Of the many questions left unanswered from this summer’s so-called Lobbygate furore, one stands out: why did Prime Minister Tony Blair expend so much energy and political capital saving Roger Liddle, the Downing Street adviser who was caught by The Observer offering access through his former lobbyist business partner, Derek Draper? Loyalty cannot be an adequate explanation. Within days of the story tailing away Blair had sacked several members of his Cabinet, including Harriet Harman, one of his most devoted supporters. And as Blair’s team were battling to protect Liddle they were simultaneously planning the removal of faithful Labour MEPs from winning positions on next year’s Euro election lists and denying Labour MPs and other senior figures in the party the chance to stand for the new Scottish Parliament, the Welsh Assembly and the mayoralty of London. Contrast, too, the dispatch with which Ron Davies was removed from the Cabinet in October for an action arguably tangential to his position in public life with the determination to defend the unelected Liddle from a promise of access which flies directly in the face of democratic propriety.
So why, so soon after Blair had to embarrassedly extricate his administration from the cash-for-access mess of the Bernie Ecclestone/Formula One affair, did the Prime Minister not quietly drop his adviser on defence and European affairs and let the summer recess quietly heal The Observer’s wound?
The reasons take us deep into the heart of the Blair project and into the history of its precursors. Follow Draper, the Labour student initially offered work by Agriculture Minister Nick Brown and then taken up by Trade and Industry Secretary Peter Mandelson, and we get a few insights into New Labour of the ‘stuffing my bank account at £250 an hour’ variety. But click on to the lobbyist’s older business buddy Liddle and his network – a journey most journalists found more arduous than listening to the voluble Draper – and we open up a much richer seam of postwar British history.
The initial Observer article in July – interesting in that it wasn’t originated by political editor Patrick Wintour who for a decade has been very close to Mandelson, Liddle’s The Blair Revolution co-author – recounted conversations with two former colleagues at the PRIMA Europe lobby company, Draper and Liddle. Draper, at the time a director of GPC Market Access, the company that paid £1.8 million to his colleagues at PRIMA Europe after a February 1998 takeover, reportedly told the undercover reporter:
‘There are 17 people who count and to say I am intimate with every one of them is the understatement of the century.’
Liddle told the reporter claiming to be acting on behalf of US energy firms:
‘There is a circle and Derek is part of the circle. Anyone who says he isn’t is an enemy. Just tell me what you want and who you want to meet and Derek [Draper] and I will make the call for you.’
Newspaper reports told us that immediately after the story broke, Draper’s former boss, Mandelson, saw his current boss, Sir Ian Wrigglesworth, (who happens to be Mandelson’s next-door neighbour in West London) and within a day Draper had lost his lobbying job. Soon thereafter he was shorn of his weekly ‘Inside the mind of New Labour’ column in The Express which Draper claimed to have had regularly vetted by the then Minister Without Portfolio.
In the next few days we heard demands from the Prime Minister’s chief of staff, Jonathan Powell,(1) for The Observer to hand over its taped evidence. We had reassuring words from Liddle’s old Social Democratic Party colleague and fellow lobbyist, Lord McNally (see below), who said of him:
‘He is a tower of integrity. Anyone less likely to sell his soul for a mess of pottage is difficult to imagine. There is probity right through him.’
While we saw The Mirror use its front page to brand Observer investigator Greg Palast as ‘The Liar’, we gathered from other newspapers that Liddle had recruited Draper to his lobbying company and was continuing to appear at its commercial events long after he was appointed to Blair’s policy unit. It appeared that Liddle had also attended other events organised by Draper for identifying New Labour sympathisers for internal party purposes. After a frenzied week in which the leaking of George Robertson’s defence review(2) followed by a Sun ‘exclusive’ about Camilla Parker-Bowles meeting the young princes had finally pushed speculation about Liddle’s future off the front pages, the story quietly slipped away. Following a Cabinet Office investigation the Prime Minister accepted what Liddle said upon his appointment to No 10 in May 1997: that the £260,000-worth of shares he had in PRIMA Europe had been placed in a ‘blind trust’ run by his South London next-door neighbour, Matthew Oakeshott. (Unlike the TV soap Neighbours, as we shall see, this is a tale in which friends become good neighbours.)
