By Claudia Rosett and James Forsyth, The Spectator
Mark Malloch-Brown, the minister for Africa, Asia and the UN,
In February 2006 Mark Malloch Brown, then the UN Secretary General's chief of staff, was interviewed by Claudia Rosett at the UN, and found himself increasingly furious at the line of questioning about his housing arrangements in New York. Malloch Brown had caused controversy with his decision to live on the smart country estate of George Soros, the financier who forced Britain out of the ERM in 1992, and a major donor to left-wing causes. Finally, the UN mandarin barked that he was doing 'God's work' before storming out of the interview. Malloch Brown might well consider himself to be on a mission from God. But, now, as then, he lives more like a mediaeval cardinal than an ascetic monk.
Scroll forward to the summer of 2007 and the same man found divine providence intervening on his behalf. Gordon Brown, shortly to become Prime Minister, was desperate to bring Malloch Brown on board. One friend who was advising him while Brown and Malloch Brown were negotiating over the telephone remembers egging him on: 'It was great fun! You know, strike a hard bargain.'
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.
Malloch Brown, the theory ran, would add instant heft to Brown's reform agenda for international institutions and signal that foreign policy would be very different under Brown. Shriti Vadera, now parliamentary under-secretary of state at DFID and one of Brown's closest aides, was apparently particularly keen on the appointment. His multilateral UN credentials also meant that the Labour party was likely to tolerate his political promiscuity--Malloch Brown had flirted with the SDP in the 1980s and done a turn at David Cameron's first Tory conference
