A JOURNEY

by Blair, Tony

  Over time I got better at it, and by the end was more often OK than rubbish, but the fear never abated for an instant. Even today, wherever I am in the world, I feel a cold chill at 11.57 a.m. on Wednesdays, a sort of prickle on the back of my neck, the thump of the heart. That was the moment I used to be taken from the prime minister’s room in the House of Commons through to the Chamber itself. I used to call it the walk from the cell to the place of execution.

  I would have got to the House of Commons around 11.30 a.m., having spent all morning in my office in Downing Street going through the papers, deciding tactics and strategy. In that last half-hour final decisions would be made, answers slipped through the door, hurried last-minute consultations held about some unfolding event. The worst thing was stories breaking at 10 or even 11 a.m., usually around bad statistics of one sort or another, or something idiotic a member of the government had said. A line would have to be taken, facts would have to be given, though the full facts might not be known. A mistake by the prime minister in that bear pit is not a mistake: it is a deliberate deception, and all hell breaks loose around it.

  By the end, I had much better karma in doing it. I got braver. I realised that in the end I had to confront the demons. It was no use praying more the night before, wearing the right shoes (I wore the same pair of Church’s brogues every PMQs for ten years) or just hoping I would get by. I decided to analyse it, and try to work out how to do it to the best of my ability.

  I remember as a schoolboy doing boxing, which was compulsory. I loathed it; I could never see the point of it nor understand its appeal. In the first fights, I was scared. I didn’t want to hit my opponent. I didn’t want him to hit me. I just wanted the thing over with. After a time, though, I chose to box properly, to stand my ground and fight. I did it with fear, but also with determination. Either do it properly or refuse to do it at all – that’s also fine – but don’t do it like a wuss. I didn’t like boxing any better, but I respected myself more.

  Gradually, I evolved a pattern of working for PMQs. It all started with a determination to be braver, to stand my ground and fight, consciously. Fear as a stimulus, in proper proportion, can keep you on your toes. Fear that tumbles into panic is all bad. In the early days, I wouldn’t sleep well the night before or eat at all in the morning. The first thing I realised was the importance of being in the right physical as well as mental condition, so I changed my routine. I took a melatonin pill the night before so I got at least six hours’ sleep. I made sure I had a proper breakfast, and just before the ordeal began, I would eat a banana to give myself energy. It seems daft, but I was finding that my energy levels, and thus my mental agility, were dropping after ten minutes. It really made a difference. At 12.28 I was still alive to the risks and up to repelling the assault.

  Secondly, I faced up to what the fear was. The fear was being made to look a fool, or simply being outwitted. The way to prevent it was not so much mastering the facts, but mastering the strategy of debate. The right facts, properly researched, are utterly essential, of course. By the time I was into my stride I had a team of great talent, headed at first by the ultra-efficient Clare Sumner, then by Kate Gross, superb organiser and mistress of ceremonies. The key special adviser was Catherine Rimmer, brilliant head of research and with an extraordinary ability to master detail (also invaluable during the Hutton Inquiry). The team was topped off by Nicholas Howard, the wonderful master of the PMQs folder. Together, they gave me confidence that the factual basis of the answer was correct. However, the final component in winning was not the facts themselves but how they were deployed. The facts were the horse, the armour and the lance; the skill was in using them to best effect, which meant guessing the line of attack, working out how to parry and then laying out the counter-attack.

  On a bad day with a no-win subject – and there were quite a few of those – the best that could be done was to fight it to a draw, but on a good or average day you had to go for a win. Winning gives your side confidence, it lifts them, it makes them think of the future as bright. Your own standing is enhanced. Losing is not only undignified, it hurts morale. A run of really bad PMQs can put the leader in jeopardy.

  The night before I would go through the folder which held all the potential answers to all the potential questions, and the really complex factual areas were studied without the frantic pressure of Wednesday morning upon us. By 8 a.m. I would have whittled down the most likely areas of interrogation and then I would sit with a pad and work out the debating lines. Sometimes the best phrases came during PMQs, but this was rare in my experience. No one speaks quite so eloquently as they do when their eloquence has been honed, toned, constructed, deconstructed and reconstructed in the privacy of the antechamber.

  By this method, I learned over time how to break out of defence and go on the offensive. It would also allow me to analyse the argument I was making with the facts – was it sustainable and persuasive, how would it play with their backbenchers as well as mine?

  I discovered the force of humour, of light and shade. John Smith had been the first person I saw use humour to brilliant effect in the House, as in his demolition of John Major over the ERM debacle. Gordon, too, in his early days had been exceptional in using wit to demolish the Tory economic front bench when he had stood in for John in the late 1980s. Some of the lines he used against Nigel Lawson and the Tory Treasury team would have our side roaring their approval. We might be, usually were, weak on the argument; but it’s amazing how much the weakness can be concealed by well-timed ridicule and well-judged wit. I tended to be more earnest, more like a lawyer with a case, but I have a sense of humour and I just needed the confidence to use it.

