The End of the Party

by Andrew Rawnsley

  The new President was acutely aware that there was no love for him in Britain’s Labour government. Blair and Clinton had their combustions, but they were soulmates of the Third Way. On the campaign trail, Bush expressed contempt for the internationalist, centrist politics which were exemplified by both Clinton and Blair. During the Lewinsky Affair, Blair flew to Washington and stood by the scandal-stained Clinton when no-one else, Hillary included, would. ‘Blair was a Friend of Bill, a FOB as they used to say,’ says William Cohen, a member of Clinton’s Cabinet. ‘Anyone who had dealt with President Clinton, the Bush administration was wary of.’66

  Before Bush’s election, he and Blair had never met nor even spoken to one another. On a host of issues, Bush looked like trouble. While Blair was becoming increasingly possessed by the need to take action on climate change, Bush didn’t look like he’d be convinced that there was a threat from global warming until the Great Lakes dried up. One of his most senior officials says:

  When President Bush came to office, he was sceptical that Tony Blair would embrace him. Prime Minister Blair was seen as very close to Bill Clinton and they shared a party base. And so the President was concerned that they might have a professional relationship, but it would be very hard to have a personal relationship.67

  Bush might have been even more wary had he known where Blair was when they had their first phone conversation. He was at Warwick University to see Bill Clinton deliver a valedictory speech.

  That first call was not much of an icebreaker. On one account ‘it was the standard stuff about the special relationship and the importance of working together. They didn’t really get into substance at all.’68 On another account: ‘It basically consisted of Bush talking about various places in Scotland where he’d got pissed when he was young and asking Tony whether he knew them and Tony not really knowing what to say.’69

  After Bush’s inauguration, the race to be the first European leader to get to the White House was won by Jacques Chirac, the President of France. Though this did not turn out to be a reliable indicator of the future pattern of relationships, Blair was highly annoyed at the time.

  Many voices, including those of the American Stan Greenberg, were telling him that ‘the Bush White House is pretty black and white. They wanted people to know that they didn’t like shades of grey.’ You were either his loyal ally or you were nothing to him. Precisely because he feared being regarded as hostile, Blair tried extra hard and ‘decided that a close embrace’ was imperative for both his and Britain’s interests.70 One of the people urging that course on him was, paradoxically, Bill Clinton. At the end of his presidency he came to Chequers for a farewell stay. Clinton counselled Blair on how he should approach Bush. ‘Hug him close’ and ‘make him your friend.’ Confirming that he had offered this advice, Clinton later explained to me: ‘I told Tony to get close to Bush because that was the way to have influence with him.’71

  This was advice for which Blair had open ears. It had been an orthodoxy of British foreign policy since the Suez Crisis of 1956, when Anthony Eden’s premiership was broken by President Eisenhower’s opposition to the Anglo-French invasion of the canal, that there should never be a rupture in what the British liked to regard as the ‘Special Relationship’. Though he saw himself as a moderniser, Blair was an absolute traditionalist in this respect. Giving a toast at a White House dinner in 1998 when Clinton was President, the Prime Minister quoted the biblical remarks of Harry Hopkins, FDR’s envoy to Churchill, at a wartime dinner: ‘Whither thou goest I will go, and whither thou lodgest I will lodge. Thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God.’72

  Even Robin Cook marked Bush’s inauguration in January 2001 by declaring that the ‘uniquely warm relationship’ between Britain and America would ‘renew and deepen’, prose so purple that it suggested an alternative career for the then Foreign Secretary as an author of romantic fiction.

  Blair also saw a domestic imperative to get close to the new President. Always anxious to protect his right flank, he told the Cabinet that it was important to show that a Labour government could work as well with a Republican President as it had with a Democrat.73

  In January 2001, I wrote a column predicting that the Bush presidency would ‘test to destruction’ Blair’s conceit of Britain and himself as ‘the bridge’ between Europe and America. ‘The effort of spanning a conservative, unilateralist America and a social democrat, collectivist Europe will stretch even Tony Blair’s legendary ability to straddle the mutually incompatible. The Atlantic will be a bridge too far.’74 The next time I saw him, Blair spent most of the conversation trying to convince me that this was utterly mistaken. It made the role he saw for himself, as the bridge across the Atlantic, all the more essential.75 He told Jack Straw that ‘regardless of whether we agreed or disagreed with particular administration policies, it was crucial that we stayed close to the United States wherever possible.’76 The alliance with America was ‘fundamental’, believed Blair.77

