Bernard Gottlieb was the “senior spokesman” at the Pay Board who during the 1974 general election briefed the press that the miners appeared to be £3 per week worse off than previously thought. The miners’ strike over pay had been the main reason Edward Heath, the Prime Minister, had called an early general election with the theme “Who governs?” Heath claimed that this briefing was a main cause of the Conservative Party’s defeat in that election in his memoirs, The Course of My Life.
Gottlieb had earlier been an Under-Secretary at the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications from 1969 to 1973, where he was the most senior civil servant responsible for implementing the policy of jamming pirate radio stations, learning from the failure to stop Radio Caroline in 1967.
Educated at Haberdashers Askes School, London, where his father was a teacher, he took a First in Mathematics at Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London, (now Queen Mary, University of London) at the age of 19.
In 1938 he joined the Air Ministry, where he was appointed Private Secretary to Sir Arthur Street, the Permanent Secretary. During the early part of the war he was involved in briefing Winston Churchill on the details of aircraft production. One of his less onerous duties as Private Secretary was to help the Air Council consider a recommendation for the award of a Victoria Cross to Wing Commander Guy Gibson, leader of the “Dam Busters” raid of May 1943.
After the war, he went with Street to the Control Commission for Germany, playing a small role in postwar reconciliation, dealing with denazification, the future level of German industry and the food crisis in the British zone in Germany. In 1946 he was seconded to the National Coal Board, involved in taking the coal industry into public ownership.
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After he retired from the Civil Service he joined the Pay Board and, after the board dissolved, he became a member of the Secretariat for the Royal Commission on the Distribution of Income and Wealth. In 1978 the Chairman, Lord Diamond, credited him as “the creator” of the Sixth Report on Lower Incomes, which remained the definitive study on low incomes until the end of the century.
He ended his career as a journalist and consultant for Incomes Data Services, where he continued to do innovative work, including conducting the first national study on share options as part of executive pay until his final retirement in 1990.
He had been appointed CB in 1970. He is survived by his wife Sybil and a son and daughter.
Bernard Gottlieb, CB, civil servant, was born on May 31, 1913. He died on February 21, 2010, aged 96