HACK ATTACK Nick Davies

HACK ATTACK: How the Truth Caught up with Rupert Murdoch
NICK DAVIES
Vintage Books, 2015, 443 pages

Review by Phil Shannon 

At Britain’s annual press awards in London’s Savoy hotel in 2011, Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World accepted, with no hint of shame, the prize for ‘scoop of the year’ for its exposé of corruption in Pakistani cricket, beating the nomination of the freelance/Guardian journalist, Nick Davies, for his six-year investigation of the criminal phone-hacking scandal that was engulfing Murdoch’s flagship gutter-press rag.

Hack Attack is Davies’ step-by-step account of how he unearthed the “dark arts” of snooping used by News of the World, in the process displaying the “secret world of the power elite and their discreet alliances”, the “casual arrogance” of press, police and politicians snubbing the law and covering up their wrongdoing.

What started as a minor skirmish which saw one private investigator and one journalist jailed in 2007 for hacking the mobile-phone voicemail of a few Buckingham Palace staff, ended in a major route and the ignominious closing by Murdoch of Britain’s biggest selling newspaper.

Guided by sleazy public voyeurism rather than legitimate ‘public interest’, and driven by a bullying managerial imperative to ‘just get the story’ regardless of ethics or legality, Murdoch’s stable of British tabloids had pioneered phone-tapping, email hacking and break-ins to dredge up the “most intimate, embarrassing and painful” secrets, usually involving sex and drugs, from the private lives of the famous and not-so-famous.  Confidential personal information was stolen from police and government databases using false pretences and deception (‘blagging’) and through cash bribes paid to corrupt employees.

News of the World  took the phone-hacking criminal enterprise to stellar heights, with thousands of victims spied on.  It was a practice deeply embedded in the paper, including amongst Murdoch’s editors who themselves directly commissioned dirt-bag private investigators or condoned their journalists’ use of them.

Yet, as the Guardian began to publish Davies’ revelations, there was a marked “shortage of people willing to get in a fight with Murdoch”.  The rest of the press (both tabloid and ‘quality’) were mute because they had their own dirty ‘dark arts’ linen to conceal.  The “senior ranks of the criminal justice system” (top cops, government prosecutors) waved everyone on.  The police were anxious to protect their own bent coppers who were on the take, were keen to butter-up a press to run only good police news stories, and were desperate to keep their own secret sexual affairs from the prying eyes of News of the World.

The then Labour Government (despite its own prominent targets of the phone-hacking) was inert.  Their politicians either ideologically embraced Murdoch’s neo-liberal values, or feared the Murdoch safes rumoured to contain dirt files on politicians, or cowered before Murdoch’s power to make and unmake governments - for the last 36 years, “no British government has been elected without the support of Rupert Murdoch”.  The incoming Conservative Prime Minister, David Cameron, appointed as his media and communications chief the Murdoch editor who had supervised the phone-hacking operation.

Both governments had invited Murdoch, his editors and his Chief Executive Officer into their inner sanctum where the price paid to keep Murdoch on side and stay his hand on mobilising News Corp readers as election-punishing “ballot fodder” was to soft-pedal on News Corp’s transgressions, to adjust media policy to promote the corporation’s business expansion, and to involve Murdoch in government appointments and Cabinet reshuffles.

Davies contrasts the elite’s kid-gloves view of the phone-hacking scandal with “the version that was being shown to me by a small collection of nervous off-the-record sources” – journalists, private investigators, the managers and lawyers of various celebrities, morally upright police detectives and government whistleblowers.

What brought the Murdoch fortress crashing down was the spread of the phone-hacking victims from the rarefied world of celebrities to common people whose targets included a murdered schoolgirl (Milly Dowler), the victims of the 2005 terrorist bombings in London, and, unforgivably to Establishment patriots, the families of British soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

This development made the News of the World product-line toxic to the entire Murdoch brand, and threatened Murdoch's plans for government sanction for gaining sole control of the TV news channel, BSkyB.  Millions of pounds of revenue were also being lost as corporate Britain withdrew their advertising.  The Church of England disinvested its £3.7 million shareholding in News Corp.  Facing such business pressures, Murdoch cut his losses and closed the paper in 2011.

