Tim Bell was Margaret Thatcher's 'man on the Clapham omnibus' who could channel the views of ordinary folk
loathed rules. In his top-floor office in Mayfair, a ritzy district of London, the man who did more than anyone to make Britain’s public-relations industry famous flouted the smoking ban. Even in winter, the smoke from his daily two packs of Dunhills wafted out of the open windows. In the street below, his chauffeur waited to drive him 200 yards down the road for lunch. “I enjoy being stared at,” he said, of his choice of a red Ferrari.
In death as in life, the role of Lord Bell in Thatcher’s three election victories has been overstated. His job—first at Saatchi & Saatchi, an advertising agency, and later at his own company—was to schmooze clients, not to come up with slogans, like the “Labour isn’t working” pun that mocked the party’s record on unemployment.
His more significant legacy is his part in establishing London as a hub for what he termed geopolitical work and others call reputation laundering. At the height of his fame, he switched from advertising to public relations. “His proximity to thedid his business no harm,” says Bernard Ingham, Thatcher’s press secretary. He won one of his first clients, F. W.
Colleagues called him a foul-weather friend, since he had a penchant for the dodgier end of the market. Insisting that “morality is a job for priests, notmen,” he helped Augusto Pinochet, a Chilean dictator, escape extradition to Spain on charges of torture, and massaged the reputations of Alexander Lukashenko, a Belarusian strongman, and Asma al-Assad, the Syrian president’s wife. In one year he helped devise both pro- and anti-smoking campaigns.
How many of his campaigns worked is open to question. He advised Pinochet’s finance minister and Jacques Chirac on elections they lost and masterminded the communications strategy for Iraq’s “transition to democracy” in 2004. He had a talent for blaming bloopers on others: he insisted David Mellor, an adulterous, decided on an embarrassing photo-op with his family; the unpopular idea to serve Spam fritters to mark the 50th anniversary of-Day was “suggested by the Royal Marines, not us”.
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