Suits, caves and silence: Powell’s PR machine must speak up about Bilal’s prison hell in Syria

Jonathan Powell is one of the most influential, shadowy figures in Britain; a posh, Oxford-educated mandarin who seems to fancy himself as a modern-day Lawrence of Arabia, swanning around the Middle East to cut secret deals with warlords.

As the UK’s National Security Adviser — a powerful, unelected political appointment secured under Keir Starmer and remarkably retained under Prime Minister Andy Burnham — Powell sits at the very heart of Downing Street’s security machine. He learned his craft at the feet of his ultimate political mentor, Tony Blair. Wherever and whenever dubious Middle Eastern interventionism is cooking, Blair’s shadow is never far away.

Serving as Blair’s right-hand man during the disastrous Iraq War era, Powell demonstrated early on that he had a keen appetite for high-stakes regional meddling. After leaving No 10, he built an entire second career out of courting some of the most shadowy figures on the planet through his secretive London outfit, Inter-Mediate, headquartered just off Queen Street in the heart of the capital.

It was Powell’s back-channel PR machine that famously helped put a Savile Row-style makeover on Syrian militant rebel leader Abu Mohammad Al-Jolani, scrubbing off the combat fatigues, ditching the battlefield facial wrap or imamah, and rebranding him as a respectable, suit-wearing statesman.

Now, that exact same secretive Queen Street advisory pipeline is working overtime to polish the image of Syria’s new First Lady, Latifa Al Droubi. Following Powell’s move back into Whitehall, Inter Mediate’s top executive duo, Claire Hajaj and Lucy Stuart, have been linked to the delicate diplomatic task of curating Latifa’s rapid transition from the shadows onto the international stage.

Suddenly, a woman whose own official backstory boasts that she spent 14 gruelling years on the run — moving through 49 different safe houses and hiding out in caves during the civil war — is being paraded in international diplomatic circles and education summits as a beacon of modern academic excellence.

We are told that she holds a master’s degree in Arabic language and literature from Idlib University, where her husband famously turned up as the guest of honour to hand her a commemorative shield at her graduation ceremony in September last year.

Yet anyone with an ounce of journalistic scepticism is entitled to ask how a wartime fugitive dodging barrel bombs across nearly fifty different boltholes and caves managed to keep up with her university studies, let alone earn a shiny postgraduate qualification from a provincial institution controlled directly by her husband’s supposedly interim administration.

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Does such an academic pedigree genuinely stand up to serious scrutiny, or is it simply the ultimate PR gloss, custom-built by Western spin doctors to reassure gullible foreign donors that the latest power couple in Damascus are safe, sophisticated and socially liberal?

Yet while Powell, Blair’s old guard and the Queen Street handlers are busy grooming the couple for polite society, there is one glaring, inconvenient detail that they have swiftly swept under the diplomatic carpet: the fate of independent journalist Bilal Abdul Kareem (American-born Darryl Lamont Phelps).

As we approach the grim, one-year milestone of Bilal languishing inside an Aleppo prison without a single formal charge or trial, the breathtaking duplicity of this back-channel diplomacy is laid bare for the world to see.

What is it with Powell’s personal obsession of playing the grand British orientalist, whispering in the ears of armed factions from Idlib to Damascus while turning a blind eye to their political dungeons? Where are the high-minded lectures on human values, youth empowerment and educational enlightenment from the Queen Street team when an American-born reporter is being denied basic legal due process just up the road in Aleppo?

You don’t need a degree from Oxford — or a wartime correspondence course from a Syrian cave — to spot the staggering double standards. Before he ever picked up a camera in a war zone, Bilal was a stand-up comedian, and right now his unjust captivity is exposing the sickest joke in British foreign policy.

Powell’s secret diplomacy was sharp enough to get Al-Jolani into a tailored suit and turn his wife into an international conference darling, yet it suddenly goes completely AWOL when a fellow journalist is in dire need of basic justice.

Until Whitehall’s ultimate shadow-broker — and the rest of the Blairite interventionist club — stops playing dress-up with Damascus strongmen and demands Bilal’s immediate release, his “conflict resolution” legacy isn’t ever going to be worth the paper it’s written on.

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