WITH THE START OF THE SYRIAN CIVIL WAR IN March 2011, the resulting displacement of millions of people would have immediate consequences for its neighbouring countries – and eventually for Europe. Sutherland knew that unless the UN and the EU had a comprehensive contingency plan in place, then the region was facing a migration crisis that would have profound humanitarian and political consequences.
Sutherland stood down from his role as chairman of BP in June 2009, and at the same time cut back on his corporate activity to focus on the migration role. His acute political antennae sensed that migration would be the geopolitical lodestone of the coming decade. He was correct. Along with Gregory Maniatis he set out a list of priorities for what he wanted to achieve.
The first of these, launched in autumn 2012, was to make migration one of the UN’s 2030 Sustainable Development Goals. Over the next three years Sutherland lobbied intensively to put migration, immigrant integration and refugee protection on the agenda. In 2015 his efforts were to pay off through his close work with key governments such as Sweden and Switzerland, as well as key agencies and civil society partners. It was an important victory – but, in view of the scale of the escalating crisis, only a small step.
When Sutherland took on the migration role in 2006, the NGOs and civil society groups focused on migration hadn’t trusted him because of his background. They viewed Sutherland as lacking either experience or the right motives, and sometimes both. That had now changed. Civil society groups had themselves been trying, without much success, to include migration in the UN’s 2030 Sustainable Development Goals agenda. The fact that Sutherland had succeeded, along with his wider efforts in the field of migration, triggered a change in attitudes. By 2015, Sutherland had gained profound respect among civil society groups. Unfortunately, he was having a much harder time gaining the same recognition at state level.
After Sutherland was brought into the UN by Kofi Annan, the two men had developed a very close relationship. On 1 January 2007, Annan was succeeded by Ban Ki-moon, formerly South Korea’s Minister for Foreign Affairs, for a 10 year term. The relationship between Sutherland and Moon was more transactional; Sutherland was never sure how much support he would receive from the new UN secretary general if he needed it. The answer came only in 2013, when, on the eve of the second High-Level Dialogue on Migration and Development, Sutherland attended a reception at the residence of the Mexican ambassador in New York. There he encountered John Ashe, the President of the UN General Assembly, and challenged him about his refusal to allow civil society to have a more prominent role at the dialogue. (Ashe, who was from Antigua and Barbuda, was subsequently arrested and charged for taking bribes from a Chinese billionaire. He died in 2016 while awaiting trial.) The exchange was acrimonious. Sutherland was furious; it was the third time that Maniatis saw him really shaken. Sutherland insisted that the two of them walk the thirty blocks back to his hotel. He told Maniatis that he would have no choice but to resign given the heat of the conversation that evening. When Maniatis told Jan Eliasson, Moon’s deputy, how angry Sutherland was, Eliasson reported this to Moon. In response, Moon met Sutherland the next day and told him: ‘As long as I’m here you are here.’ At that moment Sutherland knew that he had Moon’s full confidence.
Even though Sutherland had been successful in including migration as part of the 2030 agenda, he knew more immediate and co-ordinated action was needed. But there was very little appetite, either among governments or at an EU level, to take on the issue. It was still far too divisive. Meanwhile large numbers of refugees from Syria and economic migrants from Africa were compelled to make the journey across the Mediterranean with the aim of reaching Europe. In late 2014 and early 2015, Sutherland intensified his lobbying efforts, warning the UN once more about the scale of the looming crisis. There were up to five million refugees in Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan, and they were not going to stay there forever. He told Ban Ki-moon that the UN had to get involved, while he and Maniatis reached out to Alex Betts, an academic at Oxford University. Betts, who had studied the Vietnamese boat crisis and the international community’s response, was possibly the world’s leading expert on the looming migration crisis.
In the months before April 2015, Sutherland began urging Ban Ki-moon and Jan Eliasson to step up the UN’s diplomacy on the Syrian refugee crisis. After April he escalated his campaign, proposing the creation of the UN Quartet – consisting of António Guterres, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees; Prince Said, the High Commissioner for Human Rights; Bill Swing, the director general of the IOM; and Sutherland himself – to lead the UN’s response. He urged Moon to convene national and regional leaders to develop a plan of action.
