A new royalty?
A few weeks before former BBC political editor Andrew Marr received two Broadcasting Press Guild awards – one as ‘best TV performer in a non-acting role’ – his journalistic colleagues were quietly made aware of a little drama in his own life. Typical of the message from editorial lawyers circulated among Britain’s major news outlets was this:
‘Legal – Andrew Marr and Jackie Ashley: We have heard from solicitors acting for this couple who warn us not to publish any stories about their private and personal lives without giving them notice and thus a chance to apply for an injunction. They say that they have obtained an undertaking to this effect from a national newspaper group who were threatening such a story. The fact that the undertaking has been given is confidential and can’t be published.’
Marr is a long-time political journalist and was briefly editor of The Independent. His wife, Jackie Ashley, a Guardian columnist, was previously a political journalist for the New Statesman and ITN News. Ashley, the daughter of former Labour MP Jack (now Lord) Ashley, grew up close to the powerful in the party and the careers of both have prospered mightily under New Labour. When Peter Oborne wrote of the political class (Lobsters passim) being remote from the rest of us he couldn’t have even guessed of the legal lengths this power couple would go to prevent even modest journalistic inquiry and disclosure. At the time of the awards Marr was using his Sunday morning BBC show to press LibDem leader Nick Clegg for details of his private life. The other award given to Marr by the Broadcasting Press Guild in April was in recognition of his powers of discovery – for his documentary series History of Modern Britain.
The Westminster village
The Marr-Ashleys are not the only couple to prosper in the small but influential political circle around Westminster in the New Labour years. Patrick Wintour, currently Ashley’s political editor at The Guardian, is married to Rachel Sylvester, the New Labour outrider at The Daily Telegraph, having previously being wed to Guardian columnist (and briefly head of Demos) Madeleine Bunting. Wintour, the sister of American Vogue editor-in-chief Anna, is the son of former Evening Standard editor Charles Wintour. The present editor of the London daily is Veronica Wadley, wife of journalist and writer Tom Bower. Her Standard executive editor Anne McElvoy is married to the deputy editor of The Sunday Times (and British American Project fellow) Martin Ivens. Older readers may recognise the surname: Ivens Senior was head of Aims of Industry and a founder member of the Freedom Association.
The Evening Standard has vigorously promoted for London mayor the candidature of Boris Johnson, a former colleague of Anne McElvoy at The Spectator. The weekly is now edited by the Tory MP’s successor Mathew D’Ancona, whose wife, Sarah Schaefer, is senior adviser to Foreign Secretary David Miliband. Johnson and McElvoy are old friends and Spectator colleagues of Anne Applebaum, the St Antony’s alumnus who is a columnist on The Washington Post and a member of its board. Applebaum’s husband, an old Oxford friend of Johnson and David Cameron from Bullingdon Club days, is Radek Sikorski, a former employee of Rupert Murdoch in Eastern Europe and of the American Enterprise Institute. Sikorski is now leading the charge for the siting of US missiles around Russia in his capacity as Poland’s Foreign Minister.
Mention Poland in British politics and the name Denis McShane MP springs to mind. The son of a Polish émigré, McShane was, like Sikorski, deeply involved in Solidarity there before he rose to prominence in international relations, in his case as Foreign Office minister. He didn’t manage to match Sikorski’s rise to the top job, but his influence remains considerable (Lobsters passim) through his work on behalf of Labour Friends of Israel and friendship with newly appointed Independent editor Roger Alton. McShane’s partner is Joan Smith, a columnist on Tribune and The Independent on Sunday.
Friends of ‘the friends’
McShane was joined by his former New Labour Foreign Office colleague Lord Foulkes in speaking on behalf of the British intelligence services and calling for the early ending of the inquest into the death of Princess Diana. Whereas McShane’s rise in Labour politics was through trade union organisations (British, Polish and international, see Lobsters passim), Foulkes built his career during the Cold War years through student politics and the European Movement. After becoming president of the Scottish Union of Students he became manager of the intelligence-linked Fund for International Student Cooperation (FISC), the outfit at the centre of student politics rows in the 1960s in which a key figure was Meta (now Baroness) Ramsay, later, if not at the time, a member of MI6. Ramsay, a student friend of Foulkes, was secretary of FISC, an alleged CIA front operation. Foulkes went on to become Scottish organiser of the European Movement and director of the European League for Economic Co-operation, an organisation which likewise gave brief employment, before a safe Labour seat and a parliamentary career, to Roy (now Lord) Hattersley.
Lord Cashpoint’s memory
A Foreign Office colleague of McShane and Foulkes under Blair was Michael Levy whose memoirs attacking Blair, Gordon Brown and the state of the Labour Party were serialised in The Mail on Sunday just before the May municipal elections. A Question of Honour was ghostwritten for Blair’s chief fundraiser by Ned Temko, the editor of The Jewish Chronicle for 15 years before joining the Iraq war-supporting Observer in 2005. Some thought it an odd move for a double Pulitzer Prize nominee and Israeli historian to become a weekly paper transport correspondent. But Temko had a good seat for writing about trains and boats and planes: the chair of the Commons Select Committee on Transport was Gwyneth Dunwoody, life president of the Labour Friends of Israel until her death in April. When the donations scandal erupted last year, in which the LFI was implicated, Temko wrote a defence of the lobby group in The Observer, dismissing conspiracy theories about the extent of its influence.
