The End of the Party

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The End of the Party Page 4

by Andrew Rawnsley


  That vivid phrase appeared in my Observer column that Sunday and was projected on to the paper’s front page. There was a great media excitement at this revelation that the friction between Number 10 and the Treasury was much more inflamed than was previously appreciated. ‘Psychological flaws’ has echoed down the years since and been raised whenever the character of Brown or his relationship with Blair have been in debate. Brown confronted Blair that week demanding that the culprit be identified and sacked. Blair denied that anyone at Number 10 authored the phrase, a denial that the hurt and furious Brown rightly regarded as a lie.60 Some have conjectured that it was Blair himself who first spoke of Brown’s ‘psychological flaws’. Though we did have many conversations about the relationship, it was not him on that occasion, though he was entirely in agreement with the assessment. Blair told a close friend that ‘psychological flaws’ wasn’t ‘the half of it’.61

  ‘Psychological flaws’ did not first come from the lips of Peter Mandelson, though he too agreed with it. He once remarked to Blair that he should put a sign up on his desk with the inscription: ‘Remember: the Chancellor is mad.’62

  Alastair Campbell always publicly denied that it was he who called Brown ‘psychologically flawed’, on one occasion denying it to a committee of MPs. He had to maintain this line to remain in his job. The edited version of his diaries published in 2007 was sanitised of all the most damaging references to Brown. Campbell cut out any reference to this episode and the fierce fallout from it even though it dominated the headlines for several days and then reverberated down the years after. He has redacted the entry for Friday, 16 January 1998, the day I was told about Brown’s ‘psychological flaws’, and all the days following until Thursday, 22 January.

  Sir Richard Wilson came to believe he was the inadvertent inspiration. During a private conversation about Brown with Campbell, Wilson made a general remark about all politicians having ‘psychological flaws’ of one sort or another. Campbell, who once had a nervous breakdown and had since suffered severe bouts of depression, seemed excited by a phrase that could equally well describe himself.63

  Despite all the official denials that anyone at Number 10 was responsible for telling me that Brown had ‘psychological flaws’, some inside the building privately reported that Blair was ‘secretly pleased’ because the episode ‘put Gordon back in his box’.64 The two warring courts became progressively more compulsive in their use of briefings to the media to prosecute the rivalry. This added to the corrosive impression that New Labour was addicted to the darker arts of spin at the expense of governing.

  The most violent rows were usually about spending. In the New Year of 2000, a time when the NHS was buckling under the pressure of a flu outbreak, Blair was frantic to show that he was responding to mounting public pressure and terrible headlines. He pledged a huge increase in NHS funding, doing so to bounce Brown into making a larger commitment than the Chancellor intended. ‘You’ve stolen my fucking Budget!’ raged Brown when he confronted Blair. He was most infuriated because the other man was going to rob him of the credit for an increase.65

  Many of his closest counsellors cautioned Tony Blair that he would never control his destiny until he dealt with the rival government across the road at the Treasury. So long as Brown remained there, gripping the rest of Whitehall with his power over money and jealously guarding the economic tests for membership of the euro, he wielded a veto over Blair’s ambitions.

  In the run-up to the 2001 election and its immediate aftermath, the option of moving Brown was debated deep within the Blair circle. Cherie, Anji Hunter, Sally Morgan and Jonathan Powell were most vehemently of the opinion that it had to be done. The Chief of Staff so often argued within Number 10 for the removal of Brown that Powell likened himself to Cato, the Roman who went to the Senate every day to cry: ‘Carthage must be destroyed!’66 Peter Mandelson, too, argued for dealing with the Chancellor, though he was warier of the consequences of Brown quitting and marauding from the backbenches.

