In and out of focus
In the springtime weeks when senior Cabinet members Charles Clarke and Patricia Hewitt found themselves in difficulties, it was reported that Philip (now Lord) Gould, the focus group guru with whom the pair worked very closely in Neil (now Lord) Kinnock’s kitchen cabinet 20 years earlier, was moving into a £3m London house near Regent’s Park. Gould’s rise from obscure advertising man to pollster and ‘strategist’ to the prime minister and if we are to believe him, senior US and Israeli politicians coincided with that of New Labour. His associate for much of that time, Deborah Mattinson, now heads Opinion Leader Research (OLR), part of the Chime Communications empire of Tim (since 1990, Lord) Bell, who served in a somewhat similar advisory capacity to Margaret Thatcher.
I have yet to see any report of how much of Gould and Mattinson’s wealth has come from Labour party sources in those 20 years, or any independent evaluation of their ‘research’ on its account. Given the ease with which New Labour fabricated ‘evidence’ of WMDs, the focus group ‘data’ by whose findings Labour morphed into New Labour would seem to be a suitable case for independent evaluation.
I make this suggestion having recently met focus group members who tell of cash-in-envelopes payment received after sessions with Mattinson’s OLR. They say the 90-minute meet-ings they attended regularly feature familiar focus group faces, all happy to supply the answers the OLR facilitator prompts for an average tax-free payment of £40 to £50. Like actors in a Mike Leigh movie they didn’t need a formal script just enough prompts to come up with acceptable answers to ensure they stayed in regular focus group employment.
At one time the data from social research was lodged and made available for independent assessment. So are we now to find social scientists searching the wreckage of New Labour for the black box containing the data Gould and Mattinson used to persuade Labour leaders and much of the media to accept the creation of New Labour?
The spoils of war
Mattinson’s overall boss at Chime Communications, Lord Bell, was one of the beneficiaries of taxpayers’ largesse through contracts issued by the Blair government for post-invasion work in Iraq. Bell’s Bell-Pottinger – for a while home to No 10 press chief David Hill where he worked on the Monsanto account – received £3m, according to The Independent newspaper, for promoting democracy in the country in the run-up to the 2004 election. Sir Jeremy Greenstock, our man at the UN before the war and in Iraq after it, picked up money under the same deal as a non-executive director of new Iraq currency supplier De la Rue. Former high-flying academic turned New Labour minister Baroness Blackstone benefited as a non-exec of the Mott MacDonald engineering group for ‘infrastructure’ work in the heavily bombed country. Sir Malcolm Rifkind’s Armor group picked up an £11m contract, a snip compared to the £246m going to Aegis, whose chief executive is Tim Spicer, the former SAS man who founded Sandline.
Am I paranoid enough?
Lord Robertson of Port Ellen is on the board of another Iraq contract beneficiary, the Weir Group, one a string of business interests Blair’s former Defence Secretary has acquired since he stepped down as secretary-general of Nato. The former George Robertson quickly became deputy chairman of Cable & Wireless and a director of Smith’s, the arms company. He joined the Royal Bank of Canada Europe in 2003 as it was bidding to modernise Colchester barracks for the Army; and in spring 2004 he joined his old pal, William Cohen, President Clinton’s Secretary of Defense, as a senior counsellor in his Washington ‘non-lobbying’ lobbying business. In addition to his earnings and pensions as a tax-funded politician, Robertson now earns more than £500,000 a year from his business activities, according to a Guardian report on February 9, 2006.
Lobster regulars may recall that Robertson was one of the founders of the British American Project (BAP) way back in the Ronald Reagan/Margaret Thatcher era. When the BAP’s existence was first revealed in Tribune in 1989, an angry Robertson denounced the Labour weekly for ‘keeping a little corner open for the cold war’. Modestly presuming the BAP revelation was deliberately timed to coincide with his parliamentary reselection, Robertson wrote in response: ‘Innuendo, contrived linkages, engineered logic, prejudiced name selection – these are all the hallmarks of the sleazy journalism the Left fulminates against. So who, apart from a few CIA-under-every-bed paranoids, was your article meant to impress?’ On 12 November 2003, in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, President George W Bush presented the Presidential Medal of Freedom to that scourge of CIA-under-the-bed paranoids everywhere, Lord Robertson of Port Ellen.
Beams and motes
A splendid riposte was handed to Robertson’s old chum, Denis MacShane, in the letters column of The Guardian. The former BBC reporter turned international trade union official and then Foreign Office minister, had taken issue with former Washington ambassador Sir Christopher Meyer. He claimed the man who is now chairman of the Press Complaints Commission had used inside government information for private gain in his book on Blair foreign policy, and went on to say strong things about the PCC. Having claimed in the usually amenable Guardian that The Mail on Sunday had harassed his family during what became the break-up of his latest marriage, MacShane earned a vigorous response from Mail on Sunday editor Peter Wright who wrote to deny the MP’s charges. Ominously for the former NUJ president, Wright began: ‘Denis MacShane might be better qualified to pontificate on the Press Complaints Commission if he observed the PCC’s rules on accuracy in his own writing.’ The MoS editor concluded by saying that despite the MP’s complaints about his treatment by The Mail on Sunday, ‘since then Mr MacShane – who, like Christopher Meyer, would as a foreign minister have intimate knowledge of government policy – has offered us articles for payment, based on his Foreign Office experience. He told us he needed the money to put his children through college. A clear case of pots and kettles.’
