Bell joins a team including Ronnie Millar, Thatcher's speechwriter and Gordan Reece, head of publicity for the Tories.
Reece loved the "glamour and salesmanship" of US elections, and realised the upcoming vote would be televisual and so "decided he needed an agency that was good at TV", "up-and-coming and hungry for fame".
The strategy? To get people to emphasise dissatisfaction, getting people to crave an alternative to PM Jim Callaghan's Labour government. They begin working on an emotive campaign, rather than one of "cold and rational policy arguments".
Thatcher set a tone of "no lies" and "no tricks" -- "ambition did not trump honour". But the team does retrofit facts to suit the ads they draw up for the Tories, focusing on things "that could be true", "that had the sort of claims we'd heard in conversation".
For their ads, they aim for strong imagery, high emotion, and simple dramatization of the key political issue, using the "Girl on the Hill" ad from Lyndon Johnson's presidential bid in the US in 1964 as their template.
