by Tom Bower
Similar banal musings had seeped into his promotion of the Faith Foundation. To finance his ambitions, he had accepted $500,000 from Victor Pinchuk, a Ukrainian oligarch, and $1 million from Michael Milken (the model for Hollywood’s Gordon Gekko and his ‘greed is good’ mantra), who was convicted in 1990 for fraud. Neither maverick was noted for his particular interest in religion, but both succumbed to Blair’s charm.
Pinchuk and Milken would have been puzzled by the attendance of Faith Foundation staff at a conference in Vienna about ‘interfaith dialogue’ and the promotion of human rights funded by Saudi Arabia, one of the world’s most intolerant regimes, renowned for punishing minor infractions of Sharia law with public beheadings. As Martin Bright, an admirer of Blair, would discover after joining the foundation, there were irreconcilable conflicts between Blair’s supposed beliefs and his priority of not irritating any paymaster. Bright would leave after complaining that Blair ‘doesn’t do humility and nor do his organisations. Perhaps that’s his tragedy.’
There were no boundaries when it came to sustaining his lifestyle. In September 2012, Jamie Dimon asked Blair to help Ivan Glasenberg, the competitive chief executive of Glencore, the world’s biggest commodity trading house, buy Xstrata, a rival. One year earlier, after the company had been launched on the stock exchange, Glasenberg’s personal stake in Glencore had been valued at $9 billion. Now, the aggressive South African wanted to use Glencore’s shares to buy his competitor and become even bigger. However, Mick Davis, Xstrata’s equally bruising boss, did not agree to Glasenberg’s price. To win, Glasenberg needed the support of Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber al-Thani, the prime minister of Qatar, which owned nearly 12 per cent of Xstrata’s shares.
Glasenberg wanted to hammer out a deal with al-Thani face to face, and sought an introduction. ‘Try Tony Blair,’ suggested Michael Klein, a New York banker. ‘I know Tony fairly well, and he got to know al-Thani in Downing Street and later through his Quartet work.’ Klein suggested that Blair could make the telephone call in anticipation of a meeting already arranged at Claridge’s hotel in London. A fee was agreed and Blair was briefed by Glasenberg. Blair’s pitch, said Glasenberg, would be that Qatar’s image in London had been damaged by the revelations of a murky deal facilitated by Qatari money to bail out Barclays Bank after the 2008 crash. To rescue its reputation and prevent Barclays’ stock price from falling, Blair was to tell al-Thani that Qatar should support Glencore.
Blair delivered the script and also agreed to be present when al-Thani arrived at 11 p.m. in the hotel suite. Over the following hour, Blair sat silently in an armchair – ‘there for the urging’ in support of Glasenberg. At the end, the Qataris agreed to sell their stake. After his victory, Glasenberg could not decide whether Blair had been helpful or whether his huge fee was a waste. For the super-rich, the payment of a few million pounds was superfluous. After all, money could buy few better names than Blair’s, as Kazakhstan’s President Nazarbayev had discovered.
In July 2012, Nazarbayev asked Blair for advice about a speech he was to make at Cambridge. The problem for the president was how he should address the deaths of the fourteen civilians during the protest in December. Considering that British paratroopers had shot and killed thirteen civilians in Londonderry in 1972, Nazarbayev’s record was unexceptional. ‘Tragic though they were,’ wrote Blair about the Kazakh deaths, ‘that should not obscure the enormous progress that Kazakhstan has made.’ In his speech, continued Blair, the president should deal with the shootings ‘head on’ using the phrases and sentiments provided by Blair to express his understanding of the international anger but asking his critics to recognise the progress made by his country and accept that, in the future, ‘We are going to have to go step by step.’ Nazarbayev followed Blair’s advice, and was also grateful that the former prime minister encouraged David Cameron to plan a visit to Kazakhstan in June 2013.
