Tittle-tattle

The British American Project and the war on Iraq

The war on Iraq proved a busy time for members of the British American Project (Lobster 33 et seq) on this side of the pond.

To cover the American countdown to war, long-time UK advisory board member Jim Naughtie returned to the New York home of his alma mater, Syracuse, and thence to Washington DC where he spent time away from The Guardian in 1981 on his Lawrence M Stern Fellowship. A regular in his BBC Today studio back in London throughout was early BAP recruit Peter Mandelson, while his old friend and Project founder member Lord Robertson was busy trying to keep Turkey onside through his position as NATO secretary general.

Possibly even busier on the war in recent months than all three BAP veterans, though less publicly so, was another early member of the BAP, Gloria Craig. Twenty-six years in the Ministry of Defence when Robertson became New Labour Defence Secretary in 1997, she is now its director of general security and safety. Her former MoD colleague, Jonathan Day, moved with Robertson to NATO HQ in Brussels to become director of his private office. He was signed up to the BAP in 1987, the same year as Mandelson, along with Susan Richards, who now edits the Open Democracy web site, and Michael Maclay, the ex-Foreign Office man who became Mandelson’s colleague at London Weekend Television before helping run the MI6-linked Hayklut private intelligence organisation.

Parliamentary Secretary in Derry Irvine’s Lord Chancellor’s Department, Baroness Scotland of Asthal, also joined the BAP in 1987. She now serves on its UK advisory board with, as well as Naughtie, Nick Butler of BP, Lord Holme, the former president of the Liberal Democrats and former chair of the Broadcasting Standards Commission, Admiral Sir James Eberle, the former director of the Royal Institute for International Affairs, and Alan Lee Williams (below).

In the days before bombing began Robertson’s former ministerial and BAP colleague, Baroness Amos, was sent scuttling around Africa in a forlorn effort to sign up UN Security Council members to a second resolution. Her BAP colleague in the Foreign Office, Baroness Symons of Vereham Dean, had plenty on her hands looking out for post-war British business opportunities as, among other duties, she is in charge of Export Credit Guarantees.

There couldn’t have been much relief from the war at home for Baroness Symons as her partner is Phil Bassett, the former Rupert Murdoch man now working alongside – and possibly replacing in time – Alastair Campbell in running the Prime Minister’s spin machine.

Blair’s chief of staff is former Washington embassy diplomat Jonathan Powell. Recruited to the BAP in 1991 along with new TUC general secretary Brendan Barber, Powell has praised the organisation for ‘taking the working out of networking’.

Another BAP figure important to Blair in the Iraq crisis was Matthew Rycroft, his private secretary responsible for foreign affairs. In the Cabinet Office, Allie Saunders (BAP 2001) has responsibility for defence and overseas affairs.

Between government and its citizenry lie the important ‘opinion formers’ and the BAP was well represented here during the war. Defence specialists Col Bob Stewart (BAP 1988), James Sherr (BAP 1989) and Dan Plesch (BAP 1994), were regularly to be seen, heard and read. (Stewart’s old pal, Martin Bell, for whom the ex-soldier took time off from Hill & Knowlton in 1997 to campaign in Tatton, was a regular pundit on Channel 5.)

Senior Murdoch journalists, Mary Ann Sieghart (BAP 1996) and Bronwen Maddox (BAP 1997) of The Times, and Martin Ivens of the Sunday Times (BAP 1995), followed the Blair war line; as did Conrad Black’s BAP people at the Daily Telegraph, Charles Moore (BAP 1986) and Alice Thomson (BAP 1998). Ivens’ wife, Anne McElvoy (see below), bashed out similar sentiments at the London Evening Standard and around the studios.

At the BBC, senior figures in addition to Naughtie in the BAP network busy during the war included Evan Davis, Margaret Hill (the sister of New Labour former spin chief and later Monsanto lobbyist and war advocate David Hill), Andrew Whyte and Jeremy Paxman.

To those who think this BAP stuff is little more than an informal transatlantic freemasonry of the ultra ambitious, I would pose one question: why is the British taxpayer, through the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, helping finance it?

