Neal Lawson

Neal Lawson at the Compass conference, June 2006

Neal Lawson is a former adviser to Gordon Brown and was a strategist for Tony Blair during the 1997 election. He is the Managing Editor of the Blairite Renewal magazine and the founder of Nexus, a Blairite internet discussion forum. He has boasted of helping GTech, the discredited Lottery company, to win their Lottery contract.

Lobbygate

Lawson's lobbying firm LLM became notorious in July 1998 when they were caught up in the 'Lobbygate' controversy. Working as an undercover reporter for The Observer, Greg Palast, posing as a US businessman with ties to Enron, caught on tape two Labour party insiders, Derek Draper and LLM's Mendelsohn, boasting about how they could sell access to government ministers, obtain advance copies of sensitive reports, and create tax breaks for their clients. For example, it was revealed that Ben Lucas claimed he had given away details of one of Gordon Brown's speeches to a client before the speech was made and knew details of public spending announcements in advance. LLM said that they were a conduit from the Labour Government to business (as well as the other way round), procuring a steady stream of executives to feed the Labour Party's appetite for business contacts. This process included News International, where Ben Lucas said that the Government had sought out business, rather than business asking the lobbying firm for Government contacts.

LLM also spent more than £5,000 on 'Tickets for Dinners' for their clients to attend Labour Party functions in 1998. Their clients include Rupert Murdoch's News International, Tesco, Orange and KPMG (consultants with a large number of Government contracts).

Affiliations

• Compass, Chairman
• Nexus
• Renewal
• Lawson Lucas Mendelsohn (LLM) -- a political consultancy whose inaugural brochure in 1997 promised to bring an "ethical" fragrance to the niffy business of parliamentary lobbying.
• CentreForum - Board member

External Resources

• Francis Wheen 'Social justice - that's so old Labour' The Guardian, 7 February 2001.

Articles or books by Neal Lawson

• Neal Lawson and Neil Sherlock, We must sink our differences, The New Statesman, 29 May 2000. "A leading Blairite and a former adviser to Paddy Ashdown call for a new attempt at Lib-Lab collaboration".
• Neal Lawson and Neil Sherlock, The Progressive Century: The Future of the Centre-Left in Britain, Palgrave, 2001, ISBN: 0333949625.
• Neal Lawson and Paul Thompson, The stakes are too high, The Guardian, 9 August 2004.
• Neal Lawson, What is the point of conference?, The New Stateman, 26 September 2005.
• Neal Lawson, Labour doesn't just need a new leader, but a new direction, The Guardian, 28 September 2005.
• Neal Lawson, Why we think the Prime Minister should go now, The Independent, 9 May 2006.
• Neal Lawson, Where idealism and pragmatism meet, The New Statesman, 19 June 2006.