Like Simon Petherick (My small doomed stand against Thatcher’s war on truth, 25 October), I too joined the Central Office of Information (COI) in the mid-1980s. On welcoming new information officers, the then head of the government’s information service was clear: our only job was to publicise decisions made by parliament, not serve the whims of temporary politicians. Next up, Sir Bernard Ingham, then Margaret Thatcher’s press secretary. He was just as emphatic: our only goal should be to protect and promote our current minster.
To help us understand our responsibilities we were given an “unthinkable” roleplay to work through. In this scenario, new scientific evidence had discovered that British apples had mutated in a way that was harmful to health. Points were given for coming up with the right lines to protect the British agriculture industry, our exports, the agriculture ministry and its ministers. We were disabused of our first assumption, that public health messages would automatically take precedence.
I left the civil service after just 18 months for a career in TV current affairs journalism. At least I understood why, a couple of years later, it took the government so long from the discovery of BSE in British cows to getting high-risk foodstuffs banned from human consumption.
Mike Lewis
Stockport, Greater Manchester
• Simon Petherick’s mentioning that the COI was “told to issue itemised invoices to its departmental clients” was just one aspect of the bureaucratic consequences of the marketisation of the civil service under Thatcher.
An enduring memory of my time at the COI is of an information officer who spent a whole day matching the cost of every call listed in a lengthy telephone bill with the contracts on which he was working. Marketisation led to an increase of administrative tasks at the expense of productive work, with the growing demand from top management for statistics. When I subsequently studied the governance of the Soviet Union at university, it was all very familiar.
Dr Paul Flewers
London
• As a former civil servant myself, I often laugh at the absurdity of much that the work involved. It was rumoured at the time that the Department of Trade and Industry had a leaflet entitled How to Develop a Small Firm. That is until some wag asked the question, developing a small firm what?
Béryl Barnes
St-Julien-aux-Bois, France
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