In the meantime – and this is why international gatherings are important – leaders ended up taking matters into our own hands. ‘We’ll help sort out Liberia, if you help Sierra Leone’ was the gist of Obama’s conversation with me at NATO. France would focus on Guinea.
Sierra Leone’s healthcare system was overwhelmed. The authorities had to battle with the local cultural practice of the living touching the bodies of the dead at funerals – only to contract the deadly disease themselves. Misinformation about bogus treatments and the danger of going to hospital was spreading like the virus. The number of deaths grew dramatically. Bodies were left in streets. Entire families were wiped out. This was the brutal, bloody, tragic truth of what happens when a ‘what if’ becomes a reality. If it continued at that rate, I was warned that there could be a million dead.
But as I chaired the first of many COBR meetings on 8 October, I knew that Britain would be able to act fast. Because of the 0.7 per cent aid commitment, we were good to go. So we set up a command centre in the capital, Freetown, from which to coordinate the fight against the disease. We opened laboratories and built treatment facilities. We distributed public health information and supplied cars, ambulances, beds, safety suits and tonnes of aid supplies. Eventually over 3,000 Britons – soldiers, sailors, scientists, doctors, nurses, aid workers, volunteers – flew to Sierra Leone to assist in the effort.
Meanwhile, I embarked on a mission to backslap, cajole, coerce and even embarrass other countries into action. Half the world came to our Defeating Ebola conference in London. At the European Council I pointed out that the Swedish furniture company IKEA had contributed more to fighting the disease than Austria, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Luxembourg, Poland and Spain. They promptly increased their contributions.
By the end of the year the tide began to turn. New cases of Ebola were declining, and our volunteers slowly began to return, including the nurses Will Pooley, Pauline Cafferkey and Anna Cross, all of whom had contracted Ebola and been critically ill.
One of the most moving moments I ever had in Downing Street was the reception I held for many of these ‘Ebola heroes’, who we awarded a special medal for services in west Africa. These people had left the comfort and safety of home for a part of the planet where the most notorious disease in a century was raging. They wore their achievements lightly, and bore their experiences stoically. And I thought to myself: that’s Britain. We are defined by a quiet, practical, compassionate dedication to doing the right thing – by ourselves and by others. That’s our type of patriotism.
Looking back, it’s incredible to think how much 2014’s crises – an invasion on the edge of Europe, a virus in west Africa, and, as I’ll come to, a conflict in the Middle East – could preoccupy a country in the North Atlantic.
Even if Ebola reached our shores there would be no pandemic here. Russia hadn’t annexed East Anglia. But because of globalisation, these things matter. Trade makes us reliant on other countries. Travel and migration imports others’ problems. Technology engages everyone in what’s going on in the world. What happens on the streets of Islamabad really does play out on the streets of Bradford. The world is smaller than ever.
Yet on one of the most entrenched foreign policy puzzles, I have to be frank: in the six years I was in Downing Street we made no progress. If anything, the Middle East Peace Process went backwards.
I was wholly for a two-state solution: creating a single Palestinian state, linking the West Bank and Gaza. Some in the West had resorted to a two-faced solution: telling each side what it wanted to hear and getting nowhere. I wanted to be tougher on both.
I was – I am – a friend of Israel. This tiny country was a haven for Jews after the most horrific event in modern history. It remains a beacon of democracy in a region of dictatorships. I credit the Conservative Friends of Israel (CFI) group, and its charismatic head Stuart Polak, for opening my eyes, and those of many Tory MPs, to the issues.
But Israel did not always do the right thing. I thought we needed to put pressure on it to stop building illegal settlements, and that work was required on when and how we would take a more aggressive position on recognising the state of Palestine. No people should have to live as permanent refugees.
