Azerbaijan works hard to present itself as a modern, democratic country with excellent business opportunities for multinational corporations, and Tony Blair can undoubtedly help with this. But recent attacks against journalists and activists reveal a government unwilling to hear the voices of its people, and there are about sixty political prisoners, according to the former head of advocacy at Index on Censorship, Mike Harris.7
Another major former donor was a trust created by the late Lord (Michael) Montague, in his lifetime a Progress supporter; this has given a total of £875,500. Pharmacia and Pfizer also gave £52,287.
Progress’s total income in the fifteen months from 1 October 2011 to 1 January 2013 was £489,654. In the previous twelve months it was £368,598, and that is approximately its annual income.8
By the start of 2012, Progress had raised more money than the Green Party, Scottish Labour or Plaid Cymru. It had raised significantly more than any members’ association in the Tory Party or Liberal Democrats and 122 times more than the next highest in the Labour Party. It had the organisation and funding of a minor political party.
The money would have made a huge difference to the cash-strapped Labour Party, if it could have had it. But it can’t. Lord Sainsbury doesn’t think Ed Miliband is sound; Sainsbury supported David Miliband’s campaign to the tune of £200,000 and has been alienated by Ed Miliband’s clear wish to draw a line under New Labour. Progress is a safe home for Sainsbury’s money, because there it cannot be used to help Ed into Downing Street.
David Sainsbury’s £260,000 a year and four- and five-figure sums from finance companies and the like account for nearly the whole income. The exact figures are impossible to work out because Progress does not reveal smaller sums, or the income from early capital sums received from, for example, Lord Montague’s trust. But put all we do know together, and you are already getting close to the total income of about £370,000 a year.
So there is not much for the ordinary Labour Party member to make up. Progress’s claim that it is ‘funded by Labour Party members who support our aims and values’ is presumably based mainly on the fact that Lord Sainsbury is a Labour Party member. We know that individual membership costs £25 a year but we do not know how many members there are. It can’t be very many, even though membership is boosted by opponents such as Jon Lansman – veteran Bennite and political adviser to Michael Meacher MP – who likes to keep in touch with what the other side is doing.
Most political organisations, including Progress’s Labour Party rivals, make it as easy as possible for people to get in touch with them, because they are always on the scrounge. They need money. They are run on a shoestring.
Progress is just the opposite. It has a sophisticated website on which it is easy to find things that the organisation wishes you to find, such as a picture of Ed Miliband speaking against a backdrop of the Progress logo or a message from Tony Blair. But it is like all the Blair organisations – it makes it hard for the reader to get in touch. There are no contact telephone numbers or email addresses on the website. You can choose to follow director Robert Philpot or deputy director Richard Angell on Twitter, or on LinkedIn, but you cannot write to them.
Actually, the first time we looked, at the end of November 2013, we discovered eventually that it was possible to navigate one’s way, by a very circuitous and time-consuming route, through to a page that had on it an email address for Mr Angell, so we sent him an email. When no reply had been received by 11 December, we went back to the website. Angell’s email address had disappeared.
Simply, other political pressure groups make it very easy to get in touch because they need your money. Progress doesn’t need your money.
For a political organisation, Progress’s structure and process of decision-making is remarkably opaque. It does not seem to spend a lot of time asking its members what they want. In January 2012, Lord Adonis, a close Blair adviser, was made its chairman, but there is no record of an election being held for the post, and no one seems to know exactly who made the decision.
Its rivals for the soul of the Labour Party are both less well-organised and far less well off, and they all rely to a greater or lesser extent on trade-union funding.
The old right, the trade-union right wing, which had for decades been the right wing of the Labour Party until Blair arrived in 1994 and moved the frontier, is represented by Labour First, run by the vastly experienced Labour and trade-union fixer John Spellar MP. The left is represented by Labour Futures, and the key figure is Jon Lansman. Neither of these organisations employs any staff of its own. Only Progress does that.
