16 Daily Telegraph, 19 June 2014: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/
politics/ed-miliband/10911015/Ed-Miliband-is-
confused-and-unconvincing-Lord-Mandelson-says.html
17 Daily Telegraph, 13 January 2015: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/
politics/ed-miliband/11341667/Voters-must-decide-if-
Ed-Miliband-has-a-problem-says-Tony-Blair.html
18 The Guardian, 7 February 2015: http://www.theguardian.com/politics/
2015/feb/07/tony-blair-ed-miliband-labour-general-election
19 The Guardian, 13 November 2013: http://www.theguardian.com/politics/
2013/nov/13/falkirk-labour-gregor-poynton-paid-recruits
20 Daily Telegraph, 23 September 2011: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics
/tony-blair/8784596/On-the-desert-
trail-of-Tony-Blairs-millions.html; The Guardian, 10 April 2009: http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/blog/2009/
apr/10/tony-blair-speaking-fees;
Daily Mail, 6 April 2009: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-
1167682/Blair-worlds-best-paid-speaker-pocketing-
364-000-just-hours-work.html
21 Ken Silverstein, The Secret World of Oil (Verso, 2014)
22 Daily Telegraph, 9 November 2007: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/
news/worldnews/1568845/Chinese-turn-on-
Tony-Blair-over-speech.html; New Republic, 4 October 2012: http://www.newrepublic.com/article/
politics/magazine/107248/buckraking-around-the-
world-tony-blair
23 Observer, 14 March 2010: http://www.theguardian.com/
politics/2010/mar/14/tony-blair-faith-foundation-america
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
A GOLD-PLATED PRISON
‘I think Blair is now a very sad man. Rich, but [he] betrayed everything the Labour Party was about.’
– GREG DYKE, SPEAKING TO AUTHORS.
Tony Blair was an energetic Prime Minister. When the lights dim and the public attention moves on to other stars, where will the fallen hero turn for adulation and thrills? Blair still doesn’t have an answer that satisfies him. He doubtless receives a kick from being paid very large sums for very small tasks.
A speech to a remote country will pay him handsomely, much more than he was paid for a year’s work as Prime Minister and twice as much as a Member of Parliament earns in a year. Then there are the huge sums of money for a casual introduction, for picking up the telephone. He likes it, of course. But he can live in only one house at a time.
And, though money buys power, he is finding that there are limits to that, just as there are limits to political power. He was never happier than when making decisions that affected the lives of others, having colleagues in politics and the media hanging on his every word and gesture. His money doesn’t buy this buzz. The more money he acquires, the less likely it is that he will ever regain or even come close to the power that once was.
Money made by a businessperson is different from money made by an ex-politician. The former, if made legally, is regarded as an achievement; he pulled himself up by his bootstraps, or he had a clever idea. The latter is seen as the fruit of compromises of principle and the milking of contacts.
When Blair left power, he was told that the public expects politicians, in whom it has placed its trust, to pursue good causes before self-enrichment. The latter is allowed with discretion, but the former enables them to retain their credibility. Blair has paid the price for failing to heed this sage advice from a savvy and religious American businessman.
By pursuing money for its own sake, the arch image maker has tainted his image beyond redemption. Many in the British public – and increasing numbers of foreign politicians – hold Blair in contempt.
Blair and his dwindling band of admirers blame the media, which they say will never give him a fair hearing. Years ago, when Blair was fighting the Old Labour types he so despises, they used to say that they would never get a fair hearing from the media. Blair despised them for their defeatism. His first act as Labour leader was to fly halfway across the world to pay homage at the court of King Rupert Murdoch, and he tailored Labour’s policies so that they did not alienate the media. Now, in a wrenching irony, he bemoans media bias against him and seems unable to accept that he has done anything to deserve it. And he has alienated Rupert Murdoch utterly and, as far as we can see, irretrievably.
