Mr Mandelson, Lord Powell and New Labour's Syrian connection
STEPHEN GLOVER
0 n Thursday of last week a fascinating article by Peter Mandelson appeared in the Independent. It was in praise of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, who the previous day had contrived to humiliate Tony Blair. Mr Mandelson's piece had been written before the debacle, and in the expectation that the visit would go swimmingly. He had not foreseen that Mr Assad would defend Islamic suicide bombers as 'resistance fighters' or suggest that hundreds of civilians were being killed every day in Afghanistan. Mr Mandelson informed the bemused readers of the Independent that the Syrian President was 'an intelligent and cultured individual' who is applying a new broom. He had met Mr Assad in January, when he was still Northern Ireland secretary, and spent three and a half hours with this charming man. At that time, of course. Mr Mandelson was spoken of as a future foreign secretary.
Six weeks ago I touched on a nexus of three men — Mr Mandelson, Charles Powell, a suave operator who is a former adviser to Margaret Thatcher, and Wafic Said, the Syrian-born multi-millionaire. I remarked then that Mr Mandelson had paid a visit to Syria earlier in the year, which had been arranged by Charles Powell. Lord Powell is a close friend of Mr Said's — indeed, he heads his bank in London — and he introduced Mr Mandelson to him. I noted in that column of 29 September that Lord Powell had written an article in the Daily Telegraph chiding the Israelis at the same time that Mr Mandelson published a similar piece in the Guardian which suggested that the Israelis could do more to achieve a settlement with the Palestinians.
At about the time my article appeared, Lord Powell was asked by Tony Blair to go to Syria to see whether President Assad would agree to meet him. In whose head this idea was originally conceived I cannot be sure. It is likely that Jonathan Powell — Mr Blair's chief of staff and, as it happens, Charles's younger brother — played a part. (Charles and Jonathan meet frequently.) Lord Powell himself may have pushed the idea: and we can be certain that his boss, the Syrian-born Wafic Said, favoured the prospect of a meeting between Mr Blair and Mr Assad. Lord Levy — another of Mr Blair's unofficial Middle Eastern envoys — may well have been involved. At all events, Lord Powell flew off to Damascus to sound out Mr Assad, whom he had met once before. As he told the Daily Telegraph last Friday, he was somewhat embarrassed to find his face plastered over the front page of the Syria Times but, fortunately for him, the British press doesn't have any stringers in Damascus these days.
The question we need to address is as follows: exactly whose interests was Lord Powell representing in his visit to Syria? Since he was sent there by Mr Blair, the answer might appear to be obvious. On the other hand, Lord Powell works for Wafic Said, who wants a rapprochement between Syria, the country of his birth. and Britain, the country of his adoption. That largely explains Mr Mandelson's three-and-a-half-hour meeting with Mr Assad in January. Mr Said has arranged for others to visit Syria. For example, earlier in the year Vivienne Duffield, the multi-millionairess daughter of the late Jewish businessman Charles Clore, went there. She received a private written rebuke for her pains from Lord Weidenfeld, the former publisher and tireless Zionist.
Mr Said is by all accounts an absolutely charming fellow. He is anglicised — and married to an English wife — and has a large estate at Tusmore near Oxford where politicians, businessmen and even the occasional journalist are asked to shooting parties. Where Mr Said's vast fortune originates has never been wholly established; he vehemently rejects the description of arms dealer. One of his more striking acts of philanthropy was a gift of some £20 million towards a new building for Oxford University's business school, which was officially opened a few days ago, and outside which demonstrators were to be found early this week in the apparently misguided belief that Mr Said is an arms dealer. What is clear, though, is that he does do business in Syria. In July of last year his First Saudi Investment Company was one of four concerns which announced the formation of a $100 million holding company committed to investing in Syria's mobile-telephone net work, the Internet and hotels. At that time President Bashar al-Assad had just succeeded his murderous father. One of the other four companies in the new holding company, and therefore associated with Wafic Said, was the Bin Laden construction group, founded by Osama bin Laden's father.
It goes without saying that Mr Said's man of business, Lord Powell, is someone of complete probity, as well as a British patriot who has done the state notable service. He would not have gone to Syria on Mr Blair's behalf had he not believed that a visit by the British Prime Minister to Damascus was in the best interests of this country. But there are — how shall we put it? — potentially conflicting currents here. Lord Powell has been serving two masters. That is not to say anything against Mr Said, a businessman who wants to make money. From Mr Said's point of view the advantages of employing Lord Powell are plain. He has excellent contacts within the Blair administration, not least with his own brother, and he has also boasted in the press of his friendship with Colin Powell. the American secretary of state, as well as with the ex-president, George Bush senior. In January or February he went shooting with Mr Bush at an Oxfordshire estate, which may have been Tusmore.
Lord Powell cannot really be blamed for last week's debacle in Damascus. Why President Assad did not live up to Mr Mandelson's ecstatic (and, to me. troubling) billing in the Independent is a little unclear. Presumably the ground had been well prepared, but Mr Assad probably felt impelled by domestic considerations to toe his father's old line, at least in public. But if no particular blame attaches to Lord Powell for Mr Assad's conduct, Mr Blair would be wise to extricate himself from the Mandelson–Powell–Wafic Said nexus. His own vanity or presidential ambitions have led him to set up his own foreign-policy network with freelance operators like Lord Powell and Lord Levy. The trouble is that such operators carry their own baggage, and Lord Powell's weighs a good deal. Tucked away in an inside pocket, perhaps without his being aware of it, is the Bin Laden construction group. We have, on the whole, an excellent Foreign Office, filled with experts who owe no allegiance to Syrian-born businessmen, and it would be much better if Tony Blair could bring himself to rely on them, rather than on Charles Powell and Peter Mandelson.
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