The four directors of Progress Ltd include Jennifer Gerber, the director of Labour Friends of Israel, and lobbyist Jon Mendelsohn, former chairman of Labour Friends of Israel, who in 2013 was created a life peer as Baron Mendelsohn. In 1998 Mendelsohn was caught on tape along with Derek Draper boasting to Greg Palast, an undercover reporter posing as a businessman, that Progress could sell access to government ministers and create tax breaks for Palast’s supposed clients. He also advised an undercover journalist posing as a representative of American energy companies to rephrase their plans into language that sounded ‘Earth-friendly’ since ‘Tony [Blair] is very anxious to be seen as green. Everything has to be couched in environmental language – even if it’s slightly Orwellian.’
The other two directors are Robert Philpot, the full-time executive director, and Stephen Twigg MP.
Progress was founded in 1996, two years after Blair became Labour leader, and describes itself as ‘the New Labour pressure group which aims to promote a radical and progressive politics for the 21st century.’ The twenty-first century is mentioned in this message presumably so as to underline Progress’s commitment to being ‘modern’, since it is hard to see what other century it might be promoting anything for.
Its first director was Jon Mendelsohn’s friend and colleague Derek Draper, then research assistant to Peter Mandelson. For the first thirteen years of its existence, Progress mainly provided support and cheerleaders for everything Tony Blair did. Then, in 2007, Blair resigned as PM and the game changed. It provided a platform for those who were critical of Gordon Brown. It was a convenient way for Blair to attack Brown without having to put his own name to anything. He could appear to be above the fray.
In addition, and crucially, it supported reliably Blairite candidates in selections for parliamentary seats. During that parliament it held six parliamentary candidate workshops, to train its people in how to win selection battles. Candidates it boasts having helped get selected in that period include Stephen Twigg in Liverpool and Emma Reynolds in Wolverhampton.
After Brown resigned as Prime Minister it supported David Miliband for the leadership. His brother Ed’s election was a nasty shock, and the organisation stepped up its work of training parliamentary candidates, to equip them for selection battles, and to protest about trade-union influence in these selections.
These two activities went together. No doubt Progress supporters believe as a matter of principle that unions should have less say in the selections; but it is also the case that the unions were often the only obstacle to Progress’s ability to dictate them. The only serious opposition to a Progress-supported candidate was often a union-supported candidate, and the only machine capable of matching Progress was that of the unions.
One of the trainers for these selection battles was Matthew Doyle, former Blair spin doctor in Downing Street and by then the director of communications for the Office of Tony Blair – whose services were presumably provided free as a donation in kind from Tony Blair. Training in speechwriting was supplied by Paul Richards, former chair of Labour Students and the Fabian Society, adviser to Blairites Patricia Hewitt and then Hazel Blears.
Weekend seminars at splendid country houses were provided at the expense of generous commercial sponsors, including Bell Pottinger, which was founded by Margaret Thatcher’s favourite advertising man.
Those candidates it chooses
to help through the selection process can expect a lot of support on the ground: a team to canvass local party members, introductions to influential people, even lists of the contact details for local party members.
Its many successes include placing its former deputy director, Jessica Asato, as the prospective parliamentary candidate for Norwich North, a seat Labour should win back from the Conservatives in 2015 – it is essentially a Labour seat, thrown away by the Labour high command’s ham-fisted handling of expenses issues surrounding its then-Labour MP Ian Gibson in 2009.
It is no wonder that, by 2011, the left was describing Progress as a ‘party within a party’ in a deliberate echo of the charge mainstream Labour Party people used to level at Militant in the eighties. It is not an entirely accurate parallel. Militant, after all, had a policy of ‘entryism’ – of getting into the Labour Party in order to turn it into a different sort of party – whereas Progress seeks to continue the policies and legacy of a former Labour Prime Minister.
