Blair Inc--The Man Behind the Mask

by Francis Beckett

  Turner left the TBFF job to have a baby, but Blair is understood to have made a very favourable financial settlement which included allowing her to return to the TBFF in a part-time capacity as soon as she was ready to do so. So she is now back, working part time as the TBFF’s director of policy.

  After Yale, other universities joined, and since Durham signed up four more universities have been persuaded to teach more religion and ally it to globalisation. Monterrey Technical University in Mexico will teach ‘Globalisation and Belief Systems’; the University of Western Australia will teach ‘Religion and Globalisation’; and Peking University in China will teach ‘Interfaith Relations in a Globalised World’. The University of Sierra Leone, Foyrah Bay College, will teach ‘Faith and Globalisation’.

  BLAIR AND CHARLES CLARKE

  The idea that the world can be made a better place by creating university courses that link all the important subjects to religion is something that Blair and his old friend Charles Clarke share, and Clarke is playing his part in achieving it.

  Blair and Clarke go back a long way. As the 1970s turned into the 1980s, when they were young and ambitious Labour politicians, neither of them yet in Parliament, they fought the Bennites in Islington together. Blair’s first decision as an MP in 1983 was to vote for Neil Kinnock for leader, on the advice of Kinnock’s adviser and Blair’s friend Clarke.

  A decade later, they spearheaded the post-Kinnock ‘modernisers’ and Clarke served as Blair’s Education Secretary and then his Home Secretary. Later, when he knew he would soon have to stand down, Blair planned to make Clarke Foreign Secretary in order to give him a fighting chance to frustrate Gordon Brown and become Blair’s successor as Prime Minister. He confided this plan only to Clarke, who shared his loathing of Gordon Brown, and then only after the plan fell apart because Clarke was forced to take the rap for a Home Office failure and resign as Home Secretary. Blair says in his autobiography that he regrets not giving Clarke the Foreign Office anyway, but he could hardly give him a promotion when he was forcing him to resign because of an error.

  It was Clarke who, in those dreadful weeks before Blair finally resigned as PM, said all the things Blair was thought to believe about Gordon Brown but could hardly say himself, because he was supposed to preserve the fiction that he wanted Brown to succeed him. Clarke said that Brown was a deluded control freak, and would lead Labour to disaster. He urged Blair not to hurry out. He still harboured hopes of being the Blairite candidate for the succession.9

  In short, Clarke, though he dislikes the word, is among the purest of the Blairites.

  Now Clarke, who the last time we discussed it with him did not believe in God, is running a £12 million Religion and Society programme at Lancaster University, which has close ties with the TBFF. Clarke, like Blair, thinks that faith is a good thing for society, though apparently without feeling the need of it for himself. ‘I went along with the view of many on the Left that religion was essentially a diversion and a destructive thing, until it became clear that almost all the people involved in positive community action were men and women of faith of some kind,’ he told the Daily Telegraph. This assertion is, to say the least, unproven.10

  THE FAILED HARVARD UNIVERSITY PROJECT

  In 2014 came a collaboration with another great university, and before the year was out it had gone horribly wrong. The TBFF teamed up with Harvard University’s Faculty of Divinity to create a website about faith and globalisation. To edit the new website, at the start of 2014 the TBFF appointed journalist Martin Bright.

  After less than a year, the project collapsed, having lost both its editor and its partner. Harvard pulled out after the TBFF and the Harvard Divinity School (HDS) fell out badly. The issue, we are authoritatively told,11 was the article Blair wrote for the Observer in January 2014 announcing the collaboration between the two organisations.12 Reading it, HDS realised suddenly that it and Blair had very different ideas of what the new initiative would do, and it was furious with Blair.

  The article identified abuse of religion (and by religion he was understood to mean Islam) as the chief likely source of conflict in the twenty-first century. Blair said he wanted the world ‘to start to treat this issue of religious extremism as an issue that is about religion as well as politics, to go to the roots of where a false view of religion is being promulgated and to make it a major item on the agenda of world leaders to combine effectively to combat it.’

