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.”