Nonetheless, there was a shred of truth in Jon Lansman’s March 2011 attack: ‘Progress operates at several levels, of course, like the Militant Tendency in the 1980s: the politics (and the surroundings) may be very different, but the methods are surprisingly similar. They even have “readers’ meetings” … It is only someone who is regarded as politically reliable, truly “one of us”, who is introduced to the covert layers of operation, and only as necessary, though many more are aware of the kind of activities that Progress is engaged in than are themselves involved – the way any secret organisation sustains and protects itself.’9
But, Lansman told us in 2014, that was then, and this is now. It had by then become less of a party within a party, and less committed to the overthrow of Ed Miliband. The change, he says, was detected by Labour political fixers in January 2012, and the reason, he believes, is that it proved impossible to get a consensus around an alternative to Ed Miliband. David Miliband had ruled himself out, and the Blairites cannot stand Ed Balls, the shadow Chancellor.
That did not prevent a trade-union move at the 2012 Labour Party conference to expel the organisation for being a party within a party. Progress hastily promised reform, and has become more open about its finances and the names of those who control it.
The heart of its activities remained the continuation of New Labour policies and protecting the legacy of Tony Blair. An email to its members in July 2012 was headed ‘New Labour’s unfinished business’.10
But the methods were, for the time being at least, becoming less aggressive. Tony Blair himself started, early in 2012, to have meetings with small groups of Labour MPs. A ‘source close to Mr Blair’ told Public Affairs News magazine, ‘He wants to re-engage in the UK. He has things to say and he thinks it’s the right time. The question is how he re-enters the UK scene without re-entering domestic politics and interfering with the Labour Party.’ The pious wish not to interfere with the Labour Party evoked a hollow laugh from those who knew what Progress had been up to.
The news was too much for Richard Heller, once adviser to Denis Healey and a stalwart of the old right in the Labour Party, who relieved his feelings with a furious, passionate blog post:
In 1956 Britain’s prime minister took this country into an unlawful and unprofitable war in the Middle East, and misled its parliament and people about its origins and purpose … Once an international icon, Anthony Eden disappeared into political oblivion … He did not hawk himself round the world for money. Although a vastly more experienced diplomat than Tony Blair he was never offered any international appointment. He did not set up any foundations in his name. He did not have a spin doctor or a retinue of any kind. Above all, he abandoned any hope of a political comeback.
Eden’s afterlife was a sign of a Britain with high standards in political life. Politicians were penalised for error, failure and dishonesty. If Tony Blair returns to a frontline role in British politics, it will show that those standards have finally collapsed.
Blair seriously believes that he is entitled to such a role and that the British people should be grateful for his wisdom. Once again, he has demonstrated one of his terrifying strengths as a politician – he is never embarrassed by himself …
Blair now thinks that the time is right for him to ‘re-engage with the British people’ … Clearly Blair is seeking some special and personal avenue for this re-engagement, because he has always had the option of standing as an MP, as ex-premiers used to do routinely. Sir Alec Douglas-Home fought two general elections after being defeated as prime minister, and loyally served his successor, Ted Heath, in opposition and government. Standing again at a by-election would ‘re-engage’ Blair automatically with a selection committee and local voters and guarantee the maximum exposure for his current views. Blair could also ask for a life peerage and contribute in the House of Lords without the risks of facing a voter.
There is one major problem with either of these comeback routes: he would undergo scrutiny about his murky finances.
Tony Blair has let it be known that he has ‘things to say’ to the British people. He may have to say some of them to the Leveson inquiry, on his relationship with Rupert Murdoch. Eventually the endless Chilcot Inquiry will have ‘things to say’ about him and Iraq. It would have been seemly for Blair to await the judgment of Chilcot and Leveson before seeking a comeback, but perhaps he knows already that he will get an easy ride.
