David Hill, Labour spin doctor who steadied the ship after Alastair Campbell resigned

David Hill, who has died aged 72, was arguably Labour’s most trusted communicator; he ran the party’s media operations up to and during the 1997 election, then was recalled by Tony Blair from the world of lobbying to succeed Alastair Campbell as his Director of Communications at the height of tensions over the Iraq War.

He earned the respect of journalists at Westminster during 19 years working for Roy Hattersley, and kept it representing the party under Neil Kinnock, John Smith and Blair, rated a reliable source rather than a master of spin.

Arriving at Number 10 in 2003 amid the political firestorm that followed the invasion of Iraq and the death of the government weapons expert Dr David Kelly, Hill adopted a “new communications structure”, by inference less confrontational with the media. Campbell later credited Hill with doing “a brilliant job calming things down after a period of such turmoil”.

Hill was highly intelligent, funny, a reassuring presence and an excellent briefer – qualities shared with his sister Margaret, who became head of policy at the BBC. Tony Blair recalled him as “unflappable when most people would have been severely flapping”. He also had an unrivalled political nose, during the 1979 election correctly predicting the outcome in every constituency in his native Birmingham.

Though Hill twice fought Burton-on-Trent in 1974, cutting the Conservative majority to 2,498, he was primarily ambitious for his party. 

The nearest he came to dabbling in the dark arts was in 1999, when Blair dispatched him to help Scottish Labour win the inaugural elections for the Scottish Parliament. Unofficially, he was there to find out whether Jack McConnell, then general secretary of the Scottish party and later First Minister, was up to a key ministerial post.

Hill enjoyed an easy relationship with political journalists, although he sometimes despaired of their obsession with minutiae. He ended his (premature) farewell speech to the Press Gallery in 1998 with “and I don’t give a monkey’s about Tommy Graham” – a particularly poisonous Scottish MP the party had been trying to get rid of.

He seldom sought the limelight, a rare exception being a party political broadcast in 1987 with himself and Hattersley, then Shadow Chancellor, discussing in a London taxi a favourable mention from the stockbrokers Phillips & Drew.

Not that Hill, who uncannily resembled all the Marx Brothers at once, was a shrinking violet. Away from politics he was a gifted amateur rock vocalist who had sung on stage in Hair.

According to Leo McKinstry, a one-time colleague, “the most startling fact about Hill remains his 20 years of service as an aide to Roy Hattersley, the former deputy leader of the Labour Party,” he wrote in The Spectator. “Even murderers rarely have to endure sentences of more than 15 years, yet Hill was shackled to this charmless figure of epic mediocrity from 1971 to 1991.” Yet it was working with Hattersley that Hill perfected his skills.

David Rowland Hill was born in Birmingham on February 1 1948, the son of Rowland Hill and his wife Rita. From King Edward VI School in the city he read PPE at Brasenose College, Oxford. Graduating in 1970, he joined Unigate as an industrial relations trainee.

He soon left to work for Hattersley, MP for Birmingham Sparkbrook and then an Opposition trade and industry spokesman, as his research assistant. When James Callaghan in 1976 appointed Hattersley Secretary for Prices and Consumer Protection, Hill became his special adviser, and after Labour’s defeat in 1979 he ran Hattersley’s office.

Hill’s fortunes advanced with Hattersley’s as he became deputy leader to Kinnock in 1983 and in turn Shadow Chancellor and Shadow Home Secretary. Had Labour won the 1987 election, he would have had a powerful job in the Treasury.

However a year before the 1992 election – with Hattersley seemingly in line to be Home Secretary – he moved to Labour headquarters as the party’s director of campaigns and communications, working closely with Peter Mandelson. From 1993 through Blair’s election as leader and Labour’s landslide victory in 1997, he was the party’s chief spokesman.

With Labour in office, the party’s media operation wound down and Hill left to become a senior executive at Bell Pottinger Communications, and managing director of its subsidiary Good Relations. Here, he handled Monsanto’s campaign to persuade the Government to accept genetically modified foods.

Hill and Blair kept in touch, and after Campbell decided to leave, Blair brought him into Number 10 to steady the ship.

When Blair resigned in June 2007, Hill went back to Bell Pottinger, staying as a director until 2013. Later, he was a non-executive director of the Champollion consultancy.

David Hill married Janet Gibson in 1974; the marriage was dissolved in 1992. He is survived by his partner Hilary Coffman, a former colleague at Number 10, and by a son and a daughter from his marriage.

David Hill, born February 1 1948, died November 4 2024