David Leask: Not all political spin is as dark as Malcolm Tucker

The hook for such news? Well, it is that, if you ignore inflation, the government’s budget for press officers and special advisors has doubled over a decade and a half of SNP rule.

The “wages of spin” bill in 2021-22 was £5.4m. That is about a quid for each of us a year. So, not chickenfeed.

Opposition parties were furious at what they saw as an outrageous waste of money.

Or at least that is what their mostly publicly-funded PR teams suggested in a series of suitably angry press releases and statements.

And there is a clear subtext in commentary about these stories: spending on communications, or comms, is not just wasteful; it is sinister.

One usually astute and moderate Labour MSP – and I am not making this up – was quoted as saying that current levels of Scottish Government communications spending were “immoral”.

I think this patter is rank. We are in the bizarre situation in Scottish and British politics where spin doctors for every party condemn every other party for, well, having spin doctors.

It is a cartoon circular firing squad. Essentially, our politicians are pathologising routine public communications.

Labour, as an example, is simultaneously defending rising “spin” bills in Cardiff while attacking them in Edinburgh.

Scottish Nationalists in Westminster are mauling Tories for spending taxpayers money on Scotland Office PR.

But they tell the Conservatives that the communications budget in their devolved administration is vital and legitimate.

This is all preposterously, laughably hypocritical. But it is worse than that. Our politicians – frankly, all of them – are indulging populist anti-politics on “spin”.

They are demonising the very staffers – civil servants and party hacks alike – without whom they could not function. And they are pretending, for the sake of a few crappy headline digs at their opponents, that they do not understand how our democracy and our government works.

The reality? In a world of 24-hour rolling news and a never-ending cycle of social media noise and misinformation, we increasingly need public sector and political communications workers. All the parties know this.

They are well aware of the growing demand, in this information age, on governments and parties to communicate. And they certainly appreciate that the Scottish Government in particular, whatever they think of its current leadership, is ever more at the centre of our public life: it has, bluntly, lots of questions to answer.

So, at the risk of sounding glib, I think our politicians are all spinning about spin. I wish they would stop.

Frankly, even the term “spin” is problematic.

Some of the reporting on this topic fails to clearly distinguish between non-partisan civil service communications officers and openly party-political special advisors, or Spads.

This is spectacularly unfair. Communications teams in governments and their agencies, local, Scottish and UK, do the heavy lifting in providing the press and public with information.

They are providing a vital if sometimes unglamorous and even pedestrian service. This has included, over the last two or three years, tailoring life-saving public health messaging.

Academics tend to draw a line between such public information providers and the much smaller number of political “spin doctors”, Spads.

But scholars also stress that this line can be blurred. First, because ordinary comms work can be political too. And second because it is wrong to assume that all Spads do is spin.

We love the image of these political appointees as Machiavellian schemers, like the fictional Malcolm Tucker in Armando Iannucci’s political satire, The Thick of It, using dark arts to manipulate the press and public.

Does this perception stand up to much scrutiny? I am not sure it always does.

There is nothing wrong in principle with politicians having their own advisors, including those telling them how the public will respond to policy.

There are currently 18 Spads in the Scottish Government. That is up from 11 in 2011. There were 126 such appointees in the British Government, as of last year, more than double the number in 2010.

So why do Spads, the supposed sultans of spin, get such bad PR?

Perhaps because of some unethical behaviour two decades ago?

Think back to the make-believe pushed by New Labour spinners about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction ahead of the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

That was probably the most notorious recent example of, well, organised lying. And this ugly episode and some lesser scandals have certainly coloured what passes for debate on public sector comms across the UK.

But there is another aspect to hostility to government communications. It is not just anti-politics that fuels politicians’ attacks on each other’s “spin doctors”; it is anti-state sentiment too.

There is a popular, even populist, notion that communications workers, like all sorts of other alleged “bureaucrats”, are pen-pushers who are far from “front line” of public service.

This is the same narrative that judges, say, medical secretaries as more expendable than doctors or nurses. It is white-hot nonsense, unless you think your surgeon should do office admin rather than your operation.

Me? I think the communications specialist who encourages you to get a Covid vaccine is as important as the nurse who jabs it in to your arm. In public service, it is not always obvious where the front line lies.

The Scottish Government, as an example, is not going run more efficiently if ministers and senior civil servants have to take routine phone calls from reporters like me.

Politicians need to wise up on spin. And they also need to look at the actual source of news about rising PR bills.

They tend to come from endless freedom of information requests submitted by opaquely funded right-wing campaign groups, with their own private spin doctors.

Now those guys, they really should become the story.