Voter disenchantment with politics at all its levels was much in evidence as the country moved into an election year. The exact timing and nature of the election campaign was complicated by a serious outbreak of foot and mouth disease in February 2001. Troops were deployed the following month to assist with the containment of the disease amid scenes of massive cattle burning and fresh apprehensions about the state of British farming. Blair’s plans had to be postponed for a month, until, on 8 May, he announced the general election would be held on 7 June.
The chaotic scenes in the countryside apart, few governments could have hoped for more benign conditions with which to go to the polls. Unemployment, the scourge of the Thatcher age, had fallen below one million to its lowest level for twenty-six years. Low interest rates brought the cost of mortgage borrowing to its lowest level for forty years. The property boom, upon which so many households’ long-term financial plans rested, continued unchecked. Whatever the disputes over spin, the possibility of joining the euro or the Government’s legislative programme, these were the material improvements that were extending choice and opportunity to ever more people in their daily lives and aspirations. With the nation’s finances, Gordon Brown exuded a reassuring air (not borne out by the Exchequer’s increasing borrowing figures) of Presbyterian prudence. The opinion polls pointed to another Labour landslide.
From a news perspective, these were not the ingredients for an exciting election campaign. Indeed, there was a common perception that the contest did not begin to engage the public until John Prescott, the Deputy Prime Minister, responded to provocation by punching an aggressive demonstrator. For Matthew Parris, The Times’s principal campaign sketchwriter, it was the Prime Minister who had got off to a deplorable start with the manner in which he launched his bid for re-election. ‘With a Cross behind him, sacred stained glass above him, the upturned faces of 500 schoolgirls in pink and blue gingham before him, and to the strains of a choir singing “I who make the skies of light/I will make the darkness bright/Here I am”, Mr Blair launched his campaign at the St Saviour’s & St Olave’s church school in Southwark’, began Parris’s sketch. Entitled ‘And lo came a demiidol seeking votes’, the sketch was accorded the rare honour of a front-page placing:
… Wild rumours swept the audience that Phoenix the calf was coming on with Blair. Then, to girlish screams normally reserved for adolescent pop idols, Tony Blair strode calfless on to the chapel stage, positioned himself between the Cross and the cameras and beneath the motto ‘Heirs of the past, makers of the future’, flung off his jacket to further screams, and sat down in shirtsleeves, legs apart, arms spread like a sumo-wrestler. A girls’ choir sang ‘We are the children of the future’, which was not the case …
‘A time to love, a time to share,
A time to show how much we care’,
sang the girls. Alastair Campbell clapped caringly.
Of Mr Blair’s speech, the less said the better. We are not used to seeing a Prime Minister, with a Cross behind him, to an audience of children in their own school chapel, attacking the Opposition. ‘What did you think of that?’ my Daily Mail colleague said to a small black girl after the speech. ‘Pack o’ lies,’ said the perceptive child.
… Beside me, and before the closing hymn – yes, hymn – Alastair Campbell sneezed. I tried to say ‘Bless you.’ The words stuck in my throat.84
To Parris’s thinking, the first Blair administration, with the attempt at leader idolatry and the media manipulation that the Prime Minister tolerated from his closest servants, had debased the political currency. The result was an electorate disengaged and cynical towards those in public office. There was no sign that the Conservative opposition were any more capable of commanding respect. Hague’s perceived lurch to the right during the week of campaigning and his insistence that voting Tory was the only way to save the pound failed to move the terms of the debate in his direction.
Although The Times had attempted to portray the euro as the great issue at the previous election, there was little prospect of it endorsing Hague’s Conservative Party in 2001. Stothard had, by his own estimation, now been disappointed by a ninth consecutive year of Tory leadership. The liberal conscience of the paper was in the keeping of the chief domestic politics leader writer, Tim Hames, whose light blue empathies had also been bleached by the experience of recent years. He drafted for Stothard The Times’s leading article announcing the paper’s endorsement. It stretched the length of the leader page and was published two days before election day. It was entitled, simply, ‘In Our Time’. Unlike in 1997, there would be no equivocation as to which party to endorse. There was little danger of the country being bounced into joining the euro, it argued, so there was no longer any need to make this the criterion (as Hague sought to do) for casting a vote. Rather, ‘the task for those who toil in politics today is largely that of consolidating the core aspects of Thatcherism and extending them to fresh areas of policy’. Labour had yet to flesh out convincing policies on health, but in only four years it had ensured that ‘the central tenets of the economic settlement of the 1980s – a fierce resistance to inflation, a recognition that taxation at a certain level inflicts more harm than good and a distrust of trade union power’ were better entrenched than they had been four years ago. Making the Bank of England independent had ‘laid down roots of iron’. For all the incomplete thinking, Blair was ‘likely to blend Thatcherite means with social democratic ends in a manner that will benefit public services’. The Times had never ventured to say so before and thus had no precedent to fall back on as it prepared for the inevitable peroration. Thus, it ended by observing that Enoch Powell, William Gladstone, Joseph Chamberlain and Winston Churchill ‘all transferred in or out of the Conservative Party in their time. In our time, in this election, it is Labour which deserves the votes of reformers.’85
