Cameron’s secret weapon

The Sunday TimesJuly 8, 2007



Martin Ivens meets Dame Pauline Neville-Jones
Anyone you can hire I can hire better. Gordon Brown has recruited a host of big names to his new government. To advise on the terrorist threat he has brought in Admiral Sir Alan West and Lord Stevens, the former Metropolitan police commissioner, no less, both men pompous and reassuring when in full dress uniform.

They are, however, but mere men. David Cameron trumped them in his Conservative reshuffle last week by appointing to full shadow cabinet member status two eye-catching women. The vastly experienced mandarin, Dame Pauline Neville-Jones, comes in to keep a beady eye on security matters. And a feisty Muslim woman, Sayeeda Warsi, ascends to the Lords to oversee community cohesion. Of her more later.

Neville-Jones could give Judi Dench’s M from James Bond lessons in assuming the mask of command. She was former chair-woman of the Joint Intelligence Committee and is as tart of tongue as Dench’s character.

Greg Dyke, the former BBC director-general, whom she helped to unseat in her capacity as a governor after publication of the Hutton report, called her “a grey lady”. In the flesh she is fair to yellow of hair, neat and spare in smart white-and-yellow top and black trousers. Our conversation across a formal blue-velvet covered table could be the meeting of two amicable antagonists across the diplomatic divide. All that is missing are the flags.

A history graduate of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, by way of Leeds girls’ high school, her mother, father (he was killed in the second world war) and stepfather were all doctors. Having got the Foreign Office, the BBC and the City under her belt, Neville-Jones, a youthful 67, says she “did not expect” her latest appointment but “if you have such longstanding interest in policy and government it is an opportunity to influence them from within” and “enrich the public debate”. Lucky us to be so enriched.

Perhaps her new post makes up for the disappointment of reaching the heights of political director of the Foreign Office only to be denied the plum post of the Paris ambassadorship. She resigned in a fury amid a welter of briefing that her manner was not “sufficiently emollient for the niceties of diplomatic life”. She was shocked by what she saw as a male chauvinist assault on her character and she came from a generation who had to give up the idea of a family life in order to succeed.

I ask her about the view that the Iraq war has “blown back” terrorism to the UK. Tony Blair spent his last years in office denying it. But she says: “The threat to this country preceded the intervention in Iraq . . . but the effect of Iraq has been to act as a recruiting sergeant . . . giving our enemies the narrative of western hostility to Islam and Muslims in general.”

Was the Iraq war illegal in international law? With some hesitation she says not: Saddam Hussein had flouted United Nations resolutions. But she adds bitingly: “The equally important issue was political legitimacy. What is dangerous in any democracy is not to have a political consensus behind you.” And now Blair’s career is behind him, too.

Of the facts on the ground she has written that “the intervention in Iraq has failed in its objectives so badly that the threat to this country is actually greater than it was before it began”.

But, as you would suspect from someone so critical of the rush to war and the twisting of intelligence to suit those ends, she does not subscribe to the neo-conservative vision of spreading democracy at the point of a gun throughout the Middle East.

She supports “democracy” but “the ballot box” is not a panacea. She prefers to build up the institutions of constitutional government slowly. Some Islamists would win an election once and then abolish democracy. “The West took centuries to build the institutions which would lead to those outcomes.” Nice if you have the time.

What does she make of the Islamic organisations in Britain that Blair once attempted to bring into formal alliance with government, most famously the Muslim Council of Britain? Blair gave up on them eventually as hopelessly anti Israel, Salman Rushdie and British foreign policy in the Middle East.

The council has (belatedly) condemned the Heathrow and Glasgow airport terror plots. Perhaps it and some ministers want to resume the dialogue. Neville-Jones smiles thinly: “I was glad to see the condemnation of the atrocities but no group [of people] in this country should work through representatives.” She wants to reach out to Muslims as individuals, not through self-appointed community leaders.