Soon after, Blair chose to deny that he personally ‘makes money’ in Kazakhstan. His total income, he said, came from J. P. Morgan, Zurich Insurance and from speeches. Few were convinced, but the truth was buried. He did disclose that, in 2012, the income of the Windrush companies had increased from £12 million to £16 million. Of that, £12.5 million went on expenses and the remainder was profit. The deliberate obfuscation was his original description of the Windrush group as providing advisory services for governments, while Firerush worked on behalf of private businesses. His explanations made little sense. The following year, his accounts would show that Windrush’s turnover was £14.9 million with £2 million profit, while £13 million remained deposited in the company’s bank account. This presentation of his business interests would allow Blair to say in 2015 that he was worth ‘only £10 million’. No one could authoritatively challenge the disclosed chain of payments of £57 million over four years on travel, rent and salaries, while the interlinked companies in turn reimbursed sister businesses for management fees, services and administrative expenses. Some speculated that Blair was using the tax and legal systems to channel yet more of his income through a number of new, unknown companies.
That suspicion arose after he consolidated his new relationship with Mubadala in Abu Dhabi. Mubadala was investing in Vietnam, Serbia, Colombia and West Africa, and Blair was contracted to earn commissions of up to 20 per cent by brokering deals between the fund and those countries. His selling point was that he could open the door to national leaders; his handicap was his inexperience in closing big commercial deals. In other words, he lacked the persuasive skill to get the vital signature on a contract, and without a final signed agreement he was not entitled to any commission.
He was on surer terrain selling his expertise to governments. Thus, for instance, operating as Tony Blair Associates, he pitched to Colombia’s president Juan Manuel Santos a scheme to prevent the employees and brokers of the country’s mining industry stealing a large chunk of its annual £2 billion income. ‘Improved delivery’, he wrote, mining his own tried and tested rhetoric, ‘was one of the great achievements of the Blair administration.’ He offered assistance from the ‘founders of deliverology, a New Labour model for government reform’. His self-promoting proposal continued, ‘Mr Blair, with his extensive on-the-job experience and a politician’s instincts, will personally lead this project.’ He also offered ‘to serve as an adviser in domestic matters or questions of international politics’. President Santos agreed the deal in autumn 2013. Four months later, Mubadala bought a gold mine in Colombia.
Similar pitches to ‘deliver the reform programme’ succeeded in Serbia, Mongolia and Brazil. Erik Camarano, the chief of the Movimento Brasil Competitivo, a group dedicated to improving the Brazilian economy, had met Blair in Davos in 2011. Two years later, he part-funded a £3.7 million fee to hire Blair to improve government operations in the São Paulo region by ‘producing a strategic vision’. Similar New Labour jargon had secured a contract to advise Edi Rama, the leader of Albania’s Socialist Party, on winning the national elections and, later, to provide advice on governance. ‘With Tony Blair and his team’, said Rama, ‘we will have on our side a very important partner, with unique experience and all the right advice to build a successful government and to make a reality of our programme for an Albanian Renaissance.’ With Blair’s help, Albania was also given candidate status in Brussels to join the EU. Blair shared the income with Alastair Campbell, appointed as an adviser to Albania, and Cherie, who arrived in Tirana on a private plane provided by Rezart Taçi, an Albanian oil tycoon.
Nothing profitable and legal seemed to be excluded from Blair’s list of possible projects. During that summer, he was hired by an American hedge-fund owner in the south of France to accompany him to billionaires’ yachts along the Côte d’Azur in a search for investors. To the surprise of his hosts, Blair would smile, say little and earn a percentage in the event of success.
At that point his track record was associated with success. In 2013, Mubadala had reportedly invested $5 billion to mine bauxite in Guinea. Blair was the
country’s star. Naturally, he was invited to a conference at the Etihad Towers hotel in Abu Dhabi in November 2013 called ‘Guinea Is Back: Guinea’s Development Partners and Investor Conference’. No mention was made of any link between him and Mubadala’s investment. Instead, referring to AGI’s presence in Guinea, he delivered a ten-minute speech that described his team working ‘shoulder-to-shoulder with senior leaders in the heart of governments … to drive delivery of results on the ground’.
Not everyone was persuaded of the benefits. A senior aide to President Jonathan had cast doubt on the project’s merit to Nigeria. Tony Elumelu, he suspected, had wanted to use AGI to place his people in key government positions, but the AGI staff had failed to offer any value. ‘They sent their foot soldiers through the government but nothing changed. They hit a brick wall,’ the aide recalled. After two years, Tony Elumelu agreed. Supporting AGI in Nigeria, he decided, ‘cost too much and I didn’t think it was worth it’. He withdrew his funding. Blair was not discouraged. The original introduction had been beneficial. In 2013, Kate Gross called Jonathan’s aide on Blair’s behalf one weekend. ‘Tony,’ she said, ‘would like to speak to the president about Sikorsky helicopters.’ The chief executive of a Canadian company wanted to pitch his aircraft to the head of state to overcome an American embargo. The aide arranged an immediate conversation between the Canadian executive and the president. AGI had proved its value for Blair.
