Page 28 Daily Mail, Tuesday, August 27, 2019PR Mad Man wh
80 cigarettes every 20-hour day.
Cocaine. Bizarre sexual exhibitionism.
But Tim Bell, who’s died aged 77, was
the genius behind three Tory victories
— and poster boy for the louche 1980s
T
HE line of unemployed
snakes into the distance
under the devastating ver-
dict ‘Labour Isn’t Working’.
No matter that this jobless
multitude was composed of two dozen
volunteers from Hendon Young Conserva-
tives, pasted and re-pasted to swell the num-
bers. The image of an unending dole queue,
conveying a sense of the Callaghan govern-
ment’s chronic economic mismanagement,
did the trick.
This was American-style political advertis-
ing injected into British politics, and it
helped propel Margaret Thatcher into Down-
ing Street the following year — 1979.
Lord Bell — Tim Bell — was one of the
architects of this campaign and it
began a relationship with the Iron
Lady that endured in good times
and bad.
Bell, who has died at the age of 77,
was more than an advertising, pub-
lic relations and lobbying man.
He was a confidant and adviser to
the powerful, a player on the politi-
cal stage, if always from the wings.
Moreover, he was a true believer, in
capitalism, the Conservative cause
and, above all, the woman who
personified it.
Her hair, her clothes, her voice —
along with adviser Gordon Reece,
he helped mould them. The result:
consecutive General Election
victories in 1979, 1983 and 1987.
‘I loved her,’ he said of Britain’s
first female Prime Minister. ‘I am a
hero-worshipper. I work for my
demi-gods.’
This North London suburbangrammar school boy shaped his
own image, too. Sharp-suited, hair
smeared flat with gel, brick-sized
mobile phone clamped to his ear,
Bell personified the Thatcher years
— the quintessential fixer whose
phone calls would always be taken.
By business magnates, Fleet Street
editors and the politicians whose
frailties he finessed.
And in keeping with an era of
excess he himself could be exces-
sive, in work and play. Twenty-hour
and 80-cigarette days (he was, he
said, the guy to be found swapping
life stories with the barman at 4am),cocaine, fat expense accounts,
Maseratis — an even an insane
moment when he famously flashed
women walking below his bathroom
window in 1977.
In his younger days he was British
advertising’s ultimate Mad Man
before transmuting in his later years
into a reflective eminence grise. But
he always hogged the fast lane.
Which meant the odd car crash.
In 1998 Bell and his lifelong friend
Piers Pottinger launched their firm
Bell Pottinger. It was to become
synonymous with the dark arts of
PR and ‘reputation management’—including famously massaging
clients’ online profiles.
Touching up the images of dicta-
tors is unlikely to win you friends in
the liberal establishment. Bell’s
criteria for accepting the dodgier
kind of PR brief were nothing if not
simple: was it legal and did it pay?
Bibulous Russian strongman
Boris Yeltsin came in search of his
help, as did Asma al-Assad, wife of
Syrian dictator Bashir, the multi-
billionaire Sultan of Brunei and
Alexander Lukashenko, the dicta-
tor of Belarus (noted for favourable
remarks concerning one A. Hitler).
And when a fuss blew up over a
slush fund lubricating the enormous
Anglo-Saudi al-Yamamah arms deal
Bell helped scupper a Serious Fraud
Office investigation with a Press
campaign warning of its effect onjobs in the UK arms industry. Facts,
in the Bell universe, were elastic
things to be stretched and con-
torted in a good cause — or what he
considered to be a good one.
Of the Thatcher years he said: ‘We
could in those days find statistics
that proved anything. You could
argue we were always trying to
stretch the truth, but then every-
body was at the time.’
Timothy Bell, Baron Bell of
Belgravia, was born in 1941. His
father, Arthur Bell, was a salesman
from Belfast. He abandoned his wife
Greta and moved to South Africa
when his son was five.
Timothy’s step-father was Peter
Pettit, a solicitor and Conservative
mayor of Marylebone. At the age of
18, after leaving Queen Elizabeth’s
School, Barnet, Tim Bell got himselfby Neil Tweedie
DM Ben jashdjf ahsdfh asdjkfh
asdf asdf asdf asdagadf asdf
asdf asdf asdf asdf ashdfgh
dfgh dfghdfghk
V1