‘The Tony Blair Faith Foundation communications team and the top brass spend a long time trying to second-guess what might be embarassing for Tony Blair.’

– MARTIN BRIGHT, FORMER EDITOR FOR THE TBFF WEBSITE ‘FAITH AND GLOBALISATION’.

Tony Blair launched the Tony Blair Faith Foundation on 30 May 2008 to ‘educate, inform and develop understanding’ about different religions. His first major speech about it, nearly two months before the launch, was on 3 April 2008 at Westminster Cathedral. Blair said he wanted his new Foundation to organise a global campaign to mobilise young people, across religious divides, to work together towards achieving the Millennium Development Goals, ‘Faith and Globalisation’.1

Several years on, it is still hard to understand exactly what it is for, and what good it hopes to do. The confusion seems to extend to the Foundation itself. Early in 2014 the website had this to say: ‘We aim to demonstrate the vital importance of interfaith collaboration and showcase how faith communities can be huge assets to government and international policy.’ So it is not just about improving relationships between faiths, but making the influence of religion in the world stronger. It is followed by one of those meaningless feel-good sentences in which the Foundation appears to specialise: ‘We inform, educate and inspire how religion motivates the world today.’ How can you inspire how religion motivates the world?

By December the same year, all that had gone, to be replaced by, ‘We provide the practical support required to counter religious prejudice, conflict and extremism in order to promote open-minded and stable societies.’

What is happening here is that, throughout its life, the TBFF has two goals, and they fight each other. One is to improve the relationship between faith communities: the TBFF aims to counter extremism in the world’s six leading religions, which it identifies as Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Judaism, and Sikhism. The other seems to be to make religion a stronger force in the world.

No one would argue with the first – if you could stop Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, Sikhs, Jews and the rest from killing each other, you would certainly have helped towards making a better world. The second is of course far more controversial, and the website also says, ‘The TBFF aims to promote respect and understanding about the world’s major religions and show how faith can be a powerful force for good in the modern world.’

So is it promoting peace between religions, or is it promoting religion? It seems often to want to do the second while looking as though it is only doing the first.

In an interview with Time magazine at the time of the launch, Blair said the Foundation was ‘how I want to spend the rest of my life’, though most of his life now seems to be going into some of the other things described in this book.

The TBFF denies that there is, or even could be, any conflict of interest with Blair’s other activities:

This is an ambitious claim: that there is no conflict of interest because Blair does not control (or perhaps even influence) his charities. It seems, on the face of it, far-fetched. Insiders, speaking to us anonymously, say that while Blair seldom comes into the building – because his presence disrupts the work – it is his perceived wishes that inform pretty well every decision. Any suggested course of action must pass the test of: ‘Are we sure this will not embarrass Tony?’

The chief executive is Charlotte Keenan, a banker who is married to a Conservative MP. She came to the TBFF in 2008 after a career in corporate finance, partly spent working for Blair’s client JP Morgan Cazenove. She is an Oxford theology graduate, was President of the Oxford Union, and studied International Relations and Public Policy at Harvard and international affairs at Columbia. The TBFF website says she ‘has extensive experience in international capital markets and M&A advisory work. Her sector focus was in industrials, mining and energy.’

She is in regular and frequent contact with Blair, and they often travel abroad together. While Blair seldom goes to the TBFF’s Marble Arch offices, the top brass at the Foundation are frequent visitors to Blair’s headquarters in Grosvenor Square for formal meetings with him. A fairly typical meeting in Blair’s office in early 2014 consisted of Blair, Keenan, PR consultant Kate Bearman, editor of the Faith and Globalisation website Martin Bright, and Blair’s chief of staff Catherine Rimmer, a former BBC journalist.

Keenan’s deputy, also director of programmes, Matthew Lawrence, is another former JP Morgan Cazenove banker. He, say insiders, spends most of his time travelling the world, fundraising and visiting TBFF projects. The TBFF website says Lawrence spent fifteen years in investment banking. So both the director and her deputy are bankers by profession.

Other senior staff include Peter Welby, son of Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby, and the operations manager, Emma Selwood. According to Martin Bright, the fact that Blair often employs old friends or the children of old friends or the children of important people such as the Archbishop of Canterbury is partly explained by the fact that the security service briefed him to be careful about whom he appoints because of the risk of accidentally employing a terrorist risk.

Peter Welby, a York University graduate who studied Arabic in Egypt, warned about Vladimir Putin’s Russia after its annexation of Crimea. ‘I fear the Government would be wise to consider reversing some defence cuts, just in case,’ he wrote in an article published on the Faith Foundation website. One of Welby’s 2014 contributions to the website is a piece entitled, ‘What is ISIS?’ He declares with the authority of a gloom-laden Middle East analyst, ‘Buoyed by its advance, the group declared a Caliphate, a move that has split the jihadi world despite long being the aspiration of such organisations. What is more shocking is that over one month since these events, the Iraqi government is yet to make any significant gains in its counter-attack.’

Faith Foundation communications are run on Blairite lines. There are no fewer than seven communications staff, which seems excessive given the size of the organisation and how averse it is to communicating. Heading it up is communications director Parna Taylor, and a key figure is PR consultant Kate Bearman, who, like most of the leadership of the Blairite pressure group Progress, cut her political teeth in Labour Friends of Israel. Press officer is William Neal, who worked in Parliament and is a pillar of the Blairite pressure group Progress. New in 2014, Neal is not quite as averse to talking to journalists as his predecessor, but that is a low bar to jump.

They spend, we are told, a lot of time in meetings talking about strategic communications, which they call ‘strat comms’. They once spent a full half-day with four or five staff talking about Twitter protocols for members of staff on their individual Twitter accounts – a dreadful waste of time and money, but also an indication, says Martin Bright, of the perceived need to control everything. Discussions about whether to issue a press release are lengthy and tormented, and generally end up with the decision that it will be safer not to.

Over and over again, they return to worrying about the need to avoid anything which might embarrass the distinguished founder of the Foundation.

There is no overt role in its governance for the charity’s founder and patron, Tony Blair, but his seems to be the principal influence on key decisions, even when he does not specify precise wishes. When the TBFF appointed a journalist to edit its Faith and Globalisation website, a monthly hour-long meeting with Blair was arranged.

Yet, in the few on-the-record conversations we were able to have with them, officials of the TBFF were at pains to stress that they were quite apart from the rest of Tony Blair’s activities, and took their decisions with no reference at all to what went on anywhere else in the Blair empire.

Given the TBFF’s sensitivity to embarrassing Blair, we understand there was great concern in the office when the Daily Telegraph ran a story which suggested sympathy with the Muslim Brotherhood, because of Blair’s known strong hostility to the Brotherhood. Senior officials at the TBFF felt that references to the Brotherhood on the Faith and Globalisation website might not be to the patron’s taste. The editor of the website, Martin Bright, left after five months, feeling that he had not had the freedom he was promised and he points out that, as a matter of fact, the website never did run an article about the Muslim Brotherhood. ‘Draw your own conclusions,’ he told us. How decisions were made on the website’s contents, we do not know, but it is a matter of fact that, since then and at the time of writing, there have been no articles about the Muslim Brotherhood on the Faith and Globalisation website.

The TBFF communications team and the top brass ‘spend a long time trying to second-guess what might be embarrassing for Tony Blair’, we were told by Bright, whose claim that Blair exerts a lot of influence over the charity sparked a Charity Commission investigation. ‘The atmosphere is dominated by underlings worried about saving Blair from embarrassment in the media.’

Bright continues: ‘The Faith Foundation is an independent charity with Tony Blair as its patron. He is not supposed to have any executive role. But it was clear from the outset [of Bright’s employment] that [Blair’s] reputation was to be protected at all costs.

‘Tony’s private office began to treat my website as its own think tank or government department, with regular calls for briefings on the Middle East, radical Islam or particular conflicts. He once asked me for a worldwide map of madrassas in the world, ranked according to how radical they are, which is an impossible request.

‘There’s a huge communications department aimed at not publishing anything,’ he says. He adds that long meetings are held to work out positions on such matters as Iraq, Kazakhstan and the Gulf states that will not cause embarrassment for the charity’s patron, who took Britain to war in Iraq and has important clients in Kazakhstan and the Gulf states.

It is playing with words to say that Blair has nothing to do with the running of his Faith Foundation. He is in daily touch with it; his needs are at the forefront of the minds of its top staff all the time; and it reflects Blair’s beliefs and personality in every aspect of its activities. Even if we believed that he seldom or never instructed its top brass what to do, his needs, interests and wishes would remain their first thought when any decision needed to be made. It is like the claim that Rupert Murdoch has nothing to do with the political attitude of the Sun.

Seven months after launching the Foundation, in December 2008, Blair announced a partnership with the Canadian businesswoman, philanthropist, politician and billionaire Belinda Stronach. They were going to join forces, and to collaborate with what they called ‘representatives of a broad cross-section of the communities of faith and spiritual belief in Canada’ in ‘a new proposed interfaith initiative’.

Ms Stronach herself said, ‘We are looking to work with Canadians of faith and belief to build a secure and neutral public space in which to encourage and facilitate inter-faith cooperation on practical humanitarian matters where there is a large degree of consensus, starting with the MDGs. And the process of the interfaith collaboration itself is also an important endeavour.’2

This sounds rather like a meaningless collection of feel-good jargon, but Stronach specialises in sentences that sound as though they were taken from a management textbook. The Belinda Stronach Foundation, according to its own publicity, ‘builds partnerships with individuals, non-governmental organizations, business large and small, as well as other foundations who work in Canada and around the world to develop and incubate innovative programs confronting global challenges.’

The Stronach Foundation website says that Blair and Stronach set up Faiths Act and the Faiths Act Fellowship in Canada as an opportunity for people around the world to work together across faith divides in pursuit of the Millennium Development Goals.

On 24 April 2009, speaking to a Canadian audience, Blair said, ‘Out there, in those remote parts of Africa, a health clinic or hospital is a rarity. People have to travel miles, sometimes a hundred miles or more to get there, but, for obvious reasons, they don’t get there and they die. But every one of those communities, no matter how remote, has a place of worship in it. And they could be the means of distributing the bed nets and medicine. The infrastructure of faith could be the answer to this problem.’

Put at its kindest, the TBFF’s objective is to maximise the good that faith does in the world, and minimise the harm, which sounds like a perfectly respectable and indeed laudable, if rather limited, objective. However, when we examine what it actually does we wonder whether we have understood TBFF’s purpose correctly.