  Blair seriously contemplated trying to persuade him to go to the Foreign Office, the only alternative job with sufficient status that Brown might conceivably have accepted. ‘He nearly did it,’ says Sally Morgan and other close allies agree. ‘In the end, he wouldn’t.’67 The Prime Minister backed off partly because of a residual sense of obligation to the other man and a continuing dependency on his talents. Even Powell acknowledged that ‘it wasn’t obvious who would fill his shoes.’68 Most of all, Blair was actuated by fear of the havoc that Brown could wreak in insurrectionist exile on the backbenches.

  ‘I know that sacking Gordon Brown was discussed, but each time it was discussed they realised that it would be Armageddon in the Labour Party,’ says Robert Harris, who was intermittently close to Blair as well as being a very good friend of Mandelson. ‘At the last moment, he always swerved away.’69

  It was hard to cut down Brown’s power precisely because he had acquired so much of it. The Chancellor’s approval ratings were hugely positive. He was receiving a largely adulatory press. Blair would often excuse his hesitancy about striking by saying that it would have been ‘impossible to explain’ to the Labour Party why he was moving such a successful Chancellor.70

  The spring of 2001, after Labour had just been re-elected by another landslide and before Blair became overwhelmed by the consequences of 9/11, was his one clear opportunity to deal decisively with Brown. He would subsequently have many reasons to regret that he did not take it.

  Yet being confirmed as Chancellor did not satisfy Gordon Brown. He too felt the first term was one of frustrating under-achievement. For all the vast power he had accumulated and all the praise he earned, Brown was nagged by a dissatisfaction even greater than that which gnawed at Blair. From the moment they won that second victory, Brown started to pound at the door of Blair’s den with demands for a date for the handover of the premiership. ‘Ever since then, it was continuous,’ says Barry Cox.71

  Both men began New Labour’s second act in government determined that it would be radically different to the first. Blair thought he now knew what to do with the premiership; Brown expected to seize the crown. The second term would indeed be very different to the first. Yet it would not be for reasons that either Blair or Brown, or anyone else, had envisaged.

  2. A Cloudless Day

  The noise from above was growing louder and the President was increasingly spooked. George Bush went to the window at Chequers and anxiously scanned the horizon, trying to spot where the aircraft was coming from. It ‘sounded like a lawnmower in the sky’, perhaps a microlite, and ‘it kept getting louder and louder and louder.’ The Secret Service detail with the President became jumpy. So did their British counterparts. Accustomed to the protection of the no-fly zone around the White House, Bush became even more agitated when he saw that the plane was now flying over the fields and aimed straight at the Prime Minister’s country house.

  ‘How did they get in?’ Bush demanded. ‘How did they get over the security? How did they get close to the building?’1 Then the errant aircraft buzzed past and away.

  There was one other discordant episode during George Bush’s sleep-over at Chequers in July 2001. Tony Blair, hoping to keep things relaxed with his American visitor, had his older children join them for an informal dinner. Euan was there with his close schoolfriend, James Dove. The teenagers raised the subject of the death penalty, which Bush had applied with enthusiasm as Governor of Texas. Cherie liked an argument and joined this one with gusto, challenging the President to justify execution by telling him that it was morally wrong and you couldn’t put right a mistake. ‘Well, that’s not the way it is in America,’ shrugged Bush. ‘We take the eye-for-an-eye view.’2 Bush didn’t seem to mind being challenged. His wife Laura was also much more liberal than him. The person who did look uncomfortable was the Prime Minister, who was anxious for this not to turn into the dinner party from hell. Bush’s plans for a missile shield also came up. The argumentative Cherie suggested tha
t ‘the real danger’ was not from a missile strike by Russia but a terrorist attack. That suggestion left Bush bemused.3

  Blair was fretful before and during the visit that it should be as smooth as possible. This was only the second time the two leaders had met and they were still at the delicate getting-to-know-you stage of their relationship. It was in the hope that it would deepen the bond between them that the Prime Minister had invited the President and his wife to stop over at Chequers on their way to the G8 Summit in Italy. The American party was surprised to find that the Prime Minister’s rural retreat was quite different to Camp David, the President’s compound in Maryland where they had first met in February. ‘There were not separate cabins, we stayed in their home.’ The Bushes ate breakfast at the kitchen table with the Blairs and their youngest son, Leo. ‘We felt welcomed. It was a very warm environment for us to be in and we could hear the pitter-patter of feet early in the morning and late at night. The President felt like he was part of the family.’4 Blair thought he was beginning ‘to make a connection’ with the Republican.5 When the Bushes left Chequers, the earlier security scare had faded from memory. No-one gave any more thought to the idea of aircraft crashing into famous buildings.

