by Blair, Tony
I have a somewhat weirdly optimistic view of the power of reason, of the ability to persuade if an argument is persuasive. It sometimes led me to believe that if a political goal is right, then it could therefore be attained. Evidently, politics does not work like that: there are goals that are absolutely desirable and entirely worthy, but utterly beyond reach.
My experience with the Liberal Democrats in those initial days of power was a case in point. From the off, I wanted to have them in the big tent. I regarded Roy Jenkins as a mentor. I grew to love him, actually, and thought him a decent, courageous and vastly rational and intelligent man. I also liked and respected Paddy Ashdown, and thought they had younger folk who were basically New Labour. I understood why the SDP was formed, why it failed, and why its failure was not one of ideas but of organisation and politics.
The Liberals were regarded as a motley crew of the vaguely serious, the not so serious and completely unserious. I had all the usual prejudices about blokes with beards in sandals and hideously coloured shirts whose greatest ambition was to be a really good campaigning local councillor, and women in baggy dresses who looked odd and talked about the importance of sex education.
After the amalgamation of the Liberal Party with the SDP, the new Liberal Democrats did rather resemble in their political contours the shape of two objects jammed together on the basis that they fitted when actually they didn’t. They were a bit like the right and left wings of most parties, only more so, to paraphrase what Rick said of Louis in Casablanca.
It meant their activists tended to oddness. Now, I am an activist myself, and certainly in younger days a very active activist – so I should be careful here. But political activism always has that tinge of the oddball in it. I know that’s a shocking admission of bigotry and preconception, but anyone who has ever swum in the waters of a political party and its membership knows what a peculiar habitat it is.
The Lib Dems could also be prone to gross opportunism. Now all politicians have to be opportunistic from time to time – seizing the opportunity is often what it’s about – but in some of their local campaigns the Lib Dems had perfected this and taken it to the level of a science or art form. In particular, despite their official (and for the most part genuine) protestations of belief in racial and sexual equality, they were well up to fighting pretty dirty campaigns targeting the personal characteristics of their opponents.
Although they were a jumble, their leadership was sound, there were some outstanding people in their ranks and they were more or less aligned with New Labour politically. We had taken the Labour Party to the point which recognised that much of what the old SDP had been saying was correct; some of their prominent members had defected and joined or rejoined Labour; and truthfully, I was closer in political outlook to some of them than to parts of the old left of my own party. It made sense to try to draw them in. Could we go a step further and bring them into government? The traditional part of the Labour Party – and John Prescott especially – would go nuts at the thought; but this was a moment in time and it might never come again. I was certainly willing to give it a try. Paddy, his wife Jane, Cherie and I dined together regularly before the election. We liked each other and trusted each other. Paddy had real leadership quality and, like me, was unafraid of taking on his party.
In my party conference speech later that year, and greatly to Alastair’s and Bruce’s alarm, I specifically went out of my way to pay tribute in my own political heritage to Lloyd George, Keynes and Beveridge as well as Attlee, Bevin and Keir Hardie. I had a belief – in part intuitive, in part reinforced by Roy Jenkins – that the twentieth century had been a Tory century precisely because good and talented people who should have been together were instead in separate parties fighting each other.
Reuniting these two wings of progressive social democracy appealed to my sense of history. It also derived from my general approach to politics. I had long before come to the conclusion that the party system, though necessary, was at one level irrational and counterproductive. It meant differences had to be either exaggerated or invented; it stopped sensible people cooperating to achieve sensible ends; complex problems that required thoughtful solutions were reduced to battles about slogans.
Hearing some of the Tory speakers during debates in the House of Commons in the 1980s, I concluded that were I an objective observer, what they were saying would have made a lot of sense. From a long time back, I would sit, converse and exchange views with Tories. None of this made me a Tory or diminished my commitment to my own political tribe, but it did illustrate the foolishness and even the futility of opposing for opposition’s sake.
Above all, I realised that the battle for political supremacy between government and business, the state and the market, was essentially a twentieth-century hangover. A proper functioning state was obviously necessary to do what only government could do, as was a thriving and competitive private sector to generate the nation’s wealth. Together, each in their proper sphere, they determined prosperity. I therefore concluded that while values and ends might differ and diverge – and in that lay real politics and ideology – the question of what means should be used to achieve those ends was plainly a practical one: what counts is what works. In terms of values and ends, it was hard, certainly so far as the Lib Dems were concerned at that time, to see where the great point of fundamental difference lay. Hence the decision to try to co-opt them.
In the frantic hours following the election, I spoke to Paddy. We agreed it would be premature to put them in the Cabinet (despite our cavalier attitude to our parties, we were both nervous about their respective reactions so soon after election), and unlike in 2010 I had won a huge majority. But we agreed we would begin a process of cooperation with an official committee that would try to draw up an agreed programme of constitutional reform.
Paddy was reluctant to do this, at least until after the constitutional committee had deliberated. I feared this would mean it wouldn’t happen.