  Before Meyer took up his position in Washington, he went into Number 10 for a briefing with Jonathan Powell. As they sat in one of the grand rooms on the first floor, Powell said, in the typically blokeish way of Blair’s Downing Street: ‘Basically, Christopher, what we want you to do is get up the arse of the White House and stay there.’78

  The frost in the relationship began to thaw in early 2001 when an American spy plane was shot down over China. Blair had been anxious about how little communication there was from the new White House. The silence was suddenly broken when the Americans asked Number 10 for advice on how to handle the regime in Beijing, who were screaming foul about the spy plane incident. The rationale for this seemed to be that the British, with their long history in Hong Kong, might have extra insight into the working of Chinese minds. China experts from the Foreign Office were rushed over to Downing Street to furnish Blair with useful advice for Bush.79

  There was still a lot of nervousness about the relationship in February when Blair crossed the Atlantic for his first face-to-face encounter with the new President. After landing at Andrews Air Force Base, the Prime Minister, his wife and officials were flown down to Camp David in a couple of helicopters from the presidential air armada. At the end of the forty-five-minute journey, they began to descend on to the pad at Camp David. They looked out of the window to see George and Laura Bush waiting to greet them. Cherie groaned: ‘I don’t expect they are looking forward to this any more than we are.’ Her husband looked pained, but said nothing. Christopher Meyer, whose stomach was already knotted with nerves about how this meeting was going to work out, watched this from his nearby seat and thought to himself: ‘Jesus Christ, this is going to be a disaster.’80

  Unknown to the British party, Cherie was not far wrong: Bush was also nervous before his first encounter with Blair. ‘He was sceptical that Tony Blair would embrace him. He was concerned that it would be very hard to have a personal relationship,’ says his Chief of Staff.

  He was nervous about meeting Tony Blair and finding out whether or not there would be a dialogue of trust or one of scepticism. When they first met, I had the same feeling from Tony Blair, that he was nervous about the relationship he would have with George W. Bush, this Texan former Governor, who had replaced Tony Blair’s friend in the White House.81

  The Americans found Cherie ‘stand-offish’, though things warmed up when Laura was around.82

  The two leaders and their entourages sat down to lunch in Laurel, the big log cabin in the centre of the rustic compound which has the President’s office. As waiters poured iced tea, Bush and Blair sat facing each other across the table. ‘Welcome to Camp David, Tony. May I call you Tony? It’s great to have you here,’ opened Bush. Blair, not missing a beat, replied: ‘Well, it’s great to be here, George. May I call you George? What shall we talk about?’

  The British ambassador began to relax. ‘You sort of knew in the first fifteen to thirty seconds that the chemistry was going to be OK.’83

  Bush very quickly
said: ‘Look, I’m not Bill Clinton, but I like you and we’re gonna work together.’84

  He went on to ‘pepper Blair with questions’ about international issues and other world leaders, flattering the British guest with interest in his views.85

  After lunch, the two men went out for a walk in the woods designed to fake some intimacy for the cameras. Blair was so anxious to get this relationship right that he flapped to his aides about what he should wear. Seeing Bush in his presidential bomber jacket and casual slacks, Blair changed into a pair of crotch-clutching corduroys so tight that he could not get his hands into them when he attempted a casual swagger. They were much mocked. The Prime Minister could at least be relieved that the American seemed to want to hug him almost as tightly as his trousers.

  In the evening, the Blairs, the Bushes and their staff relaxed in the Camp David cinema. They watched Meet the Parents, a comedy which features a desperate-to-be-liked Ben Stiller as a prospective son-in-law trying to get friendly with Robert de Niro, a hard-faced, right-wing CIA man. No-one there seems to have spotted the potential lurking metaphor.