Four and a half years after Mary Ann Sieghart had stood in the Reform Club and asked her colleagues the question ‘if not now, then when?’ the paper had finally found the strength to say – with some internal dissenters – that the time had indeed come. Even then, the logic was somewhat different: that Blair would complete the Thatcher revolution more convincingly than a fractured and unconvincing Conservative Party. For this analysis, Stothard received a few letters of congratulation and, inevitably, a far heavier postbag from the disgusted and disappointed. Some came in the form of well-argued criticisms of his logic, many stated that they had no wish to subscribe any more to a newspaper that had deserted the Tories, sometimes adding, disingenuously, that the paper had lost its independent voice. One reader, whose letter was published, made clear that he had never voted Conservative in his fifty-three-year life but such was his objection to ‘The Thunderer’ telling him who to vote for that he would vote Tory as a mark of protest. He thought there were many other readers who would do likewise.86
Two days later, it transpired there were not. The election day Times carried a MORI poll that pointed to another massive Labour victory, with 45 per cent of the vote, as opposed to 30 per cent for the Tories and 18 per cent for the Liberal Democrats. Health and education were cited as the two most important issues; Europe came tenth equal. ‘Blair heads for second landslide’ ran the non-risky headline.87 The Times was busy throughout the night as the results came in and the final edition carried an impressive listing of the declarations (the complete results appeared in a twenty-two-page election supplement on Saturday). The vote, when it was finally tallied, showed 42 per cent for Labour, 33 per cent for the Tories and 19 per cent for the Liberal Democrats which, in parliamentary seats, translated into 413, 166 and 52 respectively. Blair had a majority of 167. Four years in which to rebuild after the collapse of 1997 had resulted in the Tories recording a net gain of one seat. Hague immediately accepted his share of responsibility and stepped down. The Peter Brookes cartoon that morning told a different story, one that was more in keeping with the leading column’s line of thinking. The ghostly apparition of a bouffant-haired lady w
ith a handbag was stepping into Number Ten. The caption read simply ‘Back Again’.88
Blair returned to work with a mandate marred only by a turnout that, at below 60 per cent, was the lowest since 1918. Re-engaging the public to the purposes of politics would be one of his greatest tasks. After nine years in which The Times had been largely at odds with the government of the day, it had reverted to type and become, once again, the paper most clearly identified with the ruling Establishment. Nonetheless, the roots of the attachment were shallow. The paper appeared to be endorsing Blair personally and the small coterie upon whom he relied. Empathy for the rest of his party was less clearly apparent. There could be no clearer sign of how presidential British politics had become. For their part, the Conservatives remained fractious and ineffective. With Hague stepping down, Portillo, the modernizers’ hope, did not even make the final ballot. Instead, Ken Clarke made a last stand to move his party back towards the pro-European tenets to which Sir Edward Heath had once committed it. On 13 September 2001, he was comprehensively defeated by Iain Duncan Smith, an MP with no Cabinet experience who nonetheless had the benefit, in the party member’s opinion, of opposing the euro. His victory was not the main news event that day. Like all politics around the world in the months and years that followed, it was overshadowed by terrible events that had taken place in Washington DC and New York two days previously, on 11 September 2001.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
WAR IN PEACETIME
The Peace Process in the Middle East and Ireland;
Intervention or Isolation?: Bosnia, Somalia, Rwanda, Kosovo, Chechnya;
the New World Order Versus the Rise of Fundamentalism; 9/11;
the War on Terror; Stothard Steps Down
I
‘Hallelujah! We study war no more because war is no more,’ the President of Harvard University declared, when the appointment of a professor of security studies was vetoed.1 It was a precipitous hope, as the world looked forward to embarking upon the last decade of the twentieth century, that the Cold War’s end made such scholarship redundant. In July 1990, NATO’s London Declaration announced the conflict was over and four months later, the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe* convened in Paris and agreed a non-aggression treaty between its thirty-four national signatories together with a commitment to cut conventional forces in Europe by nearly a third – the most detailed arms control agreement ever negotiated.
