Brian Barder's blog

So the prime minister has nominated Peter Mandelson to be Britain’s sole new Commissioner at the EU in Brussels, on the face of it an admirable choice: the man is an articulate and persuasive pro-European, never lacking in moral and political courage, generally acknowledged to be a talented administrator who performed excellently as a Cabinet minister at the Northern Ireland Office and the Department of Trade and Industry, and a skilful and effective politician with a reputation for manipulative deviousness which can only stand him in good stead in the Brussels piranha-tank. Yet the raising of Mandelson from the politically dead by his old friend and protégé, Tony Blair, has prompted predictably personal attacks on Mandelson of an almost unique ferocity from, mainly, his political ‘friends’ and colleagues in the Labour Party and in the liberal media. With friends like that, etc. ….

The media and Mandelson’s other critics have been free with their use of such terms as "disgracedâ€? and "discreditedâ€? as applied to him. If I were in his shoes, I’d sue the lot of them, in the expectation of securing damages on a scale comparable with an EU Commissioner’s expense account.

It’s worth recalling the circumstances of Mandelson’s two ministerial resignations.

The first arose from the disclosure that he had borrowed money to put towards buying a house from a brother MP and ministerial colleague[1], whose financial activities were at that time under investigation by Mandelson’s own department, although the investigation subsequently revealed no impropriety. Mandelson himself acknowledges that he had been imprudent in failing to inform his Permanent Secretary and the Commissioner for Parliamentary Standards of the loan. At the time there was loose talk in the press of Mandelson having failed to tell his building society of the loan when applying for his mortgage, with other innuendoes suggestive of improper, even fraudulent behaviour. It later transpired, too late to save Mandelson’s ministerial appointment, that no such impropriety had occurred. Nor was there anything intrinsically improper about the loan. With hindsight it became clear that the prime minister had over-reacted, and acted prematurely, in accepting Mandelson’s resignation over what was essentially a trivial and easily rectified omission. But Mandelson’s name acquired an indelible though undeserved scar and his enemies carved the first notch on their guns.

In March 2002 I wrote an account of the second resignation in an Ephem (available on my website). To save you the bother of looking it up, I quote it here:

"Peter Mandelson, a then Cabinet minister and close friend and adviser to Blair, [was] accused by the media of using his ministerial position to try to get a favourable decision on the passport applications of a pair of Asian brothers who were offering a financial contribution towards the Millennium Dome (for which, among other things, Mandelson had had ministerial responsibility). It rapidly became clear that there had been nothing remotely improper about the enquiry Mandelson had made, or caused to be made, about progress in processing the passport applications, and indeed even the Home Office junior minister to whose office the enquiry had been addressed, one O’Brien, confirmed that there had been nothing improper about it. The ensuing argument then revolved around the wholly insignificant question whether Mandelson had made a telephone call directly to O’Brien (as O’Brien claimed to remember him doing, although no record of such a call has ever been found) or whether it had been made on Mandelson’s instructions by his officials (as Mandelson believed, and as the few available documents seemed to confirm). The media became violently excited over this issue; the prime minister’s rapid response was to call in Mandelson and require his resignation, while publicly acknowledging that he had behaved with total propriety at all times. Another sacrifice to the ravening wolves of the British tabloids and their more staid but equally malicious broadsheet brothers!

"For unexplained reasons, Mandelson’s behaviour, although not the object of any accusations, was then subjected to an official enquiry by a not particularly eminent barrister who concluded that Mandelson had done nothing improper but had probably made the disputed telephone call to O’Brien even though he had clearly ‘forgotten’ having done so. Weirdly, this exoneration of Mandelson did him no good, since he had been made to resign before the enquiry rather than after, or in the light of, its outcome, an odd reversal of the usual procedure by which verdict generally precedes sentence, rather than the other way about.