  Though many expressed surprise that Blair could so effortlessly switch from buddydom with Clinton to a best pals act with Bush, it made sense that both men try to get along. Both were politicians governed more by their intuition and their instincts than by ideology. They had other things in common. Both were impatient of formality and ceremony, both believed in God, both were talented mimics, both tended to be bored with detail, both came over as easy-going and affable, and in both cases that concealed streaks of ruthlessness and cunning. Both were believers in the power of their personal charm to induce others to co-operate with them. Cold calculation of their interests gave them another incentive to make the relationship work. For tactical reasons at home and strategic ones on the international scene, Blair wanted to get close to the American. Bush was in desperate need of a friend in Europe. He would say to Blair: ‘I know they call me the toxic Texan.’86

  At the closing news conference, the President remarked: ‘He really put the charm offensive on me.’87 For all the bonhomie, the British thought: ‘Beneath it you got a real sense that if he didn’t get his way he would be, to quote himself, a tough son of a bitch.’88

  This became known as ‘the Colgate Summit’ because the President uttered one of his famously goofy Bushisms at the closing news conference. Asked what the two leaders had found in common, he struggled to articulate an answer and fell back on his trademark flippancy: ‘We both use Colgate toothpaste.’ To cover his own bemusement, Blair lightly responded: ‘They are going to wonder how you know that, George.’89 Bush’s National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, ‘wondered what the Prime Minister could possibly be thinking, but at least he laughed’.90 The banal explanation was that Colgate was the brand provided in all the log cabins at Camp David. A couple of nights in Maryland and one sleep-over at Chequers had brought the two men closer by the autumn of 2001, but it could hardly be said that they knew each other intimately as they faced the seismic event that was 9/11. When he declared his solidarity with Bush, Blair was not standing ‘shoulder to shoulder’ with a leader he knew at all well. He was aligning himself with a man whom he had not yet fully fathomed.

  By late on the evening of 9/11, the Prime Minister had spoken to other key leaders: Jacques Chirac, Vladimir Putin and Gerhard Schröder. What he had not done was what he most wanted to do. He had still not spoken to Bush, now back on board Air Force One and headed for another air base, this time in deepest Nebraska. Blair, not yet grasping the degree of chaos and panic on the other side of the Atlantic, was increasingly baffled that Bush had not returned to Washington to show that he was in charge. ‘There’s something not right,’ he said.91 Not only could they not get the Prime Minister in touch with the President, but Number 10 was finding it impossible to communicate with anyone in Washington while the White House was still in lock-down.

  Blair was not to know that the Americans feared a threat to Air Force One. His Secret Service told the President that it was not safe for him to return to the White House, now largely evacuated and useless. This lack of communication aggravated Blair’s anxieties about how the Americans would react to the atrocities. He knew that Bush would face immense pressure to retaliate. He worried that a wounded, angry and frightened America might be panicked into an extreme and unilateral response. One reason he used the formulation ‘shoulder to shoulder’ was to send a message to America and its President that they were not alone.92

  What impressed those working closely with him was that Blair was so quick to grasp that 9/11 was a hinge moment of history. In the words of David Manning:

  He was very quick to understand that something very profound had changed, this wasn’t going to be an isolated act. 9/11 was going to change the way we looked at security policy, foreign policy and was going to have a very, very significant impact on how the Americans viewed the world too. His sense was that it was extremely important for the international community to come together behind the United States and convey this sense of solidarity.93

  Alastair Campbell found Blair ‘worried about the advice Bush would be getting’.94 The Prime Minister was scared that the Americans would not be ‘thinking straight’, says Christopher Meyer: ‘Blair’s real concern was that there would be a knee-jerk reaction by the Americans in retribution for the attacks and that they would go thundering off to Afghanistan and nuke the shite out of the place.’95

  That was why he was so agitated about speaking to Bush say his senior staff. ‘He wanted to get in and influence Bush’s thinking so that Bush responded in the right way and not the wrong way.’96 A Cabinet minister agrees that he was desperate to ‘stop them doing something silly … stop them being crazy.’97

  This was a fear with foundation. When Bush finally overruled his Secret Service and ordered Air Force One to return to Washington, he arrived breathing fire. ‘I want you all to understand that we are at war,’ he told a crisis meeting in the White House bunker. Donald Rumsfeld, the Defense Secretary, pointed out that international law only allowed the use of force to prevent future attacks and not for retribution. ‘No,’ yelled Bush. ‘I don’t care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass.’98

