Nice work

The taxpayer is being stung so this Lord can live in Admiralty House

10 November 2007

Mark Malloch-Brown, the minister for Africa, Asia and the UN, was the most prestigious recruit to Gordon Brown’s ministry of all the talents. But this appointment might be about to come back and embarrass the Prime Minister with controversy brewing over the former UN deputy secretary-general’s taxpayer funded accommodation.

Another episode at the UN that calls Malloch Brown’s judgment into question concerns a glowing book on the UNDP published in late 2006 by Cambridge University Press. It turns out the book had been commissioned by Malloch Brown shortly before he left the agency. More than half a million dollars had been spent to hire a historian, give him a travel budget and then buy copies of the book from CUP. To no one’s great surprise, the book is very positive about Malloch Brown’s tenure.

Back in Westminster, Malloch Brown’s appointment in June was widely and correctly seen as a message that things were going to change on foreign policy. He was, after all, known to oppose the Iraq war, and had slapped Bush and Blair down over the war in Lebanon. Malloch Brown’s appalling relations with the Bush administration — the President personally pleaded with the incoming UN Secretary-General to get rid of him — were music to the ears of those who were desperate for reassurance that Brown was not going to pursue the same strategy as Blair on the global stage.

In Washington, however, Malloch Brown’s appointment caused considerable consternation and continues to cast doubt on Brown’s judgment. Confidants of the Prime Minister now report that Brown claims that if he ‘had known it would cause such a fuss, I wouldn’t have appointed him’. Nile Gardiner, a Republican foreign-policy thinker and expert on US–UK relations who is close to the White House, says that Malloch Brown is viewed in Washington as ‘viscerally anti-American’.

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carol scott

November 11th, 2007 12:18am Report this comment

Gordon Brown does not ever admit mistakes.

Maggie Black

November 13th, 2007 6:48pm Report this comment

David Lorraine is right. Malloch Brown is exceptional, and people who have worked with him at the UN have the greatest respect for him, even when they have not been personally well-served by his reforms and cost cutting decisions and have been bruised by some encounters. The idea that he would describe himself as doing God's work is preposterous, but I can well imagine that he would find a journalist only interested in a story about 'scandal and perks for top UN officials', when there are so many major problems in the world to address and so many difficulties in doing so, infuriating and a complete waste of his time. And now he's here, after 25 odd years in the interantional system, almost all of it at very high level. That's very good for us, and for others in the world. So he hasn't worked within the British political system before, and that is bound to mean some toes are trodden on and nuances missed. It is one of the anomalies of our House of Lords system that someone can be appointed to senior office in that way. Because he comes from outside the Westminster village, is it really necessary to write loaded sneers against him? It sounds as though insiders at Westminster, including journalists, are just determined to carp at someone who is not 'one of us', in a familiar phrase.

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