Greg Palast | ukwatch.net

Brown’s Fixer Explains How It’s Done

Ellie Keen — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 02:51:54 +0000

Jon Mendelsohn and the Secret Tape

It was a stunning admission. Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s crony explained to the U.S. businessman, in evil detail, exactly how the fix is done in Britain.

Unfortunately, for Jon Mendelsohn and his partners, the “businessman” was, in fact, an undercover reporter for The Observer of London.

Today, Brown’s foes are calling for Mendelsohn’s resignation as chief fundraiser of the Labour Party for his admitted knowledge of £630,000 ($1.2 million) in dodgy, possibly illegal, campaign contributions to Labour.

What’s odd here are the protestations of shock at the behavior of Mendelsohn, described in the Guardian as an “ethical” lobbyist. “Ethical” my arse.

It was exactly nine years ago that Mendelsohn and his lobby firm partners were caught trading cash for access. How this Mendelsohn character ended up heading Labour Party fundraising and how he obtained the sobriquet ‘ethical’ is the real shocker.

I know a few things about this Mendelsohn. The “businessman” with the hidden microphone was me. In June 1998, joined by my recorder and a real US businessman, Mark Swedlund, who designed my elaborate corporate front, I met Mr. Mendelsohn at his tony Soho London office. There Mendelsohn confirmed what was already on tape from his partners in the lobby firm he founded, LLM.

I explained my corporate needs: some environmental rules needed bending. I hinted I was with Enron. Mendelsohn’s partner Neil Lawson told my recorder that, if I paid LLM £5,000 to £20,000 per month, “We can go to anyone. We can go to Gordon Brown if we have to.” Brown was at the time Chancellor of the Exchequer. Could the lobbyist provide concrete examples of a fix?

Easily. Here is a short list of LLM claimed accomplishments:

- Inside information on then-Chancellor Gordon Brown’s budgets. – Tax avoided by a supermarket chain following millions donated to a New Labour pet project. – A pass on anti-trust action against client Rupert Murdoch’s media empire. – And for Gordon Brown, a favor that the Mendelsohn team expected to redeem.

Tesco Goes Tax-Free

LLM, which stands for the founders Lucas, Neil Lawson and Mendelsohn, were about to derail Brown’s plan for a tax on car parks (”parking lots” as we say in the States). This would cost Tesco, the supermarket chain, an LLM client, £20 million annually. LLM was holding secret meetings that week in June 1998 with Tony Blair’s Downing Street Policy Unit to get Tesco exempted from the proposed tax.

The tax threat went away after LLM advised Tesco to drop £11 million into funding for Blair’s odd Millennium Dome project.

“This government likes to do deals,” Lucas told me.

But this deal was complex, Mendelsohn said, not so simple as cash paid for a tax break. “Tony is very anxious to be seen as ‘green’,” Mendelsohn explained to me and my confederate. “Everything has to be couched in environmental language – even if it’s slightly Orwellian.” So LLM devised a set of cockamamie gimmicks for Tesco, like offering bus services to the elderly, which would paint the retailer green.

It worked. Tesco was spared the tax – though the company denies categorically that its cash dumped into the Dome bought any favors.

Message for Murdoch

The year of my paper’s original investigation (dubbed, “Lobbygate”), anti-trust authorities were looking into Rupert Murdoch’s companies’ alleged predatory pricing practices. LLM carried the word from Downing Street, according to Lucas, that, if Murdoch’s tabloids toned down criticism of new antitrust legislation, the law’s final language would reflect the government’s appreciation. On the other hand, harsh coverage in Murdoch’s papers could provoke problems for the media group in Parliament’s union-recognition bill.

The message to muzzle journalists was not, said Lucas, “an easy one in their culture” – journalists being a trying lot. However, the outcome pleased LLM clientele.

A Peek at the Budget

It also happened that on one of the days I recorded Mendelsohn’s partners, they boasted of informing an LLM client about details of Gordon Brown’s budget plans before the Chancellor’s announcement went public.

A lobbyist competing for my “business,” when asked to match the offer of inside information and deal-making held out by LLM and another New Labour firm said, “It’s appalling. It’s disturbing,” and added that he would refuse to match LLM’s services at any price.

If LLM appeared favored by Brown’s operation, Brown himself received favors from LLM. “Gordon Brown asked us to have our client KPMG [the consultancy] host a breakfast for him where it was pre-arranged that they would praise him for his prudent budgets.” Brown basked in this Potemkin praise-fest – a favor that would be returned with special access (for my own clients, if I paid the retainer).

Whether Mendelsohn, Lawson and Lucas actually pulled off all they claimed, I can’t say. Though just kids in their twenties, LLM had garnered millions in revenue, a lot of loot if for mere advice. No one seriously investigated; no one asked uncomfortable questions of Mr. Brown, Mr. Blair or the man at the center of several of these supposed “deals,” Mr. Peter Mandelson, now an EU Commissioner.

However, that Mendelsohn made these tawdry claims (or grinned at me while his partner made them), and that they were published on page one of every newspaper in the realm – part of an LLM tape broadcast on BBC’s Newsnight – one would think that the perspicacious Mr. Brown would have avoided Mendelsohn like the plague.

But the PM embraced Mr. Let’s-Make-A-Deal. The reason was made clear to me by Mendelsohn himself, a man as brainy as he is cynical and wealthy. Those many years ago, at the dawn of the Blair regime, Mendelsohn handed me a confidential manifesto he’d penned for LLM clients only. It was a map of the soul of New Labour.

