john kampfner on a shocking account of how consultants seized global political power |
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The problem, Peter Mandelson once said to me of a prominent Labour backbencher, is that he thinks too much. This was the mid 1990s, the Blairite revolution of spin was at its peak and nobody would be allowed to stand in its way. I had been a foreign correspondent for a decade and was green in the Westminster game.
I was pondering this exchange as I was reading Alpha Dogs, a new account of politics-as-PR. It is written by James Harding, now editor of the Times, but it draws on his years in Washington for the FT. The main figures in the narrative are American, but the model is global. Even now, with a dozen years of Westminster life behind me, I remain shocked. Call me purist. Call me naive.
Harding's account is based on the men (and it seems they were all men) of Sawyer Miller, a company created out of nothing that went
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on to advise politicians and corporations around the world. Originally, the company placed itself on the side of the liberal democratic angels, but in time it mattered not who its clients were or what they stood for - the government of Colombia, for instance. The Sawyer Miller men saw their job as to turn round whatever brand they alighted on - as long as the money was good enough. By the end, it all imploded, but not before many had moved on to smart jobs in the White House and elsewhere.
The anecdotes about their foreign consultancy gripped me most. I loved the accounts of Venezuela in the 1970s and the Philippines in the 1980s. Fascinating to learn, for instance, that it was former President Jimmy Carter who suggested to Cory Aquino's American friends that Sawyer Miller should help handle the Aquino campaign, and even more gripping to discover that Mark Malloch Brown, the Foreign Office Minister, was the fellow Sawyer Miller first sent to the Philippines. His escapades there make for very entertaining reading, as do his later
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Politics and the triumph of the will
