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Friend of George Clooney and Matt Damon who held Gordon Brown to account over Libya
Stephen Robinson8 Sep 2009
One man is responsible for the fact that Gordon Brown is still mired in the political slurry of the al-Megrahi row with Libya. That man is a preternaturally self-assured and well-connected 40-year-old lawyer by the name of Jason McCue, who stoked the furore that has prolonged the Prime Minister's Libyan agony, but nevertheless regards him a friend.
It was McCue who at the weekend leaked the letters from ministers to his clients who are fighting for compensation from Libya for its culpability in IRA bombings. These letters seemed to betray a resounding official indifference to the quest for damages, prompting Sunday morning's headlines singling out Brown for blocking a deal. Thus, in the span of a weekend news cycle, the Prime Minister's autumn re-launch was stone dead.
Yet bizarrely, later that Sunday, McCue says a Downing Street official rang him not to remonstrate, but to ask: “What do you want?” McCue says he told the official he wanted London to make formal representations to Libya that a deal must be struck, and practical assistance from the Foreign Office in his dealings in Tripoli.
He and his team of lawyers would do the actual negotiations with the Libyan government to secure millions of pounds for his 140 or so clients who have joined a class action suit before an American court. McCue just wanted Brown to put the compensation settlement back on the political agenda.
And hey presto, a few hours later, in a stumbling performance at a joint press conference with the German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Brown seemed to promise just that, thereby performing what was widely derided as yet another humiliating U-turn.
Not so, says McCue: his friend the Prime Minister had merely seen off the suits in the Foreign Office and ensured common sense prevailed by offering assistance that was already under consideration. McCue plays a long game in his legal battles, and already he sees the outline of a settlement whereby British oil companies, particularly BP, stump up the cash for his clients' compensation in the name of cordial bilateral relations between Tripoli and London.
McCue's own relations with Downing Street are multilayered. He says he finds the prime minister personally charming, intelligent, and engaged. His wife, Mariella Frostrup, the Joan Bakewell de nos jours, also happens to be a very good friend of Sarah Brown. The two wives are jointly active in third world causes, and have been helpful in another of McCue's legal crusades, ending the genocide in Darfur.
Not that the McCue-Frostrup network ends there, for they are known as a social power couple. McCue, sandy-haired with fashionable stubble and yellow-tinted spectacles, looks a little like Kenneth Branagh.
But if a movie were ever to be made about his life – and that is not a totally absurd notion for he is a genuinely brave man and a legal pioneer – his role might be played by Matt Damon. This, in turn, is not as far-fetched as it may seem because McCue and Damon are in fact good friends.
“Matt rings me when he's in London and says how about some dinner. And I say, great, but I want you to put on a Darfur T-shirt, and there'll be a photographer waiting for you.”
McCue met Matt Damon through another of his Hollywood friends, George Clooney, who was really a friend of Mariella's, who seems to know anyone who is anyone, including Damien Hirst, Annie Lennox, Mick Jagger, and pretty much everyone else. Jason and Mariella holiday at George's house on Lake Como, and their two children, Molly, 5, and Dan, 3, call the Hollywood star “uncle George”.
McCue talks of his celebrity friends with an enthusiasm so boyish that it is somehow difficult to hold it against him, he gleefully tells an anecdote about a case in Morocco where his client was freed after he got “George” to phone the president, who naturally was a fan.
When we talked yesterday in the gardens of Lincoln's Inn, close to his office off Chancery Lane, Jason McCue seems as surprised as anyone about his elevation into the apex of the little enclave of London where fashionable Notting Hill and staid Westminster intersect. He was born into a working class family in Warrington, of a Polish mother and Protestant Irish immigrant father.
He did well enough at his Secondary Modern school to win a place reading law at London University, where his first essay caused him to be sent for remedial English instruction. It turned out he had severe dyslexia which his school had failed to detect, and which to this day reduces his articled clerks to amused bafflement when they try to decode his first drafts of legal argument.
