Tim Bell was, in my opinion, the most important factor in the early success of Saatchi & Saatchi (even more so than Charles & Maurice) and was the most influential 'adman' I've ever met or had the pleasure to work with.

Charming, intelligent, the clients loved him and the staff loved him. He had some faults but hey, haven't we all.

Tim knew the power of his influence and all he really ever wanted was recognition, but unfortunately Charles and Maurice didn't exactly agree and there was never going to be a Saatchi, Saatchi & Bell Advertising. Pity.

So in 1984 Tim moved out of the agency into new premises in Maple Street, a couple of streets away, to concentrate on his own projects which, after 5 years close involvement with The Conservative Party tended to be more of a political nature rather than the huge consumer product accounts of the main agency.

One afternoon I had a call from Tim asking me if I could pop down the road to see him and I knew immediately that this was one of those "you weren't doing anything tonight, were you?" calls.

I walked into his Maple Street offices at about 6pm and Tim explained that tonight we're going to write to every Miner in the country. What?

The Miners Strike was tearing the country apart and had brought Margaret Thatcher's Government head to head with the NUM President, Arthur Scargill and violent clashes had become an everyday news item.

With Tim that evening was his secretary Wendy and a girl, whose name I can't remember, who was the fastest typist I'd ever seen, and we'll call her Jill.

Also present was that night was a mysterious journalist by the name of David Hart who ran a rather right wing organisation called 'Committee for a Free Britain' and had apparently been given virtual carte blanche by Maggie to deal with the Strike head on.

My job? To prepare the artwork for print. We sat around the huge boardroom table, Tim and David (who I went on to meet many times) hand-wrote the copy, passed it to Jill who tapped it out in seconds on her electric IBM (this was pre-computer times) who passed the typed pieces to me and I cut & pasted the letter into place – and with revisions this process took about 3 hours.

Aside from this, during the course of the evening there was a phone call from Poland and about a week later it was announced that Scargill had flown to Poland to meet Lech Walesa, (co-founder of Solidarity, the first Eastern bloc trade union) and he'd been snubbed.

Apparently Lech was out of town and that had all been 'arranged' by that phone call.

By about 10pm the 4-page letter was complete and Jill & I jumped in my car and drove to Claridges (where David Hart kept a luxury suite) to meet Lord Ian MacGregor, Chairman of the National Coal Board, who it seemed had spent the evening with another Lord, whose name escapes me, demolishing a bottle of David's finest malt.

I handed Lord MacGregor a copy of the letter, he slowly read it, looked up and said "excellent" and took another gulp of malt – and I'm fairly sure that due to the excess of Glenmorangie he would have approved anything.

That done we left the hotel. Jill went off in a taxi and I drove down to a pre-arranged printer in South London who were to produce 200,000 copies overnight.

By about 8am the job was complete, packed in boxes and loaded into every square inch of my car and I blearily drove back to Maple Street were Tim was waiting with a small army of envelope stuffers.

I went off home, showered, and drove back to Charlotte Street (my day job!) and a couple of days later the press was full of articles and comments of this hugely controversial letter and we subsequently went on to produce other work for the rogue Nottinghamshire Miners.

This terrible strike tore communities apart and blundered on until well into 1985 (and even spawned the film, Billy Elliot) but I was never comfortable nor proud of my involvement.

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Written for the book, CHUTSPAH & CHUTSPAH