Can Chatham House’s new director raise it from the dead? Last night Robin Niblett, at 45 the youngest director in the history of the 87-year-old institution, gave his inaugural lecture, arguing that Iraq has brought a profound change to the UK’s relations with the US.
Supporters of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, as this flagship of British public life is also known, hope that Dr Niblett, a British analyst of transatlantic relations who has returned from a decade in Washington, can bring about his own transformation of its failing fortunes.
“It would be tremendous if Chatham House got back in the game,” said Gary Samore, an internationally known analyst of security issues who used to be director of research at its rival, the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS).
Chatham House, which calls itself “Europe’s leading foreign policy think-tank”, still has a powerful ability to attract big names to its six-storey, 1730s house in St James’s Square (once home to William Gladstone). “The most important people in the world will drop most things to give a talk there”, said Denis MacShane, the Labour MP and former Europe Minister, who is on its council.
But the charge is that Chatham House has dwindled to no more than a beautiful backdrop for speakers in search of a podium: that its meetings promise an insider’s perspective which it no longer delivers, and that it has ceased to be a think-tank producing influential research.
Its problems spring from the strengths of its past. It was founded in 1920 by British and US delegates to the Paris peace conference, and funded for decades by the Foreign Office (an arrangement which lasted until 1980).
Its heyday was the aftermath of the Second World War (despite its failure to foresee Hitler’s rise, critics note); it enjoyed its place near the heart of political life, a block away from the clubs of Pall Mall and a short walk across St James’s Park for those in Whitehall and Westminster.
Its reputation for offering real insight into the making of foreign policy was underpinned by the famous “Chatham House Rule” which protected the confidentiality of discussions. The rule, often now invoked as a form of “off the record” in meetings unconnected with the institute, holds that “participants are free to use the information received, but neither the identity nor the affiliation of the speaker, nor that of any other participant, may be revealed."
But since the Foreign Office cut the cord, Chatham House has had a rough ride. Its constantly changing directors have struggled to raise money, tugging it in whichever direction offered most corporate sponsorship, while losing chunks of territory to the burgeoning competition for foreign analysis.
Chatham House gets much of its money by persuading people, companies or organisations to pay for research (40 per cent), or from membership fees (a fifth). It also runs commercial conferences.
Victor Bulmer-Thomas, the previous director, shored up its finances, and it has been in the black for three years. Its income in the year to March 2006 was £6.2 million; this year the budget is £6.1 million. With that, it supports a staff of about 70, including 25 full-time researchers.
Dan Plesch, a security specialist at the School of Oriental and African Studies, adds: “It is difficult for them [Chatham House] to do meaningful research that doesn’t reflect the funders’ interests. So they turn to academics, and ask them to work for not much money.”
A typical salary for a full-time researcher is in the region of £40,000, although it also doles out dollops of money to “associates” in universities (which then get the kudos for the research). “It would do better to employ fewer and pay them more,” said one observer (the IISS pays its top specialists about three times as much).
Dr Niblett’s staff may be cheered to hear he believes that the “attitude to British think-tank researchers has been to pay them in parallel with academics. I believe the combination of skills needed to be a good programme head deserves proper compensation.”
Part of its financial problems is common to all British think-tanks. London is “an extraordinary place for foreign affairs”, says Dr Niblett; it is the crossroads for traffic between US, the Middle East and continental Europe, and between politics and finance, in a way that Washington cannot match. But “the trouble in London is lack of money”, says Dr Samore, now at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.
“American think-tanks are just so rich,” Dr Samore says. “In the US, companies, individuals and foundations have a strong interest in cultivating people who are in the political wilderness, but who may be Cabinet officials at the next turn of the political wheel. That doesn’t exist in Europe — your system is built so heavily on a professional civil service.”
Dr Niblett, well able to compare the cultures after ten years at the respected Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, says that US think-tanks keep a very close eye on their impact on policy. In Britain, research tends toward the academic. If there is one change he wants to make at Chatham House, he says, it is to exhort its analysts to “go beyond the very good analysis they are doing now and, where relevant, to offer ideas and solutions to the people making decisions”.
Chatham House’s greatest strength is as a forum where officials passing through London can make their pitch. “It’s still the place where the Foreign Minister of God-knows-where wants to speak,” said one observer.
It has refurbished its underground seminar room, a modern bunker in a building otherwise redolent of the 1950s, and has held some good debates, including a sharp one last year, with The Economist, on whether India would overtake China in the next 25 years (the verdict was “no”).