‘Peter was insistent that there had to be a comprehensive plan of action for the Syrian refugee crisis,’ says Maniatis. ‘We wanted something practical to happen. We wanted states to come together to feed these people, otherwise they were going to have to cross the Mediterranean. It is spectacular that this event was never systemically analysed. There was never a UN attempt to analyse what happened with the Syria crisis, and to try and figure out a plan of action. That is what really infuriated Peter. It led to the renationalisation of migration policy. It helped lead to the decay of the political centre in Europe.’
Sutherland’s aim for the quartet was that the four offices would co-ordinate an international response to the migration crisis. The quartet went to Berlin in the summer of 2015 for a meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, but there was no official response from the UN, no commitment to a plan of action. Sutherland wanted to arrange a meeting between Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European Commission, and Ban Ki-moon, but Moon did not want to get involved.
There are a number of theories as to why Sutherland was meeting so much resistance from the UN. According to certain well-placed sources, Moon briefed UN officials that he could not risk another high-profile failure. In 2009 the UN Climate Summit had taken place in Copenhagen, with about 45,000 delegates from around the world descending on the Danish capital. There was heightened expectation that the UN would broker a historic breakthrough on climate action. But the summit ended without agreement. It was Moon’s first big challenge as secretary general, and it was a failure. He didn’t want a repeat, which he thought would damage the UN, and in view of the fractured consensus on migration, the possibility of failure was considerable. There was also speculation at the time linking Moon with the presidency of South Korea. A high-profile setback of this scale would almost certainly dent his chances.
There is another explanation: the majority of UN member states were unaffected by the Syrian refugee crisis. Many of these countries felt that the problem was Europe’s to solve. In theory the UNHCR sees its role as giving help to countries that cannot cope with refugees. The European Union is one of the richest blocs in the world; with a population of roughly 500 million people, it was faced with an influx of approximately one million refugees. Countries such as Pakistan and India took the view that the only reason this had been deemed a crisis was because it affected Europe; the EU should be able to manage it without the UN. But the scale of inaction would ensure that the crisis worsened, with yet more destabilising consequences.
The political stakes for the EU were increasing in proportion to the level of inaction. EU leaders lacked agreement in response to the crisis. The bloc was still recovering from the ravages of the financial meltdown; the single currency had come close to being sundered by member states, including Ireland, that faced solvency issues, while the austerity measures needed to restore fiscal rectitude had frayed the political consensus to breaking point. Insurgent populist parties were on the rise, particularly in the countries, such as Greece and Italy, that were most affected by the migration crisis. A number of emergency EU summits failed to agree a coherent and effective response to the migration crisis at its southern borders. Italy and Greece were demanding greater solidarity from northern member states, but a lurch to the right in some of those countries made finding a compromise almost impossible. Austria for example proposed a cap on the number of asylum seekers allowed entry to just eighty a day. In the autumn of 2015, it is estimated that 7,000 refugees were arriving in Greece from Turkey every day.
Sutherland gave up his role at Goldman Sachs altogether in 2015 to focus on the migration crisis. As a humanitarian he cared deeply about the plight of refugees, while as a passionate European he also believed in the inherent benefits of European integration. He made a decision around this time to mount a public campaign to raise awareness about migration. He opened a Twitter account, which became a magnet for every paranoid malcontent on social media. He also made countless appearances on TV and radio, and penned a number of newspaper articles on the subject.
Such pieces pulled no punches. The following was written for Project Syndicate, an international media organisation that publishes syndicated commentary, in 2015:
The EU is in disarray. Faced with waves of asylum seekers from conflict-ridden states, too many European countries have acted selfishly and unilaterally, undermining any chance of an effective collective response to the crisis.
Rather than calmly handling an eminently manageable situation, they have made Europe appear incompetent, near hysterical and without integrity.
This is not to deny credit where credit is due. Under the leadership of chancellor Angela Merkel, Germany has welcomed hundreds of thousands of people – not without controversy but in relative calm. Berlin also has been honest in declaring that the European asylum system is not working. ‘If Europe fails on the question of refugees, if this close link with universal civil rights is broken,’ Ms Merkel stated bluntly this week, ‘then it won’t be the Europe we wished for.’
Greece and Italy, which have rescued more refugees than any other member states – and Sweden, the EU state that has taken in most per capita – also have acted honourably. Countless thousands of private citizens and non-governmental organisations have done the same.
But Europe’s failure to measure up to the human disaster has radically increased the human, financial and political costs of the crisis. One of the bedrocks of the EU, the Schengen free-movement zone, is now in jeopardy. It is not too late for the bloc to recover from a crisis largely of its own making. As hardline, anti-migrant parties surge in many countries, European governments must show they can work together to tame the chaos, uphold international law and show compassion to those in need.
