Blair Inc--The Man Behind the Mask

by Francis Beckett

  There is a very revealing photograph showing Blair surrounded by the Emir and the Emir’s advisers, and, on a sofa a little way away, sits Powell. Even though the Emir has a large number of advisers with him, Blair has no one from the QR’s office. He is entirely alone. Except for Powell.

  What came out of the meeting from the point of view of the Quartet we do not know. We do know that Tony Blair Associates picked up a stunningly lucrative consultancy contract. Kuwaiti sources familiar with the deal told Dispatches that Blair’s firm stood to earn more than 12 million dinars, the equivalent of £27 million.22

  ACCOUNTABILITY ISSUES

  An American businessman who was once close to Blair says, ‘There are two issues. One is getting his financial interests, which are paramount, mixed up in things like the Quartet, which should be a very high priority and have nothing to do with his business.’

  Robert Palmer of the campaigning group Global Witness says, ‘There seems to be growing evidence that Tony Blair’s business activities across the Middle East may be in conflict with his peace-envoy role. It is time he came clean about all of his interests in the region and who they are benefiting.’

  It is possible for Blair to have all of these potentially conflicting interests because no code of conduct applies to him. Anis Nacrour, a senior French diplomat who worked directly for Blair at the Quartet’s Jerusalem office for three years as a political and security adviser, revealed this to Dispatches, saying, ‘I think he makes his own rules depending on the experience he has as a former prime minister for over ten years.’

  If Blair was still an MP or sat in the House of Lords, or worked for the World Bank or the IMF or even directly for the United Nations, he would be bound by a strict and publicly available code of conduct that demanded he set out in full all his commercial interests. But he is none of these, and, as a result, his commercial interests and those in his role as QR envoy appear to overlap significantly. Ask a question about Blair as QR and the answer – if you get one – is quite likely not to come from the Quartet’s Jerusalem office, but from a completely different Blair operation.

  British journalists reporting from the Middle East have remarked with surprise on the fact that the Quartet’s press officer, Ruti Winterstein, appears to have been sidelined. They are not expected to go to her, but to Blair’s personal head of communications in London – Matthew Doyle until 2011, then Rachel Grant until 2014. Both Doyle and Grant often travelled with him to the Middle East.

  Dr Nicholas Allen, a specialist in parliamentary ethics and standards in public life at the University of London, has told us that Blair’s role as Middle East envoy is not transparent. ‘Clearly, if he was holding a ministerial office in Britain, that kind of conflict, even the appearance of that kind of conflict, the appearance of that influence, wouldn’t be tolerated.’ When asked how many of the seven Nolan principles – the code of ethics for public servants enforced by Tony Blair when he was PM – appear to be undermined by Blair’s conduct and behaviour, Allen said, ‘I think there’s a good case for saying that six of the principles appear to be undermined by Blair’s conduct and Blair’s behaviour.’

  Allen told us that no code of conduct applies to Blair’s role as QR because of ‘the nature of the Quartet itself. A sort of weird international governmental anomaly.’ Additionally, he said, ‘If he was really serious about bringing peace to the Middle East, you might say that it would be expedient not to have those kinds of connections. It’s going to be harder to get the trust of certain groups if they know that your own Faith Foundation is massively funded by a pro-Israeli lobby.’

  He continued, ‘The question is, is this really just window dressing? Is this him just doing a jobs-for-the-boys network that’s really a cushy feather in his cap, or is it something really substantial? My horrible sneaking suspicion is that it’s possibly slightly more of a feather in the cap than anything else, but I say that on the basis of no detailed knowledge of what he’s been up to there.

  ‘The question is – do the people he’s dealing with mind? And that’s one of the key elements in terms of his effectiveness. Does he have regular meetings with the various sides in the Middle East? If he does and they mind, then he should stop. If he does and they don’t mind, then it’s probably not a problem. If he doesn’t meet them at all, it begs the question: what the hell is he actually doing?