  At lunchtime in Britain on Tuesday, 11 September 2001, the skies were clear and the weather was bright. Tony Blair was in Brighton, a seafront city he had visited many times before to make speeches. He was preparing to deliver his first significant address of the autumn political season, ‘a quite tricky speech’6 which was making him ‘pretty tense’.7 His audience was the assembled trades unionists of the TUC, a body which liked him no more than he cared for them. There was a bit of crackle in the atmosphere: the unions were angry about Blair’s plans to increase the use of private operators in the NHS. The Prime Minister planned to give a hard slap to John Edmonds of the GMB. That curmudgeonly old walrus was calling Blair ‘a privatisation freak’. Some in the media were trying to build this up as his first trial of strength since Labour’s re-election in June. It was not, though, exactly news that he and the unions didn’t see the world the same way.

  The Prime Minister and his entourage were camped in the usual state of mild chaos in a suite on the seventh floor of the Grand Hotel looking out over the seafront. The suite was divided into a large lounge area and a smaller bedroom which were connected by a short staircase. While his staff sat in the lounge, half paying attention to the television on which Sky News was trailing his speech, Blair worked in the bedroom giving a final polish to the text. As was his habit, he was still fiddling with it right up to deadline. As was also his habit, he was munching on a banana.

  For all his rhetoric about creating a modern Britain, Blair never got comfortable with technology. He preferred to write his speeches with a pen in longhand, just as Gladstone might have done. As he scribbled last-minute amendments to the script, they were collected from the bedroom and taken down to the lounge to be typed into the text. Suddenly, at a quarter to two, Sky abruptly switched its coverage to New York, where it was a quarter to nine in the morning.

  The lounge television was now broadcasting pictures of a massive gash in the North Tower of the World Trade Center. The wounded citadel of finance was on fire and belching grey smoke. ‘Oh my God,’ cried Anji Hunter, the personal aide who had known Blair for even longer than his wife. Like people all around Britain and the rest of the world, the Prime Minister’s staff and police bodyguards were transfixed by the images coming from Manhattan.

  ‘I was just looking up and saw a plane go into one of the Twin Towers, and just thought, it was some dreadful accident like most people.’8

  ‘It wasn’t at all clear to us that it was terrorism.’9

  Working away upstairs, the Prime Minister was not even watching. His Political Secretary, Robert Hill, nipped up the short set of stairs to the bedroom to tell him. ‘God,’ said Blair. ‘That’s dreadful.’10

  The Prime Minister said it quite levelly, in the way that he often responded to news that was slightly astonishing or mildly shocking. After a brief conversation with Alastair Campbell about whether he should refer to the event in front of the TUC, Blair put it out of his mind and asked to be left alone so he could start psyching himself up for his difficult speech. He paced the small bedroom, he patted his hair, he toyed with his tie in the mirror, he twitched at his cuffs, the little rituals he always performed to ‘get in the zone’ for delivering a major speech.11 Downstairs, Campbell was on the phone to Adam Boulton, the Political Editor of Sky. The Prime Minister’s chief propagandist cracked a characteristically black joke: ‘I just knew you guys would set fire to some building in America when you’ve got an important speech by Tony to cover.’12

  At just after two in Brighton – just after nine in Manhattan – United Airlines Flight 175, the second plane, plunged into the South Tower. The room instantly sensed, as did anyone else watching that day, that they were no longer looking at a freak crash.