I also thought, however, that we needed to be tougher on the Palestinian leadership, and their association with Hamas, whose goal was to destroy Israel. Many people condemned the Israeli government for firing rockets into Gaza when Hamas fired rockets into their country. I saw no moral equivalence. One was the army of a democracy; the other was a terrorist organisation. We also needed to get the Palestinians to accept that their bargaining position with Israel was going to get worse, not better, over time. There was no point always holding out for the international community somehow delivering in the future what was not close to being offered today.
Yet every inch of progress was thwarted.
Obama was, I believed, the most pro-Arab, pro-Palestinian president in history. But, as ever, his careful analysis – ‘They both need to want peace more than we do,’ as he put it to me – meant a reluctance to take risks in order to achieve progress. Plus, he was understandably distracted by the Arab Spring, and anything he did propose to put pressure on Israel was rejected by Congress.
There was some hope of the Palestinians moving towards compromise, and I found their president, Mahmoud Abbas, who I had first met in 2007, quite open to the idea. But that hope was dashed when his party announced a unity government with Hamas in February 2012.
Could Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu be a peacemaker? Sometimes the most bullish figures make the best peace partners. He talked a good game, and had even issued a moratorium on settlement-building. But by 2015 he was making it clear that he would not tackle the issue, and as the settlements grew, a two-state solution became less likely.
I visited Israel for the first time as PM in March 2014. I spoke in the Knesset, made a sobering visit to Bethlehem, where I met Abbas, and – in one of those small-world moments – bumped into someone in Bethlehem who I used to buy coffee and pastries from on the Golborne Road in west London.
But it was its Holocaust memorial and museum, Yad Vashem, that left the deepest impression, and made me determined to ensure Britain had its own national memorial and museum. There is nothing that can convey the horror of what happened to the victims of the Holocaust, or the scale of it, but the memorials and museums in Jerusalem, Berlin and elsewhere to commemorate and educate are as close as we can get.
On Holocaust Memorial Day, 27 January 2014, I held a reception in Downing Street, inviting fifty Holocaust survivors. One man told me how he had escaped from the Warsaw ghetto through a hole in the wall. A woman showed me her diary, in which her grandfather had written: ‘Wherever you go make sure you’re a good daughter to the country where they take you.’
It came home to me that these people were coming to the end of their lives, and soon we would no longer have anyone to bear witness to the darkest chapter in human history. It fell to us, right now, to work out how we were going to continue telling their stories, and commemorating the six million people who never made it.
I charged Tim Kiddell, who had written my speech for the occasion, with driving forward a cross-party Holocaust Commission. The group – including Michael Gove, Ed Balls and the actor Helena Bonham Carter – recommended that a museum and memorial should be built, and that they should be at the heart of our democracy, next to Parliament. The project is due to open in 2022.
It wasn’t long before things were to flare up again between Israel and Palestine. In June 2014, three Israeli teenagers were kidnapped and murdered. Terror attacks had taken place in southern Israel, via underground tunnels built from Gaza. Gaza launched rockets into Israel; Israel responded ferociously.
I made a statement about it in the Commons, because Philip Hammond was on his way to an EU foreign ministers’ meeting, and I was already making a s
tatement on Ukraine. I took what I felt was the correct line: ‘The crisis was triggered by Hamas raining hundreds of rockets on Israeli cities, indiscriminately targeting civilians in contravention of all humanitarian law and norms.’ I said that Israel should exercise restraint and do all it could to avoid civilian casualties, and I highlighted the heavy loss of life, but stopped short of calling it disproportionate.
Why my reluctance to use this word? Partly because it is very loaded. If something is disproportionate it is illegal, and if it is illegal it’s a war crime. And partly because I thought Israel had a right to defend itself from attack. Any prime minister appreciates that it is easy to request that such defence doesn’t result in any deaths, but harder to achieve it in practice.
But what was right in theory sounded harsh. The issue duly played out on the streets of the UK, with hundreds of thousands of people marching past Downing Street condemning Israel’s behaviour. MPs with large Muslim populations in their constituencies came under particular fire, their postbags full of outrage. Very sadly, anti-Semitic incidents in the UK began to rise.
