‘I think Blair is now a very sad man. Rich, but [he] betrayed everything the Labour Party was about.’

– GREG DYKE, SPEAKING TO AUTHORS.

Tony Blair was an energetic Prime Minister. When the lights dim and the public attention moves on to other stars, where will the fallen hero turn for adulation and thrills? Blair still doesn’t have an answer that satisfies him. He doubtless receives a kick from being paid very large sums for very small tasks.

A speech to a remote country will pay him handsomely, much more than he was paid for a year’s work as Prime Minister and twice as much as a Member of Parliament earns in a year. Then there are the huge sums of money for a casual introduction, for picking up the telephone. He likes it, of course. But he can live in only one house at a time.

And, though money buys power, he is finding that there are limits to that, just as there are limits to political power. He was never happier than when making decisions that affected the lives of others, having colleagues in politics and the media hanging on his every word and gesture. His money doesn’t buy this buzz. The more money he acquires, the less likely it is that he will ever regain or even come close to the power that once was.

Money made by a businessperson is different from money made by an ex-politician. The former, if made legally, is regarded as an achievement; he pulled himself up by his bootstraps, or he had a clever idea. The latter is seen as the fruit of compromises of principle and the milking of contacts.

When Blair left power, he was told that the public expects politicians, in whom it has placed its trust, to pursue good causes before self-enrichment. The latter is allowed with discretion, but the former enables them to retain their credibility. Blair has paid the price for failing to heed this sage advice from a savvy and religious American businessman.

By pursuing money for its own sake, the arch image maker has tainted his image beyond redemption. Many in the British public – and increasing numbers of foreign politicians – hold Blair in contempt.

Blair and his dwindling band of admirers blame the media, which they say will never give him a fair hearing. Years ago, when Blair was fighting the Old Labour types he so despises, they used to say that they would never get a fair hearing from the media. Blair despised them for their defeatism. His first act as Labour leader was to fly halfway across the world to pay homage at the court of King Rupert Murdoch, and he tailored Labour’s policies so that they did not alienate the media. Now, in a wrenching irony, he bemoans media bias against him and seems unable to accept that he has done anything to deserve it. And he has alienated Rupert Murdoch utterly and, as far as we can see, irretrievably.

He will keep his money and make more, but, in Britain at least, it will leave him isolated, surrounded by no more than bevies of flattering acolytes and corrupt dictators. They will give him the wealth and adulation he craves. But those who count morality as a value will cast him aside.

He does not want only money: he wants influence, and power, and respect. That is why his international work is structured as it is.

Mike Harris, lobbyist, former Blairite, and former head of advocacy at Index on Censorship, has made a close study of Blair’s international work. There’s a growing move, he says, to privatise diplomacy, and Blair is at the cutting edge. If you watch Blair at work, whether as Middle East envoy or as a paid consultant, or as the patron of international charities, you can see that he’s aiming to be an alternative to conventional public-sector diplomacy.

Just in the way that the British government likes to outsource other functions to private-sector suppliers, so increasingly governments all over the world are outsourcing their diplomacy, and their relationships with other governments, to him. Sir Malcolm Rifkind, in fact, described him to us as someone who ‘operates a public/private partnership in diplomacy.’

This is making him immensely rich and immensely powerful. He has now made more money than any ex-prime minister in history. The contrast between Blair and Labour’s most successful prime minister, Clement Attlee, who died leaving just £7,295, is stark.

Many former prime ministers have inherited a lot of money, as Harold Macmillan did, but no former prime minister has made anything like the sort of money Blair has made. And no former prime minister has built his or her wealth so directly on his or her former office.

Through various business initiatives Blair has amassed a fortune, which we believe, from the information we can put together, to be at least £60 million, before we even begin to consider his vast property empire.

It’s not a sin to make money. In recent years, other former prime ministers have done it. Blair’s immediate predecessor, John Major, took a senior position with the American private equity firm Carlyle Group. Margaret Thatcher, among other things, made $500,000 a year as a consultant with Philip Morris. That did not stop Thatcher being widely admired, or Major continuing to be regarded as an honourable man. Blair, in Britain at least, is increasingly reviled. Why is this? And does he deserve it? There are several differences between Blair and all his predecessors.

First, their earnings are dwarfed by Blair’s – he has turned himself into what the Daily Telegraph has called ‘a human cash register’.

