Lord of works
Sir: Your profile of Lord Malloch-Brown was grossly unfair (Labour's lord of the perks', 10 November). I have known him since 1979 when, at the age of 26, he built and ran the Khao I Dang refugee camp in Thailand. Over 100,000 Cambodian refugees had reason to be very grateful for his superb work.
Since then he has had a large number of significant international assignments, at the World Bank, the United Nations and elsewhere. He has enormous experience, particularly of the problems of poverty and international development. In recent years he has been very critical of US policies, including towards Iraq. I disagree with these views but they do not make him viscerally anti-American, as is now being claimed. And so far from being `the lord of perks', as you allege, he took a big pay cut when he stopped working for George Soros and returned home to join Gordon Brown's administration. He also had to uproot his young family, no easy matter. Perhaps he made a mistake in joining a government so visionless as this one. But his hope was undoubtedly to use his new position to try and make a difference in the policies and countries with which he is concerned, above all the poorer parts of the world. His new colleagues in the House of Lords, on both sides, say that he is now carrying out his duties there with energy and skill.
Political criticism is entirely valid, but the attacks on Lord Malloch-Brown are completely disproportionate.
William Shawcross St Mawes, Cornwall
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