This outcome would not have been possible without Davies’ forensic skills of investigative journalism.  Not content to recycle press releases, or write “propaganda masquerading as journalism”, Davies demonstrates how “the best stories are the ones which someone somewhere doesn’t want you to know”.  His accomplishment is testament to his infinite patience and unwavering attention to detail (virtues which, be warned, the reader of his book must also possess – its focus is microscopic).

“Truth had won a battle with power”, writes Davies of the phone-hacking wash-up but, he adds ruefully, “very little has changed”.  “Some people resigned and Murdoch suffered a brief humbling” but the police strengthened their anti-whistle-blowing powers and politicians’ doors have remained open to Rupert and his clones.  News of the World was relaunched as the Sun on Sunday, whilst twelve months after the Dowler story, News Corp shares rose by 23%, the company’s value rose to $73 billion, and Murdoch’s personal annual income hit $30 million.  “The power of the elite” remains, concludes Davies.

As with many Murdoch-centric books on the media, Davies’ treatment of the non-Murdoch media elite is under-developed. Ungrounded in a critical analytical framework of the media under capitalism, the focus on the grubby excesses of Murdoch can make his more moderate corporate and state media rivals appear more meritorious than they warrant, including ‘lefty’ papers like Davies’ The Guardian.  The phone-hacking of people’s private lives should be exposed but so should capitalism’s destructive hacking of people’s economic and political lives.  This is rarely part of the job description of any media which is based on and respects the boundaries imposed by the profit principle.

THE MONOPOLISTS Mary Pilon

THE MONOPOLISTS: Obsession, Fury and the Scandal Behind the World’s Favourite Board Game
MARY PILON
Bloomsbury, 2015, 313 pages

Review by Phil Shannon 

Monopoly has never been just a boardgame, not to the American feminist and anti-monopolist, Lizzie Magie, who invented the game’s forerunner in 1904, nor to the US corporate giant, Parker Brothers, which, in seeking to gain a copyright monopoly on Monopoly, stole Magie’s idea in 1935 and ideologically cleansed her game from an anti-monopolist instructional tool into an endorsement of monopoly capitalism.

The journalist, Mary Pilon’s, history of Monopoly’s copyright scandals narrates the American origins of the hugely popular boardgame, better known in Australia through the version licensed to English manufacturers with its London properties from Old Kent Road to Mayfair.

With powerful monopolies dominating key industries and unrestrainedly gouging consumers at the end of the nineteenth century, strategies to ‘bust the trusts’ were being sought by progressives, amongst them Henry George, the ‘single-tax’ politician who proposed to reduce poverty by taxing only property and leaving working class income untaxed.

Magie was a single-taxer who invented her Landlord’s Game to spread the Georgist word.  Her game had two sets of rules – one for a single-tax economy where no player could monopolise wealth, and one for monopoly capitalism where all wealth concentrated to just one player.  Modified, hand-made versions flourished during the next three decades.

Amongst the commercial fans of Magie’s game was a Depression-hit salesman, Charles Darrow, who claimed it was his invention when he sold his intellectual property rights to the game, which he had patented as  Monopoly, to Parker Bros. for $7,000 in 1935.  The rebadged game went on to sell and make millions for Parker Bros.

Parker Bros., who were aware that Darrow’s patent had been fraudulently obtained, were vigilant in protecting their sole control of their ill-gotten money-spinner.  Rival financially-themed games, and even unrelated games with the ‘-opoly’ suffix in their title (including Theopoly, designed by priests), were bought out or legally threatened for patent infringement.

The most serious potential obstacle to Parker Bros.’s bogus copyright was taken care of by paying the game’s true inventor, Magie, a measly $500 for her original patent for her Landlord’s Game, allowing it and its anti-big-business ideology to fade into obscurity whilst its monopolist set of rules became the sole set of Monopoly rules, endorsing corporate concentration and greed as players aimed to bankrupt all others.

