Saturday, June 11, 2011

Just asking

Included in the Daily Telegraph's Ed Balls document dump is a "strategy document" for the Gordon Brown leadership campaign dated 21 July 2005.  It's essentially a to-do list.  There's a curious item at the end in the category Post (presumably post-successful leadership campaign):

General Election plan/campaigning (inc. Lou Suzman/Citicorp/Internet)

The Telegraph doesn't annotate this part of the note, so who is Lou Suzman? Well, it appears to be a mis-spelling of Louis "Lou" Susman, the current US Ambassador to the UK (appointed by Barack Obama) and a former senior executive with Citibank based in Chicago, but with no previous obvious connection to the UK in general and Labour in particular.  [note: here's another Telegraph article that identifies Susman as such but doesn't dwell on it].

So why way back in 2005 did he make it to Ed Balls' premature plan for a Gordon Brown-led election campaign?  One possibility comes from the fact that the papers make clear the level of infestation of American pollsters suffered by New Labour.  They may have been suggesting names of their favourite US bankrollers for the use of the Brown team.  It's not clear if it went anywhere.

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