Europe’s leaders and media need to start calling the situation what it is: a refugee crisis, not a migration crisis. At least two-thirds of those crossing the Mediterranean come from Syria, Eritrea, Afghanistan and other states from which they are legitimately fleeing persecution. Refugees have inalienable rights under international law, and their plight is well understood by the European public. Only a minority of those taking to the seas are economic migrants.
The EU also needs to give far greater help – starting straight away – to Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey, which together host 4m Syrian refugees. Such aid will be far more effective than military missions or yet more dogs and barbed wire at border posts. Most refugees prefer to stay close to home. But, if there are no schools or jobs for them in frontline countries, they will move on. Four years into the Syrian conflict, this is what is happening.
Simultaneously, the EU must make every effort to establish safe and legal means for asylum seekers to seek protection in Europe without risking their lives. This could be done through massively expanded resettlement; by establishing private sponsorship programmes so that individuals, churches and NGOs can take responsibility for integrating refugees; by issuing humanitarian, labour, family reunification and student visas – or a combination of all these.
Finally, EU member states should agree to a permanent system of sharing responsibility for processing and hosting asylum seekers and refugees. The European Commission’s plan to relocate 40,000 asylum seekers from Greece and Italy, rejected by member states, needs to be expanded and made mandatory. There are many details to work out, but such a programme is within reach.
This would be the first, necessary step towards a single European asylum system – not a hodge-podge of 28 systems that produce vastly different outcomes. So far this year, Hungary has granted asylum to just 278 out of 148,000 applicants – barely 0.2 per cent. By contrast, Germany has accepted 40 per cent of applications. This chasm makes a mockery of both the law and the notion of a common system.
An emergency meeting of EU interior ministers scheduled for September 14 needs to make inroads on this. But the rest of the world also needs to do far more. The world’s 20m refugees, a historic high, are a shared responsibility – one that at present falls most heavily on the developing world, where 86 per cent of refugees live.
The global refugee system was originally created to help Europeans, and it has helped save and rebuild the lives of millions of them. Now, with the system strained, faltering and outdated, Europe should reciprocate. It is time for the EU to rescue its integrity and dignity before they, too, perish in the Mediterranean.[1]
During 2015, Sutherland had formed the view that the most effective way of addressing the Syrian crisis was through a UN summit. He pushed Moon and Eliasson to support a special conference to deal with the Syria crisis. He formed an alliance with the White House. When Sutherland took over the migration role, the US administration, under instructions from John Bolton, had tried to block every initiative he proposed. Under Barack Obama, that would change utterly. Throughout 2015, the US looked on in frustration at the growing inaction of both the UN and the EU, and in October of that year, Washington would back Sutherland in two crucial areas. Sutherland’s lobbying since 2006 to get the IOM into the UN had been based on the rationale that because there was no single UN institution responsible for migration, it slipped between the cracks. These shortcomings had been cruelly exposed by the Mediterranean crisis. UN member states resisted his pleas on the basis that migration should remain a national competence. The most visceral opponent of integrating the IOM with the UN, when Sutherland initially proposed it in 2006, had been the US. In 2015, Sutherland had developed very good ties with US Secretary of State John Kerry, Tony Blinken, the Deputy Secretary of State, and Anne Richard, Assistant Secretary of State. A meeting in Istanbul in October 2015, shortly after the Alan Kurdi tragedy, was attended by Richards, António Guterres, Jan Eliasson and Bill Swing, as well as Sutherland himself.
For a brief period, this boy’s death changed the tone of the debate about migration. In the Canadian general election campaign of October 2015, the death of Kurdi had featured prominently; the young boy had drowned on the first step of a journey where Canada was the final destination. Stephen Harper, the incumbent prime minister, equivocated in response to the tragedy. Justin Trudeau, his opponent, pledged to take in 40,000 Syrian refugees. Trudeau won a thumping majority. The Kurdi affair was not decisive, but it played a role in shaping public opinion.
October 2015 was also important for Sutherland for another reason. The US said it was prepared to lead on a special summit for Syria, with the specific aim of providing funding for the World Food Programme and assistance for Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon to prevent them being overwhelmed by the influx of migrants. Again the UN resisted the idea, and Sutherland found out through back channels the reason why. During a peacekeeping summit held by the UN that autumn, Jan Eliasson had felt that the US had strong-armed countries into taking roles as peacekeepers. He feared that the US would similarly bully countries into making commitments at a special summit for Syria. There began a diplomatic shoving match between the US and the UN.
