Molto panico in Downing Street yesterday. Wickets were falling. Master strategists were gobbling cyanide pills. Aides scurred right and left and further left, white-faced, trousers flapping.
Yet one figure appeared – at the time of writing, anyway – to be going nowhere. Jonathan Powell, the National Security Adviser, was safe in his roost. Why? Of all No 10’s advisers, he was arguably the most culpable for the disarray of the Starmer Government.
You may not have heard of Jonathan Nicholas Powell. He prefers it that way. Whereas Peter Mandelson and Morgan McSweeney long seemed to relish their demonic reputations, Mr Powell is one of life’s spectral figures. He is an eminence grise, a flitterer in the shadows, a half-sensed shape that shifts in the gloaming to whisper words in ears, impart viscous advice and ease his own survival prospects.
It is now widely accepted that Mr Powell was one of the two vital sidekicks who encouraged Sir Keir Starmer to appoint Lord Mandelson as our ambassador to Washington DC. The other was Mr McSweeney and he, accepting the dreadfulness of the mistake, has departed. Pouff! Gone in a puff of hemlock.
Like a midge on the windscreen of an accelerating car Mr Powell clings on for dear life, and so far his suction pads are working.
Although the title of National Security Adviser may not sound exciting, some at Westminster call Mr Powell ‘the real Foreign Secretary’. Yvette Cooper occupies that great office of state in name, yet it is said she has little influence over policy or the major appointments.
It is to the tousle-haired Powell that Sir Keir defers on geopolitical strategy. It was he, not Ms Cooper, whom Sir Keir had at his side when he met China’s president Xi Jinping in Beijing a fortnight ago. Powell was a picture of patrician languor that day, pushing back his chair from the table and crossing his legs. How conceited he looked. A year ago he was at the White House, too, carrying an enormous briefcase when Sir Keir met Donald Trump.
If Mr Powell, 69, looks to-the-manner born, it may not be surprising. His much older brother Charles was Mrs Thatcher’s foreign affairs adviser. Jonathan himself joined the Foreign Office in 1979 and held various middle-ranking positions, possibly intelligence related, until he had a lucky break. In the early 1990s he was on a posting to Washington when he was told to get close to a ‘no-hoper’ presidential candidate Bill Clinton. When Mr Clinton entered the White House, Powell suddenly became the Foreign Office’s hottest expert on US affairs.
Jonathan Powell is the National Security Adviser, though some at Westminster call him ‘the real Foreign Secretary’
That good fortune brought him to the notice of Tony Blair, newly elected leader of the Labour Party, who was eager to muscle in with President Clinton. Blair asked Mr Powell to become his chief of staff. He remained in that job during the decade of Blair’s premiership. When we handed Hong Kong over to the Chinese, Powell was there. When we did a deal with the IRA to stop their war, he was in the thick of things – it was almost as if he derived a thrill from meeting gnarled Provos who had led the terrorist campaign.
And after Manhattan’s Twin Towers were destroyed, and as George W Bush’s neo-cons took the US to war in Afghanistan and then Iraq, it was very much Powell who was supervising our involvement. The then British ambassador to Washington, Sir Christopher Meyer, asked Downing Street how it wished him to proceed. Back came the message from Powell: ‘Get up the a*** of the White House and stay there.’
If the instruction was coarse, simplistic, self-lowering, it was perhaps instructive. Mr Powell is one of those Left-wing baby boomers who has a low opinion of his own country. He is so ashamed of our history – so warped by post-imperial guilt – that he thinks we should grovel to foreign powers, or in the case of the IRA, to Ulster hoodlums.
In those Blairite days he worked closely with Peter Mandelson. Mandelson was so amused by Mr Powell’s shimmering efficiency that he nicknamed him ‘Jeeves’, after the ‘gentleman’s gentleman’ in PG Wodehouse’s comic novels. The fictitious Jeeves has the ability to enter a room unnoticed. Jeeves always knows how to get his chinless wonder of a master out of scrapes.
Wodehouse’s Jeeves is a benevolent figure. The same cannot be said of Powell. The Iraq War was an enormous mistake, costly in blood, treasure and historical consequences. It only emboldened Islamism. Hundreds of British service personnel died, as did hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.
When Blair left No 10, his successor, Gordon Brown, did not retain Mr Powell’s services. The Blairites and Brownites had got along badly, as Powell detailed in a joltingly indiscreet book.
When he published that bitchy account of the Blair-Brown struggles, he perhaps little suspected he would ever return to Downing Street. But when Sir Keir won the 2024 election, he soon appointed Mr Powell as his envoy to negotiate the so-called deal that has come to be called the Chagos Isles surrender. Britain offered to give away the ownership of its strategically vital air base in the Indian Ocean to Mauritius, which had no historical connection with the Chagos Isles.
More than that, Mr Powell agreed that we would pay billions of pounds for future use of this base – which we already own! The driving emotion behind this dreadful idea was, again, our old friend post-imperial guilt. When Donald Trump regained the US presidency in 2024, Britain had an excellent, professional ambassador, Karen Pierce. She knew the Trump team well. She was colourful, congenial and able to put the case of British interests without offending Mr Trump. But Downing Street – more particularly, Jonathan Powell – developed the view that Ms Pierce would not do. It was decided that a politician was needed. A man. Someone who could speak Trump’s locker-room language.
Sir Keir Starmer was encouraged by Mr Powell to appoint Lord Mandelson as our ambassador to Washington DC
Trump is admittedly a rum piece of work, but would Ms Pierce not have been a better choice? The usual procedure is to trust the professional diplomats. And ‘usual procedure’, as we know, is Sir Keir’s default setting. But someone talked him into defying civil service convention.
If you will permit me to join the dots, it may be worth recalling that when Powell became No 10’s chief of staff in 1997, special arrangements had to be made to allow him and Alastair Campbell (both political appointees) to work in positions that should have been held by impartial mandarins.
The Blairites, most notably Powell, have never had time for civil service convention. They regard the rules as an inconvenience. They place greater premium on personal connections, ‘who you know’, on the nod-and-wink approach, politics as the milieu of rich men and schmoozers and pals. This is the foetid swamp in which the Mandelson appointment was made, with the connivance of both the fallen Brother McSweeney and the still-untoppled Powell.
Had Sir Keir only had more belief, in himself and his country, he would have kept Karen Pierce in place. A prime minister with some national pride might also have told international lawyers to take a running jump when they pressed him to surrender the Chagos Isles.
Instead we have a National Security Adviser (National Self-Loathing Adviser, more like) who reveres our country’s critics and caves in to our opponents. And somehow, when so much else is falling to pieces, he survives. It is baffling. And wrong.