In simple terms, Draper, the man not employed by the taxpayer at Downing Street, loses out. But the one who is, Liddle – the person in a position not only to ‘make the call’, but to make it count at the heart of government – gets to keep his job. So who is this Roger Liddle that he can enjoy such invulnerability?
Roger Liddle
Before this summer’s headlines the one-time Labour councillor and SDP parliamentary candidate was rather better known for his relatives than his own political achievements. His wife, Caroline, is a former personal assistant to Lord Jenkins of Hillhead. She is now a senior colleague of Mandelson’s close friend, Sir John Birt, in her job as deputy managing director of the Foreign Office-funded BBC World Service. Liddle’s brother-in-law is Liberal Democrat peer Lord Newby of Rothwell, now a director of the public affairs company, Matrix Communications. Newby left the Civil Service to help form the SDP with Liddle in 1981 and was a full-time senior official of the party until its amalgamation with the Liberals after the 1987 election. Since then he has continued to hold important positions within it, especially during election campaigns.
Liddle’s father-in-law is Lord Thomson of Monifeith, a close ally of Lord Jenkins since entering Parliament as Labour MP for Dundee East in 1952. The then George Thomson helped Hugh Gaitskell in his early battles with Tribune and the Labour left through his work on the newspaper Forward, and while sharing his mentor’s passionate Atlanticism came to differ with him over British membership of the Common Market. In his account of the rise of the SDP, Ian Bradley said Thomson was the politician ‘who laid the groundwork for Britain’s application to join the EEC at the tail-end of the [first] Wilson Government.'(3)
Thomson, a Foreign Office minister later criticised by the Bingham inquiry into Rhodesian sanctions busting,(4) became shadow defence spokesman in opposition and after a spell as British chairman of the European Movement, resigned his Commons seat to become a European Commissioner in 1973. On leaving Brussels four years later he resumed his leadership of the European Movement in Britain, working closely with Alan Lee Williams who, for many years, was the organisation’s treasurer.(5) In addition to a business life on the boards of the Woolwich Building Society, ICI and the Royal Bank of Scotland, Thomson has chaired the Advertising Standards Authority and the Independent Broadcasting Authority. He is a former deputy chairman of the Ditchley Foundation, the Anglo-American strategic and foreign affairs centre in Oxfordshire and leads for the Liberal Democrats in the Lords on media and foreign affairs. His son-in-law, Roger, has accumulated few such distinctions in his 30 years of political life. But he has rarely been far away from centres of influence and shares with Thomson a lifelong interest in defence and Europe, the twin brief he currently holds at No 10.
After Oxford, Liddle went to work for Bill Rodgers, (now the Liberal Democrat peer Lord Rodgers of Quarry Bank). By that time the Campaign for Democratic Socialism (CDS) which Rodgers had set up and run to support Gaitskell’s battle with the Labour Left on defence, had been wound down, but its members continued to meet and organise the party Right. Liddle moved in that circle, meeting Dick Taverne, the former CDS treasurer, who is now Lord Taverne of Pimlico and formed a political and subsequent business relationship with him – they founded PRIMA Europe together in 1987 (see below).
Taverne, with Rodgers, Jenkins and Liddle’s future father-in-law, Thomson, was part of the same Gaitskellite circle distinguished from the rest of the Parliamentary Labour Party largely by their strong support for the EEC and the Atlantic alliance.(6) Those who think the Blair patronage system is new should reflect on the way it so closely follows Gaitskell’s placement of loyal middle-class supporters in plum seats. Taverne was rung up and offered the Lincoln seat vacated by Geoffrey DeFreitas in 1962. He told The Observer in 1973: ‘It was because of my work for CDS that Gaitskell pushed my candidature.’ Taverne worked with Jenkins at the Home Office and the Treasury, but shared with him and Thomson an active antipathy to the way the party was changing under Harold Wilson. The trio had been at the core of the 69 pro-Market Labour MPs who had voted with the Conservative Government in 1971.(7) Bradley quotes Liddle’s future business partner, Taverne, as saying of that time:
‘We feared not only that the party would turn against the Market but that we might face a split as serious as that of 1960 over nuclear disarmament. Only this time the odds would be against the social democrats.’