For millions of British people the one thing that they want to hear from Tony Blair is ‘I’m sorry’ and it’s the one thing he never can bring himself to say. Of course, he is not alone in this attitude. No one with authority or status in modern Britain ever apologises for their conduct – whether bankers or bosses or footballers. No matter how badly they mess up or offend people or even wreck lives they still expect admiration and money. Even in this depressing context, Blair’s return to a frontline role would represent a very special nadir.11
You can agree or disagree with Heller, but he’s right to point up the key importance of the Chilcot Inquiry in all this. If Chilcot goes half as far in its criticism of Blair as Blair’s enemies hope, it will be very damaging to Blair’s attempts to re-enter British politics.
A journalist who is close to Blair, Matthew d’Ancona, reports that Blair himself understands this, and is very apprehensive about Chilcot. D’Ancona quotes a ‘close ally’ of Blair as saying, ‘He is deeply concerned about it. It could define his legacy.’12
The report of this investigation, launched by Gordon Brown in 2009, has been delayed over and over again. The last witness gave evidence in 2011, and the report will not now appear until sometime after the general election on 7 May 2015 – and maybe a long time after that.
One of the factors holding it up is a row over whether up to 200 cabinet-level discussions on the Iraq war, notes sent between Blair and George W. Bush, and more than 130 records of conversations between either Blair or Brown and the White House may be published. The Cabinet Office has blocked publication of most of them, almost certainly at Blair’s insistence. Blair, who, as we have discovered many times, never lets any information into the public domain that he can keep secret, told the inquiry that it was important ‘that the British Prime Minister and the American President are able to communicate in confidence.’ He said he would give the inquiry the gist of what was said. Not everyone will be satisfied that Tony Blair’s summary will give them the full picture.
In November 2014, after several deadlines for publication had passed, Blair was reported to have seen the draft report. In January 2015 Sir John Chilcot told the Prime Minister that publication must be held up by ‘the process of giving individuals an opportunity to respond to provisional criticism in the Inquiry’s draft report.’13 We may safely assume that one of these individuals, perhaps the main one, is Tony Blair.
So what is he worried about? Not, presumably, that it might damage Labour’s chances if it appears before the election, since it emerged in December 2014, via leaks and interviews with people close
to the former PM, that he had written off Labour’s chances anyway; he saw the most likely election outcome as a defeat for Ed Miliband, after which he had hopes that Progress candidate Chukka Umunna would oust Miliband and return Labour to pure Blairite principles. And on the penultimate day of 2014, Blair himself broke cover with an interview in the Economist where he claimed that the 2015 election would be a return to the old pre-Blair sort, ‘In which a traditional leftwing party competes with a traditional rightwing party, with the traditional result.’ Asked if he meant a Tory win, Blair said: ‘Yes, that is what happens.’ He said he saw no evidence of a shift to the left in public thinking after the financial crisis – a move that Miliband thinks has occurred – and added: ‘I am still very much New Labour and Ed would not describe himself in that way, so there is obviously a difference there. I am convinced the Labour party succeeds best when it is in the centre ground.’14
The next day he tweeted that these remarks had been misinterpreted: he wanted and expected Miliband to win.15
Seeing that all this needed clarification, he gave the BBC’s Nick Robinson an interview on 12 January 2015 during which he said that the public must decide whether Ed Miliband ‘has a problem’, he said, and they were crying out for ‘clear leadership and direction’. Asked to endorse Miliband, he said it ‘will be for the people to choose.’16 Just a week later, Peter Mandelson was on television calling Ed Miliband confused and unconvincing, denouncing the mansion tax, and talking up the Liberal Democrat alternative.17 On 7 February the Observer had Blair saying blandly that he would do whatever the Labour Party wanted him to do to help win the election.18 Miliband might have been tempted to reply with what Clement Attlee once wrote to Harold Laski: ‘A period of silence from you would be welcome.’ But a period of silence is one thing he is unlikely to get.
The war is well under way, no less vicious because everyone concerned politely denies that it has ever been declared.
Blair Inc--The Man Behind the Mask Page 36