  ‘In one sense, yes, he’s obviously in breach of them [the Nolan principles], if you take them as general ethical values, because he is clearly mixing interests, I think. That is unambiguous – there is a potential conflict of interest in some of his work.’

  John Kerry’s $4 billion investment in the Palestinian economy could be the very last attempt to breathe life into the Blair mission. But where was the money? Where were the details? Max Blumenthal, journalist and specialist in Israeli politics, wrote, ‘Nearly all that is known is that Tony Blair, the Special Envoy of the Quartet, had been placed in charge of the initiative. My email and telephone queries to Ruti Winterstein, Blair’s political and media adviser at the Quartet offices in Jerusalem, have not been answered.’ We know how he feels.

  Blumenthal goes on: ‘The few Jerusalem and Ramallah based reporters who requested particulars about the initiative were unable to get any answers either, with one correspondent telling me they were being stonewalled by Blair and Kerry’s people.’23

  Which is not surprising, because the truth was that there was no money. The key to the whole deal, Kerry admitted, was Tony Blair; as he said this to a press conference, hardened Middle East correspondents discreetly closed their notebooks, clear at last that this was a story that was unlikely to have legs. It was all going to turn out to be smoke and mirrors.

  David Horovitz, editor-in-chief of the Times of Israel, wrote that, at last,

  Kerry – a veteran of four Middle East shuttle missions in his less than four months in office – unveiled the fruits of his diplomatic labours. No, he hadn’t cut a peace deal … In fact, no, he hadn’t even managed to arrange a meet between Abbas and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

  So what magic had he wrought? What did he have to present to us all? An economic plan. Bigger and better and bolder and brighter than anything hitherto attempted for the Palestinians.

  What? Foreheads furrowed. Fingers went to clean out eardrums. Were we hearing this right? The secretary was proposing a financially driven path to Israeli-Palestinian peace and happiness? …

  How? What? Who? Where? The answer to all such questions, it seemed, was: Tony Blair. The indefatigable former British prime minister, shaking hands with those sheikhs at the side of the hall, he was going to fix it. Somehow, Tony the economic tiger was going to rustle up the necessary $4 billion in investment and – presto! – all our problems would be solved …24

  Once again, it all ignores a harsh truth – the truth that Lord Hollick alerted us to – which Horowitz sums up like this: ‘Potential private investment is out there. And it can certainly flow into the Palestinian territories. But it will only flow – as opposed to trickle – after the conditions are created for long-term stability, not as the means to create those conditions.’25

  The French daily Le Monde’s Jerusalem correspondent, Laurent Zecchini, came to the same conclusion:

  This ‘Marshall Plan’ remains today in its box, because its implementation – which supposes a mobilisation of the private sector – requires a significant advance in Israel-Palestine peace talks … The distance separating the objectives proposed by Mr Blair from the reality of the Palestinian economy was apparent on Wednesday at the conference of Palestinian donors, held in New York.26

  But, in June 2014, Tony Blair was still chasing the illusion that private-sector investment will flow in sufficient quantities to change the politics. His office was now referring to the idea as the Initiative for the Palestinian Economy, or IPE, and it is the main focus of his work as QR. This is supposed to ‘effect transformative change and substantial growth in the Palestinian economy and cr
eate hundreds of thousands of new jobs’ according to the Quartet’s website. It’s entirely separate from ‘the political negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA), led by US Secretary of State John Kerry’.

  The office said, ‘The ambitious plan was drafted by a team of policy advisers, external economic analysts and international domain experts under the leadership of Quartet Representative Tony Blair in support of renewed Palestinian–Israeli negotiations.’ It ‘focuses on catalysing private-sector-led growth in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem’. And it relies on ‘the inflow of new financing into the Palestinian economy, in particular from the private sector’.27

  There’s a lot more like this, but no mention of where this ‘inflow of new financing’ is going to come from.

