Servants of the People
By Andrew Rawnsley
Published September 2000 by Hamish Hamilton, ISBN 0241140293
Book synopsis: Every new government promises to represent a new dawn, but for New Labour it was the Covenant that Tony Blair made with Britain. The party that won a landslide victory on May Day 1997 made the special claim that it represented a decisive break with the disappointments of the old left and the old right: its Third Way would transcend both. Having fashioned an extraordinarily wide coalition to secure power, New Labour would hold it as Servants of the People. Was that a grandiloquent way of saying the government would be enslaved to the opinion polls? Or has Tony Blair been pursuing a strategic plan, breathtaking in its audacity, to remake the political landscape of Britain in the third millennium?
Chapter 10, "The Ethical Dimension", Extract pp 176-184
Sierra Leone was a faraway country in the armpit of West Africa about which most Britons knew little and cared less. The nation's mineral wealth was also its curse. Struggle for control of the diamond fields had plunged it into years of civil war. In May 1997, Ahmed Tejan Kabbah, the elected president, was overthrown by Johnny Paul Koroma, a Sandhurst-trained army officer, who unleashed a wave of violence atrocious even by the brutal standards of African coups. The revolting specialities of the cannibalistic Revolutionary United Front included macheting legs and arms off men, women and children.
Britain was committed to restoring Kabbah to power. So much so that he was the Prime Minister's personal guest at the Commonwealth summit in Edinburgh. But in this blood-drenched corner of Africa, ethical choices were presented not in black and white, but in dirty shades of grey. The only regional power capable of restoring Kabbah was Nigeria, itself an international pariah which had been expelled from the Commonwealth for extreme violations of human rights. In the attempt to equip himself with a fighting force, Kabbah was trading arms for mining concessions through one Rakesh Saxena, whom [Robin] Cook [the UK Foreign Secretary] would memorably describe as 'an Indian businessman, travelling on the passport of a dead Serb, awaiting extradition from Canada for alleged embezzlement from a bank in Thailand'. The arms to Kabbah were supplied by Sandline International, a company of British mercenaries.
This murk was thickened by farcical confusion about the means and ends of British policy. As Sir John Kerr, the Foreign Office's Permanent Secretary, would eventually concede: 'It's not a pretty story'. If the tragedy of Sierra Leone recalled Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, then the Foreign Office's role could have been scripted by Evelyn Waugh. A sloppily worded United Nations resolution, principally drafted by British officials, could be read as imposing an arms embargo on not just the junta, but also the ousted democrats that Britain supported. It was then translated into British law as a blanket ban. Even though ministers understood that, Foreign Office briefings to MPs, the media and their own diplomatic staff gave the impression that the embargo applied only to Koroma's regime. After Kabbah was returned to power in a counter-coup in March 1998, Tony Lloyd, the Minister for Africa, told the Commons that the resolution 'imposed sanctions on the junta'.
This was the interpretation being followed by the FO's man in West Africa, Peter Penfold. The British High Commissioner to Sierra Leone was a local hero for his strong support for Kabbah. Penfold holed up at a hotel in Conakry, the capital of neighbouring Guinea. His communications with London were worse than pigeon post. Crucial documents went astray or were destroyed. His satellite phone didn't work. He had been sent a coded fax machine, security cabinet and deciphering material, but left them at the airport because he judged them too large to fit through the hotel bedroom door.
Penfold had on several occasions discussed the mercenaries' plan to arm Kabbah with Tim Spicer, the former Guards officer who ran Sandline. Though the civil servants hotly disputed this, Spicer maintained that he also told officials on the Africa desk in London of his intention to run guns to Kabbah.
The Foreign Office was formally committed to an arms embargo while its man on the spot was, if not actively encouraging, apparently not discouraging armed intervention to get the result Britain wanted. This was - as the report by MPs would conclude - the result of 'dealing in half-truths - a dangerous commodity'.
That his own department was running two policies towards Sierra Leone was something about which Cook would thereafter maintain he was in blissful - but hugely perilous - ignorance. On the evening of 28 April [1998], the Foreign Secretary returned to his official London residence at Carlton Gardens looking forward to a relaxing evening with his new wife. He found two of his aides waiting for him in a state of great agitation. One of them, Andrew Hood, had discovered a ticking fax buried in Cook's in-tray back at the Foreign Office. It was a letter from solicitors acting on behalf of Sandline, saying that the company was under investigation by Customs and Excise for sanctions-busting. The company said it was guiltless because its activities were known to officials on the Africa desk and encouraged by Penfold. Attached to the fax was a note from officials, saying that, after a tip-off about the allegations of sanctions-busting, they had referred the case to Customs in March. In fact, Customs had already raided the Foreign Office. According to Sir John Kerr's subsequent account, the Permanent Secretary did not pass this sensational information to the Foreign Secretary for three weeks.