His already vigorous social life reached a new level quite by chance when ten years ago when he decided on a whim to join an ex-girlfriend on a working trip to Nepal, where she was to photograph Mariella Frostrup – then a permanent fixture on terrestrial television -- doing a charity walk.
She is seven years his senior, but the attraction was instant and mutual. Mariella calls him “the most moral man I know”, while Jason says she often gives him a hard time, but always in the right way.
Adopting the manner of the bemused working-class lad, he affects to dislike precious Notting Hill (“actually, the Bayswater end”) and hasn't quite forgiven Mariella for making him give up his bachelor pad, “a whole warehouse in Hoxton”, he says ruefully, “just think of that.”. Not that they are underpowered property-wise: they have a large second home in Scotland, whither they repair whenever they can.
His legal celebrity arose at around the same time as his relationship with Mariella, though separately, when he fell upon an intriguing legal experiment in using the civil courts to target the terrorists responsible for the Omagh bombing of 1998.
McCue, who by temperament and background stands as far outside the Oxbridge-Temple circle of the law as you can get, waves his hand around the central garden of Lincoln's Inn, gesturing at the windows of the barristers' sets around him. “When I set off on that case, the people around here all said publicly I didn't have a chance. Well, they've changed their tune eight years on, haven't they?”
Indeed they have. Earlier this year, McCue and his small legal team won a sensational legal victory four men were found liable for the bombing which killed 29 people. The men were ordered to pay than £1.6m in damages to the victims and their relatives, and though that money will probably never be paid, the key principle of civil liability in terrorist outrages was established. It was a gruelling legal marathon kept McCue away from his young family for weeks on end, and attracted several alarming threats to his personal safety from paramilitary figures. McCue tries to brush these off as trivial, but they must have taken a toll, and he is still not blithe about his personal security.
Having established what has been called the Omagh brand', McCue is now applying the principle of the pursuit of terrorists through civil courts all over the world. His case is proceeding in an American court against Arab Bank on behalf of victims of the second intifada who claim that the bank rewarded the families of suicide bombers. He is now looking at bringing proceedings under Indian jurisdiction for the victims of the of the Mumbai attack against those who funded the terror camps in Pakistan.
McCue is such a natural networker that in his head he is already working out the complex web of connections which will bring a settlement for his clients in the Libyan case. He has drawn Downing Street into the fray, and now he is delighted that Saif Gaddafi, the dictator's son, has spoken up publicly against politicians, and in favour of a settlement being found in the court room.
“That's the first time we have had any response from the Libyans at all,” McCue says jubilantly. “I think we're seeing a readiness to find a way out of this because it's in the interests of everyone, including the Libyan and British governments.”
The bad news for BP, the company which most benefited from the exploration deal with Libya that seemingly triggered the al-Megrahi release, is that McCue now has it in his sights as he demands it contributes to a fund to compensate the victims of Libyan sponsored terrorism, as US oil companies have paid into a $2 billion in America. “It is time BP thought about others and not just their share holders. After all, good relations with Libya are in their interests as much as anyone's.”
McCue, who describes himself as “an inherent socialist who thinks the Tories speak sense on some issues”, has such a restless mind that he seess to chafe against the constraints of a simple legal career. He earnestly hopes his children will not follow him into the law, “and all the crap that entails”.
His firm made little money from the Omagh victory, though McCue concedes the return from the Libyan case, done on a contingency basis as is usual in American courts, could bring in huge fees.
But money alone does not seem to drive Jason McCue, much as he unapologetically drops names and clearly relishes the high life. These days he spends a lot of time on his Darfur project, which is bank-rolled by the Sudanese-born, British billionaire philanthropist Mo Ibrahim. Together they have formulated Mandate Darfur, a plan to bring together representatives of civil society in the region to end the fighting.
Jason McCue's drive and thick skin should not be underestimated, as the men behind the Omagh bombing found to their cost. Mandate Darfur is currently stalled due to the temporary intransigence of the Sudanese president. In the next few weeks he should prepare to take calls from Matt and George.