Proceeding with inquiries?
At this writing the promised party inquiry by former Labour Party and Blair minister Lord Whitty into the fund-raising activities of David Abrahams has yielded nothing deemed capable of publication. The word from a senior Labour official was that Whitty was being prevented from publishing other than a brief note to Labour Party chiefs on improving donation procedures by continuing police investigations into the Abrahams cash. The same source said at least 30 people had been interviewed by the police and that others were waiting on the list. Is this to be another Metropolitan Police marathon leading to no charges being laid?
BAP news
Most listeners to BBC Radio 4 in recent weeks will not have been aware of the latest success for the British American Project: two of its members – ‘fellows’ in BAP-speak – now regularly jointly anchor the Today programme. Veteran presenter James Naughtie was recruited soon after its 1985 creation and for many years has served on the UK advisory committee that vets potential recruits to attend the annual ‘fellows’ gathering. The US end of this informal Atlanticist freemasonry operation for many years had Paul Wolfowitz, the architect of the Iraq war at the Pentagon under Donald Rumsfeld, complementing Naughtie’s UK recruitment efforts. That was when Wolfowitz ran the Paul H Nitze School of Advanced International Studies in DC, the US end of the BAP.
Evan Davis was a more recent recruit to the BAP. Naughtie’s contemporary ‘fellows’ included Peter Mandelson, Trevor Phillips, Chris (now Lord) Smith, George (now Lord) Robertson, David (now Lord) Lipsey, Patricia (now Baroness) Scotland and Jonathan Powell (late of No 10). Davis’s colleagues selected for the BAP in the 1990s included journos Martin Ivens of The Sunday Times, Bronwen Maddox of The Times, Mary Ann Sieghart, formerly of The Times and Alice Thomson of The Daily Telegraph, along with Ed Miliband, now in the Brown Cabinet.
Neil’s legacy
News that Patricia Hewitt was to work for Boots offered the prospect of the former Health Secretary earnestly proferring words of wisdom to customers buying Durex and Tampax. But, of course, the woman who famously declared her full support both to Neil Kinnock and Roy Hattersley in the 1983 Labour leadership contest was offering higher value services than that – and to a couple of other British businesses as well, it has been reported. All this is being done while still pulling in an MP’s salary and living quite well in her marriage to wealthy barrister Bill Birtles. Hewitt owed her political career to Neil (now Lord) Kinnock, as, of course, did those other four giants of New Labour: Charles Clarke (who still entertains fantasy thoughts of becoming leader), Peter Mandelson (will he stay a Euro commissioner under Brown’s successor at No 10?), Philip (now Lord) Gould (the millionaire master of hocus-pocus focus groups), and Alastair Campbell (the fabricator of the Iraq war dodgy dossier and other democratic delights). All were part of Kinnock’s kitchen cabinet who subsequently made it big under Tony Blair. And what is their legacy? A demoralised, debt-ridden shadow of what used to be a political party.
Gilligan’s revenge?
Ken Livingstone might care to consider the specific contribution of Alastair Campbell to his own career. In the run-up to the local government elections in May, Livingstone attacked Evening Standard reporter Andrew Gilligan whose reports in the London evening paper did much to damage the reputation of the London mayor. Livingstone’s people suggested that Gilligan owed a debt to Tory candidate Boris Johnson because he had offered the sacked BBC reporter work on The Spectator. But why did Gilligan need a job on the Tory weekly? Because he fell victim to the hounding of the BBC Today programme over dead government scientist David Kelly by the New Labour spin machine, in particular by one Alastair Campbell.
F is for?
A little corner of old England was remembered, but little was openly spoken when family, friends and fellow brother and sister spooks of Charles Elwell OBE gathered in March for his memorial service in St James’s, Piccadilly. In his address, the Rt Rev John Perry said Elwell’s 30-year service to his country in MI5 should properly remain a ‘closed book’. The nearest the congregation heard of the work of the senior secret policeman who smeared many on the left in British public life during the Cold War as being under Soviet influence was the reading from Henry Fielding’s Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon. The passage ended with the assertion that ‘at sea drowning a cat was the very surest way of raising a favourable wind’. Elwell’s energetic attempts to drown figures as varied as Harold Wilson and Chris Mullin continued after his formal retirement from countering ‘domestic subversion’ as head of F section in 1979. Working with Margaret Thatcher’s aide during the miners’ strike, David Hart, Elwell used British Briefing – according to some sources part-funded by Rupert Murdoch – to continue to defame many of his old elected political targets, thus ‘raising a favourable wind’ for the Conservative prime minister in the miners’ strike and all that followed.
An earlier BBC political editor
When John Cole was narrowly beaten by Peter Preston in the contest to become the editor of The Guardian in 1975 he moved to The Observer – then under separate ownership – before joining the BBC in 1981. Re-reading his 1995 political memoir As It Seemed To Me recently made one wonder how The Guardian, and its influence, might have been different with him in charge. He was close to the unions and manufacturing industry, felt empathy with Harold Wilson and James Callaghan, had no time for the Social Democratic Party and regretted the rise of presentation over content in politics. Whereas Peter Preston……