"And there has been a curious postscript to this sorry chronicle. Mandelson recently found some official papers in a briefcase which he felt confirmed his recollection that he had not made the disputed telephone call to O’Brien. The not particularly eminent barrister was reinstalled to hold a further enquiry, but after scrutinising the new evidence concluded that he had no reason to change his mind about the probability, on balance, that Mandelson had made the telephone call, although he repeated that there had been nothing improper about it. Thus Mandelson, acquitted by the first enquiry but already sacked and not later reinstated, appealed against his own acquittal only to have it reaffirmed. But he still hasn’t been restored to government office: not, obviously, because had done anything wrong, but because he had made powerful enemies in the Cabinet, the Labour Party, Number 10 and the media, and Mr Blair has not been willing to face them down or to stand by his old friend and mentor. It will be interesting to see who is the next minister or official required to terminate his or her career for having done nothing wrong.â€?

Contrast and compare the cases of Jo Moore and Martin Sixsmith, also forced in February 2002 to resign from their positions as a political adviser and civil servant respectively, the former having originally been reprimanded over an indiscretion for which dismissal had been judged to be unnecessary, and the latter having been formally acquitted of having done anything wrong or improper at all. Unwarranted dismissals, driven by panicky fear of an unfavourable press, seem to be a speciality of No. 10. Some have suggested that the resurrection of Peter Mandelson and his appointment to Brussels may reflect a guilty conscience on the part of his fire-proof old friend.

I carry no kind of candle whatever for Peter Mandelson. He is a main architect of New Labour and the hi-jacking of the Labour Party that I have supported, often with enthusiasm, sometimes faute de mieux, all my adult life. I remain unrepentantly but increasingly gloomily Old Labour, and hope that Brussels will keep the British Commissioner too busy for frequent visits to No. 10 Downing Street to plant suggestions for fresh betrayals of traditional Labour values in the empty flower-beds of Mr Blair’s mind. But I also recognise that leaving Mandelson to languish on the back benches has entailed a sad waste of exceptional talent and ability; that some at least of the extraordinary hostility to him, and its often unpleasantly personal character, is connected with his sexual orientation, which is or should be nobody’s business but his own; and that he has suffered massive injustice, not once but twice, at the hands of his greatest political ally and friend. I wish him well in Brussels. So should we all.

[1] [6 August 04] A friend has helpfully pointed out to me that (contrary to what I wrote above) Peter Mandelson borrowed the money from Geoffrey Robinson before either of them was a minister, indeed even before the 1997 election. He (the friend) has argued that the loan was, or could have been seen as, corrupt, because it could have been, and possibly was, perceived at the time as in effect a disguised payment in return for which Mandelson used his influence with Tony Blair to persuade Blair to appoint Robinson a minister (although not a Cabinet minister). I am not convinced by this, believing that Robinson’s appointment probably owed more to Gordon Brown’s backing than to Mandelson, and that anyway the chain of cause and effect is too speculative and indirect to warrant a charge of corruption. I continue to believe that Mandelson was guilty of no more than a failure of judgment in omitting to declare the loan to his permanent secretary on becoming a minister and that this should not have been regarded as justification for sacking him.

Brian
http://www.barder.com/brian/

Contributed by an e-friend:
Ten-Year plans are really a great wheeze.  Should the plan run its course it is unlikely, in the event of failure, that those responsible will still be around. And as the plan unfolds, as in the case of the Transport Plan 2000, it can be ditched and replaced with one which contains virtually no specifics. And certainly no benchmarks, as did the Transport Plan 2000, against which success or failure can be measured. 
 
Thanks for that, t.
 
Brian
http://www.barder.com/brian/

What are we to make of the Butler Committee’s review of intelligence on weapons of mass destruction in connection with the Iraq war? It’s already trite to repeat the obvious conclusion, reflected in broadsheet and tabloid newspapers alike, that the report is a catalogue of criticisms, many of them serious and far-reaching, of the way intelligence on Iraq has been handled by the intelligence agencies, the intelligence analysts, the Joint Intelligence Committee and its Chairman, senior staff of No 10 Downing Street and the prime minister himself—yet according to Lord Butler in his answer to a journalist’s question at the public launch of his report, "You ask who is to blame for this. I think there is no single individual to blame. This was a collective operation in which there were the failures… but, in my view, no deliberate intent on the part of the government to mislead.â€? And: "There is no doubt that the government believed the judgments that were in the dossier.â€? "We found no evidence to question the prime minister’s good faith.â€? All were to blame, and none shall be blamed.

