by Blair, Tony
I began by apologising on behalf of the party, which I thought appropriate. I made it clear I wasn’t going to set a precise date now, but I said that the upcoming party conference would be my last. I also gave a warning shot across the bows of those who thought an assumed succession for Gordon was a good thing. One really bad aspect of the whole business was the notion of his entitlement to the job. I was sure the public would not see it like that, and though it was almost certainly going to be him, they would resent any idea that it was somehow per se legitimate. It would have to be managed carefully. ‘I also say one other thing after last week: I think it is important for the Labour Party to understand, and I think the majority of people in the party do understand, that it’s the public that come first and it’s the country that matters and we can’t treat the public as irrelevant bystanders in a subject as important as who is their prime minister. So we should just bear that in mind in the way that we conduct ourselves in the time to come.’
The statement took the heat out of it all. The next day, a group of middle-ground people – i.e. those who didn’t consider themselves really either Brownites or Blairites – sent a statement to Ann Clwyd as chair of the PLP, welcoming my statement and, in effect, making it clear I should determine the precise date of departure.
At the weekend, the Sunday Times had the story that Gordon and Tom Watson had met at Gordon’s house before the letter was sent. I reined back my folk who wanted to go into ‘kill’ mode on it. Of course, I never had any doubt that Gordon did not merely know of it all but had organised it; however, I had taken my decision to try to leave on terms that no one could say had caused this disunity, and if that meant an orderly transition to Gordon, so be it.
If someone came forward to challenge him, that might be a different matter. But if it was inevitable, then let it happen decently and without rancour. As with all TB/GB decisions from first to last, I can’t be sure I did the right thing in taking such a view, but I did take it and for the reasons given.
A few days later, I spoke at a conference in London for the Progress organisation, which I had high hopes of transforming into a serious New Labour policy think tank. It had good young people who were onside with what we were trying to achieve. The left had its own group in Compass, which basically wanted an Ed Balls/GB type of leadership. They were active and smart but hopelessly wedded to a politics that simply had no prospect of ever winning an election. They had plenty of energy, however, and they were organised. My folk tended to be great with the middle-ground electorate and resounded with a sense of the intellectual future of the party, but in organising, caballing, scheming and plotting, they were, like me, in the introduction class for primary school.
Part of the worst aspect of the GB modus operandi was the rehabilitation of old-style trade union fixing and activist stitch-ups. All great fun for those who like that sort of thing – and this was very much part of the Nick Brown/Tom Watson/Charlie Whelan psyche – but completely hopeless in terms of where a modern political party had to be to get anywhere with the right policies and have a hope of winning.
Progress were decent people, but they fast got tricked into this beguiling notion that they had to be a force for unity at a political and organisational level, whereas actually all they needed to do was to strike out with a sound, future-oriented policy agenda and leave political organising alone. The result, as GB’s team intended, was that at the very moment they should have been seeking to define the next leader’s programme, they became neutered under the pretence of being for ‘unity’.
Of course, to be fair, as some of those closest to me pointed out, this was to a large extent my own fault and born of my insistence that I could not be seen to disrupt Gordon’s ascent to the pinnacle. I would constantly stress that New Labour was a joint project with Gordon, which was somewhat beyond what the facts would bear. But I was still trying to co-opt him to the programme and hoping he might accept it, if only faute de mieux. Not unnaturally, this left people much confused.
Once I had cast the die, so to speak, it brought a type of relief to the situation; and it reignited an intense sense of urgency in myself. The GB folk calmed down. They had won, though they remained distrustful and I knew would look for a way to bring the date forward. My people were sad, but not as demoralised as they might be. I had to work hard at keeping their energy levels up; but I was thoroughly motivated myself and passed some of that on to them.
After what had been a pretty astonishing week I then went on a trip to Beirut and the Middle East. When I returned to Chequers on 14 September, to lick my wounds and work out my strategy for the remaining time in office, I had much to contemplate. Chequers in September is always a good place to be. The weather tends to be rather benign at that time of year, so there was plenty of sitting out in the grounds.
I had more or less settled into a pattern of living there at weekends. I would work hard in the morning, exercise in the afternoon. A stiff drink and a good supper. Early to bed.
The relationship between alcohol and prime ministers is a subject for a book all on its own. By the standards of days gone by I was not even remotely a toper, and I couldn’t do lunchtime drinking except on Christmas Day, but if you took the thing everyone always lies about – units per week – I was definitely at the outer limit. Stiff whisky or G & T before dinner, couple of glasses of wine or even half a bottle with it. So not excessively excessive. I had a limit. But I was aware it had become a prop.
As you grow older, your relationship with alcohol needs to be carefully defined. When young, you do drink to excess at points, but you go days without it. As you get on in life, it easily becomes a daily or nightly demand that your body makes on you for relaxation purposes. It is a relief to pressure. It is a stimulant. It can make a boring evening tolerable. But it plays a part in your life.