Second, they were far more discreet and restrained than Blair in their business dealings, and by Blair’s standards they were easily satisfied.

Third, Blair, while making his money, has also sought to create an international political profile: becoming Middle East envoy, launching an unsuccessful bid for the presidency of the European Council, attempting unsuccessfully to be a sort of elder statesman in the Labour Party. And he has set up charities, to many of which he has given his name – the Tony Blair Faith Foundation and the Tony Blair Sports Foundation.

Fourth, they were more discriminating about the sort of people they were prepared to endorse.

Last, and most important, they did not try to mix a public-service career with their commercial activities. It was always clear whom they were working for at any given time. Malcolm Rifkind attempts to explain this away thus: ‘I am no fan of Blair but I am not going to join a witch-hunt. I think he is wasting a lot of his life being a Flying Dutchman wandering round the world; it shows how restless he is. There is something almost manic in it. I don’t admire him, but he is free to choose whatever way of life suits him as long as it is within the law.’

The problem with this view, though, is that like Pooh-Bah in The Mikado: he is Lord High Everything Else. You never know what role he is playing today: the Middle East peace envoy, the principal of Tony Blair Associates, the patron of the Tony Blair Faith Foundation – and often he is more than one of these distinguished people. That’s what has made Blair’s business dealings appear so suspect, and has opened him to charges of conflicts of interest.

The appearance that – for example – his role as Quartet Representative in the Middle East assists the expansion of his business empire is utterly toxic, and has helped to destroy his usefulness in the Middle East. That’s what has ensured that the respect in which he is held has plummeted since he left Downing Street.

We have found that the same people and the same companies keep cropping up again and again in different contexts, and it has not always been easy to know in which section they ought to go. They include:

  • MOHAMMED RASHID, former financial adviser to Colonel Gaddafi’s eldest son and to Palestine’s Yasser Arafat – he is now in hiding after being sentenced in absentia to five years in jail for fraud;
  • BARONESS SYMONS, whose services to Gaddafi’s Libya continued almost until the day the Colonel himself faced his grisly death;
  • MARK ALLEN, the British spy whose secret deals with Colonel Gaddafi and his son Saif al-Islam paved the way for Symons and Blair in Libya;
  • MICHAEL KLEIN, a former banker from Citigroup, fixer and expert in Middle East financial institutions.

Then there are the institutions and companies that have joined the gravy train:

  • MONITOR GROUP, the now bankrupt American management consultancy from which Blair draws much of his talent.
  • BROWN LLOYD JAMES, the consultancy run by a former Blair aide, which was commissioned to burnish the image of Syria’s President Assad, as well as that of the Tony Blair Faith Foundation;
  • CONSOLIDATED CONTRACTORS COMPANY, a huge Palestinian-owned construction multinational.

The names of these and other businesses keep recurring, whether we are writing about Kuwait, Palestine, the USA or anywhere else.

Blair’s massive earnings are supplemented by pension and other benefits that cost taxpayers more than £250,000 per year.

‘Blair is transfixed by money,’ Peter Oborne, chief political commentator for the Daily Telegraph, told us, and we have been driven to the conclusion that, in this at least, Oborne is right. Blair has sacrificed everything else he had and appeared to value – his reputation and his ability to do good in the world – in pursuit of wealth. Conservative MP Sir Malcolm Rifkind is rather succinct with his thoughts on this matter: ‘Any good he might have done is long since dissipated.’ He seems the living embodiment of Hilaire Belloc’s famous couplet:

I’m tired of Love; I’m still more tired of Rhyme;

But money gives me pleasure all the time.

Even his desire to make the world a more religious place, with more understanding between faiths, suffers. Any influence the Tony Blair Faith Foundation might have, in Britain and Europe at any rate, is crippled by the toxic name of the former Prime Minister in the title. The calculation, we are told, is that it does the organisation good elsewhere, particularly in the USA. Now some are doubting that Blair can sustain that, as Rupert Murdoch uses his formidable firepower in the US media to respond to disclosures – denied by Blair – of a relationship with Wendi Deng, Murdoch’s ex-wife.

According to John Kampfner, a former editor of the New Statesman, ‘Blair loved being on the world stage and then he was forced out of office against his will. His business deals allow him to remain on the stage and continue to hobnob with the rich and powerful.’

His best friends now admit that he is damaged goods. Charles Clarke told the Huffington Post: ‘There is no question that he has damaged his reputation. The money has damaged his reputation, some of his contacts have damaged the reputation, some aspects of the way he’s spent his life have damaged his reputation.’

