by Blair, Tony
I was on duty and working the night of 31 December, and yes, OK, a millennium is a big deal, but – as I feel most New Year’s Eves – I could quite happily have gone to bed early, had a good night’s rest, and woken up the next day refreshed and able to contemplate at leisure the fact that another year had gone.
Anyway, you get the point: it’s not really my thing. So I looked forward to the evening of the turn of a new millennium with all the fervour of a visit to the dentist. Actually, I would have preferred a visit to the dentist. As it turned out, it would have been less painful, quieter and certainly less stressful.
First off, I had to go and start the Millennium Wheel, with an attendant firework display and great spiralling Catherine wheel of some description. We left Downing Street on foot, with me feeling an inchoate and gathering sense of dread. At times like these, Cherie would be heroic and perfect as a foil: she was – or at least put on a great act of being – thrilled by the whole prospect.
As we moved among the crowds in Whitehall and made our way to the Embankment, people were incredibly friendly and celebratory and my mood temporarily lightened. Somehow we got to the point near Hungerford Bridge where Bob Ayling, the chief executive of British Airways, was waiting for me to start it all off. Bob had taken over running the millennium celebrations and had done a great job under hellish pressure.
‘What happens when I start it off, Bob?’ I said above the din.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘not much since it’s not actually quite ready.’ He was unflappable. I liked that. Because I was definitely flapping. Bob turned his attention to the fireworks. ‘What’ll happen is that when you press the button, they’ll go off right down the Thames.’
Right, I thought. I got to the little podium; there were cheering crowds; I think I made a little speech – emphasis on the ‘little’ – of a generally inane nature; and then pressed the button.
A few desultory fireworks sprang to life, but by a cruel stroke which afflicted all our millennium celebrations, they failed to go off in quite the spectacular fashion envisaged. Indeed, as fireworks go, I had attended somewhat livelier events at Highbury Fields in Islington on Guy Fawkes Night.
And, of course, the Millennium Wheel was not yet working. ‘I don’t think that really matters for tonight,’ Bob said cheerfully.
‘It does if it’s called the Millennium Wheel,’ I said sourly, the dread returning.
But there was no time to sulk. We had the Dome Party with the Queen to look forward to.
We were due to get there on the new Jubilee Line extension. The Tube was itself part of the development for the celebrations, and new stations were being opened. Again, a great idea; again, as the new year approached, it was a source of continual fretting. We had contractors’ disputes, union disputes and political disputes. The problem was that everyone knew they had us over a barrel – the deadline couldn’t exactly be moved, and without the extension, we couldn’t get people down to the Dome. We had left it tight. I had promised all manner of torture to my staff and ministers responsible. And I didn’t like the ‘Fingers crossed, Prime Minister’ gallows humour emanating from the London Underground management. It was a massive undertaking to get it finished, and John Prescott performed minor miracles bludgeoning people.
But millennium night was the first time it would be running. The initial nerve-racking moment came when we got to the train: would it work? Would the doors open? Would it just grind to a halt?
Anyway: it did work. It let us in and let us out, and so we got into the Dome, which was thronging; except that it wasn’t quite. There didn’t appear to be hordes of people. A lot, yes. Packed to the rafters, ready to party, no. ‘Where is everyone?’ I asked our guide from the Dome.
‘I think the connecting train from Stratford station has broken down. The station is effectively shut.’
The room swayed. ‘What?’ The Stratford station, vital to transport people to the Dome, had some wretched electrical fault and was malfunctioning. I thought of the public waiting there, the panic rising. ‘I’ve got to see Charlie,’ I said.
When Peter Mandelson had resigned, Charlie Falconer had taken over as the minister responsible. Charlie took more abuse over the Dome than it is possible now to imagine. He was wondrous throughout. Every time I saw him after yet another mauling – complete with barbs about his weight, looks, character and manner of speaking – I would say to him, ‘How are you, Charlie?’ and really mean it. He would always reply that he was loving the job and was so grateful to me for the chance of doing it, all without any apparent hint of irony. I found it awesome. His performance over the Dome was an amazing feat of self-immolation.
I found him upstairs at the VIP reception. ‘Charlie,’ I said, ‘what the hell’s going on at Stratford?’ He explained the breakdown. ‘Oh Jesus, Charlie, how many people are waiting there?’
‘A few thousand, I’m afraid. Sorry.’
I looked at him melancholically. ‘What on earth will we say when the media find out?’
‘Um, I’m afraid they will have found out already since the editors are all there waiting.’
I fear I did grab him by the lapels at this point. And I adore Charlie.
‘What? What? What the hell are the media doing there? You didn’t, no, please, please, dear God, please tell me you didn’t have the media coming here by Tube from Stratford, just like ordinary members of the public.’
‘Well, we thought it would be more democratic that way.’
‘Democratic? What fool thought that? They’re the media, for Christ’s sake. They write about the people. They don’t want to be treated like them.’
‘Well, what did you want us to do,’ Charlie said, feeling he should be fighting his corner a little, ‘get them all a stretch limo?’
‘Yes, Charlie,’ I thundered, ‘with the boy or girl of their choice and as much champagne as they can drink; or at least have got them riding in the Tube with us.’
