Dean Godson

Dean Godson, Newsnight, 12 December 2007

Dean Godson is the Research Director for the Policy Exchange, a United Kingdom think-tank. He attended St Paul's School and is a graduate of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.

Career

• 1983-1984, Special Assistant to John Lehman, Secretary of US Navy
• 1985-6 ?
• 1987-1989 Research Fellow, Institute for European Defence and Strategic Studies (erroneously noted as the Institute for Defence and Strategic Studies by the BBC - no such organisation existed in the UK, and Godson is listed as a Research fellow in IEDSS publications in 1988)
• 1987 publishes a study on public diplomacy with the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis in the US.
• 1990-92 Librarian to Sir James Goldsmith,
• 1997 'Currently, Mr. Godson serves as the Chief Editorial writer of the Daily Telegraph, the Associate Editor of the Spectator and Special Assistant to Conrad Black.'
• His political career includes Joint Deputy Chairman of Kensington and Chelsea Conservative Association.
• 2004 He is the author of Himself Alone: David Trimble and the Ordeal of Ulster Unionism. *After his departure from Hollinger, he has been the Research Director of the Policy Exchange, a neo-conservative think tank.

Background

Godson's family has a history of involvement in covert action. His father Joseph Godson was a follower of Jay Lovestone, the ex-communist trade union leader who ran an international network for the CIA's James Angleton. During his tenure as US Labour attaché in London, Godson Snr was involved in an attempt to expel Aneurin Bevan from the Labour Party .

His elder brother Roy Godson is a covert action expertwho was involved in the Iran/Contra Affair. As director of the International Labor Program at Georgetown University in Washington DC., Roy organized "educational visits" for British trade unionists to visit the U.S. during the Reagan administration "to broaden international education about Western democratic values."

Godson's writings have often alluded to this background, for example his acquaintance with right-wing trade unionists like Frank Chapple.

1983-84 John Lehman

During 1983-84, Godson served as Special Assistant the the US Secretary of the Navy, John Lehman, who would later become a signatory of the neoconservative Project for a New American Century.

1987 SDI

In 1987, Godson published SDI:Has America Sold Her Story to the World, a report of the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis Panel on Public Diplomacy.

1987-89 IEDSS

Research Fellow, Institute for European Defence and Strategic Studies (erroneously noted as the Institute for Defence and Strategic Studies by the BBC - no such organisation existed in the UK, and Godson is listed as a Research fellow in IEDSS publications in 1988)

1990-92 James Goldsmith

According to his BBC biography, Godson was librarian to Sir James Goldsmith from 1990-1992

Conservative Party

In 1995 the Guardian reported on the '21st Century Tories':

From the outside it is not always easy to see the novelty in the various mutations of conservative thinking that well-up out of the party's troubles. Successive generations of young Tory thinkers appear much the same - well spoken Oxbridge graduates, astir with the decline of Britain and the conservative establishment. Is there anything really so new about Roberts, or indeed Matthew D'Ancona (Times and Fellow of All Souls), Niall Ferguson (Telegraph and Don at Jesus College, Oxford), Michael Gove (BBC and former president of the Oxford Union), Anne Applebaum (Yale and deputy editor of the Spectator), Paul Goodman (Telegraph and former chairman of the Federation of Conservative Students) and Dean Godson (Telegraph)?

Well, yes. The first obvious distinction is that its members come from widely different backgrounds and that most of them were literally children of the sixties. Gove and D'Ancona were products of standard middle-class families and although Roberts has the whiff of the grand Tory about him, he picks his friends, according to one of The Group, "to find the same mindset and congenial companions, rather than attempt to create a young England clique". Most of them have links with, or were at, Oxford - unlike their predecessors in the seventies who had strong connections with Peterhouse College, Cambridge. Quite a number are Jewish - Goodman, Godson, Applebaum and Danny Finkelstein, who was originally a member of the SDP but is now regarded by his friends as veering rapidly to the right. "One thing you can say about us," said Roberts, "is that we are extremely philo-semitic."

There are other members - banker Oliver Letwin, Steve Hilton who used to work for Saatchi & Saatchi and is now a prospective Tory candidate, Sheila Lawlor, an historian and education expert for the Centre for Policy Studies and Martin Ivens of the Times. The important thing is that most of them met after university and have come to know each other because of the congruity of their views. In this sense, The Group is a network which is spread through history departments, journalism, advertising and, in one instance, radio. As you would expect its main outlets are the Times, but more important is the Telegraph Group, which also includes the Spectator.

