23 Sep 2023
Just a handful of weeks after local Tories selected their candidate for Harpenden and Berkhamsted, nobody could have predicted he would be at the centre of a national media storm.
But Parliamentary hopeful Nigel Gardner has this week found himself accused of being a lobbyist for the Russian government because his public affairs firm GPlus entered into contracts with the Kremlin in 2006.
As co-founder of Flint Global, he also later worked for Chinese technology firm Huawei before it was banned from building the 5G network in the UK, a decision which has also come under scrutiny.
These relationships have led St Albans MP Daisy Cooper – deputy leader of the Liberal Democrats – to challenge whether he should continue running for the newly-formed Harpenden and Berkhamsted seat.
She said the revelations raised serious questions about his values and judgement.
Speaking to the St Albans Times, Nigel Gardner revealed how GPlus and Flint Global came to work for Russia and China, and why he did not believe either relationship was inappropriate in the context of the time.
He painted a picture of the global international landscape both at the time his firm took the Russian contract, but also over the preceding 15 years, as the world order dramatically changed following the break-up of the Soviet Union.
“My first job in journalism was working for Channel 4 on ‘The World This Week’, covering the huge changes that were going on in Central and Eastern Europe – which led to the fall of the Berlin Wall – and Gorbachev and Perestroika and Glasnost.
“It was so exciting, we were getting access to politicians from across the Eastern Bloc who had never been on British TV before, and we were flying them into the UK to do a live Saturday night discussion programme.
“The Soviet Union as it was then, was fundamentally changing and opening-up and dramatic changes were happening. People thought it was on a path to becoming a respectable member of the international community.”
Although he sold his majority stake in GPlus to Omnicom in 2006, he continued working on the firm’s business strategy, which included an offer to oversee the European media relations around Russia joining the G8.
“The job was literally to put Russian officials in front of the Western media and open them up to Western media scrutiny. We were putting them in front of Le Monde in France, German papers, Italian papers, Spanish papers..
“There was a real feeling and a real sense that Russia was on a new path. I remember we got it through a big American company [Ketchum] and because it was a Russian company, they had to get national approval and the American government said ‘yes of course do it’. So it wasn’t really very controversial at all.
“I think the fact that Russia was engaging more with the Western media was a very, very good thing and really, really important. Because if [the Western media] asked difficult questions about things, they had to answer them. And if they couldn’t answer them, they had to go away and think about why they couldn’t answer them.
“We employed a lot of former journalists to do this and we were in some ways a bit of a middleman because there were elements of the Russian regime that weren’t particularly open to being asked questions as it was a very different media culture. There wasn’t a sort of a long history of the Russian government dealing with Western media.
“Call it lobbying, call it media relations, call it what you want, but it was just a contract to help them improve the way they dealt with the Western media.
“I went part-time in G-Plus in about March 2007 and left the end of 2009. So I’d left the company by the time things really soured.”
Russia was indefinitely suspended from the G8 following the illegal annexation of the Crimea in March 2014, and permanently withdrew in 2017.
“If the global political picture is one where governments are starting to doubt whether their policies are working, there’s really no role for the spinners or the consultants because these things all depend on government.
“I think with retrospect we didn’t really understand the Russian soul and we didn’t understand the degree to which they worried about their national security after the collapse of the Soviet Union and losing Central and Eastern European countries.”
He said he welcomed the current scrutiny surrounding his work with Russia: “I think it’s completely correct that people are scrutinising this, that this has been picked up. I think it’s absolutely right to ask these questions. But I don’t think we did anything wrong at all working for Russia in 2006. It was a very, very different world.”
Taking a look at the bigger picture surrounding the West’s relationship with both Russia and China, he asked why we managed to get it all so wrong?
“More precisely, were there things the West could have done to have given us a better chance of embedding Russia and China in the Western system? These aren’t just questions for the United Kingdom, they’re questions for the West, especially how the Americans in particular helped the development of a market economy in Russia in those early years.
“I was EU-China spokesman in the late 1990s. I was spokesman for the European Union with China, and we made all these visits to China to open-up human rights institutes. Britain had just done the deal with Hong Kong and the Chinese just been admitted to the World Trade Organisation. We thought China was about to become a democratic international economic partner, but somewhere along the road it went wrong.
“In retrospect, we made a huge mistake trusting the Chinese on Hong Kong. I remember thinking at the time, are we actually sure this is all going to end up how we think? Because the Chinese are ruthless in the way they pursue their nationalism, and now we’ve seen political opposition criminalised, people imprisoned, the right to protest taken away. It’s disgraceful, and the Hong Kong people have a complete right to feel betrayed.”
He said the British government had encouraged closer links with China, so there was nothing untoward about following that strategy.
“When we worked for Huawei, it was British government policy to engage with them and have Huawei investing in 5G, and of course when the British government changed its policy there was nothing left to do.
“You know, hindsight is hindsight. Could you work for China now? Of course you couldn’t. Could you work for Russia? Of course you couldn’t. But government policy towards these countries was very, very different at the time. The government’s belief about what was going to happen was very different at the time.
“The Chinese economy was driving the global economy. There was a huge impetus for increasing links with China as we moved to these global supply chains. China was the great global economic hope and Chinese growth rates were powering the global economies. There was huge economic pressure to engage with China.
“I think somewhere our economic hopes led the West to overlook the worrying signs that were emerging about the treatment of minorities, around the erosion of political rights in China. We put the lure of speedy economic growth before questions of values, political stability, human rights and, most importantly, national security. We now need to recalibrate that balance.”