When a new ideological challenge emerged in the 1970s from an anti-trust economics professor and anti-Vietnam-War activist, Ralph Anspach, with his Anti-Monopoly, Parker Bros. deployed the usual threat of litigation, supplemented by commercial intimidation of Anti-Monopoly’s potential distributors and sellers, and a vindictive display of corporate power in ostentatiously burying 40,000 copies of Anti-Monopoly in a Minnesota rubbish dump when an early court decision went Parker Bros. way.  In 1983, however, after an epic eight year legal stoush, Parker Bros. finally lost their case against Anti-Monopoly, an appeals court ruling that Monopoly’s Georgist progenitor had long been in the public domain, rendering Monopoly’s trademark void. 

Like Anspach, Pilon is enamoured of the anti-monopolistic battle by little business against big business.  Capitalism, they believe, can be beneficial for all if only the “right to compete” were not stymied by the titans of corporate America and their profit-bloating, restrictive copyrights.  Even in an oligopoly of small entrepreneurs, however, the profit principle is behind the harm the capitalist economic system does and this needs to be challenged.  There is a boardgame, and concept, for that - the Marxist academic, Bertell Ollman’s, Class Struggle – one to which all the players exploited by capitalism can share common ownership.

SELLING STUDENTS SHORT Richard Hil

SELLING STUDENTS SHORT: Why You Won’t Get the University Education You Deserve
RICHARD HIL
Allen&Unwin, 2015, 227 pages

Review by Phil Shannon

‘When I leave, it will be like it never really happened’, bemoans a dejected student to Griffith University Associate Professor, Richard Hil, in Selling Students Short, his investigation into the “hollowing out” of the modern university education experience in Australia.  Many of his student interviewees report a similar alienation, a lack of connection with other students, the atrophy of teacher-student interaction and an uninspiring, narrow pursuit of a vocational qualification that together make for the social and intellectual “blandscape” of today’s campuses.

Personal enlightenment and the public good have both evaporated from “University Inc.” which has been re-purposed for the needs of free enterprise rather than free enquiry.  Market values, corporate culture and a “tighter tertiary-industry fit” are ascendant in what are now “job-training centres and feeders for the industrial economy”, pumping out credentialed ‘products’ (graduates) fit for purpose (industry needs).

Starved of significant government funding, Australia’s universities have taken on the trappings, and soul, of the corporate world.  Courses which lack immediate economic utility are culled whilst multi-million dollar marketing budgets entice “tertiary shoppers” in a “mad scramble” for undergraduate market share.  Brand promotion, free iPads and other loss-leader enticements are used to attract enrolments to secure the revenue stream from hefty tuition fees.  The removal of government caps on student numbers has invited universities to take in anyone, including the sub-literate and semi-numerate.  Student quantity is valued over quality.

Crammed into overcrowded classes, the student hordes are taught by an army of 67,000 low-wage casual teachers, stressed by oppressive administrative and bureaucratic demands.  This academic proletariat is heavily populated by a glut of PhD post-graduates, trained in their redundant droves for prestigious university research jobs they will never get by university administrations because they attract rare government funds of $100,000 each.

Amongst the most aggrieved of Australia’s university students are the 223,000 international students (one quarter of the total student population).  This particular income river is highly prized by university accountants because of international student fees which are  up to three times those for domestic students.  Fraudulent entry processes which falsify academic records and English language skills let in the unsuitable, wastefully divert resources into intensive remediation, and encourage plagiarism and “soft assessment”.

Compounding the decline in the quality of education, campus culture withers due to the time pressures of employment (80% of students work to support the costs of their study), resulting in missed classes and rising drop-out rates, especially for the bargain-basement education offered by on-line tuition.  To cap it all off, unemployment, or lack of employment in their chosen field, awaits many graduates, whilst all are mugged by a long-term debt of up to $100,000.