If that’s a friend, imagine what his enemies are saying! Here are some examples.

‘I think Blair now is a very sad man, rich, but [he] betrayed everything the Labour party was about,’ says Greg Dyke. Simon Kuper of the Financial Times writes of what he calls ‘Blair’s disease’ – the disease of former national leaders monetising their years at the top. He wrote, ‘If you are super-rich, you probably have an ex-leader working for you, like an overpaid tennis coach. Blair, for instance, has shilled for JP Morgan Chase, Qatar and Kazakhstan’s cuddly regime.’

Kuper thinks Blair (and to a lesser extent former President Nicolas Sarkozy in France and former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder in Germany) planned it from the start. ‘Most ex-leaders link up with the plutocratic class while still in office. These people have been planning their careers since kindergarten,’ he wrote.1

There was certainly a time when he was not quite sure about his post Prime Ministerial career, and perhaps that is still true. A former senior employee told us, ‘I think he went through a period when he wasn’t entirely sure what he wanted to do. One thing about Tony wanting to make money, quite honestly, is that he is so persuasive and charismatic and kind of marketable, that he has made only 10 per cent of what he could make. I think he was feeling uncertain as to how much money he wanted to make and how he wanted to make it.’

Indeed, this source suggests that at a certain point, Blair wanted to set up an investment bank (called ‘Blair Bank’, perhaps). But he stepped back from the brink, though we don’t know why.

Blair was always criticised in the Labour Party for his readiness to leap to the defence of the mega-rich. Now that he is one of them, this is more true than ever. So he told Charles Moore in July 2012, ‘We must not start thinking that society will be better off if we hang 20 bankers at the end of the street … Don’t take 30 years of liberalisation, beginning under Mrs Thatcher, and say this is what caused the financial crisis … Wrong!’

This is a caricature of the criticisms of the financial community, whose culpability for the financial crisis of 2008 is not in doubt. No one has suggested hanging twenty bankers at the end of the street, but it has been suggested that we cap their bonuses and limit their ability to gamble with our money.

The lesson of the previous thirty years, Blair claimed, was that, in a globally interdependent economy, ‘We didn’t understand properly the true implications of the financial instruments involved, and so we didn’t supervise and regulate them properly. But we mustn’t go back to the state running everything.’ Given that one of the most serious failings of the government he led was its failure to supervise and regulate finance, this is a startling admission.

The need to find a role in the world is Moore’s analysis of the ‘Blair disease’.

I detect in him something like Britain’s famous problem of having lost an empire, but not yet found a role. At 59, he’s still young for a man in his position. He has been out of the game for five years. You can see, he wants to get back in, when he says, ‘Since I left office, I have learnt a huge amount, especially about what is happening in Europe and the world. Sometimes it’s quite shocking to me: how useful would this knowledge have been!’

Yet this is part of the sacrifice he made for money. He could have got back in the game and made good use of all that knowledge, but he would have had to make that – and not the pursuit of wealth – his top priority. He could, for example, have made a real contribution to Middle East peace – enough, you would have thought, to satisfy the most demanding ambition. But he would have had to give up other ambitions, most notably the accumulation of money, in order to do that.

Moore goes on:

He thinks, I suspect, that he’d be a better prime minister now than he was before. Blair tells us, ‘I’d like to find a form of intervening in debates.’ How? By getting elected again? ‘I don’t think that’s possible.’ A peerage? A wonderful look of amused contempt suffuses his tanned face. Something in Europe, perhaps? ‘I would have taken the job [the presidency of the European Council] if they had offered it to me, but they didn’t.’

Long before he ceased to be prime minister, the Blairs had acquired a worldwide reputation for being money-hungry. Their property portfolio began when Blair was still in office (see Chapter 14 for details of the Blairs’ acquisition of properties).

Cherie’s precarious childhood seems to have left her with a pretty well insatiable need for financial security. Blair, too, suffered childhood insecurity – though not on the same scale as his wife – when his father had a stroke. How far do these personal factors explain their apparent need to build wealth way beyond their needs? And to what extent is it due to the fact that Blair admires, and is dazzled by, the very rich?

Blair’s relentless quest for financial enrichment has been dogged by accusations of conflicts of interest and suspicions that he is benefiting from the most controversial decision of his premiership – to go to war against Iraq. Readers will by now have seen what we have said about oilfields and the Middle East, and will have made up their own minds on this question.

