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Saturday 5 July 2008

Nice work

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

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.

It ended up with Malloch Brown nailing down a quite remarkable deal from the supplicant Prime Minister-in-waiting. This newcomer to British government picked up an extensive portfolio incorporating Africa — one of Brown’s foreign policy priorities — Asia and the United Nations, a peerage and the right to attend Cabinet. The message was clear: Malloch Brown was not to be some token peer picking up the crumbs under the Foreign Secretary’s table but a man with a seat at the top table.

Why was Gordon so keen to bring him in? In the months leading up to the takeover on 27 June, senior Brownites expressed concern at their boss’s comparative inexperience in foreign policy. Despite a decade at the centre of power, Brown’s experience on the global stage was limited to his work with the International Monetary Fund, the development agenda and his famously grumpy appearances at meetings of EU finance ministers. Brown’s emphasis on the economic aspects of international security and peace-making in the Middle East served only to highlight the narrowness of his focus. Blairites sneered that ‘Gordon doesn’t do abroad’.

There were obvious attractions, therefore, in hiring a foreign policy heavyweight to act as his guide and guru, but it was depressingly difficult to find anyone to fulfil this role. Margaret Beckett had proved a mediocre foreign secretary; and restoring Jack Straw to the Foreign Office would have been too clear a slap to Tony Blair and George W. Bush and boxed Brown in on Iran. So Brown looked outside Westminster.

The answer Brown’s team came up with — with help from some unofficial headhunters — was Malloch Brown; a Brit in his early fifties who was married with four children and had been educated at Marlborough, Cambridge and Michigan, been a journalist on the Economist and a political consultant before entering the world of international bureaucracy, rising to become Kofi Annan’s deputy secretary general at the United Nations in April 2006. There could only be a dozen or so people in the world who were as thoroughly well-versed in the global agenda as Malloch Brown. To add to his appeal to the Brownites, he also represented a clear break with the Blairite past on foreign policy. At the UN he had been a stern critic of the Iraq war and publicly slapped down the Bush and Blair partnership over the crisis in the Lebanon and for their ‘megaphone diplomacy’ on Darfur.

More articles from: Claudia Rosett and James Forsyth | this section

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