MR VARKEY AND THE FAITH FOUNDATION

TBFF’s activities include what it calls a ‘strategic partnership’ with GEMS Education, founded by Sunny Varkey, who is a member of its strategic advisory board. Launching it, Blair said, ‘It is rather unique, this organisation that Mr Varkey and his family has put together. The fact is they are providing really high-quality education and they are doing it in a way that I think is very interesting, very innovative and actually very exciting and there’s lots of education systems worldwide can learn from this.’

The admiration is mutual if you believe the Varkey GEMS Foundation website. Varkey states,

The Tony Blair Faith Foundation is an organisation that shares our belief in the fundamental importance of high-quality teaching. Like the Varkey GEMS Foundation, it understands the importance of investment in a strong support network for teachers: via its Country Co-ordinators and teachers’ workshops both on and offline, the Tony Blair Faith Foundation provides ongoing support for teachers the world over.

GEMS – Global Education Management Systems – is an international chain of fee-charging and profit-making schools, set up as a commercial enterprise, and these schools have made a very great deal of money for Mr Varkey. There’s nothing especially wrong with that. It’s entirely legal, and Varkey is doing only what several perfectly respectable chains of private schools are doing. But how does it tie in with TBFF’s stated objectives, and how can it be suitable work for a charity? What makes Sunny Varkey a role model for a faith organisation?

Varkey is an extremely rich Dubai businessman. His fortune is based on education and healthcare in the Gulf; he owns the top private hospital in Dubai. Starting with eighteen fee-charging schools in Dubai, mostly for expats, Varkey pioneered thirteen cut-price (he prefers the term ‘affordable’) fee-charging schools in Britain in 2004. Then he signed a deal that gave him a launch pad to bid for academies in association with 3Es, a company that manages a clutch of state schools.

3Es was Prime Minister Tony Blair’s favourite education company. Opening one of its schools, he said its name ‘apparently stands for “education, education, education”. I’ve heard that phrase before, and wonder if they should be paying me royalties.’ They could certainly afford to. The company’s wealth began with Kingshurst, near Birmingham, the first of the city technology colleges created in the late 1980s by the then Tory Education Secretary, Kenneth Baker. The colleges got a huge state handout, supplemented by a much smaller sum from business.

Kingshurst’s then principal, Valerie Bragg, teamed up with her husband, Berkshire’s former chief education officer Stanley Goodchild, to create a company to manage other state schools. The company flourished. It won the management contract for two Surrey schools, provided services for many more and ran academies under the Blair government. Though Kingshurst had been almost entirely paid for by the taxpayer, Bragg and Goodchild ran 3Es entirely as a private company.

In 2005, Prime Minister Tony Blair tried to put some of his academies Varkey’s way. Academies were a new sort of school, pioneered by the Blair government, and run by sponsors, which were often commercial organisations. Sponsors need to be approved by the Education Secretary. For a while it looked as though Varkey might get his hands on two academies in Milton Keynes, but he was forced to pull out after protests from local parents.

But he still, of course, had his thirteen private fee-charging schools in the UK. These, he says, work by taking advantage of economies of scale in a similar way to a supermarket, with centralised purchasing and teachers shared among schools. The aim was to open up a new market by charging fees that started at about £6,000 a year – less than half the normal cost at that time. The product is less luxurious, with a narrower curriculum, perhaps teaching only core subjects, and class sizes similar to those in state schools. But, in a market-driven education system, you get what you pay for. And at least it would keep out the very poor, which may have been an important selling point for the punters.

That is why, in 2004, Varkey envisaged perhaps doubling the number of children whose parents paid for their education, with two hundred new schools. His target market was the 50 per cent who, according to a poll, would send their children to a fee-charging school if they could afford it. Since he is offering little that a state school can’t offer, the extra pupils would have to come from families who do not want their children mixing with the sort you get at local comprehensives. Private schools would not be available to all, but they would move down a class.

If he succeeded, this would be a hammer blow to British state education, because it would take into private schools the children of the motivated parents – those willing to pay as much as they could afford for their children’s education – and leave in state schools two categories: the children of the very poorest and the children of those to whom education does not seem important. Anyone who knows anything about schools will tell you that, unless you have some pupils who are motivated to learn, you are destined to become a sink school.

It would pave the way for state education to become the refuge of those who cannot or will not afford anything better. It would mark the end of the road for the 1944 Education Act and for good universal schooling for all children of school age.

So far this remains a dream – the proportion of children going to fee-charging schools has remained constant at 7–8 per cent for many years. But we are left wondering what on earth a ‘strategic partnership’ with Mr Varkey has to do with any of the TBFF’s stated aims; and why a former Labour Prime Minister would be anxious to collaborate with a project that, if it succeeded, would destroy state education in Britain.

Whatever the reason, Mr Blair likes to keep in touch with Mr Varkey and underline his support for what Varkey is doing. When he was in Britain in January 2010 he found time to visit a GEMS school. One of his former senior staffers told us that GEMS liked to have a political celebrity from every country on board. Tony is its Brit. Its American is Bill Clinton, though he seems much less active in its support than Blair.

 

The TBFF’s alliance with World Jewish Relief (WJR) ‘to raise awareness of and funds for both organisations’ vital work in Africa’, according to the publicity,3 is an example of the Foundation engaging in some real and useful work.

In Sierra Leone, the two organisations have put money into training priests and imams to give health education as part of the war on malaria. In even the smallest village there is either a mosque or a church, so that is the best way of reaching the population. Here the Tony Blair Faith Foundation seems to have found a job that is well worth doing by anyone’s standards, and the link with faith is one that obviously helps the work. There is a lot of criticism of the Foundation, and there’s a lot to criticise, but here we find it doing genuinely good and worthwhile charitable work, and it would be churlish not to acknowledge that.

Less tangible, and more suspect, is its work to train the leaders of tomorrow. It has carefully selected ten ‘exceptional young people’ to take part in its ‘young leadership programme’. This again is supposed to be part of the fight against malaria, though it looks more like an attempt to choose tomorrow’s leaders, and to make sure they are people of faith – of the TBFF’s ten young leaders, there are five Christians, three Muslims and two religious Jews, all from the UK.4

Then there is the ‘Face to Faith’ initiative which apparently ‘engages students across the world in discussion of global issues through different faith, belief and cultural lenses.’ This focuses on the teaching of religion in universities, which Blair, and hence the TBFF, seem very interested in. They think there isn’t enough of it. Hence the TBFF’s partnership with Durham University, announced in July 2009, designed ‘to create a global network of twelve leading research universities teaching Faith and Globalisation over the next two years.’ Tom McLeish, Durham’s pro-vice-chancellor, in launching the TBFF link to Durham said, ‘The suggestion by the Tony Blair Faith Foundation that Durham take the UK lead in the topical international network becomes natural.’

Durham was the third partner university, following Yale and the National University of Singapore (which has apparently been persuaded to run a course called ‘Religion and Technology’). The Durham course ‘will develop greater understanding of the impact of faiths and cultures on the world and the inter-relationship between faith and globalisation.’ Blair said that the TBFF ‘will focus on building and developing the Faith and Globalisation course which started at Yale – creating a tight network between the twelve partner universities, and ensuring that this is recognised globally as a leading teaching, research, and social action orientated initiative.’5

In fact, it all started at Yale. A year after founding the TBFF, in 2009 Blair was appointed to teach a course on issues of faith and globalisation at the Yale Schools of Management and Divinity. He was paid what Yale has said was a ‘not insubstantial’ sum for ten two-and-half-hour seminars a year – the figure of £680,000 has been reported by the Daily Telegraph and never denied. But, more importantly, while he was there he was introduced to Yale’s major benefactors, and he could tap them up for donations to the TBFF.

While teaching at Yale, Blair graced the launch of a healthcare research partnership between Yale and University College London in New Haven, Connecticut. He said that, while at Yale, ‘I have witnessed first-hand Yale’s increasing international reach, under President Richard Levin’s visionary leadership.’6

Yale’s then dean of divinity, Professor Harold Attridge, told the Sunday Telegraph: ‘Whatever exchanges hands on the money side is done above my pay grade. I believe there is some contribution to the Foundation in lieu of salary to him. This is all done at the [Yale] president’s level so it doesn’t affect my budget.’

Attridge went on: ‘[Fundraising] development is always implicated in everything we do. But we don’t raise money for them [the TBFF] and they don’t raise money for us. But there is a symbiotic relationship between the two and people are interested in both, and, if those things happen, that is all well and good. We might have a dinner for our benefactors and alumni. Our intent is to get them excited about Yale, but, if they want to get excited about the Faith Foundation, that is their call. That’s the way it works.’

When it was suggested Blair had an ability to attract ‘big money’, Attridge replied, ‘That’s true.’7

The TBFF has an office on the Yale campus run by Scott Macdonald, an experienced American fundraiser who for the 2012–13 academic year advertised to take on a Yale student on an internship in the TBFF Yale office.

Professor Attridge, like Blair, is a Roman Catholic, but the relationship between Blair and Yale owed much to one of Attridge’s colleagues, Professor Denys Turner, who lectured in theology at Cambridge University before going to Yale. Turner joined Opus Dei, the secretive Roman Catholic cult organisation, in 1961. He left it in 1969. He now believes that Opus Dei traded on the instinct that Catholics then had for obedience, exercised a kind of mind control and cultivated a psychology of dependence on the organisation.

All the same, he has described leaving Opus Dei as a catastrophic experience, and he says he was told that he would lose his soul over it. He became a Catholic Marxist close to the radical Slant group, which included the academics Adrian Cunningham and Terry Eagleton, and the late Dominican Laurence Bright.8

But the key fact is that Professor Turner’s daughter is Ruth Turner, like her father a devout Roman Catholic, who was Blair’s head of government relations when he was PM, later becoming the TBFF’s first chief executive, and, according to Professor Attridge, who did all the staff work on Blair’s side to close the deal with Yale. She was arrested in the ‘cash for honours’ investigation but not charged with any offence.

Turner left the TBFF job to have a baby, but Blair is understood to have made a very favourable financial settlement which included allowing her to return to the TBFF in a part-time capacity as soon as she was ready to do so. So she is now back, working part time as the TBFF’s director of policy.

After Yale, other universities joined, and since Durham signed up four more universities have been persuaded to teach more religion and ally it to globalisation. Monterrey Technical University in Mexico will teach ‘Globalisation and Belief Systems’; the University of Western Australia will teach ‘Religion and Globalisation’; and Peking University in China will teach ‘Interfaith Relations in a Globalised World’. The University of Sierra Leone, Foyrah Bay College, will teach ‘Faith and Globalisation’.