I am ashamed to say I then shouted and bawled at him for a bit longer, while the more sensible of our party tried to find out what to do. Eventually we heard they were on their way, though possibly not in time for midnight. ‘Please don’t tell me it doesn’t matter if they’re not here for midnight, Charlie, or I will club you to death on the spot,’ I recall saying. In the end some got there, some didn’t; and anyway, the media coverage was more or less set in stone from that moment.
Meanwhile, a fresh knot of anxiety had gripped me. We had persuaded the Queen and Prince Philip to come down to the Dome to join in the fun. I don’t know precisely what Prince Philip thought of it all, but I shouldn’t imagine it’s printable. I suspect Her Majesty would have used different language but with the same sentiment. However, we all had to go through it with a cheery face and she put on her best. We sat down together. We looked at the programme.
There was an acrobatic show prior to midnight. Now this was spectacular. They were way up in the Dome performing extraordinary feats, flying through the air. They were dressed in a riot of colour and really did look and act most impressively.
Then an appalling thought struck me, and chilled me to the innards. They were doing their wild thing right above where the Queen was sitting. ‘Well, that is remarkable,’ Prince Philip said, brightening a trifle. ‘You know they’re doing that without safety harnesses?’ I swear I knew what was going to happen. I felt like someone in one of those sixth-sense movies who can see the future: from sixty feet up, one of the performers was going to fall in the middle of a somersault, hurtle down and flatten the Queen. I could see it all. ‘QUEEN KILLED BY TRAPEZE ARTIST AT DOME’. ‘BRITAIN'S MILLENNIUM CELEBRATIONS MARRED’. ‘BLAIR ADMITS NOT ALL HAS GONE TO PLAN’. Britain’s millennium would indeed be famous; I would go down in history forever.
I kid you not, I joke about it now but at 11.30 p.m. on New Year’s Eve 1999, I was absolutely convinced. I have never been more relieved than when it all stopped.
Then came the ghastly singing of ‘Auld Lang Syne’. Another dec
ision; to link arms with the Queen or not. We looked at each other. I realised helplessly that to do it was ridiculous, but not to do it was stand-offish. I made my choice, stretching out my arms. She kept her options open, holding out one arm. But what the hell, she was alive, and that was the main thing.
The rest of the evening passed in a blur. We finally got home around 2 a.m. ‘I thought the evening was rather fun,’ Cherie said as we clambered into bed.
‘Darling,’ I replied, ‘there is only one thing I am going to thank God for tonight, and that is they only come round every thousand years.’
The next morning I was back to the reality of the day job. We were now two and a half years into office. For the way governments work, it is a blink of an eye. For the way the public think, it is an eternity. The ‘forces of conservatism’ speech was the product, in a sense, of my frustration at being unable to align the two time zones. Some of the criticism from commentators and the public was undoubtedly unfair, but some – indeed the core of it, namely that change was too slow and insufficiently radical – I believed myself. Hence the speech.
I was learning how complex the institutions of public service were, how multiple their pressures, how vast their demands and how great the expectations were of what could be done and in what period of time. The millennium may have been an exceptional moment in the calendar, but the 1999/2000 NHS ‘winter crisis’ came with the monotonous predictability of death and taxes. And two and a half years in, people expected better.
It is hard now to look back and realise just how inevitable such crises appeared. This time it was a flu bug. It produced the sad cases of individual misfortune. It centred around a lady called Mavis Skeaton, who was not given proper treatment and died. Her family naturally were outraged. The intensive care units of the hospitals were finding it hard to cope. There were stories of people being turned away; people treated on trolleys; people waiting hours in A & E.
Quite apart from routine cases and the flu epidemic, there were patients waiting so long for operations for heart disease that they would die while waiting. I received a letter from a woman whose husband, I think, had been a Northern Echo photographer whom I had worked with, who had died in such circumstances. I felt it horribly, felt the responsibility and felt, perhaps worst of all, the gnawing doubt as to whether it was just time we needed or something more profound in terms of the way the service was run. If it was the latter, we weren’t scaled up to do it. And to be very frank, I wasn’t entirely sure what the answer was. That’s what I mean by learning.
I had an increasing worry on health and education, which was that while the Tory reforms may have been badly implemented and badly explained, their essential direction was one that was in fact nothing to do with being ‘Tory’, but to do with the modern world. These reforms were all about trying to introduce systems where the money spent was linked to performance and where the service user was in the driving seat. They were often divisive and even misguided in policy detail, but the overall approach was born of the same social and economic trends that had given rise to support for privatisation and tax cuts.
I could see a trend that was about breaking down centralised and monolithic structures, about focusing on the developing tastes of consumers, about ending old demarcations in professions; and this trend seemed to me to be related to how people behaved, not how government behaved. The precise shift in the way the private sector was organised and managed seemed, and not unnaturally, to have its echo in the challenges facing the public sector.
In crime and in welfare policy, I figured the Tories had not really thought it through and had only really begun to think radically at the end of their time. But in the NHS and schools it was different – there were elements of the changes they had made that we needed to examine and learn from, not dismiss.