If no British MP or journalist can wring an answer from New Labour on this, perhaps they could turn to the US end of the BAP operation. This is sponsored and supported by the Johns Hopkins University’s Paul Nitze School of Advanced International Studies whose dean, until the presidency of George W Bush, was one Paul Wolfowitz.

When, in 1997, New Labour fundraiser Julia Hobsbawm helped organise a party at the British embassy in Washington to honour the BAP – the Project newsletter reporting the event called the New Labour election victory the ‘Big Swing to the BAP’ – Wolfowitz was one of the guest speakers. Naughtie’s opposite number on the US advisory board is now deputy to US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

Clearing the channels for Blair?

An alumnus of the Johns Hopkins offspring international relations school in Bologna is Blair’s former Washington ambassador. In April, Sir Christopher Meyer became chairman of the Press Complaints Commission (PCC). He succeeds Lord Wakeham, the ex-Tory Cabinet minister and Enron director who stood down from the PCC after the crooked US company’s collapse.

After Lancing College and Peterhouse, Cambridge, Meyer spent his year with Johns Hopkins in Italy before entering the diplomatic service in 1966. After postings to Moscow and Madrid he was appointed permanent secretary to the European Community in 1978 during Roy Jenkins’ presidency and then ran the Foreign Office news operation during the middle Thatcher years. John Major made him press secretary at No 10 and then Blair sent him to Washington in 1997.

Diplomat and upmarket spin merchant Meyer, who appeared regularly around the studios during the recent Iraq War to press the Government’s case, may appear an unlikely defender of press freedom. But not to the man who appointed him, Sir Harry Roche, chairman of the Press Standards Board of Finance that oversees the PCC.

‘His distinguished record in the diplomatic service, so widely evident following the events of September 11th, is widely recognised,’ said Roche on his appointment. ‘In discussions prior to this announcement he has made clear his strong commitment to the successful self-regulation of the press.’

So who is Sir Harry Roche that he can bring such an international high-flyer into his organisation? He built his career at The Guardian group, first with the Manchester Evening News before becoming managing director of The Guardian in 1985. He stepped up to be chairman and chief executive of the Guardian Media Group in 1988 and in 1995 assumed the chairmanship of the Press Association (now PA News), the news source for much of the national and regional press.

Two of the journalists who rose with Roche at the Guardian Media Group have now joined the Press Complaints Commission alongside Sir Christopher Meyer. They are Paul Horrocks, the editor of the Manchester Evening News, and Roger Alton, the editor of The Observer.

Blackwood

Roche is also is on the board of Johnston Press, the rapidly growing regional newspaper group headquartered in Edinburgh. For many years as vice-chairman he oversaw its expansion, including the promotion of Harry Blackwood, a locally born printer turned journalist, to the editorship of the Hartlepool Mail.

But in February, after repeated complaints from Hartlepool MP Peter Mandelson and alleged calls to Johnston Press by the Prime Minister – the Hartlepool Mail is also read by Blair’s Sedgefield constituents – Blackwood was first suspended and then sacked. On his suspension, readers, including Labour councillors, registered their anger: all the Mail staff turned up in black in protest and his deputy, Neil Hunter, resigned. Roche and his fellow Johnston directors now face the prospect of their management skills and contacts with New Labour being subject to public examination at an employment tribunal.

But not only Press Complaints Commission kingmaker Roche may be worried. Roche’s colleague on the Johnston board and now chairman is Roger Parry, a former BBC journalist turned media businessman. Though Mandelson denied talking to Parry about the removal of the troublesome editor, Parry told The Mail on Sunday that Mandelson had indeed spoken to both himself and to Johnston chief executive Tim Bowdler.

More troubling for Mandelson and Blair when the employment hearing comes up will be the bulging file Blackwood built in the run-up to his removal. He claims it contains evidence of Blair’s direct intervention with Johnston Press to seek his removal. He also says he learned that Mandelson threatened Johnston Press chiefs with changes in the Communications Bill, a measure that would not only affect the business interests of Johnston Press, but those of US media conglomerate Clear Channel (see below) of which busy Parry is UK managing director.

