Will Priti Patel's replacement make the most of the government job that’s a gift from PR heaven?

As someone who has worked on Department of International Development (DFID) projects in Eastern Europe, I would like to offer Mordaunt some PR advice about her new role.

I worked for DFID as a PR consultant and for years have been frustrated by this department’s chronic inability to tell its story and promote itself. It’s the one government department that does great work, is totally transparent but is unknown to the public.

Behind the headline-grabbing challenges that Penny Mordaunt has undertaken in her past – such as competing on Splash, a TV reality swimming show – the media seem to have missed a part of her background that is surely worth an in-depth article: she worked as head of foreign press for George W Bush’s 2000 and 2004 presidential campaigns.

As a PR heavyweight with useful military experience, Mordaunt is in a good position to project the Department of International Development into the mainstream. Priti Patel, her predecessor who was ejected last week, continued the department’s lamentable tradition of burying its head in the sand while the Express, Mail and Telegraph vilified it for wasting taxpayers’ money and denounced the one good thing that David Cameron did: commit Britain to spending 0.7 per cent of the state budget on international development.

I’m hoping that Mordaunt has the proverbial balls to stand up to the tabloids, use the facts to refute their shockingly dishonest articles, invite journalists to visit the projects and not take any nonsense from the right-wing Tory backbenchers who would happily close down DFID if they could (even though it could be used to show that Britain still has global influence after the Brexit debacle).

Bearing in mind that the Department for International Development is one of the least-known government departments, some background would be useful.

The department dates back to the early 1960s, when Britain was in the process of closing down its Colonial Office and setting up new structures to maintain connections with those parts of the world it had previously governed. The Overseas Development Administration was set up in 1961 and it quickly gained a reputation in Africa, Latin America and Asia as an efficient supplier of emergency aid. The acronym ODA became a well-known brand in many parts of the world.

One of the key principles of good branding is to value an existing name and not change it without sufficient consulation and investment (the oil companies spend millions every time they adjust their logos). The newly elected Labour government of 1997 ignored this and, perhaps unaware of the value of the ODA name, changed the department’s name to DFID. Rather than use this as a “rebranding” opportunity, they didn’t invest anything in telling people their name had changed. This chronic inability to promote itself has continued to this day, despite other parts of government becoming increasingly media savvy.

For more than 10 years DFID went about its business more or less under the radar, rather like a secret intelligence agency. During the 1990s it funded useful projects in Bosnia (including several that I was involved in) and offered a wide range of practical assistance to the countries that were emerging from the Soviet Union. On the ground, it got the reputation of being the least bureaucratic bi-lateral aid agency.

In terms of PR, it all seemed to go wrong under Cameron’s coalition government (2010 to 2015). George Osborne had promised to cut every government department except two – DFID and the NHS. For the tabloids, forever on the hunt for a big victim, they couldn’t attack the NHS as everyone has a personal stake in it, but DFID represented an ideal target: it was relatively unknown and the beneficiaries of its budgets were, shock horror, Johnny Foreigner!

For the last few years the tabloids have carried out a series of outrageous attacks against DFID, accusing it of supporting dictators in Africa, funding terrorists in Palestine and paying for nuclear weapons in India. They do this by quoting the amount we give a particular country, ignoring the details of the project itself, and highlighting the most scandalous story about that nation.

With the EU the tabloids bang the drum about the mythical £350 million a week and with DFID they have an even bigger target to aim for – its £12 billion annual budget, which represents just 0.7 per cent of the national budget. “We believe,” said the Express just this week, “the 0.7 per cent budget commitment can be spent on the struggling NHS and social care services in Britain.”

The irony of these tirades is that they are based on the detailed information that DFID itself makes public about its international operations. In fact, DFID has been praised as the most transparent of all government departments as it’s the only one with all of its accounts online.

Mordaunt should be grateful that she wasn’t appointed as the new Minister of Defence, a poisoned chalice if ever there was one. The role would have involved lobbying her own government to stop cutting budgets, with very little decent PR collateral.

The DFID job is a gift from PR heaven: it has the most inspiring story that’s never been told. All it needs is someone with the guts to stand up to the tabloids and the nationalist Tory backbenchers.

DFID-funded projects in sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East are vital for people in those regions to get water, food and livelihoods. They are also among the few investments going on in those areas that give people some hope, some work and support that helps them make better lives for themselves at home, so helping to prevent waves of migrants heading towards Western Europe.

At donor meetings around the world, DFID has earned its place at the top table with the UN, EU and Japanese and American government aid agencies. The only other European country with this level of influence is Norway.

But DFID has almost no PR staff and when I was in Nepal earlier this year, trying to visit its projects and write about them, I was met with confusion. Nobody in its Kathmandu office knew how to deal with me.

If Mordaunt adopts an aggressive approach to this she could have immediate impact. She could take on the tabloids in the mainstream media, destroy their arguments with simple facts, order every DFID mission to invite journalists to visit projects – and tell the nationalists in her own party that helping poor people get on their feet in their own countries is a good thing for us to do.

Rupert Wolfe Murray is a freelance writer and PR consultant living near Selkirk. He has had no connection with DFID, or any organisation that receives funding from it, for more than five years.