by Blair, Tony
There was one other somewhat difficult and dangerous consequence. Alastair and Philip both thought it should be very much a dual TB/GB campaign. I was unpopular in many quarters; Gordon was a successful Chancellor; it made sense. But Peter Mandelson and Alan were strongly opposed, with Peter repeating to me that I was stronger than I thought and didn’t need this. The disagreement between Peter on the one hand and Alastair and Philip on the other was at times very sharp.
For once, I wasn’t totally sure what I thought. At one level, I knew the agenda was mine and felt really confident on policy. At another, I felt oppressed, and if I’m honest a touch demoralised by the sheer weight of the opposition and its very personal nature. As I said earlier, the term ‘Bliar’ had first been used in the 2001 election, but the saga of WMD had given the concept booster rockets. Despite the conclusions of the Hutton Report, despite the fact that anyone who wanted to could see the intelligence on the government website and judge for themselves, it was too good an opportunity for those who by then hated me; and I think for some ‘hate’ wasn’t too strong a word.
It was partly that they felt angry at their own impotence. Tories in particular could see a third defeat on the horizon – and they had never lost three times in a row before. Of course, just as with Labour in the 1980s, they lost for a reason and that reason was their own fault; but again just as with the Labour Opposition and Thatcher, the frustration boiled over into savagery. (‘She’s a dictator,’ I remember people screaming at me once. ‘No she’s not,’ I rather unwisely replied, ‘she won an election.’) Whereas Mrs Thatcher always had the main papers on board and rooting for her, I had key papers effectively licensing the very personal campaign against me. The Daily Mail, in particular, was vicious. As I say, Gordon was close to Paul Dacre, the editor-in-chief of the Mail Group. The combination of the two factors made it fairly toxic.
In the course of the ridiculous so-called ‘Cheriegate’ affair of 2002 – in which Carole Caplin’s partner Peter Foster became involved with Cherie’s purchase of two flats in Bristol – I crossed a threshold with Dacre. Usually, I let what the media said wash over me, irrespective of what it was. Sometimes I met journalists who had written something foul about me or even Cherie and I just said ‘Hello’ cheerily, without being overconcerned. Also, it’s amazing how quickly people can forget the publicity, whether good or bad, that accumulates around a public figure – unless it is sustained and driven by an agenda, in which case it can be an irritation and occasionally it can do lasting damage. But often I would meet someone else in public life and say, ‘How are you?’ and they would look at me as if to say: ‘You mean you don’t know?’ They would still be smarting from some wretched story that put them on the rack, but for me, as a person just watching it disinterestedly as it were, I would perhaps have permitted myself a ‘tut’ or a smile but in any event I would have moved swiftly on. I knew it would be the same when I was attacked, so I was neither paranoid about the media nor did I obsessively follow it. The stories would prick me, but my recovery time was relatively fast.
In this particular story, Carole made a poor judgement in allowing Peter Foster into her life, as she has both honestly admitted and apologised for. Cherie should probably never have tried to buy the Bristol flats, but Euan was at university there and she thought they might be useful. The trouble is you can’t really do that as the prime minister’s wife, for no better reason than you just can’t. There was nothing the least wrong in the purchase itself, or the manner of it. Peter Foster’s role was pretty minimal. Cherie had met him for five minutes; I never met or talked to him. And by the way, you can’t blame the Mail for running the story; it was almost too good to be true. But as a result of one of those classic Saturday-afternoon calls in which a Sunday newspaper phones to get a response to a story at the last moment, so as to give the subject the least time to respond, I, by phone, got the wrong end of the stick from her, said Foster had had nothing to do with the purchase, passed it on to Alastair and days later we were in the perennial media firestorm. Then, as more and more came out about Foster and his history, it turned into something really ugly. The Mail was leading the way. That was its modus operandi, so there was no point getting upset about it.
To counter the campaign against me, I decided in the election to deliberately face my critics. It wasn’t easy and had to be carefully calibrated. There is a thin line between ‘brave enough to face the music’ and ‘everyone hates him’, but on balance it worked as a strategy, unpleasant though it was.
During the run-up to the election, we nearly had a vast panic over the approaching ‘flu pandemic’. There is a whole PhD thesis to be written about the ‘pandemics’ that never arise. In this case, the WHO had issued a report claiming there would be 500,000–700,000 deaths across the world. The old First World War flu statistics were rolled out, everyone went into general panic and any particular cases drew astonishing headlines of impending doom. Anyone who caught a cold thought they were part of a worldwide disaster.
I’m afraid I tried to do the minimum we could with the minimum expenditure. I understood the risk, but it just didn’t seem to me that the ‘panpanic’ was quite justified. And in those situations, everyone is so risk-averse that, unless you take care, you end up spending a fortune to thwart a crisis that never actually materialises.
However, the reaction of the system is perfectly understandable. The first time you don’t bother is the time when the wolf is actually in the village, so you have to steer a path, taking precautions, and be ready to ramp it up if it looks like this time it’s really happening. But oh, the endless meetings and hype of it all!