Unperturbed by Elumelu’s withdrawal of funding, rather than investing his own money to continue the project Blair obtained $2 million from USAID. He presented the gloss to Lionel Barber, the editor of the Financial Times: ‘The purpose is not to make money. It is to make a difference.’ In reality, the one common factor among his associates was always their wealth. Thus, a new Israeli friend was Moshe Kantor, a rich Russian-born businessman and aggressively Zionist oligarch who recruited Blair to his fledgling European Council on Tolerance and Reconciliation. There could be no reasonable explanation for Blair’s commitment other than money.
The incongruity was apparent during his regular visits to Ehud Barak’s apartment, which spanned the entirety of the twenty-eighth floor of Akirov Towers, overlooking the Mediterranean in Tel Aviv. In 2012, Barak resigned as defence minister and resumed life as a consultant for Israeli companies across the world. The two former prime ministers forged a profitable alliance, even as Blair’s position as the Quartet’s envoy became discredited and Barak, despite his military heroism, was criticised within Israel for using his experience of office to become rich. It appeared no coincidence that Barak would be consulted by Nazarbayev in Kazakhstan and by various West African presidents, and that Blair mentioned Israeli drones to President Buhari of Nigeria.
Blair’s new relationships eroded his immunity to criticism from previous allies. Having lost the Palestinians’ trust and without access to Mahmoud Abbas, he found his role as a mediator had vanished, and some EU officials, after reading the reports of his commercial deals, demanded his resignation. To placate the critics while protecting Blair, the EU Commission withdrew its £1.5 million annual contribution to Blair’s operation, ostensibly because the money was needed for refugees. Hillary Clinton came to the rescue by committing America to pay all of Blair’s costs.
Initially, he received the same co-operation from her successor, John Kerry. In mid-2013, Kerry restarted the peace process, setting a fixed timetable of nine months for a comprehensive agreement between Israel and the Palestinians, based on an economic package put together with Tim Collins, the American businessman who had travelled with Blair to Libya and who contributed to the Faith Foundation. Blair joined them on 26 May, at a meeting of the World Economic Forum on the Dead Sea in Jordan. The secretary of state’s ‘surprise’ announcement to an audience of Israelis and Arabs was a $4 billion package for the Palestinian economy that had been put together by Collins and a McKinsey team arranged by Blair. At Blair’s behest, Gaza was excluded. Once again, Blair appeared to be at the centre of the peace process and had good reason to assume that Collins would support his role as envoy. ‘How hard would it be to reach a peace agreement?’ he asked the audience rhetorically. ‘The answer is, not very hard at all.’ He misjudged the mood in the hall, as did Munib al-Masri, a Palestinian billionaire whose speech outraged the Israelis. The audience’s anger caused State Department officials to doubt Blair’s ‘butterfly judgement’. Kerry questioned whether Blair should be sidelined.
Nevertheless, during those months, Blair privately urged Netanyahu that peace depended upon him taking a risk, both with the Palestinians and with his Israeli voters. Netanyahu would say that he followed Blair’s advice by freezing the construction of new settlements and releasing many convicted Palestinian murderers. But, at that moment, Blair’s precarious position in Jerusalem was further undermined by events in New York.
On 11 June, Murdoch and Wendi Deng hosted a dinner for a group of friends and visitors from London. Unknown to his guests, and especially to his wife, Murdoch’s lawyers were to file for a divorce the following day. Over many months, Murdoch had become weary of his wife’s verbal humiliations, her frequent absence at parties and on foreign trips, and by the endless visits to their Manhattan home of her Chinese friends. Her habit of speaking Chinese in his presence was particularly irksome. Their fourteen-year marriage, he decided, had run its course. The excuse to call it a day was presented by the investigation into the News of the World’s hacking. In the course of sifting through millions of emails in News Corp.’s computers, emails from Deng were unearthed that suggested a close relationship with a tennis coach in Carmel, another with Eric Schmidt, the founder of Google – and a third with Tony Blair.
