The End of the Party
Page 2
I offer a summary about why New Labour went from triumph to disaster in the final chapters. Conclusions about particular events, issues and personalities are woven throughout the book, which broadly unfolds in chronological sequence.
This work draws on multiple sources. The account is informed by the thousands of confidential conversations that I have had with the principal figures and many other witnesses over some two decades. Another source is the on-camera interviews that I have conducted for a series of documentaries on the governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. These are supplemented by other interviews for the Observer as well as television and radio programmes. I have further conducted a very large number of additional interviews specifically for this book. In all, more than 500 witnesses contribute to this account.
In both the text and the notes, I almost always give to people the title or status they had at the time of the episode being related. As well as detailing dialogue, I sometimes describe what someone is thinking or feeling. This is not because I claim to possess psychic powers. It is because I have had a reliable account either from the person or from witnesses to whom they have directly expressed what they were thinking or feeling.
I apologise in advance to readers who are distressed by profanities and blasphemies. I am afraid politicians and those who work with them do swear when they are under stress or angry with each other.
A project of this scope would not have been possible without the assistance of a large cast of people at all levels of politics right up to the absolute apex. I am grateful to both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown for making the time over the years to talk to me in both private conversation and on-the-record interviews. I have not always accepted their versions of events. Nor have I always agreed with their analysis of issues. It has nevertheless been a great advantage to be able to understand the thinking of the two leading men at different stages of the New Labour story. I say the same about my interviews and conversations with Peter Mandelson, the third side of the eternal New Labour triangle.
In a way which wasn’t possible with Servants of the People, I have been able to put many more witnesses on the record. I have been pleasantly stunned by the candour with which so many who saw history in the making are now prepared to speak. It remains the case, though, that some interviewees, especially serving civil servants, diplomats, and intelligence and military officers, are only willing to be frank if they are interviewed partially or wholly off the record. This is also the case with sensitive interviews with serving ministers and their aides. I have tried to be as open and comprehensive in the notes as is consistent with obligations to sources.
I feel I can express public gratitude to Robin Butler, Richard Wilson and Andrew Turnbull, successive Cabinet Secretaries of the New Labour years. I also owe particular thanks to the former Permanent Secretaries: Terry Burns of the Treasury; Michael Jay of the Foreign Office; John Gieve of the Home Office and later deputy Governor of the Bank of England; and Steve Robson, Second Permanent Secretary at the Treasury, and John Kingman, who later held the same position.
I have had enormous help in understanding the Iraq war from David Manning, Tony Blair’s senior adviser on foreign affairs and then British ambassador in Washington. I would equally like to thank his predecessor as ambassador, Christopher Meyer, and his successor, Nigel Sheinwald. I am grateful to Jeremy Greenstock, ambassador to the UN during the build-up to the invasion and later British envoy in Baghdad, whose own account was hypocritically gagged by the Government. My thanks are also due to General Charles Guthrie and his successor as Chief of the Defence Staff, Admiral Michael Boyce, and to the former head of the army, General Mike Jackson, and to Stephen Lander, Director-General of MI5 at the time of 9/11 and later executive chairman of the Serious Organised Crime Agency.
I have also drawn on interviews with key actors from other countries, including Andrew Card and Condoleezza Rice, Chief of Staff and Secretary of State to George Bush; William Cohen, Richard Haas and George Mitchell; and Christine Lagarde, finance minister of France.
I have enjoyed the benefit of talking, both on the record and confidentially, to pivotal players and key witnesses in the Cabinet over the New Labour years. In an alphabetic order which may be potentially misleading, I am grateful to Andrew Adonis, Bob Ainsworth, Douglas Alexander, Hilary Armstrong, Ed Balls, Margaret Beckett, Hilary Benn, Hazel Blears, David Blunkett, Ben Bradshaw, Nick Brown, Des Browne, Andy Burnham, Stephen Byers, Liam Byrne, David Clark, Charles Clarke, the late Robin Cook, Jack Cunningham, Alistair Darling, John Denham, the late Donald Dewar, Frank Dobson, Charlie Falconer, Peter Hain, Harriet Harman, Patricia Hewitt, Geoff Hoon, John Hutton, Derry Irvine, Margaret Jay, Alan Johnson, Tessa Jowell, Ruth Kelly, Michael Meacher, Estelle Morris, the late Mo Mowlam, Alan Milburn, David Miliband, Ed Miliband, Paul Murphy, John Prescott, James Purnell, John Reid, George Robertson, Clare Short, Andrew Smith, Chris Smith, Jacqui Smith, Gavin Strang, Jack Straw, Ann Taylor, the late Gareth Williams and Shaun Woodward.
