These were not words that he had any time to polish. This was pure reflex reaction to the moment on which his premiership would pivot. It was telling that his instinctive response was to reach for biblical language and frame what had just happened as a contest between good and evil.
The delegates rose to applaud, a rare occasion when the TUC gave him a standing ovation. Then Blair rushed off the stage and into his armour-plated Daimler to be sped to Brighton station. The train was ‘simply the fastest way to get him back to London’.22
While they awaited his return, back at Number 10 there was a frenzy to assemble a crisis meeting of key ministers and officials. Many of the crucial figures were scattered all over the country and beyond. The Home Secretary, David Blunkett, was on a train in the Midlands and first learnt about the attacks from a phone call from one of his sons.23 Blair’s senior adviser on foreign policy, Sir David Manning, was aboard a plane over Staten Island from where he observed the black smoke and at first assumed it had to be coming from a power station.24 The head of the armed forces, Admiral Sir Michael Boyce, was in Europe.25 The Commander-in-Chief of the British army, General Sir Mike Jackson, was on an exercise in Canada.26 Jack Straw was in his room at the Foreign Office holding a meeting about troop deployments in the Balkans with Geoff Hoon, the Defence Secretary. They ‘sat transfixed as we saw the first plane go into the Twin Towers and then saw the second one and realised that this was the world’s biggest ever terrorist outrage’. Straw said to the others: ‘This is going to change the world’, which was no less true for being said by so many people that it soon passed into cliché.27 The Director-General of MI5, Sir Stephen Lander, was at his headquarters in Thames House holding a meeting about ‘critical infrastructure protection’.28
The instant cause of understandable panic was the fear that if terrorists could strike at the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, then they might have a design to do the same to iconic British landmarks. Buckingham Palace, Canary Wharf and the House of Commons – the respective citadels of Britain’s monarchy, money and democracy – were the obvious targets. ‘Was London about to be attacked?’ the Cabinet Secretary asked himself. ‘My obsession was with protecting London. No-one knew what was happening.’29 One of the first calls he made was to Stephen Byers, the Transport Secretary. He ordered an air-exclusion zone over the centre of the capital. His Cabinet career had left Byers progressively more disillusioned about the power of ministers to achieve anything much. So he was pleasantly surprised to find that, on this occasion, his instructions were so swiftly executed that within twenty minutes there were no longer any planes to be seen from his window.30
Contingency planning had been exposed as pitifully inadequate during the first term. There was no plan to deal with the fuel protests when they erupted in the autumn of 2000, nor to manage the foot and mouth outbreak in the spring of 2001. As a result of those earlier failures, a Civil Contingencies Unit had been established to handle large-scale disasters. Wilson tried to activate the new unit now, only to discover that its staff were hundreds of miles away on a ‘bonding’ session in Easingwold in Yorkshire.31 Also absent were all the officials of the Overseas and Defence Secretariat of the Cabinet Office. They were en route to a meeting at the headquarters of the SAS in Herefordshire and had taken all the keys to their offices with them. The head of MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove, was not in town either. A new telephone system had been installed at the Cabinet Office the previous weekend. To compound the chaos, ‘it went down.’32 Had terrorists or a foreign power planned an attack on Britain, there would rarely have been a better time to strike than on 9/11.
Boarded on a train back from Brighton, Blair’s Special Branch protection squad created a makeshift area for the Prime Minister and his aides by sealing off part of a carriage with police ‘scene of crime’ tape. Blair tried to have phone conversations with colleagues only to be cut off when the train rattled through tunnels, a problem which repeatedly thwarted attempts to have sensible communication with London. Robert Hill passed on what news he could glean from the intermittent reception he was getting from a small radio he was listening to on an earpiece. The Prime Minister was subdued and pensive, spending long stretches of the journey staring out of the window with ‘that faraway look in his eyes’33 that those who knew him well had often seen at times of high stress. ‘The full weight of it – the implications of it – were sinking in. He was chewing it over in his mind.’34 The Prime Minister said to the others: ‘This will change everything.’ One of his staff concluded: ‘Tony Blair intuited within half an hour that this was a historic turning point and America would be transformed for ever by the experience of such a huge attack on its soil.’35
He asked for a pad so he could try to make sense of his thoughts about what had just happened and write down a list of the priority issues to address when he got back to Downing Street. He was increasingly apprehensive about the American response to what he knew they would treat as a military attack. ‘How are the Americans reacting?’ he again asked, but no-one with him could provide an answer. ‘What’s happened to Bush?’ he fretted and variations like ‘Where’s Bush?’36 He wasn’t alone in asking that question.