It’s certainly the case that during Blair’s time in office he was able to make contacts and cultivate relationships that would later make him rich, and that some of these came about as a result of the Iraq War. The demise of Saddam Hussein made him popular in Kuwait, where he has made millions as an adviser to the Emir and where he even has his own office inside the Kuwaiti parliament buildings.

And apart from the Iraq War, there’s no doubt that just being prime minister helps his cause. Malcolm Rifkind told us,

Once you have ceased to be prime minister and you don’t have public responsibilities, your added value … does relate to your international experience and people you know. It doesn’t just mean other presidents or PMs, but someone like Blair would be of enormous value to someone who wanted to get access to another company. If someone wants to see the CEO of a company and part of the delegation is Mr T Blair, you can guess what the answer would be.

There are serious questions to ask about conflicts of interests between his public role as Special Envoy to the Middle East and his private business activities, as well as how much he has benefited financially from relationships he cultivated and decisions he made while in office – in particular the Iraq adventure.

When he left office Tony Blair felt a sense of bitterness, which went much wider than his famously antagonistic relationship with Gordon Brown. It was the Labour Party, and not just Brown, that forced him into resignation, and his view about the party he led, never very complimentary, became tinged with resentment.

He was, as Charles Moore notes, a relatively young man for a former prime minister. Just as he had been the youngest PM since Lord Liverpool in 1812, he was now the youngest former PM, still full of energy and ambition. There were several courses he could have chosen. He could easily have had a career in international politics, which would probably have brought him the Presidency of the European Council (which, as we have seen, in the event he failed to get) if he had devoted himself to it and placed a lower priority on making money.2

He could have thrown himself into his work as Middle East peace envoy, in which case he might now have more to show for it, and he would have avoided the increasingly strident accusations that he does not work hard enough at the job, that he has not taken the time to brief himself properly, and that he seems to see it mainly as a way to meet oil-rich folk in the region.

He could have devoted himself to his charity work, or to campaigning on matters about which he feels strongly, such as climate change and religious faith. He could have devoted himself to business, and he would have done very well indeed, making himself quietly very wealthy, away from the public gaze. Few people would have complained, and he would not have had to tolerate the constant carping criticism that he appears to find so irksome.

It seems that, in effect, he chose to do a little of all of these, but all of them overshadowed and controlled by a determination to become seriously rich. And that is what has been so toxic for his reputation in Britain. He was for a long time able to comfort himself that his reputation in the USA, which matters much more to him than his reputation in Britain, was still strong, but that is now in serious danger, and not just from the breach with Rupert Murdoch. The speech he gave in 2014 saying that what is happening in Iraq has nothing to do with him has also damaged his reputation there, we hear from Washington sources.

One Blair loyalist and former staffer, who does not want to be named – he would be permanently exiled from the court if it was known he had said this to us – told the authors privately that he was surprised at the huge amounts of money his old master appears to be amassing. ‘He says he gives money to his charities, but I don’t think he gives enough to his charities,’ he said, so we asked, ‘How much is he giving to his charities?’ ‘I’ve no idea,’ said our informant hastily. Blair’s spokeswoman Rachel Grant told writer Ken Silverstein, ‘In the past few years Mr Blair has given significant amounts of his income to the charities.’ But just what are ‘significant amounts’?

We do have some idea how he funds his charities. He treats some of them at least in the way that the mega-rich often treat charities, by trying to incentivise them to raise money elsewhere. Thus, he gives the Tony Blair Sports Foundation matching funds.

When hard times come, it is the charities, not the business, that suffer. While income appears to be stagnant and starting to drop off at his charities, his own earnings go from strength to strength.

It is important to remember that, despite all this, not everything Blair does is worthless. Some of the work of the Tony Blair Faith Foundation and the Africa Governance Initiative is excellent. The work combating malaria and the interventions in the Ebola crisis are just two examples of Tony Blair’s organisations, backed by his wealth and that of his contacts, indisputably doing good in the world.

THE GQ AND SAVE THE CHILDREN AWARDS

All of that is why Tony Blair’s reputation has plummeted – and why attempts to revive it often end up making things worse. In 2014, in quick succession, he was first named GQ magazine’s Philanthropist of the Year, and then went to New York to accept the Global Legacy Award from Save the Children.