Many more ministers, MPs and other crucial witnesses have been generous with their time. I am particularly grateful to Jon Cruddas, Frank Field, Philip Gould, Stan Greenberg, Bruce Grocott, Roy Hattersley, Keith Hill, Neil Kinnock, Michael Levy, Ken Livingstone, Paul Myners, Geoffrey Robinson, Shriti Vadera and Michael Wills.
I also thank three of Gordon’s ‘GOATS’: Digby Jones, Mark Malloch-Brown and Alan West, the last being the only one not to tear away from his tether before the end.
Special advisers – often crudely shorthanded as ‘spin doctors’ – get a bad press even though many journalists rely on them. At their worst, they can be malevolent and mendacious operators. At their best, I have found them candid and insightful. Three outstanding examples are Huw Evans, aide to David Blunkett; Ed Owen, aide to Jack Straw; and Catherine Macleod, aide to Alistair Darling.
I have also drawn on the perspectives and knowledge of non-Labour politicians, including Paddy Ashdown, Vince Cable, David Cameron, Menzies Campbell, Ken Clarke, Nick Clegg, David Davis, Iain Duncan Smith, Michael Gove, William Hague, Michael Heseltine, Michael Howard, the late Roy Jenkins, Charles Kennedy, George Osborne, David Trimble and David Willetts.
Jonathan Powell, Tony Blair’s Chief of Staff throughout his time at Number 10 and his crucial right hand on the Northern Ireland peace process, has been of invaluable assistance. So too has been another absolutely key aide of the Blair years, Sally Morgan. From Blair’s Number 10, I also thank Tim Allan, Michael Barber, Alastair Campbell, Hilary Coffman, Phil Collins, David Hill, Robert Hill, Anji Hunter, Peter Hyman, Tom Kelly, Steve Morris, Geoff Mulgan, Matthew Taylor, Stephen Wall and Ben Wegg-Prosser.
There is a similar tally of people from Gordon Brown’s Number 10 and Treasury to whom I am grateful. At the time of first publication, I felt it best, for their own protection, to preserve the anonymity of those who were still serving in close proximity to him or who had only recently left. I am delighted to take the opportunity provided by this updated edition to honour my debts to Justin Forsyth, Spencer Livermore and Stewart Wood. I also thank Nick Butler, Stephen Carter, Patrick Diamond, Michael Dugher, Michael Ellam, Tom Fletcher, Michael Jacobs, Simon Lewis, Damian McBride, Tom Scholar, Martin Sheehan and Paul Sinclair.
I am very grateful for the significant contributions to ensuring the accuracy of this account which I have received from Jeremy Heywood, Principal Private Secretary to Blair and Permanent Secretary at Number 10 to Brown; and from Gus O’Donnell, who was Permanent Secretary at the Treasury before becoming Cabinet Secretary with both Blair and Brown.
For helping me to develop my understanding of the personalities of the men who have occupied Number 10, I am especially grateful to Barry Cox and Nick Ryden, friends to Tony Blair, and to Murray Elder, friend since childhood to Gordon Brown. My assessment of Peter Mandelson and the tormented relationships between the three founding fathers of New Labour has been assisted by his friend Robert Harris.
I thank all the busy people who made space in extremely crowd
ed diaries to be interviewed, quite often more than once, and were prepared to answer my follow-up requests for further information and amplification without complaint. I am also grateful for the inexhaustible patience of the many secretaries and personal assistants who have been so helpful in accommodating my demands.
During the period covered by this book, I have been exceptionally lucky to thrive on the encouragement of two fantastic editors of the Observer, Roger Alton and John Mulholland, and a first among deputy editors, Paul Webster. My gratitude for being such good people goes to all the friends I have made at the Observer and especially to my colleagues on the comment pages and political staff: Kamal Ahmed, Rafael Behr, Martin Bright, Barbara Gunnell, Toby Helm, Gaby Hinsliff, Bill Keegan, Ruaridh Nicoll, Jo Revill, Ned Temko, Nick Watt, Robert Yates and Patrick Wintour, Prince among Political Editors.