Assistant secretary of state Tony Blinken focused his diplomatic efforts on the quartet. The UN finally announced on 20 November 2015 that a summit would be held in September 2016. But it would be a summit on refugees and migrants. Eliasson insisted that it couldn’t only be about refugees and it couldn’t only be about Syria. It fell far short of what Sutherland had hoped.
The life of young Alan Kurdi, however, was pivotal in one of the biggest institutional shifts in the approach to migration. Richard said she could persuade John Kerry to bring the IOM into the UN. And she did. The key moment came in June 2016 at a vote of the IOM council, when it agreed to become part of the UN. The official signing ceremony was scheduled to take place at the UN summit on 19–20 September 2016. But, as a result of the heart attack Sutherland had suffered a few days earlier, he would miss one of his most significant achievements as UN Special Representative for Migration. There was a round of applause from the floor in his honour.
In January 2016, Sutherland had missed Davos for the first time in nearly three decades. Instead he visited the beaches in Greece to monitor first hand the scale of the crisis. His frustrations with the UN occasionally spilled over, particularly in correspondence. Here is just one of countless emails sent by Sutherland to both Moon and Eliasson during this period:
Dear Jan
The UN, in my view, must demonstrate leadership at this vital moment – that is really what is being asked for by both the US and Germany. The Global Compact Conference will not, in itself, provide such a demonstration. It is probably a good thing but its time frame and general remit will not answer the obvious need for a Mediterranean initiative focused on Syria which I, at least, do not believe will be adequately covered by other proposed conferences (which are not, in any event, under UN aegis).
Another concern I have is that many of the persons that we should be protecting are not refugees at all and this is not merely a UNHCR matter. IOM have a big role to play for one so does Human Rights.
So I remain convinced that there is an urgent need for the Secretary General to call for an International Conference of two parts: firstly an immediate one relating to Syria and secondly to the Compact.
The UN must be seen to be a leader at this time.
Best regards,
Peter
The US was still determined to focus on refugees, and on Syria. Samantha Power, the Dublin-born US ambassador to the UN, pushed Eliasson on the matter. On 20 December 2015, the US, whose patience with the UN had by then run out, announced that it would hold its own summit – to be known as the Obama summit – in September 2016. Focused exclusively on Syria, it was looking for specific commitments from the countries involved.
Positive developments emerged from both summits, although they fell short of the outcomes that Sutherland had wanted. The UN summit led to the New York declaration on refugees and migrants, the 126 pages of which were mostly aspirational – but at least it clearly stated that it was the political will of member states to save lives, protect rights and share responsibility on a global scale. The summit itself achieved very little else. The countries that attended failed even to agree a plan to resettle 10 per cent of the world’s refugee population. At the Obama summit, meanwhile, the US agreed to increase its intake from 85,000 to 110,000, while some countries that had never taken refugees pledged to do so.
*
The idea of a Sutherland Report on migration was originally conceived in 2012, but work started on it only in 2014. The aim was to put together a comprehensive plan and set of guidelines on how countries could work together to ensure orderly, safe migration. When, after two years, it was published, it turned out to be Sutherland’s most important written legacy. The report was very mindful of the impact migration had on host countries, although it chimed with Sutherland’s broad philosophy on migration: that it was a force for good but for it to work it had to be well managed.
In the opening of the report, Sutherland wrote:
Migration is generally good news, but its benefits can take time to materialize, while many of the associated costs arise upfront. And there are inevitably individuals – indeed sometimes large social groups – for whom it is harmful. Their concerns can and must be addressed, not brushed aside. But that requires an effort, not only from governments but from society as a whole. Rather than playing on fears or exaggerating problems, we need to identify those problems systematically, and look for practical solutions. Above all, it is in everyone’s interest for migration to happen safely and legally, in a regulated rather than a clandestine way. The latter not only exposes other workers to unfair competition, provoking resentment and lowering overall standards of welfare, safety and hygiene, but also puts migrants at the mercy of unscrupulous employers and traffickers, who may subject them to the worst abuses – sometimes described as ‘modern slavery’, which is abhorrent to all mankind.[2]
In the conclusion of the report, Sutherland reflected on the themes that had defined his decade-long tenure. He lamented that nothing could be achieved without trust – ‘trust among governments, as well as between governments and their constituents’. Sutherland pushed the point that at no time in recent history had the bonds of trust been so frayed between governments, particularly on issues surrounding migration, ‘about which the general public is fearful and badly informed’. Because of this, Sutherland knew that progress could only be made incrementally.
