Spinning for a Living

'The biggest mistake you can make about spin doctors,' according to Simon Heffer in the Autumn 1995 issue of British Journalism Review, 'is to believe they are a recent invention'. Wrong!

The biggest mistake is to believe they are harmless and that their main concern is to avoid 'unnecessary unpleasantness in public life', to quote Michael Heseltine, the seigneur of spin.

Press officers may, perhaps, be chiefly concerned with the provision of a few facts and some background information. But spin doctors (a phrase invented by Captain Frederick Marryat in 1835 for his novel, Jacob Faithfull, which begins: 'Come doctor, spin us one of your yarns...') are only concerned with spin. Long before press officers (an expensive importation from America introduced into Whitehall during the 1950s) the application of top spin by some smooth-talking 'news manager' to the more troublesome facts of a case was an accepted means of 'assisting the press with their enquiries'.