It’s probably wrong to describe the Butler report as whitewash, as some commentaries have done. That was a fair comment on Lord Hutton’s earlier reporton the circumstances surrounding the death of Dr David Kelly, in which blame was dished out in generous helpings to the BBC, but none to the government, despite the indictment implicit in the body of the report and in the Hutton evidence. At the outset of his inquiry, Butler made it clear that he would investigate and assess institutions and processes but not individuals. His report departs from this in the extraordinary and explicit acquittal of John Scarlett, Chairman of the JIC, and the recommendation that he should be allowed to take up his new appointment as head of SIS, notwithstanding the condemnation in the report of the role played by Scarlett in the preparation of the infamous government dossier, errors for which others besides Scarlett were clearly also responsible. This is the more remarkable for being pretty clearly outside the committee’s terms of reference, and casts a slightly dubious light over the rest of the report. But apart from this, the committee largely eschews the casting of blame, bestows some selective praise, and sets out the facts, many of them implicitly damning.

It is perhaps surprising that the report makes no comment on one aspect of the handling of the dossier by Scarlett as Chairman of the JIC and his relationship with those senior luminaries of No. 10, Alastair Campbell and Jonathan Powell, entailing the regrettable blurring of the respective roles of the intelligence analysts and assessors on the one hand and the policy-makers and policy-presenters on the other. This is the fact that Scarlett, as an SIS officer but not the head of an agency or government department, was outranked by a number of members of his JIC, who included two Permanent Secretaries and the Chiefs of the three intelligence agencies. Why did none of these intervene when they saw how the intelligence role of their Chairman, and thus of the whole JIC, was being compromised by his over-close association with the No. 10 policy staff, indeed the chief spinners, as well as with the prime minister himself? How indeed did it come about that the person appointed as JIC Chairman was less senior and less experienced in this kind of work than several ordinary members of the Committee? These questions, posed privately by a former member of the JIC, ex-ambassador and co-signatory of the letter of the 52 ex-diplomats about middle east policy, surely require an answer.

A striking feature of Butler’s most damning criticisms of those concerned, from the prime minister downwards, is that very few of them indeed are new. Virtually all of them had already emerged months ago with lethal clarity from the Hutton report and (especially) the evidence given to Hutton:

* the breach in what should be an impregnable firewall between intelligence and policy; the failure to correct, or even (in the case of the prime minister) apparently to be aware of, the misinterpretation by the media and others of the 45-minute claim, and the flimsiness of the intelligence on which it was based;

* the systematic and deliberate elimination from the intelligence material of nearly all the vital caveats and qualifications about the reliability of that intelligence for the purposes of the dossier and the prime minister’s speeches in justification of the case for war, misrepresenting as certain and beyond doubt that which had explicitly been qualified as doubtful – a process that could not by definition have been anything but deliberate, and which is not unfairly if inelegantly described as ‘sexing-up’;

* the suppression of the misgivings about the language and some of the material in the dossier expressed by some expert intelligence officers and analysts below JIC level, and the apparent failure of JIC members adequately to consult their more expert subordinate staff about them;

* the search for intelligence to support policies already decided, rather than decisions on policy based at least in part on objectively assessed and impartially presented intelligence;

* the by-passing of normal Cabinet collective discussion and decision-making, based on the study of properly prepared documentation and contributions from their personal and departmental experience by Cabinet ministers and their officials, including those outside the prime minister’s inner circle: the prime minister and his coterie of No 10 staff and a random selection of other ministers and officials were taking life-and-death, peace-and-war decisions that were not properly recorded, at meetings which were not properly minuted, often without even a record of who was present at which stages of the proceedings, and without any meaningful contribution by other ministers who might have sounded notes of caution and warning if they had been in the loop. Paras 606 to 611 of the Butler report are as severe in their indictment of these sloppy informalities (my language, not Butler’s) as any others in this comprehensive survey.

