by Tom Bower
Selected Kuwaiti experts were hired for the project and flown to London for training, which followed a welcome by Blair at his home in Connaught Square. ‘You need blue-sky thinking,’ he told his visitors, ‘and to think out of the box. Even if we get 5 per cent change, that will be progress.’ They were directed to conduct exhaustive research in Kuwait to identify the country’s problems – which confirmed exactly what they already knew – and were directed to visit Singapore to understand the best practice in education, and to South Korea for best expertise in health. No one mentioned any Blairite successes in Britain. ‘You need a grid for long-term planning,’ Blair declared to his visitors, unaware that traditionally Kuwaitis were resistant to thinking beyond the next day.
The Kuwaiti deal reinforced Blair’s expectation of similar contracts. Financially secure, at the end of 2007 he spent £5.75 million on South Pavilion, a beautiful seven-bedroom house with a tennis court and swimming pool in Wotton Underwood, Buckinghamshire. The period furniture found by Cherie perfectly matched the house, which was formerly owned by the actor Sir John Gielgud. Blair also bought a mews building directly behind his London home in Connaught Square. He now had his own equivalents to Downing Street and Chequers. Over the following months, he bought homes for each of his three eldest children. The total spent on property, including a block of flats in Manchester acquired as an investment, was about £25 million. Most of the money was borrowed.
The purchases attracted public attention. The mixture of Blair’s elegant homes, his Mayfair office and his frequent commutes between five-star hotels on private jets accompanied by his staff and up to six police protection officers, whose expenses were funded by the British taxpayer, angered his critics in Britain. Although he insisted that he was no longer accountable to the electorate, the government contributed £400,000 every year towards the three civil servants employed by the Quartet in Jerusalem. Put together, Blair’s description of himself as a private individual when, at the end of January 2008, he was introduced as the co-chairman of the World Economic Forum in Davos lacked credibility.
His fellow speaker there was Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of J. P. Morgan, the American investment bank. Days before, the New York banker had formally hired Blair as an adviser for about £3 million per annum. Although Dimon would say that he and Blair were old friends, their first meeting had followed a call in June the previous year by Jonathan Powell to Martin Armstrong, a leading London headhunter.
‘Tony needs a job,’ said Powell.
Armstrong visited Matthew Freud, a PR man who represented Blair and was the son-in-law of Rupert Murdoch. Together they discussed their client’s requirements.
‘He’s in charge of the Quartet,’ said Armstrong, ‘and the Middle East is oil and gas. He should also use his strong reputation in the US.’
Together they agreed on his ideal destination: J. P. Morgan. Armstrong’s proposal was sent to Dimon in early July. The banker met the former prime minister at 8 a.m. on 11 July at Freud’s office in Mount Row, Mayfair. Blair was in a hurry for another engagement, but for twenty minutes he listened to Dimon’s offer of a seat on the bank’s board. ‘You’d take over from George Shultz,’ said Dimon, referring to the ailing former US secretary of state. The annual fee was $100,000. Bluntly, Blair replied that he wanted ‘a proper job’ and expected $5 million a year, a five-year contract as an adviser and a percentage of every contract he initiated. Five minutes after he left the building, he asked his PA to send Dimon a message that he ‘found the meeting incredibly useful and is looking forward to keeping in touch with him’. Long before the Davos conference, Dimon had offered Blair nearly all he wanted.
By the end of the summit, Blair’s commercial tentacles had spread even further. Among those attending was James Schiro, the chief executive of Zurich Insurance, who hired Blair to advise on climate change for about $250,000 a year. Soon after, Blair was retained as an adviser by Bernard Arnault, the head of a French luxury-goods conglomerate, whom he had entertained at Chequers after enjoying a holiday on the Frenchman’s yacht. His income was mounting up.
More pieces of the portfolio came together after he arrived in Rwanda on 23 February 2008 to meet ‘my long-standing friend’, President Kagame. Considering Kagame’s association with mass murder, Blair was courting controversy by launching his philanthropic platform in Kigali. ‘We don’t tell the people of Rwanda what to do,’ he explained, ‘but to help get done what the president wants.’ In 2009, with his support, Rwanda joined the Commonwealth.
