The Robert Henderson/Tony Blair story.
Having failed to persuade any section of the British political class then in power to do anything about a wrong he had suffered at the hands of the media, Robert Henderson wrote letters to the then Leader of the Opposition, Tony Blair – 13 letters in all. This is Henderson’s version of what happened next; this is his view of what he thinks is an enormous scandal:
‘We have a Prime Minister who [while leader of the Opposition] engaged in a conspiracy with his wife, a QC, to pervert the course of justice, a Prime Minister who engaged in a conspiracy to criminally libel me and a Prime Minister who is using the security services to spy on me, despite the fact that the Crown Prosecution Service immediately found that I had committed no crime when the Blairs attempted to have me prosecuted on three utterly disparate charges. (The disparate nature of the charges alone suggests a desperate desire to obtain a prosecution at all costs.) All of this is substantiated by tapes and documents.'(1)
These events were the subject of an Early Day Motion by Sir Richard Body in the House of Commons on 10 November 1999
That this House regrets that the Right Honourable Member for Sedgefield attempted to persuade the Metropolitan Police to bring criminal charges against Robert Henderson, concerning the Right Honourable Member’s complaints to the police of an offence against the person, malicious letters and racial insult arising from letters Robert Henderson had written to the Right honourable Member complaining about various instances of publicly-reported racism involving the Labour Party; and that, after the Crown Prosecution Service rejected the complaints of the Right honourable Member and the Right honourable Member failed to take any civil action against Robert Henderson, Special Branch were employed to spy upon Robert Henderson, notwithstanding that Robert Henderson had been officially cleared of any illegal action.
Alerted to the incident by the Libertarian Alliance, and reading their account of it, I printed the bit in Lobster 37 p.49, and brought the story to the attention of the New Statesman/Observer columnist Nick Cohen. Eventually I got an e-mail from Henderson telling me that Cohen had contacted him and was going to write up the story in The Observer. Some weeks later I got another e-mail from Henderson telling me that Cohen/The Observer were not, after all, going to run his story. Some e-mails were sent at that point.
Item: this from Nick Cohen to me on March 4
Dear Robin,
The reason I didn’t write about Henderson is that I didn’t trust him and had a generally bad feeling about him in my water – one that has grown with his numerous calls to me which he ended with the triumphant assertion that he had taped everything I had said! A definite green inker, I’d say.
‘Green inker’, sometimes ‘purple inker’, meaning crank.
Item: part of another one from Nick Cohen to me on 12 March.
Dear Robin,
……. My reasons for not doing the Henderson story were, at root, that I could see a weak but not wholly disreputable argument from the other side. I write in a polemical manner and if I’m going to take up a cause I have to believe in it. Consider this case. The security people around Blair have to be a touch paranoid. They’re on the look out for the lone nutter on a grassy knoll. I’m not saying Henderson was that, but when you’ve got someone who as far as they are concerned in 1996, rightly or wrongly, is identified with racist views after the Wisden business, bombarding Blair and his wife with letters (I really didn’t like the way his wife was drawn into this by Henderson, incidentally) is it utterly unreasonable to take a look at him?Of course, it was over-the-top, but as my own experience has shown that this is a rather obsessive and bombastic man, perhaps the Blairs and their bodyguards weren’t being completely potty if you can put yourselves in these people’s shoes for a moment. Anyway, that’s why I wrote about something else.
The water muddies
At this point it gets complicated for me. I value Nick Cohen’s writing. Cohen’s collected essays, Cruel Britannia (Verso, 1999), is a wonderful book. Nick Cohen, I am sure, like Paul Foot, Paul Lashmar and Richard Norton-Taylor – like any journalist who shows any signs of being interested in investigating the power of the state – has more stories than he knows what to do with. When I suggested Cohen look at the Henderson story I knew it was one he would find of initial interest. Cohen detests the Blair faction and here was that faction’s leader apparently behaving like the authoritarian Cohen and many others – me included – suspect is there if you scratch a little deeper.(2) But I also knew there might be other, more pressing issues – or better stories – for him;(3) and that there might be a problem for Cohen with Henderson being on the right. Therefore when I learned that Cohen was not going to run the Henderson story I was disappointed but not surprised.
Having said all that there are some comments to be made on the right-meets-left aspects of the Cohen encounter with Henderson.
