The End of the Party
Page 1
PENGUIN BOOKS
THE END OF THE PARTY
The End of the Party has generated headlines around the world. Drawing on hundreds of confidential conversations and interviews, Andrew Rawnsley takes us behind the black door of Number 10 to provide the most authoritative inside account of all the key events from 9/11 and the Iraq War to the financial crisis and the parliamentary expenses scandal. This fully updated edition adds two new chapters and an epilogue which deliver more of the astonishing revelations, vivid character portraits, penetrating insights, acute judgements and sharp wit that readers expect from Britain’s foremost political commentator and documentary maker. The fresh material covers the 2010 election campaign and Gordon Brown’s final days in Downing Street to complete the definitive assessment of the rise and fall of New Labour.
Reviewers and commentators across the media spectrum and of all political complexions have acclaimed The End of the Party as a masterpiece.
Praise for The End of the Party:
‘The most spellbinding book’ Jon Snow, Channel 4
‘The best inside account. It vividly charts the savage wars between Tony and Gordon. His fly-on-the wall revelations explore the violent personal clashes that undermined the government at the cost of the governed’ Trevor Kavanagh, Spectator
‘The detail is extraordinary’ Victoria Derbyshire, Radio 5 Live
‘Excellent’ Iain Martin, Wall Street Journal
‘Andrew Rawnsley, the man who single-handedly has reignited interest in the political book … The book that brought us the “bullygate” scandal’ Nick Ferrari, LBC
‘Outstanding. Brilliantly reported, beautifully written’ James Harding, The Times
‘This is a book with everything. It’s got tragedy, it’s got drama, it’s got high policy, it’s got low scandal’ Mark d’Arcy, BBC BOOKtalk
‘Every page is worth savouring. The best political book in years’ Iain Dale, Total Politics
‘Andrew Rawnsley is an outstanding journalist of flawless integrity, and you’d have to be potty to doubt his portrait. Entertaining … illuminating’ Matthew Norman, Independent
‘Terrific. Downing Street laid bare. Rawnsley is blessed with superb sources’ Mark Hennessy, Irish Times
‘Meticulously researched, authoritative … skilful … powerful … shocking. Rawnsley handles the set-piece crises with aplomb, extracting every smidgen of drama but he is just as effective when analysing a landmark speech or reflecting on a theme. Flourishes of humour abound’ Christopher Silvester, Express
‘Engrossing’ Economist
‘Devastating. The best history of New Labour yet – and unlikely to be bettered any time soon’ Andrew Neather, Evening Standard
‘Unreservedly recommended’ GQ
‘A compelling read’ Chris Patten, Observer
‘Andrew Rawnsley, the New Labour chronicler par excellence’ Jon Sopel, BBC Campaign Show
‘Revealing and entertaining. Not many writers have the honour of being attacked by Lord Mandelson personally. For me, this is just more proof that it must be true’ Ann Treneman, The Times
‘Coruscating … enthralling’ Robert McCrum, Observer
‘Stuffed with political plums like a Christmas pudding’ Sir Christopher Meyer, former British Ambassador in Washington
‘Fascinating. As fine a piece of contemporary history as his previous magnum opus, Servants of the People’ Jim Pickard, FT.com
‘Masterly’ Derek Wyatt, blogminster
‘Rawnsley’s book is a very good one. He’s a top class political journalist who finds things out and writes them down extremely well. He has excellent sources and I don’t doubt what he has written. Nor do I doubt its importance’ Daniel Finkelstein, The Times
‘Wealth of detail … forensic exposition’ Ben Brogan, Daily Telegraph
‘Racy, very readable’ Richard Ingrams, Independent
‘Some journalists court controversy wherever they go. Some remain eloquent and cerebral. Andrew Rawnsley manages to achieve both’ JosephStashko.com
‘Fiercely denied, but has the ring of truth. The best account of the Blair–Brown duopoly’ Gideon Rachman, Financial Times
‘What a tale! An extraordinary account backed by meticulous references and sources. Keeps the reader in rapt attention’ Ruairi Quinn, Irish Independent
‘Compelling … colourful … there is no arguing with the quality of his anecdotes … utterly convincing portrayal of New Labour in power’ Andrew Lynch, Sunday Business Post
‘A brilliant account … a sheer delight … an invaluable service to the British public and to future historians alike. Rawnsley … the British equivalent of the famous US investigative reporter Bob Woodward … has earned the trust of key sources without compromising his mission to tell the truth. Almost every page provides a fresh insight or piece of information not previously in the public domain’ Peter Oborne, Daily Mail
‘Riveting … engrossing … devastating detail … an operatic tale’ Robert Harris, Sunday Times
‘You won’t be able to put it down’ Jeremy Vine, BBC radio and television
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Andrew Rawnsley is a multiple-award-winning writer and broadcaster. The associate editor and chief political commentator of the Observer, he has won a string of prestigious prizes for his journalism, including Channel 4 Political Journalist of the Year and What the Papers Say Columnist of the Year. GQ Magazine declared him to be one of Britain’s top five ‘super-columnists’ while the Spectator calls him ‘the master chronicler of contemporary politics’.
