This is The Guardian.

by Simon Petherick.

Six years after Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister,

I got a job as a writer at a strangely dysfunctional government department called

the Central Office of Information.

Even though I lived in a squat, I had the Socialist Historian EP Thompson's

protest and survive on my bookshelf, and had been an organizer for a miners' support group

during the 1984 strike, when he put up some of the miners' families during visits to London

for marches. They found our earnest, whole-grain lifestyle utterly ridiculous.

I thought it was okay to join the CLI for a number of reasons.

Dylan Thomas and SummerSet Moore had worked for it during the war for a start,

and I considered myself to be a writer too, even though the only thing I'd had published

was a 20,000-word guidebook to Edinburgh under the imposed pseudonym of

Elspeth Macintosh, my own surname too clearly Cornish for a book on Scotland.

But the main reason I joined was that I discovered during the application process that the

department's role was to issue information that was not beholden to any political party.

The COI was not Margaret Thatcher's loud hailer my new bosses told me.

She had to use the Conservative Party's own funds for that.

Our job was to describe clearly and objectively to the British people what it was that the government

was doing. I liked that. I'd read George Orwell's 1946 essay Politics and the English Language,

and I was filled with notions around the democratisation of language.

Having spent the past three years writing blurbs for a small publisher, the books were Westerns,

...