Chris Riddell has graced the cover of the book with one of his superlative cartoons.
I owe a huge amount to my friends at BrookLapping with whom I have made a series of documentaries about the governments of Blair and Brown. My thanks to Anne Lapping, warrior queen of executive producers, directors Rob Coldstream and Mick Gold, researcher Lucy Bell, consultant Jane Bonham Carter, production managers Bella Barr and Carrie Pennifer, and Sally Brindle, brilliant star among producers.
Gill Coleridge, my agent, was a wonderfully persistent voice telling me I had to complete the story. I could not have wished for Penguin to give me a more pleasurable editor to work with than Tony Lacey. My thanks also to his colleagues Venetia Butterfield, Amelia Fairney, Helen Fraser, Alex Hippisley-Cox, Joanna Prior, Ellie Smith and Tom Weldon. A big hat tip for his impeccable copy-editing to Mark Handsley.
My three daughters, Olivia, Jessica and Cordelia, have cheerfully sustained both their parents through a project which has often seemed all-consuming.
Nothing would have been possible without Jane, my closest collaborator, my wife and my best friend. Shoulder to shoulder, she was there at the first step and there to the last.
Andrew Rawnsley
July 2010
PART ONE
The Cost of Conviction Second Term 2001–2005
1. Twice Promised Land
Tony Blair was sprawled on the sofa in his small office next door to the Cabinet Room on the ground floor of Number 10. The Prime Minister’s den, the most modest working quarters of any leader of a major country, was where he took virtually all the crucial decisions. He sat there looking absolutely exhausted as he tackled a bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich.
The Cabinet Secretary, Sir Richard Wilson, sat on the opposite side of the coffee table. Britain’s most senior civil servant was a faintly Trollopian figure whose catchphrase was ‘God bless’. The traditionalist Sir Richard often wrangled with Blair and his team about the way they ran government from the sofa, but it was hard to argue today when he was looking at a leader who had just won a second landslide election victory.
‘Congratulations,’ Sir Richard said to the charcoal-eyed Prime Minister. ‘You are now at the peak of your powers.’ He then added a caution: ‘You may never be as strong again as you are now.’1
Blair took a bite out of the BLT, munched and nodded in a way that suggested he agreed.
Shortly after he first won power in 1997, Blair told me that ‘the most important thing’ was to get re-elected.2 From the day that they took office, both he and Gordon Brown were fixated with keeping it. Blair because no previous Labour Prime Minister had secured a second full term in a century of the party’s existence; Brown because he expected to take over the premiership. That ambition was a spur and a burden to both men during their first four years in power. That goal was now triumphantly achieved. The second term was not only secure; it was won with a second landslide, a rare result in British politics. The enormous majority won in 1997, a feat which most thought unrepeatable, was reduced in 2001 by a mere dozen seats to 167. They seemed to have realised Harold Wilson’s dream to make Labour ‘the natural party of government’.
