(c) www.lobster-magazine.co.uk (Issue 43)  | |||
| Summer 2002 |
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Issue 43 | |
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Tittle-tattle 1
Tom Easton
Mandy, The Independent and Europe
As pictures of H'Angus the Monkey, the new elected mayor of Hartlepool, filled the news pages, it emerged more quietly that the other public face of that poor North-East town, Peter Mandelson, had joined the international advisory board of News and Media, the owners of The Independent and The Independent on Sunday. In a bizarre bid to revive the flagging fortunes of the daily, editor Simon Kelner, a long-time ally of Mandelson, made membership of the Euro its principal campaigning issue.
Keen single currency enthusiasts on the paper include political editor Andrew Grice, columnists David Aaronovitch and Yasmin Alibhai-Brown (see below), and political commentator and author of the pulped Mandelson biography Donald Macintyre. Still influential at the paper now taking 'the broader view' is former Brussels correspondent Sarah Helm, the wife of Tony Blair's chief of staff, Jonathan Powell. Both are close to an earlier editor of The Independent who is also strongly pro-Euro: Andrew Marr is now political editor of the BBC.
Mandelson has long been a leading figure in the European Movement, but its fortunes seem to be as popular as those of Leo Gillen, the businessman buddy of Mandy defeated by the Hartlepool Monkey. A former official of the pro-Euro Britain in Europe campaign recently disclosed that the ageing membership of the shell of the tax-funded (from both US and UK sources) Cold War EM now barely reaches four figures and hardly any of them live outside the Home Counties.
Islington South: a Labour-free zone?
Not that life inside the M25 is getting much easier for New Labourites. On the same day that H'Angus was elected in Hartlepool, Islington South - the constituency as near as anywhere to the spiritual home of New Labour - lost its last few Labour councillors. Sacked New Labour Cabinet minister Chris Smith now finds himself without a single Labour councillor in his constituency and the party that was once proud to be Blair's Praetorian guard is effectively moribund.
Friends of Mo
Smith gets no mention from his Islington near-neighbour Mo Mowlam in her memoirs, Momentum. Both were students in the USA. Both were early members of the British American Project. Both were officials of the Tribune Group of Labour MPs as it became a tame leadership vehicle. Both were very close to Mandy and Blair. Both were very much modernising members of the New Labour Cabinet after the 1997 election. And both were thrown out of the Cabinet.
While Smith merits no mention in the Mowlam book she had lucratively serialised in the Daily Mail, one of her regular guests earns several. Bill Clinton's Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was a rising academic in the United States when Mowlam was there sitting at the feet of 'futurist' Alvin Toffler. Albright helped train young spooks at the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service before moving to its Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), an institution which was largely run by older ones, including Ray Cline from the CIA's operations directorate. The CSIS link to the American Tendency in the Labour Party for many years was Joe Godson, the US labour attaché in London who worked closely against the Left with Hugh Gaitskell (see Lobster 31). How much of this history is known to Mowlam is not revealed in her memoirs. Nor does Mowlam respond to the speculation in Julia Langdon's biography of her that she had CIA connections of her own.
Hennessy
History is the business of Peter Hennessy, but when asked to give the James Cameron Memorial Lecture to inquiring young journalism students at London's City University under the title 'Open government, Whitehall and the press since 1945', Hennessy managed to avoid even mentioning the Information Research Department. For such a massive Whitehall operation employing hundreds of people and spending enormous sums of taxpayers' money for 30 of those postwar years to remain out of sight of the distinguished professor is quite an achievement. Some secrets are indeed well hidden.
Hennessy's lecture, along with the rest of the James Cameron series, has recently been published by Politico's as Media Voices. Much more revealing than the history professor's dim effort is Tom Bower's lecture 'Robert Maxwell: a very British experience' given shortly after the death of the media tycoon who harried and threatened Bowyer with the law right up until his mysterious death. But, Bowyer tells his student audience, journalists should not blame the defamation laws for their routine failure to expose wrongdoing. Writers who tried to nail Maxwell 'were obstructed and hindered in their pursuit of their quarry to the bitter end by newspaper proprietors and television executives', said Bower. 'The reason was that too many media executives in television and the press were, and remain, part of the culture of coziness.'
