Hired guns and hatchet jobs

Michael Bloomberg's web of influence

It’s hard not to laugh when they turn on their own. Action on Smoking and Health’s longstanding CEO Deborah Arnott and her former colleague Martin Dockrell, who is now tobacco control programme lead at the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities, are the target of a hatchet job in The Times today.

Civil servant in charge of vaping policy advised e-cigarette giant

… Martin Dockrell, tobacco control programme lead at England’s public health body, met Juul’s co-founder and two other company executives in private while attending a nicotine conference in Warsaw, Poland in 2017.

… During the dinner in June 2017, Dockrell and Deborah Arnott, who heads the public health charity Action on Smoking and Health (ASH), reportedly told Juul that the UK’s medicine regulator and PHE would be supportive of the company launching in the UK as “they want to see an attractive switching product made by a non-big tobacco company”, according to Juul emails.

So what? Civil servants are allowed to speak to people from industry. They should be encouraged to speak to people from industry and then they might draft better legislation. There are rules about meeting the tobacco industry but Juul was an independent vape company in 2017. Neither Arnott nor Dockrell are politicians, no money changed hands and there is nothing wrong with chatting to people at a conference. If their advice to Juul has been reported correctly, they made a good point.

It’s difficult to see what the problem is here, so The Times invited Martin McKee, an obese rent-a-gob and Zero Covid crank who knows nothing about e-cigarettes, to whip up some outrage.

“It was entirely inappropriate even to meet with representatives of a company producing an addictive product widely used by children, much less to advise on it,” he said. “It is even worse that we are only learning about it now.”

But now we do know about it and the question remains “so what?” Ignorance should not be worn as a badge of honour. Meeting people is a good thing. You might not always agree, but you might learn something.

The Times even got Arnott’s opposite number in Scotland to put the boot in. There seems to be no love lost here…

Sheila Duffy, chief executive of ASH Scotland, said: “The evidence of Juul attempting to influence health policymakers in the UK to promote use of their vaping products is alarming and emphasises the importance of civil servants always ensuring that engagements and conversations, even informally, with industry representatives are beyond reproach.”

Arnott is supposedly a private citizen, not a policymaker. In practice, she is part of the UK’s nanny state blob and her organisation is funded by the state, but Duffy probably shouldn’t be saying that out loud. How should civil servants ensure that their conversations are ‘beyond reproach’? What evidence is there that Dockrell’s conversation with Juul fell below that standard? According to the article, Dockrell and Arnott even paid for their own meals.

I should say that I have quite a strong animus towards both Arnott and Dockrell. They are prohibitionists and their policies have done a great deal of harm. The civil service shouldn’t be recruiting activists, and pressure groups shouldn’t be given taxpayers money. Nevertheless, this story strikes me as nothing-burger, although judging by some of the comments, it has achieved its purpose of fostering paranoia about government and creating suspicion of e-cigarettes.

Why is The Times publishing such bilge? This is where it gets interesting. The article was written by Billy Kenbar, who produced a series of increasingly lame hit pieces on e-cigarettes for The Times in January, and Matthew Chapman who doesn’t work for The Times at all. He works for something called The Examination and there is an extended, free to read version of the article on The Examination’s website.

The Examination was founded last September after receiving ‘a “generous” grant from Bloomberg Philanthropies’. Michael Bloomberg is the world’s richest anti-vaping fanatic and has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on campaigns against e-cigarettes.

Before joining The Examination, Matthew Chapman worked at the Bureau for Investigative Journalism where he spent three years working on a ‘Big Tobacco’ project that focused on shadowy cabals and dark webs of influence. The Bureau for Investigative Journalism’s strategy is to generate stories that the mainstream media might pick up on. Its output is long on insinuation and sometimes flat-out wrong, as Newsnight found to its cost, but if you throw enough mud, some of it will stick. For example, in 2020 Chapman fed a story to Channel 4’s Dispatches which attacked the zealous anti-smoking MP Kevin Barron for meeting Philip Morris International (PMI). He has also written articles attacking nicotine pouches (picked up by The Observer) and criticising PMI for donating ventilators to hospitals during the pandemic.

The Bureau for Investigative Journalism’s ‘Big Tobacco’ work stream was wholly funded by Vital Strategies which, in turn, is wholly funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies. Matthew Chapman has moved from one Bloomberg-funded propaganda outfit to another and has now got one of his hatchet jobs published in The Times.

Mike Bloomberg clearly sees value in buying journalism. The Guardian makes no secret of the fact that Vital Strategies has funded much of what it has written about tobacco. But Bloomberg’s influence is not always so obvious. In 2021, a hit piece on a pro-vaping scientist appeared in the British Medical Journal, co-authored by someone from The Investigative Desk. The article did not mention that…

The Investigative Desk, a European news outlet, received an undisclosed sum for a contract with the University of Bath to publish anti-tobacco news stories. The contract was, in turn, funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies, which gave the University of Bath at least $20 million for its anti-tobacco work. The contract contains a provision compelling The Investigative Desk not to reveal that Bloomberg Philanthropies directly funds its activities.

As amusing as it is to see Deborah Arnott and Martin Dockrell have their own tactics used against them, they clearly did nothing wrong in this instance. There is no conflict of interest in having a conversation with someone. The Times article would be garbage no matter who wrote it, but shouldn’t we be more interested in the influence of a foreign billionaire over British media? UK journalists have a bit of a blind spot when it comes to Mr Bloomberg. George Monbiot often talks about the ‘billionaire press’ but you never hear him mention Mike. If The Times wants to investigate dark webs of influence, perhaps it should look closer to home.