party and asked Hattersley to help their son settle down. That said, Hill’s politics and veneration of the Labour party probably exceeded that of those who would become his political masters.
There was never any doubt of Hill’s intelligence and left of centre politics and he took quickly to learning on the job at Westminster. He was at Hattersley’s side while he was deputy leader to Neil Kinnock. In 1991, he moved to become chief spokesman for the Labour party under John Smith and then Tony Blair, all the way through New Labour’s 1997 General Election victory.
Hill was well liked and respected by political journalists across the political spectrum. His style was to talk as frankly as he could, on the basis that there was no such thing as “off the record” because what he said would end on the record in any case. He rarely gave interviews and saw his job as getting the right message out from his political masters. As he joked in 1998, when Blair was still basking in an extended honeymoon with the public, his job was “to provide the water for Tony Blair to walk on”.
A few months earlier, Hill dealt deftly with New Labour’s first major sleaze scandal. In the autumn of 1997, there were allegations that the Labour government had received a million pound donation from Bernie Ecclestone and subsequently intervened with the EU to seek an exemption for Formula 1 from a tobacco advertising ban.
Hill’s reaction was to call political journalists together and put the facts on the record. I remember his phone call inviting me to a late afternoon briefing on an unspecified topic; as I demurred lazily, he insisted “You really want to be there”. So I was. Hill confirmed that yes, Blair had met Ecclestone before seeking the opt out. Yes, it looked bad, and yes, the party was returning the donation. That weekend at Chequers, Tony Blair gave his uncomfortable “I’m a pretty straight kind of guy” interview but his popularity survived. Hill’s prompt handling of the story moved the news agenda on, to the benefit of the government.
Hill denied he was shouldered aside by Campbell and the two men remained on good terms. He spent the next four years working in PR for Good Relations, a company founded by Tim Bell. “Mrs Thatcher’s favourite spin doctor” may have seemed an unlikely boss for Hill but they had a genuine liking and respect for each other. After leaving Number 10, Hill joined Chime, another of Tory Lord Bell’s businesses.
With his walrus moustache and thick-rimmed glasses, David Hill resembled Groucho Marx, without the cigar. A garrulous character, he loved talking politics with anyone who took it seriously, including the Tory press – and broadcasters. When he escorted Hattersley to a breakfast TV interview in Brighton, I was treated to a lengthy disquisition on how The Daily Telegraph was then the newspaper treating Kinnock most fairly.
Hill was one of a number of accomplished and dedicated press officials who worked on Blair’s team, including Godric Smith, David Bradshaw and Hilary Coffman, who became David’s partner. Both have adult children from previous marriages. Hill stood out for his warmth, openness and enthusiasm.
Not that he always kept his temper. As we soon found out when we bumped into him one summer in the Pyrenees; he was absolutely fuming that Prime Minister Blair and family had gone on holiday as guests of the Tory-donating Bamford family.
Until his illness gripped, David and Hilary enjoyed exploring Catalonia armed with the Guida Gastronomica. In David’s opinion, a long, late, gourmet lunch was all that was needed for the day.
Communications have moved on. You can look up a restaurant on your phone. A career such as his would not be possible now in the fragmented media landscape. David Hill never took to social media, with its snap judgements and single sentence WhatsApp exchanges. He thrived on explication and argument. Politics mattered to him. So did the people he was arguing with. He made this case for Labour straightforwardly, but he also did his best to ensure that it was reported in all its complexity.
He was never a frontman but an essential part of the machine which carried Labour through its longest sustained period of government – so far. Political leaders were less disposable then as well.