There was the occasional scare during the first term. The foot and mouth epidemic, which filled the nation’s nostrils with the acrid smell of burning cattle, was so severe that it delayed the election by a month. Even more alarming was the shorter and sharper shock of the refinery blockades when a few hundred protestors throttled the nation’s fuel supplies in the autumn of 2000.3 The Government came ‘very close to asking the army to come in’.4 A panic-struck Downing Street also tried to use MI5 against the protestors. Sir Stephen Lander, the head of the service, was asked: ‘Why aren’t you doing the farmers for us like you did the miners for Margaret Thatcher?’5 For a few highly stressed days, Blair feared that he might live out his nightmare of being yet another one-term Labour Prime Minister overwhelmed by crisis. ‘They could finish us off,’ he shivered to his senior staff. ‘If we don’t get this back to normal soon, they will finish us off.’6
Office exposed some of the flaws in New Labour and its dominant personalities. Blair was easily seduced by poorly conceived glamour projects. The Millennium Dome was a folie de bombast which became symbolic of a compulsion to emphasise marketing over content, hype over substance.7 Self-defeating control-freakery led to humiliation in London at the hands of Ken Livingstone when New Labour’s bête rouge was elected as an independent for the post of Mayor, which had been Blair’s personal invention.8 The twin-headed beast of sleaze and spin ate into public trust for a Prime Minister who once piously claimed that he would be ‘purer than pure’. The Ecclestone Affair was an unheeded early warning about dangerous liaisons with plutocrats. ‘They’ll get me for this,’ Blair despaired to one intimate at the height of the furore about the £1 million donation secretly taken from the boss of Formula One. As it occurred during his honeymoon period with the voters, ‘the pretty straight kind of guy’ escaped from that with his premiership intact, but not all of his integrity. His halo was now stained with nicotine.9
New Labour often gave the impression of being government by soap opera and psychodrama because of the intensity of the emotions and the hysteria of the feuds between its leading characters. That was most true of the complex bonds between its founding triangle: Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and Peter Mandelson. Brown and Mandelson, once so close they could have been siblings, became ‘poisoned with lack of trust’ and ‘utterly destructive’ towards each other.10 It was Brown’s acolytes who destroyed Mandelson’s first Cabinet career by triggering the revelations about the Geoffrey Robinson home loan.11 Between Blair and Brown, there was another blood brother relationship disfigured by mistrust as they wrestled for control over the Government. The bond between Blair and Mandelson was also traumatised during the first term. In the estimation of Barry Cox, a television executive who had known both men for years, Mandelson had an ‘almost homoerotic admiration’ for Blair. ‘It was almost embarrassing the terms in which Peter spoke to me about Tony.’12 Yet that had not spared Mandelson when his career was crunched by scandal. Blair ruthlessly sacked his co-architect of New Labour from the Cabinet in Christmas 1998. He resurrected him in the autumn of 1999 only to dispatch this closest of allies for a second time in early 2001. On the second occasion, over the Hinduja Affair, a shroud-white Mandelson sat in Blair’s den and miserably pleaded for his life. ‘Are you really telling me you are going to end my political career over this?’ ‘Yes,’ responded Blair bleakly but firmly. ‘I’m afraid I am.’13 Speaking many years later, Mandelson agreed that Blair was ‘a ruthless bastard’ who had sacked him with remarkable ease.14 Mandelson’s friend, the novelist Robert Harris, thought it ‘the most brutal thing I have ever seen’.15 For all his undoubted charm and general decency towards colleagues, there was a splinter of ice in Blair’s heart. Even one of his oldest friends was not safe from sacrifice if there was a threat to his grip on power. Mandelson’s second dismissal illustrated the ‘incredibly unsentimental’ face of Blair.16 Most assumed that the double defenestration meant that there could never be a return to the front line of British politics for Pet
er Mandelson. Even Jesus Christ was only resurrected the once.
Of Blair’s gifts, the most self-evident was a flair for performance. He was the most accomplished communicator of his era, a talent not to be dismissed in the age of 24/7 media where a leader is constantly on show. At times of national drama or international crisis, he displayed a high facility for capturing public sentiment and weaving it into a political narrative. When the royal family froze in self-endangering silence after the death of Diana, Blair took on the role of spokesman for national emotion, stepping into the position vacated by the mute head of state, and helping to save the royal family from itself. With his word wreath about a ‘people’s princess’, he expressed the feelings that Britain – or at least a large part of it – wanted to hear. It was a significant episode in his early development as Prime Minister.17 His personal pollster, Stan Greenberg, reported that Blair’s approval ratings surged to such stratospheric levels that they exceeded even those manufactured in totalitarian regimes. ‘Even Saddam doesn’t get that,’ joked Greenberg.18
That episode established Blair as more than a popular Prime Minister. It projected him as a leader of the nation.
Charles Kennedy quipped that Blair was so popular for a while that he could have won a referendum compelling the slaughter of the first born.19 William Hague, Leader of the Opposition during the first term, was totally outclassed against what he acknowledged to be a ‘truly formidable’ opponent who had the country ‘bedazzled’. Hague could never compete with Blair’s ‘mastery of the trembling lip and the watery eye’.20 Successive Tory leaders scorned him as an actor while they floundered trying to compete with the potency of the act. Blair’s real rival for power, Gordon Brown, privately derided all that ‘touchy-feely stuff’ only later to try to learn to do it himself when he realised that he suffered from the comparison.