WHEN Paul Wolfowitz was named as the new president of the World Bank, staff at its headquarters fired off 1,300 e-mails to a confidential internet site. More than 1,100 of the comments complained about the appointment of a former Pentagon boss who was seen by many as the architect of a disastrous war in Iraq.

Yet less than a fortnight after he took up the reins as the 10th president of the world’s largest international aid institution, the criticism that greeted Wolfowitz’s appointment is rapidly abating. He is emerging as a potentially crucial ally for Tony Blair, the British prime minister,who has placed aid for Africa at the top of his agenda for the G8 summit of industrial nations at Gleneagles next month.

To the delight of British officials, the former deputy US defence secretary has been poring over Blair’s proposals for alleviating African poverty. He leaves today on a week-long trip to Nigeria, South Africa, Rwanda and Burkina Faso with a copy of the report compiled by Blair’s Commission for Africa. He will also attend the Gleneagles summit, where he is expected to urge his former US administration colleagues to find more resources for Africa.

The initial scepticism that greeted the arrival of a notorious neoconservative hawk at the head of a global development agency has given way to increasing optimism in London and elsewhere that Wolfowitz may surprise the world with his commitment to the fight on poverty.

“I think you’ve got someone with very much an inquiring mind, someone who likes to solve problems and who also has good contacts with the president of the United States,” one senior official said. “Take the considerable intellectual energy he displayed at the Pentagon and direct them at the World Bank, and it won’t be a bad thing, in my view.”

Sounding more like a liberal peacenik than a former Pentagon warlord, Wolfowitz said last week that the world had reached “an extraordinary moment in history” in terms of helping Africa.

He added: “Believing that Africa’s plight has no effect on the rest of the world is not only naive, it’s morally wrong.”

Wolfowitz’s hand has already been seen in yesterday’s agreement by G8 finance ministers to relieve $40 billion of international debt owed by 18 of the world’s poorest countries.

Transatlantic negotiations had stalled for several weeks over conflicting views on how to cancel Africa’s debt to the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and African Development Bank. But Wolfowitz’s arrival at World Bank headquarters appears to have encouraged a US compromise in time for the meeting in London.

From the moment his appointment was announced, Wolfowitz began quietly calling specialists on African aid. He made two long telephone calls to Bono, the rock star who has campaigned for debt relief. “They were very enthusiastic, detailed and lengthy conversations,” said a Wolfowitz aide. “They clicked.”

He was also lobbied discreetly by British and other international officials who urged him to focus on Africa as a means of distancing himself from his old job. “He really needed to show some form early on over Africa,” one official said. “He had a certain reputation (at the Pentagon) and he needed to show that he cared about tackling poverty around the world.”

Wolfowitz is also keen to prove that he is not, as critics have suggested, a “neocon Trojan horse” planted at the World Bank by President George W Bush to do the administration’s bidding. He recently admitted that he had yet to convince sceptics that he is not out to turn the World Bank into just another branch of Bush’s global war on terrorism.

Greeted on his first day with a letter of protest signed by 303 aid organisations from 62 countries, Wolfowitz said he would work hard to be “objective and credible”. European officials expect him to keep his distance from the administration, at least in his first months in office.

At the same time, Wolfowitz retains important connections at the White House, where Michael Gerson, the president’s chief speechwriter, is an evangelical Christian with a strong interest in Africa, notably in the spread of Aids.

Gerson, who is sometimes described as the man who puts the “compassion” in Bush’s conservativism, is also travelling on presidential business in Africa this week and may provide a useful conduit to Bush should Wolfowitz need heavyweight political support.

British officials hope that a unique combination of personal qualities and political circumstances will turn Wolfowitz into a powerful spokesman for the issues that Blair is battling to promote –— increased aid and poverty reduction.

As a former ambassador to Indonesia, Wolfowitz has first-hand experience of the corruption and chaos so often accompanying Third World development projects. As a former professor of international relations studies at one of America’s most prestigious universities, he is also a formidable intellectual whose misadventures in Iraq have barely dented his reputation for solving daunting problems.

Despite his reputation as a warmonger, Wolfowitz’s main job at the Pentagon involved the challenge of streamlining a bloated bureaucracy. And his experiences with Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan long ago convinced him that America could not afford to ignore any failing international backwater where terrorists might fester.

“A clear message from modern history is that this is a small world . . . and that leaving people behind is a formula for failure — for us all,” he said last week. It was music to Downing Street’s ears.

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