Here was a chilling combination of Mendelsohn, Mandelson and Nietzsche. “AN OLD WORLD IS DISAPPEARING AND A NEW ONE EMERGING,” he announced in upper case. In the “Passing World” were “ideology” and “conviction” – which would now be replaced by “Pragmatism” and “Consumption.” “Buying” would replace “Belief.”

And ultimately, in this Brave New Labour World, style was all: “WHAT YOU DO,” wrote Mendelsohn, was passé, replaced by, “HOW YOU DO IT.”

So why demand Mendelsohn’s head now? Gordon Brown is a prudent man whom, I suspect, reads a newspaper or two – and knew exactly whom he had positioned to fill his party’s coin sacks. Mendelsohn is just a gun for hire, a forgettable factotum. I wouldn’t place the blame on the hired gun, but on the man whose finger is on the trigger.

The series “Lobbygate: Cash for Access” was originally published by The Observer (UK) in July 1998 by Greg Palast and Antony Barnett. For a complete history of the scandal, read, “Blair and the Sale of Britain” in The Best Democracy Money Can Buy (Penguin/Constable & Robinson 2004). Excerpt at http://www.gregpalast.com/tony-blair-and-the-sale-of-britain

Tony Blair Can't Win

jo — Thu, 05 May 2005 23:19:39 +0000

Mark my words: Tony Blair won’t be re-elected Thursday. However, he will remain in office.

That’s because Brits don’t vote for their Prime Minister. They’ve got a “parliamentary” system there in the Mother Country. And the difference between democracy and parliamentary rule makes all the difference. It is the only reason why Blair will keep his job – at least for a few months.

Let me explain. The British vote only for their local Member of Parliament. The MPs, in turn, pick the PM. If a carpenter in Nottingham doesn’t like Prime Minister Blair (not all dislike him, some detest him), the only darn thing they can do about it is vote against their local MP, in this case, the lovely Alan Simpson, a Labour Party stalwart who himself would rather kiss a toad than cuddle with Tony.

Therefore, the majority of the Queen’s subjects – deathly afraid of the return of Margaret Thatcher’s vampirical Tory spawn – holds their noses, vote for their local Labour MP and pray that an act of God will save their happy isle. A recent poll showed the British evenly divided: forty percent want Blair to encounter a speeding double-decker bus and forty percent want him stretched, scalded and quartered in the Tower of London (within a sampling margin of four percent).

Why? Well, to begin with, Blair lies. A secret memo from inside Blair’s coven discovered this week made clear that Britain’s Prime Minister knew damn well, eight months before we invaded Iraq, that George Bush was cooking the intelligence info on “WMD,” but Blair agreed to tag along with his master.

The Prime Minister’s coterie sold his nation on the re-conquest of their old colony, Iraq, by making up this cockamamie story about Saddam Hussein having weapons of mass destruction that could take out London in 45 minutes. But Brits knew that was ‘bollocks’ (no translation available) long before this week’s shock-horror memo story.

A greater blight on the Prime Minister’s reputation: Blair likes American presidents. While his habit of keeping his nose snug against Bill Clinton’s derriere was a bit off-putting, his application to George Bush’s behind makes Blair’s countrymen retch.

I watched the machinery called Tony Blair up close as a Yankee in King Blair’s court (first as an advisor on the inside, then as a journalist also on the inside, but with a hidden tape recorder).

And it was eerie. Because what I saw was a man who, while Britain’s erstwhile leader, scorns his own country. That is, he scorns the union workers that wanted to keep filthy coal mines open; he scorns the nostalgic blue-haired ladies who wanted to keep the Queen’s snout on their nation’s currency; he scorns his nation of maddeningly inefficient little shops on the high street, of subjects snoozy with welfare state comforts and fearful of the wonders of cheap labor available in far-off locales.

Blair looks longingly at America, land of the hard-charging capitalist cowboy, of entrepreneurs with big-box retail discount stores, Silicon Valley start-ups and Asian out-sourcing.

Blair doesn’t want to be Prime Minister. He wants to be governor in London of America’s 51st state.

Britons know this. They feel deeply that their main man doesn’t like the Britain he has. And that is why the average punter in the pub longs to be led by that most English of British politicians – who is not English at all – Gordon Brown, the Scotland-born Chancellor of the Exchequer.

And so they vote for their local Labour MP on that party’s quietly whispered promise that, shortly after the election, Gordon Brown, defender of the old welfare state, union rights, and a gentleman unlikely to invade forgotten remnants of the empire, will, on a vote of his parliamentary confreres, take the reins of government in his benign and prudent hands.

As New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman says, Tony Blair is a man of principle. So was the Ayatolla Khomeini. Both were willing to have others pay any price for their beliefs.

Luckily for Britain, Chancellor Brown won’t let Blair put his fanatic hands on the kingdom’s cash or coinage. And herein is another difference betwixt the US and UK. In America, the Treasury Secretary is little more than the President’s factotum. In Britain, the Chancellor holds the nation’s purse. Brown brilliantly controls Britain’s spending, taxing and currency. For example, despite Tony’s pleas, Brown presciently nixed England dumping the pound coin for the euro.

And thus Brown, not Blair, has earned his nation’s gratitude for the island’s steady recovery from Thatcherite punishments while, across The Pond, real wages in Bush’s America are falling.

Blair will hold onto office – for now – due only to a sly campaign that relies on the public’s accepting on faith that, sooner rather than later after the vote on Thursday, Blair will do the honorable thing and end his own political life, leaving the British-to-the-bone Brown to inherit the parliamentary throne. Tony’s political corpse can then be mailed to Texas – wrapped in an American flag.