LA REPUBBLICA
30 dicembre 2005
Parla l´avvocato inglese che sarebbe stato corrotto da Berlusconi: "Ho depositato i documenti che dimostrano tutto"
Mills: "Ma quei soldi non sono del premier"
La moglie è ministro della Cultura nel governo Blair
DAL NOSTRO INVIATO CINZIA SASSO
LONDRA - «Smentisco al cento per cento che quei soldi, i 600mila dollari,
siano arrivati da Silvio Berlusconi o dal suo gruppo. È tutto falso; ai magistrati
lo abbiamo già detto e depositato i documenti che lo dimostrano». David Mills,
59 anni, l´avvocato inglese accusato di falsa testimonianza e concorso in
corruzione in atti giudiziari con Silvio Berlusconi, del resto, è davanti
a casa sua. Parla un italiano perfetto: «Mi spiace - risponde gentile - ma
non ho tempo. Mia moglie e i miei figli mi stanno aspettando, dobbiamo partire
per le vacanze».
Lo aspetta la moglie Tessa Jowell [1], ministro del governo di Tony Blair.
Ministro della cultura, dell´informazione e dello sport, in prima linea nella
candidatura prima e nell´organizzazione poi dei giochi olimpici del 2012,
nominata apposta ministro per le Olimpiadi. C´è il tempo di dire solo una
cosa, però: ai primi di dicembre l´avvocato italiano di David Mills, Federico
Cecconi, aveva appreso da un colloquio informale con i pubblici ministeri
italiani che di lì a poco il suo cliente sarebbe stato convocato a palazzo
di giustizia di Milano; il 2 è arrivata la convocazione per il 3. «Certo,
lo sapevo - spiega Mills - ma in accordo con i magistrati abbiamo rinviato
l´incontro».
Il perché del rinvio lo spiega l´avvocato Cecconi, che in mezzo a tante questioni
di diritto penale, commerciale e sportivo (è stato anche il difensore di
Marco Pantani), da una decina d´anni segue Mills: «Già un anno fa abbiamo
presentato alla procura i riscontri documentali, estratti conti, eccetera,
che dimostrano come alcune somme di denaro delle quali si ipotizza una certa
provenienza, ne abbiano invece un´altra. Quel che è certo è che non hanno
origine dal gruppo Mediaset. Naturalmente i magistrati hanno dovuto avviare
i loro riscontri e allora noi abbiamo preferito rinviare l´incontro a quando
avranno concluso le loro indagini. Abbiamo depositato una memoria, per ribadire
quanto già i nostri documenti dimostrano». E il conto svizzero dell´avvocato
Mills? «La questione è complessa: ci sono dei conti di appoggio dello studio,
anche esteri, dove sono affluite somme diverse. Ma ribadisco che manca qualsiasi
riscontro all´ipotesi dei pm relativamente all´origine di questo denaro».
Mills era già un ricco avvocato quando ha incontrato e sposato Tessa Jowell,
fedelissima di Blair, la faccia buona del partito spedita davanti alle tivù
a difenderne l´immagine. E così il Times, quando parla delle vicende dell´avvocato,
lo indica come il marito del ministro e nel titolo mette il nome di lei.
[1]
12 December 2002 15:59 GMT
The Independent
Tessa Jowell: The supreme networker
by Sean O'Grady
24 August 2001
www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4158/is_20010825/ai_n...
Tessa Jowell can be the only member of the Cabinet to have been converted
to socialism by the sight of Kirk Douglas in a loin-cloth. Some years ago,
and long before she can have dreamed she would one day be Her Majesty's Secretary
of State for Culture, Media and Sport, she told an interviewer: "Stanley
Kubrick's Spartacus moved me hugely when I was 14, with its themes of exploitation,
courageous revolt and the heroism of the slave uprising." Not much talk of
that in today's New Labour Party, of course, but Mrs Jowell's early commitment
to social justice cannot be doubted. Nor her ambition.
Having attended Aberdeen and Edinburgh universities and Goldsmith College,
London, Jowell became a psychiatric social worker in London and later worked
for the mental health charity Mind. She joined the Labour Party at the age
of 22, in 1969, and was elected to Camden Council three years later. She
first stood for Parliament, unsuccessfully, at a by-election in Ilford in
1978, at 31. Having been rebuffed by Bermondsey and Hampstead and Highgate,
she had to wait until 1992 to be elected an MP for Dulwich. Since then she
has advanced rapidly.
Even in a movement where networking is second nature to so many, Tessa Jowell's
connections are impressive, and complicated. Her second husband, David Mills,
is an ebullient personality, a wealthy solicitor who has business links to
Silvio Berlusconi. Another connection that was to lead to some embarrassment
is to the Benetton Formula 1 team and, indirectly, Bernie Ecclestone. Alastair
Campbell plays golf with Mr Mills, while Peter Mandelson has stayed at the
couple's country home and is godfather to their son.The family's Tuscany
villa also comes in handy.
