Mendelsohn and Labour funding
For a party already £20m in debt, Labour’s reported spend of £1m on the autumn election-that-never-was doesn’t chime well with the prudence on which Prime Minister Gordon Brown built his reputation. The man tasked with sorting out the financial mess now that Lord Levy has followed Tony Blair into the sunset is his old Labour Friends of Israel (LFI) colleague Jon Mendelsohn.
Announcing the appointment of the business lobbyist in August, Labour said Mendelsohn’s role would be to ‘improve overall organisational efficiency and to develop the party’s future financial strategy. He will work hand-in-hand with party staff on strengthening and extending our supporter base, seeking value for money in our expenditure and helping to build a party machinery that can best fight a general election, whenever the Prime Minister chooses to call it.’
A year before donating £5,000 to help fund Mr Brown’s uncontested leadership bid, Mendelsohn was reported by The Jewish Chronicle as saying: ‘If he is our next Labour leader, Israel will have a very strong, supportive and practical friend in the UK.’
Mendelsohn, who jointly founded the LLM Communications lobbying firm in 1997 after advising Blair on business, is reported to have left the company he set up with Jack Straw’s former aide, Ben Lucas, and the man who now heads Compass, Neal Lawson. Readers will recall the trio being a target of Greg Palast when the American journo turned over the money-making activities of well-connected New Labour types in 1998.
Mendelsohn sits on the international advisory board of the Harold Hartog School of Government and Policy at Tel Aviv University. Alongside him there is Sir Jeremy Beecham, the former leader of Newcastle City Council, the first chair of the Local Government Association, the chair of Labour’s National Executive Committee in 2005-2006 and a key figure in New Labour’s North-East redoubt for many years.
Dougie and Wendy and BAP
Mendelsohn’s boss in planning the next election is International Development Secretary Douglas Alexander. His sister, Wendy, recently assumed the leadership of the party in Scotland – like their joint patron, Brown – without being elected. The pair are long-standing alumni of the British American Project (BAP), as is another key Brown Cabinet, Ed Miliband. Working for Douglas Alexander in overseas development in the House of Lords is Shriti Vadera, another BAP member. A UBS Warburg investment banker before becoming a Treasury adviser to Brown, Vadera was involved in the sell-off of the defence research company Qiniteq and the part-privatisation of the London Tube system.
Twigg resurfaces on the Mersey
The largely publicly funded career of another Lord Levy associate, Stephen Twigg (Lobsters passim), continues with news from Liverpool that he is to replace local Iraq war opponent Bob Wareing in West Derby, a constituency with which the director of the Foreign Policy Centre had no previous connection. Twigg will be a welcome ally on Merseyside of old LFI friends and war backers Louise Ellman and Jane Kennedy.
A band of brothers
The tightness of the New Labour media and political circle was exemplified in the days following the November publication of the Independent Police Complaints Commission report on the Stockwell shooting when senior Guardian executive – and a possible future editor – Ian Katz described his disappointment with Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair:
‘By one of those ironies that seem to carry some greater moral, if only you could divine it, I first met Ian Blair at the London home of Lord Levy. It was long before Yates of the Yard had begun his dogged marathon through the corridors of power, and we had been invited to one of Levy’s famous Friday night dinners.’
What a thick undergrowth cash-for-honours investigator John Yates must have had to hack through when his boss at the Met had been a welcome guest of one of his prime suspects! That cosy intimacy is repeatedly illustrated in Peter Oborne’s The Triumph of the Political Class. He quotes this from the diary of then Daily Mirror editor Piers Morgan of a 1997 dinner with new Home Secretary Jack Straw:
‘I asked him what he plans to do about Myra Hindley, as he has to make a formal decision soon about whether she will ever be released from prison. He [Straw] smirked: “Well, officially, I fully intend to afford her the same rights as any other person in Britain…..but unofficially if you think I’m going down as the Home Secretary that released Myra Hindley, then you must be fucking joking.” ’
Writes Oborne: ‘Two months later Straw announced that Hindley would end her life behind bars.’ As Oborne observes: ‘Had this story come to light before Myra Hindley’s death, Straw’s remarks might have left him open to judicial review.’
Man bites old saw
What times we are in when Daily Mail columnist Oborne approvingly quotes from Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky and Ed Herman. Oborne’s latest book also points out that ‘chroniclers of the New Labour government as well as biographers of the Prime Minister have effectively ignored Rupert Murdoch’. Jon Sopel of the BBC never mentioned him in his 1995 Blair biog; in 550 pages on New Labour, The Observer’s Andrew Rawnsley gave Murdoch three name checks; and John Rentoul of The Independent on Sunday managed ‘10 brief mentions’ in his big Blair book.
Was it any different with Margaret Thatcher? ‘Hugo Young’s much-praised book on Margaret Thatcher, One of Us, reserves one minor, passing reference to Murdoch,’ writes Oborne.
Will, the political chroniclers be more outspoken when the next generation of Murdochs inherits the Dirty Digger’s mantle of mendacity?