Spinning on a cleaner cycle: How media management became ‘respectable’ under the United Kingdom’s coalition government

The issue of media management or ‘spin’ came to dominate Tony Blair’s time in office, so much so that even his own press secretary, Alastair Campbell, came to concede that they had over-used it. When David Cameron came to power in 2010, although he has acknowledged that he learnt many political lessons from Tony Blair, he was keen to ensure that his government did not make the same mistakes in terms of the overuse of spin. In this article, based on interviews with key players, a comparison is made between the way the two prime ministers, and in particular their press secretaries, managed their media relations in their first year’s in office. This article, written by two who witnessed the first years of Blair and Cameron at first hand, characterizes the Blair media regime as practising ‘spin heavy’ and the Cameron regime, under Andy Coulson, as practising ‘spin lite’. It concludes that, both in terms of relations with the media and how that relationship played out vis-á-vis coverage, ‘spin lite’ was a more successful formulation.