The unfolding Blackwood saga was reported every week for more than a month in the journalists’ weekly, Press Gazette, but none of the media sections of the national broadsheets touched the story. It was eventually broken to a wider audience in The Mail on Sunday on 23 February by political editor Simon Walters, a journalist with no great love for New Labour, having years ago experienced employment difficulties himself at its hands.

The following morning, Mandelson was interviewed on Radio 4’s Start the Week by BBC political editor Andrew Marr. Mandelson had much to say on Iraq, Israel and the United States, but was not questioned about Blackwood. The editor’s removal was only briefly mentioned in The Independent, on whose international board Mandelson sits. The Guardian eventually reported the story but without reference to Blair or Roche.

Three footnotes:

• Sacked editor Harry Blackwood is now writing a weekly column on Mandelson, Blair and the doings of New Labour in its North-East redoubt in the northern edition of The Mail on Sunday.
• Greg Dyke, the director general of the BBC, warned in April of the dangers to British broadcasting if Clear Channel gained a foothold here as a result of the enactment of the Communications Bill. He said that during the Iraq war Clear Channel used its US radio stations not only to attack opponents of the war but to help plan pro-war demonstrations.
• Tim Bowdler, the Johnston Press chief executive who sacked Blackwood, is a member of the Press Standards Board of Finance that, with Roche in the chair, appointed Sir Christopher Meyer to be chairman of the Press Complaints Commission.

……by any other name

Also preparing for war well before the shooting started was The Observer, edited by PCC member Roger Alton (above). Way back in December 2001 Observer reporter David Rose was arguing ‘The case for tough action against Iraq’. In September 2002 Rose attacked former weapons inspector Scott Ritter under the headline ‘Hero of doves forgets when he was a hawk’. A month before hostilities began a Rose piece ‘Top Bush aide savages “selfish” Chirac’, brought Observer readers an ‘exclusive interview’ with Richard Perle (see below), a leading figure in the Washington Israeli and arms lobby advising Bush and centred on the American Enterprise Institute (see below).

There may be lots of reasons why Rose was given space to press the war case so vigorously in the newspaper that courageously stood out against the British/French/Israeli attack on Suez in 1956 and why The Observer this year carried editorials supporting Bush and Blair on the war. One might be that Rose and Alton are very old friends and climbing partners.

Columnists for conflict

An old colleague of Rose and Alton is The Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland. He followed the Jim Naughtie upward path via a Lawrence M Stern Fellowship at The Washington Post. He then became a US correspondent during the early Clinton years before returning to Farringdon Road as leader writer, columnist and enthusiast for most things American and New Labour. His mild criticisms of some No 10 actions have given him the reputation of being a radical, sufficiently so to earn him space as a polemical columnist in the Jewish Chronicle and The Daily Mirror. In a BBC Radio 4 Talking Politics discussion on US/UK relations after the war, Freedland was introduced as the radical in a quartet of columnists that included Anne McElvoy (above and below), Michael Gove and Stephen Pollard. McElvoy is the executive editor of the increasingly right-wing London Evening Standard who was a recent participant in a New Atlantic Initiative (below) conference organised by Richard Perle’s American Enterprise Institute. Gove is the Conservative columnist at The Times much seen in TV studios pressing the war case. Pollard is a former Fabian Society official, a joint author with No 10 adviser and Jenkins biographer, Andrew Adonis, and a strong supporter of Israel and the United States. This, apparently, is what the BBC considers a balanced panel.

During the Iraq war Pollard was one of a quintet of well-lunched columnists for conflict. Perhaps he and other lunchers for liberation David Aaronovitch (The Guardian), Johann Hari (The Independent), Simon Heffer (Daily Mail) and Christopher Hitchens (Daily Mirror) will be awarded a campaign medal for loyal service in the Coalition of the Willing Catering and Communication Corps.