What his aides told him that evening left Cook aghast. The combination of mercenaries and arms-running sounded deadly. It could smash the remaining brick of what was left of his crumbling reputation. His greatest achievement in Opposition had been his merciless prosecution of the Conservative government's secret connivance in the supply of arms to Iraq. An arms scandal would surely be the final, mortal blow. When the story began to break publicly on Sunday [3 May 1998], it was with precisely the interpretation feared most by Cook. One headline [The Sunday Times] announced: 'Cook snared in arms for coup inquiry'. In a mounting panic, Cook rang Blair to assure him that he would get to the bottom of it.
What 'put the story on stilts', as Cook would subsequently lament, was a woeful performance by Tony Lloyd when he was ambushed with questions about gun-running by the foreign affairs select committee on Tuesday. As they pressed him to explain who knew what and when, Lloyd floundered like a sprat in a net. In the wake of the debacle, Cook called together an emergency meeting of senior officials and ministers in his high-ceilinged office overlooking Horseguards, Denis MacShane, one of the parliamentary private secretaries, reported that there was restlessness on the backbenches and the press was likely to be dreadful. 'Thank you, Denis,' snapped a nervy Cook. 'I think we bloody well know that.'
The Blairite minister at the Foreign Office was Liz Symons, the former General Secretary of the First Division Association of Civil Servants. She was reflecting both a desire to protect those whom she used to represent, and Number 10's general view, when she questioned whether announcing an inquiry was really necessary. Penfold, she said, should be 'treated properly'.
Ken Purchase [Cook's parliamentary private secretary], in his blunt Black Country way, turned on Lady Symons. He reckoned that was the sort of argument which he used to hear when he was a local councillor and there were allegations of abuse in children's homes. 'You're talking like a bloody NALGO [National and Local Government Officers Association] official.' Symons flushed up: 'Well, thank you very much.'
Cook felt acutely vulnerable to the accusation that he had been involved in deception. 'No one must be able to suggest a cover-up,' he told the meeting. On Wednesday afternoon, he promised the Commons that: 'There will be no whitewash.' If there had been a breach of the arms embargo 'that is a very serious matter which must be fully and openly investigated'. He implied - much to the fury of civil servants at the Foreign Office - that officials had left ministers in the dark and suggested there was a case to answer by offering them the services of criminal lawyers.
Fearing that he would be accused of prejudicing the Customs investigation, Cook was opaque about many details of the affair. While this may have been technically proper, it added to the impression that there was a scandal which was being covered up. 'Coup plot Cook never noticed,' chortled the Independent. 'We are invited to believe that, to adapt an old joke, Mr Cook has been treated by his staff as a sort of political mushroom - kept in the dark only to find himself now covered in the rich manure of political embarrassment.' The Sun, a newspaper not previously distinguished for interest in West African affairs except of the sexual variety, devoted four pages to what was now known as 'Arms-to-Africa'.
Number 10 watched with mounting infuriation. This was yet another case of the Foreign Secretary getting himself into a mess. To his aides, Blair vented his exasperation: 'For God's sake, the good guys won.' The Prime Minister discussed it with Alastair Campbell, Peter Mandelson and Jonathan Powell: they were agreed that Cook had lost the plot.
On Monday 11 May, doing a media 'doorstep' at a London college, Blair delivered an apparent extempore, but actually carefully rehearsed, interpretation of what had happened. Britain had been helping democrats back into power against a military junta. 'Don't let us forget,' said the Prime Minister, 'that the UN and the UK were both trying to help the democratic regime restore its position from an illegal military coup. They were quite right in trying to do it.' Penfold had done 'a superb job'. Blair repeated the message in the Commons two days later, dismissing the furore as 'a lot of hype in the media and on the Opposition benches … I described it as overblown hoo-hah and that is what it is.'
On the large fact - that Britain had taken the side of the democrats - the Prime Minister was perfectly correct. President Kabbah wrote an open letter expressing his profound thanks for the 'principled and ethical position' of Britain.
What Blair dismissed as a 'hoo-ha' on Wednesday blew up again the following morning courtesy of the Permanent Secretary himself when he appeared before the foreign affairs select committee. Sir John Kerr, though more modern-minded than his predecessor, had a traditional view of the loyalties he believed civil servants and politicians owed to each other. Kerr was angered that Cook had dumped the blame on officials. Now the Foreign Office's senior civil servant dropped the politicians in it. The usually smooth mandarin cut up rough in an acrimonious 100-minute confrontation with the MPs. Asked how far up warnings of illegal arms shipments had gone, he replied: 'I don't know.' Disastrously for the government, he told the MPs that ministers had been told about the Customs investigation in March, contradicting the categorical and repeated assertions by Cook and Lloyd that there had been no briefing about the allegations of sanctions-busting until much later.