Pillow talk
No great changes are to be expected in the lacklustre Westminster coverage of The Guardian with the appointment of long-standing No 2 Patrick Wintour to succeed the ubiquitous Michael White as political editor. Hard-working but forever stuck with the reputation of being Peter Mandelson’s amanuensis in writing so uncritically about what became New Labour, Wintour may be one of several Westminster hacks a little disorientated after the departure of Tony Blair. Helping to guide him into whatever follows will be his wife, Rachel Sylvester, another fervent New Labourite now at The Daily Telegraph.
Wintour and Sylvester look set to overtake that long influential journalistic couple Andrew Marr and Jackie Ashley in terms of large-scale exposure of a single household’s views; but don’t overlook the claims of Matthew D’Ancona, the former Sunday Telegraph No 2 who is the new editor of The Spectator. His wife is Sarah Schaefer, a big wheel at the Foreign Policy Centre alongside Stephen Twigg (see Lobster 50), Baroness Ramsay, formerly of MI6, and Blair fundraiser and Middle East envoy Lord Levy. Schaefer previously worked for the pro-Euro campaign, the Social Market Foundation and as adviser to Denis MacShane. When former Labour MP Tam Dalyell talked of the ‘Jewish cabal’ around Blair, Schaefer used her regular Tribune column to warn: ‘The Left should not resort to shabby anti-Semitism just to make a point’.
It would be unfair to dwell too long on David Blunkett in the context of either anti-Semitism or influential political couples. But his antics with Kimberly Quinn certainly took him into very strange company at a very critical time. Here was a Labour Home Secretary – and a key ally of the Prime Minister – being introduced to The Spectator publisher around the time of 9/11 just as Conrad Black’s newspapers from London to Jerusalem were swelling the chorus for war. Love is blind, we know, but was that the only thing on the agenda?
Just after Blunkett’s resignation as Work and Pensions Secretary last year The Jewish Chronicle reported: ‘The politician has enjoyed a long-standing connection with the Jewish community…He was last month a guest speaker at a Friends of Haifa University dinner, revealing that his son, William, by former lover Kimberly Quinn, was attending a Jewish nursery. He also thanked the community for its support after he was forced to resign as Home Secretary at the end of 2004.’
In The Great War for Civilisation, Robert Fisk reminds us how an attack on Iraq had long been high on the Israeli agenda and, thus, that of the country’s powerful lobby in the US. Kimberly Quinn’s family were part of that network as well as being close to the Bush dynasty. How much of this Blunkett knew when then Spectator publicist Julia Hobsbawm introduced him to that London circle – and thus Quinn – in London, we may never know. That is unless Hobsbawm, who makes much of her well-publicised PR mission to ‘handle the truth’, ever decides to come clean.
BAP people
We do know from the Fisk book how important a role a media member of the British American Project can be. One of the turning points in Fisk’s decision to leave the Murdoch-owned Times for The Independent was the rewriting of his copy by then Times foreign editor George Brock. He writes that references in his story to US incompetence in the 1988 shooting down of the Iranian airliner by the USS Vincennes were systematically deleted by BAP member Brock. Bronwen Maddox now has Brock’s old job. She is a long-standing member of the BAP, too. And so, of course, is Hobsbawm.
Saint Bob’s people
As well as being a key member of the Murdoch empire through regular appearances on Sky as well as her Times job, Maddox is also part of the increasingly influential media operation run by Sir Bob Geldof. His Ten Alps business, of which former Gaitskellite Labour MP Brian Walden is chairman, is not only buying up one documentary film company after another, but also training senior British diplomats in media skills. Whether this government contract by the undiplomatic Geldof to polish the public appearances of the FCO is linked to the closeness of the former Boomtown Rat to Blair and Gordon Brown in last year’s G8 gathering is a question not likely to be asked by the many journalists now on the Geldof payroll.
On Ten Alps’ books are a string of commentators who can be booked through Geldof’s ‘Know Comment’ staff for media appearances. These include Maddox and Tim Hames of The Times, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, Steve Richards and Michael Brown of The Independent, New Labour figures Charlie Whelan, Ellie Levenson, Simon Buckby, Peter MacMahon, David Clark and Alan Milburn and all-purpose Muslim thinker Ziauddin Sardar. Oh yes, focus group whiz Deborah Mattinson is also one of Sir Bob’s charmed circle.
News values
As far as I could tell none of Sir Bob’s crew of commentators had anything to say about the 30th anniversary of Harold Wilson’s resignation, the subject of a BBC documentary based on the tapes of the former Prime Minister and his secretary Marcia Falkender made by Barrie Penrose and Roger Courtiour. The only paper to give any prominence to the programme was The Daily Mail, whose two-page spread on March 13 conveyed the seriousness as well accuracy of the coup plot allegations. On that day The Guardian’s new political editor Patrick Wintour gave us nothing on Wilson, but a full page on the former leader of the Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire under the headline: ‘I should have been a Trappist monk.’ Ah, the joys of joined-up journalism.