A JOURNEY

by Blair, Tony

  There was a constituency for New Labour all right, but it was not reflected in the media and it was still in its adolescence in the Labour Party. Around me, at the top, were people who for one reason or another were lukewarm. Those who supported it – like John Reid, David Blunkett, Tessa Jowell, Charles Clarke, Alan Milburn, Hilary Armstrong and John Hutton – were on their way up, with still some distance to go; or, like Peter, were under a lot of attack. Go back to May 2001 and none of the major posts – deputy prime minister, Chancellor, Foreign Secretary, Home Secretary – was held by an out-and-out moderniser.

  Yet I had now become militant for radical change. I was absolutely clear that in each of these areas, we had an argument that was strong, right and could win the country. Here was the rub: I couldn’t get the argument heard. I don’t mean I didn’t make it – I did, loud and clear – but it was not really listened to. It found insufficient echo among other Labour speakers and very little within the media. The result was a campaign and mandate that meant different things to different people. I was completely certain: the manifesto and the mandate was one for New Labour, but the absence of serious policy discussion meant there was no sense of that being so. If you had asked ordinary people, they would have said: You’ve done OK, the other lot aren’t ready, carry on. It was an election fought in prose, when I was trying to make poetry out of it.

  At the time, at one level, what did it matter? We won, and handsomely. But it gave rise to a dangerous confusion among the party, part of which believed that what had won the election was not really New Labour but a benign economy, some extra cash and the parlous state of the Tories. I was absolutely sure the only route to victory was New Labour; even without a focus on policy, that essential radical centre-ground position had somehow still been established and come through. But it was not clear to the party or to the media.

  The turnout was low, and the myth was born that the true victor was indifference. We were assailed by cynical over- and undertones. Of course, turnout is often a function of how close people think the result may be. The 1992 turnout was higher than 1997; 2005 higher than 2001. It is actually a very unreliable guide to the feelings about the government.

  But, hard as I tried, it meant that as the campaign came to a close, though we were out-of-sight winners, there was a tinge to the victory that discomfited me, and made me realise that reform in term two was going to be a rocky road indeed.

  Nonetheless, election night was the opposite of 1997, when everyone except me had been euphoric. This time I was fairly euphoric, while everyone else felt a little flat. After all, it was the second biggest win in the history of British politics – two landslides in a row was impressive. (George Bush phoned me after the election to say, ‘Man, how did you do that?’) As the results rolled in and it was plain it was going to be overwhelming, this time I did permit myself a drink and some celebration. But I also had decisions to make.

  One was internal to the office. Anji was keen to go. John Browne, the boss of BP, had offered her a job. I, of course, thought her mad to give up being at the heart of Number 10, even for the sake of working for a company the size of BP and a person of John’s reputation and talent. Frankly I couldn’t believe it, and I spent significant time before and during the election trying to get her to reconsider.

  Eventually, she relented and agreed to stay, but for her it was a mistake. She repented of relenting, and finally left at the end of the year, though not before seeing me through the challenge of September 11.

  It was a terrible wrench. She was one of my oldest friends. I trusted her totally. The prime minister’s job is a lonely position, and given that my political isolation was acute for the reasons stated, someone like that, in whom you can have complete confidence, is a godsend. She had developed into an outstanding operative – charming, vivacious, spreading lots of happiness and contentment, while retaining a formidable ruthlessness and capacity to scheme. She was a solid voice for Middle England, had no ideological baggage and was calmness personified in a crisis.

  I learned a lesson: never try to keep someone who’s moved on in their mind or who wants to go.

  On the morning of 8 June, I put Anji in a new position with added power. I hastily moved Sally to the Lords and made her a minister, which she took with remarkably good grace and from which experience she profited enormously, so that when she took charge of government affairs and political liaison some months later, she had turned into a quite exceptional political manager and was invaluable in the travails of the second term. I had soon realised I missed her badly; and that her skills, more attuned to the party than Anji’s, were equally required.

  Partly because much of the reform had to be driven from and through Number 10, I knew that we had to strengthen the centre of government considerably, and I made major changes. It is a feature of modern politics that nothing gets done if not driven from the top. Once the framework is set, the departments know their direction and they know what they should do, but leaving it up to them to do it is highly risky, unless the individual ministers fully buy into the vision; and even then, they need to have the power of the centre behind them.

  My impatience with the scale and ambition of our reform was now carved in granite. I was going to do it, come hell or high water. I needed to be able to solve the tricky questions of policy detail that added up to the general shape of the change; and I needed to track whether and how the change was being introduced. I had also become aware that the length and breadth of foreign policy issues were creating a requirement for a wholly different order of service. Summits were proliferating, and the scope of foreign policy decisions and their consequences meant leaders, and not foreign ministers, inevitably took on bigger roles.

