As director of communications for Tony Blair’s last four years in 10 Downing Street, David Hill, who has died aged 76, showed himself to be the consummate professional of his generation in a business that he did much to help develop. While many of his contemporaries were scorned, mistrusted or feared, he won respect from politicians and press alike for his straight-talking, honest decency and secured equal success when he took the same skills into the private sector.
His calm competence was much in demand in the fraught hot summer of 2003 when he succeeded Alastair Campbell in the prime minister’s office after the latter’s resignation, which followed the suicide of the government scientist Dr David Kelly, which went on to lead to the Hutton inquiry. Hill never allowed himself to become part of any story, and as Blair acknowledged in his 2010 memoirs (A Journey) it was as well that Hill had replaced Campbell then. “I think [Alastair] would have been tipped over the edge completely in that last period and would have rampaged through the media like a mad axeman!” he wrote.
Hill did not regard himself as a “spin doctor”, nor accept the practice of what in the course of his lifetime came to be called the “dark arts”. He believed that the pursuit of good public relations in any context meant being cheerful, helpful, available and above all, trustworthy. “You never lie to the media, it’s a golden rule,” he said once. “It’s wrong in principle and you get caught out.” In his view trust was something that was of mutual benefit to both the press officer and the client – whether in the media or industry – and he sought (almost entirely unsuccessfully) to persuade journalists to look at life through a more positive prism and not believe that news always has to be bad.
He had his own strongly held political views – although the stridency of his distinctly leftwing youthful ideology dissipated with the passage of years – and fought the former Burton constituency in Staffordshire in both the 1974 general elections, running the Conservative victor a close fight and achieving a creditable second place on both occasions. By this time he had been working at Westminster for two years for his local MP in Birmingham Sparkbrook, Roy Hattersley, for whom he undertook political research and helped with speechwriting.
Hattersley recalled the young Hill as a somewhat chippy, abrasive young man in scarlet corduroy trousers, but he matured into a smooth-talking professional with something of the air of a disappointed Edwardian bank manager. His neat moustache would always remain resolutely in place, despite the supposed decree against facial hair during the early Blair years.
The individual nature of the working relationship between Hill and Hattersley, now vastly expanded into today’s thriving network of special advisers, was then a considerable novelty. MPs were reimbursed only for secretarial help, but Hill had offered to work as a volunteer for a month. He stayed for 20 years, moving into government as a political adviser with Hattersley at the Department of Prices and Consumer Protection (1976-79), and as head of his office thereafter, including the period from 1983 to 1991 while Hattersley was deputy Labour leader. He became a spokesman who understood and represented his MP with faultless precision, regardless of whether the views coincided with his own.
He had first met Hattersley through his mother, a stalwart of Birmingham Sparkbrook Labour party. Born in the city, to Rita (nee Grace), who worked as a secretary, and her husband, Rowland Hill, an accounts clerk, David and his younger sister, Margaret, who would become chief adviser on editorial policy at the BBC, were raised on a council estate and both went to Oxford University.
Their father suffered a stroke before either had reached their teens, inevitably placing additional responsibility on their mother. David was educated at King Edward VI school, to which he had won a scholarship. He sang in a pop group and was captain of rugby; rock music and sport both remaining lifelong interests. An Aston Villa supporter, he loved film, travel and cooking. He studied philosophy, politics and economics at Brasenose College, where his tutor was Vernon Bogdanor.
By the time he took over as the head of the Labour party’s communications and the director of its campaigns in 1991, he was a vastly experienced practitioner. Having previously been blocked by Neil Kinnock from succeeding Peter Mandelson as the party’s head of communications, in favour of an outsider with TV experience, John Underwood, he nevertheless secured the post when Underwood left within a year. When Blair took office in 1997 and Hill was again overlooked, he became a director of Bell Pottinger, run by the Conservatives’ ace PR guru, Tim Bell, personally running a subsidiary company, Good Relations Political Communications.
He would return there after Blair left office in 2007, dealing with some of the top companies in retail and television until 2013, and observed that there were considerable similarities between managing business profiles and those of a political party. Thereafter he worked as a consultant and helped voluntarily with the UK charity Since 9/11, which aims to tackle extremism through the classroom.
In the course of his career Hill’s commitment to honest dealing enabled him effortlessly to straddle the dramatic changes in the media world that came with the digital age. He continued to maintain a low profile but to win admiration and regard as the quintessential professional who could handle responsibility for anything from war to the weather – two subjects which, he once observed, both came within his remit at No 10.
In 2019 he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.
He married Janet Gibson in 1974. They divorced in 1992 and he subsequently married Hilary Coffman, a former Labour party and Downing Street press official. He is survived by Hilary, the two children of his first marriage, Lucy and Sam, and two stepchildren, Ben and Charity.
• David Rowland Hill, political communications executive, born 1 February 1948; died 4 November 2024