Anyway, we got over that. We were just about to start the campaign when Pope John Paul II died in early April. He had been a remarkable and hugely popular leader of the Catholic Church. We had celebrated Mass with him two years before in his own private chapel. He had been so solicitous, kind and concerned. He didn’t agree with Iraq, but he understood the perils and pressure of leadership, and when he spoke to me about it, he did so not to make a point but to give spiritual counsel. He was, of course, a theological conservative but with the true common touch.
When he died, literally millions took to the streets. World leaders went to St Peter’s in Rome for the funeral. The Vatican is an amazing place. As you drive in, you are suddenly in another world. The Swiss Guards – a tradition there since the early sixteenth century – greet you and usher you in. It is grand beyond grand. The king of Saudi Arabia once told me it was the most palatial building he had ever entered (and he would have known a few). If you visited the Pope, in order to get to the audience room you would go through a series of antechambers, each grander than the last, until you finally greeted His Holiness. If the purpose was to impress, it succeeded. From Pope Gregory in the fifth century onwards, there had always been that curious mixture of the political and spiritual in the Vatican, and the same sense still resides there – it is the headquarters of a religious organisation, yes, but also a power, to be engaged with and certainly not to be trifled with.
The funeral service was held on the steps of the cathedral. On high were the leaders. In the square the people were amassed. Everyone came. There was an amusing moment in the seating of the dignitaries. The Vatican decided to sit us all by alphabetical order. Unfortunately this put me next to Robert Mugabe, the UK being next to Zimbabwe. I was literally just about to take my seat when, in the nick of time, I spotted who was in the next chair, luckily at that moment talking to his neighbour on the other side. He hadn’t seen me. I was on the point of starting the election campaign, and this would not have been the ideal launch picture. It was too ghastly to contemplate.
I capered off to the back steps, where the ambassadors and security people and so on were assembled. This provided consternation among the priests doing the seating, who kept trying to drag me to the front row to take my seat. As the service was about to get under way, to my horror I saw Prince Charles enter and of course get ushered to the UK seat.
I rushed forward, but it was too late, and he sat down bang next to Mugabe. At least royalty don’t need to get elected.
A couple of days later, we launched the bid for the historic third term. We started as favourites, the polls showing us with a five-point lead or thereabouts, despite having had a difficult few months. There had been the continued rumblings and fallout from my decision to fight the election. Robert Peston – a close journalist associate of Gordon – had recently published a biography of him which basically put up in lights the ‘victim/betrayal’ thesis, and this had reverberated for weeks. To be fair, I think the book had been supposed to coincide with his assumption of the leadership and it then took on a different context, but it meant that the TB/GB divide was now common currency.
However, I felt very sure of our manifesto, our record and our ability to expose the frailty and thinness of the Tory campaign. The first visit was down to Weymouth, right in the heart of former true-blue Tory country, where we had won Dorset South for the first time in 2001.
The eventual result was actually less remarkable for its outcome or even the size of the majority, as for the lack of uniformity in the swing. In our two most marginal seats, of which Dorset South was one, the majority increased, an extraordinary result. In some places, we had a swing towards us. In others, we lost traditional Labour seats to the Lib Dems who campaigned rigorously against the war and on opposition to tuition fees.
At the core, the New Labour vote held firm. It was intact. But as it became clear that we would indeed be re-elected, so votes were peeled off from people who felt that they could safely vote Lib Dem in the secure knowledge they weren’t going to get a Tory government.
Nonetheless, in what was a serious misreading of the result, the party became convinced that with a different leader, i.e. Gordon, we would have done better. The truth is with a different New Labour leader we may have done, certainly with one who could have made Iraq someone else’s decision. But the real difference between 2001 and 2005 was in the 4 per cent loss to the Lib Dems, not in any significant swing to the Tories. This was, in other words, a classic protest vote, easily recoverable in a third term in time for a fourth-term bid, provided we did not lose the core New Labour support that had stuck with us. The very lack of uniformity in the swing, therefore, was not a quirk – it held, on analysis, a profoundly important political lesson.
So we got under way. The mood was OK, but soured by the decision of some to make Iraq the only issue – which included a disproportionately large part of the media – while for most of the electorate, Iraq played differently.
This was not because people didn’t care about the war or its consequences – they manifestly did, and by then we were losing soldiers with horrible regularity in the terror campaign being waged around Basra. It was rather that most people felt Iraq was a difficult decision. In other words, they had a keener appreciation of how tough it was to decide the issue than the black-and-white predilection of the media. Even if they disagreed, they understood the dilemma. They sympathised with the fact the leader had to take the decision. During the campaign, many people said to me they were glad they did not have to take it themselves. Also, as I said before, they distrusted the way my opponents used it, especially the Tories.
Other issues abounded, such as the Longbridge factory in the Midlands, right in the heart of swing territory, where the owners of the major and historic car plant were on the verge of bankruptcy. It all kicked off just as the campaign got under way. Here Gordon and I worked well and with visible impact, immediately getting up there, speaking to people, trying to sort it, clearly in charge and in gear, as it were.
