Tim Bell, a British public relations executive who served as the spin doctor for Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, helping to orchestrate her triumph in the 1979 general election, and went on to blend politics with PR as an adviser to statesmen, strongmen, celebrities and oligarchs, died Aug. 25 at his home in London. He was 77.
He had vascular parkinsonism, a neurological disorder that affects mobility, said his wife, Jacky Bell.
With his business partner Piers Pottinger, Bell formed a one-stop shop for political campaigning, reputation laundering and corporate image-polishing. Their PR firm Bell Pottinger, established in the late 1980s, became one of the most powerful and influential agencies in London before collapsing in disgrace in 2017, amid controversy over its racially divisive work in South Africa.
Unlike many of his peers, Bell was no mere behind-the-scenes player. Knighted by Thatcher and awarded a life peerage by Prime Minister Tony Blair, “Lord Bell” was the rare media-strategist celebrity, known for taking on unsavory clients, regardless of whatever criminal charges or war crimes allegations they might be facing, as well as for his enduring connection to Thatcher, whose death he announced to the world in 2013.
Bell and his agency represented English composer Andrew Lloyd Webber, Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko, South African leader F.W. de Klerk and companies such as HSBC and the supermarket chain Waitrose. He also advised autocrats and dictators, including Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus, the governments of Bahrain and Egypt, and the foundation of Gen. Augusto Pinochet of Chile, which was campaigning against his extradition to Spain.
In interviews, he said that he was not above turning down clients – Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe crossed a line, as did Britain’s Labour Party – but that everyone had a right to representation. “I am not an international ethics body,” he told The Guardian. “We do communications work. If people want to communicate their argument, we take the view that they are allowed to do so.”
“He was a giant of the public relations industry, but he was a controversial one, and deliberately so,” said Francis Ingham, director general of the Public Relations and Communications Association, a London-based trade group. “He enjoyed being seen as a sort of bad boy of conservative politics, and he took pleasure in the intellectual challenge and stimulation of working for unpopular clients.”
Bell “was one of the first people to understand the link between PR, communications and geopolitics,” Ingham added by phone. “He had an ability to find the message that cuts through to business people, politicians and ordinary people alike. Someone once said that he was the man that dogs would cross the street to be patted by.”
A grocer’s daughter was his ticket to fame and fortune. Bell was an executive at the Saatchi & Saatchi advertising firm when he began advising Thatcher, a Tory politician who had risen from modest beginnings to become opposition leader in Parliament. “He could pick up quicker than anyone else a change in the national mood,” Thatcher wrote in a memoir. “And, unlike most advertising men, he understood that selling ideas is different from selling soap.”
Bell was credited with refining her appearance, wardrobe and speech patterns, encouraging her to develop pithy sound bites that played to voters and the media. Her persona as “the Iron Lady,” Ingham said, “was to a certain degree his creation.” (Bell preferred to call her “the She-Wolf,” not without affection.)
Crucially, he helped convince Thatcher to adopt the Conservative Party’s cheeky “Labour Isn’t Working” campaign for the 1979 election, in posters showing a long line of people waiting at an unemployment office. His colleagues reportedly coined the phrase, which was invoked in the 2012 U.S. presidential campaign when Mitt Romney’s team released an almost identical banner with the line “Obama Isn’t Working.”
Bell shifted from advertising to public relations in the 1980s, helping “define what PR could be,” said John Harrington, deputy editor of PRWeek UK, a trade magazine. Previously, he said, “PR was boozy lunches, getting on well with journalists and smoking too many cigarettes.” In Bell’s hands, the field became one of high strategy and image-making.
His success was evident by 2010, when The Guardian reported that London had become “the reputation laundering destination of choice for foreign heads of state,” partly through the work of Bell Pottinger. The firm drew headlines and occasional scorn for its choice of clients, as well as jibes from rival agencies. While debating whether to take on a particular client, The New Yorker reported last year, some publicists joked that the answer was either “Yes,” “No” or “One for Bell Pottinger.”
Bell left the firm in 2016, just before it was thrown into chaos, crisis and eventual insolvency over its work with South Africa’s Oakbay Investments, a holding company run by the Gupta family. The three Indian-born brothers had been accused of leveraging their close association with President Jacob Zuma for financial gain and of running a “shadow government” within the country.
Bell Pottinger ran a campaign for Oakbay focusing on “economic apartheid” and “white monopoly capital,” branding the Guptas’ opponents as stewards of a racist system – and poisoning the country’s political rhetoric, critics said. In September 2017, the PRCA expelled Bell Pottinger from its ranks, saying it had tarnished the PR and communications industry.
One week later, the firm was put into administration, a British legal process similar to bankruptcy. It had reportedly taken on heavy debt, partly because of payout to senior staffers such as Bell, who was by then running a new firm called Sans Frontières Associates. He had flown with several colleagues to Johannesburg to meet with the Guptas and signed off on the original contract, he said, but later sought to distance himself from the campaign.
“I don’t take any responsibility,” he told the BBC’s “Newsnight” program.
Timothy John Leigh Bell was born in North London on Oct. 18, 1941. His father, he wrote in a 2014 memoir, “was a Belfast-raised Protestant and an alcoholic – a committed participant in both traditions” who walked out on the family when Tim was 5. His mother was an Australian-born laundress who later married the lawyer who had worked on her divorce.
In lieu of a college education, Bell found work at ABC Television and moved into advertising jobs, joining Saatchi & Saatchi at its formation in 1970.
He was married three times, including to Virginia Hornbrook, with whom he had two children, Harry and Daisy, before divorcing. In 2017, he married Jacky Phillips. In addition to his wife, survivors include his two children.
Bell sometimes described himself as a warrior for political causes and said that his work with Thatcher was driven by love and admiration for her conservative ideology. Nonetheless, he acknowledged that he was a businessman, not an activist. “Morality is a job for priests,” he told The New York Times in 2018. “Not P.R. men.”
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