The reason why Mark Malloch Brown was made a life peer is, I think, likely to have been that in our system, it is necessary for ministers to be directly answerable to Parliament. In June 2007, when Gordon Brown succeeded Tony Blair as Prime Minister, Malloch Brown (no relation, obviously!) was appointed as Minister of State at the FCO, with responsibility for Africa, Asia and the United Nations. As he had extensive experience of all three areas, at first sight at least, there was nothing surprising, or reprehensible, in the new PM following a more ‘American’ model and having a minister, in an important portfolio, who had not been elected to the Commons. And installing Malloch Brown in the ‘Upper House’ would have been a perfectly natural and proper thing to do. A closer look at his ‘CV’, however, would have filled me foreboding, even had I read it outside of the context of ‘Russiagate.’ I have been attempting to assimilate the material in the piece which Matthew Ehret published on the ‘Strategic Culture Foundation’ site on 17 November, and follow up some of the leads there and elsewhere. (See https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2020/11/17/lord-malloch-brown-revealed-the-british-hand-behind-coup-shows-its-scales-again/ .)
There is a relevant contrast with the three figures I discussed in my previous comment. So, unlike them, Malloch Brown is a kind of ‘toff’ - although not really any kind of ‘standard issue’ British kind. According to ‘Wikipedia’, his father, an erstwhile South African diplomat, was in exile from his native country when his son was born, in London, in 1953. The relevance of the African background to his subsequent career looks as though it may be complex, and worth exploring. His education and early career, however, follow a familiar British pattern. After attending Marlborough, a famous ‘public school’ whose pupils have included the Duchess of Cambridge, Malloch Brown took a ‘First’ in history at Magdalene College, Cambridge, and then did a Masters in ‘Political Science’ at Michigan. Shortly afterwards, he became political correspondent of ‘The Economist.’ This was already a ‘red light’ for me, as that paper, and to a somewhat lesser extent the ‘Financial Times’, gave me something of a shock at the time of the retreat and collapse of Soviet power. People whose politics I had thought were not so far from my own – which in those days might have been loosely called ‘conservative liberal’ – suddenly revealed themselves as displaying a postively ‘neo-Bolshevik’ belief that simply toppling deeply unloveable ‘authoritarian’ systems would magically create some kind of ‘nirvana.’ Also, many such people have displayed – time and again – their inability to display any kind of ‘empathy’ – which may or may not mean imply ‘sympathy’ – for ‘deplorables’, be they in Russia, the United Kingdom, the United States, or wherever. In so doing, they have done nobody any favours, not even, looking longer term, themselves. I got censored by the ‘Financial Times’, I think it was before ‘Brexit’, when I suggested that contemporary Western élites made the pre-1789 French aristocracy look ‘ear to the ground’ and ‘in touch.’ If such people had not decided that they could safely ignore the discontents which to anyone who bothered to look had been visibly building for decades, then then there would not have been a ‘Brexit’, or indeed the election of Donald Trump. Looking at Maddoch Brown’s career after his initial stint at the ‘Economist’ aroused further suspicions. My current, very preliminary, ‘SWAG’ is that he may be a kind of British ‘Alden Pyle’ figure. Without wanting to express regret that none of the the inhabitants of the polities in whose murky political intrigues he became entangled have resorted to drastic methods to counter Malloch Brown’s activities, I think it quite possible that his career may illustrate ‘degenerative dynamics’ whose early stages Graham Greene’s novel charts.
The fact that such people characteristically become involved in intrigues too deep for them, in which they are liable to find that rather than being the ‘dog’ they are the ‘tail’, is liable to create very good ‘rational’ reasons for ‘cover-up.’ This reinforces the pressures towards acting with a complete lack of scruple, arising from their very limited understanding characteristic of how the ‘hoi polloi’, both in foreign societies and their own, think and act, and their consequent inability to cope with the ‘populist revolts’ which their own incomprehension fuels. (The appalling treatment of Lieutenant-General Flynn by a whole range of people, on both sides of the Atlantic, may I think have been eminently ‘rational’, from their point of view, seen against this background: he was simply too dangerous.) Moreover, once one has placed a great deal of faith in the use of ‘political technologies’ to influence voters, and one discovers that they are failing to deliver, it may not be so large a step to take to look for ways to exploit modern technologies to do, more effectively, what has been done by crude means at a local level for years. But, until I have a better grasp of the evidence relating to Dominion, Smartmatic, and Soros, I am not in a position to be clear as to quite how the suspicions which have been raised about the role of Malloch Brown in election manipulation, by Ehret and others, are justified.
Where a naive faith in the possibilities of technology ends, and the deliberate cynical exploitation of very real possibilities for corruption technological development can create begins, is often not easy to determine. There is one reservation I have about the Ehret article, which is related to the mixed feelings I have had, over the years, about much of the material produced by people associated with the late Lyndon LaRouche. They have been, in my view, absolutely right in seeing the interrelations between elements pursuing ‘covert’ strategies in the United Kingdom and United States as central to making sense of recent history. And I have found that the work they have produced has turned up a very great body of very valuable information – just as Ehret has done. However, the ‘narrative’ into which they ‘fit’ – sometimes one might indeed say ‘shoehorn’ – this evidence, in which innocent Americans are led astray by devious, Machiavellian ‘Brits’, very often, in my view, fails to justice to the complexities of the interactions involved. Over the past months, moreover, I have become increasingly concerned that this ‘narrative’ can be exploited by those individuals and groups in your country who have been most intimately involved in ‘The Plot Against the President’, to use Lee Smith’s title, to, in effect, get off ‘scot-free’: or at least, with no more than a ‘slap on the wrist.’ What Christopher Steele rather clearly suggested, in his responses to his cross-examination by Hugh Tomlinson, QC, on behalf of the Alfa ‘oligarchs’, back in March, was that his ‘co-conspirators’ were colluding to make him the ‘patsy’ in relation to ‘Russiagate.’ In my view, there would, in this, be a certain of ‘poetic justice.
It may very well be, however, that, on this point at least, Steele is, essentially, telling the truth. And if he is, then those who in one way or another give aid and comfort to the ‘patsy’ strategy may make it materially easier for a Biden Administration to obscure the collusion between people at the top of your law enforcement and intelligence apparatus and the Democratic leadership, which, in my view, is central to ‘Russiagate.’
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