He will keep his money and make more, but, in Britain at least, it will leave him isolated, surrounded by no more than bevies of flattering acolytes and corrupt dictators. They will give him the wealth and adulation he craves. But those who count morality as a value will cast him aside.
He does not want only money: he wants influence, and power, and respect. That is why his international work is structured as it is.
Mike Harris, lobbyist, former Blairite, and former head of advocacy at Index on Censorship, has made a close study of Blair’s international work. There’s a growing move, he says, to privatise diplomacy, and Blair is at the cutting edge. If you watch Blair at work, whether as Middle East envoy or as a paid consultant, or as the patron of international charities, you can see that he’s aiming to be an alternative to conventional public-sector diplomacy.
Just in the way that the British government likes to outsource other functions to private-sector suppliers, so increasingly governments all over the world are outsourcing their diplomacy, and their relationships with other governments, to him. Sir Malcolm Rifkind, in fact, described him to us as someone who ‘operates a public/private partnership in diplomacy.’
This is making him immensely rich and immensely powerful. He has now made more money than any ex-prime minister in history. The contrast between Blair and Labour’s most successful prime minister, Clement Attlee, who died leaving just £7,295, is stark.
Many former prime ministers have inherited a lot of money, as Harold Macmillan did, but no former prime minister has made anything like the sort of money Blair has made. And no former prime minister has built his or her wealth so directly on his or her former office.
Through various business initiatives Blair has amassed a fortune, which we believe, from the information we can put together, to be at least £60 million, before we even begin to consider his vast property empire.
It’s not a sin to make money. In recent years, other former prime ministers have done it. Blair’s immediate predecessor, John Major, took a senior position with the American private equity firm Carlyle Group. Margaret Thatcher, among other things, made $500,000 a year as a consultant with Philip Morris. That did not stop Thatcher being widely admired, or Major continuing to be regarded as an honourable man. Blair, in Britain at least, is increasingly reviled. Why is this? And does he deserve it? There are several differences between Blair and all his predecessors.
First, their earnings are dwarfed by Blair’s – he has turned himself into what the Daily Telegraph has called ‘a human cash register’.
Second, they were far more discreet and restrained than Blair in their business dealings, and by Blair’s standards they were easily satisfied.
Third, Blair, while making his money, has also sought to create an international political profile: becoming Middle East envoy, launching an unsuccessful bid for the presidency of the European Council, attempting unsuccessfully to be a sort of elder statesman in the Labour Party. And he has set up charities, to many of which he has given his name – the Tony Blair Faith Foundation and the Tony Blair Sports Foundation.
Fourth, they were more discriminating about the sort of people they were prepared to endorse.
Last, and most important, they did not try to mix a public-service career with their commercial activities. It was always clear whom they were working for at any given time. Malcolm Rifkind attempts to explain this away thus: ‘I am no fan of Blair but I am not going to join a witch-hunt. I think he is wasting a lot of his life being a Flying Dutchman wandering round the world; it shows how restless he is. There is something
almost manic in it. I don’t admire him, but he is free to choose whatever way of life suits him as long as it is within the law.’
The problem with this view, though, is that like Pooh-Bah in The Mikado: he is Lord High Everything Else. You never know what role he is playing today: the Middle East peace envoy, the principal of Tony Blair Associates, the patron of the Tony Blair Faith Foundation – and often he is more than one of these distinguished people. That’s what has made Blair’s business dealings appear so suspect, and has opened him to charges of conflicts of interest.
The appearance that – for example – his role as Quartet Representative in the Middle East assists the expansion of his business empire is utterly toxic, and has helped to destroy his usefulness in the Middle East. That’s what has ensured that the respect in which he is held has plummeted since he left Downing Street.
