My friend Mike Finn, who has died aged 79, was a well-loved government press officer who was able to win and retain the respect of hard-bitten journalists through his warmth and humanity.
Mike began his career in the Treasury in 1960, moving from there to the Civil Service Department and later, after a brief spell at British Airways, to the Department of Education and Science and finally the Office for National Statistics. To all these organisations he brought a flair for communication and a sense of the dramatic, for example hosting a press conference for a statistical digest of the second world war, Fighting With Figures, in the Cabinet War Rooms while wearing a tin hat, or organising a gathering of five Concordes on the runway at Glasgow airport to launch a new service for British Airways.
Ministers he worked with included Jim Callaghan, Christopher Soames, Keith Joseph and Kenneth Baker. He wrote for many others and claimed authorship of the phrase “the pound in your pocket” in Harold Wilson’s speech on devaluation.
Born the seventh of eight children in Youghal, County Cork, to Jack, a cinema manager, and Kitty (nee Quirke), a tailor, he was educated by the Christian Brothers but missed out on university as his parents could not afford to support him in higher education. He moved to Britain, where he was for a short time a management trainee with British Rail before joining the civil service.
I first knew him at the Civil Service Department at the heart of Whitehall, where he was a press officer during pretty traumatic times in Margaret Thatcher’s Whitehall, as the then prime minister persistently attacked what she regarded as the uncommitted and rather lazy intellectual know-all culture of the civil service mandarins.
Imposed pay restraints in the early 1980s led to a long campaign of industrial action across government departments, including the Ministry of Defence. I covered the developing story daily for the Guardian, dividing time in different Whitehall pubs between civil service union leaders and Mike, who was a marvellously undeferential, unconventional, government spokesman, full of humour, mischief and anecdotes. It was precisely this that led his political masters and journalists alike to respect him. He had credibility, a vital commodity among the cynical press corps.
After he retired, Mike moved to the Surrey hills, where he was able to indulge his love of long walks and quiet country pubs. His rapport with people made him ideally suited to the work he did as a volunteer driver for the local Help Your Neighbour scheme. His final years were marred by dementia, which cruelly deprived him, little by little, of all the things that made him so uniquely himself – his wit, his gift for storytelling, his jaunty and rapid walk, and his prodigious memory. The force of his personality was not completely dimmed, though – he retained the ability to raise a quizzical eyebrow almost to the end.
He is survived by his wife Anne (nee van der Linden) and their daughter, Katie; and by four children – Conor, Warren, Vanessa and Matthew – from his first marriage to Janet (nee Cooper), which ended in divorce.
