the downfall of the David Held regime
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- Published on Tuesday, 01 March 2011 09:05
- Written by Erik
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A former student sent me a quote from the Guardian about my old LSE colleague David Held:
'The London School of Economics took £1.5m from Saif al-Islam Qaddafi, money which by definition had to have been stolen from the Libyan people, despite being warned to back away by Professor Fred Halliday, the LSE's late and much-missed authority on the Middle East, who never flinched from looking dictators in the eye.
"I've come to know Saif as someone who looks to democracy, civil society and deep liberal values for the core of his inspiration," purred the LSE's David Held as he accepted the cheque. ... Last week, Saif, the "liberal" promoter of human rights and dining companion of Mandelson, appeared on Libyan television to say that his father's gunmen would fight to the last bullet to keep the Gaddafi crime family in business, a promise he is keeping.
David Held has a long and pathetic history of sucking up to people in power. For a while he thought of himself as having a "special relationship" with Clinton's White House. I had a run-in with him at the time since he insisted that I'd accept a student to our MSc program in Comparative Politics who was a relative of Sidney Blumenthal, a Clinton crony. I also thought it was despicable how Held used to stop me in the staircase of the Government Department and tell me how he was invited to hobnob with VIPs in Davos.
I'm now watching news from Libya with rapt attention. If Qadaffi's downfall can lead to the downfall of David Held, I'm all for it. Yes and another thing: Held used to tell us about the "rather lucrative sideline" he had teaching courses in "business ethics" at universities all around Europe. Just the man!
Another former student of mine, who took a course with Qadaffi's son, reports that he was as incoherent and rambling in class as he now is in interviews with assorted international TV networks. But of course that never stopped Held from accepting him as his PhD student. There is a petition online to revoke Qadaffi's son LSE alumnus status.