The corporatisation of higher education results in the depoliticisation of university life, churning out graduates with the professional skills needed to administer, but not critically challenge, the hegemony of “global capitalism”.  Universities now manufacture the politically passive brain-worker whereas they once produced critically aware citizen-graduates.

Hil laments the bygone age of the liberal university when the rigorous exploration of ideas in a “joyous, passionate and engaged passage through higher education” was assumed.  Hil’s book could have benefited from an historical analysis of the tension between, on the one hand, the university’s role in preparing the workforce essential to capitalism and, on the other, its antagonism to that system’s political-economic values.  This tension has been present from at least the time when universities were essentially elite finishing schools for the sons and, more rarely, daughters of the ruling class to the contemporary era of the university grinding out capitalism’s technical-managerial class.  Neo-liberalism has been very bad news for what was once a “community of scholars”.

A hopeful Hil notes that pockets of academic resistance remain, that student protest has not been extinguished and that the (market-agnostic) humanities still account for the majority of undergraduates who remain the least unhappy students because they are doing what they really love, irrespective of what the market deems directly utilitarian.  Hil’s fervent and deeply-felt book maps out the ground still to be fought over for the purpose of the modern university.

MANNIX by Brenda Neill

MANNIX
BRENDA NIALL
Text Publishing, 2015, 439 pages

Review by Phil Shannon

Daniel Mannix, Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne for half a century, could be a bit of a rebel.  As Monash University’s Brenda Niall recounts in her biography, the Irish nationalist and opponent of conscription in Australia during the first world war would show his disdain for the British monarchy by sticking postage stamps, bearing the King’s image, on sideways.

The one-time Labor Party-supporting champion of the working class, however, spent his last decades splitting the party and keeping it out of government, whilst white-anting the trade unions, by unleashing his literally secret weapon, the Italian grocer’s son from Brunswick, Bartholomew Augustine Santamaria, in a clandestine, anti-communist offensive.

Born to a tenant farmer in Ireland in 1864, Mannix was always conscious of the grim and violent past of British rule in that colony.  This survived his seminary training and he retained his Irish republican sympathies when he was sent to head the Church in 1913 in Melbourne, the then seat of federal government.

Mannix condemned Britain’s murderous reprisals for the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin which declared an ill-fated independent republic.  Alone amongst Australia’s Catholic Archbishops, Mannix “took the side of the rebels” and declared himself for Sinn Fein, Ireland’s radical nationalist republicans.  Unwilling to see colonial lives sacrificed for British empire, Mannix opposed, and helped defeat, the two conscription referenda during the Great War, adding that ‘the working class would pay the highest price in the war and then be forgotten’.

Mannix openly supported Labor and his working class parishioners in north Melbourne, and, during the seamen’s strike of 1919, said ‘the worker must get a fair share of the wealth he produces’ and that people are ‘more sacred than property’.

The worm in the apple of this putative Red priest, however, was anti-communism, an ideology shared by all the Catholic hierarchy.  Mannix sought to promote Catholic leaders in the secular world, beginning in the politically turbulent 1930s, to ensure that if people ‘are to move along safe lines, the public mind should be leavened by Catholic principles’.  ‘Safe lines’ meant stopping the Red Menace.

It was fine to give coins to the poor, as Mannix did on his daily walk to his Cathedral, or to organise welfare relief, but just don’t let the workers do anything about their lot that might actually challenge capitalism, or the Church.

Santamaria’s publicly nameless and secretive anti-communist strike force was Mannix’s insurance against any such outcome.  Mannix “ensured funding for The Movement” as it organised ‘Industrial Groups’ to overthrow Communist Party leadership of key Australian trade unions and it penetrated the ALP to campaign against its left, splitting the party in 1954-55 and keeping it out of office until 1972 courtesy of the anti-Labor preferences of his splinter Democratic Labor Party.

Santamaria was Mannix’s lever for directly influencing public political and industrial policy in the way an Archbishop could not openly do.  In a 1961 interview on ABC TV, two years before his death, Mannix called Santamaria ‘the saviour of Australia’.