Thomson resigned from the Shadow Cabinet over Europe and then left Parliament for Brussels in 1973, the year Taverne famously resigned his Lincoln seat and then re-won it briefly as a Democratic Labour candidate. Those on the right of the Parliamentary party, shorn of leadership first by the sudden death of Gaitskell in 1963 and then by the departure of Jenkins for the Presidency of the European Economic Community had first formed themselves into the Manifesto Group. Key officers were two bright young Gaitskellite MPs from the North-East (again the parallels with New Labour’s grip on seats in that region are striking), John Horam (later a Tory minister) and Ian Wriggles-worth (later a Labour Home Office minister with Jenkins), who represented a Teesside constituency adjoining that of Liddle’s boss, Bill Rodgers. This Ian Wrigglesworth, who became an MP in 1974, is now Sir Ian Wrigglesworth, Freeman of the City of London. A founder member of the SDP and former President of the Liberal Democrats, Wrigglesworth is a long-standing business partner of Roger Liddle, boss of the now-sacked Derek Draper, close friend and Notting Hill neighbour of Peter Mandelson; and, apparently, bit-part player in this summer’s Lobbygate drama.
The Wrigglesworth network
Before digging deeper into the Wrigglesworth network, it may be worth saying why. The main reason is this: at a time when the Prime Minister uses the word ‘tribalism’ to criticise the loyalty to the party of his critics; when we are led to understand that ideological principles are ‘dogma’ and that what matters in politics is ‘what works’, networks assume tremendous importance. And not just who forms the membership of the current circle, as described unwittingly to journalists by Liddle and Draper, but how those influences became so powerful – their routes to gaining that importance. Without some exploration of that, stories that briefly burn and then die like Lobbygate give us little purchase on their significance: figures like Wriggles-worth, for example, flit briefly through the news pages and then are lost to public awareness. Impatient readers are asked to stay a little while longer with Liddle’s business and political pals precisely to make more sense both of his role and that of the Blair project of which he so valued a part.
Wrigglesworth became marked for a public career, as did so many who became founders of the SDP and godparents to New Labour, in the student politics of the Cold War. He was elected to the National Union of Students executive in the Sixties at the time its president, Geoffrey Martin, was trying to calm more radical members about the funding sources of the NUS’s international work. Martin’s supporters in the NUS at that time – along with Wrigglesworth – included Tom McNally, (who as Lord McNally defended Liddle’s integrity earlier this summer), Mike Thomas (who later, as a defecting Labour MP, was to mastermind the launch of the SDP in 1981) and Jim Daly, (who with Liddle was in 1977 to launch the Campaign for Labour Victory and publish the work of Matthew Oakeshott, the Liddle neighbour who manages his ‘blind trust’). Unfortunately Martin’s calming words were blown away by events in the United States.
From the NUS into the Atlanticist circuit
Briefly told, Ramparts magazine disclosed that the work Martin and his colleagues had defended had, for many years, been funded by the Central Intelligence Agency.(8) The fuller story of how student politicians from the Cold War onwards eased into the state establishment – Draper being only the most recent example – has yet to be written.
This revelation did not nothing to impede the careers of the NUS politicos and Martin, after a brief spell at Shelter and in the City, became a Brussels bureaucrat. Those who already detect an increasingly ‘European’ dimension to this Lobbygate saga may not be surprised to learn that Martin now heads the London office of the European Union.