Jowell is politically close to Tony Blair, Robin Cook and David Blunkett,
and her friends in Parliament include Margaret Hodge; Harriet Harman (Jowell
provided a shoulder to cry on when Harman was sacked from the Cabinet in
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; Baroness (Margaret) Jay, who has recently described the job of Chairman
of the BBC as a "very good fit" for her; and Frank Dobson, her boss when
she was a junior minister the Department of Health and, two decades earlier,
when he was leader of Camden council.
Her special adviser, Bill Bush, is a former head of research both at the
BBC and in 10 Downing Street. Regular guests at her dinner parties are Alan
Rusbridger, editor of The Guardian, and his wife Lindsay Mackie, a friend
since Edinburgh University. Her first husband, the distinguished social scientist
Roger Jowell, was an informal adviser to the Labour Party until the mid 1990s
and the brother of Jeffrey Jowell, a legal academic who is married to the
daughter of the South African liberal campaigner Helen Suzman. Roger and
Tessa were divorced in 1978, when she left him for David Mills. All three
were Camden Labour councillors at the time, as was Mills' brother, John.
John's wife is Barbara Mills, the former Director of Public Prosecutions.
And so on.
Now, in her new post, Jowell finds herself paid to be at the junction of
the worlds of politics, the media, sport, culture and the arts, a role to
which this accomplished networker is well-suited. It is her first proper
government job. Her previous appointments, as minister for public health
and then for women, despite the controversy in which she occasionally found
herself embroiled, were essentially exhortatory. Her jobs generated headlines
like "Minister urges sun bed clampdown" and led her to be sniggered at for
events such as the "bodyshape summit", which was a sincere effort to raise
awareness of eating disorders.
Now she is in charge of the most powerful cultural forces shaping the nation.
At the many receptions and parties she must attend she will no doubt demonstrate
her uncanny ability to "lock-on" to the most important personality in the
room. Possessed of a charming demeanour, Jowell will find massaging the awkward
and oversized egos she will encounter less of a problem than some of the
momentous decisions she now finds in front of her.
There is, for a start, the potentially explosive matter of advising the Prime
Minister about the next chair and deputy chair of the BBC. Gavyn Davies,
himself well connected to New Labour, remains the favourite for the top job.
In her ministerial red box also lie papers dealing with the aftermath of
the Wembley stadium fiasco, the athletics stadium at Picketts Lock, museums,
galleries, operas and all the rest. She must also create a super media and
telecommunications watchdog, Ofcom, prepare for the next stage of legislation
on media cross-ownership and decide whether to approve the BBC's plans for
digital broadcasting.
Indeed, she was due to make her intentions on the last issue known this weekend
in a speech at the Edinburgh television festival, but the tragic death in
South Africa of her son Matthew's former girlfriend, Amelia Ward, led to
the cancellation of all her public engagements. When she returns to the issue,
she is likely to balance sympathy for the BBC's ambitions with a determination
that the Corporation will not be allowed to "dumb down" by dumping output
like Panorama and Newsnight onto the digital channels.
These are big decisions that affect by far the most powerful medium in British
culture. And Jowell has already shown an instinct for the potentially hazardous.
Alert, for example, to the danger that the Government will appear to be "ordering"
people to buy new televisions and forcing them to switch to digital on some
arbitrary date, she has stressed that "digital will never work if we don't
succeed in convincing people that this is going to be good for their homes.
We can't conduct this analogue switch-off debate as one that carries the
threat that "we are going to switch you off".
This echoes her attempt to de-scarify Labour's policy on women's issues when
she replaced Clare Short as the party's official opposition spokesperson
and declared her mission to "win the hearts and minds of the middle-aged,
middle-class WI set". During the 1997 election she was one of the few figures
outside the Shadow Cabinet who were allowed to appear at the party's morning
press conferences. Most recently, she managed to avoid the worst of the fall-out
over the Brass Eye spoof documentary about the media's treatment of paedophiles,
merely "asking questions" about the Independent Television Commission's regulatory
powers. Small wonder the telegenic Tessa Jowell is routinely described as
an "identikit Blairite".
To which some riders need to be added. First, that she is hardly alone in
a party that has been remade in its leader's image far more than most observers
seem to appreciate, and is less patronising in tone than some of her Cabinet
colleagues (Patricia Hewitt's nanny-knows-best-there'll-be-tears-before-bedtime-if-you-don't-listen
voice comes to mind). Second, that Jowell was, for example, as a Camden councillor,
never part of the then fashionable far left and can lay some claim to being
a Blairite before Blair.