To return to Cohen’s second e-mail to me: is Henderson obsessive? Perhaps: but if he is he has cause to be obsessed. Henderson was first smeared as a racist by the media and then, having to failed to persuade anyone in the government or state to address the wrong he had suffered, he wrote letters to the leader of the Opposition about his unjust treatment. He was then smeared again – this time as a stalker. Cohen makes a half-plausible case for Special Branch ‘taking a look at’ Henderson. It may be – just – arguable that a dozen, non-threatening letters(4) to the Leader of the Opposition justifies the interest of Special Branch. (Though if it does, God help us!) But that is not the issue. As I understand this, Blair – or his team – did not receive Henderson’s letters and report him to the Special Branch. They received Henderson’s letters and made a series of complaints to the police – all of which were immediately rejected: the subject of the complaint, Henderson, wasn’t even contacted by the police. Having failed to get the legal authorities to prosecute Henderson, the Blairs, or somebody close to them – Alistair Campbell, more than likely (5) – went to the Daily Mirror and used it to smear Henderson as a potential ‘stalker’; and only then, with Henderson splattered all over the front page of a major newspaper, was Special Branch involved.
Enter Searchlight
As Cohen’s first reply to me indicates, Henderson was recording his calls with journalists. Given his previous experience at the hands of the British press, this is merely a sensible precaution on his part. I have heard a tape of the Cohen-Henderson conversations. It is clear that between Cohen’s initial enthusiasm for the story and his decision not to write it, one of the intervening variables was information about a magazine called Right Now. Cohen discovered, via Searchlight, that the editor of Right Now, Derek Turner, had been in the National Front; and Henderson had written for Right Now. When Cohen rang me about Henderson, before he had talked to him, the first thing he said was, ‘Is Henderson kosher?’ For most left journalists, a connection, even at one remove, with someone who had once been a member of the National Front, is not kosher.
At this point there were several possible responses. There is Cohen’s: walk away from possible association with the right and political contamination, succinctly expressed by his use of kosher, about which I wrote in Lobster 33. But there is another response, which I expressed to Cohen, that it doesn’t matter where on the political spectrum Henderson is, no one not breaking the law – ‘green inker’ or not – deserves the assault by Blair or his staff on them; and as a left-wing journalist, if he ran the story, his position would be all the stronger precisely because Henderson is on the right.
I have tried without success to interest Nick Cohen in the Searchlight saga and its extraordinary position as the media’s sole reference point with regard to the British right. Searchlight’s assertion that Derek Turner was in the NF, turned out to be untrue – or, at any rate, rate denied by Turner. While the Henderson-Cohen encounter was taking place, quoting Searchlight, the Guardian had named Turner as a former member of the NF. But on 4 March under, Corrections and Clarifications, the Guardian printed the following:
Derek Turner, the editor of the rightwing magazine Right Now! says that contrary to the report headed ‘Leeds don to attack Lawrence findings’, page 6, March 2, he is not and never has been a member of the National Front.(6)
Derek Turner e-mailed Henderson about this.
Dear Robert,
In time-honoured Grauniad fashion, the paper got various facts wrong in their articles on Right Now and Frank Ellis……To many Leftists, I fear, men and women of the Right are somehow less than human and undeserving of even basic human courtesies. I wouldn’t wish to sound too precious about the National Front – and admit freely that I went on a NF Remembrance Day march in 1988. I didn’t join because there seemed to be no point, and there were too many dimwitted skinheads. So what? What, after all, is the difference between the NF and the SWP? I might mischievously suggest that whilst some (not all) in the NF harked back nostalgically to the Nazi period in which millions were killed by a brutal dictatorship, most people in the SWP look back fondly to a golden age when even more millions were killed by a different brutal dictatorship. It is obviously all right, even laudable, to kill Ukrainians, Cambodians, Chinese, etc,
These extracts from Turner’s letter takes us further into the issues which Cohen’s encounter with Robert Henderson raise. Take Turner’s comment, ‘To many Leftists, I fear, men and women of the Right are somehow less than human and undeserving of even basic human courtesies.’ This is certainly partly true. At worst, the left suspects that underneath the conservative is the fascist; at best, that a conservative philosophy is either rationalisation of self or class interest, or a delusion. But the mirror image is also true. To many on the right, the men and women of the left are somehow less than human etc. This is illustrated by Turner’s false account of the SWP’s position. The SWP does not ‘look back fondly to a golden age when even more millions were killed by a different brutal dictatorship.’ (No left organisation in this country does this – or ever did, to my knowledge.) On the contrary, the SWP’s view of the Soviet regime – for that is what Turner is alluding to – is exactly like his own: it was a brutal dictatorship which killed millions. Turner evidently knows little about the actual British left and lumps it all together as Stalinist. But then the British left knows little about the British right and too often lumps it all together, often steered by Searchlight, as fascist.
