During the years they employed me, Thatcher had eroded this notion so effectively that we COI writers had little or no authority left. Also, I thought, Thatcher would soon be replaced by a Labour government and everything would be rosy.īy the time I left, seven years later, the COI was no longer the sole arbiter of what was and what wasn’t “objective information”. I thought I could learn my trade, and I was right about that at least. Having spent the past three years writing blurbs for a small publisher (the books were westerns: “Peace wouldn’t reign in Vulture valley until six gunshots rang in the air!”), I was intrigued by the idea of cold truth set out in type. I’d read George Orwell’s 1946 essay Politics and the English Language and I was filled with notions around the democratisation of language. Our job was to describe clearly and objectively to the British people what it was that the government was doing. The COI was not Margaret Thatcher’s loudhailer, my new bosses told me she had to use the Conservative party’s own funds for that. Dylan Thomas and Somerset Maugham had worked for it during the war, for a start, and I considered myself to be a “writer”, too, even though the only thing I’d had published was a 20,000-word guidebook to Edinburgh under the imposed pseudonym of Elspeth Mackintosh (my own surname too clearly Cornish for a book on Scotland).īut the main reason I joined was that I discovered during the application process that the department’s role was to issue information that was not beholden to any political party. Even though I lived in a squat, had the socialist historian EP Thompson’s Protest and Survive on my bookshelf and had been an organiser for a miners’ support group during the 1984 strike – when we put up some of the miners’ families during visits to London for marches, they found our earnest wholegrain lifestyle utterly ridiculous – I thought it was OK to join the COI for a number of reasons.

S ix years after Margaret Thatcher became prime minister, I got a job as a writer at a strangely dysfunctional government department called the Central Office Of Information.

Boss tone central