The parallel wing of Blair’s charitable operation was the Faith Foundation, established in America in May 2008. After his conversion to Catholicism, few doubted Blair’s interest in religion. To enhance the foundation’s credibility, Ruth Turner, his ultra-loyal Downing Street aide, recruited to the board Richard Chartres, the Bishop of London, the best-selling author and evangelical pastor Rick Warren and other leading American clergymen, as well as billionaires such as Haim Saban, an Israeli-born Hollywood producer, and Tim Collins, an American banker. Within a year, the foundation had over £4 million in funds and Blair had been invited by Yale to teach a course on faith and globalisation. ‘Moral judgements’, he said, were guiding his career. His speeches were raising millions of dollars, although their content was benign. ‘When things are in the balance,’ he told an audience in Beijing in 2008, ‘when you cannot be sure, when others are uncertain or hesitate, when the very point is that the outcome is in doubt, that is when a leader steps forward.’ His growing income, he explained, financed his good works. ‘I do not undertake any commercial activities’, he said, ‘which conflict with the charitable aims and objectives of AGI.’ Jamie Dimon’s visit to Rwanda alongside Blair to seek investment opportunities was brushed aside as consistent with AGI’s programme.
To his good fortune, Blair’s reputation was not further damaged by either the banking crash in London or the economic recession of 2008. Rather, Gordon Brown was in the firing line for having encouraged reckless growth, relaxing controls on greedy bankers and failing to build up a surplus during the post-1997 boom. While the former chancellor was held culpable for Britain’s soaring debt of over £1 trillion – the second highest in the industrialised world – and soaring welfare benefits, Blair escaped serious criticism. He was detached, appearing to live in voluntary exile.
That impression was underlined during Elisabeth Murdoch’s fortieth birthday party at her country estate in Burford in October 2008. Among the hundreds of guests invited by Matthew Freud, her husband, was Martin Armstrong, the headhunter who had first suggested that J. P. Morgan employ Blair. The customary introductory fee from the bank had not materialised, so, in some anger, he approached Blair.
‘I’m the guy who placed you with J. P. Morgan,’ said Armstrong.
‘Good for you,’ replied Blair and walked quickly away.
By early 2009, partly thanks to J. P. Morgan and Blair’s friendship with Hillary Clinton, newly installed as the US secretary of state, his opportunities for offering advice about ‘governance, modernisation and implementation’ were growing. Other than Bill Clinton or Henry Kissinger, few others could confide to a network of potential clients that they had access to President Obama and other world leaders.
But trading access to earn millions of pounds, Blair soon discovered, could be a grubby business. Among those who offered money to mitigate their own tainted reputations was UI Energy of South Korea. The company, embroiled in a corruption scandal since 2003, sought an introduction for an oil contract. Blair accepted the fee – and once again persuaded the British Advisory Committee on Business Appointments that ‘commercial sensitivity’ should prevent disclosure of his contract. The secrecy was fortunate: in 2012, the South Korean regulator compulsorily delisted UI Energy from the local stock exchange.
Under that same veil of secrecy, Blair recruited David Lyon from Barclays Capital to offer financial advice to his clients. Tony Blair Associates, operating under a licence from the Financial Services Autho
rity, filed sparse accounts through Firerush Ventures No. 3 LP. The obfuscation was intentional.
Among TBA’s new clients was Mubadala, an investment fund controlled by Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan. After several visits to Abu Dhabi, in each case by private jet, Blair agreed to provide ‘global, strategic and political advice’ to Mubadala and to monitor the fund’s investments in mineral-rich countries. Soon after, Mubadala bought a share of the Zubair oil field in Iraq. In a statement that was repeated frequently to distance himself from any controversy, Blair denied ever giving advice about the purchase.
Denial also covered his relationship with Qatar, a gas-rich state further up the Gulf coast that was a bitter enemy of Abu Dhabi and the other Emirates. The corrupt dictatorship there supported extremist Muslim groups, suppressed freedom of the press (despite owning the Al Jazeera TV network) and was offering bribes to win the right to host FIFA’s football World Cup in 2022. The Qataris hired Cherie rather than Tony. Like her husband, she had organised her interests carefully, establishing her commercial activities alongside the Cherie Blair Foundation for Women and the Africa Justice Foundation, two charities financed by rich Americans.