As the hijacked planes converged on New York and Washington, George Bush was on his way to a photo opportunity at an elementary school in Florida. ‘It was a cloudless day’ and his Chief of Staff, Andy Card, told the President that it was going to be ‘an easy day’ as well: just talking to the children, parents and teachers. Bush was about to go into a classroom when Karl Rove, one of his most senior advisers, told the President that a small twin-engine prop plane had crashed into one of the towers. To Card and Rove, the President remarked: ‘The pilot must have had a heart attack.’37
Bush was already in the classroom when his officials learnt that it was not a light aircraft, but a commercial airliner. The photo op proceeded anyway. The TV cameras started to record the Commander-in-Chief reading to the children from The Pet Goat.
Card came into the classroom. He answered the inquisitive look on the faces of the reporters in the press pool by mouthing: ‘Two planes.’
The cameras were therefore able to capture the moment, though not the words, when his Chief of Staff went up to the President, bent over and whispered into his right ear: ‘A second plane hit the second tower. America is under attack.’38 Then Card deliberately stood back so Bush could not ask any questions while the cameras were trained on him.
At a loss what to do, Bush looked bewildered and frozen, an image that would be repeatedly used to ridicule him, notably in Michael Moore’s antiwar film, Fahrenheit 9/11. That lampooning would make him the more determined to later prove his machismo, to take the ‘eye-for-an-eye’ that he had spoken about at Chequers two months earlier.
Shortly afterwards, Bush abandoned the classroom to deliver a rushed and jarring statement. ‘Today we’ve had a national tragedy,’ he said in a tone less assured than a local TV newsreader making his first broadcast. ‘Terrorism against our nation will not stand.’ He would be ordering ‘a full-scale investigation to hunt down and to find those folks who committed this act’.39
‘Folks’ was a strangely homely description of terrorists who had just perpetrated a mass murder which would be compared with ‘the day of infamy’ when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941.
These unconvincing and unnerving words were the last that the world would hear from the President for several long hours as he was rushed to Sarasota airport and bundled aboard Air Force One. The presidential plane took off to circle the skies until it was clearer whether the attacks were over or this was just a beginning. At just after ten o’clock in America came the news that a fourth plane, United Flight 93, inbound to Washington, was not responding to air traffic control. In terror that the White House and the Capitol were the next targets, there was absolute chaos around the American President. While he circled the skies, most of the White House staff were evacuated. The Vice-President and the Secretary of State were locked in the hi
gh-security bunker underneath the East Wing. America was left with no visible leadership. The President and his number two were having difficulty communicating with each other, never mind the rest of the world.40
At just before five in the afternoon in Britain, the commuter train carrying the Prime Minister pulled into Victoria station. He was hurtled back to Downing Street accompanied by a wail of police outriders. Watching from the doorstep of Number 12, one of his staff was struck by Blair’s profile as he strode through the front door of Number 10. ‘This was not someone floored by what had just happened. It was someone who had half expected something like this. By the time he got to Downing Street he had analysed the consequences. That was why he was able to respond with such certainty and such strategic sense.’41 The Cabinet Secretary agrees: ‘The moment he was in the building you could see that he regarded this event as of enormous significance.’42 Wilson checked whether the Prime Minister was content with the protective measures that the Cabinet Secretary had ordered in his absence. ‘Sure, sure,’ said Blair, a little impatiently. ‘Fine.’ He went straight into his small den accompanied by Wilson, Campbell and Powell. They were joined by Stephen Lander and John Scarlett, recently appointed as the chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, which collates the work of the intelligence agencies and GCHQ. ‘Blair comes alive when something exciting and dramatic is going on. The adrenalin was running. He was very focused, very alert.’43 The Prime Minister addressed the group in the den. ‘Who did this?’ he demanded. Lander of MI5 spoke: ‘This is not my territory particularly,’ he said. ‘But it’s got the whiff of al-Qaeda. I think people will be pointing the finger at al-Qaeda.’ Scarlett broadly agreed that was most probable. The intelligence chiefs talked about previous al-Qaeda attacks in Africa and the Middle East, and how they were being harboured by the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. Blair looked fuzzy at the mention of Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network. Turning to Lander, he asked: ‘Did I know about this?’ ‘JIC has been reporting about this. It was in the red book,’ replied Lander, who knew Blair well enough to be direct with him. ‘Perhaps you haven’t read them.’ Blair shrugged: ‘Fair enough.’44 One of the non-intelligence officials present comments: ‘I don’t think Blair knew much about al-Qaeda at this point. It was clear to me that he hadn’t taken in earlier warnings.’45
Jonathan Powell insists that Blair was already ‘slightly obsessive’ about al-Qaeda before 9/11, but agrees ‘we hadn’t focused on the Taliban at all.’46 Powell sent one of the duty clerks out to the Waterstone’s bookshop on the corner of Trafalgar Square to buy every book he could find on Afghanistan and al-Qaeda.47
Blair would later tell me: ‘September 11th was for me a revelation. They killed 3,000, which was a lot. But if they could have killed 30,000, they would have.’48
He was again asking: ‘What are the Americans doing?’ and ‘Where’s Bush? How will he react?’ Lander offered the opinion that there would be massive pressure on the President to retaliate against Afghanistan for harbouring al-Qaeda bases. The Americans might also have their sights on Iran, Iraq and Libya. Blair agreed that there was a big risk that Bush would feel compelled to lash out. He continued to fret about the whereabouts of the invisible President. In the words of one aide: ‘We were all thinking: where the fuck are they?’49
It was now approaching 5.30 p.m. Blair went down to the basement to chair a meeting of COBRA, the viperish acronymn for Cabinet Office Briefing Room A, Downing Street’s cheaper version of the White House situation room. Some sixty people were crowded into the windowless basement room. Ministers and officials had rushed there, invited or not, of their own accord. ‘Some Cabinet ministers just turned up.’50 People stood against the walls.
‘This is really big,’ Blair told the meeting, rather redundantly. ‘This is going to have a huge impact on America.’
Various Cabinet members reported on the action they were taking to protect Britain. Geoff Hoon worried some in the room with a ‘gung-ho’ declaration that the armed forces were ready for action. Gordon Brown was typically anxious about the impact on the economy, fretting that the evacuation of Canary Wharf and the closure of the Stock Exchange would send out a ‘bad signal’. Jack Straw told them that he had just come off the phone with Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State. The Americans were already certain that the atrocities were the work of al-Qaeda.51
One of the military reported that they had two fighter planes up patrolling the skies over London. ‘I’m worried,’ said the Cabinet Secretary to the Prime Minister. ‘If we do get an aircraft flying towards London, who takes the decision to shoot it down?’ Blair frowned and suggested that it wouldn’t be him. ‘He clearly didn’t want to be thinking about that.’52 Hoon seemed to some colleagues also reluctant to be given the responsibility for giving the order to shoot down a passenger jet. ‘It ended up that the poor bloody fighter pilot would have to take the decision.’53
Only later were proper rules of engagement agreed and it fell to Hoon to decide whether or not to shoot down a plane during a scare seven months afterwards.54
According to many present, there was an air of barely suppressed terror in the basement room. ‘There was the most intense anxiety that the attacks could continue and it would lead to a meltdown across the world.’55
The meetings inside Number 10 were interrupted to allow the Prime Minister to make a statement for the six o’clock news. As was ever the case with Blair, he was a master at camouflaging his own anxieties in order to present a face of calm and control to the public. ‘It is hard even to contemplate the utter carnage and terror which has engulfed so many innocent people,’ he said. ‘As for those that carried out these attacks, there are no adequate words of condemnation.’ He located some words of condemnation nevertheless. ‘Their barbarism will stand as their shame for all eternity.’ After listing the security measures that were being taken in Britain, he returned to his central theme, one which would now dominate the rest of his second term:
