MEMORANDUM: CONFIDENTIAL
Friday 27 August 2010
To: Financial Secretary to the Treasury
Subject: Extra-statutory concession A19
Do you remember the furore that broke out when Labour press officer Jo Moore suggested 11 September 2001, the day of the attack on New York’s Twin Towers, was a ‘good day to bury bad news’?
Obviously, we would not want to be seen to be using the same spin-doctoring approach as our predecessors, but here in the HMRC press office we did wonder if there were any lessons to be learnt.
Over a lunchtime drink today we were kicking this idea around, and after a couple of Bacardi Breezers our secretary came up with comment, ‘A good day to bury good news’.
Well, of course, she came in for a lot of derogatory comments, but back in the office we started to think this could be an idea with legs, although preferably not clad in tights with holes in them.
Coincidentally, we have some good news for taxpayers due to come out Wednesday, 1 September.
Basically, we are reminding taxpayers that extra-statutory concession A19 allows HMRC to waive the collection of underpaid tax if we have not made timely use of information provided by them.
Instead of waiting for a major story to break before releasing the news (risking it leaking out before then), why don’t we arrange a major story to break on the same day, thereby ensuring our good news gets buried? After all, the country needs every pound of tax it can get its hands on these days; we don’t want to go giving it back unnecessarily, do we?
All we need is a story that’s guaranteed to get front page coverage and preferably pages 2, 3, 4, and 5 coverage as well. In our experience, we find that anything involving sex and politicians is a sure-fire headline-grabber, only being trumped by sex and vicars, or sex and royalty.
Not having royalty or vicars in government, we wondered if the Chancellor could ask his cabinet colleagues if there were any juicy stories ‘bubbling under’, so to speak, which we could get out in the middle of next week.
Actually, we did hear a good rumour from the Foreign Office the other day. Maybe that’s the place to start…