I could never work out whether for me it was, on balance, a) good, because it did relax me, or b) bad, because I could have been working rather than relaxing. I came to the conclusion – conveniently you might think – that a) beat b). I thought that escaping the pressure and relaxing was a vital part of keeping the job in proportion, a function rather like my holidays. But I was never sure. I believed I was in control of the alcohol. However, you have to be honest: it’s a drug, there’s no getting away from it. So use it with care, maybe; but never misunderstand its nature and be honest about its relationship to your life.
I took a few days to prepare my conference speech – the very last I would give to the Labour Party, which I had led for over twelve years by then – and also to reflect and work out my game plan. There could be no easing up, for sure. There were multiple challenges. The media would want me to go earlier, partly because they were impatient for change, partly because it was a sport to them to see if they could score a victory and push me out before my due time. OK, they knew that in one sense I was going involuntarily, but in another, it was too close to being my call, not theirs, for their comfort. We could circle each other, clash with each other, but that was on equal terms. They thought it would be great to get the better of me one last time and force the departure.
Then there was the party. They would accept my ruling as to when the exact date would be, but there would be a constant underlying accusation of selfishness, that I was staying for my own good, not theirs.
There would be a genuine problem of authority. Gordon was the almost appointed successor. He was the future. He would draw people to him. If he disagreed on matters, even Labour ministers would think twice about siding with me over him. And though, to be fair, once I made the decision he did his best to get on with me, his people remained resistant, prone to resentment and straining at the leash.
The unions, who sensed that they were about to come back into the centre of things, certainly in respect of the party, were dismissive. When I addressed the TUC for the last time, they were polite but not much more than that. We both knew what we thought of each other, though there were genuine and really good union leaders – like those in U
SDAW (the shop workers’ union) and Community (the old iron and steelworkers’ union) – who were sad and worried about my leaving, but the big unions were never reconciled. We ended our time as we began: in mutual incomprehension. They couldn’t understand why I was doing what I was doing; and I couldn’t understand why they couldn’t see it was the way of the future. Funnily enough, as people I rather liked them and I was a lot more loyal to the basic union and Labour case than many ever realised. But they thought I was a Conservative in Labour clothing; and I thought they were conservatives in labour clothing. So there you are. But if you look back on the history of Labour governments, they were a lot less trouble to me than they were to Attlee, Wilson or Callaghan. Mind you, they had a lot less power by then.
Also, I had to focus on my own closest folk, in keeping their spirits up and maintaining their sense of purpose. They were an incredibly good bunch. There were those who had endured all the way through: Jonathan Powell, Jonathan Pearse and Liz Lloyd. Liz had come on immensely over the years, became deputy chief of staff and brought an order and discipline that Jonathan and I naturally lacked. She had an excellent temperament too: lovely to work with, honest and, underneath all the English feminine charm, quite steely. Above all, capable.
One of the most depressing dimensions of the return of Old Labour politics to the party organisation was that really good young people like Liz were going for nominations for Labour seats and being rejected in favour of those who had the GB machine behind them but who were much less competent. Something I was able to do in the early years of my leadership was to encourage smart, young professionals to join us and to stand for Parliament: David Miliband, James Purnell, Ruth Kelly, Liam Byrne, and, to be fair, the GB equivalents, Ed Miliband, Ed Balls, Yvette Cooper. The mood was for a younger generation of really good talent. Even though I knew GB’s lot might be trouble for me, I had an unbending belief that you always promote talent. I’ve had some harsh things to say about Ed Balls – I thought he behaved badly at points, and was wrong on policy – but I also thought he was really able, and a talent that any political party should be grateful to have. So I was very clear in my instructions to the folk at grass roots: don’t organise against these guys. Whatever we think, their ability gives them a right to come and be part of it all, and we have a duty to let them in.
But I could see towards the end that this was not reciprocated. And much more important than it being unfair, it is foolish for the long-term health of the party and will be a serious problem for the future. The very problem I had faced trying to be selected in the early 1980s, and the problem the party then had in attracting talent, had been because of old-fashioned fixing in ‘smoke-filled rooms’. By the end of the 1990s we had overcome it – if you were good, you stood a chance.
In that last period, I could feel it going backwards. Not to have someone like Liz in Parliament, if you could have her, was our loss, not hers. And a serious, indicative one. A party that turns away its talent corrodes its capacity. But she was too close to me and it told against her.
Others in the team had joined more recently. Matthew Taylor had a great combination of intellect and political nous. He could reach across the party in a way that didn’t desert New Labour ground, but expanded out from it. David Bennett, head of the policy directorate, had joined from McKinsey. He was a total outsider, and I think at points found the whole political experience alarming, but he was really clever and, as I had wanted, brought an outsider’s expertise and different perception analysis to bear. He was very helpful in writing the last policy chapter of the government.
Then the political team, Ruth Turner, John McTernan and Nita Clarke, and in the Labour Party the General Secretary Peter Watt, were of a quality far beyond what I could have hoped for at that stage of the game: dedicated, utterly loyal and fiercely determined on my behalf. But it was a tough hand: a leader on his way out; an alternative power base ruthlessly flexing its muscles; and in respect of all but Nita, a police inquiry into their integrity. When I think of how they managed and performed with distinction during that period, I am overcome with admiration.