When news of Kerr's performance was conveyed to him, the Foreign Secretary was furious. After a seething exchange in Cook's office at lunchtime, Kerr sent a letter of clarification to the MPs. 'I have checked my memory,' read his recantation. The 'briefing pack' prepared for Lloyd when he spoke to MPs on 12 March 'does not mention arms shipments', though it had reported a possible deal between Kabbah and Sandline.
Briefing packs were at the centre of the controversy, which was particularly unfortunate for Cook. He was once again hoist by the braggadocio of his early days in office. Finding a bust of Ernie Bevin hidden behind a pot plant at Carlton Gardens, Cook had it dusted off and given it a proud place. That January, he had been seen on television comparing himself with the great post-war Labour Foreign Secretary:
'The story goes that Ernest Bevin, on his first weekend, was left with five red boxes and a note saying: 'Foreign Secretary we thought you would like to do these five red boxes over the weekend.' And on Monday, when the staff came in the private office, they found the five red boxes in the same place with a note in his handwriting: 'A kind thought, but sadly erroneous.' I'm happy to say that nobody's ever tried to present me with five red boxes, but ever since I heard that story I have recognised that you can be a successful Foreign Secretary if you focus on the big questions, not necessarily if you finish the paperwork.'
His own suggestion that he did not finish his paperwork reverberated back to Cook to add weight to the charge that he was incompetent. The accusation of idleness was unfair, but his conceit had handed this hurtful weapon to his critics.
On 18 May, there were two announcements designed to draw a line in the sand under Sandline. The Attorney-General said that there would be no prosecution of the company. Cook simultaneously set up an inquiry by Sir Thomas Legg, a retired civil servant, who savaged 'systematic failures of communication' within the Foreign Office, but cleared ministers of deceit. Blair had already pre-empted the verdict by declaring: 'When people say they run an ethical foreign policy, I say Sierra Leone was an example of that.'
The foreign affairs select committee continued to dissect the Foreign Secretary, his ministers and officials. The MPs' report was scheduled to be published on Tuesday 9 February 1999. The Friday before, the committee's chairman, Donald Anderson, bumped into Cook in the House of Commons. 'Don't rubbish our report, Robin,' said Anderson, suggesting it could even be quite helpful. Cook said nothing in reply. What Anderson did not know was that the Foreign Office, in breach of parliamentary rules, already had possession of his committee's report.
Contrary to Cook's subsequent explanations of the leak, it was not faxed to the Foreign Office out of the blue. Ernie Ross, an MP on the committee, had approached Ken Purchase in a Commons tearoom and asked him whether he wanted an advance copy. Ross had it faxed to himself, which is why his name was later discovered on the document, then passed it over to Purchase, who walked around clutching the brown envelope for two hours until he met Cook and handed it over. The Foreign Secretary then dropped it - whether he opened it or not is unknown - into the in-tray of his political adviser, Andrew Hood.
When Ross was revealed as the leaker and forced to resign from the committee, Cook said he had 'nothing to apologise for'. He was rebuked after admitting that his office had received not just that report, but two others leaked from select committees. Cook claimed: 'Any use of that knowledge would have been an offence, but I made no use of it.'
Yet the Foreign Office was giving to the media a detailed rebuttal of the report before it was officially released. The morning of its publication, Tony Blair was extraordinarily well acquainted with the contents of a report he could not have had time to study when he attacked the MPs' findings on the Jimmy Young [BBC radio] programme. This was a typical display of New Labour's manic combination of arrogance and insecurity. For it was all rather unnecessary. The inquiry had actually cleared ministers of the killer charge that they had been complicit in the breach of an arms embargo.
The excoriating findings were about the mismanagement of the Foreign Office. Sir John Kerr had 'failed in his duty to Ministers': just about the gravest charge that can be levelled at a Permanent Secretary. Officials were accused of 'at best political naivety, and at worst Yes-Minister like contempt'. Yet Kerr remained in post. The officials accused by the committee of treating policy on the arms embargo 'in a disgracefully casual manner' and 'making serious errors of judgement' were promoted. The whitewash that Cook had forsworn was thrown over the Foreign Office by the bucketload.
As the furore dissipated, it left behind confusion in New Labour's collective head about what was an ethical foreign policy. The murderous gangsters of the RUF, now led by Foday Sankoh, continued to destabilise President Kabbah. With encouragement from Britain, Kabbah signed a peace deal which brought them into the government of Sierra Leone. 'The good guys', as Blair had called them, were sharing power with the vile guys. Sometimes in foreign policy there are no clearly moral options, just choices between evils. This did not prove to be the right choice. Sankoh was soon back on a murderous rampage. In the spring of 2000, British troops were sent to rescue a hopelessly inadequate United Nations force. Rather that boast of protecting the democrats, ministers pretended that the mission was confined to securing the safety of British citizens. Even when they were operating something that might resemble an ethical foreign policy, they were either too muddled or embarrassed to say so.