Amid some acrimony, Cherie had resigned from Matrix Chambers, where she had operated as a barrister, and opened Omnia Strategy, a consultancy advising Middle Eastern and African governments. Among those grateful for her help was Sheikha Mozah bint Nasser al-Missned, a wife of a Qatari royal. In 2009, on her behalf, Cherie sent messages to Hillary Clinton, urging her to engage in a woman-to-woman meeting to improve relations between the two countries. After an exchange of nineteen emails, Cherie won the day. ‘When I see what a difference you are making,’ she flattered Clinton, ‘it reminds me why politics is too important to be left to the bad people.’
Few politicians were as ‘bad’ as Colonel Gaddafi. Tony Blair remained attracted to the dictator, whom he revisited several times after May 2008. Travelling with him were J. P. Morgan bankers seeking a licence to trade in Libya. During a meeting arranged by Blair, Gaddafi agreed to the bank’s request. Blair next asked for money that would go towards education programmes for Palestinians. Gaddafi agreed, but delivered – after much lobbying – only $1 million, two years later.
After his visit, Blair wrote a letter of thanks suggesting that Gaddafi should also consider funding projects in Africa, ‘since you know I am doing a lot of work there and know of good, worthwhile projects for investment’. In April 2009, he returned to Tripoli from Sierra Leone in a jet provided by the colonel. Waiting for him was Tim Collins, the American billionaire. Collins, an admirer of Ruth Turner and the Faith Foundation, had been encouraged by Blair to meet Gaddafi to discuss the provision of malaria nets for Africans. During the meeting, the colonel urged Collins to invest in a holiday resort on the Libyan coast. To Collins’s surprise, Blair encouraged the idea. ‘This is a Muslim country which forbids alcohol and Western music,’ Collins told Blair. The former prime minister, Collins realised, was trying to earn a commission. ‘I don’t need Blair for business,’ he thought, outraged that he had been brought to Libya under false pretences.
After the meeting, Collins turned to Blair. ‘This guy Gaddafi is batshit crazy,’ he exclaimed. ‘I’d rather go hungry than deal with a guy who’s a complete lunatic.’
Collins drove to the airport alone, while Blair remained to negotiate contributions to AGI, broker other business possibilities and discuss a prisoner exchange. The stumbling block was the refusal of the British government to free from a Scottish jail Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, convicted for involvement in the Lockerbie bombing. Gaddafi threatened that, unless the release was agreed, he would cut commercial ties with Britain. Blair assured his host that he would try to broker a deal.
Throughout all these exchanges, he seemed unconcerned about placing himself in such invidious circumstances. Over the following year, he was also seen stepping on and off Kagame’s Bombardier jet in Israel, Zurich and Abu Dhabi. Collins was not alone in reassessing his judgement of Blair. ‘Perhaps I’ve been naive,’ he reflected. ‘He wants to be a player in the spotlight to save the world.’ But he pushed his doubts aside.
Similar mixed sentiments had been aroused in Jerusalem. In early 2008, Blair had presented Ehud Barak with a detailed plan drafted by the Quartet’s staff to lift hundreds of Israeli roadblocks across the West Bank to improve the Palestinians’ economic and social life. Barak immediately asked General Michael Herzog, a veteran of peace negotiations, to study which blocks might be removed. Working through the night, Herzog’s staff produced an amended plan. As some roadblocks disappeared, Palestinians hailed Blair’s success and Israelis re-emphasised their faith in an exceptional friend. ‘That was the high point,’ Herzog later recalled. ‘It didn’t get any better. Only worse.’
Over the first year and a half of his new life, Blair spent about four days every month in Jerusalem, travelling occasionally between the city and the West Bank to discuss financial investment in the Palestinian territories. Shocked by the realities of life on the West Bank, he realised that economic progress was impossible without a political settlement. This became his albatross. Although he was initially trusted by Abbas, neither the Israeli nor American governments needed Blair as an intermediary in the political peace process, and he was denied any influence. Diplomats and Israeli officials watched his authority ‘swiftly drip away’, as one observer reflected. His original conviction about his power to shape events withered as the Israelis discovered that Washington had limited his authority. The ex-prime minister found himself excluded from discussions and relegated to caring for minor issues.