Another old Wrigglesworth friend from student days also reaches into this No 10 network. When Wrigglesworth needed his first job after NUS politics he became personal assistant to Ronald Gould, the National Union of Teachers general secretary who also presided over another Cold War organisation set up with CIA money, the World Confederation of Organisations of the Teaching Profession (WCOTP). A fellow student politics contemporary, Peter Robinson, also joined the staff of the NUT but, unlike Sir Ian, still works there, running the union’s training centre near Grantham. Outside his NUT work Robinson has another life, working for a number of Atlanticist organisations, including the Washington-based Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and the Trade Union Committee for European and Transatlantic Understanding (TUCETU). As David Osler has well described in Lobster 33, all the Labour’s Government’s initial defence team were part of the NATO-backed TUCETU, a well-funded outfit which has published a pamphlet by Peter Mandelosn. Robinson’s long-standing associate in this work on both sides of the Atlantic is Alan Lee Williams, the treasurer of the European Movement when Liddle’s father-in-law, George Thomson, was chairman. A generation on, Liddle now advises the Prime Minister on Europe and his co-author and old friend, Mandelson, is a vice-chairman of the European Movement and a leading Cabinet proponent of British membership of the European single currency. The close association of Liddle and Wrigglesworth dates from the younger man’s role as adviser to Rodgers and was forged in the intensity of the Manifesto group, and its successor, the Campaign for Labour Victory (CLV). Rodgers launched CLV in 1977 but, as Bradley says,
‘the driving force behind CLV came from a group of young men from outside Parliament who were in some ways reminiscent of the group which had launched the Campaign for Democratic Socialism 17 years earlier.'(9)
By that time rising Labour membership demands for MP accountability meant Liddle could not ease into Parliament through the right-wing patronage route, but he became a central figure in that ‘group of young men’.
This is not the place to retrace how many of those in that grouping left the Labour Party in 1981 and sought to replace it with the SDP (Defence Secretary George Robertson and Giles Radice, the Europhile chairman of the Treasury Select Committee, were two exceptions). Bradley, writing at the time, and Crewe and King in their later SDP history cover much of that ground: my ‘Who were they travelling with?’ in Lobster 31 does so more briefly and less sympathetically. But in the context of this summer’s events it is important to record that both Liddle and Wrigglesworth were important SDP figures, the latter, in part, through being one of the few defecting Labour MPs in 1981 to be re-elected in the 1983 general election. As well as being a stern Labour critic during that time and parliamentary consultant to the First Division Association of top civil servants (work subsequently taken up by Mandelson after he was selected for a safe Commons seat in the North-East), Wrigglesworth also worked closely with the National Working Miners’ Committee during the 1984-85 miners’ strike.
Liddle figured in many SDP activities, included standing as a by-election candidate in Fulham in 1986. He maintained a very active interest after the merger with the Liberal Party. He rejoined the Labour Party in 1995, two years before Blair appointed him to No 10. There, he joined economic adviser Derek Scott, twice an SDP candidate and, like Liddle, married to an influential media figure, Elinor Goodman, Channel Four’s political editor. David Sainsbury, the multi-millionaire super-market chief who is said to have bankrolled the SDP, is now a minister in Mandelson’s Department for Trade and Industry.
PRIMA Europe
PRIMA Europe was born in 1987, the year the SDP died. Liddle, after four years as director of the Public Policy Centre (PPC), founded PRIMA with his father-in-law’s old CDS colleague, Dick Taverne, who had directed the PPC before Liddle and had subsequently become its chairman. Though Taverne’s career in the British and European parliaments had ended in 1974, he had helped set up the SDP and had been one its parliamentary candidates. Along the way he had become a member of David Rockefeller’s Trilateral Commission and been the British member of the Spierenburg Committee, a five-member body set up to review the working of the institution of which two of his closest associates, Thomson and Jenkins, had been members – the European Commission. PRIMA Europe, a self-styled ‘small, sharply focused consultancy’, was joined by City investment banker John Dickie in 1989 and then by Wrigglesworth, who, turning his attention to business in a serious way after the SDP collapse, had already accumulated several directorships. In one of its pre-election promotional brochures Liddle mentions his joint authorship with Mandelson of The Blair Revolution and is said to ‘advise the chairmen and chief executives of some of Britain’s largest companies’. PRIMA offered to help businesses communicate ‘their corporate position in the light of government and regulatory policy in both the United Kingdom and the European Union’.