The lecture series is edited by City University journalism professor Hugh Stephenson. A former Foreign Office diplomat, Stephenson became editor of the New Statesman soon after the formation of the Social Democratic Party in 1981 and wrote Claret and Chips, a shortand rather uninformative bookabout his many friends in the new party, the following year. Stephenson apologises in his introduction to Media Voices for the absence in the book of one of the 14 lectures in the series - that of James Cameron's old historian friend, Studs Terkel, under the title 'The journalist in flesh and blood'. Stephenson, explaining the omission, says: 'The evening was part reminiscence and part answers to questions from the audience and there was no editable text.' This, from a professor of journalism?
Someone who probably could have knocked out a reasonable account of Terkel's talk is John Lloyd, who succeeded Stephen-son in the editor's chair at the New Statesman. A former labour editor and then Moscow correspondent of the Financial Times,Lloyd remains an 'associate editor' and is also an 'associate' of the Foreign Policy Centre (FPC), the strongly pro-EU New Labour think-tank. The FPC is run by Mark Leonard, the son of Dick Leonard, the right-wing Labour MP close to Anthony Crosland who for many years was assistant editor of The Economist. Lloyd and Leonard Jr. keep interesting company at the FPC. Independent columnist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown (see above) is 'senior researcher' and career MI6 officer Meta (now Baroness) Ramsay is on the advisory council. Alongside Lloyd and Ramsay are Sir Michael Butler, the former British permanent representative to the European Community and, according to the FPC, 'the originator of the Hard ecu plan and Chairman of the City's European Committee'. Tony Blair's fund-raiser and foreign affairs envoy Lord Levy is also on the advisory committee.
Enron and New Labour
Greg Palast is returning to his native United States after kicking open a few windows on to the lobbying doings of the Blair government and its business friends (see Lobster 36). Once Enron collapsed Palast revealed that it was its name he had used to ease open the doors of No 10. The pliant guardian was Blair's defence and Europe adviser, Roger Liddle, close ally and joint author with Peter Mandelson, of the vacuous The Blair Revolution.
Old friends of Mandelson and Liddle at Citigate Public Affairs, Richard (Lord) Faulkner and Rex Osborn, ran Enron Europe's public affairs operation in London, but were pretty much ignored by the media after the crooked company's collapse. Two explanations were offered by journalists I asked about the omission. One is that political journalists don't understand business and business reporters don't follow politics, so as lobbying links the two, little gets written by either group. The other reason given was that public affairs companies are regular sources for harried hacks, so tend not to be fingered in stories themselves. That some New Labour politicos move back and forth between journalism and public affairs might also have something to do with it.
No question about one New Labour figure who knows a lot about business - Gavyn Davies, the Goldman Sachs partner who now chairs the BBC when he is not advising his wife's boss, Gordon Brown. A long-time colleague of Davies at Goldman's is David Fleischer, the bullish Enron analyst at Goldman Sachs. He was recommending Enron as a Buy until almost the moment Enron filed for the biggest Chapter 11 bankruptcy in US history.
In July last year Fleischer published a 'Conference Call Transcript' on Enron. One investor asked him: 'You'd concede that when stock was trading on 50 times next year's earnings, that was slightly entering the realms of science fiction?'
Davies' colleague Fleischer replied: 'Well, I look back and ask myself why wasn't I smarter back then.....As I look at this company today, I'm trying to not make excuses for the past, but look at the present and value it going forward.'
We don't yet know whether Fleischer advised any friends of New Labour to invest in Enron. Perhaps we should ask Lord Wakeham, the accountant on the Enron board who until the Enron crash and the Andersen fallout was the man No 10 regarded as doing a solid job at the Press Complaints Commission. But then Wakeham's senior full-time official at the PCC is Guy Black - a very old friend indeed of the man who shares the Hartlepool limelight with H'Angus the Monkey. Such a small world. Did someone once call it globalisation?
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