BLAIR AND CHARLES CLARKE

The idea that the world can be made a better place by creating university courses that link all the important subjects to religion is something that Blair and his old friend Charles Clarke share, and Clarke is playing his part in achieving it.

Blair and Clarke go back a long way. As the 1970s turned into the 1980s, when they were young and ambitious Labour politicians, neither of them yet in Parliament, they fought the Bennites in Islington together. Blair’s first decision as an MP in 1983 was to vote for Neil Kinnock for leader, on the advice of Kinnock’s adviser and Blair’s friend Clarke.

A decade later, they spearheaded the post-Kinnock ‘modernisers’ and Clarke served as Blair’s Education Secretary and then his Home Secretary. Later, when he knew he would soon have to stand down, Blair planned to make Clarke Foreign Secretary in order to give him a fighting chance to frustrate Gordon Brown and become Blair’s successor as Prime Minister. He confided this plan only to Clarke, who shared his loathing of Gordon Brown, and then only after the plan fell apart because Clarke was forced to take the rap for a Home Office failure and resign as Home Secretary. Blair says in his autobiography that he regrets not giving Clarke the Foreign Office anyway, but he could hardly give him a promotion when he was forcing him to resign because of an error.

It was Clarke who, in those dreadful weeks before Blair finally resigned as PM, said all the things Blair was thought to believe about Gordon Brown but could hardly say himself, because he was supposed to preserve the fiction that he wanted Brown to succeed him. Clarke said that Brown was a deluded control freak, and would lead Labour to disaster. He urged Blair not to hurry out. He still harboured hopes of being the Blairite candidate for the succession.9

In short, Clarke, though he dislikes the word, is among the purest of the Blairites.

Now Clarke, who the last time we discussed it with him did not believe in God, is running a £12 million Religion and Society programme at Lancaster University, which has close ties with the TBFF. Clarke, like Blair, thinks that faith is a good thing for society, though apparently without feeling the need of it for himself. ‘I went along with the view of many on the Left that religion was essentially a diversion and a destructive thing, until it became clear that almost all the people involved in positive community action were men and women of faith of some kind,’ he told the Daily Telegraph. This assertion is, to say the least, unproven.10

THE FAILED HARVARD UNIVERSITY PROJECT

In 2014 came a collaboration with another great university, and before the year was out it had gone horribly wrong. The TBFF teamed up with Harvard University’s Faculty of Divinity to create a website about faith and globalisation. To edit the new website, at the start of 2014 the TBFF appointed journalist Martin Bright.

After less than a year, the project collapsed, having lost both its editor and its partner. Harvard pulled out after the TBFF and the Harvard Divinity School (HDS) fell out badly. The issue, we are authoritatively told,11 was the article Blair wrote for the Observer in January 2014 announcing the collaboration between the two organisations.12 Reading it, HDS realised suddenly that it and Blair had very different ideas of what the new initiative would do, and it was furious with Blair.

The article identified abuse of religion (and by religion he was understood to mean Islam) as the chief likely source of conflict in the twenty-first century. Blair said he wanted the world ‘to start to treat this issue of religious extremism as an issue that is about religion as well as politics, to go to the roots of where a false view of religion is being promulgated and to make it a major item on the agenda of world leaders to combine effectively to combat it.’

HDS felt it had unwittingly been shackled to what might be seen as an anti-Islam agenda – and, worse, that its new initiative had been shackled to Blair’s defence of the Iraq War, for in the same article he wrote of Iraq that ‘exactly the same sectarianism threatens the right of the people to a democratic future … It is one reason why the Middle East matters so much and why any attempt to disengage is so wrong and short-sighted.’

The divinity school told us tersely, ‘HDS was engaged in discussions on a working relationship with the TBFF team but decided not to pursue a formal collaboration after realizing that the aims of both organizations would be better served independently.’

As for Martin Bright, he lasted just five months. On the face of it, he was a surprising choice in the first place, because he had been political editor of the New Statesman in the days when the Blairites saw the magazine as being under the control of the hated Brownites. However, he was widely known to have fallen out of love with the Brown camp, and he felt badly treated by the Brownite owner of the New Statesman, Geoffrey Robinson, after Bright had been forced to leave the magazine in circumstances that are hotly disputed to this day, with Bright describing political reasons and our New Statesman sources quoting professional ones. In recent years he has been, pretty reliably, an opponent of the Brown camp, and this alone ensures him a welcome in Blairite circles, as a sinner who repenteth. It also helps that he went from the New Statesman to be political editor of the Jewish Chronicle, and he is, from Blair’s point of view, sound on Islam – British Muslims see him as an unrelenting opponent.

Bright was approached about the job by two Blair emissaries, one of whom was a recruitment consultant who had cut her political teeth in Labour Friends of Israel, which has become a kind of nursery for Blairites. He started the job in late January 2014 with an hour-long meeting with Blair himself, and was promised a similar meeting with Blair every month.

Though not a religious man himself, Bright is interested in religion, and wrote in the Jewish Chronicle in the week he took up the appointment in late January 2014 that he and Blair ‘share a conviction that the role of religion in the geopolitics of the 21st century remains poorly understood. At the same time, we know there are academics, intellectuals and journalists out there who can bring a profound knowledge of this field to those of us who crave a more comprehensive and nuanced approach.’

He had come to admire Blair, he wrote. ‘As might be expected with anything involving Tony Blair, the scope and ambition of this project is vast. The intention is to make this site the first port of call for anyone wishing to grasp the nature of conflicts where religion plays a part.’13

The website, launched in April, was to contain analyses of religious conflict and contribution in various parts of the world. So what would happen, we asked Bright on his appointment, when he wanted to run an analysis of a country that is one of the clients of Tony Blair Associates – Kazakhstan, for example, where there is plenty of religious conflict, and the role of Blair’s client, the President, might not stand too much scrutiny? What would happen when he was told that, in order not to embarrass the patron, the website should not run such-and-such a story? Bright said he’d cross that bridge when and if he came to it.

As we have seen, five months after he arrived, Martin Bright left. In the aftermath of his departure, the experiment of getting a journalist to run the website and trying to run it on newspaper lines was not judged a success. Bright knew that his replacement would not be a journalist and would run a more tightly controlled operation. In the event, there was no operation to run. The communications department has taken over his website, he says, and there is no longer any pretence of independence.

After leaving, and after talking to us, Bright wrote an article for the Daily Mail about his experiences, and Blair’s friends and loyalists were beside themselves with fury and rushed to say that he was talking rubbish.14 One of the authors happened to meet Matthew Taylor, still a Blair friend and the partner of TBFF founder and director Ruth Turner, the morning the piece appeared. He said, ‘Bright says the office is full of bean bags. I’ve been there many times, I can tell you there are no bean bags.’ We pass this on because it’s the only firm information we have ever been given on the record (or, at least, not off the record) by anyone as close to Blair as Taylor. There are no bean bags in Blair’s office. We hope Taylor does not get into too much trouble for telling us this.

THE RELIGIOUS ADVISERS TO THE TONY BLAIR FAITH FOUNDATION

Company accounts show that senior employees at the Foundation received six-figure salaries in 2009–10.15 The Foundation then employed twelve staff and managed to raise £3.5 million in the twelve months to April 2009. In February 2013 its accounts showed that it had almost £3 million in the bank, and employed twenty-eight people with annual staffing costs of £1.3 million, and was operating in twenty countries. A year later, it was still employing twenty-eight staff, we are told.

The formal governance structure includes a Religious Advisory Council. To what extent this is purely ornamental is hard to fathom, but presumably it has some influence, if only because, should a member of this council dislike what is going on, he or she could create great embarrassment.

This council includes top international figures from most main religions, but until 2013 no Catholic at all – although the Blairs are themselves Catholics – and no Muslim cleric or theologian. The only Muslim on the board was a politician – the adviser to the Prime Minister of Kuwait, who is, of course, the biggest client of Tony Blair Associates.

Outside these two faiths, the board is a pretty impressive array of the great and good in world religions. Blair has recruited the Rev. David Coffey, president of the Baptist World Alliance, and Roshi Joan Halifax, Abbot of the Upaya Zen Center. Its Jewish representatives could hardly be more distinguished: not only Rabbi David Rosen, chairman of the International Jewish Committee on Interreligious Consultations, but also the former British Chief Rabbi, Sir Jonathan Sacks.

The Anglican church is represented by the Rt Rev. Richard Chartres, Lord Bishop of London, and some of the biggest figures in evangelical Christianity are there: from the West Indies, the Reverend Joel Edwards, director of Micah Challenge International and former general director of the Evangelical Alliance, a famous West Indian evangelical Christian; from America, the Rev. Dr Rick Warren, founding and senior pastor of the hugely wealthy and important Saddleback Church; and, from Africa, the Rt Rev. Josiah Idowu-Fearon, Bishop of Kaduna, who campaigned for laws in Nigeria that would send gay people to prison.

Sikhs and Hindus are also represented by distinguished scholars and theologians. For the Sikhs there is Professor Jagtar Singh Grewal, former chairman of the India Institute of Advanced Study and former vice-chancellor of Guru Nanak Dev University; and, for the Hindus, Anantanand Rambachan, professor and chair of the Religion Department at St Olaf College, Minnesota.

Against this glittering array, the presence as the sole Muslim representative of Dr Ismail Khudr Al-Shatti, adviser in Diwan of the Prime Minister of Kuwait and former president of the Gulf Institute for Futures and Strategic Studies, seemed incongruous, for he is a politician, not a religious figure at all. Dr Abdul Wahid, chairman of Hizb ut-Tahrir UK, told us that he had never heard of Ismail Khudr Al-Shatti, and added, ‘The single Muslim name will be unknown to most Muslims across the world. Whereas several of the members of this advisory council are prominent people – for example, Lord Sacks, Bishop Chartres, Joel Edwards – the Tony Blair Faith Foundation appears to have been unable to recruit a single person from the UK’s two-million-strong Muslim community, nor anyone from a much larger European Muslim community, nor anyone of any global prominence across the Muslim world.’

Blair was already popular in Kuwait for bringing an end to Saddam Hussein’s regime in neighbouring Iraq, which could by itself have been sufficient reason for Al-Shatti’s willingness to cast himself in the role of fig leaf. But Al-Shatti must also be fully aware of, if not actually a party to, the lucrative contract between TBA and the Kuwaiti government. It is the usual problem with Blair: too many hats.

