Abrahams Says Mendelsohn Knew, Mendelsohn Says He's Lying
This is now becoming farcical. Like ferrets in a sack, things are becoming desperate.The mendacious Mendelsohn is in a hole, there is no way out for him now. On LabourHome activists are calling for him to go. He was Gordon's choice to raise funds for Labour...
91 comments:
All right Mr Brown, just let me see your hands.
Other side as well please.
Well, everything appears to be clean here Sir - with the exception of those decomposing bogies wedged underneath your nails...but I'll overlook those on this occasion...
So I think my business here is concluded, Sir.
You'll be glad to hear we've caught the orchestrator of all the trouble, Sir...
his name's...
Mendelsohn or something...
I was only wondering today (honest) when your ferrets.jpg would reappear.
Enough, I say, of these shenanigans at Westminster! Some of us have work to do and can't afford the time for compulsive viewing of the continuing train-wreck that is Zanu Labour.
Give it a rest, Guido. That goes for Iain Dale too.
Mendelson is Brown's creature. If he is finished then so is Brown.
Survival or meltdown. What's it to be?
Say there were 'a pretty straight kind of guy' with experience of high office that the Labour Party could call to arms. Would they bite the bullet and recruit him to wait in the wings in case the PM has to resign on health grounds? Or not?
Hari on BBC news: 'Abrahams says that for every donation he has a letter of thanks from the Labour p
Party.'
This comparison degrades ferrets.
Cute little fellas!
Looks like there's going to be quite the changing of the guard. If Abrahams has kept every letter, and Yates forces him to hand them over, things could get tastier yet!
http://www.arksark.org/blog/
If a Harri said on the BBC Abrahams apparently has a thank you letter from the Labour Party for every donation he made then that is interesting because of course they WERE NOT made in his name - which is evidence of systematic lawbreaking at the heart of the Labour Party. Who suggested that Abrahams make donations in this way to hide his name, sounds like the loans that were made to disguise certain individuals not so long ago ... will the old bill be popping round to see Lord Levy again??
Gordon, and most of the cabinet (Straw, Hain, Harman, et. al) are compromised. Who will be left to run the country (into the ground)..?
And what about all that money they wasted on Kings Cross - which has no loos or open shops and stands ready for an invasion from the north (they have strong bladders up there) which will never come - never mind go to Paris?
Alan Johnston your time has come!
From postman to prime minister.
the plan is in place.
you read it here first.
dangermouse: running the country?
dangerous assumption!
Given Martin/Abrahams's record, including his pretend wife and family when seeking candidate selection, one is tempted to believe Mendelsohn over him.
What was their old row about (when Abrahams was attempting to be accepted as a Labour Friend of Israel), by the way?
- Frank Little
For the benefit of Mr Brown
There will be a grand showdown on Westminster Green
The Labour crooks will all be there
Late of Michael Levy's fair - what a scene
All the stunts and dodges, swerves and wotsits
Lastly through a bog that's a real mire
In this way Mr Bean will challenge the world.
I just typed into Google:
"gordon brown" "mr bean"
and got 36,800 results.
This Mr Bean jibe is going to stick.
Guido, it's the brazen lying that is the common denominator here. Ferrets in the proverbial sack, desperately ducking & diving as past crimes catch up......
Never mind the 'Mr Bean' piss taking, here in Scotland decades of Labour hegemony has resulted in a culture of the the stuffed brown envelope, political whores pimping for the price of a sleazy bung.
Now we have Labour's past crimes & misdemeanours returning to haunt them, not just in Westminster, but in Bottler Broon's Scottish backyard where Wendy Alexander's arrogant and cavalier approach to financial probity has left her with no alternative other than resignation.
The scoundrels have had it coming to them big time.
Time to drive them out.
Thank goodness for the blogs. I have just had a look at The Times on line and they do not have a single story about Labour on their front page. Why is this ?
This is like a murder in a bad movie when all the suspects point at each other. In your heart of hearts you know they all did it but you can't quite prove it.
i keep expecting to see Brian Ricks trousers to fall down , as the rocking horse photo flies into pc yates hand , whilst harmen is is being clubbed by gordo who in turn is clubbing leslie who in turn is clubbing mendlesho who in turn is clubbing abrahams .
meanwhile wendy alexander ends up in a repeat performance.
but there has been talk of gordon going , but harmens saying he should go if she does.
meanwhile jack straw and alan johnson , peterhain look good .
but david milliband , still doing his good work in rescuing the teacher from the teddy islams , do you notice how millibands havent appeared , i wonder why, apparently he was furious with sudanese , not to worry lord ahmed is on his way out to sort it , bit late in liverpool for that.
They won't be able to keep it of the front pages next week.
We have only scratched the surface here.
The Labour front bench kept it's head down all day yesterday trying to come up with line to take.
today, the line seems to be we are all angry and upset.
They spent all day, and thats the best they can come up with. God they are in trouble.
If they are angry and upset now, god help them when the arrests start.
Who is liable to be arrested.
Abrahams, and his little gang, Mendelsohn, Watt, Harman, and a few of her gang, Hain.
That is just for starters, once they start singing then who knows what dirty little secrets will come out.
If it takes a year, maybe two before going to trial, then it should hit just before the next election.
This my friends is about as bad as it gets.
Cheers to one and all.
W.W.
Wheres Poirot and
Miss Marple when you need them they would have solved this in an hour
Please God, let Abrahams have a thank you letter from Harman.
Please God, let abrahams have a thank you letter from Blair/Brown.
Would like both, but settle for Blair as Browns finished now anyway.
W.W.
I want to see this lot go down but but I think your all just dreaming this gang of shiesters own the cps,the police and most of the msm,they will be calling in favours from everywhere,in the middle of december mr Bean will sign us over to the EU and that lot of rubbish will make sure they win.
@dearieme
For the benefit of Mr Brown
There will be a grand showdown on Westminster Green
The Labour crooks will all be there
Late of Michael Levy's fair - what a scene
All the stunts and dodges, swerves and wotsits
Lastly through a bog that's a real mire
In this way Mr Bean will challenge the world.
Good stuff! Should be something for YouTube in that.
I am no lawyer but surely if Labour new Abrahams was giving the money it is their responsibility to register it not his. The law does not ban third party donations as long as they are registered as such.
If Brown gets collared, surely the Queen will need to say "games up lads time for an election." She can't have corruption at the very heart of her government and let it carry on.
I do hope the Tories are bang on, every 'i' dotted and 't' crossed. What are the odds that, in the next week, someone somewhere finds some Tory in similar trouble? Very short. If Cameron has any sense, he will soft pedal this.
Guido, any chance of posting Wendy Alexander's petulant apology on guy news?
Still can't quite believe that she stomped down those steps, gave an exaggerated and sarcastic sigh and then launched into the most insincere apology I have ever seen from a politician. A six year old would have been proud of that act of childish defiance in the face of their own wrong doing.
Wendy "apology" is here
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/7120096.stm
Why would Mossad want Gordon Brown to be Prime Minister?
Left wingers have been consistently anti-Israel, and pro-Palestinian.
Unless you think Mossad are in league with Guido to entrap Labour in corruption allegations? Ah..now I get it.
Olmert House
Shamir Street
Tel Aviv
Israel
Shalom Agent Abraham!
