Matthew Norman: Demise of our latter-day Kissinger

When finally it came, the statement we had long been dreading struck a curiously dispassionate tone, and was of course all the more moving for that. Lacking the lachrymose sentimentality of a recent effort in Sedgefield, it contented itself with stating the fact.

Lord Levy will step down as the Prime Minister's special envoy to the Middle East, his official spokesman announced yesterday, when Mr Tony Blair leaves office next month. And that, bar an expression of goodwill towards Gordon Brown and an equally sincere word of thanks to all the Foreign Secretaries and diplomats who so profoundly resented his presence in the Foreign Office, was that.

Momentous shifts in the tide of human history come with thankful rarity, but when they do the danger of rushing to judgment weighs heavily. How are we to appraise his contribution without even knowing, at the time of writing, the immediate reaction of the world beyond our shores?

Are the streets of Damascus thronged today by protesters burning placards bearing the likeness of Inspector Yates of Scotland Yard, in violent protest at the news? Has King Abdullah of Jordan swapped the warmth of the Hashemite throne for a seat on a Washington-bound 747, en route to urgent discussions with the State Department about the full implications? In Tel Aviv, has the former and would-be future PM Bibi Netanyahu ratcheted up his machinations, seeing his lordship's departure as the straw that could break Ehud Olmert's back?

We just don't know yet how the Middle East will react, let alone how history will judge him ... but when it comes to Baron Levy of Mill Hill and his role in that region's affairs, we know little more now than when he was appointed to his unique post five years ago. All we do know, in fact, are a few statistics. He made 121 foreign trips to 24 countries as envoy (the "special" only applies in the Middle East; elsewhere he was a very ordinary envoy), self-allegedly paying for the flights himself, but receiving an estimated £250,000 worth of accommodation on the taxpayer.

Of these, 38 were to Israel, 24 to the Palestinian Authority, and often to the United States. He has also escorted his platform shoes to many countries in Latin America, and most bizarrely to Kazakhstan, where in 2004 he met the deranged lifetime dictator Nursultan Nazarbayev for reasons about which it feels futile to speculate.

In the pursuance of his duties, whatever they may have been, he held meetings with 16 presidents, seven prime ministers, two kings, one governor of the World Bank and one secretary general of the United Nations, not to mention myriad ministers and ambassadors. And yet the only discussions about which we know a dickie bird were with our then man in Washington, Christopher Meyer, who with palpable distaste recalls a Levy visit in 2001 in his memoir DC Confidential.

"At first his ambitions were reasonable in scale," recalls Sir Christopher, "senior, influential people appropriate to his status." Alas, a chasm was soon to appear in their respective notions of that status. "It was too good to last. Not long before he was due to arrive, Levy called me to say that he now wanted to see Condi Rice, Colin Powell, and others of Cabinet rank... Levy duly arrived at the residence. He told me that humiliation awaited him in London if these meetings did not materialise."

Lord Levy wished to be seen "as a latter-day Kissinger", Meyer had been warned, and if that appears a peculiar ambition for anyone without a heavy stockholding in a napalm factory, it's worth remembering what a pin-up of global statesmanship the old monster always was to New Labour's high society. With my own ears I have heard Peter Mandelson dwell disconsolately on how "I don't get invited to breakfast with him when he's in London any more. I've had some of the best conversations of my life with Henry."

Apart from any other paltry differences between Michael and Henry, one important thing divided these globe-trotting titans. Whereas Kissinger was obliged to explain himself from time to time, via Congress and its committees, to the American people, Lord Levy and his works remained a closed book to us.

For five years, British policy on the most politically complex, dangerous and incendiary part of the planet was shaped by a former record label owner answerable solely to the PM; an unelected crony who, having been created a "working peer" by Mr Blair, hasn't spoken in the Lords once since his maiden speech in December 1997. Anyone in doubt about the need for a written constitution might care to dwell on that as Lord Levy takes his leave not with a bang, and with barely a whimper.

You'd need a heart of stone and all that, yet there is something genuinely poignant about his demise. I'd rather be force fed my own pancreas sautéd in a gutsy renal jus than sit through another lunch with him, hearing the famous names being dropped like bombs on to Dresden.

Yet it isn't an entirely one-sided story. Even the haughty Christopher Meyer was mildly impressed with his grasp of his subject, and one thing no one questioned until very recently was his honesty. His discovery Chris Rea (it wasn't only Stardust, you know) describes him as a hard bastard but a fair one, and in a blog a certain Chris Bell confirms this with recollections about being his chauffeur in the 1970s.

Levy chucked the odd ashtray if his daily salt beef sandwich from Reuben's of Baker Street arrived cold, reports Mr Bell, but when he totalled the company van, Levy was straight on the phone asking after his well-being rather than the vehicle's. Another business acquaintance tells me that, most unusually in the music business, Levy's handshake was his bond.

All in all, then, this is not a bad man, if an unusually vain one, and you can barely imagine the depth of his distress at being left marooned and isolated in Totteridge, pacing the thick white shagpile as he waits to learn whether he will be prosecuted for carrying out to the letter the fund-raising instructions of the man who appointed him.

Each man destroys the thing he loves, said Oscar Wilde, and so it has proved. Mr Mandelson, Alastair Campbell, now Lord Levy ... all those on whom Mr Blair lavished his deepest love have seen their reputations annihilated for doing his bidding - and having been left to swing in the wind, they now flit around the outskirts of public life like tragicomic spectres.

But the destruction of Lord Levy seems somehow the saddest because he had climbed the furthest, from the single room in Hackney where he spent his earliest years to the kingly and presidential palaces of the world, and has had the most precipitous fall.

More from Matthew Norman