These days, the go-getting author will persuade whatever notable mates he has to write some glowing words of praise for the cover of his new book. Lord (Mark) Malloch Brown, former deputy secretary-general of the United Nations, former vice-president (external affairs) of the World Bank, former minister of state at the Foreign Office, and all-round Mr Fix-It, is clearly in the premier league when it comes to mates.
So his first book is presented with encomiums from, among others, Queen Noor of Jordan (“this wise and passionate book”) and his old boss at the UN, Kofi Annan (“Mark’s book is authentic, compelling and immensely enjoyable. His message should resonate in national and international discourse for years to come”).
Annan may well believe that it should, but I’d be most surprised if it did. The “message” is neither new nor exceptional, amounting to little more than the plea that the nations of the world should all work together, casting off the petty nationalistic concerns of their local electorates (as Malloch Brown sees them), to make the planet safe and “sustainable”. It is the internationalist’s equivalent of motherhood and apple pie. Thus, in his peroration, he declares: “The stakeholders in global openness — governments, civil society, and businesses — need to stand up for the values that underpin this agenda: the rule of law, democracy, human rights, opportunity, and sufficient security for all.”
You see what I mean? Malloch Brown is a master of well-meaning guff. Actually he does seem, and not just from his own account, a very decent man. Yet he is also too intelligent and honest an observer not to concede that the UN’s collective record in delivering on its objectives has been lamentable: the whole of that gargantuan and unaccountable organisation has never been bigger than the sum of its inchoate parts.
What he could have brought to his account, given the extraordinary access this ex-journalist has had, is the real dialogue of international diplomacy, laying bare, verbatim, the hypocrisy of rulers as they strut the world stage. Alas, there is not a single indiscretion in the book. British readers, for example, will have wanted to know about the chaos Malloch Brown must have encountered within Gordon Brown’s administration, given that he quit in frustration after two years.
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To be fair, the author does vent a tiny bit of the rage he must have felt when Brown replaced him at the very last moment as emissary to the opening of the 2007 General Assembly, where he would have sat next to President George W Bush. The prime minister, apparently, was worried that Malloch Brown’s presence would offend the president: he had been an outspoken critic of the invasion of Iraq.
Malloch Brown protests that he loves America. There’s no reason to doubt him. He found his wife there, and on the one occasion we met it seemed to my ears that he had developed a faintly mid-Atlantic accent. That is no excuse, however, for writing this, presumably the British edition of his book, in American. Thus, one sentence reads: “Britain has gotten over empire.” Another informs us that “Asia had every right to be mad”.
Malloch Brown’s prose as a whole could have been given more attention by his editors. The ghastly, almost always redundant phrase “quite literally” crops up whenever he wants to emphasise a point: for example, “Those who dared could quite literally lead the UN into new areas”; or, “At UNDP I had literally one of the world’s best jobs” — what, as opposed to metaphorically?
His editors might also have done something about his observation that he would be joining the board of George Soros’s foundation the International Crisis Group, “when I am out of government”. Since Malloch Brown was “out of government” by July 2009, such sloppiness reveals that this book is actually several years old.
Soros, indeed, is accorded more praise than any other person in the book, even more than the author gives to Annan, whom he clearly adored. According to Malloch Brown, “Soros…deserves equal billing with Gorbachev, Reagan, Thatcher and Kohl in the fall of the Berlin Wall”; and he credits Soros’s $2,300 donation to Barack Obama’s election funds in its early stages as “the tipping point” in the race for the presidency. Elsewhere in the book Malloch Brown notes his connections with the billionaire speculator; but while he cannot be accused of failure to disclose his interest, such inordinate praise for his admittedly remarkable associate reminds one that Malloch Brown’s fields of professional expertise include public relations.
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Which makes me wonder: why isn’t there an effusive quote from Soros on the back of this book, alongside Queen Noor, Annan and sundry other illuminati? Perhaps he’s saving that up for the paperback edition.