He has made a series of highly acclaimed television documentaries about the governments of Gordon Brown, Tony Blair and John Major as well as presenting such renowned flagship political programmes as BBC Radio 4’s The Westminster Hour and Channel 4’s A Week in Politics.
He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. His award-winning and bestselling account of the rise of New Labour and its first term in office, Servants of the People, was published in 2000. The End of the Party became a Number One bestseller in its first week of publication in hardback.
He lives with his wife and daughters in London.
ANDREW RAWNSLEY
The End of the Party
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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First published by Viking 2010
Published with new material in Penguin Books 2010
Copyright © Andrew Rawnsley, 2010
The moral right of the author has been asserted
All rights reserved
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrie
val system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978-0-14-196970-1
Contents
Introduction
PART ONE: THE COST OF CONVICTION
1. Twice Promised Land
2. A Cloudless Day
3. Shoulder to Shoulder
4. The TB-GBs
5. Oath of Allegiance
6. Tell Me No Secrets
7. Trouble and Strife
8. Naked in the Middle of the Room
9. With You to the End
10. Squandered Victory
11. Broken Dream, Cabinet Nightmare
12. A Body in the Woods
13. Dinner for Three
14. Too Good to be True
15. The Long Dark Tunnel
16. On and On
17. Another One Bites the Dust
18. The Ugly Campaign
PART TWO: THE PRICE OF AMBITION
19. Sore Winners
20. Rules of the Game
21. Back to School
22. The Hollowed Crown
23. Bad Vibrations
24. A Very Brownite Coup
25. Miracle Worker
26. The Long Goodbye
27. A Short Honeymoon
28. Run on the Rock
29. The Election That Never Was
30. It Eats My Soul
31. The Penny Drops
32. An Enemy in Need
33. Assassins in the Shadows
34. The Great Escape
35. Land Without Maps
36. Trillion Dollar Man
37. Chamber of Horrors
38. No Time to Lose
39. Prisoners of their Fate
40. Dusk
Epilogue: The Last Days
References
Broadcast and Published Sources
Index
Introduction
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be New Labour was very heaven. Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and Peter Mandelson seized the commanding heights of their party in 1994 and three years later they captured the country with a parliamentary landslide of unprecedented scale in modern times. Whether you liked New Labour, as so many millions did at the peak of their popularity, or whether you loathed them, as so many millions did by the end, it was a remarkable phenomenon. If New Labour came to seem old, that was a consequence of both its failing and its success. It is a formidable fact, which is usually overlooked, that this was the longest-lasting non-Tory government since 1762. New Labour’s story is all of our stories.
Since the publication of Servants of the People, which described the making of the project and its first term in office, I have continued to chronicle the victories and the tribulations of New Labour through television documentaries, in the Observer and on radio. It was around the time that Tony Blair reluctantly handed power to Gordon Brown that I decided I wouldn’t be content until I had brought the story up to date between covers. Only the scope provided by a book could fully explain the characters who have governed us, comprehensively explore how they have wrestled with the dilemmas and events that have confronted them, and properly reveal the arguments which have divided and convulsed them.
