As director of communications for Tony Blair’s last four years in 10 Downing Street, David Hill, who has died aged 76, showed himself to be the consummate professional of his generation in a business that he did much to help develop. While many of his contemporaries were scorned, mistrusted or feared, he won respect from politicians and press alike for his straight-talking, honest decency and secured equal success when he took the same skills into the private sector.
His calm competence was much in demand in the fraught hot summer of 2003 when he succeeded Alastair Campbell in the prime minister’s office after the latter’s resignation, which followed the suicide of the government scientist Dr David Kelly, which went on to lead to the Hutton inquiry. Hill never allowed himself to become part of any story, and as Blair acknowledged in his 2010 memoirs (A Journey) it was as well that Hill had replaced Campbell then. “I think [Alastair] would have been tipped over the edge completely in that last period and would have rampaged through the media like a mad axeman!” he wrote.