  HDS felt it had unwittingly been shackled to what might be seen as an anti-Islam agenda – and, worse, that its new initiative had been shackled to Blair’s defence of the Iraq War, for in the same article he wrote of Iraq that ‘exactly the same sectarianism threatens the right of the people to a democratic future … It is one reason why the Middle East matters so much and why any attempt to disengage is so wrong and short-sighted.’

  The divinity school told us tersely, ‘HDS was engaged in discussions on a working relationship with the TBFF team but decided not to pursue a formal collaboration after realizing that the aims of both organizations would be better served independently.’

  As for Martin Bright, he lasted just five months. On the face of it, he was a surprising choice in the first place, because he had been political editor of the New Statesman in the days when the Blairites saw the magazine as being under the control of the hated Brownites. However, he was widely known to have fallen out of love with the Brown camp, and he felt badly treated by the Brownite owner of the New Statesman, Geoffrey Robinson, after Bright had been forced to leave the magazine in circumstances that are hotly disputed to this day, with Bright describing political reasons and our New Statesman sources quoting professional ones. In recent years he has been, pretty reliably, an opponent of the Brown camp, and this alone ensures him a welcome in Blairite circles, as a sinner who repenteth. It also helps that he went from the New Statesman to be political editor of the Jewish Chronicle, and he is, from Blair’s point of view, sound on Islam – British Muslims see him as an unrelenting opponent.

  Bright was approached about the job by two Blair emissaries, one of whom was a recruitment consultant who had cut her political teeth in Labour Friends of Israel, which has become a kind of nursery for Blairites. He started the job in late January 2014 with an hour-long meeting with Blair himself, and was promised a similar meeting with Blair every month.

  Though not a religious man himself, Bright is interested in religion, and wrote in the Jewish Chronicle in the week he took up the appointment in late January 2014 that he and Blair ‘share a conviction that the role of religion in the geopolitics of the 21st century remains poorly understood. At the same time, we know there are academics, intellectuals and journalists out there who can bring a profound knowledge of this field to those of us who crave a more comprehensive and nuanced approach.’

  He had come to admire Blair, he wrote. ‘As might be expected with anything involving Tony Blair, the scope and ambition of this project is vast. The intention is to make this site the first port of call for anyone wishing to grasp the nature of conflicts where religion plays a part.’13

  The website, launched in April, was to contain analyses of religious conflict and contribution in various parts of the world. So what would happen, we asked Bright on his appointment, when he wanted to run an analysis of a country that is one of the clients of Tony Blair Associates – Kazakhstan, for example, where there is plenty of religious conflict, and the role of Blair’s client, the President, might not stand too much scrutiny? What would happen when he was told that, in order not to embarrass the patron, the website should not run such-and-such a story? Bright said he’d cross that bridge when and if he came to it.

  As we have seen, five months after he arrived, Martin Bright left. In the aftermath of his departure, the experiment of getting a journalist to run the website and trying to run it on newspaper lines was not judged a success. Bright knew that his replacement would not be a journalist and would run a more tightly controlled operation. In the event, th
ere was no operation to run. The communications department has taken over his website, he says, and there is no longer any pretence of independence.

  After leaving, and after talking to us, Bright wrote an article for the Daily Mail about his experiences, and Blair’s friends and loyalists were beside themselves with fury and rushed to say that he was talking rubbish.14 One of the authors happened to meet Matthew Taylor, still a Blair friend and the partner of TBFF founder and director Ruth Turner, the morning the piece appeared. He said, ‘Bright says the office is full of bean bags. I’ve been there many times, I can tell you there are no bean bags.’ We pass this on because it’s the only firm information we have ever been given on the record (or, at least, not off the record) by anyone as close to Blair as Taylor. There are no bean bags in Blair’s office. We hope Taylor does not get into too much trouble for telling us this.