We have found that the same people and the same companies keep cropping up again and again in different contexts, and it has not always been easy to know in which section they ought to go. They include:
MOHAMMED RASHID, former financial adviser to Colonel Gaddafi’s eldest son and to Palestine’s Yasser Arafat – he is now in hiding after being sentenced in absentia to five years in jail for fraud;
BARONESS SYMONS, whose services to Gaddafi’s Libya continued almost until the day the Colonel himself faced his grisly death;
MARK ALLEN, the British spy whose secret deals with Colonel Gaddafi and his son Saif al-Islam paved the way for Symons and Blair in Libya;
MICHAEL KLEIN, a former banker from Citigroup, fixer and expert in Middle East financial institutions.
Then there are the institutions and companies that have joined the gravy train:
MONITOR GROUP, the now bankrupt American management consultancy from which Blair draws much of his talent.
BROWN LLOYD JAMES, the consultancy run by a former Blair aide, which was commissioned to burnish the image of Syria’s President Assad, as well as that of the Tony Blair Faith Foundation;
CONSOLIDATED CONTRACTORS COMPANY, a huge Palestinian-owned construction multinational.
The names of these and other businesses keep recurring, whether we are writing about Kuwait, Palestine, the USA or anywhere else.
Blair’s massive earnings are supplemented by pension and other benefits that cost taxpayers more than £250,000 per year.
‘Blair is transfixed by money,’ Peter Oborne, chief political commentator for the Daily Telegraph, told us, and we have been driven to the conclusion that, in this at least, Oborne is right. Blair has sacrificed everything else he had and appeared to value – his reputation and his ability to do good in the world – in pursuit of wealth. Conservative MP Sir Malcolm Rifkind is rather succinct with his thoughts on this matter: ‘Any good he might have done is long since dissipated.’ He seems the living embodiment of Hilaire Belloc’s famous couplet:
I’m tired of Love; I’m still more tired of Rhyme;
But money gives me pleasure all the time.
Even his desire to make the world a more religious place, with more understanding between faiths, suffers. Any influence the Tony Blair Faith Foundation might have, in Britain and Europe at any rate, is crippled by the toxic name of the former Prime Minister in the title. The calculation, we are told, is that it does the organisation good elsewhere, particularly in the USA. Now some are doubting that Blair can sustain that, as Rupert Murdoch uses his formidable firepower in the US media to respond to disclosures – denied by Blair – of a relationship with Wendi Deng, Murdoch’s ex-wife.
According to John Kampfner, a former editor of the New Statesman, ‘Blair loved being on the world stage and then he was forced out of office against his will. His business deals allow him to remain on the stage and continue to hobnob with the rich and powerful.’
His best friends now admit that he is damaged goods. Charles Clarke told the Huffington Post: ‘There is no question that he has damaged his reputation. The money has damaged his reputation, some of his contacts have damaged the reputation, some aspects of the way he’s spent his life have damaged his reputation.’
If that’s a friend, imagine what his enemies are saying! Here are some examples.
‘I think Blair now is a very sad man, rich, but [he] betrayed everything the Labour party was about,’ says Greg Dyke. Simon Kuper of the Financial Times writes of what he calls ‘Blair’s disease’ – the disease of former national leaders monetising their years at the top. He wrote, ‘If you are super-rich, you probably have an ex-leader working for you, like an overpaid tennis coach. Blair, for instance, has shilled for JP Morgan Chase, Qatar and Kazakhstan’s cuddly regime.’
Kuper thinks Blair (and to a lesser extent former President Nicolas Sarkozy in France and former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder in Germany) planned it from the start. ‘Most ex-leaders link up with the plutocratic class while still in office. These people have been planning their careers since kindergarten,’ he wrote.1
There was certainly a time when he was not quite sure about his post Prime Ministerial career, and perhaps that is still true. A former senior employee told us, ‘I think he went through a period when he wasn’t entirely sure what he wanted to do. One thing about Tony wanting to make money, quite honestly, is that he is so persuasive and charismatic and kind of marketable, that he has made only 10 per cent of what he could make. I think he was feeling uncertain as to how much money he wanted to make and how he wanted to make it.’
