The biggest mouth among all the talents strikes again

There were once four billy goats who crossed Westminster Bridge to exchange their coats for ermine. When invited into Gruff’s big tent, these goats – recruits to Gordon Brown’s “government of all the talents” – began to chew the guy ropes and threaten the structure. So pesky was one goat that a fearsome troll named David Miliband decided to gobble him up. That, in a nutshell, is the rumoured predicament of Lord Malloch-Brown.

The off-message grandstanding of the former deputy secretary-general of the United Nations, elevated to the cabinet last June, has not only upset Miliband, his boss at the Foreign Office. The prime minister is reported to have said that if he “had known it would cause such a fuss, I wouldn’t have appointed him”.

The whispering campaign against Malloch-Brown has come as a bit of a shock to the 54-year-old mandarin who once thought nothing of crossing swords with President George W Bush and America’s neoconservatives. “I feel a bit like the bewildered Dr Who figure who stepped out of the Tardis,” he confessed last week.

Even his own officials have turned on him, describing him as a “liability”.

“I don’t think he realised that he would have very few friends in parliament or in officialdom,” said the writer William Shawcross, who described his old friend Mark as “charming, extremely smart and diplomatic”.

Malloch-Brown’s plight reflects the difficult transition of Brown’s three other “goats” to the roughhouse of British politics. Last week Lord West, a “simple sailor” turned security minister, performed a spectacular about-turn on his declaration that he had yet to be “fully convinced” about extending detention powers. Lord Jones, the CBI chief turned trade minister, has voted just once as a peer. Lord Darzi, a surgeon turned health minister, blotted his copybook by issuing an early interim report that fed speculation about an autumn election.

However, the new boy is not short of friends. “Mark is incredibly good company, very witty and entertaining,” said Andrew Mitchell, the Conservative spokesman on international development. “He’s also extremely tough and no wilting violet.”

Malloch-Brown’s worst enemy is his own big mouth. He lost little time after his appointment to brag of his reputation: “From Colin Powell to Condi Rice all the way through to Richard Holbrooke or Madeleine Albright, across that massive swathe of American foreign policy, I would bet you a drink that you would find that I am their favourite multi-nationalist Brit.”

The knives came out when he signalled that Brown and Bush would not be “joined at the hip” in the way that Tony Blair and the US president had been – a suggestion from which the prime minister was energetically back-pedalling last week.

Malloch-Brown’s remark that he was Miliband’s “wise eminence” was said to have inflamed the foreign secretary’s insecurities. His portfolio of Africa, Asia and the UN has left his inexperienced boss with little to do other than to hector countries on their shortcomings.

The mighty mouth was in trouble again this weekend when it was reported that he had told officials of the Syrian regime: “Think of me as your man in the cabinet.” Malloch-Brown denies making the comment.

Some see the hand of Miliband behind the savaging of Malloch-Brown in The Spectator. The focus was the opulent London grace-and-favour apartment that he occupies with his wife Patricia and their four children in Admiralty House, where John Prescott used to live. By this account, the flat was part of a remarkable package that he won from the “supplicant” Brown, who was “desperate” to hire a foreign policy heavyweight.

The disparity between Malloch-Brown’s salary of £81,504 and the £173,000 subsidised rent paid for Prescott’s comparable flat was reminiscent of a similar arrangement with his friend George Soros, the US billionaire and philanthropist.

As Soros’s tenant in a five-bedroom property, Malloch-Brown was paying a UNsubsidised rent of about $120,000 while his take-home pay was $125,000.

Leaving the UN last year, he was appointed to senior positions at Soros’s hedge fund Quantum and its sister Open Society Institute, which promotes democracy. The Wall Street Journal dubbed him part of an “axis of Soros”.

Malloch-Brown denounced the disclosure of his rent as a smear by American conservatives opposed to the UN. His fiercest critic, John Bolton, the former US ambassador to the UN, has taken delight in trashing his old enemy in a new book, Surrender is not an Option.

Disdaining “this petty bureaucrat” who had dared to criticise America for allowing “too much unchecked UNbashing and stereotyping”, Bolton claimed that Bush had told Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general, that he should “get rid of Malloch-Brown” as an “antiAmerican”.

This accusation wounded Malloch-Brown. “I’ve an American wife, kids . . . I love the country,” he protested. But he made no secret of the fact that he detested the neocon ideologues, although his friend Paul Wolfowitz is “a great guy”.

Born in Britain, Malloch-Brown was raised in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), the son of a South African diplomat who fled the apartheid regime. He was educated at Marlborough before earning a first in history from Cambridge and a masters in politics from Michigan.

A two-year stint as political correspondent at The Economist seemed to be little preparation for his mission to save the world at the office of the UN high commissioner for refugees (UNHCR). Aged 26, he built a refugee camp for more than 100,000 Cambodians on the Thai border in 1979.

There he won the admiration of Morton Abramowitz, then US ambassador to Thailand, who recalled last week that he was “stunned” that someone so young could show such drive and initiative. “He did a spectacular job,” he said.

Later, while acting as advisers to Soros on how to spend his $50m gift to Bosnia, the two men set up the International Crisis Group in 1993 to lobby western governments during humanitarian crises.

His flirtation with British politics was fleeting when he decided to stand in the 1983 general election for the nascent Social Democratic party. Prudently, he kept his options open. “I went to see the [UNHCR] director of personnel and got an undated, signed resignation letter just in case I got a seat.” He was sent packing by a selection committee, but the personnel director kept the letter. His name was Kofi Annan.

Malloch-Brown went on to make his name as a “mercenary for democracy” with Washington’s Sawyer Miller political consultancy, which spread the techniques of American political campaigns to foreign governments. As head of its international division, Malloch-Brown turned up in the Philippines to help Corazon Aquino’s successful campaign to unseat the dictator Ferdinand Marcos. He was also involved in another successful campaign to depose a dictator, Augusto Pinochet in Chile.

In 1994 he joined the World Bank as a PR supremo while the organisation was suffering low morale and under attack for wasting American tax dollars.

Five years later Annan – by then secretary-general of the UN – appointed him administrator of the equally fraught UN development programme (UNDP). A development official speaks well of him: “The consensus is that he was successful. What he did was to reinvent the UNDP as a specialised agency which dealt with governance and postconflict issues.”

In 2005 he became chief of staff to Annan, who had been damaged by the revelation that his son Kojo was paid by a Swiss firm that held a UN food contract.

Malloch-Brown’s hardest task was defending the UN’s oil for food programme to Iraq. His claim that “not a penny was lost from the organisation” was at odds with an internal audit showing that overcompensation amounted to $557m.

When Annan had declared that the invasion of Iraq was illegal, the gloves came off. Malloch-Brown, installed as Annan’s deputy last year, found himself in a war of words with Washington. The Americans still feel bruised by Brown’s decision to coopt him, despite the prime minister’s reported aside that “Malloch-Brown does not speak for the government on relations with America”.

Aryeh Neier, president of the Open Society Institute, believes that his friend of 20 years can take the heat: “He’s a big boy. He’s been in the thick of things in the past and is probably going to remain in the thick of things for his whole career.”

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