Alastair Campbell Is Advising Najib On How To Win Election – Exclusive!
SARAWAK REPORT
Sarawak Report can now add to growing questions in Britain over Tony Blair and his former PR advisors’ links with repressive regimes.
We have learnt from exclusive sources that the former PM’s ex-Communications Chief, Alastair Campbell (world-famous for the so-called ‘Dodgy Dossier’ that sanctioned the invasion of Iraq), is now advising Malaysian PM, Najib Razak on how to win the next election!
This follows the recent scandal over FBC Media, a story also broken by Sarawak Report, which revealed that Najib and Chief Minister Abdul Taib Mahmud were illegally buying positive publicity on worldwide TV-news shows.
A common link between FBC Media, the PM’s previous PR firm, APCOA and now Alastair Campbell is believed to be Paul Stadlen, who is a British PR man, close to Najib and based in KL.
Najib is said to be desperate to brush up his international image, on the eve of an expected election and in the wake of the appalling world publicity gained by his treatment of the July 9th Bersih rally. He also wants to increase his voter appeal towards an increasingly independently-minded urban electorate in Malaysia.
Our sources say that Campbell recently visited Najib in KL and has been behind advice over the past couple of months to show a more friendly image, such as the promise to reform detention laws (a gesture which has subsequently been put on indefinite hold) and the concept of a “Cool Najib”, reflective of the coining of Tony Blair’s “Cool Britannia” back in the 1990s!
Cosying up to oil-rich dictators?
Our revelations about Malaysian links with Tony Blair’s team of advisors past and present, come hard on the heels of weekend reports in the UK’s Financial Times and Daily Mail newspapers about similar activities in Khazakhstan.
Alastair Campbell was seen returning earlier this month from Astana, the Khazakh capital, where he admitted to doing some consultancy work “but nothing like on the scale that Tony is doing”.
Tony Blair himself is believed to have forged close relations with the Khazakh President, Nursaltan Nazabayev during his period in office and to have continued those relations, including making a number of visits this year.
Nazarbayev is another potentate with international image problems, given the notorious cruelty and corruption of his 20 year regime.
Intriguingly, the growing ties between him and Najib Razak, particularly in the field of public relations, have already been well documented in Sarawak Report’s coverage of the FBC Media scandal.
Both countries had hired FBC’s PR services and were frequently featured on FBC programmes. The question now must surely be what ties have there been between FBC and people linked to Tony Blair and how directly linked has Blair himself been to these and related PR initiatives?