The lack of a credible Muslim figure is the direct result of Blair being seen as anti-Islam. It is the same problem that has shackled his effectiveness as Middle East envoy. The architect of the war in Iraq is now seen as the man who wants to bomb Muslims in both Iran and Syria, having called first for a bombing campaign against President Assad, and then for a bombing campaign against ISIS (or the Islamic State) in Iraq.

The English-language Arab News, a moderate and respected news source across the Arab world, has an explanation for all this:

Following the killing in London of Fusilier Lee Rigby on 22 May 2013, as Muslim leaders queued up to condemn the murder in the strongest possible terms, Blair announced that the act was a symptom of ‘a problem within Islam’. He dismissed the argument that religiously motivated terrorist attacks are the work of a fringe few. There is, he said, an ‘exclusivist and reactionary world view’ throughout the Muslim world.

The ‘problem within Islam’, he said, came from ‘the adherents of an ideology that is a strain within Islam. And we have to put it on the table and be honest about it.

Of course there are Christian extremists and Jewish, Buddhist and Hindu ones. But I am afraid this strain is not the province of a few extremists. It has at its heart a view about religion and about the interaction between religion and politics that is not compatible with pluralistic, liberal, open-minded societies …

I understand the desire to look at this world and explain it by reference to local grievances, economic alienation and of course ‘crazy people’. But are we really going to examine it and find no common thread, nothing that joins these dots, no sense of an ideology driving or at least exacerbating it all?

He was saying that murderous extremists of other religions are just individual murderous extremists – but in Islam they are something like the mainstream. He’s not the only person to say this. But he is the only person to say it who is at the same time claiming to bring faiths together and work for better understanding between them.17

It was hugely harmful to the TBFF’s reputation in the Muslim world – so much so that TBFF chief executive Charlotte Keenan tried to limit the damage with a blog post called ‘What Tony Blair meant about Islam’. According to her, he was ‘characteristically clear in his view that when the perpetrators cloak their crimes in such language it is ludicrous to say that these terrorist attacks are nothing to do with religion’.

He was actually saying much more than that. He was drawing a clear distinction between Islam and the world’s other religions.

His words, no doubt, represented Blair’s honest opinion. But, if he is serious about having an organisation that bears his name, and that has credibility with all faiths, that is an opinion he would avoid giving public expression to. For he has a lot of ground to make up in the Muslim world. Muslims will find it hard to forgive him for Iraq, even if he had not followed this in July 2005, after the 7/7 London bombings, with a speech at Labour’s national conference in which he said,

The greatest danger is that we fail to face up to the nature of the threat we are dealing with. What we witnessed in London last Thursday week was not an aberrant act. It was not random. It was not a product of particular local circumstances in West Yorkshire … What we are confronting here is an evil ideology …

This ideology and the violence that is inherent in it did not start a few years ago in response to a particular policy. Over the past twelve years, al-Qaeda and its associates have attacked twenty-six countries, killed thousands of people, many of them Muslims. They have networks in virtually every major country and thousands of fellow travellers. They are well financed. Look at their websites …

Neither is it true that they have no demands. They do. It is just that no sane person would negotiate on them. They demand the elimination of Israel; the withdrawal of all Westerners from Muslim countries, irrespective of the wishes of people and government; the establishment of effectively Taliban states and sharia law in the Arab world en route to one caliphate of all Muslim nations …

Its roots are not superficial, but deep, in the madrassas of Pakistan, in the extreme forms of Wahabi doctrine in Saudi Arabia, in the former training camps of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, in the cauldron of Chechnya, in parts of the politics of most countries of the Middle East and many in Asia, in the extremist minority that now in every European city preach hatred of the West and our way of life.

This is what we are up against. It cannot be beaten except by confronting it, symptoms and causes, head-on. Without compromise and without delusion. Their cause is not founded on an injustice. It is founded on a belief, one whose fanaticism is such it can’t be moderated. It can’t be remedied. It has to be stood up to. And, of course, they will use any issue that is a matter of dissent within our democracy.

But we should lay bare the almost devilish logic behind such manipulation. We must pull this up by its roots …

Thirty-seven Muslim organisations signed a statement protesting about this speech, saying, ‘To equate “extremism” with the aspirations of Muslims for Sharia laws in the Muslim world or the desire to see unification towards a Caliphate in the Muslim lands, as seemed to be misrepresented by the prime minister, is inaccurate and disingenuous.’

Hizb ut-Tahrir said, ‘He was propagating a narrative that was born out of right-wing US think tanks that certain orthodox ideas from Islam are somehow a precursor to terrorist violence.’ Dr Abdul Wahid, chairman of Hizb ut-Tahrir UK, told us, ‘Tony Blair conflates the bombing of 7/7 with orthodox and peaceful things. The TBFF just wants to find like-minded people. He has a certain narrative on Islam.’ Blair has a long way to go before his Faith Foundation will have credibility among Muslims.

Even odder than the absence of a credible Muslim was the complete absence of a Catholic representative, even though Blair was received into the Catholic Church in 2007 shortly after leaving office, as we predicted in our 2005 book Tony Blair in Peace and War – a prediction widely dismissed at the time. In June 2009, three months after Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor resigned as Archbishop of Westminster and leader of Catholics in England and Wales, the TBFF announced that he had agreed to be a member of its Religious Advisory Council – and the Cardinal then rather pointedly said that he had not agreed to this, and had no intention of agreeing to it.

This is because neither the Foundation nor the Blairs have gone down well in Rome following the former PM’s demands for wholesale changes in Catholic belief and practice. The Blairs managed to annoy Pope Benedict by disagreeing with the Vatican’s hard line on homosexuality and abortion, while acting as ambassadors for Catholicism.18

But this is unlikely to be the full story. We know that the Catholic Church, which only a few years ago was proud and excited about its high-profile recruit and was telling us Blair intended to convert long before Blair himself admitted it, has gone distinctly cold on the man. The Blairs have always been mystics, which is why Blair did so badly in his debate against the late Christopher Hitchens on theism versus atheism. He has never believed his religion requires arguing for: it’s just true, and that’s all there is to it.

So far, so good: the Catholic Church is based on authority, on a set of beliefs laid down by Christ and by popes who are infallible in matters of faith and dogma, beliefs that are simply true, and that’s that. The trouble is that Blair wants the bulwark of the authority, but does not always want to accept the authority of the Pope.

As long ago as 2001, the Blairs were introduced to spiritualism by Carole Caplin’s spiritualist mother Sylvia. Cherie took to wearing a ‘magic pendant’ known as a bio-electric shield. Catholics purse their lips in disapproval at this sort of behaviour.

It’s also suggested in Catholic circles that Blair’s current activities may bring discredit on the Church if it is too closely associated with him. The relentless moneymaking does not accord well with Christ’s teaching, they say, though there are, of course, many very wealthy Catholics.

Whatever the reason, the Church has moved to distance itself from the Blairs, which is why Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor pointedly contradicted the TBFF statement that he had agreed to join the Religious Advisory Council. This was an acute embarrassment for the TBFF. Worse was to follow. The Blairs were equally pointedly not invited to the installation of the new Archbishop of Westminster, the Most Rev. Vincent Nichols, who said Catholic thinking was ‘rather different’ from the kind promoted by Blair.

Nichols was furious because, among other things, Blair had used an interview with the gay publication Attitude to criticise the approach of the Pope towards gay rights. He argued that religious leaders must start ‘rethinking’ the issue.

Blair’s falling-out with the Catholic Church was serious. According to the Tablet, the Catholic weekly, Stephen Pound, Labour MP for Ealing North and a Catholic, said that Blair’s ‘hubristic’ attitude was ‘extremely counterproductive. Entrance to the Vatican is only gained through a series of iron-clad, hermetically sealed, heavily padlocked and bolted doors, and I can hear them creaking shut as we speak.’ Pound warned Blair against ‘dictating to the Pope through the media.’ Meanwhile, Catholic theologians queued up to condemn the former Prime Minister and all his works. Professor Michel Schooyans of the Catholic University of Louvain spearheaded the attack with a sarcastic speech in which he said, ‘The fresh “convert” does not hesitate to explain to the Pope not only what he must do, but also what he must believe! Is he a Catholic? … So now we are back in the time of Hobbes, if not of Cromwell: it’s civil power that defines what one must believe.’19

Catholic Action UK, a ginger group that seeks to ensure that the Church does not grow lax on its fundamental beliefs, spits fury about the Blairs, and Cherie in particular. A 1,300-word ‘dossier’ on Cherie Blair accuses her of heinous crimes. She apparently ‘visited the exhibition stand of the International Planned Parenthood Federation, Population Concern and Marie Stopes International’ at the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting in November 1999. Not content with this wickedness, she ‘endorsed CEDAW [the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women], specifically mentioning CEDAW’s affirmation of women’s so-called “reproductive rights”’. And then, in 2004, horror of horrors, ‘in a lecture to students at Harvard university, Mrs Blair described the US Supreme Court’s striking-down of the Texas law against sodomy as “a model of judicial reasoning”.’

There was more. As a lawyer, Mrs Blair once represented a lesbian against South West Trains, who had refused to grant travel concessions to her same-sex partner. She has said that the Catholic Church is not ideal, therefore implying that it is not infallible, a dreadful heresy. She ‘accepted an invitation to the gay wedding [same-sex civil partnership ceremony] of anti-life [code for pro-abortion] MEP Michael Cashman’. She supports Human Rights Watch, which is pro-abortion. The charge sheet goes on and on.

The dossier ends: ‘Why is she still being invited to speak at Catholic institutions? This must stop.’20

It is easy to laugh – and comparatively safe, since these people no longer have the power to burn you at the stake – but the zealots of Catholic Action UK do represent something, just as the Muslim extremists Blair denounces represent something. They can make it awkward politically for the princes of the church to cooperate with the Tony Blair Faith Foundation.

Nonetheless, a TBFF spokesperson told us, ‘The Foundation works side by side with anyone committed to practically supporting preventing religious prejudice, conflict and extremism. Given that context and our mission, it would be totally counterproductive to favour one religious or non-religious group, and we would never do that.’

The relationship between Blair and the Catholic Church has not been eased by Blair’s close relationship with the remarkable Father Michael Seed. Seed was the Blairs’ confessor and confidant when they were in Downing Street, as secretary for ecumenical affairs at Westminster Cathedral, and he celebrated masses for the Blairs. As late as September 2014 the Catholic newspaper The Universe was still describing him as ‘The priest who converted Tony Blair to Catholicism.’21 He proved to be very good at getting celebrities into the Roman Catholic Church: in addition to Blair, he helped in the conversion of Ann Widdecombe and John Selwyn Gummer. Seed confidently told us, while Blair was still Prime Minister, that Blair would convert to Catholicism as soon as he left Downing Street. He was right, but people who thought they were close to Blair told us he was wrong.