Niall, for her part, is in fairly comfortable proximity to the Mannix-Santamaria ideological cosmos.  Communism, she agrees, “was a cruel failure”.  She puts down all Communist Party union leadership to “ballot-rigging, intimidation, physical force and mass apathy”.  Her first job was research assistant to Santamaria and, although she claims not to have been aware of The Movement at the time, Niall would probably have been right at home with its politics as demonstrated by her going on to work for Santamaria’s anti-communist News Weekly as book reviewer.

Niall’s wooden anti-communism is complemented by a largely unreflective Catholicism.  The Mannix hobby-horse of state aid for private religious schools is assumed to be a good and just thing.  The ethics of Church wealth is unchallenged (as is the hypocrisy of the worker-friendly Archbishop living in wealthy Kew, in the conservative electorate of Liberal Prime Minister, Robert Menzies).  “Atheistic communism” (simplistically reduced to Stalinist horrors) is assumed to be undesirable.

Niall’s academic career was in English literature, not history, and her personal background that of Catholicism not Marxism.  Unsurprisingly, therefore, her portrait of Mannix is closely intimate rather than politically substantive.  Arcane points of Catholic doctrine and institutions tend to crowd out a fully rounded analysis of Archbishop Mannix who, like the majority of working class Irish Catholics at the time, was mocking of the Union Jack, cold on conscription and who could be numbered with the unionists and the left but who wound up undoing all this as a remote control leader of the anti-democratic, anti-communist Catholic right in Australia.

ELEANOR MARX by Rachel Holmes

ELEANOR MARX
By RACHEL HOLMES
Bloomsbury, 2015, 508 pages

Review by Phil Shannon

“Is it not wonderful when you come to look at things squarely in the face, how rarely we seem to practise all the fine things we preach to others?”, lamented Eleanor Marx in 1892.  Karl’s youngest daughter was to be the tragic victim of this truism, as Rachel Holmes explores in her biography which extricates this pioneering revolutionary socialist-feminist from the giant shadow of her father.

In a Britain where women had no political or economic rights, Eleanor willingly took after her rebellious dad.  The young Eleanor was questioning and combative, absorbed in the free-thinking, theatre-loving, fun-filled and intellectually-rich but financially-stunted Marx household.

If Eleanor inherited Marx’s political genes, she chose to nurture them with frenetic activism and inexhaustible political stamina.  Her support for the 1879 Paris Commune (‘the first attempt of the proletariat to govern itself’, as Karl put it) gave her her first public profile but it was her leadership in the trade union movement that defined Eleanor’s political impact.

She was “the epicentre of strategy and organisation” for the newly-stirring ranks of unskilled, often female, workers who had been long-ignored by the craft unions.  She opposed divisions between skilled and unskilled unionists, and between men and women workers, arguing that women must refuse to undercut men’s wages and that men must insist on equal pay for women for the same work.

Eleanor’s many successes in the labour movement, however, were not replicated in Britain’s revolutionary circles.  ‘Socialism’, she said despairingly, ‘is at present in this country little more than a literary movement’ and it was a time of “faction, schism and split” with nationalists against internationalists, revisionists against revolutionaries, and the anarchists against everyone.  Eleanor, nevertheless, stiffened the Marxist cause by bringing to it her strengths of organisation, strategy and economics (she was one of the few who had actually read, and understood, Marx’s Das Kapital).

Her most original, and most enduring, contribution, however, was the development of socialist feminism.  She detested domestic drudgery, was appalled by the grim lives of women factory workers, and resented the cultural constraints of the period which saw both of her (socialist) sisters’ lives wasted by the demands of housework, motherhood and their (socialist) husbands’ careers.

Eleanor followed Engels and other Marxist men who deplored women’s oppression and saw socialism as its solution but she went further, making women’s liberation necessary to, as well as dependent on, socialism.  Her pamphlet, ‘The Woman Question: From a Socialist Point of View’, refocused feminism from its limited rights for middle class women to full equality at work and at home for the great mass of poor, working class, women.

