Blair Inc--The Man Behind the Mask

by Francis Beckett

  They spend, we are told, a lot of time in meetings talking about strategic communications, which they call ‘strat comms’. They once spent a full half-day with four or five staff talking about Twitter protocols for members of staff on their individual Twitter accounts – a dreadful waste of time and money, but also an indication, says Martin Bright, of the perceived need to control everything. Discussions about whether to issue a press release are lengthy and tormented, and generally end up with the decision that it will be safer not to.

  Over and over again, they return to worrying about the need to avoid anything which might embarrass the distinguished founder of the Foundation.

  There is no overt role in its governance for the charity’s founder and patron, Tony Blair, but his seems to be the principal influence on key decisions, even when he does not specify precise wishes. When the TBFF appointed a journalist to edit its Faith and Globalisation website, a monthly hour-long meeting with Blair was arranged.

  Yet, in the few on-the-record conversations we were able to have with them, officials of the TBFF were at pains to stress that they were quite apart from the rest of Tony Blair’s activities, and took their decisions with no reference at all to what went on anywhere else in the Blair empire.

  Given the TBFF’s sensitivity to embarrassing Blair, we understand there was great concern in the office when the Daily Telegraph ran a story which suggested sympathy with the Muslim Brotherhood, because of Blair’s known strong hostility to the Brotherhood. Senior officials at the TBFF felt that references to the Brotherhood on the Faith and Globalisation website might not be to the patron’s taste. The editor of the website, Martin Bright, left after five months, feeling that he had not had the freedom he was promised and he points out that, as a matter of fact, the website never did run an article about the Muslim Brotherhood. ‘Draw your own conclusions,’ he told us. How decisions were made on the website’s contents, we do not know, but it is a matter of fact that, since then and at the time of writing, there have been no articles about the Muslim Brotherhood on the Faith and Globalisation website.

  The TBFF communications team and the top brass ‘spend a long time trying to second-guess what might be embarrassing for Tony Blair’, we were told by Bright, whose claim that Blair exerts a lot of influence over the charity sparked a Charity Commission investigation. ‘The atmosphere is dominated by underlings worried about saving Blair from embarrassment in the media.’

  Bright continues: ‘The Faith Foundation is an independent charity with Tony Blair as its patron. He is not supposed to have any executive role. But it was clear from the outset [of Bright’s employment] that [Blair’s] reputation was to be protected at all costs.

  ‘Tony’s private office began to treat my website as its own think tank or government department, with regular calls for briefings on the Middle East, radical Islam or particular conflicts. He once asked me for a worldwide map of madrassas in the world, ranked according to how radical they are, which is an impossible request.

  ‘There’s a huge communications department aimed at not publishing anything,’ he says. He adds that long meetings are held to work out positions on such matters as Iraq, Kazakhstan and the Gulf states that will not cause embarrassment for the charity’s patron, who took Britain to war in Iraq and has important clients in Kazakhstan and the Gulf states.

  It is playing with words to say that Blair has nothing to do with the running of his Faith Foundation. He is in daily touch with it; his needs are at the forefront of the minds of its top staff all the time; and it reflects Blair’s beliefs and personality in every aspect of its activities. Even if we believed that he seldom or never instructed its top brass what to do, his needs, interests and wishes would remain their first thought when any decision needed to be made. It is like the claim that Rupert Murdoch has nothing to do with the political attitude of the Sun.

  Seven months after launching the Foundation, in December 2008, Blair announced a partnership with the Canadian businesswoman, philanthropist, politician and billionaire Belinda Stronach. They were going to join forces, and to collaborate with what they called ‘representatives of a broad cross-section of the communities of faith and spiritual belief in Canada’ in ‘a new proposed interfaith initiative’.