The first was greeted mainly by cynical laughter: there was a feeling that GQ and Tony Blair were made for each other. The TV presenter and former footballer Gary Lineker tweeted, ‘Apparently, Tony Blair has won GQ’s philanthropist of the year award. Finally these awards have grasped irony!’ Even Blair himself seemed to join in the mirth – or perhaps he was being serious when he accepted the award with the words, ‘I feel the pulse of progress beating a little harder.’ Did he remember that on the day of the Good Friday agreement he had said, ‘This is no time for soundbites, but I feel the hand of history on my shoulder’?

But the second was more serious, and led to a speedy backlash. Critics were swift to point out that Justin Forsyth, formerly a special adviser to Blair, is the head of Save the Children UK, and Jonathan Powell, Blair’s former chief of staff, is on the board. Did they have anything to do with the decision to give Blair the charity’s Global Legacy Award?3

The award was made on 14 November, and within a week the charity realised it had blundered into a PR disaster, as this internal email, which was leaked to the Guardian’s Harriet Sherwood, shows:

Colleagues in the Middle East, SCUK [Save the Children UK] and at SCI [Save the Children International] have started to receive a high volume of complaints and negative reactions regarding the award given by SC US to Tony Blair, who is a hugely controversial and divisive figure in many parts of the world.

The reactive line below was developed by SCUK, but this will also need to highlight how this award is not a recognition of other aspects of Blair’s controversial foreign policy, nor of his role as Peace Envoy with the Quartet, and focuses purely on this achievement in terms of international development.4

The ‘reactive line below’ said that the award was only about ‘Tony Blair’s leadership on International Development’ as PM. He established the Department for International Development and hosted two G8 summits, in 1998 in Birmingham and in 2005 in Gleneagles, which STC considered to be key events in the battle against world poverty. ‘The UK’s achievement of 0.7% of GNI to international aid in 2014 is the culmination of work started under his leadership,’ it added, though both his successors, Gordon Brown and David Cameron, might claim their share of the credit for meeting the target in rather more challenging economic circumstances than Blair faced.

The email also revealed that the charity was getting hostile questions from all over the world, and asked for some answers.

‘We have also been asked to provide answers to the questions below … A reactive on Blair’s role in Iraq would not go amiss, either,’ the email continued.

One of the questions, mostly asked by supporters in the UK, was, ‘Is Save the Children a pro-Israeli organisation?’ Another was, ‘How much money did you raise for this Gala?’

There were also some questions specifically from supporters in the occupied Palestinian territories:

Meanwhile Jasmine Whitbread, chief executive of Save the Children International, was writing to the charity’s staff worldwide a letter that showed something near panic at the top, and that was also leaked to Sherwood at the Guardian:

I wanted to write to you directly about the concerns over the recent award given to Tony Blair by Save the Children US at their annual gala dinner in NY. In the scheme of all the critical work we are doing for children around the world some of you might ask why I am focusing on this issue, but it has touched a nerve close to our sense of identity and as such I think it’s important that we have a shared understanding of how this happened, what we are doing about it, and how we will come out of this together …

We are all frustrated and disappointed about the situation we are in, but I think we can understand how this happened: In our current structure, members make their own decisions about their marketing and fundraising as long as these are in line with our brand and other agreed guidelines. If there is a sensitive question then they consult, and this does increasingly happen. In this case, SC US simply did not anticipate anything sensitive – in the USA Tony Blair is widely seen very positively for his contribution to international aid … I first heard about this when it became public and was immediately in touch with Justin [head of STC UK] and Carolyn [head of STC US], who agreed with me that there should have been a better process of consultation and risk assessment and that we must learn from this …

Now, this is very odd. That STC US did not understand the negative reaction to be expected from other countries is believable. But Blair’s former adviser Justin Forsyth, head of STC UK, was asked to convey the invitation to Blair before it became public. If the Americans did not realise the likely reaction, he must have done. Why did he not warn his American colleagues? Was he keen for his old boss to have an honour that might restore Blair’s reputation? Or did he warn them, and see his warning ignored?