Indeed, this source suggests that at a certain point, Blair wanted to set up an investment bank (called ‘Blair Bank’, perhaps). But he stepped back from the brink, though we don’t know why.
Blair was always criticised in the Labour Party for his readiness to leap to the defence of the mega-rich. Now that he is one of them, this is more true than ever. So he told Charles Moore in July 2012, ‘We must not start thinking that society will be better off if we hang 20 bankers at the end of the street … Don’t take 30 years of liberalisation, beginning under Mrs Thatcher, and say this is what caused the financial crisis … Wrong!’
This is a caricature of the criticisms of the financial community, whose culpability for the financial crisis of 2008 is not in doubt. No one has suggested hanging twenty bankers at the end of the street, but it has been suggested that we cap their bonuses and limit their ability to gamble with our money.
The lesson of the previous thirty years, Blair claimed, was that, in a globally interdependent economy, ‘We didn’t understand properly the true implications of the financial instruments involved, and so we didn’t supervise and regulate them properly. But we mustn’t go back to the state running everything.’ Given that one of the most serious failings of the government he led was its failure to supervise and regulate finance, this is a startling admission.
The need to find a role in the world is Moore’s analysis of the ‘Blair disease’.
I detect in him something like Britain’s famous problem of having lost an empire, but not yet found a role. At 59, he’s still young for a man in his position. He has been out of the game for five years. You can see, he wants to get back in, when he says, ‘Since I left office, I have learnt a huge amount, especially about what is happening in Europe and the world. Sometimes it’s quite shocking to me: how useful would this knowledge have been!’
Yet this is part of the sacrifice he made for money. He could have got back in the game and made good use of all that knowledge, but he would have had to make that – and not the pursuit of wealth – his top priority. He could, for example, have made a real contribution to Middle East peace – enough, you would have thought, to satisfy the most demanding ambition. But he would have had to give up other ambitions, most notably the accumulation of money, in order to do that.
Moore goes on:
He thinks, I suspect, that he’d be a better prime minister now than he was before. Blair tells us, ‘I’d like to find a form of intervening in debates.’ How? By getting elected again? ‘I don’t think that’s possible.’ A p
eerage? A wonderful look of amused contempt suffuses his tanned face. Something in Europe, perhaps? ‘I would have taken the job [the presidency of the European Council] if they had offered it to me, but they didn’t.’
Long before he ceased to be prime minister, the Blairs had acquired a worldwide reputation for being money-hungry. Their property portfolio began when Blair was still in office (see Chapter 14 for details of the Blairs’ acquisition of properties).
Cherie’s precarious childhood seems to have left her with a pretty well insatiable need for financial security. Blair, too, suffered childhood insecurity – though not on the same scale as his wife – when his father had a stroke. How far do these personal factors explain their apparent need to build wealth way beyond their needs? And to what extent is it due to the fact that Blair admires, and is dazzled by, the very rich?
Blair’s relentless quest for financial enrichment has been dogged by accusations of conflicts of interest and suspicions that he is benefiting from the most controversial decision of his premiership – to go to war against Iraq. Readers will by now have seen what we have said about oilfields and the Middle East, and will have made up their own minds on this question.
It’s certainly the case that during Blair’s time in office he was able to make contacts and cultivate relationships that would later make him rich, and that some of these came about as a result of the Iraq War. The demise of Saddam Hussein made him popular in Kuwait, where he has made millions as an adviser to the Emir and where he even has his own office inside the Kuwaiti parliament buildings.
And apart from the Iraq War, there’s no doubt that just being prime minister helps his cause. Malcolm Rifkind told us,
Once you have ceased to be prime minister and you don’t have public responsibilities, your added value … does relate to your international experience and people you know. It doesn’t just mean other presidents or PMs, but someone like Blair would be of enormous value to someone who wanted to get access to another company. If someone wants to see the CEO of a company and part of the delegation is Mr T Blair, you can guess what the answer would be.
Blair Inc--The Man Behind the Mask Page 38