  Ms Stronach herself said, ‘We are looking to work with Canadians of faith and belief to build a secure and neutral public space in which to encourage and facilitate inter-faith cooperation on practical humanitarian matters where there is a large degree of consensus, starting with the MDGs. And the process of the interfaith collaboration itself is also an important endeavour.’2

  This sounds rather like a meaningless collection of feel-good jargon, but Stronach specialises in sentences that sound as though they were taken from a management textbook. The Belinda Stronach Foundation, according to its own publicity, ‘builds partnerships with individuals, non-governmental organizations, business large and small, as well as other foundations who work in Canada and around the world to develop and incubate innovative programs confronting global challenges.’

  The Stronach Foundation website says that Blair and Stronach set up Faiths Act and the Faiths Act Fellowship in Canada as an opportunity for people around the world to work together across faith divides in pursuit of the Millennium Development Goals.

  On 24 April 2009, speaking to a Canadian audience, Blair said, ‘Out there, in those remote parts of Africa, a health clinic or hospital is a rarity. People have to travel miles, sometimes a hundred miles or more to get there, but, for obvious reasons, they don’t get there and they die. But every one of those communities, no matter how remote, has a place of worship in it. And they could be the means of distributing the bed nets and medicine. The infrastructure of faith could be the answer to this problem.’

  Put at its kindest, the TBFF’s objective is to maximise the good that faith does in the world, and minimise the harm, which sounds like a perfectly respectable and indeed laudable, if rather limited, objective. However, when we examine what it actually does we wonder whether we have understood TBFF’s purpose correctly.

  MR VARKEY AND THE FAITH FOUNDATION

  TBFF’s activities include what it calls a ‘strategic partnership’ with GEMS Education, founded by Sunny Varkey, who is a member of its strategic advisory board. Launching it, Blair said, ‘It is rather unique, this organisation that Mr Varkey and his family has put together. The fact is they are providing really high-quality education and they are doing it in a way that I think is very interesting, very innovative and actually very exciting and there’s lots of education systems worldwide can learn from this.’

  The admiration is mutual if you believe the Varkey GEMS Foundation website. Varkey states,

  The Tony Blair Faith Foundation is an organisation that shares our belief in the fundamental importance of high-quality teaching. Like the Varkey GEMS Foundation, it understands the importance of investment in a strong support network for teachers: via its Country Co-ordinators and teachers’ workshops both on and offline, the Tony Blair Faith Foundation provides ongoing support for teachers the world over.

  GEMS – Global Education Management Systems – is an international chain of fee-charging and profit-making schools, set up as a commercial enterprise, and these schools have made a very great deal of money for Mr Varkey. There’s nothing especially wrong with that. It’s entirely legal, and Varkey is doing only what several perfectly respectable chains of private schools are doing. But how does it tie in with TBFF’s stated objectives, and how can it be suitable work for a charity? What makes Sunny Varkey a role model for a faith organisation?

  Varkey is an extremely rich Dubai businessman. His fortune is based on education and healthcare in the Gulf; he owns the top private hospital in Dubai. Starting with eighteen fee-charging schools in Dubai, mostly for expats, Varkey pioneered thirteen cut-price (he prefers the term ‘affordable’) fee-charging schools in Britain in 2004. Then he signed a deal that gave him a launch pad to bid for academies in association
with 3Es, a company that manages a clutch of state schools.

  3Es was Prime Minister Tony Blair’s favourite education company. Opening one of its schools, he said its name ‘apparently stands for “education, education, education”. I’ve heard that phrase before, and wonder if they should be paying me royalties.’ They could certainly afford to. The company’s wealth began with Kingshurst, near Birmingham, the first of the city technology colleges created in the late 1980s by the then Tory Education Secretary, Kenneth Baker. The colleges got a huge state handout, supplemented by a much smaller sum from business.

  Kingshurst’s then principal, Valerie Bragg, teamed up with her husband, Berkshire’s former chief education officer Stanley Goodchild, to create a company to manage other state schools. The company flourished. It won the management contract for two Surrey schools, provided services for many more and ran academies under the Blair government. Though Kingshurst had been almost entirely paid for by the taxpayer, Bragg and Goodchild ran 3Es entirely as a private company.