Negotiations in Israel were mind-numbingly time-consuming. Israeli officials were intractable, even preventing James Cameron’s film Avatar from being released on the West Bank (although, after an excessive struggle, they relented). Nevertheless, there were some minor achievements. With considerable effort, Blair negotiated Israel’s agreement to the UN spending $500 million on new houses in Gaza and, by shuttling from Jerusalem to meet Abbas in Ramallah, the ‘capital’ of Palestine on the West Bank, he persuaded the Israeli government to allow Wataniya, a Kuwaiti and Qatari company, to establish a second mobile network across the West Bank, albeit with a more limited spectrum than originally envisaged; and there was also a concession for British Gas to extract gas off the Gaza coast. Both Wataniya and British Gas were advised by J. P. Morgan, and Blair voiced outrage when anyone implied that there was a conflict of interest. He hailed those agreements to Hillary Clinton as part of his ‘transformative change agenda’.
The small triumphs did not silence the mounting criticism over his failure to broker an agreement between Israel and the Palestinians. Potential investors told Blair that their money was conditional on a settlement but, even after minuscule progress, he was condemned for failing to tour Gaza. He blamed the discovery by Israeli intelligence of a jihadist threat to murder him; his critics said he was obeying Netanyahu and Bush to isolate Hamas and so prevent any agreement.
To his detractors, his invisibility suggested disengagement. Blair confided to friends his dismay over his exclusion from the Middle East peace negotiations and even from politics in Britain, including the Labour Party. The compensation was the pleasure of eating in the sun at Turkiz and other seaside restaurants in Tel Aviv. Feted as a hero, he had been introduced to the generous hospitality of Israel’s multimillionaires, especially Ofra Strauss, an attractive, dark-haired, rich divorcee. His frequent visits to Strauss’s home fuelled gossip of an affair, which he, Strauss and Cherie all denied. Through Strauss, he mixed with billionaires who offered him advice. Like scores of others, Arnon Milchan, a film producer, and Avi Tiomkin, a hedge-fund adviser, were electrified by Blair’s entry into their homes. Encouraged by their warmth, he slipped into sharing their fears about Islamic extremism, and his sympathy for Israel’s position grew.
On 27 December 2008, the Israeli army invaded Gaza in retaliation for rocket attacks launched by Hamas, the Palestinian group who had seized
power the previous year. Over three weeks, nearly 1,400 Palestinians died and thousands of buildings were damaged or destroyed. At the beginning of the fighting, Blair was on holiday. Later, he stood on the sidelines, embarrassed by his isolation from Gaza but refusing to criticise Israel for any excess. His silence fed the Palestinians’ conviction that he was prejudiced, but at least he had instant entrée to Israel’s prime minister, unlike other Europeans. That access did not change after Olmert resigned in disgrace and, in February 2009, Benjamin Netanyahu was elected.
Blair and Netanyahu forged a bond of trust just as Obama, addressing a rally in Cairo in June, proposed new negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. Blair urged Netanyahu to reciprocate. Although in September the Israeli flew to New York to meet Abbas, Hillary Clinton and George Mitchell, who had been appointed to lead a new round of peace talks, Blair was again excluded from the process. Washington was decidedly uninterested in the Quartet. Robert Danin, dubbed ‘the Tranquilliser’, was replaced as Blair’s chief of staff by Firas Raad, a softly spoken member of the Jordanian royal family. With Washington’s declining support and Raad’s appointment, the Quartet had become more ineffective and even invisible. Blair was rarely seen in Jerusalem, other than to receive a $1 million award from an Israeli charity for his ‘unique, profound contribution to humanity, on a global scale’. The Palestinians were unimpressed, but Blair showed no concern about their disdain.
His priority was to complete his memoirs in anticipation of Labour’s defeat in the 2010 election. Finally, there was an opportunity to settle some scores against Brown and the media. He had survived their harassment, he wrote, thanks to him ‘trying to wear what was effectively a kind of psychological armour which the arrows simply bounced off, and to achieve a kind of weightlessness that allowed me, somehow, to float above the demonic rabble tearing at my limbs. There was courage in it and I look back at it now with pride. I was cornered, so it was either go down or fight.’
