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 radical 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 Defence 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.

Hardline unionist

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.'

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 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. 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?"

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.