Lord of works
Sir: Your profile of Lord Malloch-Brown was grossly unfair (‘Labour’s lord of the perks’, 10 November). I have known him since 1979 when, at the age of 26, he built and ran the Khao I Dang refugee camp in Thailand. Over 100,000 Cambodian refugees had reason to be very grateful for his superb work.
Since then he has had a large number of significant international assignments, at the World Bank, the United Nations and elsewhere. He has enormous experience, particularly of the problems of poverty and international development. In recent years he has been very critical of US policies, including towards Iraq. I disagree with these views but they do not make him viscerally anti-American, as is now being claimed. And so far from being ‘the lord of perks’, as you allege, he took a big pay cut when he stopped working for George Soros and returned home to join Gordon Brown’s administration. He also had to uproot his young family, no easy matter. Perhaps he made a mistake in joining a government so visionless as this one. But his hope was undoubtedly to use his new position to try and make a difference in the policies and countries with which he is concerned, above all the poorer parts of the world. His new colleagues in the House of Lords, on both sides, say that he is now carrying out his duties there with energy and skill.
Political criticism is entirely valid, but the attacks on Lord Malloch-Brown are completely disproportionate.
William Shawcross
St Mawes, Cornwall
DeLay response
Sir: I nearly fell out of my chair when I read Douglas Murray’s egregrious whitewash of Tom DeLay (‘A thoughtful man at the eye of the storm’, 10 November). Murray suggests that the reason for DeLay’s indictment on criminal charges was ‘the inevitable blow-back for what the Republicans had put a Democratic president through’ and that ‘the charges brought against him follow directly from that particularly personalised tone which Republicans set during the Clinton years’.
In fact, DeLay was indicted by a Texas grand jury, and it is tendentious to argue that this is about Democrat blow-back or revenge. Republicans control all statewide Texas offices, both houses of the state legislature and have a majority in the Texas congressional delegation. The people of Texas are largely Republican. How can the grand jury indictments of DeLay on very serious criminal charges be attributed to Democrat blow-back?
Moreover, in America, the man Murray characterises as a ‘thoughtful man’ enjoys the sobriquet of ‘The Hammer’, because of his political pit-bull style of vicious ad hominem attacks.
Finally, Murray uncritically accepts The Hammer’s statement that the Left ‘undermined the will of the American people on Vietnam’. In fact, DeLay sat out the Vietnam war on a student deferment (only available to university students, who were disproportionately white), and when questioned about this, stated publicly (according to the Houston Press) that so many minority youths had volunteered for the well-paying military positions to escape poverty and the ghetto that there was literally no room for patriotic folks like himself. This is well known in the US, but is entirely omitted in Murray’s whitewash. Why?
Andrew Halper
London NW3
Powell’s racism
Sir: Rod Liddle implies (‘Don’t mention Enoch’ 10 November) that Enoch Powell’s 1968 speech was not racist, and that his comments were taken out of context. This is a case of argumentum ad ignorantiam, for it is Mr Liddle who has taken Enoch Powell’s words out of context and misrepresented his speech.
The main thrust of Enoch Powell’s speech, which became self-evident following his TV and radio interviews in 1968, was directed against coloured, not white immigration, for he regarded the former as harbingers of future social instability and racial tension. It was this aspect of Powellism which made his speech and his name anathema to Sir Edward Heath and future British politicians.
Enoch Powell may have been proved right on many issues (the EU, for example), but on immigration, I am happy to say, he has been proved wrong. He predicted widespread race riots, which did not materialise; on the contrary, Britain witnessed IRA terrorism. Even the 7/7 paroxysm, as subsequent inquiries have revealed, was not motivated by race.
Randhir Singh Bains
Gants Hill, Essex
Brought to book
Sir: Paul Barker’s account of the recent AGM of the London Library is a distorted version of both the temper of the meeting and of the discussion (‘The Stalinists have taken over the London Library’, 10 November). He does not mention that some Library members already voluntarily pay the full cost of their membership. Why does he wish to avoid paying the honest and proper amount? Why does he feel that he is entitled to a hand-out of £165 a year paid from the fast-dwindling reserves of a charity which was not set up to give pecuniary benefits to its largely middle-class members?
He is very free in pitching epithets like ‘Stalinist’ at his opponents. May I say that some of his allies reminded me of the selfish dinosaurs of yesteryear defending the Spanish practices of the London dockers or old-style Fleet Street printers. They wanted something for nothing, and someone else to pay â” Jack Dash blustering in the sanctimonious tones of North London bien-pensants.
Richard Davenport-Hines
London W14
Second Adam
Sir: I agree with Charles Moore that the sense of Newman’s ‘Praise to the Holiest in the Height’ is not ‘impenetrable’. Yet it does seem to be open to more than one interpretation. I have always assumed that ‘Man’ with the capital M referred to the second Adam, for He is our substitute and representative who was smitten in our stead. For me the double agony is a reference to the horror of being separated from the Father (‘my God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me’) and being punished for crimes He had not committed.
R.A. Massie-Blomfield
Nairobi, Kenya
Sir: If Melanie Phillips had checked her facts – or checked with the subject of her article – she would have avoided making assertions about Mr. Khalid Bin Mahfouz which are wrong (‘The Lights go out in Britain’, 20 November).
Mr. Bin Mahfouz — who has publicly condemned terrorism– has not used English libel laws “to suppress evidence about the alleged links between Saudi financing and terrorism,” but to shed much-needed light on this topic. By openly confronting stories that had linked him to funding of terrorism through his role as head of the National Commercial Bank of Saudi Arabia, Mr. Bin Mahfouz has demonstrated convincingly that there is no factual basis for these claims. He has not sued 30 publications, as Ms Phillips suggests, but 4. In dozens of other instances, publications that have repeated these allegations have promptly and publicly apologized, usually without any threat of litigation, because it was evident from material publicly available that there was no evidence to support these sensational and extremely defamatory claims.
Much of this material is summarized by Mr. Justice Eady in his Judgment against Rachel Ehrenfeld (posted at http://www.binmahfouz.info/news_20050503_full.html). As the Court made clear, Ms. Ehrenfeld is indeed “fighting a lonely battle” –not against “libel tourism,” as Phillips suggests, but against the truth. Rather than check her facts, defend her statements in open court, or acknowledge her mistakes, Ehrenfeld hides behind a claim to free speech. Thank goodness, the legal lights remain on in Britain to expose such harmful journalism.
Laurence Harris
Ken dall Freeman
Solicitors for Sheikh Khalid Bin Mahfouz
London
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