A JOURNEY

by Blair, Tony

  So all this was going on, along with the usual flotsam and jetsam: the campaign group Fathers 4 Justice threw a condom filled with purple flour at me during Prime Minister’s Questions (it was the shortest PMQs I ever did, and much was I grateful); Ken Livingstone was re-elected as mayor of London, and England got knocked out of the Euro 2004 football competition on penalties. For a moment, the eye of the media beast was distracted and some semblance of normality reigned. I appointed Peter Mandelson as the new EU commissioner, despite intense internal opposition from parts of the PLP and Cabinet. We lost one seat to the Lib Dems and narrowly held on to another against them in two by-elections. We had a heavy but not utterly disastrous defeat in the local elections. The by-election in Peter’s seat was won.

  Our political position seemed fragile, but in reality we remained strong. The Tories never won a by-election from us during my time as leader. I should have taken more heart from all of that than I did. As Peter used to say to me, but I never quite accepted, ‘You are far stronger than you think.’

  In the course of the first part of 2004, we had proceeded with the next stage of the reform plans. We now had on the books a schools programme that included greater freedom for schools but also the first embryonic academies; variable tuition fees, modelled on the US system; NHS hospital trusts and the first foundation hospitals and again the beginnings of private sector competition; asylum reform; antisocial behaviour legislation; a new system of early-years learning in childcare; and work under way on pensions, welfare and ID cards.

  The aim now was to construct a clear forward agenda to take all these changes to a new, sustained and pervasive level. The changes so far had shown clearly that the greater the autonomy for schools and hospitals, the greater the innovation; the more choice and competition, the higher the quality of outcomes; and especially with the NHS, cuts in waiting times were all coming from the combination of the system being open to private sector investment and money increasingly following the patient; and the only problem with the law and order changes was that people wanted them to go faster and further.

  In summary, extra money plus system change delivered results. Through 2004 and after seven years in power, we were finally getting real and substantial improvements. The Delivery Unit set up by Michael Barber after the 2001 election was producing big dividends. Along with the Strategy Unit, it had been a major innovation. It had been harshly criticised and remained subject to fairly continual sniping from the traditional Civil Service, but Michael and his relatively small team of around thirty were making a quantitative and qualitative difference to the performance of government.

  As Michael explains in his book Instruction to Deliver – which has become something of a public sector hallowed text round the world – for the first time we were tracking priority commitments, receiving real-time data on how they were proceeding and following up so that obstacles were removed and policies adjusted as necessary. Most of all, those charged with delivering knew they were being monitored. It was not a heavy process. Michael’s consummate skill was to make performance management seem, and indeed be, a partnership. It was highly effective.

  By this time, I felt things were really moving but, as I say, we now needed to take it all to the next stage. So we began work on a series of five-year plans, to be published at the end of the summer session. The aim was to give the party a solid, radical New Labour platform on which to win a third term. Of course, critical to this was to ensure that Number 10 and Number 11 were working closely on it, so we began the sessions to try to take it forward.

  Meanwhile, I prepared for the likely departure. Cherie and I had been out of the London housing market since 1997, during which time prices had rocketed. With the help of Martha Greene, a friend, we began discreetly to look for a house. It’s not an easy thing to do without being discovered, but Martha handled it all with great skill and we identified a house in Connaught Square which would allow us to keep Leo at the Westminster primary school where he was very happy.

  I was reasonably settled in my own mind that two terms was enough. I had, as I explained, taken the decision over Iraq in good faith. Right or wrong, I tried to do what I thought was in the best interests of the country. But the coming together of a right-wing media that wanted me out because I could win for Labour and a left-wing media that was genuinely outraged by war led to a campaign that tested even my resilience and fortitude. You should get used to being criticised as prime minister. Being vilified was a little different. I am not by nature a whiner; but inside I was starting to whine.

  Worn down is, again, how I would describe it. It’s hard to express what it’s like. Naturally, it is a great privilege and honour to do the job – and by the way, it really is! – but here’s where my greatest strength was my greatest weakness: I am normal. Faced with a choice between a thriller with plenty of action and special effects, where in the end the hero triumphs, and a psychological drama about a dying wife who discovers her husband has been having a passionate affair with her best friend, her only child commits suicide and who then dies in solitude and penury, I go for the first. Ask me whether I would prefer to eat out at a good restaurant with friends talking about anything other than politics or sit through Wagner’s Götterdämmerung and you would find me in the restaurant. Like most of humanity I prefer laughing to crying, enjoyment to mourning, feeling up to feeling down. My natural disposition is to wake up looking forward to the day ahead.

  And I found I wasn’t. Of course, sometimes life is more like a psychological drama than a thriller; Wagner’s opera can provoke more reflection than a casual night out with friends; and tears are more appropriate than laughter. There were many tears being shed as a result of my decisions, so why should I not share them? Indeed, how could I not share them?

  The euphoria, the boundless optimism of the early years had long dissipated. Instead, each day, each meeting, occasionally each hour seemed a struggle, an endless pushing up against forces, seen or unseen, that pushed back sometimes steadily, sometimes violently, but always with what seemed like inexhaustible energy and often malice.