Without risking the accusation of claiming to have ‘told you so’, I merely recall that all these serious criticisms were included in my own commentary of 1 February this year on the Hutton report and its many lacunae, as any reader of this can confirm by clicking the link to it. Did we need the expensive months of another enquiry by Lord Butler and his distinguished colleagues to tell us what we already knew, if we had had the wit to look at the evidence given to Hutton? Of course there is some value in having those critical conclusions spectacularly confirmed by the Butler committee after its privileged access to all the relevant intelligence material and associated documents, much of it not seen by Lord Hutton – especially as our own critical conclusions had to be gleaned from analysis of the Hutton evidence rather than being articulated in Hutton’s own findings. Indeed the picture painted by Butler is even more alarming (and even more damaging to the prime minister’s reputation and standing) than anything we had been able to extrapolate from Hutton.

Which brings us to the most baffling question of all: where does all this lead us? Apologists for Mr Blair have focused on the findings that there was no intention on the part of the government deliberately to mislead, and that the committee found no evidence to question the prime minister’s good faith. But Tony Blair’s ‘good faith’ is not the issue. Nor is his familiar ‘passionate belief’ that what he did was right, in spite of everything. Mr Blair himself has put up his usual spirited, polemical and counter-attacking defence, declaring that he accepts personal responsibility for all the things that went wrong but giving no indication whatever of any intention to translate that responsibility into a cleansing resignation. What does an acceptance of responsibility for numerous calamitous errors and shortcomings in the conduct of the country’s business mean in practice if the head of government who played such a uniquely personal role in those events carries on as if nothing has happened?

These were not mistakes and errors leading to the loss of a few million pounds of taxpayers’ money through waste and inefficiency in the National health Service. Thousands of lives have been lost as a direct result of what was decided on this deeply flawed basis. The world has been made a more dangerous place. We have removed a malign dictator from the necks of the Iraqi people and substituted terrorism and insurgency. We have inflamed Muslim opinion throughout the world, including in our own country, thereby fostering anti-western fundamentalist extremism and violence. We have divided the European Community, instead of acting in concert with our EU partners to press on Washington the need for patience and diplomacy rather than killing and destruction. The chairman of the Governors and Director-General of the BBC have been forced out of their jobs because of a single radio report in the small hours of the morning which contained one inaccuracy but which has subsequently been shown, not least by Butler, to have been basically correct and of the utmost importance. Yet it seems that no resignation by a single minister, official or intelligence officer is to follow the damning criticisms of their performance by Lord Butler, Lord Hutton’s witnesses and virtually every other serious commentator on these sad events.

It is difficult to see how a Labour government, in many respects the most successful in our history, can regain its credibility or resume its effective functioning so long as this irreparably damaged prime minister remains its leader.

Brian Barder
16 July 2004
http://www.barder.com/brian/

The Butler Committee team 

Honours: Report of the Select Committee on Public Administration
An extract:

"136. On the other hand, the seemingly automatic nature of the awards, the sense that they are expected and assumed, creates a feeling of unfairness and undermines the credibility of the system—especially when senior civil servants are so prominent on the honours committees. The argument that honours are needed to compensate for low state pay is hardly conclusive; in strict logic, it would mean that those in paid employment in the voluntary sector (where salaries are often very modest) should be treated with even greater generosity. Privileged access for state servants is something of an anachronism. The original historical justification for favourable treatment has weakened as the Nolan principle of selection on merit has established itself as an integral part of public life. The practical utility of some honours also appears dubious. Lord Hurd’s view after many years in the Foreign Office, was that ambassadorial knighthoods were simply not necessary to the proper conduct of diplomacy, while a former ambassador’s wife described to us her husband’s unsuccessful battle to avoid acquiring one.â€?

No prizes for guessing…

Brian
http://www.barder.com/brian/