And then there was Parliament, where the balance of power had shifted markedly and, extraordinarily, the Labour Party, under its first Jewish leader, Ed Miliband, whipped its MPs to call for the immediate recognition of the state of Palestine.
That August I went off with Sam and the children to Portugal, to a house my mother had rented for the holidays. As we arrived I received a text telling me that Sayeeda Warsi was considering resigning over what she believed was the government’s one-sided response to the Israeli conflict.
I asked her to speak to me before making any decision. As I was speaking to her on my BlackBerry, my iPhone buzzed in my other hand. It was a tweet from Sky News saying that she had already announced her resignation. Her own tweet shortly followed. After all those years working together, she had told the media before she told me. It was a sad end: from the first female Muslim in cabinet to the first minister to resign from cabinet via Twitter.
Her resignation said something about the power of global issues in domestic politics: that a UK cabinet minister could resign over a distant war in which Britain played no part.
I spent much of the rest of that holiday on the phone. Israel and Gaza, Ukraine and Russia, Syria and Iraq. The world is never at peace, and as a result, neither is a prime minister.
39
Back to Iraq
On 26 September 2014 I stood at the despatch box in Parliament and made the case for why Britain should, for the third time in three decades, fight a war in Iraq.
ISIS was the successor to al-Qaeda and other fundamentalist groups that had taken root in Syria’s war-ravaged plains, like weeds rising from untended fields. It had seized the Syrian city of Raqqa in March 2013, and in June 2014 had overrun Iraq’s second city, Mosul, as Iraqi soldiers ran away.
I watched on TV as the ISIS leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, proclaimed from Mosul’s central mosque that the city’s capture marked the establishment of the ‘caliphate’. This was the utopia many extremists dreamed of: an Islamist state, supposedly modelled on what society was like in the Prophet’s day.
The fact that ISIS took on the form of a fully fledged state made it different to anything else we’d confronted. It had an army, a police force, an intelligence service, courts, schools, a health service – even a flag and a national anthem. It received vast revenues from taxes, seized oil fields and captured banks. And it would become notorious for melding medieval methods with modern ones: hanging and flogging, tweeting and blogging.
It is argued that Bush and Blair’s invasion of Iraq in 2003 led directly to the rise of ISIS. I don’t think that is fair. The aftermath of the invasion certainly spread anti-Western feeling, anger and resentment, which the extremists effectively channelled to recruit more disillusioned Sunnis to their cause. They drew strength from veterans of Saddam Hussein’s nationalist Ba’ath Party, which had been dismantled after his defeat.
But more potent was the fact that the Sunnis of Iraq had been marginalised, insulted and ignored by their Shia prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki. A Shia–Sunni settlement had been established, and a functioning state and army were emerging. But once the US withdrew in 2010, Iraq reverted to a Shia-dominated, corrupt, sectarian state. The reason 12,000 mostly Shia soldiers ran from fewer than 2,000 ISIS fighters in Mosul was that they had lost faith in their commanders, who stole their pay and sold their equipment. The UK and the US backed the government, all the while trying to get it to change course. But we failed. And that is the extent to which I believe 2003 indirectly led to 2014.
Once again, while we seemed to be highly capable at intercepting plots – I lost count of the number of atrocities MI5, MI6, GCHQ and the police prevented – no one saw ISIS coming.
To be fair, our attention had been on the Khorasan group, a branch of al-Qaeda that was intent on attacking civilian aircraft. The UK had a unique role in disrupting this, but we had to some degree looked away from Iraq. The war had been traumatic for UK forces and policymakers, and once our troops withdrew in 2009, the machine breathed a sigh of relief that the troubled country would now be almost entirely under the auspices of the US.
Quite right, some might say. After all, what had chaos in the Middle East got to do with Britain? My answer is that it had everything to do with Britain.