Seed was closer to Blair than they were. Seed was very close. Close enough to become a fundraiser for Blair’s pet education project, his academy schools, introducing wealthy businessmen of his acquaintance to Blair’s people. Close enough for Cherie Blair to call him a man who turned ‘the great into the good’. Close enough to know the Blair family’s deepest secrets.

Close enough, after Cardinal Basil Hume died in 1999, for the relationship to become an irritant to Seed’s new boss, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, who does not seem to have appreciated Father Seed’s talking about the famous new convert whose arrival he was expecting; nor did he think much of Father Seed’s seeming endorsement of Blair’s controversial policy of academy schools.

Murphy-O’Connor’s irritation was reported in the Daily Telegraph just as Blair was resigning as Prime Minister, and this may have played a part in the Cardinal’s refusal to join the TBFF Religious Advisory Council the following year. But Seed continued to be a player, increasingly moving in the rarefied world of the American and Middle Eastern megarich, which Blair was getting to know so well, until the wheels conclusively fell off the Michael Seed bandwagon in 2012, when a Mail on Sunday investigation found that he was trying to sell papal honours as well as introductions to clients for arms dealers, for cash.22

Papal honours are given on the authority of the Pope, and several prominent Catholics have one, as well as a few people judged by the Catholic Church to be exceptionally deserving. Jimmy Savile was awarded a papal knighthood, and there is no procedure for withdrawing it posthumously.

Father Seed, an apparently humble little priest who seemed to us to model himself, or at least his image, on G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown, was suddenly an embarrassment to the Catholic hierarchy. And, in a different way, so was Tony Blair, who had the same aura of Middle Eastern money about him. The past association between Blair and Seed, in addition to Blair’s theological unreliability, seems to have fed the Church’s desire not to be too closely associated with Blair.

So Britain’s important Catholics wanted nothing to do with the TBFF. But, from Blair’s point of view, not having any Catholic prelate on the Religious Advisory Council who could match the Chief Rabbi, or the Bishop of London, or the world’s top Christians, Sikhs and Buddhists was clearly a weakness that had to be addressed.

That may be why we have not heard much from Cherie Blair since 2009 on abortion, or homosexuality, or ordination of women, or any of those matters on which her deeply held views are heretical. She has confined herself to safe subjects, such as women entrepreneurs.

In 2013 the problem was partially resolved, aided no doubt by the arrival of a new and more liberal Pope: Francis. An important Catholic finally joined the council, though not a member of the British Catholic hierarchy. This was Archbishop Diarmuid Martin, Roman Catholic Archbishop of Dublin and the second most important bishop in Ireland. Martin is the leading voice for reform in the Catholic Church in Ireland. He has called for a full independent inquiry into the Irish Catholic Church’s child-sex-abuse scandal, a call resisted and resented by many of his colleagues, among whom he is therefore quite unpopular.

A not wholly successful attempt has been made to address the lack of a credible Muslim figure. In 2013 the TBFF Religious Advisory Council recruited Imam Umer Ahmed Ilyasi, chief imam of the All India Organisation of Imams and Mosques. The website of this organisation says of Ilyasi,

But Abdul Wahid of Hizb ut-Tahrir tells us, ‘I’m afraid I had never heard of Umer Ahmed Ilyasi or this organisation before receiving your email. I checked with a close friend of mine, an Indian Muslim, who had also never heard of him or the organisation – and was frankly stunned by the claim on his website that he is the spiritual leader of half a million imams in India. He in turn checked with friends and relatives in India, who had also never heard of him or the organisation. I further checked with an Indian Muslim businessman I know who had heard of him some years ago, but did not know much.’

The American and African evangelical Christians on the Council hold deeply conservative views, and, like the Catholics, represent another good reason for the Blairs to soft-peddle their liberal views about homosexuality, abortion and the place of women.

The Rev. Rick Warren founded Saddleback Church in Lake Forest in 1980 with one other family. Today, it is one of America’s most influential churches, with about 20,000 people attending the weekend services. He is the author of Purpose Driven Life, and built the Purpose Driven Network, a global alliance of pastors from 162 countries and hundreds of denominations who have been trained to be what he calls purpose-driven churches. He founded Pastors.com, an online interactive community that provides sermons, forums, and other practical resources for pastors.

Warren is strongly against abortion, same-sex marriage and stem-cell research, and could be expected to disapprove of any move by the TBFF to support any of these things.

But even stronger disapproval would come from the Rt Rev. Josiah Idowu-Fearon, Bishop of Kaduna. Although the Bishop preaches an end to religious violence in his country, Nigeria, he has also said, ‘Unfortunately, some Anglican leaders do not embrace the official positions of the Church, making dumb comments such as “Muslims do not have a monopoly on violence.”’24

And, although he has said that corruption is even worse than homo-sexuality, he thinks the latter is pretty bad and ought to be punished: ‘The church in Nigeria is, however, grateful to the National Assembly for passing a law against same-sex marriage,’ he told an internet newspaper for young Nigerians.25

 

Legally, the TBFF is run by its trustees. For the first five years of the trust’s existence, there were just the three of them: a lawyer, an investment banker and an advertising executive.

Robert Clinton is a lawyer at Farrer and Co., and also a director of the Cherie Blair Foundation for Women. Farrer and Co. are TBFF’s lawyers, and this company’s Lincoln’s Inn address is the only address given out for the Foundation – its real Marble Arch address is kept as secret as possible.

Robert Coke is the co-head of absolute return and buyouts at the Wellcome Trust, chairman of the British Private Equity and Venture Capital Association’s advisory board and director of the Private Equity Investors’ Association.

But the advertising man is the most interesting, for Jeremy Sinclair created the infamous, but unsuccessful, ‘Demon Eyes’ advertising campaign against Blair for the Conservatives in the 1997 election. ‘It is nasty, it is vicious, it is negative. It is all the things that you would expect from the Conservative party,’ said Blair at the time.

That campaign reinforced M&C Saatchi’s reputation as the Rottweiler of political advertising. But it was far from being Sinclair’s first campaign for the Conservatives, nor his last. He was responsible for the famous, and devastatingly successful, ‘Labour Isn’t Working’ poster in 1978, which helped ensure Margaret Thatcher’s election victory the following year. He was back working for the Conservatives in 2010, scrapping the planned positive campaign about the virtues of David Cameron for a ruthlessly negative one demonising Gordon Brown, so he has a reasonable claim to being the man who won the 2010 election for the Conservatives.

He lists his interests as ‘spiritualism, architecture and Conservative politics’, which gives him a lot in common with Blair, though Blair is not thought to be especially interested in architecture.

Sinclair took a copywriting diploma from Watford School of Art and went straight on to work for Saatchi & Saatchi in 1968. He has never worked anywhere that is not owned by the Saatchi brothers. He rose rapidly within the agency, creating campaigns for major clients such as Silk Cut cigarettes and British Airways.

He had reached the post of deputy chairman when, in 1994, a board rebellion secured the ousting of Maurice and Charles Saatchi. Sinclair opted to stay with the Saatchis, who had made his career, and to whom he was a perfect foil, adding a calmness that they lacked. So he was the founding director of the new firm created by the Saatchis, M&C Saatchi.

In 2013 Blair brought in two old friends to add to his trustees: Dame Gail Rebuck and Sir Michael Barber. Rebuck is chairwoman and chief executive of the huge publishing empire Random House, which published Blair’s autobiography. She was married to Blair’s pollster and friend, the late Philip Gould. Barber was chief adviser to the Secretary of State for Education on school standards during Blair’s first term as Prime Minister, and the real architect, along with Andrew Adonis, of Blair’s education policy. During Blair’s second term he worked as Blair’s chief adviser on delivery, reporting directly to the Prime Minister.

After Blair resigned as PM, Barber worked as global head of education for McKinsey, then chief education adviser for Pearson.

The Tony Blair Faith Foundation is also a registered charity in the USA, where its five directors, apart from Blair and the first TBFF chief executive, Ruth Turner, included Tim Collins, the billionaire businessman who accompanied Blair on a trip to Libya to meet Gaddafi. As previously discussed, Collins claimed that Blair asked him to make that trip in his capacity as a Trustee of the TBFF, though no one has established any link between the work of the TBFF and Blair’s dealings with the Libyan dictator Colonel Gaddafi. Gaddafi certainly saw none – he apparently thought Collins was there to advise on building beach resorts. Collins was obliged to disabuse him of this notion.

Collins is deeply involved with the Yale Divinity School. It was precisely the opportunity to meet its super-rich donors such as Collins that made the Yale Divinity School so useful for the TBFF after Blair ran a course there.

Collins was one of the early donors to the TBFF, but has now stopped both donating and giving his time to it. His defection removes a key figure from the early days. Collins had helped set up Blair’s link with Yale, had provided money to help start the TBFF, put him in touch with other wealthy donors, imagining that Blair would make his priority doing reconciliation work around the globe.

Our sources tell us that Collins has become thoroughly disillusioned with Blair; that the visit to Libya was a turning point for him; that he was willing to go on supporting the TBFF as long as Ruth Turner was there, because he had a lively admiration for her. But, after her departure, he felt it was no longer a good use of his time.

Collins himself avoids talking about Blair publicly, and apparently still thinks Blair is an entertaining character, but has no interest in supporting the Faith Foundation without Ruth Turner.

He feels there is too much crossover between Blair’s businesses and his public and charitable work. Bill Clinton, he believes, has handled this a lot better.

Collins was also puzzled by Blair’s conversion to Catholicism, and asked for a robust theological explanation, which he never felt he got. He fears being tainted by Blair’s reputation.

Another director of TBFF in the USA is Alfred E. Smith IV, who ticks two key boxes for Blair: he’s a Catholic and he’s fabulously wealthy, having spent thirty-five years on Wall Street. There is also Linda Lader, wife of former US ambassador to London, Philip Lader. Philip Lader is chairman of WPP, the global media and communications firm that bankrolls Peter Mandelson’s commercial activities.