He continued:
That is why I suggest tackling problems at the lowest level where they can be solved. Sometimes that means the local or national level, but on some issues States need to work together, bilaterally, at the regional or even the global level – seizing on the initiatives of pioneers and champions, and working through what has been called ‘mini-multilateralism’, whereby small groups of interested states work together to develop and implement new ideas that can then be debated, and perhaps adopted, in more formal settings. Attending to the concerns of those who feel threatened by migration is necessary, if we are to avoid destructive reactions and achieve sustainable results. Confrontation will get us nowhere. Progress on international cooperation in this area must take the interests of all legitimate actors into account. As long as there are stakeholders for whom the system is not working, they will at best ignore it or worse, undermine it. Listening to each other, seeking tirelessly to identify shared goals and to agree on paths for reaching them, will – I am convinced – enable us to find solutions that hold out hope for us all.[3]
According to Maniatis, the UN was initially resistant. Normally this type of report would be requested by the UN system, but there was clearly no appetite at an institutional level for its putative aims. ‘We wrote it but we didn’t want to have to get UN support because we didn’t want it to sound like a UN report. We needed a lot of leverage to get it published by the UN without having it reviewed by the UN. The main aim we had was to speak straight about the challenges facing migration, and to outline what could be the foundations for international co-operation. For example, if the IOM was placed within the UN, then what would it do? What should be the priorities that the UN should tackle? What should member states do? How do you go about that in a practical way?’
The Sutherland Report was finished at the end of 2016 and was the product of among the most systematic work ever conducted on migration. Sutherland had committed the funds needed to strengthen his New York team to work on the report. In drafting the report, Maniatis was joined by Doyle, Mortimer, Fouinat, and several other independent migration experts and other advisors – Colleen Thouez, Sarah Rosengaertner, Justin MacDermott, Katy Long, Kathleen Newland and Maggie Powers. Sutherland had read a final draft a few days before his heart attack. But because he had been unable to approve the final document, Maniatis and the team spent three months getting pushback from the UN.
‘The UN view was, how can it be called the Sutherland Report when he hasn’t signed off on the final draft? I ended up going personally to Guterres to get his support to publish it,’ says Maniatis. Guterres ensured that the report was translated and published in February 2017, and it would help form the basis for the UN’s Global Compact for Migration.
The Global Compact for Migration is not legally binding and allows countries to remain in charge of their own immigration policy, but commits signatories to improving co-operation on international migration. The pact was agreed by all 193 UN members, except the United States, in July 2018, and was to be formally ratified at a conference in Marrakesh in December 2018. That October, however, it became highly politicised. Sebastian Kurz, the coltish chancellor of Austria, who had flirted with the far right on his way to becoming the country’s youngest ever leader, publicly expressed reservations about the pact. Viktor Orbán, the authoritarian prime minister of Hungary, came out against it. The Yellow Vest movement in France organised against it. The Belgian government collapsed because of the pact. Although the Global Compact for Migration was signed in Marrakesh on 16 December 2018, only 164 countries had formally adopted it at the ceremony on 10 December. Among those who refused to adopt the deal – in addition to the United States – were Hungary, Austria, Italy, Poland, Slovakia, Chile and Australia.
It was still a significant achievement. Maniatis has bittersweet memories of the ceremony. Sutherland had set out twelve years earlier to put migration on the agenda. There had been a number of victories along the way, but the signing of the global compact was by far the most important. Sutherland, however, would not live to see this outcome.
History very rarely repeats itself, but it often rhymes. Twenty-four years earlier, in the same city, Sutherland had presided over the ratification of the Uruguay Round of trade talks. That, some people would argue, had been the starting point of globalisation. The compact on migration directly addressed one inevitable outcome of that process.
*
Migration today is perhaps a less politically sensitive issue than it was in 2015 and 2016, but it is still divisive. It is still fuelling populism and the move to the far right, particularly in Europe. ‘A lot of that is based on the misunderstanding of emigration,’ observes Michael Doyle. ‘There are lots of studies to show that well-regulated migration, not just opening your borders, is a net long-run positive on societies, but it has to be well managed so that the type of people who would be in competition with migrants have the resources invested in them that allow them to also prosper. That can be done. We see that in the UK migration was a big factor in the Brexit vote, but cities like London are dependent on migration.’
