See the light

Of all the people I met while living in England in 1987-8, among the most memorable was Bernard Ingham, press secretary to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Thatcher was not too available to us out-of-country types, so every Monday while Parliament was in session, Ingham would brief members of the Foreign Press Association. 
Journalists, myself included as a columnist for the Financial Post, who attended the Economic Summit in London in 1988, agreed that of all the briefings by staff of leaders, Ingham was the best. Not just information, either, but performance as well. Ingham’s manner was gruff, his face ruddy, and he had a bushy pair of eyebrows that danced about like two grasshoppers in a sun-filled field.
As for his capacity to offer insights to Thatcher’s thinking, I was reminded of a quote from novelist Edith Wharton, who said, “There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.” Ingham was too brash to be a candle, he was the mirror. 
And an anonymous one at that. The strength of the briefings to the Foreign Press Association was that we got inside information. The weakness was that it was all off the record, which, by tradition means that journalists can use what they hear but cannot attribute any of it directly to the person who said it. So we’d get such phrases as how Thatcher was as “tough as old boots.” As for relations with the U.S., his comment on the attempt by Michael Dukakis to become president was, “We are old enough and long enough in the tooth not to pay much attention to what people say during an election.”
After about six months of such off-the-record sessions, I got fed up and wrote a column that opened with a description of Ingham by name, his role, and said that “a certain mirror was feeling bold and ebullient.” I then went on to refer to him as Mr. Not-For-Attribution or Mr. NFA and used quotes from the briefing.
As you might imagine, I was persona non grata. For several weeks, Ingham refused to hold any Foreign Press Association briefings at all. When he did finally return, I was not allowed to attend. Looking back, I’m comfortable with what I did. Off-the-record is fine once in a while, but not holus-bolus. In a world where there is a candle and a mirror, I’d rather be the journalist who let the light shine in.