In the 1997 election Godson stood for the Conservatives in Great Grimsby East:

Great Grimsby E 65,043 V 43,096 (66.3%) Austin Mitchell (Lab) 25,765 Dean Godson (C) 9,521 Andrew De Freitas (LD) 7,810 Lab hold Maj 16,244 Swing 11.5% from C to Lab 1992: Lab 25,895; C 18,391; LD 6,475

By this stage Godson's political career included serving as Joint Deputy Chairman of Kensington and Chelsea Conservative Association.

Hollinger

Godson, who was Conrad Black's Personal Assistant was part of the process of moving the Telegraph towards Black's right wing views. Godson was initially a feature and profile writer for the Sunday Telegraph before becoming chief leader writer of the Daily Telegraph under the patronage of Charles Moore. Here is a report from 1996:

hope that Moore, who was the prototype young fogey in his youth, would turn into a traditional fat-bottomed Conservative in his middle years was forlorn. Among his first moves was to import from the Sunday paper his two favourite leader writers, Paul Goodman and Dean Godson, whose style was vigorous, amusingly arch and very right-wing. The views of the couple (who swiftly came to be irreverently known as Pearl and Dean) opened up a gap between the new and old Telegraph camps. "I know that you think we're a bunch of homosexual fuckwits," said Moore to the paper's news editor David Sapsted, a robust hard newsman of the old school, "but we know what we're doing."

The result is a much closer reflection of the hard-right views of the Telegraph proprietor, the Canadian media magnate Conrad Black. This is what might have been expected. When Black bought the Jerusalem Post he turned its editorial policy on its head, transforming the line of the leading Israeli paper from a dove-ish to a hawkish one virtually overnight. The views in yesterday's leader - "cutting taxes, including capital taxes, and spending so that Labour would either limp behind them or be forced out into the open and declare its tax-and-spend philosophy" and abandoning the vision of Europe embodied not just in the single currency but in the whole of the Maastricht treaty - were pure Black.

George Galloway

In April 2003, The Daily Telegraph's David Blair reported the discovery of documents from the Iraqi Defence Ministry which, it was claimed, showed MP George Galloway had taken £375,000 from the Iraqi government. In December 2004, Galloway was awarded £150,00 in libel damages as a result of this claim. The MP has said that he believes Godson was the author of one of two editorials that resulted in this verdict.

Departure from Hollinger

Godson left The Telegraph after Conrad Black lost control of the paper in 2004.

Young fogey Dean Godson, one of Conrad Black's favourite leader writers at the Telegraph, has had his contract terminated shortly after Black's legal war with parent company Hollinger International began. Strangely, Godson, who is great mates with Boris Johnson and often sports an India Jones-style hat, is still turning up at the office, to the bemusement of fellow journalists. 'He was definitely booted out but he has either not noticed or he's coming in and using the reference library,' says our Telegraph mole. Whether the Barclay brothers will take pity on him and allow him to stay remains to be seen.

In the acknowledgements to his June 2004 biography of David Trimble, Godson expressed his thanks to Hollinger International directors Conrad Black, Barbara Amiel and Dan Colson. The three were being sued by the company at the time over the alleged diversion of £391 million between 1997 and 2003.

Later that year, editor Martin Newland said:

"I soon came to recognise we were speaking a language on geopolitical events and even domestic events that was dictated too much from across the Atlantic. It's OK to be pro-Israel, but not to be unbelievably pro-Likud Israel, it's OK to be pro-American but not look as if you're taking instructions from Washington. Dean Godson and Barbara Amiel were key departures."

Policy Exchange

Godson is currently a research director specialising in terrorism and security and International issues at the conservative-leaning think-tank Policy Exchange, which is chaired by his former Telegraph editor Charles Moore.

On British Islam

In an April 2006 Times article Godson called for a new war of ideas against radical Islam, citing past British and American covert operations as precedents.

During the Cold War, organisations such as the Information Research Department of the Foreign Office would assert the superiority of the West over its totalitarian rivals. And magazines such as Encounter did hand-to-hand combat with Soviet fellow travellers. For any kind of truly moderate Islam to flourish, we need first to recapture our own self-confidence. At the moment, the extremists largely have the field to themselves.

