Who is one of the most influential figures in the Labour Government and yet almost unknown to the British public?
Who secretly brokered the recent controversial deal whereby Britain agreed to hand over £101million annually to Mauritius for 99 years in return for a lease on a base in the Chagos Islands, which a previous administration had already secured with a payment of £3million in 1968?
Who is fanatically anti-Brexit – and indeed began to campaign for a second referendum only a couple of weeks after the British people had voted to leave the European Union?
Who was in Ukraine in March – a one-man diplomatic service flitting about the corridors of power in Kyiv – trying to thrash out a ceasefire with Volodymyr Zelensky that would be acceptable to Donald Trump?
The answer to all these questions is Jonathan Powell. He is Tony Blair‘s former chief of staff who last November was appointed Britain’s National Security Adviser by Sir Keir Starmer. Powell is the principal official adviser to the Prime Minister and Cabinet on national security matters, which is a very important job.
Jonathan Powell was appointed Britain’s National Security Adviser by Sir Keir Starmer last year. He is the principal official adviser to the Prime Minister and Cabinet on national security matters, which is a very important job
His was an arresting appointment in several ways, not least because, unlike his six predecessors in the role, he hadn’t been a very senior civil servant. Powell was a junior diplomat when he was plucked out for stardom by Blair 30 years ago.
He became an effective Labour Party apparatchik, serving Blair for the entire ten years of his prime ministership. That was four years longer than his more high profile, and much less subtle, colleague – spin doctor Alastair Campbell.
Powell is in the news – doubtless much to his discomfort – because yesterday’s Mail on Sunday reported accusations that he is running a secret diplomatic back channel to terrorists and other dodgy characters using his own taxpayer-funded team of nameless operatives.
A few years after he left No 10, Jonathan Powell founded an outfit called Inter Mediate, whose website says its mission is ‘to advance political solutions toward a more peaceful and secure world’. Much of its work is rather less highfaluting than this statement implies.
Inter Mediate continues to receive funding from the Foreign Office for making contact with non-state armed groups even though its founder is now the National Security Adviser. He has formally stood down as the charity’s £200,000-a-year chief executive.
Powell (pictured with Sir Tony Blair in 2007) was a junior diplomat when he was plucked out for stardom by the former prime minister 30 years ago
One of the group’s reported successes was to help establish links with the new Syrian government, paving the way for a visit to Damascus by Foreign Secretary David Lammy to meet recently installed President Ahmed al-Sharaa.
Unfortunately, not everything is going according to plan. Inter Mediate’s work is being undermined by a bloody conflict between Islamist Bedouin tribes and the Druze in the south of Syria.
There is of course nothing illegal, or even necessarily undesirable, about a so-called charity associated with Britain’s National Security Adviser playing a behind the scenes role in UK foreign policy. But it is certainly a very rum state of affairs.
Even rummer is the fact that Jonathan Powell, despite his important job, is classified as a ‘special adviser’. This means he doesn’t have to answer to Parliament even though he deals directly with foreign governments – for instance, when popping up in Ukraine and negotiating with Mauritius over the Chagos Islands.
Such unaccountability of course suits him perfectly. Most of his working life he has operated in the shadows, seldom having to give an explanation for his actions, still less having to justify them.
As Tony Blair’s chief of staff, this serpentine creature was (along with Alastair Campbell) given unprecedented powers to issue orders to civil servants, including senior ones, despite the objections of the then head of the civil service.
But being neither a civil servant himself, nor of course an elected politician, Powell was able to avoid giving evidence to parliamentary committees. During his ten years at Tony Blair’s side, he largely flew below the radar, making or being party to important decisions without being properly examined.
Stephen Glover has no doubt that Powell, the veteran anti-Brexiteer, is using his influence over Sir Keir Starmer, persuasively dripping his pro-EU propaganda into the Prime Minister’s receptive ear
For example, he supported the efforts of Alastair Campbell in ‘sexing up’ the September 2002 dossier, which tried to make a case for war against Iraq on the grounds that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. (He didn’t.)
On one occasion, Powell wrote to Campbell and Sir John Scarlett, head of the Joint Intelligence Committee, who was charged with drawing up the dossier: ‘I agree with Alastair you should drop the conclusion … Alastair – what will be the headline in the Evening Standard on the day of publication? What do we want it to be?’
Powell later told the Hutton Inquiry that he hadn’t played a ‘major role’ in drafting the dossier. Arguably true, but he certainly exercised some influence over it.
Despite his virtual immunity to parliamentary scrutiny, Jonathan Powell was chief British negotiator in Northern Ireland from 1997 to 2007. In this role, he and Blair secretly agreed to amnesties for more than 200 suspected IRA terrorists, though this was not revealed for many years.
Powell nursed a soft spot for Martin McGuinness, chief of staff of the Provisional IRA during the Troubles and undoubtedly responsible for many murders. After McGuinness’s death in 2017, Powell remembered him as ‘likeable’. (Campbell went even further, tweeting that McGuinness was ‘a good guy’.)
Incredible though it sounds, as well as being a major figure in what was called Blair’s ‘sofa government’, Powell was also responsible for raising funds for the Labour Party.
He nearly landed his master in the soup after approaching Formula One tycoon Bernie Ecclestone for contributions after Labour’s 1997 election victory. Blair narrowly escaped corruption charges after the Government said it would seek an exemption for Formula One (which Ecclestone had backed) from an EU ban on tobacco advertising.
Jonathan Powell was undeniably an important figure in Blair’s court, loyally doing what he thought his master wanted, while receiving much less media attention than the more confrontational and brutish Campbell.
And now he’s back. So too, as British ambassador in Washington, is Peter Mandelson, another Blairite acolyte. The two men probably wield more power in foreign affairs than the slow-footed David Lammy. To this degree, at least, New Labour is back.
Since Powell and Mandelson are far more experienced, intelligent and well-informed than Lammy – as well as than most of those on Labour’s unimpressive front bench – one might be tempted to welcome their return.
But Powell’s reinstatement in particular is hard to take. How typical of the man
that the company he founded should be playing a mysterious, unofficial role in British foreign policy, possibly connecting the Foreign Office with some very dubious people.
Nor do I have any doubt that this veteran anti-Brexiteer is using his influence over Sir Keir Starmer, persuasively dripping his pro-EU propaganda into the Prime Minister’s receptive ear.
More than anyone in modern politics, Powell has succeeded in wielding power without accountability. The extraordinary thing is that he has been allowed to get away with it.
Where will this elusive man turn up next? Someone must collar him. A fundamental axiom of democracy is that public figures should answer for their actions – and it’s high time Jonathan Powell was made to do so.
