In 1972, Keith McDowall, who has died aged 96, was contacted by the Conservative cabinet minister Willie Whitelaw. Direct rule had just been imposed on Northern Ireland, and Whitelaw, an uncertain media performer, was made the first secretary of state for the region. McDowall, an experienced journalist then serving as chief information officer at the Home Office, took up the invitation to join Whitelaw’s department. After hesitating initially and assuring Whitelaw that his Labour sympathies would not have an impact on his civil service duties, McDowall swiftly retrained the minister. Effective public relations became the trademark of Whitelaw’s time in Ireland, with the close-cropped McDowall frequently mistaken for a security man.
They were exceptionally difficult times, with tit-for-tat murders, a disconnection between government and police communications, and a shortage of information. McDowall became an indispensable part of the team, ending the practice of airport press conferences every time a minister passed through; drawing government and RUC communications together; and originating the first and highly successful confidential information line, with its number carried on payslips and the side of buses. When secret talks with the IRA were leaked and a disconsolate Whitelaw considered resignation, McDowall’s advice to make an immediate parliamentary statement, while he briefed the lobby, helped defuse the issue.
The Sunningdale agreement of December 1973 proposed a power-sharing executive and a cross-border council of Ireland. Whitelaw was seen as one of few ministerial successes, and his reward was a summons to the Department of Employment to avert a threatened miners’ strike. When he insisted that McDowall came too, the latter counselled against the move, which resulted, against protocol, in displacing Bernard Ingham as director of information; a furious Ingham claimed that McDowall had engineered the move.
After the Conservative electoral defeat in Februrary 1974, McDowall found himself serving Michael Foot, the employment secretary, and the Labour government in discussions that led to the Social Contract agreement between the government and the trade unions. But in 1978, with Foot replaced by the lacklustre Albert Booth, McDowall was tempted by a better paid post as managing director, information, at the newly nationalised British Shipbuilders.
In 1981 he became director of information, and from 1986 a deputy director-general, of the CBI, where again he markedly improved the public performance of his chief, the respected Terence Beckett, and kept lines open with the TUC.
While still at the Department of Employment, he met Brenda Dean, then secretary of the Manchester branch of the printing union Sogat at a TUC function. Starting as an office worker, she achieved the extraordinary success in a male-dominated industry of securing office, but was uncertain on a national stage. McDowall coached her and provided her with introductions. His first marriage, to Shirley Astbury in 1957, ended in divorce in 1985, and three years later he and Dean were married.
Their mutually supportive partnership blossomed as Dean became general secretary, joined the TUC general council, and was made a Labour peer. McDowall claimed that he got more grief from CBI members over the relationship than she did from the Labour movement.
She acknowledged the support that he provided when she and her union became embroiled in the bitter “Battle of Wapping” in 1986, when Rupert Murdoch successfully shifted production of his newspapers away from heavily unionised Fleet Street and rancorous street demonstrations took place every weekend.
When Beckett retired from the CBI in 1988, McDowall was made CBE and also left, to set up a public affairs company with an old Daily Mail colleague, Monty Meth. Clients of Keith McDowall Associates included the Post Office and the Norwegian shipbuilders Kværner. He sold to Chime Communications in 1999, remaining chairman until 2001.
Born in south London, Keith was the son of Edna and William McDowall. His father died when he was 12 and he left Heath Clark school at 16. After a few months in import/export, he joined a Croydon paper as a reader’s boy, the start of a picaresque journalistic career that took him to the library of the Daily Telegraph before national service in the RAF (1947-49). Never backward in coming forward, he parlayed this limited experience to become founding editor of Provost Parade, the RAF police’s magazine.
Back as a junior reporter on the South London Press, he supplemented his income with shifts on The People and Daily Mail. Meanwhile, “McDowall of Bermondsey” supplied daily lineage to three competing London evening papers. In 1955 he joined the Mail, for less money, but compensated with a milk round before work, just in case things did not work out.
He made his mark alongside colleagues such as Walter Terry and Patrick Sergeant, and in 1958 became an industrial reporter. For the next decade, as the economy faltered and British industrial relations became a political battleground, the industrial correspondents became key interpreters. Close contacts with Bob Mellish, the Bermondsey MP and a pivotal London Labour figure, helped, and McDowall, who relished what he called “mingling”, became a formidable story-getter and trader of information, especially when Labour came to power in 1964.
With John Cole of the Guardian, Geoffrey Goodman of the Mirror and Ron Stevens of the Telegraph, he formed a cabal close to the key TUC and major union leaders. Ingham, arriving on the Guardian from Yorkshire in 1966, described an approach by McDowall, “the shop steward”, inviting him to join. “You can’t expect to take anything out of the pot, unless you put something in. You know what I mean.” Affronted, Ingham made other arrangements, and their rivalry was set in train.
McDowall’s newspaper career ended unexpectedly in 1967. Reporting on the Ideal Home exhibition, he encountered Inca Construction, which used new techniques to manufacture bricks from plastic, with impressive industrial backers. Glimpsing financial opportunity, he joined as managing director, only for the enterprise to collapse when the bricks failed their fire safety test.
By 1969 the Whitehall information service was full of Labour-supporting former reporters, and McDowall found a berth first supporting Peter Shore at the Department of Economic Affairs and later at the Home Office, under James Callaghan, once again operating as a formidable trader of information. “What do you know?” was his standard riposte to a journalist’s query.
Still instinctively entrepreneurial after leaving the CBI, he started the Post Office’s First Day Cover Club and set up and chaired the radio station Kiss FM (1990-92).
At annual parties at the Reform Club, his cross-party links were evident as old and New Labour mingled with his Tory friends. He helped Tony Blair meet industrialists before the 1997 election and ran regular receptions for business to meet MPs at the party conferences. He was elected life president of Natpro, bringing together public affairs directors of major companies, and in 2016 produced a memoir, Before Spin.
From a second home in Falmouth, Cornwall, he went yachting. He even persuaded Brenda to accompany him on England’s overseas cricket tours, and was devastated by her sudden death in 2018.
He is survived by the two daughters, Clare and Alison, from his marriage to Shirley, together with six grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren.
• Keith Desmond McDowall, journalist and PR consultant, born 3 October 1929; died 22 November 2025
