BAP
There was a nice little twist to be observed by followers of the British American Project when Home Office minister Baroness Scotland dashed to Washington this summer seeking to prevent the extradition of the NatWest Three, caught in the long shadow of Enron. The old friend of Tony and Cherie Blair was a young barrister when she was recruited to the Atlanticist freemasonry in 1987. BAP was not just a rite of passage for Baroness Scotland. She continues to serve on the UK advisory board with her old BBC pal James Naughtie and Mike Maclay, the man from Hakluyt. The small irony she may have pondered as she flew west on behalf of the wealthy City trio was that one of the funders of the BAP used to be the NatWest Charitable Trust.
The influence of the unelected Baroness Scotland may wane rapidly once Blair goes, but the BAP will still have plenty of members around Gordon Brown should the man, who has already said he wants to replace Trident, begin to stray from Atlanticist orthodoxy. Thinking even further ahead we have BAP veteran ‘two brains’ David Willetts on hand for a future Conservative cabinet. Already a powerful influence on David Cameron is Steve Hilton,([1]) an early BAP recruit and a fellow trustee of the Citizenship Foundation with Maclay.
Guardian news
Leaving the comfort of her Guardian column, Madeleine Bunting announced to her readers in June: ‘I’ve reached a point where I want to do more than describe and comment I want to try to shape debates, to move upstream in the process of how ideas bring about change.’ The chosen new arena for her talents was the congenial world of thinktankery Demos, no less, the home of the Third Way dreamed up by Geoff Mulgan (before he became top policy adviser at No 10) and Martin Jacques (after he moved on from Marxism Today).
Whoops! Just weeks after Ms Bunting’s much-heralded move ‘upstream’ Demos announced:
‘Madeleine Bunting has decided to resign as Director of Demos. Since it has emerged that her vision for Demos is incompatible with that of the trustees, she has decided to focus on her interests as a writer and a thinker at this point in her career. She will resume her regular column in the Guardian and her position as Associate Editor, and has agreed a book contract with the publishers Granta, on the future of the countryside.’
Does this mean that Bunting, who came to The Guardian as protégé of its grand old man, Hugo Young, and for some years was married to its now political editor, Patrick Wintour, is moving back downstream? Or is this just another Third Way?
A couple of Bunting’s colleagues in the first-class lounge of The Guardian are also on the move. Lover of all things American, Jonathan Freedland tells his readers he writes regularly for the Daily Mirror, Jewish Chronicle and London Evening Standard as well as The Guardian that he has finally clocked the importance of climate change. ‘I am ashamed to say it took a movie,’ he confessed in September, ‘to make me realise what, above all others, is surely the greatest political question of our time.’ The movie in question is An Inconvenient Truth by his old pal Al Gore. So what did Al talk to you about in May, Jonathan, when you interviewed him at the Hay Literary Festival? And didn’t Big Al’s green credentials impress you when he was Bill Clinton’s vice-president and you were an eager young Guardian newshound in DC?
Freedland’s fellow Guardian columnist Martin Kettle, the Communist turned great friend of Tony Blair and New Labour, has just discovered the City of London is not all it’s cracked up to be. As the Square Mile starts just down the road from his Farringdon Road office, and as Big Bang occurred in 1986, two years after Comrade Kettle joined the paper, this might be considered something of an oversight. As his beloved New Labour embraced the City and all its works, it must have come as a terrible shock to discover in 2006 that ‘Big Bang fuelled gross inequality, epitomised possessive individualism and cemented a cultural and housing apartheid’.
For services rendered?
In 2003 that giant of regional newspaper publishing, Tim Bowdler, the head of Johnston Press, sacked the independent-minded editor of the evening paper read by the constituents of Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson. He was made a CBE in the Queen’s Birthday honours list. Can a resignation list knighthood be far behind?
Con by name
Also mentioned in dispatches is Con Coughlin, the new foreign editor of The Daily Telegraph. In his days on The Sunday Telegraph Coughlin falsely attributed a story about the son of Colonel Gadaffi to a ‘British banking official’ when it had been given to him by officers of MI6. In the course of losing the subsequent libel battle, it transpired MI6 had been supplying Coughlin with material for years. So who in September raised this defamation drongo to this dizzy new height? The then Telegraph Group editor-in-chief John Bryant who, in his Daily Mail days, had helped secure a British passport for the barefoot South African runner Zola Budd in time for the 1984 Olympics. And what were Bryant’s welcoming words for Coughlin? ‘Con is a journalist par excellence for our times. His skills and expertise are right at the heart of the foreign, defence and security issues that confront us daily.’
Evening Standard business editor Chris Blackhurst also seems to be a bit slow catching on. He started a recent glowing piece about ‘City Minister’ Ed Balls: ‘Something seismic is occurring in the Government, otherwise known as Gordon Brownland. Fingers crossed, but for the first time ever, it’s showing signs of falling in love with the City.’ Not so his Standard colleague Anthony Hilton. The veteran financial editor followed reports that at least 4,000 City workers will receive bonuses of at least £1m this year with a piece under the headline ‘We can’t afford this house price madness’.
Notes
[1] See, for example, ‘Power couple behind the new Tory throne’ The Sunday Times, 26 March 2006, <www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2092-2103339,00.html>