What was true was that the thaw between the East and the West prompted much talk of new, and generally more hopeful, paradigms in international affairs. Francis Fukuyama argued that the age of ideological conflict was receding and a new post-historical world emerging where liberal democracies would speak peace unto liberal democracies and problems and crises would be subject to technical and managerial tinkering rather than the assertion of clashing dogmas. Extrapolating recent events certainly pointed in this direction. The shift towards democratic forms of government was not confined to Eastern Europe’s seismic convulsion in 1989 and 1990. Around the globe, more than thirty countries had swapped authoritarianism for democracy in the twenty years up to the fall of the Berlin Wall. The crumbling of the ideological divide aroused expectations that the Security Council of the United Nations could be freed from the prospect of one or more of its permanent members instinctively vetoing affirmative action. More than forty years after it had emerged from the rubble of the Second World War as the forum for a new international comity, the UN, at last, had an opportunity to become the agent of world peacemaking. The sanction it gave in 1990 to the liberation of Kuwait would have been unthinkable during the previous decade. What was more, the success of the operation with so little loss of life to the US-led coalition forces – in marked contrast to what the doomsayers had prophesied – encouraged those who believed that peacemaking could be an attainable and relatively cheap forward policy if the world’s great nations were persuaded to cooperate rather than actively hinder it. President George Bush spoke optimistically of a ‘new world order’ while his Secretary of State, James Baker, announced ‘our new mission to be the promotion and consolidation of democracy’.2
South Africa offered hope. After more than four decades of especially repressive white minority rule, apartheid was dismantled with as little state-sanctioned bloodshed as had accompanied the withering of European Communism. Commentators who anticipated an immediate and vicious backlash from the incoming African National Congress were confounded by the dignified tone of Nelson Mandela. Inaugurated President on 10 May 1994, Mandela promised that his beautiful country would never again become ‘the skunk of the world’. Despite spending twenty-seven years in detention, he recognized that the republic’s many problems would not be solved by the expulsion or degradation of its white and business-orientated community. As The Times’s Southern Africa correspondent, Michael Hamlyn, noted, Mandela felt unable even to acknowledge his wife, Winnie, sitting next to him on the rostrum at the inauguration ceremony to which he had, nonetheless, sent a VIP ticket to James Gregory, his white former jailer on Robben Island.3 The scars of South Africa could not be healed by the sentiments of redemption alone but, whatever its shortcomings, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission made a better job of burying enmities without developing historical amnesia than many other countries were able to achieve in the years following the toppling of old regimes.
Nowhere was the search for peace more urgent that in the Middle East. The Intifada had begun in late 1987 in the Gaza Strip and spread throughout the Occupied Territories. Between 1987 and 1994, 192 Israelis had been killed by Palestinians, 822 had died in inter-Arab attacks and 1306 Palestinians had been killed by Israelis.4 One of the effects of exiling Yasser Arafat in Tunis was that the PLO leadership was sidelined by the new generation of Islamic fundamentalists in Hamas and Islamic Jihad who were determined to pursue their holy war against the Jews with even more senseless ferocity than the PLO. The chances of securing any meetings of minds between Israelis and those determined to wipe their nation from the face of the earth were all but unimaginable. Arafat’s relationship with other Arab powers had also been damaged by his decision to back Saddam Hussein’s occupation of Kuwait. Yet, at the moment when the PLO leadership appeared at its weakest, the United States began to press Israel to view these old adversaries as a potential force for moderation. This was how the latter now appeared, at any rate in comparison to the fanatics of Hamas (in 1989 Arafat had announced that the 1964 PLO Charter’s denial of Israel’s right to exist was ‘null and void’). A sign of this new approach was evident when Palestinian negotiators with links to the PLO were allowed to participate in the 1991 Madrid peace talks. The breakthrough came in September 1993 when, after rounds of secret negotiations in Oslo, the Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, and Arafat agreed the White House accord, shaking hands under the gaze of President Clinton. It was, in the literal sense of the term, a peace process. Limited Palestinian autonomy would be created in the Gaza Strip and around Jericho in the West Bank under an elected Palestinian council. A timetable was established to finalize the status of East Jerusalem and even to settle the relationship between Israel and what, it seemed, would emerge as a Palestinian state. ‘The handshake was neither warm nor lingering,’ The Times’s leading article admitted, yet, ‘Peace, the oldest message from the Middle East, the eternal hope behind so many wars that have wracked the region, came a step closer.’5 The following year the PLO was handed authority for Jericho and Palestinian police assumed security over the area.
The 1994 Nobel Peace Prize was shared between Arafat, Yitzhak Rabin and the Israeli Foreign Minister, Shimon Peres. Israel and Jordan formally ended their forty-six-year state of war. Yet, while many Israelis believed that it took a strong man with a fearsome reputation like Rabin – the former general who had led Israel’s lightning 1967 conquest of the occupied territories – to guarantee a plausible order for peace to take root, a few believed he was selling out on all they held dear. Despite the efforts of a Jewish fundamentalist
to derail the peace process by massacring Muslims at prayer in Hebron, in September 1995 Rabin and Arafat made further progress, agreeing on West Bank self-determination from which Israeli troops would be withdrawn. By the end of the year, Nablus and Bethlehem were to be among the towns under Palestinian control. By then, Rabin was no more, gunned down in November at a Tel Aviv peace rally by a Jewish extremist. Shimon Peres succeeded as Prime Minister and, in February the following year, Yasser Arafat became President of the Palestinian Authority. Despite this, Rabin’s assassination had created a new climate of uncertainty and vulnerability. Islamic suicide bombings undermined both the Israeli government’s ability to safeguard its citizens and the belief that the Palestinian Authority was anything other than a front behind which terrorists could operate at will. Israelis responded in 1996 by voting in a new Likud administration under Benjamin Netanyahu that was committed to maintaining the policy of Jewish settlements on the West Bank. For its part, the Palestinian Authority proved to be a byword for corruption.
The History of the Times Page 77