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MARGARET THATCHER’S former liar-in-chief and engineer of the Tory fake news campaign against striking mineworkers is dead.
Peer, knight and public relations adviser to some of the world’s most despotic regimes, Tim Bell was 77 when he died on Sunday.
His period with the Thatcher regime began during the 1979 election campaign when he was responsible for the Tories’ “Labour isn’t working” posters, depicting a queue of jobless workers.
Unemployment at the time was around one million but under Thatcher it soared to almost four million.
Bell was then involved in Thatcher’s re-election campaigns of 1983 and 1987.
His roles under Thatcher included secondment to the National Coal Board (NCB) in 1984 to help run a campaign of media deceit against the National Union of Mineworkers during the 1984-5 strike against pit closures.
Throughout the campaign the government and NCB lied that “there is no pit closures programme.”
Thatcher rewarded Bell with a knighthood, though later Thatcher’s “apprentice” Tony Blair went one better and gave him a peerage.
Bell in 1987 founded public relations firm Bell Pottinger. It went bust in 2017, shedding business amid a scandal over its secret campaign to stir racial tensions on behalf of billionaire clients in South Africa.
It resulted in Bell Pottinger being suspended from membership of the Public Relations and Communications Association. Its director general Francis Ingham said of the firm’s behaviour: “This is the most blatant instance of unethical PR practice I’ve ever seen.
“Bell Pottinger’s work has set back South Africa by possibly 10 years.”
While Bell said he had no part in stoking racist tensions with the firm he had no qualms about advising and acting for some of the world’s most reviled regimes for his £1 million annual salary.
In 2006 his agency successfully lobbied on behalf of the Saudi government to derail an investigation by the Serious Fraud Office into alleged bribes in an arms deal.
He worked for the authoritarian government of Belarus and for the Pinochet Foundation, an organisation named in honour of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, who in 1973 overthrew the elected left-wing government of Salvador Allende.
The New York Times described Bell Pottinger as a “PR firm for despots and rogues.”
Bell died after a “prolonged” illness.
