by Alex Evans | Nov 16, 2007 | Cooperation and coherence, Influence and networks, UK
Lots of gossip in Whitehall about Sue Cameron’s piece in the FT the day before yesterday:
Oh dear! No one in Whitehall expected Gordon Brown to revert to type so quickly. He has been in Number 10 less than six months but, to the horror of civil servants, he has already hunkered down and cut most communication with the rest of government. Insiders say that no papers, no ideas and no decisions are getting through the barbed wire – only announcements from the leader that have been discussed with no one outside Mr Brown’s inner circle.
As a result, the corridors of power have become the corridors of impotence. Whitehall teems with unhappy cabinet ministers who have not been consulted or even informed about proposals that concern them – little details such as the date of the Budget, troop withdrawals in Iraq or the cancelling of the general election.
Equally significant yet unnoticed by outsiders is the impact on officials who find they are as much out of the loop as ever they were in the days of Tony Blair. With their ministers sidelined, their own expertise – and sometimes months of work on new proposals – is being ignored.
Their mood has shifted markedly from the welcome they gave Mr Brown in the summer. They feel he has reneged on his promises of a return to a more open, listening government. Criticism among the permanent secretaries, Whitehall’s college of cardinals, is swelling.
This is a story that Brown can’t afford to allow to run…
by Alex Evans | Nov 10, 2007 | Influence and networks, UK
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?
by Mark Weston | Nov 6, 2007 | Middle East and North Africa
If you ever have to choose a country for your worst enemy to run, you should strongly consider Turkey.
Recep Tayyip Erdo?an, the current Turkish Prime Minister (known to both friends and enemies simply as Tayyip), is in the US asking for help in controlling the Kurdish rebels who are attacking his country from northern Iraq. Tayyip’s instincts are not to invade – he knows the operation is unlikely to succeed, and that what the Kurds need is “more democracy”, not more oppression. But Turkish public opinion, fanned by nationalist paranoia, is bellicose and the army is determined to invade in a bid to claw back some of its diminishing clout.
Tayyip has other balancing acts to grapple with too. Take Europe, which he has steered Turkey towards by giving more rights to Kurds and reducing the army’s power, but which unhelpfully keeps raising the bar for entry. Europe’s duplicity offends Turkish pride (yes, that nationalistic streak again), so Tayyip is forced to use the prospect of stronger ties with Iran and Syria as a negotiating weapon. (more…)
by David Steven | Nov 3, 2007 | Middle East and North Africa, North America
The Sunday Times in its lead editorial:
Is no news good news or bad news? In Iraq, it seems good news is deemed no news….
The instinct of too many people is that if Iraq is going badly we should get out because it is going badly and if it is getting better we should get out because it is getting better. This is a catastrophic miscalculation. Iraq is getting better. That is good, not bad, news.
Victor Davis Hanson:
In the recent silence about Iraq (apparently no bad news is no news at all), we fail to appreciate that we are witnessing one of the most dramatic turnabouts in a war in our history, comparable to the 90 day radical change from June to September 1864.
Both expect the Democrats to suffer. The Times:
The current achievements, and they are achievements, are being treated as almost an embarrassment in certain quarters. The entire context of the contest for the Democratic nomination for president has been based on the conclusion that Iraq is an absolute disaster.
Davis Hanson:
There will be fundamental political adjustments… [such as] having the entire leadership of the Democratic either ignore Iraq, claim the victory was not worth the commensurate cost of the last four plus years, or take proprietorship over Gen. Petraeus’s success…
If Iraq is stable by spring of next year, the entire political landscape here at home will be altered.
by Alex Evans | Nov 1, 2007 | North America
The FT’s Edward Luce was dispatched to lunch with John Bolton at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington earlier this month, and reports back from the front line. Luce has a lovely turn of phrase, and the article has some gorgeous moments – like this:
I am no believer in providence. But having booked lunch with John Bolton – perhaps the most hardline (now former) member of the Bush administration – I arrive to find Donald Rumsfeld seated at the next table, and have the fleeting thought that I might possess my own newspaper-reading guardian angel. Since I have arrived first I now have the advantage of watching Bolton, whose shock-white handlebar moustache gives him an unmistakeable Asterix-like appearance, cross the floor towards me. I wait to see what happens when he chances upon the former Secretary of Defense.
or this, when Luce and Bolton are discussing the latter’s book about his time at the UN, entitled Surrender is not an Option:
Feeling mildly intimidated, not least by Bolton’s warlike moustache, I venture an ill-timed joke: “Well of course, everyone will instantly think of that phrase ‘Cheese-eating surrender monkeys’,” I say, referring to the memorable line coined for the French after they had voted against the Iraq war at the UN. Bolton looks at me suspiciously. An awkward moment of silence follows.
But here is my favourite:
The waiter asks what we would like next. Bolton asks for a coffee – “just a coffee” – while I request a double espresso with separate hot milk. Bolton gives me another of his flinty looks. Feeling the need to explain, I say: “Ordinarily I’d order a large macchiato, but sometimes they don’t know what that is.” I realise at once that I am only digging myself deeper. “I wouldn’t know,” says Bolton after a pause. “I just get coffee.”