In 2014, the hole left by the departure of Tim Collins was filled by Rabbi Peter Rubinstein. Rubinstein is Rabbi Emeritus at the Central Synagogue in New York, and, according to its website, oversees the Bronfman Center for Jewish Life as the director of Jewish community at 92nd Street Y. ‘He is recognized as a leader in the changing face of the Jewish community and was ranked number 3 in Newsweek’s 2012 list of “America’s 50 Most Influential Rabbis”. He has been on the list ever since its inception.’26

There is every sign that America is where Blair sees the long-term future of the TBFF.27 He is far more comfortable these days in the USA than in Britain, for at home he is now widely disliked, whereas in the US, where faith and power are more closely linked, he is still a hero. Unlike in the UK, Blair’s religious fervour is seen as a strength in the US. Blair’s status there is such that he is now called on to sprinkle stardust at religious gatherings, such as the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington. He regularly crops up in Washington society diaries.

That, insiders have told us, is the justification for continuing to have the sponsor’s name in the title of the organisation. TBFF leaders recognise that the name ‘Tony Blair’ in the title weakens the organisation in Britain. But it strengthens it in the USA, they say, which is why it’s there and why it stays.

In March 2010 the Observer reported that the former Prime Minister was preparing to launch a ‘faith offensive’ across the USA, after building up relationships with a network of influential religious leaders and faith organisations. It noted the growing TBFF activity in the USA, the relationship with Belinda Stronach, and also a relationship with what the TBFF described as ‘the Washington-based Center for Interfaith Action’. This centre, which has now changed its name to Religions for Peace following a merger, supported a meeting of major international organisations active in faith-based approaches to combating malaria, in collaboration with the TBFF.28

 

Another of the TBFF’s charitable activities is the sponsorship of an annual film competition under the title Faith Shorts. In 2012, the winners of this competition were announced in London on 26 November. Charles Andrew Flamiano, a sixteen-year-old Catholic filmmaker from General Santos City, Philippines, won the first prize in the 14–17 age category for a film titled Letting Go, Letting God. We first learned of this from the TBFF website but for some reason all reference to it has now been removed from the site, though you can still find newspaper coverage.29

Letting Go, Letting God is a three-minute tale, acted to mournful music, of a young woman who is told she has terminal cancer. As she walks along the hospital corridor, understandably depressed, she drops her notes containing her diagnosis in front of another young woman in a wheelchair, who picks them up, reads them, and hands her a small crucifix. She hugs the crucifix to her bosom and feels better. That’s it, except for three little slogans that pop up on the screen afterwards, the last of which is ‘Love out your faith, you’ll never know whose life you’ll touch.’

Of course it’s the work of someone very young, but, if it’s the sort of work the TBFF tries to encourage, then it seems reasonable to conclude that TBFF is, to some extent at least, a proselytising organisation on behalf of religious belief generally, and Christianity in particular.

In a 2013 advertisement for a new head of communications, the TBFF sums up its work alliteratively (Blair has always been addicted to alliteration):

Leadership: we seek to ensure that current and future leaders understand the role religion plays in the modern, globalising world.

Literacy: we educate and support young people to help them become global citizens.

Lives: we help religious communities in 140+ countries work together to save lives.

It also organises events, often in the House of Commons. We attended a ‘debate’ on ‘How faith can help deliver global health’ in one of the modern committee rooms there. It wasn’t a debate at all. The whole platform of speakers seemed to agree entirely with each other and with the views of the TBFF. Those expecting a glimpse of the former PM himself were to be disappointed. We had to make do with the Shadow Development Secretary Ivan Lewis and Shadow Health Secretary Andy Burnham. Burnham suggested that the Ten Commandments might be amended to include eating five pieces of fruit and vegetable per day.

The message from the TBFF at this meeting was that faith-based organisations were being used to deliver aid on the ground but not being given any say in how development policy is made. Its purpose seemed to be to argue that churches should be able to influence national aid and development policy. This was strange, because getting more say for religions in public policy is not at all what we thought the TBFF was founded for – and is arguably not a charitable objective, but a political one.

The audience was rather partisan. One member of the audience conducted his own straw poll: did anyone disagree with the notion that faith-based organisations should have a say over government policy on international aid? No one did. And what about domestic policy? Labour MP Ivan Lewis put the essential message in a nutshell, and this was what the TBFF chose to pull out for its website: ‘Faith communities should not be at the periphery of health development policy. They need to be at the centre if we are to make real progress in this area.’

Jeremy LeFroy, Conservative MP for Stafford, offered a reassuring thought: ‘Not everyone in government is a pagan – I’ve met many ministers who agree with the idea of faith playing a greater role in development.’ The director of Charles Clarke’s Religion and Society programme at Lancaster University, Professor Linda Woodhead, was there to argue that government officials need to be better informed about which channels to go through in faith communities.

There was, says the TBFF, ‘general consensus that faith communities have reach, authority and are cost-effective. But, the efficiency of health development could be improved further if governments consulted with faith communities at the point of policy development rather than delivery.’

So here we have an organisation that refuses to declare who funds it, yet argues for certain groups – religious ones – to have a greater influence over government policy, to be consulted when policy is formulated. These religious organisations to which the TBFF wants to give greater influence in International Development Policy are all represented on the TBFF’s Religious Advisory Council. Some of them support marginalisation and imprisonment of homosexuals in, say, Uganda and Nigeria. Mr LeFroy did not think that was a problem, because ‘we gave them most of these laws during the age of Empire’.

The suggestion that faiths and churches should have more say in public policy on matters such as aid, development and health policy may have achieved ‘general consensus’ on a panel hand-picked by Tony Blair’s Faith Foundation, but it remains contentious outside that room. It is, of course, an arguable view, but arguing for it might not be appropriate work for a registered charity.

It’s also a controversial view. There are many who would argue that religions should not have a say in public policy on such matters. If they are to do so, which religions get a say will become even more controversial. Is Islam to have a say along with the rest, and, if so, will those evil strands in Islam identified by Blair be excluded?

When Tony Blair’s Faith Foundation takes a stand on such matters, the question of who funds it becomes acute. No charity can ignore the views of major funders if it is to take a view on controversial matters, and the TBFF must take more notice than most because it has only major funders. A collecting tin being shaken in the street for the TBFF would not attract much money, which is probably why you never see one.

THE BIG DONORS

If the TBFF is going to take stands on such contentious issues, it ought to say where it gets its money. Otherwise there will always be the suspicion that it is funded by organisations that stand to benefit, in terms either of money or of power, from the policies it advocates.

The TBFF not only refuses to say who any of its funders are, but also refuses even to say whether Blair himself is among them. We asked for information on donors and got this:

Re the Tony Blair Faith Foundation’s finances, all information can be found in our annual report which can be found here:
http://www.tonyblairfaithfoundation.org/
news/2012/01/30-0 and is also available on the Charity Commission’s website. If you do have any questions relating to our work on the ground or indeed need any further details on the themes discussed at the event you attended please do let me know.

We pointed out that this gave no information on donors, and got this: ‘As is the case with many charities, we don’t disclose information about our donors.’ This is entirely legal – the Charity Commission demands only that accounts reveal the full amount donated, not where it comes from. It is, however, fairly unusual. Most charities reveal the names of their major donors.

In the TBFF’s case, it almost certainly has only major donors. The TBFF claims that some of its income ‘could be described as grassroots giving, smaller donations from people motivated to support a specific campaign or area of work’, but refuses to say how much.

If we were entirely reliant on the TBFF itself for our information, we would know nothing at all about its donors. In fact there are some sources of money we do know about.

Newspaper tycoon Rupert Murdoch is one, to the tune of $100,000, according to a US tax return quoted by the Daily Mirror. Blair used to be very careful of his relationship with Murdoch and his newspaper empire News Corp. When former News of the World editor Rebekah Brooks was arrested on a charge of phone hacking (she was subsequently cleared), Blair got in touch with News Corp to offer her, Murdoch and Murdoch’s son James advice on a ‘between us’ basis. He advised Brooks to ‘keep strong’ and ‘take sleeping pills’.30

It was Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger who drew attention to the timing of the Blair offer, in a tweet on 21 February 2014. ‘Blair’s advice to Rebekah 7 days after Milly Dowler, 3 days after Coulson arrested & as Ed Miliband attacking Murdoch,’ he wrote.

Another major funder we know of – as we saw in Chapter 1 – is Haim Saban, creator of the Power Rangers (and one of the richest people in America, according to Forbes magazine), along with his wife Cheryl. His Saban Entertainment merged with News Corp’s Fox Children’s Productions to form Fox Kids Worldwide Inc. in 1996. It was renamed Fox Family Worldwide Inc. in 2001, then acquired by Disney and renamed Disney XD.

Saban’s political agenda is clear and straightforward, and he makes no secret of it. He says, ‘I’m a one-issue guy and my issue is Israel.’ He has also said, ‘I used to be a leftie but am now very much on the right. The reason for the switch is Israel.’

In addition to funding the TBFF, Saban contributed heavily to George W. Bush’s re-election campaign, mainly, if not entirely, because he approved of Bush’s stance on the Middle East. The other American politician Saban admires is Joe Lieberman, who has been described by an authoritative Washington-watcher as ‘among the strongest backers of Israel on Capitol Hill.’31 Lieberman was Democrat Al Gore’s running mate in the 2000 presidential election, but he split with the Democratic Party mainly over his support for the Iraq War, and now quarrels with it over Iran. By 2008 he was supporting Republican candidate John McCain against Barack Obama – and he almost became McCain’s running mate.

An Israeli television interviewer once told him, ‘You really are our rich uncle in America, and we can rely on you.’ He told Israeli television of the Obama administration, ‘They are leftists, really left leftists, so far to the left there’s not much space left between them and the wall.’33

Tony Blair is publicly signed up to Saban’s view about Iran and Israel. If that were not the case, it is most unlikely that Saban would be funding his Faith Foundation. We do not, of course, suggest that Blair took this position in order to get his hands on Saban’s money – we are sure Blair sincerely holds the opinion he expresses. But it is a reminder that money comes with strings attached. Tony Blair would have to be very careful not even to appear to criticise the government in Tel Aviv, should he ever wish to do so, if he wants his Faith Foundation to keep receiving Saban’s money. If this can be said to be relatively harmless for the patron of the TBFF, it is crippling for the Quartet Representative. We are told by TBFF insiders that Saban is one of a large number of very wealthy strongly pro-Israel Jewish donors, and that there are no Muslim donors at all. Even within the organisation this is seen to be a problem Our sources also say that the senior management of the organisation are concerned about this, and anxious for it not to become public knowledge, for fear of embarrassing their patron, who, not for the first time, is wearing more hats than are entirely comfortable.