  This was never popular with the traditionalists. There was a lot of talk of centralising government; wanting to be a president; overweening (even manic) desire to have absolute power. It was complete tosh, of course. The fact was you couldn’t get the job done unless there were clear procedures and mechanisms in place to implement the programme. There was so much to do in foreign policy terms, where an interdependent world was exponentially increasing the impact of multilateral and foreign policy decisions. And, in domestic policy, changing public service systems inevitably meant getting into the details of delivery and performance management in a radically more granular way. Increasingly, prime ministers are like CEOs or chairmen of major companies. They have to set a policy direction; they have to see it is followed; they have to get data on whether it is; they have to measure outcomes.

  There was, again, a lot of exaggerated nonsense about targets and so on in the public sector. Some criticism was valid. Targets can be too numerous. Sometimes different targets conflict, which is a recipe for incompetence. Sometimes they are too prescriptive. All of that was valid.

  However, as I used to say to ministers and civil servants, if that is true, cut them down to the essentials, unwind any conflicts, grant a sensible discretion on how they should be met – but don’t think for an instant that in any other walk of life you would spend these sums of money without demanding a measurable output. Inputs we had aplenty, but I knew, as the money spent increased, it would be on the outputs that the focus would come; and rightly so.

  We established a Delivery Unit, headed by Michael Barber, who had been David Blunkett’s adviser in the Department of Education. The concept of the Delivery Unit was Michael’s idea. It was an innovation that was much resisted, but utterly invaluable and proved its worth time and time again. It was a relatively small organisation, staffed by civil servants but also outsiders from McKinsey, Bain and other private sector companies, whose job was to track the delivery of key government priorities. It would focus like a laser on an issue, draw up a plan to resolve it working with the department concerned, and then performance-manage it to solution. It would get first-class data which it would use for stocktakes that I took personally with the minister, their key staff and mine, every month or so. The unit would present a progress repo
rt and any necessary action would be authorised.

  We reduced radically the number of unfounded asylum cases that way; drove up literacy and numeracy in schools; applied it to NHS waiting lists, street crime and a host of other things. It was like an independent private or social enterprise at the heart of government. In the process, whole new areas needing reform would be illuminated, since often it became clear that the challenge was systemic, requiring wholesale change to the way a public service worked, rather than a centrally or bureaucratically driven edict.

  We also created a Strategy Unit, to look ahead at the way policy would develop, the fresh challenges and new ideas to meet them. That also was highly successful. It allowed us to take a medium- and even long-term view of certain issues that were looming but not imminent. Whereas the Policy Unit handled the day-to-day and focused on managing the departments to produce the policies and their implementation that derived from the manifesto or the departmental plans, the Strategy Unit was trying to construct the next policy platform. Of course the two overlapped, but in areas like pensions, welfare to work, public health and further education, the Strategy Unit was constantly putting issues on the agenda that, even if not urgent today, would become tomorrow’s crises unless prepared for.

  In addition, I strengthened the foreign policy team. Instead of one poor soul covering all foreign policy for the prime minister, which usually meant they worked fourteen-hour days and were never able to interact with other parts of our system or those of other countries in the way they needed to, we formed a unit of four or five, with one senior person on Europe and another on the rest of foreign policy, and some other officials to help. This hugely helped Downing Street to cope with the mounting burden of foreign policy challenges.

  I wanted to go further in the machinery of government. I was really passionate about antisocial behaviour and petty crime and the misery it caused people. I also believed we needed a completely new approach to organised crime. This area was to prove incredibly frustrating. I had a plan to reorganise the whole way the criminal justice system worked: to reduce crime, the fear of crime and their social and economic costs, to speed up the process of cases through the system, to dispense justice fairly and efficiently, to promote confidence in the rule of law and to promote confidence in the system.

  The decision I didn’t take was to move Gordon. When people look back, they always think that was the crucial moment when moving him could have been achieved politically; and that therefore this was an opportunity missed. On balance, I still disagree. He was recognised as an outstanding Chancellor. He was a big figure, a towering figure in many respects. He had a solid media and party following. Moving him would have seemed, and been written up as, a piece of petty spite on my part, as a jealousy move, a self-interested one rather than a disinterested one. And who would I have put in his place? At that point only Robin Cook or Jack Straw could have filled the position. In truth, neither would have been as good – more amenable, maybe, but not as formidable. The Gordon problem – the combination of the brilliant and the impossible – remained.

  I think he believed I would move him, so when I tried to say to him the second term must be different from the first and you must cooperate, he immediately said he knew I wanted to get rid of him. What was an attempt to have a frank way of putting the thing on an even keel only further destabilised the vessel.