  I learned how to disarm an opponent as well as blast them. They get angry; you get mild. They go over the top; you become a soothing voice of reason. They insult you; you look at them not with resentment, but with pity. Under attack, you have to look directly at them, study their faces, your eyes fixed on theirs rather than rolling with anxiety.

  Finally I realised that if you foul up, you move on. Easy to say; hard to do. When I had had a bad PMQs, the walk back to the room from the Chamber was almost as bad as the walk to it. We would always have a few minutes afterwards to deal with any consequential issues. For the poor old team, it was always tough when I messed up. The disappointment would be written large on their faces, even as they struggled to contain it. Jonathan Powell was usually the only one to voice the truth. ‘Thank God there’s no more of that for a week,’ he’d say cheerfully as others would mutter about it being ‘a score draw, really’, or some such bull****.

  Anyway, in those early days of May 1997, the twice-weekly PMQs was transformed into one. I never regretted that decision and subsequent prime ministers will thank me for it!

  The next decision was of an altogether different and more fundamental nature. Some months before the election, Gordon and I formed the desire to give monetary policy – i.e. setting of interest rates – over to the Bank of England. The so-called ‘independence’ of the Bank had been a keen academic, economic and political debate going back decades.

  I had no doubt it was right. I had been convinced long ago that for politicians to set interest rates was to confuse economics and politics, the long term with the short term, the expedient with the sensible. I had watched the game played out as governments carefully calibrated the interest rate movements with the electoral cycle. Everyone knew it was happening and why. The result was the country effectively paid a political premium on the interest rate. The contrast with the independent central banks of Europe, especially that of Germany, and with the US Federal Reserve, was instructive and telling.

  The issue, as I liked to say to doubting backbenchers and the serious experts who opposed the move, was not whether the Governor of the Bank was a more intelligent person than the Chancellor of the Exchequer. He might or might not be of superior intellect. But the decision-making process at the Bank was definitely of superior objectivity. I had talked about it
often with Roy Jenkins. Gavyn Davies – at that time with Goldman Sachs, and someone I often turned to for economic advice – had been immensely persuasive on the merits. I knew Nigel Lawson – a Chancellor I really admired – had wanted to do it. It was also the perfect riposte to those worried about the economic credentials of an incoming Labour government, so although the rationale was ultimately to put long-term economics above short-term politics, there were very good political reasons for doing so.

  Gordon had come to the same conclusion, and so when I suggested it, he readily agreed. There was some debate about when it should be announced. I favoured doing it before the election to solidify our business credibility; he felt that it was sufficiently important to the way the markets would move that we should do it straight after the election, a proposition to which I eventually consented.

  Gordon announced it on 6 May. It went well. Business and the markets liked it. The Tories opposed it but weren’t really in the mood to create a major storm, and were unable to do so even if they had wanted to. For me, it was a very important moment. It defined not simply our approach to economic policy, but an approach to governing: it was not born from traditional left/right ideology; it drew people to the intelligent, radical centre ground; it spoke of our determination from the outset to protect and enhance our economic opportunity as a nation.

  I allowed Gordon to make the statement and indeed gave him every paean of praise and status in becoming the major economic figure of the government. I did so firstly because I thought he deserved it, secondly because it was good for the whole thing not to look like a one-man show, and thirdly not doing so would have created considerable tension.

  But it had an unfortunate and long-lasting consequence. I have many faults, but one virtue I have is that I don’t mind big people around me. In my own office, I liked Alastair, Jonathan, Anji, Sally, Peter, David Miliband and others precisely because I knew they would tell me what they thought. That is not to say they were disrespectful (though the familiarity bred in Opposition wasn’t always appropriate transferred into the more formal settings of government), but they spoke their mind. I welcomed it, and drew valuable advice and even confidence from it.

  So when I consciously and deliberately allowed Gordon to be out there as a big beast, as the acknowledged second most powerful figure in the government, I did so without any fear of being eclipsed or outmanoeuvred. Indeed, the concept of manoeuvring seemed irrelevant. The office were less sanguine. Alastair in particular worried that a picture was being drawn that I was ‘the chairman’ or ‘president’, and Gordon was ‘the chief executive’ or ‘prime minister’, which, as he pointed out with vigour, easily translated into the person who simply does the glad-handing, and the hard-working serious guy who runs the country. So relaxed was I in my own sense of who I was and what I was doing that it didn’t trouble me and I shrugged the warnings off.

  In truth, too, as with the Bank of England independence, the broad framework on the economy, never mind anything else, was set by me. My notes to the office during those initial months were peppered with references to economic policy: getting the Comprehensive Spending Review aligned with the government’s priorities, explaining what we wanted to do to create a more competitive economy, and jerking back hard on the rein if I thought there was a deviation from the essential pro-business, pro-aspiration line (stamping on the idea of taxing professionals more, or on taxing second homes, for example). Frequently, and at quite a micro level, a salvo would be fired off to keep the Treasury in check. Nevertheless, the perception – which later became damaging and undermining – was that I kept out of the economic policy space. The reality was that the train, the tracks and the destination were constructed in close interaction with Gordon, and on lines I shaped or was comfortable with. The driver was then given considerable freedom to manage the service. Not until very late on did I ever really yield control of economic policy.