  In 2005, Prime Minister Tony Blair tried to put some of his academies Varkey’s way. Academies were a new sort of school, pioneered by the Blair government, and run by sponsors, which were often commercial organisations. Sponsors need to be approved by the Education Secretary. For a while it looked as though Varkey might get his hands on two academies in Milton Keynes, but he was forced to pull out after protests from local parents.

  But he still, of course, had his thirteen private fee-charging schools in the UK. These, he says, work by taking advantage of economies of scale in a similar way to a supermarket, with centralised purchasing and teachers shared among schools. The aim was to open up a new market by charging fees that started at about £6,000 a year – less than half the normal cost at that time. The product is less luxurious, with a narrower curriculum, perhaps teaching only core subjects, and class sizes similar to those in state schools. But, in a market-driven education system, you get what you pay for. And at least it would keep out the very poor, which may have been an important selling point for the punters.

  That is why, in 2004, Varkey envisaged perhaps doubling the number of children whose parents paid for their education, with two hundred new schools. His target market was the 50 per cent who, according to a poll, would send their children to a fee-charging school if they could afford it. Since he is offering little that a state school can’t offer, the extra pupils would have to come from families who do not want their children mixing with the sort you get at local comprehensives. Private schools would not be available to all, but they would move down a class.

  If he succeeded, this would be a hammer blow to British state education, because it would take into private schools the children of the motivated parents – those willing to pay as much as they could afford for their children’s education – and leave in state schools two categories: the children of the very poorest and the children of those to whom education does not seem important. Anyone who knows anything about schools will tell you that, unless you have some pupils who are motivated to learn, you are destined to become a sink school.

  It would pave the way for state education to become the refuge of those who cannot or will not afford anything better. It would mark the end of the road for the 1944 Education Act and for good universal schooling for all children of school age.

  So far this remains a dream – the proportion of children going to fee-charging schools has remained constant at 7–8 per cent for many years. But we are left wondering what on earth a ‘strategic partnership’ with Mr Varkey has to do with any of the TBFF’s stated aims; and why a former Labour Prime Minister would be anxious to collaborate with a project that, if it succeeded, would destroy state education in Britain.

  Whatever the reason, Mr Blair likes to keep in touch with Mr Varkey and underline his support for what Varkey is doing. When he was in Britain in January 2010 he found time to visit a GEMS school. One of his former senior staffers told us that GEMS liked to have a political celebrity from every country on board. Tony is its Brit. Its American is Bill Clinton, though he seems much less active in its support than Blair.

  The TBFF’s alliance with World Jewish Relief (WJR) ‘to raise awareness of and funds for both organisations’ vital work in Africa’, according to the publicity,3 is an example of the Foundation engaging in some real and useful work.

  In Sierra Leone, the two organisations have put money into training priests and imams to give health education as part of the war on malaria. In even the smallest village there is either a mosque or a church, so that is the best way of reaching the population. Here the Tony Blair Faith Foundation seems to have found a job that is well worth doing by anyone’s standards, and the link with faith is one that obviously helps the work. There is a lot of criticism of the Foundation, and there’s a lot to criticise, but here we find it doing genuinely good and worthwhile charitable work, and it would be churlish not to acknowledge that.