  So when does fatigue turn to self-pity, and to surrender? I was very aware that these feelings were gripping me. I accepted the first, despised the other two, but could feel my will ebbing and my resistance faltering. And I had told Gordon I would go if he carried through the same agenda. So that gave me my reason (or was it excuse?) to go. Whatever, I wanted out.

  I talked about it with Cherie. She thought I was wrong to go, but made it clear she would support my decision. But, as she could be at critical moments, she forced me to be honest about why I wanted to go. She told me bluntly I was kidding myself if I thought Gordon shared the same programme. ‘You just want out,’ she said. ‘I understand why. In many ways, so do I. But let’s be honest about it.’

  I wasn’t sure she was right about Gordon. I had thought it possible he might go with the agenda once he owned it. And there was another reason motivating me, concerning the Labour Party. In modern politics, to go two terms is a big achievement; I did ten years, which must be the maximum nowadays. In earlier times, when the pace of politics was slower and the leader was far less visible, less scrutinised and criticised, you could go for three or four. Today, a new prime minister or president becomes almost boringly familiar to people even after a year. By year eight, they’ve had enough. Actually, you’ve had enough.

  We had put in an offer on the house. It had been accepted. My feeling at that point was to announce around conference time that I would go, and be out by Christmas. That would leave a good six-month run-in for the election for Gordon.

  However, the work on the five-year plans was now running into serious difficulties. The trouble is that once you declare an intention that you are going to go, even if only to yourself in your own mind, it seeps out as if by osmosis.

  Also, one stipulation I had made with John Prescott and Gordon was that neither should mention my departure, not even to their closest staff. In particular, I h
ad said to Gordon he must not on any account discuss this with the two Eds, Balls and Miliband. I permitted him to tell Sue Nye and I told Anji (who was of course no longer working for me), but that was it. In spite of this, he had actually told his inner circle as a whole.

  This was a real problem. I had set up the possibility of my going by saying to the Guardian that if I felt I was a liability to the Labour Party then I would leave. That was as far as I wanted to go – if my leaving became current and imminent, then self-evidently all authority would evaporate. But articles were now appearing discussing the possibility of my departure, with some even saying it was all agreed.

  I resented this, but in the end I suppose it was inevitable he would talk to his people, and he would say he needed to plan. Actually, the reason for my change of mind was not to do with that.

  The reason I started to draw back was to do with the ongoing discussions with the Treasury. Matthew Taylor and Jeremy Heywood, who were conducting them on behalf of Number 10, were saying in effect that it was completely clear there was no way that Ed Balls, in particular, was supportive of this programme. Other Treasury officials were talking of me and describing how – as one put it – ‘It’s all a bit pointless anyway as he’s not going to be there.’

  This had been filtering back to me in dribs and drabs, and then one day in May, Matthew had a quiet word with me. ‘You do know there is not the slightest possibility of them running with these five-year plans, don’t you?’ He also told me they were contemplating significant alterations to the tuition-fees reforms.

  I decided to have it out with Gordon, and we met later that month. I told him that we were having serious worries that this agenda wasn’t in line with his thinking. It was then that he miscalculated.

  I’m sure I never quite handled him right in tense situations. Maybe we knew each other too well, and like some quarrelling, married couple we let emotion run out on the pitch before thinking. But on this occasion he made a grievous error: he should have reassured me, and instead he tried to bully me. He snarled when he should have charmed.

  In effect, he said: you’ve promised to go and that’s that. That was completely the wrong tactic, and I became very tough in response. He then altered and said of course we agreed the agenda, refuting that Ed Balls was anything other than one hundred per cent in favour of it, and also denying that he had told Ed anything about my going. I knew both things were wrong.

  The meeting ended badly. But worse, the hostility started up again almost immediately. They had decided to force the issue. It was the stupidest thing – it forced me to confront or yield. And if I yielded, what word could I utter when I looked in the mirror except ‘coward’?

  At the end of June I went to a NATO meeting in Istanbul, where I recall getting the first headlines from the British papers from David Hill. Normally, and mercifully, David showed me little of the media. As he put it, ‘I show you this stuff on a “need to know” basis.’ He was a consummate operator with really excellent political judgement, calm, assured and as good a suffocator of a febrile story as there was. And there were plenty to suffocate, as you can imagine. The papers were full of what was obviously, and almost openly, a GB press operation arising out of critical comments which Derek Scott, my former economic adviser, had made about Gordon. Derek had by then left Downing Street. Although a really good and freethinking adviser, he had been ‘independent’ (i.e. uncontrollable) enough when he worked in Number 10; outside it, there was no hope of keeping him ‘on message’. Anyone knew that. Gordon knew that. But Derek’s comments were hyped and presented as an attack on Gordon as if authorised by me, which was absurd. It saw the start of a ‘Gordon as victim’ line which ran pretty constantly from then until I left.

  ‘What do we do?’ said David.

  ‘Nothing,’ I replied, ‘except make it clear we are fully supportive of Gordon and don’t share Derek’s views.’