The email continues:

Urgently, right now, a team is trying hard to contain the situation and stop things escalating further, detracting from our wider work for children … Importantly, we must safeguard and rebuild the trust and commitment to our shared values that we have worked so hard on over the last few years. This will take time and effort …

While I can’t pretend I’m not very concerned about this situation, I’m confident that we can pull together to come out of it in a better place. There is so much that is amazing about what we are doing together for children … Let’s use this experience, painful as it is, to inform our next strategy …

The next day, Whitbread was handed a letter from 500 STC staff, which said, ‘We consider this award inappropriate and a betrayal to Save the Children’s founding principles and values. Management staff in the region were not communicated with nor consulted about the award and were caught by surprise with this decision.’ The executive director of Human Rights Watch, Kenneth Roth, tweeted, ‘As this man defends any dictator who’ll pay him, @SaveChildren inexplicably gives him award.’

A petition to the charity to withdraw the award mustered more than 125,000 signatures.5 Save the Children’s Director of Policy and Advocacy Brendan Cox later responded to the petition:

The response from Blair’s office screams of an organisation that feels it’s under siege. It accused the Guardian of bias, saying that it ‘conveniently disregards the facts that support the award as well as quotes from African presidents, the head of USAID and indeed anything which would give a more balanced view than the one presented.’

Julie Crowley of Blair’s communications team wrote to the Guardian’s Harriet Sherwood,

Your piece is a complete distortion of the truth, it is not impartial, balanced or fair, and is simply an exercise in muck-raking. You chose to ignore the support received by Tony Blair for his work in Africa, given by those who should matter most and know best, the people who have witnessed the impact made by the AGI in delivering better lives for their people, let alone the legacy from his time in office.

And it beggars belief that you quote George Galloway, who is not only biased but is making a film about the killing of Tony Blair, how is he best placed to make any sort of judgement on Tony Blair’s work in Africa.

You did not make any attempt at all to provide a balanced picture and simply sought to smear and denigrate. I am frankly appalled.

Harriet Sherwood’s piece seemed to us to be moderate, careful and accurate (you can judge for yourself: it’s at http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/nov/28/save-the-children-tony-blair-award-row). She didn’t use the quotes Ms Crowley supplied from President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia and President Ernest Bai Koroma of Sierra Leone about what a good chap Blair is, which were neither interesting nor relevant to her story. And when George Galloway, in the title of his film, uses the word ‘killing’ he makes it perfectly clear that he’s talking of a financial killing. His producer has also told us that she has made this distinction clear to Blair’s office.

A similarly over-the-top letter went from Blair’s head of communications Rachel Grant to the New Republic after a piece by American investigative journalist Ken Silverstein.8 Our notes are in square brackets.

Dear Sir,

 

It’s with huge disappointment that I read Ken Silverstein’s unbalanced and vindictive article. [We thought it was well researched and thoughtful. Judge for yourself – it’s at
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/politics/
magazine/107248/buckraking-around-the-world-tony-blair.]

It is one thing to disagree with Mr Blair’s views but it is something entirely different to not reflect our side of the argument simply because the facts don’t fit the story.

I spent a considerable amount of time explaining Mr Blair’s work, the work of his charities and the fact that much of his work is done pro-bono – none of this has been reflected in the article. This is poor by any standard of journalism and unacceptable for a publication like the New Republic. [If Silverstein’s conversations with Blair’s spokespeople were like ours, they answered the questions they thought he should have asked, rather than the questions he did ask.]

So to set the record straight again:

Around two thirds of Mr Blair’s time is spent doing pro-bono work. [We have asked for this figure and not been given it. In fact, Blair goes to so many places wearing more than one hat that the figure cannot be worked out. For example, his meeting with the Emir of Kuwait described in Chapter 4 no doubt counts towards the two-thirds, because he was supposedly there as Middle East envoy. But the product was a contract for Tony Blair Associates.]

His commercial interests fund his philanthropic work. [We’ve asked for figures on this, which of course we’ve not been given. The Blair charities are largely funded by Blair’s mega-rich friends – the likes of Haim Saban, Rupert Murdoch and Victor Pinchuk. No doubt Blair gives them some money too, but we do not know how much.]

The work in Kazakhstan is entirely in line with the international community’s agenda for change, and many Western governments as well as international organizations, including the EU, OSCE and World Bank also work with Kazakhstan on this agenda. [It’s one thing for governments to deal with a brutal dictator because he’s there, he’s the government, and he’s containable. It’s quite another for a company to take the man’s money to go out into the world and burnish his image.]