My programme revolved around visits to schools and hospitals, to children’s centres, to the whole infrastructure of public services in which we had invested massively and where the results were coming through. You could see the bricks-and-mortar effect of the money. The statistics on school results, hospital waiting times and crime figures told of the benefits of reform. Ten-year-old pupils ranked third best in the world in literacy and the fastest improving in numeracy, with three-quarters of eleven-year-olds reaching high standards in reading, writing and maths. Less than four-hour waits in accident and emergency for 97 per cent of patients, and virtually no one waiting more than nine months for an operation. Overall crime as measured by the authoritative British Crime Survey down 30 per cent – the equivalent of almost five million fewer crimes a year. Record numbers of police – almost 13,000 more than in 1997 – working with 4,600 new community support officers.
The fresh programme in the manifesto no longer seemed like a politician’s wish list, but the next stage of an already fructifying and coherent plan. The people who worked in the public services felt we were on their side and felt, instinctively, the Tories weren’t. So on the domestic agenda, we were strong.
The Tories had one good issue to beat us with: immigration. In our early years, we had had a real problem with asylum claims made by people who were really economic immigrants. The system to deal with such claims was, as I described earlier, hopelessly out of date. Eventually and after much bureaucratic agony, we had battered it into shape, but illegal immigration persisted as an issue. Britain was not the only country facing such a problem, of course, but I watched with dismay as progressive parties around Europe, one after another, got the immigration issue wrong and lost.
People on the left are, on the whole, people with immensely decent instincts on migrants. They loathe racism and know the issue of immigration is often a carrier for the racist virus. When people in Britain used to say they were against immigration, a goodly proportion would really be against a particular type of immigrant, i.e. a black or brown face. It was unspoken, but everyone knew it was there.
So the tendency for those on the left was to equate concern about immigration with underlying racism. This was a mistake. The truth is that immigration, unless properly controlled, can cause genuine tensions, put a strain on limited resources and provide a sense in the areas into which migrants come in large numbers that the community has lost control of its own future. In our case this concern was natural, given the numbers involved. It was not inspired by racism. And it was widespread. What’s more, there were certain categories of immigrant flow, from certain often highly troubled parts of the world, who imported their own internal issues, from those troubled parts of the world, into the towns and villages in Britain. Unsurprisingly, this caused real anxiety.
Every time we regulated and tightened the asylum laws, I would get grief from well-intentioned progressives who thought I was ‘conceding’ to racism. I used to explain that it was precisely to avoid racism that we had to do it. The laws were a mess. The political challenge was to prevent subjective racism building up into a coalition that was mainstream. But time and again across Europe, right-wing parties would propose tough controls on immigration. Left-wing parties would cry: Racist. The people would say: You don’t get it.
The Tories were desperate to push us into the same bind, so they began a high-profile assault on illegal immigration, claiming that it was not racist to be worried about it and hoping that we would say that it was. Of course, I insisted we did no such thing.
Instead, some way into the campaign I visited Dover, where unfounded asylum claimants were often lodged, and made a speech that directly took on the issue. Gwyn Prosser, the MP for Dover, was someone on the left himself, and canny enough to understand that if he wasn’t armed with an argument that conceded there was a problem, he was not going to be re-elected. I praised the contribution of immigration to Britain, but also acknowledged the problem of illegal immigration. I described how we were going to tackle it. I attacked the Tories for raising the issue without having a policy to deal with it, i.e. they were exploiting the issue, not solving the problem. Rather to their surprise, I put ID cards at the centre of the argument, reasoning that some system of identity check was the only serious way of meeting the challenge. Essentially, after that speech we shut down that Tory attack, and f
or once the media actually allowed an issue to be aired and debated. Because our position was sophisticated enough – a sort of ‘confess and avoid’, as the lawyers say – we won out.
However, all this did was leave our opponents, especially those in the media, with nothing to go on except Iraq.
The campaign had to be very carefully managed. Well, obviously, you say. But in this instance, we had to be more than usually careful. Wherever we went in the 2005 campaign, anyone who shouted or made a scene captured the news. Of course, the campaign then reacts by trying to ensure it doesn’t get disrupted. Result: media and politics in a stand-off. We feel unfairly treated; they feel unfairly shut out or manipulated.
It was a nightmare for the party organisers, but they were a brilliant and deeply loyal bunch who were prepared to throw themselves in front of a passing train in a heartbeat if it was of help. I had taken care to build a strong party machine. Although it was always going to be harder raising money for this campaign than in 2001, it wasn’t that much harder, and Michael Levy, our chief party fund-raiser, had done superbly well, as ever. Our basic, centre-ground, reasonable, middle-opinion coalition remained solid, and the business community instinctively distrusted the Tories and didn’t like the slightly nasty edge of their policies on Europe and immigration or the personal attacks on me. The Tories were well funded from Eurosceptic sources, but the modern, sensible money stayed with us.