TRUTH OR lies? What’s your take on spin? As an illustration a pal of mine emailed me a story the other day about an alleged ancestor of Hillary Clinton.

The tale goes that a professional genealogical researcher discovered that the former First Lady’s great-great uncle, one Remus Rodham, was hanged for horse stealing and train robbery in Montana in 1889.

The story unfolds that the only known photograph of Remus shows him standing on the gallows. On the back of the picture is the inscription: “Remus Rodham: Horse thief, sent to Montana Territorial Prison, 1883, escaped 1887, robbed the Montana Flyer six times. Caught by Pinkerton detectives, convicted, and hanged in 1889.”

For the uninitiated the Montana Flyer of the time was a train, typical of those that thundered through the Wild West, and were plundered, Butch and Sundance style, on a regular basis.

As for the Pinkerton detectives they worked for a national detective agency formed in 1850 by one Allan Pinkerton who had successfully foiled an assassination plot on president-elect Abraham Lincoln.

That’s the history lesson over so let’s get on with the story. Still with me? Anyway, said researcher contacted Hillary’s office for comments. And a creative lot they proved to be for this is spin at it’s best – or worst, depending on your standpoint.

According to the Clinton camp Remus Rodham was no horse thief. Rather, he was a famous cowboy with a business empire that grew to include the acquisition of “valuable equestrian assets” and “intimate dealings” with the Montana railroad. Beginning in 1883 he apparently devoted several years of his life to service at a “government facility”, finally taking leave in 1887 to “resume his dealings” with said railroad.

Subsequently, says the Clinton (somewhat warped) version of events, he was a key player in a “vital investigation” run by the renowned Pinkerton Detective Agency. Then in 1889, Remus “passed away” during an “important civic function held in his honour” when “the platform on which he was standing collapsed.”

I was going to say you couldn’t make this up, but someone apparently did just that and produced an audacious piece of PR spin that puts the antics of Alistair Campbell and Lance Price to shame. Such creativity! Such yarn spinning! Which is where it all derives from in the first place… Apparently, to understand the derivation of spin we need to go as far back as 1812 when one James Hardy Vaux in his “new and comprehensive vocabulary of the flash language” coined the phrase that to “spin a yarn” was to tell a tale. He wrote of sailors and other storytellers “yarning or spinning a yarn, signifying to relate their various adventures, exploits, and escapes to each other”.

But it wasn’t until the 1980s that it began to be used in a political and promotional context – indeed, in 1984 the New York Times said how “a dozen men in good suits and women in silk dresses will circulate smoothly among the reporters, spouting confident opinions. They won’t be just press agents trying to impart a favourable spin to a routine release. They’ll be the Spin Doctors….”

So there you have it. Spin doctors all wear Armani suits and silk frocks. They spin their way around the world of public relations acting, according to one pundit, as translators analysing the ‘complex tsunami’ (new buzz phrase for spin doctors that frankly is an insult to all those affected by such terrible events) of information that is constantly generated by governments, corporations and organisations.

Well, no. Because in my experience, many such bodies are populated by supposed public relations ‘experts’ who are pretentious, overblown and so up themselves as they attempt to flog dubious ideas and concepts to weary journalists who get sick and tired dealing with missspelt, misinformed and mis-targeted press releases that invariably end up in the recycle bin.

The ones who do know what they’re talking about, who actively add to the flow of information that is crucial to the role of a democratic society, are few and far between.