For her, as for many others, multiculturalism has stopped Muslims integrating with the host community. She doesn’t want French-style assimilation where women have to remove veils in public – but “there must be more to groups than just rubbing along”. She quotes Amartya Sen, the thinker: “The right to be involved is the right to be treated the same despite difference, not differently because of it.”

Neville-Jones shares Brown’s interest in “what it is to be British” although she thinks this is partly prompted by the prime minister’s Scottish problems postdevolution. But she seems genuinely misty-eyed about the good old days: “In the 19th century the fathers of the nation had the Children’s Reader series in the new compulsory schools” – “kings and things” taught them what “made them Brits”.

Once “we sang Rule Britannia” without embarrassment: “We have become apologetic about what it is to be British.” I can’t, somehow, see us singing Rule Britannia together.

Cameron bested Brown at prime minister’s questions on Wednesday over identity cards. Brown had cited Neville-Jones’s support for them. The Conservative leader shot back with a quote from Alistair Darling, the new chancellor, who once sneered that ID cards reduced all our lives “to a magnetic strip”.

Brown might have said, if he had been agile, that his friend had changed his mind. Has Nev-ille-Jones? Just to make this helpfully clear to David Davis, the shadow home secretary, I will repeat what she said a few years ago: “I am aware that measures raise civil liberty issues. It is a question of the citizen’s individual rights of liberty and privacy versus the rights of the public to collective security. What modern terrorism had done is to tip the balance.”

Neville-Jones concedes: “I have expressed support for them [IDs] but there are a whole series of qualifications. It is more important to know who is in the country and who is leaving.” She thinks that a border police is a greater priority.

Cameron also had fun at Brown’s expense on his hesitation about banning the Muslim extremist Hizb ut-Tahrir organisation: “If you put legislation on the statute book to put boundaries about what is permissible . . . you must enforce it.” Like her leader, Neville-Jones cites the organisation’s antisemitic pronouncements. But why not prosecute it under existing antiracist legislation, say the critics. Why resort to a ban? These are deep waters. Neville-Jones counters that if the government is satisfied that Hizb ut-Tahrir is not extremist then it should say so.

What offends her is the cascade of new antiterrorist law churning through parliament, replicating existing powers and creating new offences. It offends her sense of orderly government: “Abu Hamza was prosecuted for offences passed in the Victorian era on public order. The government is overloading the statute book.”

She defends the judges and won’t support suspending parts of the Human Rights Act on the deportation of foreign nationals suspected of terrorism to countries that practise torture. “They must produce a case,” she argues, using telephone tap intercept evidence if need be: “If the government appears to have an aggressive agenda on security, others feel they must protect rights and liberties.”

Noble sentiments but last month showed us how far terrorism can proceed before evidence can be obtained. Do we owe sanctuary to foreigners who want to kill us? The dame is hard to pin down but says she is uneasy about the concept of detention without trial: “I would like to see sunset clauses built into this legislation.”

Yet there are degrees of opposition to the government. I quote Warsi, her new colleague, on Blair’s last set of antiterror proposals: they were “enough to tip any normal young man into the realms of a radicalised fanatic”.

“We have good debates, Sayeeda and I,” says Neville-Jones with a not waving but drowning grimace.

This part of our conversation worried her Central Office minder enough to ring back later to remind me that Warsi made these remarks only about the 90 days’ detention proposal, not about all antiterror legislation. Well, here’s another interesting quote from her colleague: “If terrorism is the use of violence against civilians, then where does that leave us in Iraq?”

Warsi, 36, now insists, “I did not say Iraqis are freedom fighters”, and she backs the banning of Hizb ut-Tahrir. But she still wishes to win hearts and minds “and if that means speaking to ‘the nutters’ then that’s what we must do . . . Angry young men should be brought round the table because we have to engage with them”.

I am not sure Neville-Jones is so keen on angry young men. The combination of a Muslim woman who happily accepted an arranged marriage, and an English establishmentarian who had to surrender hope of marriage so as to advance in the old sexist Foreign Office, is one to watch.