Many believed that the reduction in public spending was a disaster but the spin doctors presented it as a triumph for lower taxation.

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 favorable spin to a routine release. They'll be the Spin Doctors, senior advisers to the candidates, and they'll be playing for very high stakes.

Now that the cold war has ended and political ideologies have been replaced by pollsters and spin doctors, Machiavelli's cleareyed assessments of power dynamics and pragmatic advantage are suddenly in vogue.

William Hague, shadow foreign secretary, said the Williams document was "further evidence that spin doctors, not intelligence analysts, were leading from the first in deciding what the British people were told about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction".

Lord Steel, the former Liberal leader, has launched a despairing attack on the prevalence of spin doctors in politics, noting that he is given "daily outpourings of tweets to circulate" and bombarded by email with "lines to take" on current issues.

Spin doctor

Meaning

Noun

Verb

Synonyms