Nice work so far but not exactly a difficult assignment eh? No need for you to go to ground so you can keep popping up as much as you like to bite your friends in the ass, no questions asked. The UK is a conspiracy free zone you see ha ha!
Still, some of our gentile friends in the Britih press suspect you're a shekeless Topol. Don't worry, that's just a ruse to rev up all the Islamophiliac Arab brown nosers. Once they sniff our little Friends of Israel front is bankrolling Gordo they'll be baying for his goolies.
Scarlett and Evans owe us big time for this - a fact that I'll remind them of at the VX Xmas do.
L'hitraot,
Mo Sad
Director
International Slush Funds Inc
PS Don't fret about Mendy - there's worse things in life than being an unemployed voluntary fund raiser!
OT sorry: Pay your TV licence you fuckers
Mossad has the drop on Gay Gordon and his 'Lavender Marriage'.
> Mossad has the drop on Gay Gordon and his 'Lavender Marriage'.
It's not exactly secret is it?
I see that the Dear Leader is continuing to try and appear innocent by sending groveling letters to the police offering support for their investigation and announcing all sorts of reviews into party funding. Is he sick, or what? Our son, a serving senior detective, reckons this is the hallmark of guilt laced with anxiety, which he has witnessed in criminal suspects over many years. He reckons, and I agree, that Brown should have made one statement at the beginning, aka "I'm bringing in the cops" and then stayed clear of it.
Mea Culpa me thinks!
With each passing day so my impression of the incompetence, and dishonesty of the Labour Party, and its government of this county, grows. With each new rumour of duplicity there's a growing conviction that this rumour is true. The Labour Party appears to be drifting, rudderless, on a sea of sleaze.
The integrity of its leader, Mr. Brown, has been repeatedly challenged. It's no longer sufficient for Labour MPs to trawl round the TV studios expressing shock horror that anybody could ever dream of challenging Mr. Brown's integrity. The mantle of integrity is not a God given right. Integrity, like respect has to be earned.
Senior members of the Labour Party and the Government have been accused of breaking the law. Indeed, have been accused of acting as if the law doesn't apply to them. For years, certain members have acted with the almost unbelievable arrogance of pre-revolution aristocracy.
In the first months of Mr.Brown's premiership, disaster upon disaster has revealed itself.
What, though has Mr.Brown done to restore confidence in his self-appointed right to govern? When the news first broke of the donor scandal, he did, eventually, give an impression of action. He admitted that Watt's actions had been illegal and he had sacked him. Whether in this Nulab world of spin and smoking mirrors, Watt had resigned, or Brown had indeed sacked him is a moot point. No matter, Mr. Brown had given an impression of action, perhaps even of integrity.
Since that day though, he has done nothing to show the voters that he is in control. He rules over a government and party that has among its senior members, Harriet Harman, apparently and allegedly guilty of a number of criminal actions, Wendy Alexander, self-confessed breaker of the rules of accepting donations and therefore, by her own admissions, an un-sentenced criminal; Mendelsohn, chosen by Mr.Brown to lead his election fund raising team, guilty, by his own admission, of covering up, some say for months, the fact that illegal donations were being accepted by Labour Party officials; Peter Hain, conveniently forgetting to register a £5,000 donation, remembering only when it looked as if the police might be investigating his records. How many more? We don't know, and may never know. The lingering smell of rotten fish hangs in the air though. It will continue to do so unless and until Mr.Brown shows so evidence of leadership.
Mr.Brown must request Wendy Alexander's resignation. He should demand Harriet Harman's immediate resignation. If they refuse to resign, then Mr.Brown should make public the fact that they have so refused , and should categorically state that he has no confidence in their continuing to be members of his government. Peter Hain, together with all of the others who stood for election for the Deputy Leadership of the Party should have their accounts independently audited.
THEN, and only then, will Mr. Brown be able to assume a mantle of integrity. THEN, and only then will MR.Brown be able to put Black November behind him, and start, what he been claiming to be, a new era.
3 facts which knock out Brown's integrity:
1. The unlawful concealed 'donations' so far known publicly [there may well be more] were made in the context of a Brown led and pre-meditated drive to an early election, in which a prime consideration was to ambush/wrong foot the opposition on resources.
2. The [officially titled] General Election fundraiser appointed by Gordon Brown was/is Jon Mendelsohn.
3. Mendelsohn, a long time acquaintance and fellow pro Israel campaigner with David Abrahamas, generated and supervised receipt of all donations in the aborted General Election build up including those at the heart of the controversy.
It beggars belief that this is nothing to with Brown when Mendelsohn as his appointee was acting directly on his behalf in a political stealth mission.
2 observations:
1. The article Guido refers to in which labour activists call for Mendy to go has a poll on the left-hand side asking who should go into the cabinet, and gives some 9 options (varying from Blunkett/Byers to Katy Clark (?)). Activists are so demoralised that the winning option, with 49% of the vote is... none of these. Says quite a lot about the party faithful's morale and enthusiasm for the upper echelons of the party.
2. 11.27PM Friday: "I have just had a look at The Times on line and they do not have a single story about Labour on their front page." The Times has been extraordinarily disinterested in this story. Twice this week (Tues and Fri, I think), they've put some pretty poxy education-related story on the front page. I'm not that well-versed in newspaper editors/proprietors' love-ins with Gordon, but there's clearly something beautiful blossoming in Wapping (on the days I've checked, the Sun's front page has also avoided the story). For how much longer will Lupert back the lame duck that is the Labour party? Time for Dave to carpe diem and embark on some serious Murdoch arse-licking.
I see they've wheeled out Brown's fag hag Sarah to write some guff in today's Sun telling us how we should be educating our kids.
First point: since when did a PR gimp for Camelot become an expert on education?
Second point: Brown must be getting rattled by the gay/rocking horse jibes if he has to start playing the "happily married man" card again. (was it something Eric Moonman implied?)
I almost feel sorry for Brown.
For years he sat in the background playing in the calm of the Treasury, waiting, stiffing opponents, plotting for the Big Job only to find that its turned into a Big Jobbie (as I believe they say in Scotland).
All the seething mess of corruption, lies, graft, spin and incompetence that grew and festered under his predecessor is now exposed...and Brown will carry the can.
But hey, that's politics
Is Brown trying to do a deal with the opposition parties?
Is he offering to make some concessions on trade union funding of the Labour Party if the Tories and Lib Dems go easy on him over the Abrahams donation scandal?
8.50 - 8.51 am.Bill Turnbull describing donor 'RULES' as having been broken.9.24-9.25 am.His female companion describing donor 'RULES' as having been broken.CLEVER EDITING AGAIN.LAWS!! were broken NOT RULES.
Matthew Parris sums up the dismal, empty, mediocrity of Gordon Brown in today's Times:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/matthew_parris/article2980338.ece
To me Brown resembles the Steerpike character in the novel Gormenghast (Gordonghast?) A fanatically ambitious psychopath who seeks personal advancement solely for it's own sake and doesn't care who he destroys in his climb up the greasy pole.
I feel sorry for the poor Sarah, the "Fag Hag". She brings to mind the story of Churchill's comment on the "marriage" of Tom Driberg to a woman of challenging physical appearance - "it just goes to prove that buggers can't be choosers".
I complained to the BBC regarding the 'bbc bias' post above.I'm sure things will change as a result.
@ bbc bias 9.31
They're also calling them 'disguised donations'
Nice and low key...