Despite her feminist principles, however, Eleanor’s own ‘free-love union’ with the playwright and socialist, Edward Aveling, spectacularly failed to achieve socialist-feminism in one household.  Economic independence or domestic equality was doomed for her because, although “Eleanor loved Edward”, “Edward loved himself”.

Aveling’s main interest was in sponging off Eleanor’s earnings and exploiting her famous name as his passport to fame.  He treated lecture tour expenses as his own little pork barrel, did no share of the housework, and was decidedly lacking in courage compared to Eleanor who put herself in the front line of free speech and free assembly fights and wore the scars of police violence for her pains.

To top it all off, he killed her.  Or she suicided.  Soon after she had shatteringly discovered that the latest in Aveling’s series of sexual infidelities had resulted in a clandestine marriage to a 22-year-old actress, Eleanor was found dead in 1898 from chloroform and prussic acid (cyanide).

Her timely death also opened Aveling’s way to the money the recently-deceased Engels had bequeathed to Eleanor (Aveling had been the chief beneficiary of Eleanor’s will and remained so after he destroyed the codicil by which Eleanor had disinherited him after her discovery of his secret marriage).  Literally or morally, either way, Aveling was responsible for Eleanor’s death.

Holmes’ book is more a page-turner of a period historical novel, narratively propelled by the collision course between the villainous Aveling and the deaf-to-all-warnings Eleanor, than a politically-rounded biography.  Eleanor, for example, agitated for an electorally-focused labour party but lacked any premonition of the pitfalls of parliamentarism, which Holmes, despite the benefit of over a century of disillusioning hindsight, also does not critically explore.

Nevertheless, Eleanor Marx’s forty-three years of socialist-feminist activism are dynamic enough to make even a romantic pot-boiler a tribute to her and her cause.

THE UGLY GAME: The Qatari Plot to Buy the World Cup, BLAKE & CALVERT

THE UGLY GAME: The Qatari Plot to Buy the World Cup
HEIDI BLAKE and JONATHAN CALVERT
Simon & Schuster, 2015, 472 pages

Review by Phil Shannon 

The only surprising thing about the currently unfolding FIFA corruption scandal is that anyone should be surprised, given the long history of credible allegations of bribery in world football’s governing body.  As Blake and Calvert, investigative journalists at Britain’s The Sunday Times, reveal in their exposé of Qatar’s corrupt winning in 2010 of the hosting rights for the 2022 World Cup, the technical merits of the competing bids “were not worth the glossy paper they were printed on”.  What mattered was money.

The winner was the world’s richest (GDP per capita) country, the sweltering desert monarchy of the football minnow, Qatar, as it bought the most votes amongst the 24-member FIFA Executive Committee, the “elite cabal” who run world football.

Courtesy of a FIFA whistle-blower who leaked a mountain of confidential Qatari documents, Blake and Calvert copiously document the corrupt backroom deals and vote-rigging by the architect of Qatar’s Cup victory - Mohamed bin Hammam, the construction industry billionaire, Royal Family insider, Asian Football Confederation (AFC) President and FIFA Executive member.

Despite being privately described as ‘our greatest asset’ by the Qatari bid team, Hammam was publicly kept at arm’s length as he successfully bribed scores of FIFA officials through his AFC, construction company and other slush funds.

Hammam paid more than $5 million  to the presidents of thirty national football associations in Africa, venal men who had risen from Africa’s endemic poverty and who fully intended to stay that way.  $1.7 million of Hammam money found its way to greedy soccer chiefs in Asia.  The recipients’ emails to Hammam contain effusive outpourings of brotherly devotion and, by the way, yes, US dollars would be fine and here are my personal bank account details.