My fear, amply borne out by events when the Lib Dems ended up opposing our public service reforms on what were basically Old Labour grounds – however they tried to dress it up – was that while we could agree on the easy stuff – or, if not easy, the stuff that didn’t touch voters’ immediate lives – they would shy away from the painful but thoroughly necessary changes in schools, hospitals, pensions and welfare, which most directly touched voters’ lives. In other words, for me the question was: is this cooperation for real? In the end, I’m afraid, it wasn’t, not through a lack of good intentions or good faith on Paddy’s part – he was totally straight about it throughout – but because of what I thought was their lack of the necessary fibre to govern. In the ultimate analysis, the Lib Dems seemed to be happier as the ‘honest’ critics, prodding and probing and pushing, but unwilling to take on the mantle of responsibility for the hard choices and endure the rough passages. It will be fascinating to see whether the coalition conceived after the 2010 election holds. It may, since the Lib Dem desire for electoral reform is so intrinsic to them. But if that doesn’t come about, I doubt the coalition will last long. However, I may be wrong . . .
Back in 1997, when a coalition would have been an entirely voluntary act between consenting parties, I thought that the opportunity for them to criticise, and thus take the easy way out, was just too tempting. The trouble is they get used to sitting on panels or TV shows and people nodding along with them because they are saying what people want to hear – which never really changes anything, I fear, and can lead them to opportunism that can be breathtaking.
I recall vividly when I was Shadow Home Secretary in 1993. Ken Clarke was Home Secretary. I like Ken, he’s a proper stand-up politician. The Tories were foolish never to make him leader, though I was very grateful for that. He had proposed a set of wide-ranging reforms to the police. Some were smart (like changing pension requirements), others not so smart (as with their disciplinary code). Most were justifiable, but my God did the police hate them. The Police Fed
eration – by far the most well-drilled union I ever came across – held a rally against the reforms at Wembley Arena, which was remarkable for two things. The first was the collective discipline of the coppers. The Fed’s committee sat on the stage, with the audience in front of them. There must have been 10,000 police there, which was and is a really scary prospect. The massed ranks took their cue completely from the committee. When the committee applauded, so did the masses; when they sat on their hands, not a single person clapped. It was awesome.
The second remarkable thing was the performance of the Lib Dem speaker, Robert Maclennan, who was then their law and order spokesman. This story reveals the problem with them. Now the Lib Dems’ official position was as weak-kneed and liberal, with the smallest of ‘l’s, as you can imagine. They basically took civil liberties to the point where the worst punishment was a jolly good talking-to and the most important thing was to crack down hard on police brutality, all of which was a million miles from the heart and mind of your average British bobby.
I got up and spoke. Truth to tell I was a bit shamefaced, since I thought some of the reforms seemed entirely sensible, but I made a reasonable fist of sounding angry at the injustice of it all and was duly applauded.
Then it was Robert’s turn. Now just a word about him. John Smith used to call his speeches in the Commons the work of a one-man crowd-dispersal unit. To describe Bob as a dull speaker was to fail completely to convey the full nature of the experience. If you had to follow him in the House as the next speaker and so had to listen to him, you could miss your opening just because he had reduced you to a catatonic state. By the way, he was also intelligent and decent and obviously so, and that didn’t endear him much either.
So it was with the anticipation of considerable amusement that I saw Bob rise to address 10,000 coppers who I guessed would not appreciate being bored near to death by a Liberal. I can only describe his speech as one of the most electrifying I’ve ever heard. He knew what they wanted to hear. He had read their handouts describing the unparalleled iniquity of the proposed reforms. He gazed on their 10,000 expectant, upturned faces as he laid into the government not just with abandon, but with what appeared to be genuine, sustained and unstoppable outrage. By the time he had finished painting a picture of a country whose poor police were shackled and downtrodden while laughing criminals ransacked the nation, and all as part of a deliberate and heinous Home Office plot, the Fed committee, the 10,000 coppers, even the sound and lighting people were on their feet, stomping, roaring, baying for more from Bob the policeman’s best friend.
However, it did all illustrate the problems with the Lib Dems. When it came right down to it, they were happier as critics than as actors. As time went on and I became more convinced we needed radical solutions to welfare and public services, not to say law and order issues, they gravitated naturally and contentedly towards an opposing position. The dream of getting them to reunite social democracy faded. Paddy was a leader really committed to the idea of uniting the progressive forces. Charles Kennedy was a very decent guy, but not of the same commitment. Iraq was such a massive point of disagreement, and became such a huge recruiting and campaigning bonus to the Lib Dems, that after it our relations soured completely. It was a pity, but probably inevitable. To begin with, I thought that the sheer force of a reasonable position, reasonably argued, would win the day. Over time you learn that this is not so; change brings opposition, and opposition is much easier to advocate than change.
