For those who didn’t click through to Kathryn’s link yesterday, it’s worth doing so. Gordon Brown’s elevation of Mark Malloch Brown to the House of Lords and thence to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office is one of the most revolting public appointments in modern British history.
Malloch Brown was Kofi Annan’s deputy at the UN and widely promoted (and self-promoted) as an agent of reform, or rather “reform”. He’s best known to Americans for his Trent Lott-esque attack on talk radio. As I wrote in NR exactly a year ago:
The bit in the speech that got everyone’s attention was when he argued that the reason the U.N. was so unpopular in America was that the moronic hayseeds in flyover country had fallen for the right-wing blowhards — or, as he put it, “much of the public discourse that reaches the U.S. heartland has been largely abandoned to its loudest detractors such as Rush Limbaugh and Fox News.” He didn’t, in fact, say “Limbaugh” but “Lim-bow,” as in “Daddy Wouldn’t Buy Me a Bow-Wow.” A chap as important as Mr. Malloch Brown can’t be expected to tune in a radio and actually listen to Rush in order to get his name correct: After all, he’s a lot busier than those dimwit yokels in the “heartland”…
The deputy secretary general’s fellow speakers at this meeting included George Soros, who happens to be Mr. Malloch Brown’s next-door neighbor and landlord. Mr. Malloch Brown earns $125,000 a year, $120,000 of which he gives to Mr. Soros as rent for his home, next to the gazillionaire’s own in Westchester County. When they entered into this relationship, Mr. Malloch Brown was head of the U.N. Development Program, which works with Mr. Soros on many multimillion-dollar projects. The deputy secretary general insists there’s nothing “improper” in his mixing of his professional and personal lives, and, indeed, by the ethical standards of the U.N. — which is to say, the Oil-for-Fraud program, the Child-Sex-for-Food program, etc. — there isn’t.
George Soros has been Malloch Brown’s patron for decades. Upon his retirement from the UN, the deputy secretary-general became vice-chair of Soros’ hedge fund company and “Open Society Institute”. With respect to Andrew Stuttaford, anyone inclined to join the good-riddance-to-Blair chorus of the last week might now appreciate the difference he made: a huge chunk of the foreign policy of America’s closest ally has just been outsourced to a man who is the living embodiment of the worst kind of sleazy careerist transnationalism, and an all but wholly owned subsidiary of George Soros. Amazing.