Although probably not entirely immune to the fads of the day, she comments:
"People turned their backs on me, called me Thatcherite scum. I wondered
how our party could ever be electable ... I was always pro-European, I thought
the mixed economy was inevitable, I was never a unilateralist and I always
believed in constitutional change". A Spartacus fan maybe, but a Spartacist
she was not.
Besides, looking at the current state of the Tory party, there might be something
to be said for being on-message and disciplined, even at the cost of seeing
yourself referred to every so often as the "speak-your-weight-machine tendency"
of New Labour politics
Indeed, Jowell's loyalty to the leadership is one of her defining characteristics.
During the Ecclestone affair in the early months of the Blair government
the press made much of the links between her husband and Formula 1. David
Mills was a director of the company which runs Benetton's Formula 1 team.
But an examination of the events puts Jowell herself in a rather better light.
She had attended a meeting of EU health ministers before the affair broke
and argued forcefully for a ban on tobacco advertising. She did not then
know, and indeed knew only shortly before most of the press found out, that
Ecclestone had donated £1m to the Labour Party. Nor was she aware in advance
of the lobbying session that took place between Ecclestone and Tony Blair
with his chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, which led to the Prime Minister's
decision to try to exempt tobacco companies' sponsorship of Formula 1 teams
from the ban.
The question in looking at Jowell's behaviour – as opposed to the Prime Minister's
– was whether she was right then to acquiesce in events and go along to another
EU ministers' meeting to argue for an exemption for Formula 1, or if she
should have resigned on a matter of principle. She had, after all, pledged
herself to be the "scourge of tobacco" and to implement the Labour manifesto
pledge to ban tobacco advertising outright. (Despite the odd pang, Jowell
had given up the evil weed herself at the age of 23).
At a time when Blair had to dip into his considerable political capital and
plead on television that he was a "pretty straight kind of guy" the resignation
of even a junior minister would have done still more damage to a government
badly tarnished by the affair. But there was never any chance that the ambitious
Jowell would go, and she confined herself to making a careful note of the
exact time at which she first heard the news that Ecclestone had been a major
party donor. On the really big issue, of party funding influencing policy-making
she, and Dobson for that matter, were innocent, if only because they were
not important enough to know about what was going on.
Sometimes Jowell jars. Her description of herself as a "street fighter" is
odd, but she can be ruthless. After she was shortlisted for Dulwich, she
appeared before a trade union nominating meeting where she was asked by a
supporter of rival candidate Barbara Follett whether she backed the same
age of consent – 16 – for homosexuals and heterosexuals; she said she did
not. Later in the selection process in the constituency, she said she would
because it was now party policy.
A government publication on health targets carried 32 photographs of her.
Interviewed on the Today programme recently she was asked to nominate her
favourite building. She chose Dulwich Picture Gallery, which just happens
to be in her constituency, and proceeded to give a slightly cloying account
of some poor people entering a gallery for the first time.
There are three more factors in understanding what makes the Culture Secretary
tick. First, her devotion to her family, as glimpsed publicly after the tragic
events of this week. Second, her Christianity – she was confirmed in the
Church of England in 1996. And, third, her capacity for hard work. The story
is told of her working through the night to finish her paperwork so she could
attend a play featuring one of her children the following evening.
Tessa Jowell may get free tickets to some of the best events in the nation's
cultural calendar but, even with her application, she may find it tricky
to find the time to attend many of them. Being minister of fun can be no
fun. One wonders when she will next have time to watch a video of that inspirational
movie Spartacus.
Life Story
Born: Tessa Jane Helen Douglas Palmer, 17 September 1947.
Family: Daughter of Dr Kenneth Palmer, a chest consultant at Aberdeen Royal
Infirmary, and Rosemary Palmer (née Douglas),
a radiographer.
Married: First to Roger Jowell, 1970. Marriage dissolved 1978. Second, to
David Mills, 1979. Daughter Jessie, 20, is about to start at Sussex University
and son Matthew, 17, is at David Leadbetter Golf Academy, Florida. There
are three stepchildren from Mills's
first marriage.
Education: St Margaret's School, Aberdeen (fee-paying); Aberdeen University
(MA); Edinburgh University (diploma in social administration); Goldsmith's
College, London.
Career: Child care officer, Lambeth, London, 1969-71; psychiatric social
worker, Maudsley Hospital, 1972-74; assistant director Mind, 1974-86; director,
community care special project, Birmingham,
1986-90; director, Rowntree Foundation projects 1990-92.
Political career: Camden councillor 1971-86. Contested Ilford at 1978 by-election
and at the 1979 general election. MP for Dulwich since 1992. Spokeswoman
on Women 1995-96, Health 1994-5 and 1996-97, and a whip 1994-5. Minister
for Public Health 1997-98; for Employment, Welfare to Work, and Equal Opportunities
1999-2001. Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport since June 2001.
She says: "I'm a post-feminist."
They say: "Tessa Jowell makes my blood boil" Steve Coogan.