Many of its meetings do not use the Chatham House Rule (now a handicap for it in the competition for publicity, some in rival institutions believe). But even private meetings lack the sense of being at the heart of policy-making, many argue. It tends to hold them at lunchtime (carefully thanking whichever high commission has subsi-dised the crustless sandwiches) or at 5.30pm, ideal for the elderly expatriate Americans and academics who make up much of the audience, but not for politicians or the media.
Its greatest problem, however, is in research, where its claim to be a competitive think-tank looks frail. One frequent accusation is that it has allowed corporate interests to determine its choice of subjects. Its biggest programme is “energy, environment and development”, which might seem an eccentric focus for an institution claiming to pronounce on foreign affairs.
Mr MacShane agrees that Chatham House “is business-driven — and business wants [research on] energy, market openings, transparency, corruption”. However, Dr Niblett defends the weighting, saying that energy and environment are the mainstream foreign policy”.
It also has solid expertise in Russia (its small programme wins universal praise) and in the Middle East, although its publication rate there has been slow — it took months to produce any comment after the 2003 Iraq invasion. Its highest-profile work has flinched away from policy conclusions. A subtle analysis of Iran and its neighbours in August was devoid of recommendations. A much noticed report on Iraq in September 2004 offered “three possible scenarios” for the country’s future but declined to say which it thought most likely.
But at least it devotes resources to that region; other areas are glaringly absent. It does not have a separate programme on Europe, having failed twice to raise the money, keeping only one senior research fellow and folding his work into other themes.
Nor, in a period dominated by US policy, does it research the US at all. It sustains only a “discussion group” (the highlight of 2006, it says, was “an invitation to the US Embassy to attend a private meeting with Dr Lynne Cheney, the historian, author and wife of Vice-President Dick Cheney.”
That does not help it counter the widespread perception that it is antiAmerican, an impression exacerbated by Professor Bulmer-Thomas’s valedictory lecture in December, an attack on Tony Blair’s closeness to President Bush. It is antiIsrael, too, many maintain; in a sentiment expressed by half a dozen others close to Chatham House, Mr MacShane says: “Sometimes I’ve had the feeling that it takes an approach to Israel informed by that British, Bloomsbury disdain for Jewish causes through the ages.”
Dr Niblett partly accepts the first point, arguing that the Iraq invasion created “an intense and odd period” and “it is perhaps inevitable that the perception of the US having made a serious mistake, which could have repercussions for the UK, worked its way into the writing and thinking at Chatham House”. Of the “antiIsrael” accusation, he says “I’ve heard it, but in the short time I’ve been here I’ve not seen any signs.”
While Chatham House has dwindled, competition has grown. The Centre for European Reform is the best-known house for analysis of the European Union, and the Royal United Services Institute for military theory (offered up in a quirky mixture of quotations from the Chinese strategist Sun Tzu and highly technical brief-ings from field commanders). But banks, stockbrokers and consultancies such as Kroll and Control Risks are also pushing in. Dr Niblett is alert to “this increasingly commoditised world of analysis” and “the risk that we’ll be pushed to the edges”.
The IISS, Chatham House’s greatest rival, which was founded to study nuclear arms control, has flourished in the recent intense interest in international security. The £15 million building it bought for itself, overlooking the Thames at the Temple, has helped it to pull in top speakers from the US, Europe and the Middle East. It has outstripped Chatham House in demonstrable influence on policy (albeit most memorably with its September 2002 “dossier” on the threat posed by Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, which Downing Street cited weeks later in justifying the invasion). Its media coverage (helped by the televi-sion suite in the basement) is modern to a fault.
It has overtaken Chatham House, too, in income, turning to the US, Asia and the Gulf for support, and running mini-summits for the defence establishment worldwide. John Chipman, its director-general, is paid more than £300,000 a year, partly in reflection of his fundraising skills; senior fellows are paid more than £100,000 (including bonuses determined by the public impact of their work).
In the face of these pressures, can Dr Niblett turn Chatham House around? There is a widespread view in the London think-tank community that he is its best chance for some time. “He has all the right skills,” said one observer from another institute. One who has worked with him credits him with “a lot of charm, which he’ll need to persuade the staff to change”. He is conspicuously bright and articulate; his familiarity with the US, its foreign policy and its think-tanks, will plug two of Chatham House’s worst gaps.
He is lucky in his timing, too; the rising interest in energy, the environment and development will play to Chatham House’s strengths. But the problems are deeply entrenched, and the risk is that his plans, like too much of Chatham House’s research, will precipitate no change at all.