Some background:
http://www.gregpalast.com/browns-fixer-explains-how-its-donejon-mendelsohn-and-the-secret-tape/
Brown is like a vampire. He has sucked the lifeblood out of Labour, first as Chancellor for ten years and now as leader.
He is a disaster.
Wow Matthew Parris - how did Lurdoch let that one through?
This should have been your Friday caption contest a few months ago Guido.
Is that John Prescott and Rosie Winterton at it again??
Parris is pure genius - go and read it if you haven't already - link to the right on guido's homepage
At a difficult time like this I stop and ask myself, 'what would a man of courage do?' When I ponder the uplifting examples of Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy or Rowan Atkinson the answer is clear. A man of courage would give the police his full cooperation. A man of courage would send Jack Straw out to tell the world that I am innocent. A man of courage would spend the day closeted with his comrades on the National Executive Committtee sharing his great vision for the future. When the going gets tough the tough get going. See you when I get back. Have a wonderful Christmas.
Mendelsohn should go, Harman should go, Hain should go - how far up do you have to go to clean up the mess?
It was a stunning admission. Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s crony explained to the U.S. businessman, in evil detail, exactly how the fix is done in Britain.
Unfortunately, for Jon Mendelsohn and his partners, the “businessman” was, in fact, an undercover reporter for The Observer of London.
Today, Brown’s foes are calling for Mendelsohn’s resignation as chief fundraiser of the Labour Party for his admitted knowledge of £630,000 ($1.2 million) in dodgy, possibly illegal, campaign contributions to Labour.
What’s odd here are the protestations of shock at the behavior of Mendelsohn, described in the Guardian as an “ethical” lobbyist. “Ethical” my arse.
It was exactly nine years ago that Mendelsohn and his lobby firm partners were caught trading cash for access. How this Mendelsohn character ended up heading Labour Party fundraising and how he obtained the sobriquet ‘ethical’ is the real shocker.
I know a few things about this Mendelsohn. The “businessman” with the hidden microphone was me. In June 1998, joined by my recorder and a real US businessman, Mark Swedlund, who designed my elaborate corporate front, I met Mr. Mendelsohn at his tony Soho London office. There Mendelsohn confirmed what was already on tape from his partners in the lobby firm he founded, LLM.
I explained my corporate needs: some environmental rules needed bending. I hinted I was with Enron. Mendelsohn’s partner Neil Lawson told my recorder that, if I paid LLM £5,000 to £20,000 per month, “We can go to anyone. We can go to Gordon Brown if we have to.” Brown was at the time Chancellor of the Exchequer. Could the lobbyist provide concrete examples of a fix?
Easily. Here is a short list of LLM claimed accomplishments:
- Inside information on then-Chancellor Gordon Brown’s budgets.
- Tax avoided by a supermarket chain following millions donated to a New Labour pet project.
- A pass on anti-trust action against client Rupert Murdoch’s media empire.
- And for Gordon Brown, a favor that the Mendelsohn team expected to redeem.
Tesco Goes Tax-Free
LLM, which stands for the founders Lucas, Neil Lawson and Mendelsohn, were about to derail Brown’s plan for a tax on car parks (”parking lots” as we say in the States). This would cost Tesco, the supermarket chain, an LLM client, £20 million annually. LLM was holding secret meetings that week in June 1998 with Tony Blair’s Downing Street Policy Unit to get Tesco exempted from the proposed tax.
The tax threat went away after LLM advised Tesco to drop £11 million into funding for Blair’s odd Millennium Dome project.
[To my US readers: The Dome is a gargantuan tent costing $100 million - no kidding.]
“This government likes to do deals,” Lucas told me.
But this deal was complex, Mendelsohn said, not so simple as cash paid for a tax break. “Tony is very anxious to be seen as ‘green’,” Mendelsohn explained to me and my confederate. “Everything has to be couched in environmental language - even if it’s slightly Orwellian.” So LLM devised a set of cockamamie gimmicks for Tesco, like offering bus services to the elderly, which would paint the retailer green.
It worked. Tesco was spared the tax - though the company denies categorically that its cash dumped into the Dome bought any favors.
Message for Murdoch
The year of my paper’s original investigation (dubbed, “Lobbygate”), anti-trust authorities were looking into Rupert Murdoch’s companies’ alleged predatory pricing practices. LLM carried the word from Downing Street, according to Lucas, that, if Murdoch’s tabloids toned down criticism of new antitrust legislation, the law’s final language would reflect the government’s appreciation. On the other hand, harsh coverage in Murdoch’s papers could provoke problems for the media group in Parliament’s union-recognition bill.
The message to muzzle journalists was not, said Lucas, “an easy one in their culture” - journalists being a trying lot. However, the outcome pleased LLM clientele.
A Peek at the Budget
It also happened that on one of the days I recorded Mendelsohn’s partners, they boasted of informing an LLM client about details of Gordon Brown’s budget plans before the Chancellor’s announcement went public.
A lobbyist competing for my “business,” when asked to match the offer of inside information and deal-making held out by LLM and another New Labour firm said, “It’s appalling. It’s disturbing,” and added that he would refuse to match LLM’s services at any price.
If LLM appeared favored by Brown’s operation, Brown himself received favors from LLM. “Gordon Brown asked us to have our client KPMG [the consultancy] host a breakfast for him where it was pre-arranged that they would praise him for his prudent budgets.” Brown basked in this Potemkin praise-fest - a favor that would be returned with special access (for my own clients, if I paid the retainer).
Whether Mendelsohn, Lawson and Lucas actually pulled off all they claimed, I can’t say. Though just kids in their twenties, LLM had garnered millions in revenue, a lot of loot if for mere advice. No one seriously investigated; no one asked uncomfortable questions of Mr. Brown, Mr. Blair or the man at the center of several of these supposed “deals,” Mr. Peter Mandelson, now an EU Commissioner.
However, that Mendelsohn made these tawdry claims (or grinned at me while his partner made them), and that they were published on page one of every newspaper in the realm - part of an LLM tape broadcast on BBC’s Newsnight - one would think that the perspicacious Mr. Brown would have avoided Mendelsohn like the plague.
But the PM embraced Mr. Let’s-Make-A-Deal. The reason was made clear to me by Mendelsohn himself, a man as brainy as he is cynical and wealthy. Those many years ago, at the dawn of the Blair regime, Mendelsohn handed me a confidential manifesto he’d penned for LLM clients only. It was a map of the soul of New Labour.
Here was a chilling combination of Mendelsohn, Mandelson and Nietzsche. “AN OLD WORLD IS DISAPPEARING AND A NEW ONE EMERGING,” he announced in upper case. In the “Passing World” were “ideology” and “conviction” - which would now be replaced by “Pragmatism” and “Consumption.” “Buying” would replace “Belief.”
And ultimately, in this Brave New Labour World, style was all: “WHAT YOU DO,” wrote Mendelsohn, was passé, replaced by, “HOW YOU DO IT.”
So why demand Mendelsohn’s head now? Gordon Brown is a prudent man whom, I suspect, reads a newspaper or two - and knew exactly whom he had positioned to fill his party’s coin sacks. Mendelsohn is just a gun for hire, a forgettable factotum. I wouldn’t place the blame on the hired gun, but on the man whose finger is on the trigger.