TUCETU

The reward to Labour Party chairman John Reid was not long coming once Baghdad fell. The former Communist who turned strongly pro-American is now Robin Cook’s successor as Leader of the Commons. How pro-American is Reid? Remember that after Blair’s 1997 victory he joined the defence team of fellow Scot George Robertson (above) along with long-time electricians and engineers union fixer John Spellar. All three, as David Osler recorded in Lobster 33,(1) were, with Peter Mandelson, supporters of the tax-funded Trade Union Committee European and Transatlantic Understanding (TUCETU) run by officials of the Atlantic Council. One of those officials is Alan Lee Williams, the former Labour MP who helped set up the Social Democratic Party in 1981. Lee Williams also helps run the British American Project (above), serving with Naughtie, Butler, Holme and Eberle on its UK advisory board. He also pops up in the American Enterprise Institute’s New Atlantic Initiative (below).

The forerunner of TUCETU was the US-funded Labour Committee for Transatlantic Understanding, set up in 1976 by Joseph Godson, a close ally of Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell when serving as US labour attaché in London. Upon retirement from US government service Godson maintained his interest in British politics – Frank Chapple, Eric Hammond, Peter Shore and Ray Whitney, the last head of the Foreign Office/MI6 covert Information Research Department – through the work of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington DC.

New Atlantic Initiative

One of the latest ventures of the AEI New Cons – apart from getting its people on British radio and TV at every opportunity – is the New Atlantic Initiative (NEI). It is led by the deputy defence minister in the first post-Communist Polish government, Radek Sikorski. As a young Solidarity member, Sikorski came to the UK as a refugee in 1981 and studied at Oxford. On graduation he became a correspondent in Afghanistan, Angola and Yugoslavia before becoming Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation representative in Poland in 1989 and then a government minister.

Whilst at Oxford he met his American wife, Anne Applebaum, who was studying at St Antony’s College. She moved with him to Poland where she became a correspondent for The Economist, subsequently covering the end of Communism in Central and Eastern Europe for a variety of publications. Applebaum returned to the UK in 1992 to become foreign and then deputy editor of The Spectator, writing for other Conrad Black titles in London and the Evening Standard as well as appearing regularly on the BBC. When Sikorski took up the AEI job in Washington, she became a columnist for the Washington Post and a member of its editorial board.

The New Atlantic Initiative counts Margaret Thatcher as one its patrons. Its advisory board includes her former adviser, Sir Charles Powell (brother of Blair’s chief of staff, Jonathan), and such other Cold Warriors as Lord Chalfont, Robert Conquest, Newt Gingrich, Jean-François Revel, Samuel Huntington and Brian Beedham. Alongside Michael Ledeen on the board are also Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle, Midge Decter, Norman Podhoretz. Max Kampelman, Daniel Pipes and William Kristol of the Project for the New American Century. Roger Scruton, Lord Weidenfeld and Alan Lee Williams (2) complete the British complement.

Applebaum, who wrote a long, soft-focus interview with Blair for The Sunday Telegraph in March 2001, not only had a rapid rise to the top in her journalistic career, she’s been lucky in her travel arrangements. She was booked on Pan Am Flight 103 that left London for New York on December 21, 1988. She told Sunday Telegraph readers on the 10th anniversary of the Lockerbie disaster: ‘About a week before the flight I postponed my trip simply in order to stay a day longer with friends in Oxford’.

Any doubts that the Iraq war would not be prevented by the United Nations or anyone else were quashed for me in early January. It came when I learned of the unlikely appearance at a long-planned journalists’ course in Hampshire of BBC veteran Peter Allen. Why should the grey-haired 57-year-old who normally co-hosts Radio Five Live’s Drive programme from the comfort of White City be given the rough treatment for a week by the ex-SAS and Special Forces toughies who, deep in Army country, prepare hacks for nasty business? The answer came when the bombs starting dropping on Iraq two months later. Allen anchored the BBC show from Qatar.

Notes

1 https://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/article/issue/33/new-labour-new-atlanticism-us-and-tory-intervention-in-the-unions-since-the-1970s/

2 See https://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/article/issue/31/who-were-they-travelling-with-sdp-the-birth-life-and-death-of-the-social-democratic-party/ and https://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/article/issue/33/the-british-american-project-for-the-successor-generation/