  I did move Robin from Foreign Secretary and put in Jack Straw. Robin had done well, but four years was considered a long time doing that job. It wasn’t necessarily wise politically, however. From then on, he was a potential danger. Indeed, I had the same problem with Jack in 2005. The trouble is no one ever wants to stop being Foreign Secretary. As I have said, of all the jobs, that’s the one they get to thinking is theirs and should jolly well continue being theirs until the end of time, or at least the end of the government, and even then some harbour the thought that they had done it so well, shouldn’t it be elevated above the squalor of party politics?

  At the first PLP meeting after election, the PLP were in truculent mood. Unbelievable – second landslide in a row, what’s there to complain about? The tension I had felt during the campaign was coming to the surface: they felt they had won on one basis; I felt I had won on another.

  However, before either of us had much time to moan about the other, within less than nine weeks of our victory the world would change, and the fate of my political leadership – along with many other things of far greater importance – would change with it.

  TWELVE

  9/11: ‘SHOULDER TO SHOULDER’

  It is amazing how quickly shock is absorbed and the natural rhythm of the human spirit reasserts itself. A cataclysm occurs. The senses reel. In that moment of supreme definition, we can capture in our imagination an event’s full significance. Over time, it is not that the memory of it fades, exactly; but its illuminating light dims, loses its force, and our attention moves on. We remember, but not as we felt at that moment. The emotional impact is replaced by a sentiment which, because it is more calm, seems more rational. But paradoxically it can be less rational, because the calm is not the product of a changed analysis, but of the effluxion of time.

  So it was with September 11 2001. On that day, in the course of less than two hours, almost 3,000 people were killed in the worst terrorist attack the world has ever known. Most died in the attack on the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center that dominated the skyline of New York. It was a workplace for as diverse a workforce as any in the world, from all nations, races and faiths, and was not only a symbol of American power but also the edifice that most eloquently represented the modern phenomenon of globalisation.

  The explosion as the planes hit killed hundreds outright, but most died in the inferno that followed, and the carnage of the collapse of the buildings. As the flames and smoke engulfed them, many jumped in terror and panic, or just because they preferred that death to being on fire. Many who died were rescue workers whose heroism that day has rightly remained as an enduring testament to selfless sacrifice.

  The Twin Towers were not the only target. American Airlines Flight 77, carrying sixty-four people from Washington to Los Angeles, was flown into the Pentagon. A total of 189 people died. United Airlines Flight 93, bound from Newark to San Francisco with forty-four on board, was hijacked, its target probably the White House. It came down in Somerset County, Pennsylvania. Its passengers, realising the goal of the hijack, stormed the cabin. In perishing, they saved the lives of many others.

  It was an event like no other. It was regarded as such. The British newspapers the next day were typical of those around the globe: ‘at war’, they proclaimed. The most common analogy was Pearl Harbor. The notion of a world, not just America, confronted by a deadly evil that had indeed declared war on us all was not then dismissed as the language of the periphery of public sentiment. It was the sentiment. Thousands killed by terror – what else should we call it?

  Opinions were forthright and clear, and competed with each other in resolution, not only in the West but everywhere. In the Arab world, condemnation was nearly universal, only Saddam ensuring that Iraqi state television played a partisan song, ‘Down With America’, calling the attacks ‘the fruits of American crimes against humanity’. Yasser Arafat condemned the acts on behalf of the Palestinians, though unfortunately, most especially for the Palestinian cause, the TV showed pictures of some jubilant Palestinians celebrating.

  The most common words that day were ‘war’, ‘evil’, ‘sympathy’, ‘solidarity’, ‘determination’ and, of course, ‘change’. Above all, it was accepted that the world had changed. How could it be otherwise?

  The reason for such a description was also not hard to divine. The first attempt to attack the World Trade Center, in 1993, had been foiled, but the planning this time had obviously been meticulous. The enemy had been prepared to wait until it had accumulated the necessary means and opportunity.

  However, more than that, a terror attack of this scale was not
calculated to do limited damage. It was designed for maximum casualty. It was delivered by a suicide mission. It therefore had an intent, a purpose and a scope beyond anything we had encountered before. This was terror without limit; without mercy; without regard to human life, because it was motivated by a cause higher than any human cause. It was inspired by a belief in God; a perverted belief, a delusional and demonic belief, to be sure, but nonetheless so inspired.

  It was, in a very real sense, a declaration of war. It was calculated to draw us into conflict. Up to then, the activities of this type of extremism had been growing. It was increasingly associated with disputes that seemed unconnected, though gradually the connection was being made. Kashmir, Chechnya, Algeria, Yemen, Palestine, Lebanon; in each area, different causes were at play, with different origins, but the attacks, carried out as acts of terror, were growing, and the ideological link with an extreme element that professed belief in Islam was ever more frequently expressed. Until September 11, the splashes of colour on different parts of the canvas did not appear to the eye as a single picture. After it, the clarity was plain, vivid and defining.