The series “Lobbygate: Cash for Access” was originally published by The Observer (UK) in July 1998 by Greg Palast and Antony Barnett. For a complete history of the scandal, read, “Blair and the Sale of Britain” in The Best Democracy Money Can Buy (Penguin/Constable & Robinson 2004).
OBBYIST JON MENDELSOHN HAS BEEN RENTING HIS INFLUENCE WITH GORDON BROWN FOR A DECADE
by Greg Palast
from The Best Democracy Money Can Buy
ON THE first Wednesday of July 1998, on the floor of the House of Commons, Britain’s prime minister rose to defend himself. According to the news reports, for the first time since his election the year before, Tony Blair’s hands were shaking. The PM denounced the American reporter whose exposé of wholesale corruption in his cabinet “had not one shred of evidence”. Meanwhile, Blair’s press spokesman, a former pornographer named Alastair Campbell, grabbed every newsman he could find in the hallway to whisper that they should not trust a “man in a hat”, while Peter Mandelson, known as Prince of Darkness, and the power behind the power of the prime minister, hissed a warning about “the man with an agenda”. Note: For Britons who can stomach a full autopsy of British democracy, the UK edition of ‘Best Democracy’ has a much expanded chapter, ‘Lobbygate: Cash for Access, Blair and the Sale of Britain” (Constable & Robinson 2003)
Unfortunately, I didn’t get to enjoy any of this. I could hardly keep my eyes open, half-passed-out after 70 sleepless hours in my “safe house” in Crouch End, a workingclass neighborhood in London. I had moved in with sympathetic friends in the middle of the night because of a crank bomb scare at my hotel and to avoid camera crews.
But that’s not why I didn’t get any sleep. My paper, the Observer, had run a front-page story with detailed evidence that cronies of the prime minister, including his princeling and other cabinet members, had bartered policies for payola, cash for access. Our Observer team described lobbyists’ special, secret access to ministers operating a flea market for favors out of 10 Downing Street.
Not a shred of evidence? My paper announced on page one that I had tape recordings of lobbyists explaining exactly how and when and to whom they made the fixes – for American power companies and banks, for friends of Clinton, friends of Bush, friends of Blair, for US media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, and others.
Until our story hit the headlines, Blair was seen as Britain’s incorruptible new leader. He claimed to have put an end to “Tory sleaze,” the cash pay-offs to Margaret Thatcher’s ministers that had tainted the conservative government. (When ExxonMobil wanted to get off the hook for taxes on oil extracted from the North Sea, they paid the Tory energy minister a ten-thousand pound “consulting fee.”) Prime Minister Blair’s New Labour Party avoided the cash-in-envelope lobbyists. But like his good friend Bill Clinton, Blair hoped to turn his once-progressive party into the party of business. In particular, he had an almost fetishistic desire for the affection of US corporations, the entrepreneurial stallions that would pull Olde England out if its tradition-shackled ways. What my Observer team had uncovered was a daisy chain of favors and inside access to confidential information in return for political support from these corporations (and a bit of cash for New Labour cronies). The Prime Minister’s reputation as Mr. Good Government was on the line.
Blair’s attack-masters demanded, the radio and TV stations demanded, I play the tapes. They said, the tapes are phoney. They don’t exist. Palast’s a liar. And now the business editor of the Observer, the brilliant journalistic fanatic Ben Laurance, was shouting at my friends trying to block him at the door at my Crouch End hideaway that I had to get out of bed, get to the BBC studios and confront with tape the number one New Labour fixer, Derek Draper, on another live Newsnight broadcast.
But the truth was, I didn’t have the tape.
The day before, I called my wife who was back home in the States with our one-year-old twins and told her to overnight to me the tape marked “Draper”. It was right in the middle of my desk. Linda said, “I don’t see any tape. There’s no tape here.” The next day, the entire front page of the Mirror was taken up by a photo of a balding, snearing, devious-looking man – me – under a four-inch-high screamer, “THE LIAR”.
The story that became known as “Lobbygate” began innocently enough. Antony Barnett, Britain’s best investigative journalist, got a tip that lobbying firms close to Blair’s New Labour Party government were getting their hands on inside information to pass on to their clients. Antony who, with the editor, Will Hutton, had just asked if I could write for the Observer, thought I might give a couple of these guys a call, maybe hinting to our targets I needed a little influence.
At first, I said no. My idea had been to bring to journalism the full arsenal of weapons used in my official racketeering probes. No more quick and cheap.
What I had in mind would take time and it would cost thousands of pounds.
To do this right, we needed a front, for which I enlisted a top US business executive, Mark Swedlund, formerly with Booz Allen Hamilton, who mixes street smarts with boardroom savvy. We added a former Morgan Stanley executive (no name, sorry) and gave ourselves impressive legitimacy by tying up with one of America’s white shoe law firms well known to Her Majesty (no names, sorry again).
While the target was Britain’s prime minister, if Blair’s cabinet was selling, it was corporate America buying. This would give me the chance, which no American editor would dare do, to get myself inside the corporate influence machinery and see how the deals came down.
The most difficult fake-out was to recreate me. All these lobbyists knew me; it was their job to know. They knew I contributed to the Guardian, but more important, I was, before the election, one of Blair’s much displayed American policy advisers, close in with Blair’s Trade and Industry and energy ministers, “that influential American”, said a big-shot British industrialist. It was bullshit, but now it would be useful bullshit.
I couldn’t wear a false moustache and voice-coder – so I changed from Greg Palast, policy weanie and reporter, to Greg Palast, scuzz-ball, sleaze-o- “consultant” on the take … just like them. I didn’t get my beach-front estate and stable of ponies, I told them, by writing good government advice for the Guardian. I had a damn successful consulting firm that made deals.
At no time did we offer money in return for influence or access or favors (though they would be offered to us). I was looking for something else: what had these lobbyists already done for others. My line: “The Texans I’m working with don’t want a lot of boasting horseshit, these boys need hard, no-nonsense evidence of exactly what you’ve done, for whom. Names, dates, deeds, and solid proof, if you want our business.”
And they delivered … right to my fake office in New York and our “business suite” at the Tower of London Hotel. The spigot of evidenced first opened on June 8, 1998. A Fax for Enron
That morning, I found a surprise in my fax machine, a copy of the United Kingdom’s Trade and Industry Select Parliamentary Committee Report on Energy Policy. What made it surprising was that the report had not yet been released to the public.
Attached to the fax was a short, hand-written note to me from Karl Milner, a lobbyist with GJW Government Relations. During the 1997 general election that brought Tony Blair to power, Milner handled internal communications for Gordon Brown, now Chancellor of the Exchequer, the second most powerful man in government after Blair himself. Milner wrote, “Thought you may be interested.” I was.
I called Milner. Maybe he had not filched the documents from the government but rather had committed the lesser offense of lifting a pre-release copy from a journalist. Milner assured me otherwise. His special access to policy papers for his clients was standard operating procedure. “We have many friends in government. They like to run things past us some days in advance, to get our view, to let them know if they have anything to be worried about, maybe suggest some changes.” His operation represented US power companies, like Pacificorp of Oregon, which had bought out almost the entire British electricity industry. The document, the inside info, would be especially helpful for the client he was pitching for, Enron of Houston, Texas. What a coincidence: those were my Texans too. I was lying, but mentioning Enron was like saying, “Abracadabra.” Doors of the influential opened wide.