These national football bosses would influence their regional Cup-voting FIFA Executive representatives, whose vote was also ripe for cultivation by Hammam through cash backhanders and lavish hospitality for international, all-expenses-paid junkets.  It was corrupt business-as-usual for these top decision-makers, whether voting on Cup sponsorship by major corporations, Cup broadcasting rights, Cup venues or FIFA presidents.  Hammam also dished out vote-inducing football ‘development’ grants to poor countries through FIFA’s ‘Goal Program’, a vote-currying creation of FIFA president, Sepp Blatter.

Hammam was as adept at gas-for-votes as cash-for-votes, facilitating massive and highly favourable trade deals for football nations on Qatari gas (for Thailand) and Siberian gas extraction (for Russia).  His flurry of commercial matchmaking also procured the support of other countries through billion dollar corporate deals on property (for Thailand), land (for Cyprus), football clubs (for France’s financially-plagued Paris Saint-Germaine), football television rights (for the French government  from Al Jazeera to televise French football) and Cup infrastructure building contracts (for Belgium).

The official Qatar Cup bid was not content to outsource all the vote-buying to Hammam.  They secretly offered $1.5 million to key African members of the Executive and to African national football presidents, whilst also funnelling $1.8 million to Africa for a well-catered regional football shindig whose real business took place in side-meetings between Hammam and African football chiefs.

The other string to Hammam’s bow was vote-trading collusion, which is technically forbidden under FIFA rules but undetectable because Cup voting is secret.  Amongst other pacts, Hammam arranged for his Asian confederation votes to go to the joint Spain-Portugal bid for the 2018 Cup in return for the Iberian votes supporting Qatar for 2022.

All this activity delivered the prize when the FIFA Executive, barely pausing to acknowledge, let alone read, the FIFA technical assessors’ report which rated Qatar’s as the worst of the bids, voted for Qatar to host the 2022 Cup.  The incredulity at this decision sparked renewed allegations of corruption but over at Sleepy Hollow, FIFA’s Ethics Committee, serenity reigned - and why would it not when the committee’s members included the corrupt (Hammam, for example, was an initial member) and ancient judges whose well-remunerated sinecures depended on not upsetting the FIFA family business.

The vehemence of public outrage, however, eventually compelled FIFA to refurbish its ethics window-dressing by beefing up the Ethics Committee with a criminal investigator (a former Melbourne, and Interpol, police detective).  Qatari money again proved its power, however, as FIFA’s internal cop, and his entire investigations team, was bought off with well-upholstered positions at a new International Centre for Sports Security in Doha.  FIFA’s internal investigation was duly closed delivering no adverse corruption findings.

At the end of this Great Cup Robbery, Hammam took the time to attend to his own nest, challenging Blatter for the top job in FIFA’s 2011 presidential election.  Hammam deployed his usual junkets, bank transfers and envelopes stuffed with cash.  Blatter, however, out-Machiavellied Hammam, using the public backlash against Qatar’s corrupt purchase of the 2022 Cup vote to threaten Qatar with being stripped of its hosting rights unless they pressured Hammam to withdraw from the presidential race, which Hammam duly did.

As a heavily censored new internal ethics investigation report put Qatar (and Russia) in the clear for their Cup wins, all ended well for FIFA’s privileged parasites.  Qatar’s 2022 Cup was safe.  Blatter’s job, and its massive, but secret, salary, was safe.  FIFA’s culture of corruption remained safe.

The FBI, whose recent raids narrowly post-date the publication of this angry but pessimistic book, may be the ‘super-sub’ which sinks the FIFA rust-bucket but FIFA’s structural corruption needs a radically more democratic game-changer, a revolution in who control the people’s game – those who profit from it (whether by fair means or foul), or the people who play and love the game.

17 CARNATIONS: The Windsors, the Nazis and the Cover-up by ANDREW MORTON

17 CARNATIONS: The Windsors, the Nazis and the Cover-up
ANDREW MORTON
Michael O’Mara Books, 2015, 327 pages

Review by Phil Shannon

The 1936 abdication had it all for Royal soap opera addicts.  The King of England, Edward VIII, gave up the crown so he could marry Wallis Simpson, who, as an American, a divorcée and not being “PLU - People Like Us”, had three strikes against her being allowed to become Queen, as Andrew Morton explores in 17 Carnations.  The real story, however, lay elsewhere, well-concealed, in Edward’s untimely ardour for Hitler when Nazism shifted from being a valued defence against the Red Menace to posing a threat to the British empire.

