Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson
were quick to disparage Derek Draper and the other lobbyists caught boasting of
their government contacts by the Observer
last month.
Draper and the rest were conceited young men of little importance in New
Labour’s scheme of things, they assured us.
But the truth is rather different.
Draper is certainly a braggart – but he has played a significant part in Labour
politics in recent years, most importantly as controller of the glossy Blairite
propaganda magazine Progress and its
associated organisation. Two of the other main characters in the Observer story, Neal Lawson and Ben
Lucas of the lobbying company LLM, have had major roles in sustaining a
Blairite intellectual current inside Labour, through the journal Renewal and the ‘ideas network’ Nexus.
Draper set up Progress in late 1995 while working for Mandelson, just before the
publication of The Blair Revolution,
a dreary book-length account of New Labour’s politics supposedly authored by
Mandelson and Roger Liddle but actually written largely by Draper. (Liddle
subsequently hired Draper as a lobbyist at Prima Europe, and it was Liddle, by
now a government adviser, who was caught by the Observer promising favours to what he thought was an American
utilities company but was in fact the investigative journalist Greg Palast.)
Progress was intended
as a magazine that would never contradict Labour’s official line, and from the
start it enjoyed the support of the party’s most powerful figures. Eight issues
have appeared so far, all but the first full colour throughout, the latest at
the end of June this year. Mandelson, Blair, Gordon Brown and Blair aide Philip
Gould have been regular contributors since the beginning. Other contributors
have included Liddle and a host of other government advisers, most members of Blair’s
first cabinet (including Robin Cook, Margaret Beckett, David Blunkett, Harriet
Harman, Clare Short, Donald Dewar, George Robertson and David Clarke) and a
welter of other Labour politicians, many of them first elected as MPs in the
1997 election.
Progress’s patrons
include Gerald Kaufman and Baroness Jay. It has had substantial financial
backing from David Sainsbury, the supermarket magnate who once bankrolled the
SDP; he was put in touch with Draper by Blair himself.
Progress also
organises ‘political education’ events at which Labour activists can meet
senior government figures. This summer, speakers at its weekend schools include
ministers Chris Smith, George Foulkes, John Spellar, John Reid, Joyce Quin,
George Howarth, Derek Fatchett and Peter Hain, members of the Number Ten policy
unit (including Liddle) and various party officials. The goal of these events
is simple: to build up a cadre of Blairite activists in local Labour parties
who can be called upon to organise in support of the leadership in internal
party elections and on policy.
The efforts of Lawson and Lucas,
at least in recent years, have been less visible but no less important. Even
though they are only in their thirties, they are both political veterans who in
the late 1980s were stalwarts of the Labour Co-ordinating Committee, the once
hard-left internal Labour pressure group that in the mid-1980s transformed
itself into a pro-leadership faction.
After the 1992 election, the LCC
put most of its efforts into producing a quarterly journal, Renewal, of which Lawson became business
manager. Renewal in turn spawned
Nexus, an electronic ‘ideas network’ largely composed of academics, in 1996.
Lawson and Lucas, both by then working as lobbyists after spells as aides for
Gordon Brown and Jack Straw respectively, played a decisive role in getting
Nexus off the ground as the key members of its ‘core working group’.
Renewal was the
nearest thing to an intellectual forum that Labour’s modernisers had between
its launch and the New Labour take-over of the New Statesman in 1996; and Nexus has provided the Labour leadership
with a useful platform for developing big ideas. It was at a Nexus event last
month, for example, that Jack Straw gave his much-hyped speech on the ‘third
way’; there has also been a Nexus seminar with Blair at Number Ten Downing
Street.
Add the role of their lobby firm
LLM as a conduit between business and government, and it is clear that Lawson
and Lucas were, until exposed by Palast,
just as useful to New Labour as Draper. The disgrace of all three cannot be
lightly dismissed.