And so
The mutual ignorance and antipathy of the British right and left has serious consequences. Sections of the right and left agree on a number of issues. They are opposed to US dominance of the world, opposed to globalisation and opposed to the UK’s membership of the European Union. But because left and right are reluctant to be associated with each other, the anti-EU, anti-federalism case, for example, is almost always portrayed as a marginal (right) ‘extremist’ position; and opposition to corporate control and globalisation is almost always portrayed as a marginal (left) ‘extremist’ position.
That left/right agreement is illustrated by the 1980 Holly Sklar book, Trilateralism. This is still the best single volume of the elite management groups, chiefly the Trilateral Commission and Bilderberg. In 1980 that was a left issue: Jimmy Carter had been in the Trilateral Commission and what was then a section of the American New Left became interested in these groups. Sklar’s book is still available:(7) but these days I am told it is bought almost exclusively by the American right trying to understand the so-called New World Order.
These elite management groups are no longer of interest to the liberal-left. I reported in issue 37 that the late John Smith had been on the Steering Committee of the Bilderberg group – and nobody followed this up, not even Andy McSmith, his biographer, to whom I gave the information. So the Labour Party myth of John Smith, the ‘honest right-winger’, survives. The minutes of this year’s Bilderberg group meeting appeared, in full, on the Net and not a column inch was published in the major British media.(8) I think these elite managerial groups are central to any understanding of the world we live in today; and even if that is disputed, it cannot be disputed that such forums are of significance. Yet neither the British left nor the British media appears to be interested in them.(9) A journalist at The Independent to whom I told the John Smith story reported back that his editors said that since Tony Blair had been at a Bilderberg meeting ‘it was OK’. The media are more interested in Blair’s summer holidays in Chiantishire than they are in the fact that he attended a Bilderberg meeting and then tried to conceal this from the House of Commons.
I am not trying to argue for a left-right fusion; nor do I believe that ‘left’ and ‘right’ have ceased to mean anything: the old distinctions based on wealth distribution, power and equality have not gone away. But there are certain crucial issues on which some of the left agree with some of the right. The better bits of both British left and right are decentralisers and serious democrats, for whom democracy is an end in itself rather than just as a means to other ends. Our new corporate masters and their political fronts, such as Mr Tony and the crooks in the European Commission, are not democrats; and if their grip is ever to be weakened their opponents on the democratic right and left will have to learn to work together.
Notes
- The details of his can be read at the Web site at http://members.dencity.com/ delenda/
- See for example, his assault on the mind-bogglingly tedious and vacuous Anthony Giddens in the New Statesman 20 March 2000, p.53.
- My strike rate on getting things I think are important looked at by the major media is about 1 in 50 or 1 in 100 – it’s a rare event.
- I haven’t read the letters but I am told by people who have that they are not threatening.
- On Campbell see Peter Oborne’s excellent biography of him, Alastair Campbell: New Labour and the Rise of the Media Class, (London: Arum Press, 1999).
- I presume this would not have been printed had Searchlight been able to stand up their allegation.
- In this country it is listed in the wonderful AK Distribution Catalogue for 2000. Catalogue requests by e-mail to or to PO Box 12766, Edinburgh EH8 9YE.
- Is it possible that most of the major media are simply unaware of the existence of these minutes? I only informed a couple of journalists of their existence. On the other hand, the Big Issue published large article with a précis of their contents.
- Those minutes, apparently, are not a story. News values? David Beckham, a mildy talented English footballer changes his hair style – that gets wall-to-wall coverage. An unprecedented insight into the off-the-record discussions of the elites who are running the universe is ignored.