Gordon Brown may come to regret appointing former adman, quango chair PR supremo and failed telecoms CEO Stephen Carter as No 10 propaganda commissar.
“‘What I tell them is nine-tenths bullshit and one-tenth selected facts.” Stephen Carter, special adviser to Gordon Brown
Gordon Brown never lets us down, does he, where duplicity, spin and cowardice are concerned. As usual when faced with trouble, our unelected PM, our Beloved Leader, has turned tail and run away.
In other words (to borrow a Thatcherism) Brown’s frit.
The prime minister may think that by disappearing off to furthest China ( has he never heard of the internet?) that he’s distancing himself from his (*cough* Peter Hain) troubles. He should be so lucky.
While Gordo’s away with the begging bucket, other quietly simmering governmental troubles are coming bubbling to the top. The appointment of Carter was meant to deal with negative publicity while Brown makes himself scarce. But it’s going to prove a little tricky now the spindoctor has now become the story.
Isn’t the whole point about propaganda to never let the pretence slip, to never tell the truth, to be economical with the actualité?
But it seems Carter, who you’d think’d know about spin, once forgot himself and told the truth:
Stephen Carter, Brown’s new chief of strategy, who has given up a lucrative job chairing a City PR firm to take up his new £137,000-a-year government post, was chief operating officer at British cable TV company NTL between September 2000 and 2001. When Carter arrived, NTL had $17bn of debt on its books and the company was struggling to retain customers. He continued to reassure investors and the media that the company was performing well and was expanding its customer base, according to a class-action lawsuit filed in the Southern District Court of New York in 2002. One document alleges that following a teleconference call with investors and analysts in 2001, Carter was asked by his customer marketing director, Charles Darley: ‘How can you … persuade investors to believe that NTL is going to be OK when you know it isn’t?’
According to Darley’s recollection, quoted in the lawsuit, Carter allegedly replied: ‘What I tell them is nine-tenths bullshit and one-tenth selected facts.’
In 2006, the insurance company acting on behalf of Carter and some other NTL directors named in the lawsuit agreed a $9m settlement with disgruntled NTL investors who brought the action through New York-based law firm Milberg Weiss. As part of the agreement, the directors did not admit liability when the lawsuit was wound up.
Not exactly credibility-enhancing, is it?
It seems Brown’s new chief spin doctor’s attitude towards the public that pays his salary chimes with that of his new boss – he thinks we’re so stupid we’ll accept any old bollocks.
Admittedly it wasn’t the British voters he was referring to, rather the hapless investors and customers of cable company NTL, but it’s a pretty good insight into the quality of advice Gordon Brown’s getting at present.
But it’s not just advice he’s giving – this unelected flimflam man is being given the power to make crucial political and governmental decisions, despite never having been elected by anybody:
Stephen Carter has been hired, I’m told by one well placed adviser, to be Gordon Brown’s ‘back of the car man’ – i.e. someone who can grab a few minutes with the boss on the way to an event and take him through a list of 10 pressing political decisions. In addition, the hope is that Brown and his aides will trust Carter to take those decisions when the PM is simply too busy to take them himself.
So now we have a spindoctor and alleged fabricator as our de facto unelected deputy PM. But then Brown was never really elected either, was he? Democracy, schemocracy.
But let’s get back to spinner in chief Carter.
Because the evidence against him was never tested, after the NTL settlement there were no obstacles to Carter’s next appointment as Head of Ofcom, the regulatory body for UK telcoms. Many were surprised, to say the least:
When Stephen Carter was appointed to run Ofcom, the media industry’s first super-regulator, there was little sound coming from the chattering classes – their jaws had universally dropped.
At the time of his appointment, Carter was an unemployed 38-year-old whose last job was presiding over the bankruptcy protection proceedings of NTL, the cable company crushed by £12bn of debt.
What a fantastic idea – to put an alleged market-rigger and failed CEO in charge of regulation of the very same market he failed in! Genius.
From there Carter then became CEO of massive PR company and Friends of Labour The Brunswick Group:
Brunswick Group is an international PR firm, with almost a third of the FTSE 100 top firms as clients, they are the biggest financial communications consultancy in the UK. They paid more than £5,000 to the Labour Party for ‘tickets for dinners’ in 1999-2000 and gave £9,000 in August 2001. The company also donated the services of an employee to the Government to help work on the Financial Services and Markets Bill – legislation which will regulate business in the City and which would provide invaluable information to Brunswick’s clients.
Oh – you mean that same legislation that’s enabled the subprime meltdown and debacle that is Northern Rock? Well done, thou good and faithful servant.
Now Carter’s in No 10, right at the elbow of the PM. He’s the man whose job, to quote the Times, it is to “sell Gordon Brown to the public”. I hope he’s on a probationary period, because he’s not doing a well so far, is he?
A few of today’s headlines:
Gordon Brown dithers over Peter Hain
This slow death, watched with open glee
Brown denies dithering over Northern Rock rescue plan
Come along, Mr Brown … if Hain is incompetent, just sack him
However, it appears that advising the most incompetent and floundering PM in recent memory and taking decisions no-one ever elected you to take isn’t actually the full-time job – and more – that you’d think it is. No, Carter kept a couple of other sinecures, despite being paid 137,000 pounds a year by the taxpayers:
He resigned from the post of chief executive of Brunswick, and stepped down as non-executive director of Royal Mail and Travis Perkins and as a commissioner of the UK Commission for Employment and Skills. He will remain chairman of the Ashridge Business School and a governor of the Royal Shakespeare Company
Carter’s reported to have got the No 10 job through connections of Sarah Brown:
Gordon is married to Sarah, who used to work for Alan, who owns Brunswick, the City’s biggest PR firm. Stephen also used to work for Alan, but now he works for Gordon, who also happens to be godfather to one of Alan’s children.
The appointment of Stephen Carter, former head of media regulator Ofcom, as Gordon Brown’s new ‘fixer’ at Number 10 is testament to the growing power of Brunswick founder Alan Parker, whose sphere of influence now extends far beyond the Square Mile and deep into Whitehall and Westminster.
Parker is close to Brown and his wife Sarah , who ran her own PR company before moving to Brunswick, and the PM is said to have been impressed with Carter, who was chief executive of Brunswick, after meeting him socially. When the 51-year-old multi-millionaire Parker remarried last year, Brown and David Cameron were among the guests and Parker has hired other politicos in the past, including Andrew Hood, a former adviser to former Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon, who joined the company as his ‘chief of staff ‘ in a similar role to that carried out, briefly, by Carter.
Nice how they keep it all in the family isn’t it?
In addition to spinning the truth Gordon Brown and New Labour, in their ten years of power have spun a web of unelected, unaccountable connections amongst and between the corporatocracy and the government, of which Peter Hain’s mucky funding scandal is only one loose thread. Whether it can ever be untangled is doubtful. and to extend the metaphor, it may be that the whole dirty tangle will have to be cut down if public confidence in government is ever to be restored. Cutting the Gordian knot, if you will.
Next stop the heart of Gordo’s web: The Smith Institute.