The signs of progress in Kazakhstan, again which are not cited but which I gave to Mr Silverstein, are facts such as GDP reaching double digit growth in the last 20 years; Kazakhstan’s renouncing of its nuclear weapons (something President Obama praised in his press conference recently with President Nazarbayev), it is a majority Muslim country of religious tolerance, and one of the few to have built a synagogue in recent years and that it has played a key role in supporting the allied effort in Afghanistan. [Silverstein was writing – properly, in our view, not about the economic growth of Kazakhstan, or its attitude to religion or nuclear weapons, but about human rights in the country.]

There is not space to list everything that is wrong in this article but you should not take that as any indication of its accuracy.

 

   Yours faithfully

   Rachel Grant

   Director of Communications

   The Office of Tony Blair

The last sentence of Grant’s letter is a Blair classic, and is echoed in another exchange we have seen. The Liberal Conspiracy blog said, ‘Blair currently receives £63,468 as part of his pension package following his exit from office, on top of an allowance of £84,000 a year. In case he felt this was an insufficient amount to live from, the variety of positions he has taken on led to an estimation that he had earned £80 million since leaving office in 2007.’

Blair’s office replied, ‘It’s always best to check the facts before running a story. Firstly, the figures you quote on Mr Blair’s earnings are completely wrong.’ It did not say what the correct figures were.

There really is, among Blair and the Blairites, a feeling that they are under siege. Folk like Charles Clarke and journalist John Rentoul, still Blair’s main cheerleader in national newspapers, feel genuinely affronted that anyone should be asking unwelcome questions about his activities.

His staff, even down to the humblest intern, have to sign ferocious confidentiality agreements – we have had several pained conversations with people who wanted to talk to us but had just re-read their agreements, which suggest all sorts of appalling consequences if they give us any information at all.

One of these, who worked in banking, thought the confidentiality agreement he had to sign in banks was ferocious – until he saw the one he had to sign before working for Tony Blair Associates. A bank’s confidentiality agreement could be two or three pages long; this was more than twenty. One source required to sign such a document questioned whether it would pass current legal tests. But he does not care to find out.

Blair and the Blairites are genuinely baffled by why Blair is so reviled in Britain, hence the fury of Charles Clarke and the bafflement of John Rentoul, when we start asking questions; the instinct to close ranks against any intruder, to clam up and say nothing.

A former senior member of his staff says, ‘My opinion is that his PR is rubbish because he feels so beleaguered; he thinks he’ll never get a fair hearing in the British press. There are a few journalists that he knows and trusts, like John Rentoul, but he feels that the press is out to get him in a way.

‘So he thinks, Even if I’m really cooperative with them, they’ll still write bad things about me, so I’m not going to bother, I’m just not going to talk to any of them. People think there is something to hide when there isn’t.’

That may be the reason, or part of the reason. But it is also true that treating any and every bit of hard information like gold bullion, never to be given away, enables Blair’s spokespeople to throw dust in the faces of their pursuers. If you mention a figure – if you say, ‘Is this the amount Blair receives annually from the government of Kazakhstan?’ or, ‘Is this the proportion of his income that Tony Blair gives to his charities?’ – they will say, in a well-rehearsed phrase, that there has ‘been a lot of inaccuracy’ reported about his earnings.

They will tell you that your figure is wrong, but not give you an alternative figure. So everyone who writes about them has to make the best estimates possible, from the information that is available, and then they can then tell you that you have failed to check the facts.

His spokeswoman says the amount of money Blair gives to his charities is ‘substantial’, which tells us nothing. Why not tell us, and let us judge whether, against his earnings, it really is substantial? Why not do what the former member of his staff quoted above thinks he ought to be doing? ‘I would stick the charities and the commercial activities in the same organisation and show figures,’ says the former staff member. ‘His charities employ large numbers of people, who have to be paid, so he’s being phenomenally successful financially and, of course, he’s made his family wealthy, which John Major has set out to do as well.’

If Tony Blair were a private individual, out in the world enriching himself the best he can – as his immediate predecessor John Major is – he could get away with this sort of thing. Rightly or wrongly, we demand lower standards of transparency from private companies.

But most of Blair’s money comes from the public sector in different countries, and most of his time is spent doing public-sector work. It is as though Capita were to take over government or local authority functions, but then say that, as a private company, it did not have to tell the public anything about them.

Tony Blair has turned himself into an international outsourcing company, very like Capita, but on a global scale. He will be, and should be, held to account for it in the international media. This book is an attempt to do just that.