Another big funder is a Ukrainian oligarch, son-in-law of Ukraine’s former President. The scale of Victor Pinchuk’s funding of Blair’s charity emerged at a meeting he hosted at the Davos World Economic Forum in Switzerland in January 2013. He has given the TBFF $500,000 (£320,000) – a fifth of all the donations declared in its 2013 accounts.34

Pinchuk, like Saban – and, if our sources are to be believed, like a very large number of TBFF donors – is fiercely pro-Israeli, this view fuelled, in Pinchuk’s case, by bitter experience of anti-Semitism in his childhood in Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine’s fourth-largest city, 280 miles from the capital Kiev.

Pinchuk, whom Forbes ranked 255th on the list of the wealthiest people in the world, with a fortune of $4.2 billion, is a steel magnate and philanthropist who made his fortune after marrying the daughter of Leonid Kuchma, Ukraine’s former President. He is also an old friend of Blair’s.

Blair’s choice of priorities may have nothing at all to do with donations to the TBFF, but it is a matter of record that, in October 2012, Blair undertook an official tour of Pinchuk’s new Interpipe Steel Works in Dnipropetrovsk. Unusually, Blair did not charge for the visit. Photographs of Blair touring the factory with his host were posted on Pinchuk’s company website. They showed a grinning Blair signing a hard hat and presenting it to a grateful Pinchuk. ‘The public figure [Blair] has managed to see live the modernisation and development of the Ukrainian metallurgy,’ says the website.

Blair apparently, according to the company’s website, said while he was there, ‘I have visited a huge number of Great Britain mills. Interpipe Steel is undoubtedly an outstanding creation. This is one of the best and most modern mills in the world. I am greatly impressed with the spectacular and almost fantastic design of the facility. It is a real pleasure for me to come to Dnipropetrovsk and see the true personification of the twenty-first-century industry. It is extremely essential for Ukraine to have such a state-of-the-art production facility as Interpipe Steel. The most up-to-date technologies, the brand-new approaches to the work – all these things are an enormous success for the country. The mill should become a platform for development – a symbol of what the modern industry must be like.’35

While he was there, Blair also gave a lecture to university students and staff from Pinchuk’s factory entitled ‘Modernising Countries in [the] 21st Century’.

TBFF priorities may have nothing to do with who gives it money, but it is also a matter of record that its activities now include an educational programme in Ukraine, launched in June 2011 in collaboration with the Victor Pinchuk Foundation.36

The visit to Pinchuk’s factory was at least the third time Blair had visited Ukraine since he left Downing Street in 2007. In 2008 the former Prime Minister was a guest speaker at a conference held in the Black Sea resort of Yalta and organised by Pinchuk, at which Blair pushed Ukraine’s case to join the European Union, the presidency of whose commission Blair was then widely tipped to take.

Pinchuk has been a keen advocate of EU membership, setting up a firm to promote Ukraine’s EU credentials. Its directors included, until 2010, Stephen Byers, Blair’s former Trade Secretary, who, as we have seen, has also been active with Blair in the Middle East.37

Blair and Pinchuk seem to have been introduced by Bill Clinton and senior staff at the Clinton Foundation, which has also received money from Pinchuk.

Pinchuk has been accused of exploiting his relationship with the daughter of the president of Ukraine to grab state privatisations on the cheap, and of swindling two Ukrainian business associates out of hundreds of millions of dollars amid a mass sell-off of state-owned industry by the country’s leader at the time, Leonid Kuchma.38

Born in Kiev in 1960, Pinchuk grew up in Dnipropetrovsk and studied at the city’s metallurgical institute before beginning a career as a research engineer in pipe production. He founded Interpipe in 1990, just as the Soviet Union was breaking up.

He met his second wife, Elena Franchuk, in 1997, and they both left their spouses to marry in 2002. Elena’s father was Ukraine’s president from 1994 to 2005 – the years when Pinchuk turned himself from a successful businessman into a billionaire. Interpipe bought a 50 per cent stake in the Nikopol steel plant in 2003 for $80 million.

Like many of those who became suddenly wealthy when the Soviet Union collapsed, Pinchuk faced the threat that a new government might want a share in his wealth, and the sale was contested two years later, following a change in government. Viktor Yushchenko, the president who came to power after the Orange Revolution, said, ‘Despite all of Pinchuk’s sniffles and groans, the factory will be returned to the state.’ In fact, Yushchenko was still in power when the privatisation was confirmed as lawful.

The Pinchuks bought a house in Kensington in central London for £80 million in 2008, a then-world record price. The house has an underground swimming pool, gym, sauna and cinema, and now probably houses some of his contemporary art collection, reckoned to be one of the best collections in private hands.

Pinchuk, who also has an office in Mayfair, is a major collector of Damien Hirst’s work but refuses to say which of the British artist’s creations he owns. He has also spent large sums on work by Jeff Koons, and in 2006 he opened the Pinchuk Art Centre in Kiev, where some of his collection is housed and where Hirsts have been exhibited.

‘To spend money is much more exciting than to make it,’ he once said.39

Pinchuk was very much a player in the troubles in Ukraine at the start of 2014. Former President Viktor Yanukovych, now in exile, used to worry about the attitude of the oligarchs, of whom Pinchuk is one of the three most important, because they control much of the Ukrainian economy, and Yanukovych had not managed to place them under control, as Putin has done in Russia.

Pinchuk’s television stations have covered the troubles extensively, and they were not sympathetic to Yanukovych’s switch away from the EU and towards Russia. Yanukovych’s enforced departure made way for a pro-EU government, and new president Petro Poroshenko is more to Pinchuk’s taste.

Ukraine is now moving towards much the same position as the existing clients of Tony Blair Associates in that part of the world, as we have seen in an earlier chapter. Blair’s interest in the country could then include not just the TBFF taking money from the oligarch, but also Tony Blair Associates taking money from the government.

We also know of a $1 million donation from a reformed Junk Bond King, Michael Milken. According to Andy MacSmith in the Independent,

He was the 1980s Junk Bond King, who piled up untold wealth in the boom years, but came to grief at the end of that decade when he copped a 10-year jail sentence, a $200 million fine and a permanent ban on dealing in securities, after pleading guilty to six felonies, in what was then the biggest fraud case in the history of the US securities industry. The jail sentence was later reduced to two years. Since his release, he has reinvented himself as a philanthropist, contributing huge sums to medical research.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the star guest at the annual Milken Institute Global Conference in Beverly Hills this week was Tony Blair. The former Prime Minister was asked about a number of topics, including his time as a wannabe rock star, at Oxford University, when he was lead singer for a band called Ugly Rumours.

When the session ended, Mr Milken informed his ‘visibly shocked’ guest that he was donating $1 million to the Tony Blair Faith Foundation.

So who else is there? We don’t know, and rumours are rife. One journalist who has done a lot of work on Blair’s activities told us confidently that the TBFF was funded by orthodox Zionists. But another journalist, Melanie McDonagh, wrote, ‘Tony Blair’s Faith Foundation [is] handsomely supported by Arab donors.’40

Our sources tell us there are no Muslim donors, but do the government of Kuwait and oil-rich sheikhs associated with the government give money to the TBFF? If so, why? Is the government merely continuing to pay the debt it appears to feel it owes to the architect of the Iraq War, or is it expecting a return for its money, in terms either of the policy of the TBFF or in the statements made by Tony Blair?

It is certainly the case that a very large proportion of its income comes from wealthy and uncompromising supporters of Israel.

Defending its refusal to give the names of its big-money donors, a spokesperson told us, ‘The public absolutely has a right to know that any funding received by the charity has been used solely in furtherance of the charity’s aims. Company law and charity law set out a series of regulations and reporting requirements on charities precisely so that the public can have confidence in how registered charities are run. The Foundation complies with all its obligations under company and charitable law.’

He went on to explain what these are, and added, ‘There is no requirement for a charity to list individual donors. We, like many other charities, don’t name individual donors in our accounts as many people prefer for their donations to charitable causes not to be made public. Individuals can of course make known their support of the Foundation if they wish.’

It is the trustees, not the donors, who decide what the TBFF will do, he said, though it does accept donations for specific purposes. ‘But a restricted donation may not be accepted if the trustees are not confident that it will be spent in the interests of furthering the charity’s aims.’

However, the TBFF will go a long way to please its big-money donors. In a 2013 advertisement for a head of communications, TBFF says, ‘TBFF is seen as a pioneering and innovative thought leader, and funder-friendly organisation.’

And what of Mr Blair himself? It seems likely that he is giving the TBFF some money from his own enormous earnings, though we cannot know this for certain. We remember what an old friend and colleague of Blair’s said to us in an unguarded moment: ‘He says he gives money to his charities, but I don’t think he gives enough to his charities.’

This is borne out by the fact that in 2012 the TBFF’s income started to fall off slightly, but Blair’s own income continued to grow. The TBFF reported an income of £3.66 million, down slightly on the £3.75 million that it received in 2010.

Perhaps this is why, in July 2012, the TBFF advertised for a head of major gifts to join a four-strong fundraising team and report to the head of fundraising:

We are looking to recruit an exceptional individual for this new post, who will help develop our international portfolio of Major Donors. Working at the most senior of levels, this individual will need to have at least 5 years professional fundraising experience with a proven track record of securing six and seven figure major gifts.

The team, said the advertisement, ‘oversees all donor solicitation, engagement, donor events and donor management, from an increasing number of international sources that include high net-worth individuals, trusts, foundations, corporations and statutory bodies.’

The long – very long – advertisement gave something of an insight into how fundraising for something like the TBFF works. It is not the sort of organisation that could go onto the streets and expect ordinary people to throw in the sums of money that ordinary people can afford. A charity chugger for the Tony Blair Faith Foundation would have a very hard sell indeed. Ordinary people might want to give comparatively small amounts of money to Oxfam, or Save the Children, or Crisis, but that sort of money does not go to the TBFF, and neither is the TBFF interested in sums of that size. It is interested in big money from very rich people.

So, says the advertisement, the successful candidate will ‘manage a range of international donors and prospects, and will work … to ensure that each donor has the most appropriate and stimulating engagement strategy.’ Required attributes include ‘experience of creative cultivation, solicitation and stewardship techniques’ and ‘a track record of working with major gift prospects to secure six and seven figure gifts’.

The culture of secrecy endemic in all Tony Blair’s operations must be retained. The post holder would ‘work alongside people from the other Tony Blair organisations, and will have access to confidential information … They will be required to sign a confidentiality agreement.’