Edward was a “miserable prince”, depressed by, as the party-boy complained, having to ‘hit up with a lot of old-fashioned and boring people and conventions’.  Sure, the privileges of royalty were nice - Edward would rise “not much before eleven”, before an afternoon of golf or fox-hunting or polo followed by cocktails in the evening and then the nightlife until the early hours - but the dull ‘Princing’ duties and the limited pool of royal mating partners were too much to bear.

When the untitled Simpson hove in to view from Baltimore, Edward was infatuated.  Also excited was Adolf Hitler who took a political interest in the pro-Nazi love-birds.  Hitler had earlier attempted to broker a marriage between German royalty and the Prince, and now set Joachim von Ribbentrop, his foreign affairs point-man, to the cynical ploy of engaging in a carnation-strewn, clandestine affair with Simpson to gain access to the new king.

Edward was receptive to the Nazi cultivation.  He was a man of staggering wealth who thought, like most of the pukka aristocracy, that Britain’s very own Blackshirts were ‘a good thing’ for sorting out trade unions and communists.  His anti-Semitism, his hatred of Indian and Irish nationalists, his dislike of ‘those bloody suffragettes’ and his “lifetime loathing of the Bolsheviks” because of the execution of Czar Nicholas (Edward’s god-father) also made this right-wing extremist into a potential Nazi recruit.

Hitler’s hopes were rewarded when the newly-crowned King leant on the British government to not respond to the Nazis’ early expansionism in Europe.  Hitler was aghast then, when Edward abdicated, but Plan B was to get the now demoted Duke to be a celebrity voice for ‘peace’ (on Nazi terms) and ultimately to be installed as the Nazis’ puppet King of England.

To keep Edward away from Nazi temptation, the government ordered him from semi-banishment in Nazi-threatened France to the Bahamas as governor in 1940, where he continued to entertain Hitler’s plans, telling an interviewer (and undercover FBI agent) that ‘it would be a tragic thing for the world if Hitler were to be overthrown’ by revolution in Germany.

Crisis, however, loomed for the monarchy when Edward’s Nazi-friendly past threatened to publicly emerge after the war.  The Allies had agreed to a joint US, UK and French history of Nazi foreign policy as a re-education tool for the German population, based on seized German Foreign Office archives.

These documents, however, contained Edward’s compromising comments on Nazism, causing Buckingham Palace and Whitehall to attempt to suppress ‘the Windsor file’ in order to cover up the existence of a treacherous rat-in-waiting, and his like-minded circle, at the heart of the monarchy, the “beating heart of the nation” as they liked to see it.

The US and French (but not the British) editors, as professional historians, bridled at the political interference and threated resignation.  Their would-be censors eventually agreed this would be a bad look for academic freedom in the victorious capitalist democracies and, after re-jigging the publication schedule to keep the offending file away from public eyes until 1957, opted for public relations massaging on its release.  Edward, soothed the Foreign Office via a compliant establishment media, was an “innocent party caught in a web of Nazi intrigue, a royal dupe rather than a traitor king”.

Morton, alas, joins this rehabilitation chorus – Edward “made mistakes, said things he shouldn’t and met people he should have shunned” but “he was a nuisance not a traitor”.  Morton ends up soft-soaping Edward, including, for example, ignoring the Prince’s fascist propensity for street violence when he volunteered as a strike-breaking ‘special constable’ in the 1926 General Strike.  Despite declaring an antipathy to Royal history-writing “on bended knee”, Morton’s book is intrinsically deferential to (and fascinated by) the cult of monarchy, including its very English King who was knee-deep in fascist mud of his own making.