Kevin Bell, RIP

11 Sept

I am very sorry to hear that retired public affairs guru Kevin Bell has died. He was only 68.

Kevin and I shared an office when I got my first job in London after leaving university in 1980. The company was called KH Publicity and it was a public relations company that specialised in financial and consumer PR.

I was offered the job by Michael Forsyth, who was the youngest director of the company. He was a Westminster councillor at the time and later became an MP, then Secretary of State for Scotland, and is now Lord Forsyth of Drumlean.

Kevin and I worked directly for Michael. (We rarely saw the other directors.) Kevin’s title was account director while I was a lowly account executive (ie bottom of the executive ladder). Our desks faced one another and he was enormous fun, enjoying a gossip but also very discrete (an interesting combination!).

From day one he welcomed me into the office (something that could not be said of everyone) and was generous with his advice. He was also good enough to lend me his Mini for a week when he was away on holiday. It was one of the original Minis but it was the first automatic car I had ever driven and he forgot to explain how the automatic transmission worked. As a result, I don’t think I got out of first gear all week and I eventually gave up before I wrecked the engine.

When he returned he told me he hadn’t been on holiday at all but had been to Moscow. He had travelled there as a political courier, smuggling literature into the country on behalf of a Russian emigre organisation called NTS. He hadn’t said anything before because it had to be a secret between him and Alex, his Frankfurt-based ‘handler’. I knew other people who had done something similar and, long story short, Kevin introduced me to Alex and that’s how I ended up going to Moscow as a courier too.

But back to the office. This was the very early Eighties when client lunches were the norm, and Kevin loved to lunch. If I remember, his favourite restaurants were in and around Covent Garden, which was a mile from our office in Fleet Lane, just beyond Fleet Street and close to the Old Bailey and St Paul’s Cathedral. He would disappear for several hours but, as I’ve often said, we always made up the time later in the day and client lunches were part of the job.

Then, a year after I started working at KH Publicity, Michael resigned as a director in order to set up his own company. He rented a small office above a sandwich shop in St Andrews Hill (even closer to St Paul’s Cathedral), took Kevin and me with him, and employed a secretary, so there were just the four of us.

Kevin was happy because, although the office was small, he had his own space at one end with a dividing wall which gave him some privacy. In November 1982, however, he gave notice that he intended to leave to launch his own PR company. The problem for Michael was that, a few weeks earlier, I had given in my notice as well. Kevin was a far bigger loss to the company, but Michael didn’t want to lose both of us at the same time so, late one night, a few weeks before my leaving date, he rang and offered me, not Kevin’s job exactly, but (if I stayed) Kevin’s company car, a black MGB GT.

It was tempting but only very briefly, and after thinking about it overnight I turned it down, although I’ve sometimes wondered what might have happened had I stayed. The car was a huge incentive but I realised I would have been staying for the wrong reasons because I didn’t really enjoy PR.

If I remember Kevin then rented a tiny office in Russell Street, Covent Garden, just around the corner from the Opera House. For whatever reason, going it alone didn’t really suit him (he was far too sociable for a start), and his career soon took a different path, as did mine, and we lost contact.

I was aware however that he had carved out a great reputation. According to the Institute of Economic Affairs, for whom he was a trustee for 24 years:

Beyond the IEA, Kevin enjoyed a distinguished career in public affairs, holding senior leadership positions at Westminster Strategy, Lowe Bell Political, Fleishman-Hillard, Maitland Political, and Burson-Marsteller, where he became worldwide president. Over four decades, he advised senior business leaders, cabinet ministers, and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and mentored countless colleagues and younger professionals, who saw him as a guiding light. He was widely regarded as one of the industry’s most experienced and best practitioners, with expertise in media relations, reputation management, M&A, political counsel, crisis communications, and regulatory campaigns.

Kevin retired in 2018. Ten years earlier I had seen him at the unveiling of the Adam Smith Statue in Edinburgh’s Royal Mile in 2008, which I wrote about here (A day to remember). Tragically, he died of a heart attack on Tuesday while returning to his house in Gloucestershire from Vienna where he shared a second home with Michael Haas, the music producer and historian, who was his husband and partner for 40 years.

I would be surprised if there were not one or two obituaries in the mainstream media in the coming days. If there are I will add the appropriate links to this post.

PS. By coincidence, I originally ‘discovered’ Forest through Kevin because Stephen Eyres, Forest’s first director, was a friend of his and would occasionally pop into the office in St Andrew’s Hill. As I often say, it’s a small world.

Photo (home page): Institute of Economic Affairs

Simon Clark

Kevin Bell, RIP

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