This is not a battle between the United States of America and terrorism, but between the free and democratic world and terrorism. We, therefore, here in Britain stand shoulder to shoulder with our American friends in this hour of tragedy, and we, like them, will not rest until this evil is driven from our world.56
Across the world, leaders expressed their solidarity with the United States. But Blair stood out in crucial respects. One was his clarity and conviction. ‘As with all his best statements, he had written it himself.’57 Another was the way in which he went much further than simply offering sympathy with the United States. He was already embracing America’s crisis as his crisis. When he showed the statement to his staff beforehand, there was ‘a question over the shoulder-to-shoulder remark’. Campbell was worried that it might be seen as too ‘poodling’ to America. Blair rejected that advice. ‘He was very clear that he wanted to send an unambiguous message because that was the way to make sure that his voice was heard in the White House.’ One thing Blair already understood about Bush was the premium the President put on loyalty. ‘Blair thought any quiver of equivocation would be misinterpreted. That was his consistent stance throughout.’58
This would make him an instant hero in the United States; not least because he gave much more eloquent voice to the shock and horror of this moment, and offered far more reassurance that it could be overcome, than America’s own leader who was still on his zig-zagging aerial tour. Bush had just delivered up another stumbling statement to the cameras, this time from an air force base in Louisiana.
Blair was becoming more anxious about how the wounded Prometheus might react. Again he was asking: ‘What will the Americans do?’
The consequences of 9/11 would entwine the fates of Blair and Bush, defining a presidency and a premiership which were both utterly changed by this event. What people usually forgot, if they had ever known it, was that they did not start off at all close.
Much of the world believed that George Bush stole the 2000 American election from Al Gor
e, the Democratic Vice-President. That belief ran especially deep and angry in the Labour Party. The Prime Minister’s personal pollster, Stan Greenberg, worked for the Gore campaign and there was no-one in the Labour Party who was not rooting for the Democrat. Blair tried to assist Gore’s chances by inviting him to make a status-boosting visit to Number 10 during the campaign. ‘The expectation had been that Al Gore would win.’59 Blair was looking forward to working with Gore, hoping it would be a continuation of his relationship with Bill Clinton but without all the embarrassing bits. When the British ambassador in Washington, Christopher Meyer, sent a cautionary note that Bush should ‘not be under-estimated’ and might win the election ‘this was very unwelcome news in Number 10.’60 They were stunned when the Supreme Court of the United States, with the assistance of the notorious hanging chads in Florida, tipped the White House to the Republican from Texas.
‘Our hearts sank when the result was finally ratified,’ says Cherie.61 Blair ‘just could not imagine that Al Gore was not going to be elected which is why it was such a shock’.62 Soon after, Greenberg came to visit the Prime Minister in the Blairs’ flat above Downing Street. ‘Stan, if you had done your job, I wouldn’t have to deal with this problem,’ complained Blair. The problem being ‘how to build a relationship’ with this very right-wing President.63
Blair was worried about Bush’s lack of experience in international affairs. The worst crisis he had ever faced as Governor of Texas was comforting families who had lost their homes in a flood. ‘No-one needs to tell me what to believe,’ Bush had said on the campaign trail. ‘But I do need somebody to tell me where Kosovo is.’64 The Kosovo conflict had been Blair’s most significant moment on the world stage in his first term and the new President couldn’t even find it on a map. There was more apprehension when Colin Powell, the new Secretary of State, only referred to Britain once in his confirmation hearings before the Senate. Meyer had done his best to cultivate relationships with the Bush team. Karl Rove, Bush’s senior political strategist, sent both encouragement and a warning via Meyer: ‘You’re going to start with a blank sheet of paper. By your works shall ye be known.’65
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