This week’s Spectator leads with a full scale assault on FCO minister and former UN Deputy Secretary General Mark Malloch Brown (also picked up in brief by the Telegraph and the Times). The article dredges up various old canards that aren’t exactly news – Malloch Brown’s friendship with George Soros, the UN oil for food scandal, Malloch Brown’s controversial interview with the Telegraph over the summer – but its chief revelation is that since becoming a Minister, Malloch Brown has been living in a grace and favour flat in Admiralty Arch.
Malloch Brown, astonishingly, has secured one of the three government flats in Admiralty House, where John Prescott used to live. In so doing, this newcomer has leapfrogged 20 full members of the Cabinet who notionally enjoy seniority over him … The Treasury’s National Assets Register values the Admiralty House accommodation at £7.76 million and as worth more than the flats above No. 10 and 11 Downing Street. It is, indeed, fit for a Lord, and one with tastes which are the opposite of frugal. A parliamentary answer earlier this autumn revealed that ‘the floor area of the ministerial residences in Admiralty House is 859 square metres.’ In 2006–07 the Deputy Prime Minister’s Office paid the Cabinet Office no less than £173,000 for John Prescott’s living in one of the flats there.
Er… is that it? For one thing, the charge that Malloch Brown has “leapfrogged 20 full members of the Cabinet” wilts somewhat given that the article admits that “the other two flats in the building are empty, and another government grace-and-favour residence in South Eaton Place, SW1, is being sold off”. Not exactly a queue stretching around the block, then. Besides, is it so unusual for a large organisation to provide relocation assistance to a senior executive joining from overseas? And if not, then what on earth would the cost case be for expending taxpayers’ money on renting an apartment when three apartments that the Government already owns are vacant?
Of course, whether you’re a defender or a detractor of Malloch Brown’s, the flat is no more than a tactical football. The real story here is the resurrection of the unilateralist right’s long-standing vendetta against Malloch Brown, and its migration to this side of the Atlantic. One of the authors of the piece, Claudia Rosett, has long enjoyed attacking not only Malloch Brown but indeed anything to do with the UN, as her blog confirms. Not one, not two, but all of the posts on it are attacks on the United Nations; so this December’s UN climate summit, for instance, becomes in Rosett’s view a “UN climate-crowd pajama party on Bali” at which cocktails begin at 3pm.
What is surprising about the article is to see that the other author of the piece is James Forsyth, the Spectator’s engaging and thoughtful web editor. Forsyth is on the right, to be sure – he’s a climate change sceptic, for instance – but his arguments are usually well thought-through, capable of understanding the opposite view, and generally a very long way from Rosett’s obsessive fulminations. His most recent blog post on the Spectator site, for example – which discusses Deroy Murdock’s defence of waterboarding in the National Review, which David discussed here on GlobalDashboard earlier this week – argues that
Some on the right are so determined to always take the toughest position possible on any war on terror question that they sound like a Stephen Colbert parody of themselves.
Swap “the United Nations and multilateralism” for “any war on terror question” and Forsyth might as well be talking about Rosett. So why the joint article? For what it’s worth, my guess is that Forsyth was simply told to write it with Rosett by Matthew d’Ancona, the Spectator’s editor, who’s been after Malloch Brown’s scalp from the start; way back on the 29th June, before Malloch Brown’s interview with the Telegraph had been published, d’Ancona was already calling it a “dreadful appointment”.
What this is really about, one suspects, is Malloch Brown’s opposition to the war in Iraq and his criticism of the Bush Administration. Fair enough. But shall we all stop pretending that this is about a flat, then?