I hope to bridge the gap between instantaneous journalism, which is inevitably forced to sacrifice deep research for immediacy, and the future historian who gains a longer perspective at the cost of delay. Historians will have the benefit of access to official papers that are today concealed, as well as memoirs and diaries that are as yet unpublished. The disadvantage of the future historian is that he or she will have to wait for a very long time – in some cases, we will all be dead first – to get sight of many Whitehall documents. Experience suggests that official papers will often mask as much as they reveal. It is also the case that many of the most crucial conversations at the heart of power have taken place without civil servants present to record a note. The literary output of New Labour’s dramatis personae, as we know from some of the memoirs and diaries already published, is written from single and self-serving perspectives. At best, they offer only a partial account of what really happened. They often seek to shade, sanitise or conceal.
The unpartisan writer has the advantage of being able to seek answers from all the pivotal players and to ask any question to tease out the truth about how we have been ruled.
As I have revisited the seminal episodes of this Government’s life, I have once again found that neither the claims made for themselves nor daily media coverage have told anything like the full story.
Part One of this book opens on the day after the election triumph in 2001. That victory was a remarkable achievement. New Labour was the product of repeated and traumatic failures: the party’s four serial defeats in the seventies, eighties and nineties at the hands of the Conservatives. Now it had achieved a rare consecutive landslide victory. Within months, though, the seismic event of 9/11 utterly altered the trajectory of Tony Blair’s premiership. The master consensualist of the first term became the conviction-driven lone warrior of the second. The early campaign against the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, which made regime change look so easy, was followed by the invasion of Iraq and another deceptively swift victory in the conventional war. I explore the fatal dynamics of the relationship between Blair and George Bush, how the Prime Minister overcame the apprehensions of the majority of both his Cabinet and senior aides to take Britain to war, and why the allies were so catastrophically unprepared for what would happen after the fall of Saddam. At his lowest point, Blair came very close to resigning as Prime Minister. It was also during this term that his dream of taking Britain into the euro died.
Another large theme of the second term is the battle to reform health, education and other public services to try to extract levels of performance commensurate with the huge extra resources that began to flow into them. This was enmeshed with the increasingly toxic power struggle between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. To try to contain Brown and deal with his incessant demands that he should hand over power, Blair responded by making promises that he would do so. When he then reneged, Brown was driven even more demented. The two men managed to agree a brittle truce which just got them through the next campaign. Part One ends on election night 2005, when they secured a bittersweet victory: a third term with a solid parliamentary majority, but won with a miserably reduced share of the vote.
Part Two tells the story of the third term, beginning with Tony Blair’s final two years at Number 10. Among the events addressed are 7/7, the Olympics bid, the Gleneagles Summit, the ‘cash-for-coronets’ affair and final battles on school reform. I also look at the Government’s sharpening authoritarianism. A late pinnacle is the peace process in Northern Ireland, a shining achievement of Blair’s premiership. He is ultimately forced to leave Number 10 earlier than he desired as a result of a coup orchestrated from the heart of the camp of Gordon Brown and with his knowledge.
Brown’s honeymoon at Number 10 came to an abrupt and self-inflicted end when he led everyone to believe that he was going to hold a general election and then cancelled it. After the phantom election, the revolt over 10p tax and a sequence of other debacles, Brown was regarded as such a liability by key Cabinet ministers that they were poised to remove him. Two things saved his premiership in the autumn of 2008. One was the greatest financial crisis since 1929, to which Brown responded with a boldness and imagination that impressed even those colleagues and civil servants who were otherwise in utter despair about him. The bursting of the bubble raised many questions about his stewardship of the boom years, but it also gave him a purpose for his premiership and a temporary political bounce. The other lifeline was provided by his remarkable reconciliation with Peter Mandelson, the man with whom Brown had waged a titanic feud for more than a de
cade. They were bound back together by a joint and desperate ambition to try to save the project they founded as the Government was engulfed by the parliamentary expenses scandal and the country endured the deepest recession since the 1930s.
The original hardcover edition chronicled events up to November 2009. This updated edition contains two entirely new chapters and an Epilogue, which end the story. They cover New Labour’s final months in office, the electrifying election campaign in spring 2010 that resulted in a hung parliament, the secret negotiations between the parties, and Gordon Brown’s last days in Downing Street.