“I’m Very Excited”
June 11: Chancellor of the Exchequer Brown, announced new government spending caps. I was trying to end my third phone call with Derek Draper, top lobbyist with GPC Market Access. Draper had been chief aide to The Dark Prince, “Minister-without-Portfolio” Mandelson. “I’m very excited,” said Draper, “Very excited.”
What had so excited Mr Draper?
“Gordon Brown put the cap on total spending at 2.75 per cent, not 2.5 per cent, like everyone expected! And we said so! We said so last week!” This one-quarter percentage point difference may seem minuscule, but in the hands of securities traders and arbitrageurs, advance word could be parlayed into quite a windfall. Indeed, the week earlier, Draper had given the correct number to his client Salomon Brothers, the US investment banking giant. I complimented Draper on his firm’s extraordinary forecasting work. He responded, “No, I’m afraid it’s inside information.” In a voice crackling with school-boy glee, Draper added, “If they [Salomon] acted on it, they’d have made a fortune!”
Indeed they would have. And under US law, they would have risked jail time.
The Observer never asked any lobbyist to produce confidential government documents or information. We did not have to. Milner, Draper and others provided the evidence unrequested, meant to convince us they could deliver the goods from Tony Blair’s government.
Draper too quickly recognized me as a writer with the Guardian and Observer.
Yet, from our first New York-to-London call, Draper gossiped, gushed and ultimately could not resist revealing his special access to the Treasury and 10 Downing Street, Britain’s White House.
If we retained his firm, what could he deliver for our money? Could he secure a seat on one of the government’s task forces? Done! “We just got the Chief Executive of British Gas on the government’s Welfare to Work Task Force.” Draper emphasized that winning this coveted spot at the elbow of the chancellor was an enormous achievement for a company once known in Labour circles as “the Fat Cats headed by Cedric the Pig” (an unkind reference to former British Gas chairman Cedric Brown).
What if my clients had reputations far less savoury than BG? Not a problem.
In fact, Draper was about to sign up such a “challenging” client, US lottery operator GTech Corp, a company whose lucrative links to Bush allies in Texas I was also investigating. Gtech was in hot water. A jury had found Gtech’s CEO guilty of attempting to bribe British tycoon Richard Branson, hoping to buy him out of the competition to run Britain’s lottery. While running for office, Blair had committed to oust these Ugly Americans from the consortium which had exclusive rights to operate the United Kingdom’s lottery. Draper described his scheme-in-progress to waltz GTech around the official watchdogs and lure Blair’s ministers into a sticky web of agreements with his new client.
“The government needed someone to sell tickets for this ridiculous Millennium Dome thing that my old boss is building. But GTech is offering to do that via the national lottery-selling equipment. Now it doesn’t take a lot to work out that if the government thinks that GTech can sell government tickets for the Dome then it’s got to be a legitimate firm to sell tickets for the lottery.
See what I mean? Our forte, like, is to be imaginative.” His “old boss” was The Dark Prince, Minister Peter Mandelson. To call Draper and “Mandy” close would be a grievous understatement. Mandy had dedicated his book, The Blair Revolution, to the young man. In a profile in Business on Sunday Draper said his friendships with top office-holders were a “hindrance” to his lobbying business because his former workmates are “all so concerned to be ethical”. Nevertheless, Draper assured me that, if we needed to change a law to our liking, “I can have tea with Geoffrey Robinson! I can get in to Ed Balls!” When Draper spoke of reaching Blair cabinet heavyweights Paymaster General Robinson and Balls, the chancellor’s chief adviser, you could hear the exclamation points in his voice. He added, “Once someone pays us.”
The Politics of Emptiness
While fielding calls and faxes from Draper and Milner, we reached Lawson Lucas Mendelsohn, a firm less than one year old yet already the hottest lobby group in town, collecting £2 million ($3 million) in billings in one year. LLM lists 20 powerful clients including the RSPCA and Rupert Murdoch’s News International, owner of America’s Fox TV network. LLM, named for its three founders, is the definition of “inside”.
Neal Lawson advised Tony Blair on campaign strategy, Ben Lucas conducted Blair’s political briefings and Jon Mendelsohn handled the future prime minister’s contacts with business.
But LLM is no influence-for-hire operation that can be purchased by anyone with a check-book. To obtain their much-sought services, LLM clients are asked to review and embrace an eleven-page introductory statement of principles and methods, a somewhat chilling mix of Dick Morris and Nietzsche. A chart on page 3 displays two columns labelled in bold face, “The Passing World and The Emerging World”. To the Passing World belong “ideology”, “conviction” and “politicians who lead”. These will be replaced in the Emerging World by pragmatism, consumption and “politicians who listen”.
The sales brochure-cum-manifesto announces that the political terms Right and Left are now “obsolete”. LLM promises to guide clients to understand “not only new Labour but more importantly the new world”.
Partner Ben Lucas knows what government will do because “we know how they think”. But what may seem like telepathic prognosticating comes down to harvesting insider leaks. Lucas knew, for example, that on June 11 Chancellor Gordon Brown would announce the creation of a new housing inspectorate. “The reason I knew that in advance is that I was speaking to people who were writing the chancellor’s speech.” He delivered the information to an LLM client and advised them on ways to capitalize on the early warning.
Also, like his competitor Draper, Lucas had several days’ notice of details in the chancellor’s public spending announcement. Lucas offered up other examples of “intelligence which in market terms would be worth a lot of money”.
The inside track on decisions is one thing, influencing the outcome is another. Influence requires access. What could we obtain for our monthly retainer? LLM’s Lawson trumped GPC’s tea with Geoffrey Robinson by offering, if needed, to “reach anyone. We can go to Gordon Brown if we have to.” His partner Lucas commented, “We use relationships in a subtle way.”
And how were these relationships subtly used? On behalf of Tesco, a supermarket chain, LLM were about to derail the chancellor’s plan for a tax on car parks. LLM was holding secret negotiations that very week with Policy Unit advisers to Blair, the ones who told Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott, nominally in charge of the issue, when to jump and how high. The tax, pushed by environmentalists to discourage excessive auto use, would have cost the supermarket giant more than £20 million ($30 million) annually.
When I complimented Lawson for avoiding less reputable clients such as Gtech, the US lottery company, he countered that he had in fact lobbied for the bribery-tainted outfit. LLM used the Blair cabinet’s trust in LLM to “assure the government how [GTech] will behave”.
Lawson and Lucas were quick to point out that lobbying is not all about calls to the Treasury. Sometimes LLM recommends the indirect route, “placing things with columnists we know the chancellor reads”. They called this “creating an environment”. In addition, in deliberate imitation of US lobbyists’ methods, LLM operates a captive think tank, Nexus, to give their views (or their clients’ views) the imprimatur of academic legitimacy. Sometimes they make use of the lefty-sounding Socialist Environmental Research Foundation, which, Lucas assured me, is a purchased front for retailers.
Lawson explained how LLM plays on what they call “politics without leadership.” In a milieu in which a lack of conviction is deemed an asset, with no fixed star of principles by which to steer, policy is susceptible to the last pitch heard over cocktails. “The Labour government is always of two minds, it operates in a kind of schizophrenia. On big issues especially, they don’t know what they are thinking. Blair himself doesn’t always know what he is thinking.”