The trouble was, at the time there was not a great appetite in the Labour Party for such thinking. Indeed, it was heretical. In particular, at the helm of the NHS, I had put Frank Dobson. This, in itself, indicated how little I understood when first in office. The truth is Frank was genuinely and, to be fair, avowedly Old Labour. He was one of the many who considered New Labour a clever wheeze to win. He didn’t understand it much, and to the extent that he did, he disagreed with it.
The hierarchy in the department and in the NHS, though truly dedicated and fine public servants, believed sincerely that there was an incompatibility between private sector concepts like choice, and the basic equity of the NHS as an institution. It was the age-old problem of the policy becoming the principle, so the policy of the NHS for 1948 – perfectly appropriate for its time – became the hallowed principle for all time.
So I was turning all this over in my mind during 1999 and beginning a conversation with my nearest and dearest political associates. But I had two problems: the first was Frank Dobson, the second was money. I knew that the underinvestment in the NHS was clear and the Tories had not understood it, or maybe hadn’t wanted to. When we compared our spending with that of any similar country, the disparity was plain. Money was not sufficient. But it was necessary.
The winter crisis was the immediate manifestation of the problem. But that was all it was. The true problem lay deep within the service: the funding and how it was run.
I had had a series of seminars with health professionals that the excellent Robert Hill (my adviser on health and author of NHS Direct) had put together for me. It was fascinating. From within the NHS, there were people who fully endorsed the NHS principles of equity, but were chafing at the bit about how the service was managed; how outdated its practices were; how there was an incompetence in some of its systems that led to consequences that were truly inequitable.
I had also had a conversation or several with Gordon about NHS funding; but as I anticipated, he was fairly adamant against doing anything big on it. Incidentally, I make no criticism of that. It was his job as Chancellor to run a tight ship in respect of the finances and repel boarders, as it were.
So I had to get the money, in order to get the reform; and in order to get the reform, I had to get a top team who believed in it.
I did the first in a somewhat unconventional way. I was due to do my annual new year Frost programme interview.
David Frost was still far and away the best interviewer around on TV, far better than those who sneered at him for not being sneering enough. He wasn’t rude or hectoring, but had an extraordinary talent for beguiling the interviewee, leading them on, charming them into indiscretion, tripping them, almost conversationally, into the headlines. I lost count of the number of times Alastair would say to me, ‘What the hell did you say that for?’ after a Frost encounter. I would say, ‘What?’ and he would explain and I would go: ‘Oh.’
Also, David had the revolutionary notion in his head that the audience wanted to hear what the person answering the questions had to say, rather than the person asking them. By this device, he got people to say much more than they intended and on a much broader range of topics. You would always end up with four or five news stories out of the interview. And of course by being insistent but not aggressive, he made it far harder, psychologically, for the interviewee not to answer directly.
Anyway, in this instance there was no need to worry about what I might say inadvertently. I had decided to say it advertently. I decided to commit us to raising NHS spending to roughly the EU average. Naturally, there were a plethora of methods for calculating what that was. There were armies of statisticians and accountants who worked it out and came to different conclusions from each other, but the basic point was fairly clear and the signal such a commitment sent would have its own determinative impact.
On Saturday, Robert Hill and I worked through the possible permutations. I talked again to Gordon, who became more adamant. But I was convinced, as a matter of profound political strategy, that this decision had to be taken and now.
I also knew by then that we had a chance of getting the reform. In late 1999, Alan Milburn had replaced Frank in
the department. Alan had been Minister of State and really shone there and was fully simpatico with the direction of change. Frank had resigned in order to concentrate on the mayoral contest for London.
I admit, at this point, that I had not discouraged Frank from resigning, partly because I thought it would free up the Department of Health. It did, however, leave us with a big problem for the mayoral race. The truth is that Frank had about as much chance of beating Ken Livingstone in a contest to be London mayor as Steptoe and Son’s horse had of winning the Grand National. At a later point of this saga, when in the course of the election I was trying to lift my team’s spirits, I said gamely that I thought Frank would just win it. To which Anji said: ‘If you think Frank Dobson can beat Ken Livingstone in London, I’m calling a doctor.’
So there was a big mess looming in London; but by the time I did Frost, I knew what I wanted and I had who I wanted at the helm.
I did the interview and, to David’s pleasure, I didn’t need my confession to be extricated, but averred it fully, openly and right speedily, as it were. It was one of the few examples I can remember of going on a programme with a story in mind and emerging from it with the same story on record.
There were a few days of tin-helmet time with Gordon, but he could see the inevitability of it and anyhow the politics made it impossible to oppose. It was a straightforward pre-emption. But it was a pre-emption that was both necessary and justifiable. It then allowed me to get on with the other part of the plan: to work with Alan on a serious proposal of reform.
We talked about it and agreed that we would work over the coming months to produce a proper, fully-fledged plan of transformation for the NHS. After some toing and froing we agreed it should be a ten-year plan. The aim should be to change fundamentally the way the NHS was run: to break up the monolith; to introduce a new relationship with the private sector; to import concepts of choice and competition; and to renegotiate the basic contracts of the professionals from nurses to doctors to managers.