Liddle’s company, already with clients such as Unilever, Glaxo Wellcome, Abbey National, British Nuclear Fuels, Rio Tinto, PowerGen and British Gas on its books, warned potential clients: ‘Lobbying comes too late. It represents a reaction to a policy agenda which others have set.’ Instead, PRIMA advised: ‘Companies must anticipate trends in order to influence the public agenda. They need a systematic process for developing consistent public positions. These must be integrated fully with their commercial strategy.’ If promotional documents entitled ‘Helping companies manage the interface between business strategy and the public sphere’ did not quite press everyone’s button, a letter sent to potential clients immediately after the 1997 election could scarcely be clearer. For those who knew of the role of Liddle, Taverne and Wrigglesworth in so recently seeking to destroy the Labour party, it could hardly be more ironic, for it said:
‘The Labour election victory last Thursday was a major watershed in British politics. Many companies like yours will now be considering the effect of the new government on their business. As you can see from the attached brochure, PRIMA Europe has unrivalled knowledge of the Labour Party’s policies and personalities. I am therefore writing to you to tell you a little more about the unique service we offer our clients…’
Again they were warned that ‘to resort to lobbying is to accept that you have failed to shape the policy agenda. PRIMA’s approach is more strategic, effective and in keeping with toda”s needs.’ Among other services this would include undertaking ‘detailed reconnaissance projects’. The word ‘access’ is not used, but it is difficult to see quite what else PRIMA’s unique selling point was if conventional lobbying was dismissed as an admission of failure. Before this invitation to ‘shape the political agenda’ went out Liddle had recruited Derek Draper to PRIMA. The company updated its pitch to include Draper’s ‘six years of experience working with senior Labour MPs; first for Nick Brown, then a Treasury spokesperson on tax, and then from 1992-1996 as Adviser [sic] to Peter Mandelson MP. He set up and is the Director of Progress, the new Labour political education trust and magazine. He is also Director of Eureka, a cross party group for young politicians interested in Europe.’
By the time Draper joined PRIMA the company was back in the hands of its founders after several years of being owned by Burson-Marsteller. Another chairman had replaced Taverne who became president at about the time the company became part of the US public affairs conglomerate which also employed fellow Liberal Democrat Des Wilson. Perhaps not surprisingly new PRIMA chief, Harvard-educated Lord Holme of Cheltenham, is another enthusiast for the Atlantic Alliance and the European Union. Since being president of the Liberal Party in the year the SDP was formed, Holme has been a key figure in Alliance and now Liberal Democrat politics for almost two decades. The chairman of the Constitutional Reform Centre since 1985 and a former director of the Campaign for Electoral Reform, he is a close adviser to Paddy Ashdown on the two principal issues that have brought the Liberal Democrat leadership close to No 10 in the past year. A friend of Peter Mandelson for many years, Holme is said by some to have followed John Birt’s example and given the former Labour director of communications consultancy work between his leaving Walworth Road and becoming MP for Hartlepool. Certainly their paths have crossed for many years, not least through the British American Project for the Successor Generation(10) of which Mandelson is an alumnus and Holme a long-standing board member, a position he shared for several years with David Lipsey, the political editor of The Economist who was a member of Lord Jenkin’s commission on electoral reform – and a friend of Liddle’s since the pair worked as Labour ministerial advisers more than 20 years ago.
Before we weary of circuiting names and networks for the umpteenth time – the same small circle popping up under assorted guises but usually pursuing the same agendas – let me add just two more sets of coincidences before attempting to reach some concluding thoughts about Liddle and Lobbygate.
After the July defence review leak and The Sun’s Camilla and the Princes ‘exclusive’ cleared Liddle’s embarrassment off the front pages, Lobbygate finally died when the Prime Minister agreed that Liddle was in the clear because his next-door neighbour in south London was administering his lobby wealth in a ‘blind trust’. The next-door neighbour, Matthew Oakeshott is, like Liddle’s wife, a former adviser to Roy Jenkins. He helped keep the ‘leader over the water’ in touch with British developments when the former Labour deputy leader went to Brussels in 1977. He wrote for the grandly named outfit run by Wrigglesworth’s old NUS pal, Jim Daly, on behalf of Jenkins – the Radical Centre for Democratic Studies in Industry and Society. Bradley tells us that after the meeting at David Owen’s Limehouse home on January 25 1981 that drew up the declaration of the Council for Social Democracy, ‘Matthew Oakeshott went to Shirley Williams’ flat to get her a suit to wear for the inevitable press photographs’.