However, no appointment was made, and there are no plans to reopen the appointment.

Interns are taken on, unpaid, for three months. Even they have to sign a confidentiality agreement. They are told, ‘Your Volunteer Internship Agreement will contain a confidentiality clause. During your internship you may be exposed to sensitive data, and therefore confidentiality is extremely important.’

The Liberal Conspiracy blog reported TBFF posting advertisements for an external-affairs intern and an education intern, both lasting for a period of three months.

Making use of unpaid interns is controversial. Blair’s office told Liberal Conspiracy that the Office of Tony Blair does have interns, but it pays them the London living wage. However, the office says, the Blair charities, such as the TBFF, have their own policies and, ‘as charitable organisations, they have volunteers’.

It goes on:

This confuses the words volunteer and intern. A volunteer is not an unpaid intern. What TBFF and the other charities have is not volunteers, but unpaid interns. The TBFF justifies this on the grounds that it is a charity, but it is hardly the sort of charity to which a young person might wish to donate their time for charitable reasons – in other words, to volunteer. For the TBFF, taking on unpaid labour is not the same as for, say, Oxfam or Amnesty.

If they go to work for the TBFF as an intern, they are probably doing so in the same spirit as they might if they were an intern in a commercial organisation. They are hoping for good experience, exposure to exciting work and the possibility of a job at the end of it. And the TBFF knows that, for its statement goes on: ‘In return, participants get all we can offer in terms of a structured programme of professional development.’

Our information is that the TBFF does not deliver this. Its interns, in at least some cases, are simply unpaid labour, doing the boring work for nothing. We are aware of people who already have a decade or so of relevant experience applying for paid work, and being offered unpaid work in their field of expertise instead.

One such person was told that paid data-input work was available; that it might well be repetitive and boring, but would require a high degree of accuracy; that it would be commercially confidential and the person would need to sign a confidentiality agreement; that it would be based in a satellite office in Stanmore; and that the person would need to agree with the core proposition of the project.

The offer, when it came, was all these things – but as an unpaid intern, doing boring data-input work for which the person had earned a living doing for some years, and in Stanmore, way out of reach of the heart of the TBFF’s operations in Marble Arch and well away from anything interesting.

THE MINOR PARTNER: THE TONY BLAIR SPORTS FOUNDATION

The Tony Blair Sports Foundation was launched in 2007 for Blair to ‘give something back to the North East.’42 It aims to encourage more people in the region to take part in sports. What figures and anecdotal evidence we have suggests that it is struggling, and not making a huge contribution to the region. It appears not even to have its own website, just a very uninformative page on the website of the Office of Tony Blair.

After working its way up to an income of £348,233 in the year ending 31 March 2010, it brought in only £37,576 the following year, less than half what it spent on staff.

It does not sound as though Blair is making the same effort with his rich contacts for his Sports Foundation as he is for his Faith Foundation. He has told the staff, and any volunteers the charity may have, to go out and raise money, and he will match everything they raise, pound for pound.43 This is quite a common method for a very rich man to donate money to a charity – but extremely odd when it is his own charity and bears his name. Further, it requires the staff and volunteers to go out and combat the hostility that the mention of his name will arouse in many circles in order to bring in money.

CONCLUSION

If the Faith Foundation was what Tony Blair wanted to work on for the rest of his life, just what was it that he thought he wanted to do? Its objectives seem ill-defined and contradictory. Its work is mostly not what we associate with charity, and it is certainly not charitable towards Islam. Sometimes it feels like a recruiting sergeant for faith – almost any faith, so long as it’s not Islam.

Its secret donors’ list will one day make fascinating reading, but we know enough already to be sure of two things. Firstly, most of them, if not all of them, would cease to donate if Blair ever fell out with Israel, surely an awkward position for the Middle East envoy to be in. And secondly, they are all very seriously rich. The well-intentioned person with a modest income and a bit of money to spare for a good cause is not the sort of donor the Tony Blair Faith Foundation has any interest in. Its advisers and funders are the wealthy and the well-connected. It is staffed by more than its fair share of bankers, and they occupy both top positions.

Perhaps Tony Blair has forgotten the quote from Jesus in the Gospel according to St Matthew: ‘And again I say unto you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.’

Notes

1 www.tonyblairoffice.org, 3 April 2008: http://www.tonyblairoffice.org/
news/entry/millennium-development-goals-
are-litmus-test-of-worlds-values/

2 www.tonyblairoffice.org, 5 December 2008: http://www.tonyblairoffice.org
/news/entry/tony-blair-and-belinda-stronach-
join-together-to-support-faiths-act-fellows/

3 www.tonyblairoffice.org, 30 March 2009: http://www.tonyblairoffice.org
/news/entry/bringing-people-together-across-
faith-communities-for-action-in-africa/

4 www.tonyblairoffice.org, 15 April 2009: http://www.tonyblairoffice.org/news/
entry/ten-uk-faith-fellows-announced-to-
help-deliver-millennium-development-goals/

5 www.tonyblairoffice.org, 8 July 2009: http://www.tonyblairoffice.org/news/
entry/tony-blair-announces-durham-university-
partnership-as-faith-and-globalisati/

6 www.tonyblairoffice.org, 8 October 2009: http://www.tonyblairoffice.org
/news/entry/tony-blair-attends-launch-
of-transatlantic-healthcare-alliance-between-yale/

7 Daily Telegraph, 19 December 2012: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics
/6844763/Tony-Blair-earned-680000-
for-his-foundation-for-50-hours-work.html

8 http://www.thetablet.co.uk/article/4774 [page no longer available]

9 Francis Beckett, Gordon Brown: Past, Present and Future (Haus Publishing, 2007)

10 Daily Telegraph, 26 February 2012: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics
/labour/9105663/Charles-Clarke-Thanks-
to-religion-Ive-found-life-after-politics.html

11 Authors’ interview with Martin Bright

12 The Guardian, 25 January 2014: http://www.theguardian.com/politics/
2014/jan/25/extremist-religion-wars-tony-blair

13 Jewish Chronicle, 24 January 2014: http://www.thejc.com/comment-
and-debate/columnists/115017/finding-nuance-
religious-debate-i%E2%80%99ve-got-quite-a-job

14 Daily Mail, 2 August 2014: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/
article-2714316/Inside-Blair-s-lair-Five-spin-doctors-
ministerial-red-box-town-hall-meetings-doughnuts-
deals-dictators-After-THAT-party-Cherie-former-ex-
PM-employee-reveals-really-happens.html

15 Daily Telegraph, 13 February 2010: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/
religion/7229874/Tony-Blairs-faith-charity-
pays-six-figure-salaries-to-top-officials.html

16 Arab News, 31 October 2014: http://www.arabnews.com/news/652761

17 Daily Mail, 2 June 2013: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-
2334560/The-ideology-Lee-Rigbys-murder-
profound-dangerous-Why-dont-admit--Tony-
Blair-launches-brave-assault-Muslim-extremism-
Woolwich-attack.html

18 Independent, 8 April 2009: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/
world/politics/blair-pope-is-wrong-about-gays-
ndash-and-most-catholics-think-so-too-1665363.html

19 The Guardian, 13 May 2009: http://www.theguardian.com/
commentisfree/belief/2009/may/13/tony-blair-faith-foundation

20 www.catholicactionuk.blogspot.co.uk, 5 December 2008: http://catholicactionuk.blogspot.co.uk/
2008/12/dossier-on-cherie-blair.html

21 The Catholic Universe, 18 September 2014: http://www.thecatholicuniverse.com
/priest-tells-rochdale-inquiry-horrific-abuse-school-4174

22 Independent, 8 April 2009: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/
news/article-1370323/Tony-Blairs-priest-fixed-papal-
knighthoods-cash.html

23 http://www.allindiaimamorganization.org/about-umer-ilyasi.html [page no longer available]

24 www.berkleycenter.georgetown.edu, 1 July 2010: http://berkleycenter.georgetown.edu/interviews/a-
discussion-with-bishop-josiah-fearon-of-kaduna

25 www.ynaija.com, 22 December 2013: http://www.ynaija.com/corruption-worse-
than-homosexuality-bishop-of-kaduna-speaks/

26 http://www.centralsynagogue.org/
about_us/our_clergy/rubinstein

27 Observer, 14 March 2010: http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2010/
mar/14/tony-blair-faith-foundation-america

28 Ibid.

29 www.huffingtonpost.com, 5 November 2012: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/
charles-andrew-flamiano/letting-go-letting-god-
faith-shorts-finalist_b_2134803.html

30 Daily Mirror, 28 February 2014: http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/rupert-murdoch-
donated-100000-tony-3190828#ixzz3CGpWUzlk

31 http://www.washingtonindependent.com/86305/
but-really-would-joe-lieberman-ever-criticize-israel

32 New Yorker, 10 May 2010: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/
2010/05/10/the-influencer

33 www.tabletmag.com, 14 May 2010: http://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/
33826/will-israel%E2%80%99s-%
E2%80%98rich-uncle%E2%80%99-buy-%
E2%80%98newsweek%E2%80%99

34 Sunday Telegraph, 10 February 2013: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/
politics/to-ny-blair/9859780/Revealed-Tony-
Blair-and-the-oligarch-bankrolling-his-charity.html

35 www.interpipe.biz, 24 October 2012: http://www.interpipe.biz/en/
media/newsone/58S

36 http://tonyblairfaithfoundation.org/foundation/
news/tony-blair-announces-new-education-projects-ukraine [page no longer available]

37 Daily Telegraph, 10 February 2013: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/
politics/tony-blair/9859780/Revealed-Tony-Blair-
and-the-oligarch-bankrolling-his-charity.html

38 The Times, 12 October 2013: http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/law/article3892816.ece

39 Daily Telegraph, 10 February 2013: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/
news/politics/tony-blair/9859780/Revealed-
Tony-Blair-and-the-oligarch-bankrolling-his-charity.html

40 Spectator, 17 September 2012: http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/
2012/09/britain-should-call-for-reform-of-existing-blasphemy-laws/

41 www.liberalconspiracy.org, 3 July 2013: http://liberalconspiracy.org/2013/07/03/excl-tony-
blairs-office-once-agains-caught-not-paying-interns/

42 http://www.tonyblairoffice.org/sports/

43 www.tonyblairoffice.org, 18 March 2011: http://www.tonyblairoffice.org
/news/entry/join-team-tbsf-in-running-jogging-
or-even-walking-the-great-north-run-and-h/