  I left Istanbul, went on to the Special EU Council, and came back to London on 30 June to make a statement on both the NATO and the EU meetings. It had been an incredibly busy month. The week before we had had the ordinary EU Council. The week before that, we had had the G8 summit at Sea Island in Georgia. I had been more or less continually on the go, with barely time to think on Gordon. But I could feel the pressure building and getting uglier by the day.

  I did the usual Thursday Cabinet, held various other meetings and then went to Chequers on the Friday. I used to entertain there sporadically, and had leaders there when it was unavoidable, or when discretion and secrecy were paramount (as in some of the Irish talks); but on the whole Chequers was a place for relaxation and reflection. I’ve always found the two go together.

  In the summer I could sit out on the terrace, ploughing through the box papers, stopping every so often for a mug of tea or to take a call. I used to have a light lunch with nothing to drink, watch Football Focus if it was a Saturday and pretend I was a pundit, or a live game if it was on at midday, work a little more and then go to the gym. In the early days I might go off to RAF Halton and play tennis.

  On this weekend, I sat and thought long and hard. I came to one inescapable conclusion, and then another. The first was that I didn’t really believe Gordon would carry on the agenda. The truth is: if he believed in it, he would have supported it. And you can tell a lot from the people around someone; those around Gordon didn’t agree with it. OK, they might be cajoled into it, even pressed into it, but once I was gone there was no earthly hope of the fledgling programme being pursued.

  The second conclusion was that the only reason I wanted to go was cowardice, pure and simple. I could try to dress it up in grand gestures of selflessness, pretend that I would be going for the good of the party or country, or even family; but it wouldn’t wash. That motive was not selfless but selfish. I would be going because I couldn’t take it any more, the abuse, the pressure, the hounding, the misrepresentation of my motives, the denigration. The kitchen temperature had become too high; I was sweating.

  Also, I now knew what would be coming after me. It would not exactly be Old Labour, but it wouldn’t be authentic New Labour either. Very soon we would be back to conventional Labour versus conventional Tory. And there would be only one winner from that.

  A couple of weeks before, in a rare break from the helter-skelter, John Reid had come to see me. John is a very wise man. Once he broke the grip the demon drink had on him, he flourished into one of the most shrewd and profound politicians in any party. Had he come through earlier, he could have played a huge part in keeping Labour as New Labour.

  We had sat out on the wicker chairs in the Downing Street garden. As was his wont, he was very direct.

  ‘You must not go,’ he said. I began to protest but he waved me silent. ‘I know you’re thinking about it. It would be the most terrible mistake not only for you but for the party and the country. You must not do it. You know as well as I do what Gordon will be like. He may become leader some day, he may not; but to hand over now would be irresponsible. What is more, you need to fight the election even after Iraq, even with its burden, and you need to win it. And if you don’t, however you may present it, you are running away.’

  As I sat in the gentle July sunshine at Chequers in 2004, I realised not that John had persuaded me – Tessa Jowell, Alan Milburn, Peter Mandelson and others had made the same argument – but rather that he had brought my own thoughts out from under the cover of my fantasy and illuminated them. It would be tough to stay, even at points horrible; but it would be a failure of simple, basic courage to go.

  The British people, whom I genuinely adored and with whom the political relationship, at least on my part, was on occasions almost like a love affair, had ceased loving and were not going to start again. Support remained, but many were sullen, even resentful. The enjoyment that remained was the joy of doing what I believed in wholeheartedly, winning a third term, forcing the Tories therefore to change, and seeing through a programme of domestic reform that I was sure was right. Iraq
would be a severe headwind; but I was again sure that whatever the wisdom of doing it, the folly of retreat was unthinkable and precipitate withdrawal a disaster. I looked as dispassionately as I could at our programme, and at that of the Tories under Michael Howard, and I didn’t really have any doubt as to what was sensible for Britain. But our winning depended vitally on us remaining clearly and unashamedly New Labour. If we shifted from it, even deviated from it at the margins, I knew we would be finished.

  My mind was made up. I could not hand over to Gordon, at least not at this time and quite possibly never. The following week I informed him. You can guess the reaction. I took back the management of the five-year plans. We just worked with departments, and worked round and despite the Treasury. We got the plans in proper radical shape, and they became the basis of the third-term manifesto. After a good two weeks’ holiday, I came back fully refreshed.

  In my conference address, I set out our stall for the third term. Previously, Alastair and Peter Hyman would supply a draft speech, something they excelled at. I would then amend and re-amend, usually over ten or fifteen drafts. They would tend to pull one way ideologically, Anji and Jonathan the other. Over time, starting with the 2001 speech, I would do the draft myself. Peter and Alastair would write certain key passages or be commissioned to give the speech colour. The others would give a view. Meanwhile, David Hill would point out pitfalls or unintended headlines. Matthew Taylor and Andrew Adonis would look after policy. Sally Morgan would comment.

  I made the case for what we had done, and what we still had to do. As always, I tried to unite traditional values with an analysis of the future world in which they had to be applied. I also attempted to settle the party with their new status, not as the underdog allowed to govern only occasionally, but as a party able to govern for a substantial period.