The fixer treading a risky path through the new humanitarian hellscape

David Beasley had a hotline to Trump and raised billions to feed children. As aid cuts bite, Steve Bloomfield hears of his next move

- Steve Bloomfield

If you wanted to lobby Donald Trump not to cut aid, you'd ask David Beasley to do it. If you wanted someone to call up the leader of the Rapid Support Forces in Sudan and urge him to stop his troops killing innocent citizens in El Fasher, you'd ask David Beasley to do it. And if you wanted someone to lend much-needed credibility to your deeply controversial new aid outfit that planned to use armed contractors to deliver food in Gaza, you'd ask David Beasley to do it.

For six years Beasley, a charismatic Republican former governor of South Carolina, ran the World Food Programme. He had no background in aid, but he knew how to lobby and, crucially, fundraise. As he never tires of telling anyone, in his last year at WFP it raised $14bn which enabled it to feed 160m people. (By contrast, so far this year, WFP has raised somewhere between $4-5bn.)

He had a hotline to the White House and, during Trump's first term, was a reminder of what US diplomacy could look like if it still cared about the rest of the world.

If Beasley was the most high profile representative of the old world of aid (western governments spending billions, UN agencies and NGOs delivering assistance), he is arguably now the most prominent figure trying to lead a path through the broken, frightening hellscape that is the new world of aid.

He has very few formal roles, but sees himself as a fixer and persuader. When we meet he has spent the day at the One Young World Summit in Munich, speaking to 2,000 young delegates from around the world, but in between he's been on the phone trying to help get aid into El Fasher, the city in Sudan's western Darfur region taken over just a day earlier by the RSF.

"We've been trying to get supplies in, pressuring both sides, meeting with everyone involved. I know Burhan, Hemedti, all these guys," he says, referring to the leaders of the Sudanese Armed Forces and the RSF.