The evidence of her conduct was shown to Murdoch by his son. Specifically, there was one memorandum Deng had written to herself: ‘Oh shit, oh shit. Whatever why I’m so so missing Tony. Because he is so charming and his clothes are so good. He has such a good body and he had his really, really good legs Butt … and he is slim tall and good skin. Pierce blue eyes which I love. Love his eyes. Also I love his power on the stage … and what else what else what else …’
Other messages suggested that Blair had met Deng in New York, London and Beijing. The Chinese authorities prized a security video recording the two walking together through the lobby of a Beijing hotel. Of outstanding relevance was Deng and Blair’s overnight meeting on 27 April 2013 at Murdoch’s ranch in Carmel. Blair had met Murdoch the following day in Los Angeles and, while asking for more money for the Faith Foundation, had not mentioned meeting his wife. In his version of events, Murdoch later explained that, after returning from Australia, ‘I naturally asked the staff in Carmel and it opened up.’ He was told that, during their meals, Blair and Wendi would feed each other, and that Blair was seen joining Deng in her bedroom and closing the door.
Hours after the announcement of the divorce, Blair telephoned Murdoch. He insisted that he was innocent. After a brief conversation, Murdoch refused to take any more of his calls. Blair nevertheless spoke regularly with Deng on the phone. Both his and Cherie’s denials that there had been a sexual affair were ridiculed by Murdoch, who was supported by his staff.
Blair was damaged by the global interest in the scandal. For six years, he had enjoyed a strife-free honeymoon as a respected globetrotting statesman earning sufficient money to maintain a millionaire’s lifestyle. Now, Tim Collins and others regarded Blair’s conduct as beyond the pale. Collins, an observant Christian, was particularly appalled. ‘The Wendi Murdoch affair put me off,’ he recalled. ‘The real man was revealed. He’s incapable of self-criticism. I felt so naive.’ Collins was equally disenchanted by Blair’s stridency against Islamic extremists. ‘He was meant to reconcile the faiths, not attack them,’ Collins complained, and withdrew his support from the Faith Foundation. ‘Even Ruth Turner was disillusioned,’ he added. (She would later resign from the Faith Foundation.) Blair’s status as the Quartet’s envoy was imperilled. But, like a spider darting about on top of water, he would n
ot succumb. ‘He hung around the Quartet,’ complained Collins, ‘using it as a calling card long after he could have an impact. Blair was no longer relevant.’
His reputation dived further after he delivered a eulogy at Ariel Sharon’s funeral in January 2014. Wearing a skullcap and seated next to Netanyahu, Blair outraged the many Palestinians who still mourned the death of 20,000 Arabs during Sharon’s invasion of the Lebanon in 2002. The kudos Blair earned from the Israelis for his attendance was lost on Kerry. The American team in Jerusalem raged about his prejudice in favour of the Israelis, his conflicts of interest, the annual cost of his operation – in excess of £10 million – and his shifting opinions. Long liberated from Westminster, he had forgotten the limitations imposed upon politicians by those with vested interests. The Americans wanted his dismissal, but held back as they watched his gyrations.
In August 2013, Blair had energetically advocated intervention to remove Syrian president Bashar al-Assad and to encourage the country’s reformists to take control. He joined the clamour for an air attack on Syria in revenge for the ‘moral obscenity’ of Assad’s fatal gas attacks on civilians, and urged Britain’s MPs to vote for bombing the country because ‘we have to understand the consequences of wringing our hands, not putting them to work’. If Assad were not removed, he predicted, the country would become ‘mired in carnage’ and a ‘breeding ground for extremism’. The MPs rejected his advice. Blair’s legacy had left Labour MPs distrustful of intelligence reports and sceptical about any plan for Syria after Assad.
A year later, Blair completely reversed his view. In a speech in April 2014, he urged co-operation with Assad. In the ‘Titanic struggle’ between moderates and extremists promoting ‘dangerous and corrosive Islamic ideologies’, he told his audience in London, ‘We have to take sides.’ Defeating ‘the biggest threat to global security’, he said, depended on the West co-operating with Russia and China, and therefore supporting Assad, despite his murderous conduct.