It would be a mistake to view this politics of emptiness – in which ideals and beliefs are suspect – as a British invention, unique to Blair’s “New” Labour Party. Blair and his buddy Clinton call this, “The Third Way.” The leaders of the world’s “liberal” and “socialist” parties – Blair, Cardoso of Brazil, Frei of Chile – are all products of the factory that manufactured Bill Clinton, all bionic election machines who, in Mendelsohn’s words, are “not ideologically constrained”. LLM’s manifesto dismisses “leaders who lead” as antique creatures of The Passing World. Today, markets lead. Industry CEOs lead. In the Emerging World, prime ministers and presidents merely “listen.” Without the restraints of conviction, they are free to respond to the requests of the powerful while shifting their media images as the polling gurus dictate.
Lunch at Number 10
Draper was now aware that he had competitors for our business, and he determined to display his prowess at opening the doors to power. “I took the chief executive of the House Builders Federation in to see Geoff Norris [a top Blair policy adviser] the other day, and that meeting took place in the Downing Street dining room! It’s not difficult for me to take people into these people.”
Sensing I was not impressed with merely breaking bread with ministers, he offered a story certain to leave an impression. Draper’s client PowerGen PLC has long hungered to buy a regional electricity company, a deal even the pro-business Tories had killed off. And behind Britain’s PowerGen was the secret Mr. Big: Reliant, the power giants out of Houston, which wanted to merge (i.e. take over) the whole new super-utility. The British cabinet minister who would make the decisions, Margaret Beckett, head of the Department of Trade and Industry was dead against the PowerGen proposals to create a super-monopoly in energy – especially one that would be owned by Texans. She’d publicly blasted new US takeovers of UK electricity companies. Under the law, Beckett had final say, not even the prime minister could intervene.
The PowerGen-Reliant scheme seemed lost. Now Draper told me he’d steered the chairman of PowerGen, Ed Wallis, around Beckett and brought him directly into the Treasury for a confidential meeting with Geoffrey Robinson, a top adviser to Chancellor Brown. The PowerGen merger deals are now locked, he told me. Government rejection “will not happen again”. Had Draper pulled off an extraordinary fix or was this merely hard-sell horsefeathers?
I told Draper my own clients, representing US oil shippers and power plant builders, would need exemptions from environmental rules, in effect, a licence to pollute England. Draper enthusiastically invited us over.
Two weeks later, in London, pouring sherry cocktails at my Tower of London Hotel suite – this front operation cost the Observer a pretty penny – I asked one of Draper’s competitors, Rory Chisholm, if he could match Derek’s setting up the meeting between PowerGen and Geoff Robinson to talk mergers. “Now hold on there!” Chisholm, a Director of GJW and a lobbyist of the old school, put down his drink. “That’s getting a bit illegal. It’s a judicial process. It’s like approaching a judge.” But Chisholm’s partner Milner, who learned about lobbying US-style while working for Hillary Clinton, was ready to match Draper’s offers.
There Are 17 People That Count
Monday, June 23. Swedlund and I, fresh off the plane with fake business cards and references from big-name confederates, went to London’s very soul, the Sanctuary building at Westminster Abbey. Within this historic courtyard at Number 7, GPC Access’s Derek Draper guides us through the peculiarities of British democracy.
“There are 17 people who count,” Draper tells us. “And to say I am intimate with every one of them is the understatement of the century.” This intimacy is based on a web of favors of which the lobbyist keeps a careful mental inventory. At Chancellor Brown’s confidential request, he put out a supposedly independent newsletter praising Blair’s keeping the minimum wage low. Press control was especially valuable. In the Sunday Telegraph, Draper authored a 2,000-word profile of Ed Balls, a Brown aide. He’d given Balls editorial control and the Telegraph was none the wiser.
As to Jonathan Powell, the prime minister’s chief of staff, gatekeeper at Number 10, the corporate lobbyist “got him the job.” My “business partner”, Mark Swedlund, interrogated Draper. We Americans have come for access, not lessons in Labour rhetoric. We needed proof of Draper’s insider bona fides.
Draper rose to the challenge, literally. He stood up from his chair, removed a phone pager from his belt and, holding it above his forehead, read off one phone message after another, nearly two dozen, from the powerful and nearto- power. “Ed Miliband – call me, Dave Miliband – please call, Andrew Hackett … that’s [deputy prime minister] Prescott’s office.” The recitation continued. There were several messages from Liz Lloyd of the Downing Street Policy Unit, Balls from the Treasury and others, each pleading for a moment of the lobbyist’s time for tea, advice or requests unknown.
The lobbyist was in a cheery mood. His walking the CEO of the Builders’ Federation into Downing Street the week before was already paying dividends.
Blair’s adviser Geoff Norris agreed to resurrect the Builders’ plans to dig up several greenbelt areas for houses. “Just a bloody bunch of mud tracts at the edge of town,” as Draper described the lands at issue, despite the claims of local councils.
Such favors must be returned. “Tony needed ten environmental gimmicks” for a news release to support the government’s green image. Draper rapidly provided a list, “electric cars, silly things like that”. Draper rolled his eyes. “They loved it.”
Message to Murdoch
Our next stop, Soho. There, in the trendy loft offices of LLM lobbyists Ben Lucas and Jon Mendelsohn, we endured a mind-numbing two-hour lecture on the Third Way, “analytically-driven evidence-based decision-making,” a solid wall of New Labour-speak.
But what at first seemed like an aimless think tank seminar had purpose.
Lucas and Mendelsohn’s point was to introduce us to a world in which, as their manifesto told us, message matters more than content. For their fee of £5,000–20,000 per month, these two Professor Higginses would instruct us in the political grammar of the Emerging World of Tony Blair.
Our cover story was that we needed LLM’s help in defeating environmental restrictions. Mendelsohn advised we must recast our plan for new power stations, noisy and polluting, into something that sounded earth-friendly. “Tony is very anxious to be seen as green. Everything has to be couched in environmental language – even if it’s slightly Orwellian.”
But LLM demands more of their clients than adopting new PR gloss. LLM clients are expected to “reshape their core corporate culture”, to get in sync with New Labour’s vision, as their client Tesco’s Supermarkets had done to defeat the car park tax. Part of Tesco’s cultural reshaping involved dropping £11 million ($16 million) into Mandelson’s Millennium Dome project.
Once we have changed our culture, we asked exactly how does LLM help us get a law changed? Lucas said, “This government likes to do deals.”
He gave an example. Labour’s anti-monopoly competition bill threatened LLM client Rupert Murdoch. Murdoch, the American media baron owns, besides Fox TV, Chinese satellite stations and those British tabloids with the naughty “Page Six girls” with their boobies hanging out. In Britain that made him a power to be feared. But he had a little legal problem. Anti-trust authorities were looking into Murdoch businesses alleged predatory pricing practices. LLM carried the word from Downing Street to Murdoch’s News International that, if their tabloids toned down criticism of the new anti-trust legislation, the law’s final language would reflect the government’s appreciation.
On the other hand, harsh coverage in Murdoch’s papers could provoke problems for the media group in Parliament’s union recognition debates. Kindly reporting would produce, as well, a kindly union bill (i.e. one that would kill off unions). The message to muzzle journalists was not, said Lucas, “an easy one in their culture”. However, the outcome pleased all parties.