  Robert Hill rushed back up the flight of stairs to alert Blair. ‘What is it?’ he said to his Political Secretary, irritated to have his pre-speech rituals interrupted. ‘I said I wanted to be left alone.’ ‘A second plane,’ replied Hill.13 Now Blair did come down the stairs to look at the atrocious scenes being broadcast from Manhattan. ‘Get Alastair back,’ he said. Campbell had already gone over to the conference centre. There was a frenzy of phone calls between Brighton and London. Campbell was rung by Tom Kelly, one of his deputies, who was back at Number 10. ‘Don’t worry, we’ve seen it,’ Campbell told Kelly. Everyone had ‘the same thought. One is an accident, two isn’t.’14 One of the Downing Street secretaries, known as the ‘Garden Girls’ because their room in Number 10 overlooks the back garden, was typing up Blair’s speech. She turned to Anji Hunter and asked: ‘Is there any point going on with this?’15 There was not. After the second plane struck, Blair and his aides rapidly agreed ‘that there was no question he had to abandon the speech and get back to London’.16

  The Cabinet Secretary was lunching at Gran Paradiso, his favourite London restaurant. Sir Richard Wilson heard about the first plane from his driver, Gary. ‘I bet that’s some amateur,’ remarked Sir Richard as he got into the back of his limousine. As they set off back to Number 10, he learnt about the second plane from the car radio. Jeremy Heywood, the Principal Private Secretary, rang as Wilson’s car was rounding Parliament Square. ‘We’ve been told that the White House is evacuating,’ reported Heywood. ‘Should we be evacuating?’ ‘If you evacuate, where would you evacuate to?’ responded Wilson. He had a mental image of the entire staff of Number 10 and the Cabinet Office standing in the street clutching their laptops and mobiles looking lost. ‘I think it is a good rule not to evacuate unless you have an idea where you are going to evacuate to,’ Wilson drily told Heywood.17

  Jonathan Powell, the Prime Minister’s Chief of Staff, didn’t believe the official who ran in to tell him another plane had gone into the towers. ‘Don’t be silly – they’re just repeating pictures of the first plane,’ scoffed Powell. ‘It really is a second plane,’ insisted the official. ‘Oh, fuck,’ said Powell.18

  He and Wilson made a conference call to Blair in Brighton. ‘This looks bad from here,’ they told him. ‘You’d better come back.’ ‘Yes,’ Blair replied. ‘I’m coming back.’ He added: ‘Do you know how the Americans are reacting?’19 No-one did.

  After a rapid debate with Campbell, Hill and Hunter, Blair agreed that he could not now possibly deliver the intended speech about public service reform, one of the more minor casualties of that seismic day. At just after 2.30 p.m., the Prime Minister left for the Brighton conference centre. Though the Grand Hotel is right next door, the protection squad insisted that he was driven the short distance between the buildings. At 2.39 p.m. in Brighton, 9.39 a.m. in Washington, American Airlines Flight 77, the third plane, smashed into the west wall of the Pentagon. In the very short time available, Blair and Campbell had been exchanging thoughts about what the Prime Minister should say.20

&nb
sp; At one minute to three in Brighton, one minute to ten in New York, the global television audience watched the collapse of the shattered South Tower, which engulfed lower Manhattan in a deathly blanket of smoke and debris.

  Moments later, Blair delivered his hurriedly prepared lines about the atrocities. ‘There have been the most terrible, shocking events in the United States of America in the last hours,’ he told the delegates, many of whom were only fuzzily aware of what was unfolding in New York and Washington.

  This mass terrorism is the new evil in our world today. It is perpetrated by fanatics who are utterly indifferent to the sanctity of human life and we, the democracies of this world, are going to have to come together to fight it together and eradicate this evil completely from our world. I know that you would want to join with me in offering our deepest sympathy to the American people, and our absolute shock and outrage at what has happened.21

 

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