Godson's approach to fighting radical Islam has significant parallels with a US Department of Defense proposal from 2002.

The Defense Department is considering issuing a secret directive to the American military to conduct covert operations aimed at influencing public opinion and policy makers in friendly and neutral countries, senior Pentagon and administration officials say...

...Such a program, for example, could include efforts to discredit and undermine the influence of mosques and religious schools that have become breeding grounds for Islamic militancy and anti-Americanism across the Middle East, Asia and Europe.

Godson's campaign against any engagement with Islamist political movements had already led him led to focus on a broad range of institutions.

In August 2005, he criticised the Home Office report Preventing Extremism Together:

One panellist, Tariq Ramadan, is a case in point. This grandson of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood once had his visa revoked in America and was once kept out of France — but is most welcome here. Based at Oxford, he has become the pin-up boy for elements of the Met’s Specialist Operations department. He opposes violence yet he intervened on the task force to ensure that Salafist ideology was not condemned.

In February 2006, he accused part of the Metropolitan Police of "a kind of ideological “Stockholm syndrome.”

Members of the Met’s Muslim Contact Unit, one of the weirder parts of the force, extol the work of the Muslim Association of Britain and George Galloway in the East End — and have been known to rebuke a young woman of Muslim origin who dared to question the British State’s chosen Islamist partners.

He turned to the police once more in April 2006:

The Association of Chief Police Officers also frets about a ban, fearing it will drive HuT underground. Acpo argues that it will be hard to justify proscription when the group claims to be non-violent political organisation. This is to misunderstand HuT. Its role has never been to perpetrate violence here. That would not be in its interest, since London is its nerve centre.

In February 2007, Godson accused Dominic Grieve and Sayeeda Warsi of being part of an 'MCB-friendly faction' in the Conservative Party.

After Gordon Brown became Prime Minister, Godson noted that 'battle is being waged behind the scenes' over 'the Government’s approach towards radical Islamism.'

Who should be the Government’s chosen Muslim partners in the struggle against radicalisation? Mr Brown is already facing a big push from an Islamist-friendly faction in the Cabinet, led by Jack Straw and John Denham, to bring the once pre-eminent Muslim Council of Britain back in from the cold.

In August 2007, Godson asked:

How did the Crown Prosecution Service and West Midlands Police come to refer Channel 4’s Dispatches programme, Undercover Mosque, to Ofcom? It is one of the most bizarre decisions taken by public authorities in recent times. Having decided that they could not or would not prosecute the purveyors of Wahhabite hate speech portrayed in the film – mostly from the Green Lane mosque in Birmingham – they instead turned round on the documentary-makers and investigated them for allegedly stirring up racial hatred.

In February 2008, Godson defended the bugging of MP Sadiq Khan:

As a former chairman of the Muslim Council of Britain’s legal committee, Mr Khan remains the most Islamist-friendly of MPs. Compared with other Labour Muslim MPs – such as Khalid Mahmood – he has too often catered to the “victim mentality” in the community.

But Mr Khan is also highly ambitious. Is this really the cause for which he wants to be remembered? And will he continue to dance like a cat on a hot tin roof when the Government pushes for a further extension in police powers under the new counter-terrorism Bill?

Later that month, he backed a RUSI report stating Britain's security was at risk because of a “loss of confidence in our own identity, values, constitution and institutions”.

Dean Godson, a security expert at the think tank the Policy Exchange, said of the report: “It doesn’t deal with specific legislation or whether we need 25 extra battalions or whatever. It deals with vital but unobvious elements. It’s very impressive on how soft power – such as education – can impact on hard power.”

On the Middle East

Godson has praised the scholarship of Bernard Lewis:

How democracy is implemented is critical to him: unlike much of the Administration, he believes that free elections should be the culmination of the reform process, rather than the starting point (as shown by the ballots in Egypt and Palestine that have strengthened anti-democratic Islamists). Democracy, he contends, needs to be introduced “like an antibiotic — drip-drip, or else it kills the patient”.

Following Israel's failed campaign in Lebanon in 2006, Godson predicted that Israelis might turn to former chief of staff Moshe Yaalon for political leadership.

General Yaalon, a Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, has so far been almost as cryptic about his intentions as General Eisenhower was before being drafted to run for the US presidency in 1952. If he wins power, it will be by constitutional means rather than by a military coup — unlike almost everywhere else in the Middle East. But in the current climate in Europe, don’t expect anyone to give the Israeli political system much credit for that..

