Malloch Brown

Guardianistas are getting all excited about Gordon's new, nuanced, non-poodly foreign policy and his anti-neocon new minister Mark Malloch Brown.

From the Telegraph interview Mr Malloch Brown seems to have a fiver each way on himself.

Some worry that Lord Malloch Brown, who is 53, will dominate the 42-year-old David Miliband, but he said: "It's fine for me to be, for the first time in my life, the older figure, the wise eminence behind the young Foreign Secretary."

What he wants to contribute, he said, is his less conventional, internationalist views. "I am not steeped in the British way of doing things. My whole career has been spent trying to get China or France or the international rescue committee to back me on some quixotic intervention on anything from child mortality to an ugly little civil war somewhere. I think in a more lateral, out-of-the-box way."

He said that he sees himself merely as a back-up. "I think David Miliband will score a hit when he goes to Washington. They know me very well. They have already started doing what they did at the UN, calling me when they have problems that they want to see fixed," he said.

I look forward to Des Browne asking him to sort a few more armoured helicopters and some body armour. Oh, and 4,000 extra troops. I'm sure the Swedes or French will oblige.

His highly-paid job as vice-chairman of a hedge fund had to be sacrificed when he accepted Mr Brown's job offer.

That hedge fund wouldn't belong to George Soros, would it ?

Mr. Malloch Brown was recently appointed vice-chairman both of Mr. Soros's hedge fund and of his Open Society charity. The luxurious upstate New York house in which he lives belongs to Mr. Soros.

He joined Labour last week, sends the kids private. Certainly fits the profile of recent appointments.

He's getting rave reviews across the pond.

It is extraordinary that in the midst of a global war on terror led jointly by Britain and the United States, the new P.M. has chosen a hugely controversial figure as one of his chief international spokesmen, a man who can barely disguise his contempt for the current American administration. Other than outspoken former International Development Secretary Clare Short, it would be difficult to think of a prominent British politician more disdainful of present U.S. foreign policy than Mark Malloch Brown.

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 ...
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.

Is this appointment just a sop to the anti-war brigade, or does Gordon really mean it ?