Seventeen years on and Liddle’s ‘blind trust’ administrator has developed a lucrative investment business. One of his companies, Audax Properties, is chaired by Lord Thomson of Monifeith. Roger Liddle’s father-in-law also chairs Oakeshott’s Value and Income Trust. Another Oakeshott investment vehicle is the Olim Convertible Trust. The chairman of that is Liddle’s long-time business partner and political ally, Lord Taverne of Pimlico.
And what about those two big newspaper stories diverting attention away from Liddle’s troubles and also from the resultant attacks on his friend and ally Mandelson? New Labour has built itself a reputation for news management and while it is difficult for outsiders to know the inside details, we can safely assume that story spinning would be part of the counter-attack as criticism of the Government grew.
After the defence review was leaked it was a newspaper generally supportive of the Blair administration, The Independent, which suggested on July 9 that it occurred ‘amid suggestions that it might have been used as a diversionary tactic.’ Attempts were made to blame the leak on the Tories, but it is hard to see how this would benefit William Hague when he had the Liddle/Lobbygate target so clearly in his sights. Liddle was the defence adviser at No 10, arch-spinner Mandelson is his friend and Defence Secretary Robertson is a political ally of both, so if there was to be a deliberate ‘diversionary’ leak, certainly the means for creating it were readily available. At the least, there are grounds for suspicion.
What the defence leak did for the broadsheets, the story of Camilla and the Princes did for the tabloids: it swept the Liddle furore off the front pages. Again it may never be possible to prove what really happened, but again there are good reasons to suspect a little collusion. For the story, broken initially in The Sun and then picked up in later editions elsewhere, was essentially a good news one for Buckingham Palace in its effort to promote Camilla as an acceptable consort to Prince Charles. As Matthew Parris, The Sun columnist sacked for ‘outing’ Peter Mandelson on television, discovered recently, there is powerful support from the Murdoch family for Blair and his Trade and Industry Secretary. Earlier this year Buckingham Palace appointed a new communications director to improve its image. Whether Prince Charles took advice on this from Mandelson we do not know. But we do know that Mandelson is an old friend, was the only Cabinet member to attend the Prince’s 50th birthday party, and is a close friend, too, of Simon Lewis, the former head of corporate affairs at British Gas arm Centrica, who landed the Palace PR job. Followers of the British American Project for the Successor Generation may recall that Lewis, then working for NatWest, was a 1994 alumnus. We do not know whether fellow alumnus Mandelson recommended him for membership, or whether that came from Lord Holme, the former PRIMA Europe chairman who sits on the BAP board. But we do know that Lewis and Holme are old colleagues from Alliance politics in the 1980s – a time when Lewis was head of public relations for Roger Liddle’s earlier love, the SDP. It may also may a complete coincidence that one of the top companies PRIMA Europe has on its books is Lewis’s former employer, British Gas.
But let’s desist from further speculation of this kind and return to our original questions: why is Liddle apparently so important to Blair and what does that tell us about his government and its direction a third of its way through to the next election?
The political meaning of Roger Liddle
The first thing that needs to be said is that Roger Liddle is not in No 10 for any obvious inherent abilities. Those who read his New Statesman articles before the election rarely remarked on their originality or stylistic fizz. Those who remember him as an SDP politician have memories of a somewhat hapless figure laughing a lot at his own jokes. His joint work with Peter Mandelson, The Blair Revolution (in which both authors paid generous tribute to Derek Draper) did not become a must-buy for reasons apparent to the most casual reader. He is not well liked by others in No 10 who find him indiscreet: I was told of an occasion when a loud-voiced Liddle blurted out to an attentive restaurant audience that Tony had just torn up his draft of a speech on Europe and had told him to rewrite it including the following keynote points, which Liddle then rehearsed to the assembled diners. But while in assessing Liddle’s significance we are clearly not describing a political rocket scientist, we are talking of a close friend and ally of an important close friend and ally to the Prime Minister, Peter Mandelson, and that was the first reason why Liddle had to be kept in place this summer. Derek Draper was not in government and therefore was detachable and disposable. Liddle was at No 10 and as Mandelson was about to move to the DTI, it was important for Mandelson that his influence at No 10, particularly on defence and Europe – Liddle’s twin brief – be not eroded. So, at least for a while, Liddle had to be kept in Downing Street.
