Wick the forgotten
One of the most prestigious, yet least challenging, posts in British journalism is that of Washington correspondent. Prestigious because of the importance of the United States; but least challenging because the natives speak English, more or less; and there are so many ready-made stories ripe for recycling to Britain, as the Internet now makes clear to anyone wondering where their favourite stateside hack picked up his – it usually is a he – latest little gem. What’s disappointing is how little insight into Atlanticism these big beasts of the journalistic firmament bring back to London when their Washington years have eased them up the career tree back in London. Michael White, still busy dissing any possibility of political conspiracy to his Guardian readers and BBC listeners despite being a Washington hack during President Reagan’s IranContra years, is probably the worst of them in this regard. But his old Guardian colleague, Jim Naughtie, is not far behind and also has all his British American Project (Lobsters passim) baggage – none of it disclosed to BBC Today programme listeners.
One of the better post-war Washington reporters has been Godfrey Hodgson. But even his Guardian obituary of Charles Z Wick, the Hollywood producer and political fundraiser Reagan put in charge of the United States Information Agency in 1981, fell way short of his subject’s significance for British readers. Yes, it was important to be reminded that Wick instituted a USIA blacklist that included Coretta Scott King and Walter Cronkite. But there was nothing of Wick’s important role in domestic European politics during the revived Cold War of the Reagan/ Thatcher/Kohl years.
Wick’s work is not hard to uncover. A sceptical Senate Foreign Relations Committee forced the USIA director to divulge all his contacts with those he met in Europe during Reagan’s fierce anti-Soviet reign, and published them in 1984 for any Washington correspondent to pour over as USIA: Recent Developments. While Greenham Common women were protesting in the UK and the Social Democratic Party (SDP) was being set up to, among other things, cement the then fragile Atlantic alliance, Wick was in London seeing senior TV, radio and news executives, civil servants, academics, politicians and business figures promising ‘public diplomacy’ backing for their efforts to stifle the critics of Reagan and Thatcher. All were named in the Senate hearings document. Wick was also the organiser of the 1983 White House meeting (Lobsters passim) at which Rupert Murdoch and James Goldsmith became part of this propaganda effort.
High on Wick’s agenda during his European trips was the building up of what the White House called a ‘successor generation’ of sympathetic European leaders. The Wick diary entry recorded for his UK trip in September 1982 says: ‘The President’s Youth Exchange Initiative was the cornerstone of his visit.’ That the British American Project for the Successor Generation (the BAP’s original title) came into being on Wick’s watch shortly thereafter may be pure coincidence. But British readers of Wick’s obituaries, and Hodgson’s was probably the most detailed of them, might have been given the chance to reflect on the odds of that possibility themselves – had they been told.
The son-in-law also rises
Two other key Atlanticist figures died recently, and British newspaper readers were not much better served by their obituarists.(1) Lord Thomson of Monifieth, who died in October, had been better known in recent years as father of senior BBC executive Caroline Thomson and father-in-law of Roger Liddell, the SDP founder member and lifelong pal of Peter Mandelson, who became adviser on Europe and defence at No 10 when Tony Blair became Prime Minister. Liddell, like his wife’s father, gravitated to a Brussels job when Mandelson became an EU commissioner. Lord Thomson, who shared his son-in-law’s strong interest in defence and Europe, became a European commissioner in 1972, one of the many Atlanticist Gaitskellites to find the Labour Party an increasingly inhospitable home as the Vietnam War, the Chile coup, and other US foreign policies failed to chime with younger party members as they had with Thomson’s older post-war and early Cold War generation.
Lord Thomson finished his life as a Liberal Democrat and, apart from several business interests, had a spell chairing the Independent Broadcasting Authority. Lord Holme of Cheltenham, who chaired the successor Broadcasting Standards Commission until one of Rupert Murdoch’s papers turned over his colourful private life, became a LibDem when his Liberal party merged with the Labour breakaway SDP after the 1987 election. Never elected, he nonetheless exerted behind-the-scenes influence over ‘moderate’ centre politics for over 20 years, enjoyed several multinational directorships, was treasurer of the Green Alliance and was a key figure in setting up and navigating the British American Project (Lobsters passim).
The Lord giveth
Still very much in the land of the living is an old political associate of both departed peers, Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee. A teasing thought crossed my mind during the phoney leadership war in the days before the Labour Party conference when Toynbee switched her allegiance to David Miliband from Gordon Brown. (We are talking ancient history, of course: of times BC, Before Crisis, when the PM had not become saviour of the economic world.) In the same week came news in Polly’s paper that supermarket heir and ex-New Labour minister Lord (David) Sainsbury was reportedly willing to help fund the Foreign Secretary’s leadership bid. The timing led me to reflect on the past history of Polly and David. When she was a rightish Labour type, Sainsbury was helping fund the rightish Labour Fabian Society. When she helped launch the SDP, Sainsbury was on hand with cash. When Polly refused to join the newly formed LibDems in 1987, she stuck with the David Owen rump of Social Democrats that relied heavily on Sainsbury dosh. Both shared early loyalty to New Labour – she writing supportive columns while he signed big cheques – and then came their apparent simultaneous conversion to the charismatic qualities of the banana-waving Foreign Secretary.