  THE RELIGIOUS ADVISERS TO THE TONY BLAIR FAITH FOUNDATION

  Company accounts show that senior employees at the Foundation received six-figure salaries in 2009–10.15 The Foundation then employed twelve staff and managed to raise £3.5 million in the twelve months to April 2009. In February 2013 its accounts showed that it had almost £3 million in the bank, and employed twenty-eight people with annual staffing costs of £1.3 million, and was operating in twenty countries. A year later, it was still employing twenty-eight staff, we are told.

  The formal governance structure includes a Religious Advisory Council. To what extent this is purely ornamental is hard to fathom, but presumably it has some influence, if only because, should a member of this council dislike what is going on, he or she could create great embarrassment.

  This council includes top international figures from most main religions, but until 2013 no Catholic at all – although the Blairs are themselves Catholics – and no Muslim cleric or theologian. The only Muslim on the board was a politician – the adviser to the Prime Minister of Kuwait, who is, of course, the biggest client of Tony Blair Associates.

  Outside these two faiths, the board is a pretty impressive array of the great and good in world religions. Blair has recruited the Rev. David Coffey, president of the Baptist World Alliance, and Roshi Joan Halifax, Abbot of the Upaya Zen Center. Its Jewish representatives could hardly be more distinguished: not only Rabbi David Rosen, chairman of the International Jewish Committee on Interreligious Consultations, but also the former British Chief Rabbi, Sir Jonathan Sacks.

  The Anglican church is represented by the Rt Rev. Richard Chartres, Lord Bishop of London, and some of the biggest figures in evangelical Christianity are there: from the West Indies, the Reverend Joel Edwards, director of Micah Challenge International and former general director of the Evangelical Alliance, a famous West Indian evangelical Christian; from America, the Rev. Dr Rick Warren, founding and senior pastor of the hugely wealthy and important Saddleback Church; and, from Africa, the Rt Rev. Josiah Idowu-Fearon, Bishop of Kaduna, who campaigned for laws in Nigeria that would send gay people to prison.

  Sikhs and Hindus are also represented by distinguished scholars and theologians. For the Sikhs there is Professor Jagtar Singh Grewal, former chairman of the India Institute of Advanced Study and former vice-chancellor of Guru Nanak Dev University; and, for the Hindus, Anantanand Rambachan, professor and chair of the Religion Department at St Olaf College, Minnesota.

  Against this glittering array, the presence as the sole Muslim representative of Dr Ismail Khudr Al-Shatti, adviser in Diwan of the Prime Minister of Kuwait and former president of the Gulf Institute for Futures and Strategic Studies, seemed incongruous, for he is a politician, not a religious figure at all. Dr Abdul Wahid, chairman of Hizb ut-Tahrir UK, told us that he had never heard of Ismail Khudr Al-Shatti, and added, ‘The single Muslim name will be unknown to most Muslims across the world. Whereas several of the members of this advisory council are prominent people – for example, Lord Sacks, Bishop Chartres, Joel Edwards – the Tony Blair Faith Foundation appears to have been unable to recruit a single person from the UK’s two-million-strong Muslim community, nor anyone from a much larger European Muslim community, nor anyone of any global prominence across the Muslim world.’

  Blair was already popular in Kuwait for bringing an end to Saddam Hussein’s regime in neighbouring Iraq, which could by itself have been sufficient reason for Al-Shatti’s willingness to cast himself in the role of fig leaf. But Al-Shatti must also be fully aware of, if not actually a party to, the lucrative contract between TBA and the Kuwaiti government. It is the usual problem with Blair: too many hats.

  The lack of a credible Muslim figure is the direct result of Blair being seen as anti-Islam. It is the same problem that has shackled his effectiveness as Middle East envoy. The architect of the war in Iraq is now seen as the man who wants to bomb Muslims in both Iran and Syria, having called first for a bombing campaign against President Assad, and then for a bombing campaign against ISIS (or the Islamic State) in Iraq.