Unlike his wheeler-dealer partners, Jon Mendelsohn, aloof and intellectual, does not have an obvious ounce of fixer in him. Rather, he is their Big Idea man with a deep understanding of the modern politicians’ obsession with corporate and media contacts. “[Tony Blair’s] super-majority in Parliament means the only countervailing force is media and the business community. So when the economy turns soft, as it naturally must, we will make certain they stay with us. If we have business and media, the people will come along.”
Lucas reviewed their awesome fee schedule, and we were on our way.
Over-Priced Claret Rush hour in Soho. We walked down the street to the Groucho Club where we would be guests of an operative with yet another lobby shop. He’d got word that these Americans were looking for political help. Over a bottle of overpriced claret, we listened to one more young Blairite make his pitch for our business.
We then detailed what his competitors had on offer: Milner’s purloined reports for Enron, Draper’s back-room deals for Reliant of Texas, LLM’s insider information from the Exchequer.
I waited for him to top their accomplishments. He put both hands over his eyes. “It’s appalling,” he said, “It’s disturbing.” If that’s what we wanted, he’d have none of our business.
Mr Liddle’s offer
The next evening, GPC held its annual bash at the Banqueting Room in Whitehall Palace. Under vaulted ceilings inset with nine canvasses by Rubens, GPC’s 200 guests washed down thin canapés with a never-ending supply of champagne (Lambray Brut) poured by discreet waiters. Lords, MPs and Downing Street powers by the dozen mixed with the nation’s business elite. It was Derek Draper’s phone pager come to life.
At the center of this swirl, Draper held court. Yet, he graciously took the time to offer us free samples of his connections, introducing us to several government luminaries who could be useful to our projects, including more than half the prime minister’s Policy Unit. From the Member of Parliament who chaired the Select Committee on Trade and Industry we endured an earnest discourse on the development of Parliament’s energy review (and we confirmed how lobbyist Milner of GJW received advance information of his committee’s report for Enron, where this investigation began).
My confederate Swedlund asked Draper to point us to someone who could vouch for his influence with government. He reached out, seeming to pull at random from the crowd the nearest figure. He grabbed a short, balding man with sweat beaded on his forehead. Derek told the official we were potential GPC clients, then walked off.
Roger Liddle is one of the more important men in government, in charge of European affairs for the Prime Minister’s Public Policy Unit, with an office near Blair’s in 10 Downing Street. We talked about our power generators for our Texans – polluting and noisy and squandering resources, if we were honest about it. We needed the rules and asked Liddle if Draper was as influential as he claimed. Liddle leaned forward. “There is a Circle.” Liddle was now whispering. “There is a Circle and Derek is part of the Circle. And anyone who says he isn’t is An Enemy.” He reassured us that, “Derek knows all the right people.”
Could Draper introduce us to key policy-makers? In response, Liddle handed us a card with his Downing Street and home phone numbers, and made this extraordinary offer. “Whenever you are ready, just tell me what you want, who you want to meet and Derek and I will make the call for you.”
Derek and I. It was a strange locution. Swedlund remarked that Liddle sounded “more like a member of Derek’s outfit than a member of the government”. It was not until the next day we learned that Swedlund was not far off. Liddle had, until the general election, been managing director of Draper’s firm.
Officially, he’d placed his 25 per cent ownership interest in GPC Access into a blind trust when he took the post at Downing Street. Any new business Liddle cooked up for Draper would go right into the minister’s “blind” piggy bank.
Jail
The next morning I received a call from the persistent lobbyist from the Groucho. He still refused to match his competitors’ offers. “If Draper and Lawson delivered half of what they promise they’d be in jail! Half of Downing Street would be in jail!”
Phone call from Tony “What I really am,” said Draper the next day, “is a commentator-fixer. Your Mayor Daley has nothing on me.” We were sitting in the exclusive Reform Club on Pall Mall, the kind of swanky, over-wrought confection which could only be built by the overlords of an old empire. Draper sipped his trademark champagne and sank into a red leather armchair under a tall painting of an aristocrat from another century.
He tossed a copy of Progress magazine on the antique table. “I own it,” he said of the Blairite journal, “100 per cent of it, all the shares.” The funds to launch the magazine came from a “Labour billionaire”, a financial arrangement accomplished by “a single phone call from Tony”. He meant the prime minister. In the lobbyists’ world, there are no last names.
Draper had just filed his weekly column published in the Express newspaper. His writings are edited in an unusual manner. “I don’t write that column without vetting it with [Minister] Peter. They say, Oh [Chancellor] Gordon [Brown] will be mad at Derek, but he won’t because his press secretary has vetted it.”
It was June 25. For Draper, it was a day of miracles he had prophesied. Only two hours earlier, the government released its energy review. The coal industry would be saved if PowerGen agreed to sell a few generating plants. Simultaneously, newspapers reported PowerGen would buy Midlands Electricity for £2 billion, if the government approved. The suspicious alignment of the two announcements forced Trade Minister Beckett to deny categorically that a secret deal had been struck. “There has been no wink or nod to anyone about anything.” But then, how would she know? The PowerGen meeting at the Treasury was a quiet affair, no record of it was kept and, as an LLM lobbyist assured me, Beckett is “out of the loop”.
Draper should have been pleased with his success. But his mood was philosophical.
“I don’t want to be a consultant,” he said. “I just want to stuff my bank account at £250 an hour.”
Beer at Crouch End
From the Reform Club, Swedlund and I took a cab for a get-together with Will Baker, another lobbyist of sorts. We joined up with Baker at a friend’s flat in Crouch End. Baker works as an for a large non-profit organization based in Liverpool. The group was pleading Blair to eliminate electricity, and gas heating disconnections, and this puts them squarely up against Draper’s and Milner’s key clients, the American-owned utility companies. The anti-poverty group lacks the £8,000 a month to hire an LLM or other professional consultants, so Baker and his colleagues must themselves act as lobbyists on behalf of their low-income constituents.
Over Budweisers at the kitchen table, Baker said his group failed to get a meeting with a single key minister during the government’s Utility Review, not even contact with junior civil servants. “We can’t get in the door. They tell us to submit our comments in writing. We are just totally excluded.” He could not imagine an invitation to sit on a Task Force.
Ultimately, the government, despite campaign promises, chose to continue the system permitting private electricity, gas and water companies to disconnect poor customers behind in their bills – a big victory for Draper’s and GJW’s clients over Baker’s group of clerics and poor people. Special access is not a victimless crime.
The curtain comes down It’s hard not to like Draper, Milner and Lawson. They each have that Bart Simpson charm: mischievous, a bit immature, yet endearing. And they exude New Labour’s enthusiasm for the New Britain. Do any of these young men harbour misgivings about renting out their contacts? They see no reason for apology. It’s their world after all. They are convinced that they crafted New Labour and now, through GPC, GJW and LLM, they are merely charging admission to enter the show they produced.
But even the best players of the game fear for its future. Derek Draper, in an unusually reflective moment, said he had worried thoughts about the inside access to government that goes under the rubric “public–private partnership”.
Draper said, “I think there will be a scandal here eventually. The curtain is going to come down. I’m sure it will happen.” Then he returned to discussion of fees and lunch. And inside the newsroom …
Just before the story hit the streets, the Observer contacted Roger Liddle for his side of the story.