Four possibilities occur: have Polly Toynbee and David Sainsbury shared uniquely astute political wisdom for over 30 years? Does Polly get free shopping at Sainsbury’s? Does The Guardian happily take the Sainsbury advertising income and throw in Polly’s column for free? And have these two important figures ever been in the same place at the same time? The more serious question is this: why have we yet to read a serious account of the life of David Sainsbury, arguably the single most significant individual political donor in post-war Britain?
LFI news
Thoughts of political donations quickly bring the Labour Friends of Israel to mind and with it the deafening media silence that has descended on this controversial area since the succession of Jon Mendelsohn to the job done for so many years by his old LFI pal Lord Levy. While inquiries are still apparently proceeding into the David Abrahams funny money, we should note that leading LFI personnel, including new Jim Murphy and Jamers Purnell, continue to move into important jobs as a result of Gordon Brown’s autumn reshuffle. In the Commons, leading LFI light Louise Ellman has succeeded former LFI life president Gwyneth Dunwoody as chair of the Commons Select Committee on Transport; LFI veteran Mike Gapes stays on as chair of Foreign Affairs, and who is that old radical lefty who is now chairing the Security and Intelligence Committee? Step forward one-time Hornsey College of Art rebel and comrade of the striking miners, Dr Kim Howells. Described by The Jewish Chronicle as ‘a staunch friend of Israel’, the Pontypridd MP and old friend of Lord Kinnock was a minister from the day New Labour was elected in 1997. As a Foreign Office minister in 2006 Howells criticised Muslim leaders for condemning British foreign policy. Howells has as good a CV as one would wish to become a welcome recruit to the ‘War on Terror’ being so expensively waged on our behalf by the still unaccountable intelligence services.
Peter’s friends
In its same October issue The Jewish Chronicle reported one Israeli diplomat telling them that Peter Mandelson had been ‘extremely friendly’ towards Israel as the EU Trade Commissioner. At this writing (late October) events around the friendships and confidences of Gordon Brown’s new Business Secretary on and off yachts are moving so fast, it would be worthless saying too much. But a few things are worth remembering.
- Nathaniel Rothschild is not the only member of that banking dynasty to be close to the former Hartlepool MP. Evelyn Rothschild and wife Lynn Forester are old Mandelson pals and the former handed over £250,000 to launch the great man’s ‘think tank’ toy, the Policy Network.
- As events unfold in Israel, it’s worth recalling that Mandelson shared a pro-Israel platform in London six years ago with ex- and would-be-again Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
- Most of the Russian oligarchs have Israeli passports.
- Mandelson’s old LFI friend Jon Mendelsohn has a big hole to fill in New Labour finances.
Still one of Peter’s friends?
It would be interesting to know if the friendship of Mandelson with Harold Wilson’s old press aide and minister Gerald (now Sir Gerald) Kaufman has survived the years. The 78-year-old Manchester Gorton MP is not going quietly into the night, but not for him is that to do with controversy over money, yachts and powerful friends. In 2002, Kaufman’s highly critical BBC documentary about Israel, ‘The End of the Affair’, generated criticisms that he was anti-semitic – and he a member of the Jewish Labour Movement and its predecessor, Paole Zion. His Wikipedia entry shows him sporting a T-shirt with the legend: ‘A Cry for Justice in Palestine’. With hair, he might have qualified as what American friends call an ageing radical – a Grey Panther. Not a sobriquet that can readily assigned to the darkly coiffured Business Secretary.
Out of focus
A Mandelson friend of slightly shorter standing is Deborah Mattinson, the focus group guru he recruited to his Shadow Communications Agency alongside her then associate Philip (now Lord) Gould. Ms Mattinson has grown wealthy in the subsequent 20 years, some of it on the back of New Labour as adviser to the party organisation and as the beneficiary of assorted Treasury-funded opinion-testing projects. Regular readers may recall (Lobsters 51 and 53) that some of the focus group methods of her Opinion Leader Research (OLR is part of Lord Bell’s Chime communication conglomerate) have long been called into question, so there was little surprise when an October Independent headline ‘PM “used crony to fix nuclear power inquiry”’ drew our attention to Gordon Brown’s personal pollster’s more recent activities. Greenpeace had denounced a government consultation organised by Ms Mattinson as ‘a sham and insult to the people who took part’, a conclusion largely upheld by the Market Research Standards Board when it found that material given to focus groups by OLR was ‘inaccurately or misleadingly presented’. When a serious history of New Labour finally appears it will be interesting to learn how much its leading characters – many of them routinely strangers to the truth on matters as diverse as war and money – employed ‘research’ methods characterised by the same imprecision.
Victims of history
Innocent people can suffer from past deceit. When four members of the International Rescue Committee (IRC) were killed in Afghanistan during the summer, the US-based charity’s chief, George Rupp, spoke movingly about their tragic fate. But opponents of US foreign policy, perhaps including some in Afghanistan, may remember that the IRC has a history of being implicated in covert intelligence activities. Eric Chester, in his 1995 book Covert Network: Progressives, the International Rescue Committee and the CIA, concludes:
‘As it grew and developed, the IRC became increasingly tied to the intelligence community; during the first years of the Cold War, it coordinated a series of highly sensitive covert operations directed at the Soviet bloc countries. After 1953, the Committee became an integral component of the psychological and political warfare programs conducted by the CIA.’
Naught there for the comfort of today’s humanitarians to learn that fairly or otherwise, history bites back.
Notes
- The role of obituarists as gatekeepers of orthodox historical wisdom may one day attract serious research attention. If it already has, I’ve missed it, and would appreciate the references.