Second, in the figure of Liddle we see represented the political ancestry with which the Prime Minister seems most comfortable, that personified by the figure of Lord Jenkins of Hillhead. Liddle worked with him; Liddle’s wife worked with him; Liddle’s next-door neighbour, Oakeshott, worked with him; Liddle’s business partners, Taverne and Wrigglesworth, worked with him – and on electoral reform, Tony Blair worked with him, too. In endorsing Liddle, the Prime Minister was seen to be making a statement about the inclusiveness of New Labour – that Liddle, like economic adviser Derek Scott, trade minister David Sainsbury and the grand old man of ‘the Centre’, Lord Jenkins, were all welcome members of the Blair project, one that might extend to include Liberal Democrat members of the Cabinet or even a merged Labour-Liberal Democrat party in due course. What Blair was actually endorsing by keeping Liddle on board was not so much non-ideological radical New Labour as highly political right-wing Old Labour, a network whose future loyalty and popular support might prove as doubtful and unreliable to him as history shows the Jenkins camp were to Harold Wilson.
A third conclusion is probably by now blindingly clear: Liddle is important because Liddle is about the European Union and he matters because the Blair project, in large part, is about the European Union. It’s true that Liddle also advises on defence, but, as the history of postwar social democrats shows- the US funding of the early European Movement and the rest – the two issues have always been closely linked.(11) One of the big issues coming up on the political agenda – some would say the only big issue – is that of the single currency and future of the EU. It is in that context that we must seek to understand Liddle and his network, Draper and his assorted European outfits, Mandelson and his leading position within the European Movement and the rest of the personalities and events linking Downing Street to the future of the EU and what, after all, was called PRIMA Europe.
Of course, politics is a complex business and not everything can be fitted into neat explanatory categories. Gordon Brown and Mandelson agree on the euro but fight on other issues, just as the old Social Democrats agreed on defence and Europe, but fell out over David Owen. But because a human enterprise is complicated doesn’t mean it’s inexplicable – that we can’t catch the drift of what it’s about and where it’s heading. And Europe is one thing Lobbygate was clearly about.
There are lots of loose ends and even more unanswered questions remaining. Is Oakeshott’s Liddle ‘blind trust’ really blind? Is the relationship between Mandelson, Birt and Liddle’s wife at the FCO-funded Bush House one of simple friendship or does it have an institutional dimension? Where does the funding of Draper’s European and other networks come from and what interests are behind them? Did the Liddle network have any influence over the selection and ordering of Labour candidates on the closed list system proposed for next year’s European Parliament elections? Does Tony Blair’s November overture to Liddle’s old friends in the Liberal Democrat leadership have electoral reform, the euro or the creation of a new party – or perhaps all three – as its driving motive?
As resentment grows in the Labour Party over the direction and methods of the Blair leadership and the national debate about the euro begins to hot up, more and more such questions will be asked. It will be interesting to see where Roger Liddle and his friends figure in the answers.
Notes
- For more on Powell see Ramsay and Easton in Lobster 33.
- See Lobster 33 for more on the Defence Secretary.
- Ian Bradley, Breaking the Mould? The Birth and Prospects of the Social Democratic Party, Martin Robertson, Oxford, 1981 p. 53
- On which see Oilgate, Martin Bailey, Coronet Books, London, 1979
- See Lobsters 31 and 33 for more on Williams.
- Readers who are new to this topic may find Smear! Wilson and the Secret State, Robin Ramsay and Stephen Dorril, Fourth Estate, London 1981 and Lobster 31 and Lobster 33 (see the articles: Contamination, the Labour Party, nationalism and the Blairites by Robin Ramsay, The British American Project for the Successor Generation by Tom Easton, and New Labour, New Atlanticism: US and Tory intervention in the unions since the 1970s) by David Osler.
- Liddle’s mentor, Rodgers, had, according to Bradley, acted as ‘unofficial whip’ to the group on EEC entry.
- A fuller account of this episode can be found in Student Power, eds. Alexander Cockburn and Robin Blackburn (Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1969) and Students and the Cold War, Joel Kotek, (Macmillan, London 1996).
- Bradley, op. cit pp. 62/3
- See Lobster 33.
- See Lobsters 31 and 33 (See note 6 above)..