  Bush’s intentions remained Blair’s main preoccupation when he woke early the next morning to be briefed about events overnight. He learnt that the President had got back to the White House to deliver an address from the Oval Office. It was regarded as a poor performance even by Bush’s own speechwriting team, one of whom despaired that it was ‘a doughy pudding of stale metaphors’.99 The one thing clearly telegraphed was an intent to move against the Taliban regime. Bush declared: ‘We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbour them.’100

  There had been no further attacks in America and none in Britain or elsewhere in the world. Yet nerves were still stretched taut and would remain so for many days after 9/11. ‘We didn’t know what was going to happen next.’ One morning soon afterwards, the whole of Downing Street jumped when they heard the growl of a plane coming in the direction of Number 10. ‘It scared the shit out of everybody.’101 This turned out to be a Second World War bomber flying down the Mall as part of a commemorative fly-past. The night of 9/11, the lights burnt round the clock at the Foreign Office, Cabinet Office, MI5 and MI6 as they prepared ‘a mountain of paper’ for Blair about al-Qaeda and likely American responses.102 Satellite photography of Afghanistan was included in the pack, showing the two types of al-Qaeda camps, those where they did ‘religious indoctrination’ and those where they did ‘the terrorist boy scout training stuff’.103 Dearlove, Lander and their experts then gave Blair a detailed oral briefing. ‘Blair punched questions at them and they gave really on-the-ball answers. He was operating at a high-octane level.’104 Blair was using his lawyer’s skill for absorbing and mastering a brief. ‘Blair was on the ball, unflustered. He was very quick to get the main point,’ says one of
the intelligence chiefs.105 Foggy about the whole subject less than twenty-four hours before, he was soon rattling off references to ‘OBL’ as if he was now the world’s most renowned authority on bin Laden. He told the meeting: ‘We’re going to have to do Afghanistan.’106

  At half past twelve, seven thirty in the morning in Washington, the call from the President finally came through. Blair was pleased to learn that he was the first foreign leader to speak to Bush. The President told the Prime Minister that he was not treating this as an act of terrorism. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘We are at war.’

  Blair expressed his outrage about the atrocities and offered his sympathy about the deaths. ‘We stand with you.’ He was building up empathy between them before he tried to press his advice about what should be done.

  Blair told Bush, not entirely truthfully, that he himself had ‘no concerns’ that America might react wildly. He then revealed that he did have precisely such concerns by arguing against instant retaliation.

  Bush appeared to be reassuringly calm, replying that he was not going to order a knee-jerk response and ‘just pound sand’.107 He was not going to make Bill Clinton’s mistake when he ineffectually fired cruise missiles into Afghanistan and hit only an abandoned terrorist training camp.

  On the American side, it was regarded as ‘a very comforting’ and ‘a very important conversation’ that established Blair as the most staunch of allies.108 On the British side, there was a feeling that the bond between the two was strengthened.109

  Powell wrote up ‘a top-speed note of the phone call’.110 When Wilson suggested to the Prime Minister that he should follow up with a written message to Bush, he was surprised and impressed to learn that Blair had already drafted a memo designed to ‘steer Bush, keep him on the rails. The worry was that the Americans would do something stupidly rapidly.’111 In the note, Blair argued for a measured response, focused on al-Qaeda and the Taliban. The regime in Afghanistan should be given an ultimatum to give up bin Laden and shut down the terrorist training camps. If they failed to comply, only then should they be attacked. Even at this early stage, he was arguing for the publication of a dossier about al-Qaeda and Afghanistan to make the case against them to world opinion. He also grabbed the opportunity to argue for re-energising the Middle East peace process with the suggestion that this would help to sustain Arab support for action against terrorism. When he saw it, the British ambassador in Washington thought the note a ‘first-rate piece of work’.112 It delineated many of the themes which would dominate the years ahead: the imperative for conflict not to be defined as a clash of civilisations between Islam and the West, the need to maintain public support, and Blair’s emphasis on creating and sustaining an international coalition behind action.