Liddle was the squat little man who offered to get “what you want and who you want to meet” at Downing Street. This was no small fish in the net. Liddle and Peter Mandelson had co-authored the book The Blair Revolution . The three of them were the key architects of that revolution-in-reverse, the program to seize the Labour Party, yank it to the right, and rename it “New” Labour. That was step one; step two was The Project – to merge New Labour with the Liberal- Democrats, Liddle’s political bailiwick. Big business would provide the gilded glue, shepherded by the lobbying firm set up by Liddle and Draper, GPC.
Blair moved Liddle right into 10 Downing Street, and made him the real power on European affairs. Liddle’s equity in Draper’s lobby shop went into a “blind trust”. Liddle’s wife was a dear friend of the wife of my editor Will Hutton. When Liddle heard the story was about to break, he called Hutton at home, knowing full well that Will was about to turn Liddle’s career into garbage with a pen stroke. Liddle begged. He claimed he was drunk, and when he’s drunk he’s a fool, everyone knows that, and he shot his mouth off, didn’t mean it, didn’t know what he was saying.
Hutton told me this on Sunday morning over croissants at a little bistro in the tony Belsize Park section of London. “Lobbygate” was on the streets, but we talked mostly, as we prefer, about industrial regulation and the political economy of Brazil. He was off that afternoon to São Paolo to meet President Cardoso – reluctantly, because of our influence-peddling story. I said, “Go. Brazil’s the future, Britain’s history.” In Hutton’s view, Liddle was pathetic and sincerely remorseful. So Will gave him the benefit of the doubt and did not call for Liddle’s resignation in our paper’s editorial. And besides, Liddle told him, he couldn’t gain from swinging business to Draper: the blind trust had sold off his interest in Draper’s lobby firm.
Hutton’s as smart, maybe smarter, than his formidable reputation as Britain’s leading intellect. So I paused to let him work it out himself. Liddle knew his interest had been sold? “So, Will, the blind trust ain’t so blind.” Hutton, a big man, laughed so hard he almost knocked over the metal table. He’d been had.
Liddle was a weasel and a liar. But not a very good one.
In the newsroom the next day, I met the deputy editor. With Hutton away, the wan young corporation man now in charge preferred to meet surrounded by a guard of lawyers and marketing people. By Monday afternoon, the full force of the New Labour government and their running dogs at the other papers were tearing our journalistic flesh. And the deputy wanted to throw them something to chew on. Preferably me.
In the meantime, he’d hand over our tapes to the government. I said, “Well, that’s nuts, that’s just straight fucking insane nuts.” But he’d made an Executive Decision. “So give us the tapes.”
I explained about my wife. Didn’t have ’m. He looked ready to die on the spot. He figured he would lose his job. (He did.)
In the meantime, he had another brainwave: he’d tell Alastair Campbell, Blair’s press python, which accusations we had on tape, and which were “merely” backed up by witnesses and contemporaneous notes. How brilliant.
I opined: “The sleazy little shit-holes will talk away with excuses anything we have on tape then flat-out deny anything from notes, say we made it up.” But there was no stopping him from stepping on his own dick.
At 4 am London time, I reached my editor Hutton in Rio. “There’s a Concorde leaving São Paolo tomorrow. For Christ’s sake, Will, get on it.”
Too late. The Observer showed our cards to Campbell and immediately, the government’s guardians talked away what we had on tape, flat-out denied what we had from notes and witnesses, even though Swedlund – he was with me at the meetings with Draper, in the hugger-mugger with Liddle – gave us a sworn affidavit under penalty of perjury.
Liddle was no longer the pathetic drunk contrite over his corrupt offer. At first, he announced he couldn’t remember meeting me, certainly couldn’t remember what was said. Once he knew we had “only” a sworn affidavit of a witness, he grew bolder, and in his third version, he suddenly remembered it all clearly. And what he remembered was that I was a liar; I’d fabricated his words.
Then the next morning, a hand-scrawled note came through the Observer’s fax machine, no signature. “I’ve got your tape. What’s it worth to you?” Linda thought she was quite droll.
Lobbyist Ben Lucas, smugly assured that I had no tape, flatly denied to BBC Newsnight’s cameras that he had detailed to me passing on advance information from the Treasury to his client, the Government Association. Meirion Jones, one very smart producer at the program, let Lucas swallow that grenade – then played on air my tape of him saying the words he denied.
Then it was Draper’s turn to step on a landmine. Assuming I had no tape of our chats, Draper denied the words I attributed to him, but that day, Linda relayed the tape via phone, and anyone could hear Draper’s incriminating statements about Downing Street cronies on the Guardian’s web-set. Draper lost his job, but got a payout which will keep him in Lambray Brut for another decade. For two weeks, every paper in Britain ran nothing but Lobbygate stories on their front pages.
And yet, in that first week, while I was The Liar and Blair’s hands were shaking, I was sure I’d nailed Liddle. The mendacious little scamp was drunk, was he? Didn’t remember me, did he? Never offered to bring me into Downing Street, give me his private numbers? In fact, the next day after his offer, and sober as a deacon, Liddle called me from 10 Downing Street to set up a time to get together, to seal the deal. He denied it, and that stunned me. Now I had him! All I had to do was go over the Downing Street phone records and point to my mobile phone number … when I discovered that, in Great Britain, telephone records of a public servant from a public phone were “private”, or confidential or some kind of state secret. I was screwed. Liddle walked away smelling like a rose; and Blair rewarded him with the highest increase in salary awarded anyone in government.
Let's face it guys, Guido has had a good week. But, we all know that the Westminster machine will make sure sufficient whitewash is ordered and delivered to the correct addresses - by hand this time - to make sure no harm comes to Zanu Labour (nice one anonymous).
Yates of the Yard will run into the same brick walls as he did last time. The relevant Quangos - including the CPS - will be told what conclusions and recommendations they must come up with. Soon, the whole Westminster village will put their snouts back in the trough; "in good faith" you understand.
When they finally tire of "We're busy doing nothing, working the whole day through" at the village of milk and honey, they have that unfunded, gold plated pension pot to look forward too.
Just as John Major's "Back to Basics" followed by countless revelations was his undoing, so is Brown's "Clean-up" followed by what we are seeing now.
The moral of the story? Promises can be a hostage to fortune. Especially when it was a LABOUR Government who introduced this Donations law.
Tony Wright is aghast that anyone could believe that politics is sleazy.
Let's face it. We have been saddled with an empty, self-agrandising, incompetent, fantasist as Prime Minister. Now that he has been found out he is thrashing about trying to restore his shattered credibility.
He will find, however, that his credibility is lost and gone forever. This could become increasingly dangerous for all of us.
Amanda Platell puts Wee Dougie Alexander firmly in the frame for that dodgy planning decision in the north -east in today's Mail.
As Transport Minister at the time did Wee Dougie overturn a planning decision for Abrahams company after Abrahams had given Labour another £200, 000 via one of his proxies?
That's corruption on a grand scale.
I can just picture Wee Dougie on the rule 43 nonse wing in Durham nick. Just don't drop the soap in the shower, Doug.
Just watched Sky,bloody hell mr Bean is definatly not on this planet,I hope we all have deep pockets,where the fcuk is all that money coming from for his vision,wasn't the Lotto supposed to help give money the get youth clubs going in each area not to splurge on the dome and olympics,I think Bean has lost the plot,vote Labour and see Britain die by a thousand taxes,god help us for the future.