  The fact is that it is not peace, but money – both real money and pretend money – that is at the heart of what Tony Blair does in the Middle East. And that makes it all a chimera, because private-sector money is not going to flow into Palestine without real political progress towards peace. This progress can only be hustled along by someone who is trusted by both sides – and Blair has thrown away the trust of the Palestinians.

  He appears to be trying to juggle various roles. ‘In the morning he is the big Middle East negotiator,’ writes the American journalist Jacob Heilbrunn in the American publication The National Interest. ‘In the afternoons, he’s the businessman trying to lubricate connections between big shots. In essence, Blair has turned himself into a mini-corporation. He’s cashing in on his former job.’28

  This is a tragedy. Tony Blair left Downing Street in 2007 with huge international prestige, and walked straight into the QR’s job. If he had devoted himself to it, heart and soul, history might have remembered the man credited with peacemaking in Northern Ireland as one of the few people in the world to have made a real difference in the Middle East, which would be enough for most of us to say: well done, Tony. His international reputation would have soared. If he wanted the European presidency – a job that, in the event, he did want, and it was denied to him – it would probably have been his for the asking.

  Why did he not do so? He does not need money. He already owned several properties (though not as many as he owns now). He can command six-figure sums for speeches pretty well whenever he chooses, and so can his wife. He can be sure that his family will never want for anything. A man, however rich, can wear only one suit at a time, and sleep in only one house at a time. To be sure, the envoy’s job is unpaid, but if he had felt, for any reason at all, that it ought to be paid, the Quartet would surely have agreed a very good salary, and no one would have begrudged him that, for he would have been demonstrably earning it.

  Instead, he has irrevocably contaminated the QR job with his other activities. He often takes his personal staff, not QR staff, to meetings, and his personal staff, not QR staff, often speak for him in his role as QR. His personal business and politics – whether it is being a hardline opponent of Islam, taking money from Israeli lobbyists, appointing Israeli spies to his personal staff, or taking well-paid work from Middle Eastern potentates – have been allowed to overshadow his work in the Middle East.

  Maybe he really is putting in the effort, spending far more time in the region than observers are aware of. If that’s the case, why not demonstrate it, rather than needlessly allow the perception to grow that he does not? If he actually spends far more time there than journalists and the top people in the Palestinian Authority realise, it would be sensible to make himself more visible, to them and to everyone else, instead of simply saying that all the estimates we have heard are wrong. Otherwise, the Palestinians are bound to believe either that he is too busy elsewhere or that he arrives in secret and talks only to Israelis. Both these perceptions are poison to his mission.

  Today as QR he is a passenger at best, a liability at worst. He is still in the job partly because the Israelis are quite sure he will never bring them unwelcome news, but, much more importantly, because he symbolises a comforting untruth to which American and Israeli negotiators are clinging: that private-sector investment in Palestine can be used as a path to peace. The truth is the one that businesspeople such as Hollick and well-informed journalists such as Zecchini and Blumenthal have been telling anyone who would listen: that progress in peace talks come first, and only when they have delivered some sort of stability will private investment follow.

  We know from private sources that some old political friends have spoken privately to Blair about his role in the Middle East, and urged him to do it full time. They have said: no one can blame you if you don’t bring peace to the Middle East, but you should avoid the criticism that you haven’t tried hard enough; you should do it full time or not at all.

  But we’re way beyond that stage now. Today, it’s impossible not to have some sympathy for the Palestinian view, shared now by several key people in Europe, that Blair – to paraphrase what the Tory politician Leo Amery said of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in 1940, quoting Oliver Cromwell – has been there too long for any good he can do, and that he should go.