In 2015, at the height of the Mediterranean crisis, Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, took the very brave decision to announce an open border policy and accept an estimated one million asylum seekers. The move caused a backlash not only in her own country but also throughout Europe, and featured prominently in the Brexit campaign. When Sutherland met Merkel in the autumn of 2015, he whispered in her ear, ‘You are my hero’; it is safe to assume that his reaction was quite different from most others she had encountered.
In retrospect, says Doyle, Merkel’s policy had unfortunate consequences, because the image of open borders was played upon very heavily by the far right. But he wonders what she could have done differently in the circumstances. ‘Tens of thousands of migrants were flowing through Austria and arriving at the German border. It is not clear they could have all been vetted adequately, which is what should have happened. The Austrians were threatening to close their border, which would have backed the problem into less humane circumstances in Hungary.
‘The only migration that is good migration is when it is safe, orderly and regulated to ensure that there is proper vetting to keep out criminals, to ensure that refugees are legitimate and that labour migrants are needed in the recipient economy,’ adds Doyle. ‘Nobody would say Germany was a model of what should have happened, and I don’t think Peter would have said so, but in the circumstances it was the only humane thing to do. It will probably take another ten years for the German investment to be recouped.’
Doyle was not surprised at Sutherland’s passion for migration. Assessing his legacy on the matter, he believes, will take time. ‘His main accomplishments are founding the GFMD and bringing everybody together to see what needed to be done.’ The end result of his efforts, the New York Declaration of 2016, greatly improved understanding of refugees. Sutherland was on track, says Doyle, to create the kind of institutions that led to the WTO. ‘We are not there and it was not achieved during his lifetime, but he was laying the intellectual foundations for a better regime for migration. I think he will be considered the pioneer who outlined a humane face for global migration.’
Mary Robinson commends Sutherland’s practical approach to migration. ‘I was very impressed about how articulate he was on the subject. He wasn’t naive about migration.’ She adds, ‘He was very good at building alliances. He was very good at cajoling. When you have somebody who has a strong personality and has a passion, it’s called leadership, although he could be a benevolent bully at times. I think Peter’s main legacy is that he was hugely influential in making migration a central issue.’
According to Mortimer, Sutherland stayed in the UN migration role for longer than anybody expected. The Sutherland Report, he believes, would probably have had more of an impact if he had been able to personally present it at the UN. ‘People took notice of him. As far as I could see he was not intimidated by the backlash on social media. He would have preferred to do it in a non-confrontational way.’ Sutherland was, says Mortimer, ‘a liberal with a small l’.
In October 2016, António Guterres was unveiled for his five-year term as secretary general of the United Nations, replacing Ban Ki-moon. Other candidates who had applied for the position included Helen Clark, the former New Zealand prime minister and head of the UN Development Programme; Irina Bokova, the Bulgarian chief of UNESCO, the cultural and educational agency; Danilo Turk, an ex-president of Slovenia and former UN assistant secretary general; Igor Lukšić, Montenegro’s foreign minister; Natalia Gherman and Vesna Pusić, former foreign ministers of Moldova and Croatia respectively.
Although it was never publicly disclosed, Peter Sutherland had also thrown his hat in the ring. In the summer of 2015, he had held private discussions with several friends and associates about his intentions. As Gregory Maniatis explains, ‘I don’t think there was a time when he thought there was a decent chance it would happen. He spoke to people in Ireland and a few other countries. He was perfect for the role. He was visionary and he knew how to manage. He got enough positive feedback from countries to keep his campaign going for a year. We gamed out a lot of different scenarios. We could see a pathway for Peter. He had risen very much in prominence over 2015 and 2016. It wasn’t such a strong field that you would think he didn’t have a chance.’
There was one big problem, however. The UN Security Council had a veto – and Russia, as a member, could exercise that veto. Sutherland sensed that this presented a roadblock. When he was chairman of BP, he had taken on powerful Russian oligarchs close to Russian President Vladimir Putin, while the Russians were fundamentally opposed to his views on migration. ‘He also had the sense that the French viewed him as too much of a free marketeer to be suitable for high office,’ says Maniatis. Because of this, Sutherland quietly dropped his campaign in the spring of 2016.