Media, party, GB, unions, private office – the moment I declared I was going, all of them were going to take a lot of handling.
I had retreated to Chequers to think. I decided the only way through was to give them a defined and clear reason for believing I should stay until the summer of 2007. ‘What is the point of you?’ – that’s the question, as Matthew Taylor and Peter Mandelson both said. So I determined on the point. The point would be: I would go out having taken core, fundamental decisions on policy which embedded completely the New Labour programme on which we were engaged; and then I would create a process whereby the Cabinet and party participated in setting out a future programme. GB could be a full partner, he could agree to take part or stand aside from it, but he wouldn’t be able to say I hadn’t set it out for him, or that he hadn’t had the chance to shape it. If there were disagreements in the course of it, let them be had. At least at the end of it we would have a clear platform. If he took it, great. If he didn’t, no one could say he hadn’t had the opportunity, and any alternative leadership would be able to grasp it and run with it.
By and large, in the face of much cynicism from many quarters, that’s what we did. Despite having said I would leave, I was, after all, still prime minister, and had much nominal and much residual actual power. I could still reshuffle, still promote; even with a hostile media I still had the platform from which to speak, to argue, to persuade. The last nine months could have been a vanity valedictory – lots of media voices tried to make it so – but actually we pinned down crucial parts of the change programme and we left a perfectly sensible set of future policy directions if people want to take them up – on pensions, welfare, the NHS, schools and law and order.
No political leader had ever left like this before. But then, in this regard, like so many others, politics was changing. As leaders get younger and the place of Britain shifts in the world, I may be the first, but I doubt I will be the last.
TWENTY-ONE
DEPARTURE
Those months were a huge strain, especially on the family, a cloud of uncertainty and insecurity hanging over them. Though intimately involved, a family, particularly a young one, is oddly detached from the prime minister’s job. They witness the events, they participate in the moments of joy and sadness, but they always feel like bystanders, because, inevitably, in the end they are.
They are relieved of the intense pain and pressure that is the prime minister’s alone, but they are not relieved of the scrutiny. And the fact that they can see what you are going through, but at a certain level remain shut out, can give them a strange feeling of being lost, a little betwixt and between, never wholly involved in the prime minister’s life but still integral to it.
When we first went into Downing Street, we were the youngest family to have lived there since Lord Russell’s time in the 1850s and 60s, when the house was the family home. There were no official functions and it was not really a place of work. Today Downing Street is a busy, bustling thoroughfare of government, with adjoining buildings and hundreds of staff. The iconic nature of the most famous address in Britain means that it is very much the seat of power. It is therefore first and foremost now a working office, and only a family home a distant second.
The introduction of children was at one level lovely; at another, the place was completely unprepared for it. Once Leo arrived, we then had a baby in the building, which was immense fun for everyone and the staff adored him, but it wasn’t exactly geared up as an institution to crèche-style working. But we managed, and though I never appreciated how weird it must have been for the kids to have grown up in Downing Street, we coped on the whole pretty well. Also, Chequers was a blessed relief from the Downing Street swirl. Without it, the prime minister’s life would have been very different, and worse.
We lived in the flat above Number 11. We redid the kitchen, which badly needed it, but every
refurbishment always brought its tales of expense – the contractors had to work to special rules – and ‘living it up’. People used to be amazed that we had no staff in the flat to cook and so on, but in fact we preferred it like that. It was quieter and more private, though of course there would be a constant stream of duty clerks, civil servants and messengers passing through. However, the people who worked in Downing Street were, by and large, friendly, helpful and, in an understated but nonetheless obvious way, supportive of the burden you bore as prime minister. They never talked about it much; but you could feel the emotional succour being gently and kindly offered.
The flat above Number 11 was bigger than was commonly thought and had a clutch of spare rooms above the two main floors, where the living and sleeping quarters were. There at the top, from where you could look out over Downing Street, Horse Guards Parade and St James’s Park, I had a gym with a running machine, rowing machine and weights. Nicky had a room where he used to keep his drum kit along with my guitars and occasionally we would sneak up to the top and jam together, making the most frightful noise, no doubt.
Somehow, and probably mainly due to the extraordinary Jackie, who had been with the family since 1998, we got through the adolescence of three youngsters, the birth of Leo and his first years at primary school. You are at your most real in a family – at your most angry, at your most loving, at your most suffocated, at your most motivated. You can’t be fully selfish in a family. You want to be, often, but in the end it drags you back to your need for and your commitment to the company of others. In the family there are few hidden spaces, few facets of character, good or bad, that lie undiscovered, few delusions and even fewer fantasies. There are many glimpses of the best and the worst of the human being. In the end, most important of all, you have to forgive the trespasses in order that yours too can be forgiven. And just occasionally, you espy the essential strength that the family represents, and realise it is a marvel of human achievement and for all its shortcomings, anxieties and tensions, greatly to be cherished.