  Less tangible, and more suspect, is its work to train the leaders of tomorrow. It has carefully selected ten ‘exceptional young people’ to take part in its ‘young leadership programme’. This again is supposed to be part of the fight against malaria, though it looks more like an attempt to choose tomorrow’s leaders, and to make sure they are people of faith – of the TBFF’s ten young leaders, there are five Christians, three Muslims and two religious Jews, all from the UK.4

  Then there is the ‘Face to Faith’ initiative which apparently ‘engages students across the world in discussion of global issues through different faith, belief and cultural lenses.’ This focuses on the teaching of religion in universities, which Blair, and hence the TBFF, seem very interested in. They think there isn’t enough of it. Hence the TBFF’s partnership with Durham University, announced in July 2009, designed ‘to create a global network of twelve leading research universities teaching Faith and Globalisation over the next two years.’ Tom McLeish, Durham’s pro-vice-chancellor, in launching the TBFF link to Durham said, ‘The suggestion by the Tony Blair Faith Foundation that Durham take the UK lead in the topical international network becomes natural.’

  Durham was the third partner university, following Yale and the National University of Singapore (which has apparently been persuaded to run a course called ‘Religion and Technology’). The Durham course ‘will develop greater understanding of the impact of faiths and cultures on the world and the inter-relationship between faith and globalisation.’ Blair said that the TBFF ‘will focus on building and developing the Faith and Globalisation course which started at Yale – creating a tight network between the twelve partner universities, and ensuring that this is recognised globally as a leading teaching, research, and social action orientated initiative.’5

  In fact, it all started at Yale. A year after founding the TBFF, in 2009 Blair was appointed to teach a course on issues of faith and globalisation at the Yale Schools of Management and Divinity. He was paid what Yale has said was a ‘not insubstantial’ sum for ten two-and-half-hour seminars a year – the figure of £680,000 has been reported by the Daily Telegraph and never denied. But, more importantly, while he was there he was introduced to Yale’s major benefactors, and he could tap them up for donations to the TBFF.

  While teaching at Yale, Blair graced the launch of a healthcare research partnership between Yale and University College London in New Haven, Connecticut. He said that, while at Yale, ‘I have witnessed first-hand Yale’s increasing international reach, under President Richard Levin’s visionary leadership.’6

  Yale’s then dean of divinity, Professor Harold Attridge, told the Sunday Telegraph: ‘Whatever exchanges hands on the money side is done above my pay grade. I believe there is some contribution to the Foundation in lieu of salary to him. This is all done at the [Yale] president’s level so it doesn’t affect my budget.’

  Attridge went on: ‘[Fundraising] development is always implicated in everything we do. But we don’t raise money for them [the TBFF] and they don’t raise money for us. But there is
a symbiotic relationship between the two and people are interested in both, and, if those things happen, that is all well and good. We might have a dinner for our benefactors and alumni. Our intent is to get them excited about Yale, but, if they want to get excited about the Faith Foundation, that is their call. That’s the way it works.’

  When it was suggested Blair had an ability to attract ‘big money’, Attridge replied, ‘That’s true.’7

  The TBFF has an office on the Yale campus run by Scott Macdonald, an experienced American fundraiser who for the 2012–13 academic year advertised to take on a Yale student on an internship in the TBFF Yale office.

  Professor Attridge, like Blair, is a Roman Catholic, but the relationship between Blair and Yale owed much to one of Attridge’s colleagues, Professor Denys Turner, who lectured in theology at Cambridge University before going to Yale. Turner joined Opus Dei, the secretive Roman Catholic cult organisation, in 1961. He left it in 1969. He now believes that Opus Dei traded on the instinct that Catholics then had for obedience, exercised a kind of mind control and cultivated a psychology of dependence on the organisation.

  All the same, he has described leaving Opus Dei as a catastrophic experience, and he says he was told that he would lose his soul over it. He became a Catholic Marxist close to the radical Slant group, which included the academics Adrian Cunningham and Terry Eagleton, and the late Dominican Laurence Bright.8

  But the key fact is that Professor Turner’s daughter is Ruth Turner, like her father a devout Roman Catholic, who was Blair’s head of government relations when he was PM, later becoming the TBFF’s first chief executive, and, according to Professor Attridge, who did all the staff work on Blair’s side to close the deal with Yale. She was arrested in the ‘cash for honours’ investigation but not charged with any offence.