On Iraq

Godson has defended the role of the neoconservative 'Pentagon civilians' in planning the Iraq War:

What about the postwar period? General Jack Keane, the Army Vice-Chief of Staff during this critical period, told me that it was just as much the military’s responsibility to anticipate the insurgency, if not more so. “We had no plans for that”, he said. “It was our fault, not Donald Rumsfeld’s.”

He has also contested the view that the war was a failure:

Many years hence, will Iraq come to be viewed in the same light? From 2005, the jihadi world was riven by a dispute between al-Qaeda’s Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and his mentor, Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi. Al-Maqdisi stated that al-Zarqawi’s priorities were askew. Iraq was the wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time. It was rapidly becoming a “crematory” for the flower of Islamist youth. No energies were left for wider Islamist revolution elsewhere in the region.

On Iran

Godson criticised St Andrews University for awarding an honorary degree to former Iranian president Mohammad Khatami.

On Ireland

In 1995, Godson was linked to a group that played a role in the leaking of the good Friday Agreement an act which was intended to damage the Conservative government:

The conspirators wore surgical gloves. The document they were handling was so politically explosive they dared not leave a single smudged fingerprint or speck of grease to show it had been touched. And, last Monday, as he studied the leaked framework of the London-Dublin proposals for the future of Northern Ireland, Matthew D'Ancona, a 26-year-old assistant editor at The Times, was not even allowed to photocopy it. The paper was believed to be in ink containing a secret masking agent preventing duplication and was imprinted with an identifying code. That code would have shown which of the 25 copies circulating at the highest Government levels had been leaked.

But as the original slim folder of papers was returned pristine and swiftly to the Government office it came from, it now seems highly unlikely that the senior politician or civil servant who connived at the leak will ever be identified. Last night it was becoming clear that a caucus of fervent Loyalists under the umbrella of a Unionist study group is closely associated with the leaker. It is made up of PR man David Burnside, D'Ancona himself; Dean Godson, a Daily Telegraph staff reporter; Paul Goodman, Northern Ireland correspondent on the Sunday Telegraph; Noel Malcolm, a historian and Daily Telegraph political columnist; Andrew McHallam, executive director of the Institute for European Defence and Strategic Studies; Charles Moore, editor of the Sunday Telegraph; Simon Pearce, a Conservative election candidate; company director Justin Shaw and historian Andrew Roberts. One of the group said last night: 'We didn't want the position when the framework document was published of being out in the cold as we were over the Anglo-Irish Agreement in 1985. There was a coming together of minds over what should be done.'

Other sources note his devotion to the unionism over his Tory colleagues:

Even stranger goings-on in the Daily Telegraph conference room this week. Dean Godson, one of the paper's star leader writers, was bemoaning the fact that Michael Portillo was reluctant to back its "Save the RUC" campaign. "I don't understand it," said Godson, David Trimble's biographer. "He's afraid to put his name to our campaign but not ashamed to admit he's had homosexual experiences (except that Godson used a more descriptive phrase). Is he mad or am I?"

In his 2004 biography of David Trimble, Himself Alone, Godson noted that the former Ulster Unionist leader was "influenced in his opinion of the Cold War by the London-based monthly journal of culture and politics, Encounter, in which contributors often urged a tough line on the Soviets."

In August 2005,Godson claimed that republicans were 'already privately telling their supporters that they should join the police to subvert it.'

In a 2006 Times article, Godson claimed that he had been told by Fr Denis Faul that Sinn Fein's Martin McGuinness was an MI6 agent. Since the article was an obituary for Fr Faul, the conversation is presumably unverifiable. The article came shortly after a similar allegation by the former FRU agent known as Martin Ingram, based on an unpublished document, which several journalists concluded was of doubtful authenticity.

In July 2006, Godson criticised community restorative justice schemes as a recipe for parallel policing by the IRA.

In November 2006, he highlighted opposition to a power-sharing deal in the Free Presbyterian Church:

A senior minister, the Rev Ivan Foster, has led a chorus who abhor the moral compromises inherent in sharing office with Sinn Fein/IRA.

In March 2007, Godson criticised Ian Paisley for his willingness to do a deal with Sinn Fein.