  Notes

  1 www.jonathan-cook.net, 23 April 2013:

  http://www.jonathan-cook.net/2013-04-23/tony-

  blairs-tangled-web-the-quartet-representative-

  and-the-peace-process/

  2 www.bruxelles.blogs.liberation.fr, 22 October 2009:

  http://bruxelles.blogs.liberation.fr/coulisses/

  2009/10/conseil-europ%C3%A9en-comment-

  blair-a-fait-pschiiiiiiiiit.html

  3 Daily Mail, 28 September 2011:

  http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2042775/

  Tony-Blairs-Middle-East-adventures.html

  4 Alvaro de Soto’s report to the UN after his Middle East mission, ‘End of Mission Report,’ May 2007:

  http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-files/Guardian/

  documents/2007/06/12/DeSotoReport.pdf

  5 Ha’Aretz, 19 July 2007:

  http://www.haaretz.com/weekend/magazine/all

  -the-dreams-we-had-are-now-gone-1.225828

  6 www.jonathan-cook.net, 23 April 2013:

  http://www.jonathan-cook.net/2013-04-23/tony-

  blairs-tangled-web-the-quartet-representative-

  and-the-peace-process/

  7 The Guardian, 21 June 2013:

  http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/jun/

  21/tony-blair-six-years-middle-east-envoy

  8 Daily Mail, 28 September 2011:

  http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2042775/

  Tony-Blairs-Middle-East-adventures.html

  9 Independent, 16 December 2012:

  http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/

  middle-east/useless-useless-useless-the-palestinian-

  verdict-on-tony-blairs-job-8421163.html

  10 http://www.tonyblairoffice.org/quartet/pages/how-we-work1/

  11 The Guardian, 13 May 2009:

  http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/

  2009/may/13/tony-blair-faith-foundation

  12 Toby Greene, Blair, Labour and Palestine (Bloomsbury, 2013)

  13 The New York Times, 5 September 2004:

  http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/05/business/

  yourmoney/05sab.html?_r=1&

  14 www.project-syndicate.org, 10 June 2013:

  http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/lee-rigby-

  and-the-struggle-to-contain-violent-islamists-by-tony-

  blair# i02z3GXBCdjblch4.99

  15 Daily Telegraph, 4 July 2010:

  http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/

  labour/7870784/Tony-Blairs-security-team-

  cost-the-taxpayer-250000-a-year.html

  16 The Guardian, 25 September 2011:

  http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2011/

  sep/25/tony-blair-middle-east-deals

  17 http://www.palestine-studies.org/files/pdf/jps/11844.pdf [document no longer available]

  18 Financial Times Maga
zine, 29 June 2012:

  http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/b2ec4fd6-c0af-11e1

  -9372-00144feabdc0.html

  19 The Times, 24 May 2007:

  http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/business/industries/

  naturalresources/article2180803.ece

  20 Ha’Aretz, 8 June 2012:

  http://www.haaretz.com/news/middle-east/palestinian-

  court-sentences-arafat-aide-in-absentia-1.435118

  21 Financial Times, 21 December 2009:

  http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/d375ca6c-edcf-11de-

  ba12-00144feab49a.html#axzz3PdBxIRoI.

  22 Daily Mail, 14 December 2010:

  http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1338368/

  Tony-Blairs-company-make-27m-advising-Kuwait-

  govern-itself.html#ixzz2iRbEO7wm

  23 www.mondoweiss.net, 31 May 2013:

  http://mondoweiss.net/2013/05/billion-palestine-

  capitalism.html

  24 Times of Israel, 27 May 2013:

  http://www.timesofisrael.com/memo-to-kerry-its

  -not-the-economy-stupid/

  25 Ibid.

  26 Le Monde, 28 September 2013

  27 http://www.quartetrep.org/quartet/pages/the-

  initiative-for-the-palestiniane-conomy

  28 The National Interest, 25 September 2011:

  http://nationalinterest.org/blog/jacob-heilbrunn/tony-

  blairs-closest-business-partner-col-gadaffi-5931

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE BLAIR RICH PROJECT

  ‘Blair is very interested in money and it takes precedence over other things. There is no evidence that he has done anything positive, other than make money. My advice to him was that he can make a lot of money as long as it’s a by-product of what you’re doing.’

  – AMERICAN BUSINESSMAN AND FORMER FRIEND OF TONY BLAIR, SPEAKING TO AUTHORS.