Margaret Thatcher’s former press secretary Sir Bernard Ingham has died at the age of 90 after a short illness, his family has said.
Ingham was a journalist with the Guardian in the 1970s before going into communications for the government. He served as press secretary for Thatcher for almost her entire time as prime minister.
In his later years, he wrote his memoirs, Kill the Messenger, and worked as an after-dinner speaker, a cruise-line lecturer and a newspaper columnist. He was still writing for the Daily Express in the weeks before he died.
His family said “he was a journalist to his bones”, starting out at 16 on his local newspaper in West Yorkshire, the Hebden Bridge Times.
Ingham’s son, John, said: “To the wider world he is known as Margaret Thatcher’s chief press secretary, a formidable operator in the political and Whitehall jungles. But to me he was my dad – and a great dad at that. He was a fellow football fan and an adoring grandfather and great-grandfather. My family will miss him greatly.”
He was known to be averse to what he called the “black art” of political spin, and in 2003 published a book entitled The Wages Of Spin – in which he criticised those who perpetrated it. He would always insist he was not a spin doctor, but simply a government press officer.
Eschewing any notion he controlled the news agenda, he instead once said: “If by news management you mean I try to avoid the government coming out with five major announcements on the same day, I plead guilty”.
“I only wish I was as sophisticated and devilishly clever, as Machiavellian as some make out,” he added.
His retirement coincided with Thatcher’s removal from office. He was awarded a knighthood in her resignation honours.
In 1993, he successfully “arrested” a subsequently convicted fare dodger on the London Underground.
Tributes began to pour in for Ingham on Friday. Priti Patel, the former home secretary, called him “a giant of British political communications and hugely loyal man”.
Ingham was married for 60 years to Nancy Ingham, a former police officer, who died in 2017. He is survived by his son, two grandchildren and a great-grandchild.