  The English-language Arab News, a moderate and respected news source across the Arab world, has an explanation for all this:

  Unlike George W. Bush, Tony Blair persists in crossing continents, portraying himself as a man of peace – apparently blind to his toxic image throughout the Muslim world as a pro-US, pro-Israel war-monger. Perhaps Blair is so ethnocentric as to be incapable of viewing the world through Muslim eyes. It may also be that he simply does not care what people think about him. Certainly, there is an impression of bone-headed insensitivity about the efforts of the Tony Blair Faith Foundation to counter ‘extremism’, to ‘deradicalize’ British Muslims who have been to Syria, or who might be thinking of going there, to enlist as jihadists … Many are bound to feel that the deradicalizing endeavors of this latter-day British crusader, this unrepentant instigator of bloody interventions in Muslim lands, cannot be other than counterproductive.16

  Following the killing in London of Fusilier Lee Rigby on 22 May 2013, as Muslim leaders queued up to condemn the murder in the strongest possible terms, Blair announced that the act was a symptom of ‘a problem within Islam’. He dismissed the argument that religiously motivated terrorist attacks are the work of a fringe few. There is, he said, an ‘exclusivist and reactionary world view’ throughout the Muslim world.

  The ‘problem within Islam’, he said, came from ‘the adherents of an ideology that is a strain within Islam. And we have to put it on the table and be honest about it.

  Of course there are Christian extremists and Jewish, Buddhist and Hindu ones. But I am afraid this strain is not the province of a few extremists. It has at its heart a view about religion and about the interaction between religion and politics that is not compatible with pluralistic, liberal, open-minded societies …

  I understand the desire to look at this world and explain it by reference to local grievances, economic alienation and of course ‘crazy people’. But are we really going to examine it and find no common thread, nothing that joins these dots, no sense of an ideology driving or at least exacerbating it all?

  He was saying that murderous extremists of other religions are just individual murderous extremists – but in Islam they are something like the mainstream. He’s not the only person to say this. But he is the only person to say it who is at the same time claiming to bring faiths together and work for better understanding between them.17

  It was hugely harmful to the TBFF’s reputation in the Muslim world – so much so that TBFF chief executive Charlotte Keenan tried to limit the damage with a blog post called ‘What Tony Blair meant about Islam’. According to her, he was ‘characteristically clear in his view that when the perpetrators cloak their crimes in such language it is ludicrous to say that these terrorist attacks are nothing to do with religion’.

  He was actually saying much more than that. He was drawing a clear distinction between Islam and the world’s other religions.

  His words, no doubt, represented Blair’s honest opinion. But, if he is serious about having an organisation that bears his name, and that has
credibility with all faiths, that is an opinion he would avoid giving public expression to. For he has a lot of ground to make up in the Muslim world. Muslims will find it hard to forgive him for Iraq, even if he had not followed this in July 2005, after the 7/7 London bombings, with a speech at Labour’s national conference in which he said,

  The greatest danger is that we fail to face up to the nature of the threat we are dealing with. What we witnessed in London last Thursday week was not an aberrant act. It was not random. It was not a product of particular local circumstances in West Yorkshire … What we are confronting here is an evil ideology …

  This ideology and the violence that is inherent in it did not start a few years ago in response to a particular policy. Over the past twelve years, al-Qaeda and its associates have attacked twenty-six countries, killed thousands of people, many of them Muslims. They have networks in virtually every major country and thousands of fellow travellers. They are well financed. Look at their websites …

  Neither is it true that they have no demands. They do. It is just that no sane person would negotiate on them. They demand the elimination of Israel; the withdrawal of all Westerners from Muslim countries, irrespective of the wishes of people and government; the establishment of effectively Taliban states and sharia law in the Arab world en route to one caliphate of all Muslim nations …

  Its roots are not superficial, but deep, in the madrassas of Pakistan, in the extreme forms of Wahabi doctrine in Saudi Arabia, in the former training camps of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, in the cauldron of Chechnya, in parts of the politics of most countries of the Middle East and many in Asia, in the extremist minority that now in every European city preach hatred of the West and our way of life.