  We had had enough run-ins during the three years when I was leader for me to understand that there was a significant difference in our approaches. Only in the latter years did that difference start to become not just marked but fundamental. I was in no doubt that we came at politics from essentially divergent positions which of course converged, but did so as much for reasons of politics as for reasons of conviction. In the end, we were two very different people in terms of economic attitudes, with two very different backgrounds. Perhaps a better way of putting it is that we had different economic, financial and business instincts.

  Basically, I understood aspiration. I like people who want to succeed, and admire people who do. When I was at the Bar – and the seven years I spent as a full-time barrister were immensely formative for me in many ways – I did a lot of commercial and industrial work and got on well with the risk-takers, those who didn’t mope around, who had ‘get-up-and-go’. I hate class; but I love aspiration. It’s why I like America. I adore that notion of coming from nothing and making something of yourself.

  This attitude had its downside. While the stories of my being dazzled by the wealthy are always ludicrously exaggerated (most of my close friends are not at all of that ilk), nonetheless I sometimes underestimated the ruthlessness and amorality that can go with moneymaking. Don’t misunderstand me: many business people can be creative people for whom money is the consequence of their success, rather than the motivation. But others don’t give a damn. And I tended on occasions not to comprehend fully the difference.

  However, I didn’t resent success, and on the whole that was a good thing for a progressive politician. I identified with it personally too. Did I want a nice home? Yes. Did I prefer a five-star hotel to a two-star? Yes. Did I appreciate that there was more to life than this? Yes. I never thought that enjoying life’s good things led to indifference to the plight of those who couldn’t. For me the opposite was true: what I wanted for myself, I also wanted for others. But I didn’t feel it wrong to want it nonetheless.

  When I was with a group of entrepreneurs, I felt at home. Gordon was completely different. He could analyse what a good business was and discuss the intricacies of this policy over that in order to promote it; but he never felt it. I was a public service guy who, if I had chosen a different path, would have liked running a business and making money. A bit of me thought: Wouldn’t that be great? Now if I had really wanted that, I would have done it. I am, all said and done, a public service guy at heart. Gordon was a public service guy who, if he had chosen a different path, would have been a bigger public service guy. That’s not to say he couldn’t have made it in business – with his brain and determination he could have made it doing anything – but it would never have motivated him or possibly even interested him.

  So, for me, top-rate tax was not about top-rate tax. Of course you can make a perfectly good case for wealthy people paying more, and around the edges – National Insurance and so on – I was content that they did, but I wanted to preserve, in terms of competitive tax rates, the essential Thatcher/Howe/Lawson legacy. I wanted wealthy people to feel at home and welcomed in the UK so that they could bring more business, create jobs and spread some of that wealth about. They weren’t my priority; by which I mean that it wasn’t a priority to run after them, and nor was it a priority to run at them. I was happy to leave well alone.

  I knew if we put up the top rate of tax it would be seen as a signal, a declaration of instinct, an indicator whose impact would far outweigh its intrinsic weight. When Gordon suggested it prior to the election and I was given the usual opinion-poll guff showing 70–80 per cent in favour of it, I put in a complete nolle prosequi. For me, it was a total red line. After time, Gordon backed off.

  To be fair, he took a more radical view on capital gains tax, which in turn helped the private equity industry enormously. He cut the rate down to as little as 15 per cent for those who held shares for a fixed minimum period, so those investing in companies, sorting them out and then selling them on, were paying far less than the income tax rate. Nevertheless, I felt i
t was done more as a political sign to those he thought were designating him anti-business, and a product of those who were advising him, rather than an act born of great conviction.

  No matter; in that first statement on the Bank of England and his first Budget, he was pretty clearly New Labour. However, his seeming endorsement of the notion that I had vacated the economic sphere sowed seeds of distortion whose harvest was damaging. Of course, it is in the nature of politics that all the elements that ultimately bring about the downfall are there from the outset, albeit in mild form. Time merely enlarges and strengthens them. Even in those early days of power, indeed even from the moment of the phone call after John’s death when I didn’t immediately accede, there was a battle unresolved. Whether it was ever resolvable is another question.

  Despite all this, the presence of such a big figure, the mere appearance on the landscape of someone who plainly was up to it as well as up for it, whose energy, intellect and political weight were undeniable, was a massive plus for the government. If there was a clash, it was at least a clash of the titans. If there were tensions, they could also have their creative side. In my Cavalier embrace of the middle class and his Roundhead identification with Labour tradition, there was surely a coalition of sorts that could be built and could function. So it seemed in those months following 1 May 1997, and so it was.