Another early reminder of this came with the changes to housing benefit we introduced in the summer of 1997. They were entirely justified in order to stop abuse of the system, but suddenly and for the first time we knocked up against the need for a difficult decision as a government. The backbench revolt was immediate and large (with Lib Dems joining in). The size of the majority could take care of it, but there were ugly moments. When we then proposed further radical cuts to the welfare bill through reforming incapacity benefit, similar scenes were played out. We wanted to cut the welfare bill radically as the costs had risen sharply and now ran into billions. We were still handling the fallout from the recession of the early 1990s in terms of public finances. We had given a commitment – a very tough one, which Gordon stuck to, tenaciously and rightly – to keep to the previous government’s spending totals for our first two years, but nonetheless wanted to get more money into health and education, and so were looking for every way we could to trim the welfare costs. In any event, it was clearly unhealthy for people to be subsidised on a life of benefit; and when they could work, then in their own interests, they should.
As with housing benefit, incapacity benefit had also become open to systematic abuse. In the 1980s, as long-term unemployment rose it suited the government quietly to allow large numbers of people, particularly in the old mining industries, to be transferred on to the incapacity register. They would thus count as sick, not unemployed, and the unemployment figures were reduced. All of us knew people in our constituencies who had spent years on benefit when their incapacity seemed, let us say, more than a trifle exaggerated.
The proposed changes had people chaining themselves to the railings of Downing Street in protest. They were usually chosen as protesters by virtue of being in wheelchairs, as if everyone on incapacity benefit was confined to a wheelchair, or all those in wheelchairs were unable to work – both of which positions I thought highly dubious. But that wasn’t the point. Naturally, they elicited much sympathy.
Then at the end of July, as the summer recess approached, David Blunkett announced the introduction of means-tested tuition fees, and so began the long and often slow march towards university reform. Again cries of outrage and betrayal ensued.
It was all manageable, of course, but it was a portent.
We were a popular government, I still retained high approval ratings, but even back then, the signs were clear of storms and troubles to come.
I was learning, on the job, the trade of prime minister, the trade of decision-maker and responsibility-taker and, as I occasionally stepped back and surveyed it all, I could see where it was going. I could see the end even as I lived the beginning. I could see the rhythm of it all. The difference between beginning and end is not – major crises like wars excepted – simply in the nature of the events themselves. In other words, an event – let’s say a scandal – can occur at the start, and because everyone is still in the throes of excitement at the new government it can be overcome reasonably easily. If it occurs later, it can be terminal. It depends less on the nature of the events than on their place in the cycle. The adversity, the intensity of the criticism, the fullness of the attack grow not in proportion to the decisions of leadership, but rather to the chipping away over time of its freshness, its appeal, its novelty and thus its persuasive power.
At first, in those early months and perhaps in much of that initial term of office, I had political capital that I tended to hoard. I was risking it but within strict limits and looking to recoup it as swiftly as possible. Over Kosovo, the first real life-and-death decision, I spent freely. But in domestic terms, I tried to reform with the grain of opinion, not against it.
If things went calm for a time, I wasn’t in any great mood to disturb them. We were making changes. Devolution was one and that was historic. But much of the fruit was low-hanging. Some of it was even popular, like the minimum wage.
In public services, we had all the right language and all the right intentions, but the method tended to be one of driving change from the centre. The origins of later, far more radical change were discernible in those starting months, yet the policy prescriptions were too tame; the belief in the power of government itself to make the change on the ground was too trusting; and perhaps also we had an analysis that underestimated the gravity of the problems and therefore the requirement for reform of a nature that was fundamental and structural.
The instincts were by and large spot on. The knowledge, the experience, the in-depth understanding that grapp
ling over time induces – these qualities were missing. There was a political confidence, even swagger about us; but it was born of our popularity with the country, not our fitness to change it as it needed.
That rhythm, too, was intruding and I was aware of it, for the first time. Of course I knew from the moment I became leader of the Labour Party that you never end as you begin. I understood completely that the business of politics was rough, the public could be fickle, the cracks and crevasses would appear soon enough, even in a carefully constructed edifice of political advancement; and our edifice had been constructed with immense care. But to contemplate it is one thing; to experience it is another. And feeling it first-hand both disconcerted me and sobered me.
No one ever believes a politician when he or she says this, but I was never desperate to be prime minister or to stay as prime minister. That’s the honest truth. I don’t mean I lacked ambition – I had plenty of that – but I did lack courage. I knew it would be brutal and ugly, and could end in tears.
In my moments of reflection on holiday in 1997, down in the south of France in the lovely old twelfth-century house we used to stay at in the Ariège – a beautiful and understated part of the country – I would think of the future. I would think of being released, of escaping with reputation and soul intact having served two terms, handing over to Gordon – let him have the damn thing – and being free again, free of all the anxiety, the responsibility, the living on a perpetual knife-edge where any slip could cut you to pieces. I thought of how good it would be to go, still young, just past fifty, still popular, still a friendly face in a friendly country. I would lead, of course, to the best of my ability. I wouldn’t shirk the tough decisions. But I prayed they would not be those that could lose it all, could end in failure and humiliation. Get out before they stop listening, stop liking, and start loathing. That was my hope.