First of all, Britain was a direct target. We knew these people were planning attacks on our streets. It’s what al-Baghdadi urged his followers to do during his call to arms. He may have been focused on creating a caliphate in the Sunni belt between Syria and Iraq, but his ISIS was also a franchise operation, which hosted sub-units of ‘foreign fighters’ focused on punishing the Western democracies which had brought them up.
Fortunately, a potential ISIS-sponsored marauding gun plot was prevented. A man armed with a knife, who was later found to have ISIS propaganda on his phone, made it as far as the London Underground, but was thwarted. Some, however, would slip through the net, for example a gunman who managed to murder four people at a Jewish museum in Brussels.
There was a second way in which the caliphate affected Britain. Our citizens were victims of ISIS brutality in Iraq. When Mosul fell, ISIS held three Britons hostage: aid worker David Haines, journalist John Cantlie, and Alan Henning, a taxi driver who had been volunteering with a charity taking aid convoys to Syria. Ransoms were sought via video messages. And when those ransoms weren’t paid, more videos would emerge. They followed the same format: the victim kneeling in the desert, the orange jumpsuits, the masked killer, the speech, the beheading. I had never seen anything as chilling or disturbing. Yet I felt I ought to watch them. It wasn’t because they were addressed to me personally (by, disturbingly, a man with a strong British accent), but because I felt I owed it to the victims’ families to understand what they were going through.
The UK doesn’t pay ransoms to terrorist kidnappers. It’s the right and sensible stand – in theory. But my God it’s hard in practice; especially when you see Italian, French, German and Spanish hostages being released because ransoms have been paid. I was convinced that we shouldn’t change our policy, though, because that would put more people in mortal danger. But it made me doubly determined to do everything possible to save those that were kidnapped.
Every time a hostage was taken, I would chair a COBR meeting, kick the system into action, discuss the readiness of our military teams, check we had enough drones, go through all the options for a rescue, and consult fellow world leaders.
And here I worked exceptionally closely with Obama. During every phone call over this period we would discuss the status of our hostages. I pushed and pushed for rescue attempts, and Paddy McGuinness sent me a long note on 26 June 2014 saying that all our work pressing Obama was paying off – US special forces were taking up the baton. I immediately wrote back and said we should support it in every way we could.
On 1 July the mo
ment for the rescue attempt arrived. The US launched a huge operation, with 140 soldiers on the ground. They went to the places where we thought the hostages were being held, only to find they’d been moved and separated a few days earlier.
I was overwhelmed by the bravery of those 140 people who were prepared to risk their lives to save others. And I thought constantly about the hostages, who were enduring a living hell and who we hadn’t been able to save this time. We never stopped trying to find our people.
So who were these willing executioners? Appallingly, many of them were British citizens. People who had had all the advantages of an upbringing in a safe, tolerant society full of opportunity, yet ended up in this dystopian desert, murdering innocent people. That was another way Britain was caught up in this war. Because as well as urging attacks on the West, al-Baghdadi encouraged Sunni Muslims all over the world to join the caliphate – and they did. By 2014, five hundred people from across the UK were thought to have left the safety of our country to join this death cult.
I studied their profiles in amazement. An NHS doctor from Sheffield who left his family behind. A teenager from Glasgow whose well-off family said she was radicalised online. Three straight-A schoolgirls from east London. And of course, the masked executioner whose voice I had come to know in those videos, a twenty-six-year-old Londoner called Mohammed Emwazi, known to the press as ‘Jihadi John’, and one of four of the most prominent ISIS killers nicknamed ‘the Beatles’.
I was in no doubt: ISIS had to be confronted and defeated. I never thought that would be done with Western ground troops directly trying to pacify or reconstruct these countries. ‘Boots on the ground’ – when they were predominantly Western boots – fuelled our enemies’ narrative that we were foreign occupiers their followers could be incited to fight against.
For the Record Page 68