For years, officials have smirkingly counted upon the defeatism, vanity and venality of much of the Unionist political class to push through a project of creeping condominium with the Republic. But who would have thought that Ian Paisley, the ultimate “honest bigot”, would turn out to be their last card?

In June 2007, Godson backed calls for the Labour Party to organise in Northern Ireland.

Godson declared his admiration for Conor Cruise O'Brien on the occasion of the latter's 90th birthday:

O'Brien became a hate figure among republicans and civil libertarians for his modernisation of Section 31 of the old Broadcasting Act giving the Government the right to ban paramilitaries from the airwaves; it was precisely at times of heightened tribal consciousness, he argued, that restrictions on speech were necessary.

In January 2008, Godson criticised the British Government's proposals for dealing with the legacy of the conflict:

The Consultative Group on the Past - set up by the Government last year to determine how best to deal with the legacy of Northern Ireland's Troubles - seems to be turning into a veritable Frankenstein's Monster. Far from laying the past to rest, its cack-handed and morally flawed approach risks envenoming Ulster's political process all over again.

On Freedom of Information

Godson supported Conservative MP David Maclean's bill to exempt MPs from the Freedom of Information Act:

Neither side in this debate has yet secured a knockout blow. But there is far more to this than the simplistic notion that MPs are featherbedding their nests. More “open” government is not necessarily better government.

On Migration

Godson has praised Sir Andrew Green and MigrationWatch as an example of a successful thinktank:

Ralph Harris and Arthur Seldon, of the Institute of Economic Affairs, one of the most successful think-tanks of all time, laboured in the vineyards for nearly 30 years before their faith in the free market became accepted. Yet MigrationWatch has managed to “mainstream” the case for a much tougher immigration policy in less than five...

...Sir Andrew’s current career shows that if the people are to have their way, the struggle must first be prosecuted via “insiderist” strategies within the elites. Not for him the trahison des clercs.

Connections

He attended the memorial for Lord Stewart of Fulham in 1990. Godson was best man when James Barnard married into the Guiness family in 1995:

GUINNESS and Guinnesses alike were in abundance at London's Claridges Hotel last Monday evening, brought together for a rare family celebration. For once, it wasn't a board meeting but a wedding that saw so many members of the extensive clan converge on the one place, as Lady Emma Guinness married barrister James Barnard. The couple first met early in 1993, brought together by a mutual love of music; Lady Emma plays the piano and is currently taking singing lessons. Eldest child of the late Earl of Iveagh, who died three and a half years ago, the bride wore a dark green velvet suit from Belville Sassoon for the earlier part of the day, which was marked by three separate ceremonies. After going first to the Kensington/Chelsea registry office, the party moved on to Rut land Gate's Kent House synagogue (the groom is Jewish) before an afternoon blessing at St George's, Hanover Square.

Godson attended the memorial service for Lord Houghton of Sowerby in July 1996 along with other neocons/atlanticists such as Alan Lee Williams.

Affiliations

• Joseph Godson, father
• Roy Godson, brother
• Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Godson has written for it.
• Policy Exchange - Research Director
• Institute for European Defence and Security Studies
• Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis
• Prospect Magazine - Contributing Editor

Publications, further reading, notes

Publications

• Dean Godson, SDI: Has America Told Her Story to the World?, Pergamon-Brassey's International Defense Publishers (for the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis), 1987. 73 pp. (Special Report.)
• British Attitudes Towards the United States, in Martin Holmes (ed) British Security Policy and the Atlantic Alliance: Prospects for the 1990s, Published 1987 Pergamon-Brassey's International Defense Publishers ISBN 0080359663 A publication of the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis, Inc., Cambridge, Massachusetts and Washington, D.C.
• Himself Alone: David Trimble and the Ordeal of Unionism, HarperCollins, 2004.

Further reading

• Wikipedia Dean Godson

• Tom Griffin, PC Spooks? II: The Godsons, the IRD and Fr Denis Faul, 27 June 2006

• Dean Godson (2004) LESSONS FROM NORTHERN IRELAND FOR THE ARAB-ISRAELI CONFLICT, Think Israel. This article appeared October 1, 2004 as a Jerusalem Viewpoint (#523), which is published by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs (jcpa@netvision.net.il).

• Dean Godson (2006) Why America's Generals Are Out For Revenge: The US top brass are ducking their responsibilities - and beleaguered Donald Rumsfeld is just doing his job, Times April 18.