The End of the Party

by Andrew Rawnsley

  ‘I’m so honoured the British Prime Minister has crossed an ocean to show his unity of purpose with America,’ said Bush, glancing up to Blair in the gallery. In Texan vernacular, he added: ‘Thank you for comin’, friend.’28

  Blair adopted a mien of modesty at the rapturous applause. But it was bound to be head-swelling, noted Sir Stephen Wall, a senior diplomat who worked at Number 10. ‘He was seduced, as most British Prime Ministers are, by the relationship. The red carpet is laid out, the national anthems are played in the middle of Congress, all that stuff is very seductive.’29 The Prime Minister and his entourage left Washington ‘euphoric’ about their reception.30

  Not so much Campbell, who worried ‘that some would use it to do the whole “Bush’s poodle” thing’31 that was beginning to run in parts of the Labour Party and the British media. He had even asked Meyer whether it would be possible for Blair to go to the dinner but skip Bush’s speech. ‘Do we really have to stay? Couldn’t he slip away before the speech?’ he wondered of Meyer beforehand. ‘Yes, he has to stay, Alastair. No, he can’t slip away,’ responded the ambassador. ‘This is going to be a huge occasion. To be invited to sit in the gallery with the President’s wife is a signal honour. They won’t understand, it will not go down at all well if he says no. It’s a moment in history.’32 Blair liked moments in history and he did not anyway see himself as a poodle. He preferred to think he was a guide dog.

  He had prepared for his encounter with Bush by lunching with Silvio Berlusconi in London on the Sunday and dining with Gerhard Schröder in Berlin on the Wednesday as well as breakfasting with Jacques Chirac at the Elysée Palace on the Thursday. The idea was to collect intelligence about the positions of the European leaders which would enhance his value to Bush as an ally.

  He’d also been working the phones, talking to the President of China and the President of Iran, the first time that a British Prime Minister had held a conversation with the leader of the regime in Tehran since the overthrow of the Shah more than twenty years ago. Bush was astonished when Blair told him about that call.

  Just as Bush felt he had found ‘a mission’ for his presidency, so Blair believed that he had located an international calling for his premiership. ‘He saw it as a moment of destiny, ‘ says his friend Michael Levy. ‘Almost instantly, it became the focus of his energy.’33 Terrorism capable of causing death on a previously unimaginable scale was the new and most mortal threat facing not just the West, but all of what he liked to call ‘the civilised world’. In his view, one shaped by his religious belief, it was a Manichaean struggle between good and evil. The military response was inevitably going to be spearheaded by the Americans. It was essential that they sustained international sympathy and did not become isolated. Blair believed he could be instrumental in ensuring both. Among other things, that demanded that Britain make a substantial military commitment to accompany its leader’s rhetoric.

  General Sir Mike Jackson, the Commander-in-Chief of the British army, began ‘force generation’ for Afghanistan in ‘quite short order’ after 9/11.34 Admiral Boyce started to redeploy elements of the Royal Navy towards the Indian Ocean. He told Blair ‘not to worry’ that this would look prematurely aggressive because ‘no-one would know.’35 Blair’s favourite man in uniform was his first Chief of the Defence Staff, General Sir Charles Guthrie, a foxy and smooth operator who always came with a can-do attitude. He’d been a reassuring ally and mentor in the first term when Blair ordered British forces into action three times: against Slobodan Milosevic in Kosovo, in Sierra Leone to restore democratic government, and in punitive action against Saddam Hussein in Operation Desert Fox. Blair did not gel so well with Guthrie’s successor, Admiral Sir Michael Boyce. He was a submariner, from the silent service. Boyce was a careful and precise man who always identified the hazards of military action. At a meeting with the Prime Minister on 27 September, Boyce outlined some of the difficulties of a campaign in Afghanistan. Air power was not sufficient for the task. ‘There’s not a lot to hit,’ pointed out Boyce. ‘There’s mud huts and people living in caves.’ They had to have ‘boots on the ground’. The Taliban were not going to be ‘friendly foes’. They had a record of giving their opponents ‘a hairshirt’: skinning alive captured enemy combatants.36

  Cool with Boyce, Blair was developing a warmer relationship with Sir Richard Dearlove of MI6 and John Scarlett of the JIC. In the view of one senior spook, Blair was turning into ‘an intelligence groupie’.37 Members of the War Cabinet watched him ‘being seduced by the confidence with which they would assert things. MI6 did some really good work. He became very reliant on the intelligence services during this period.’38 This was a development which would have huge significance for the future.

  Blair was about to send British forces into military action for the fourth time in his premiership. Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian Prime Minister, privately told him that he was supportive of military action ‘provided not too many people die’. Blair’s response revealed how he’d been battle-hardened by previous conflicts. He shrugged to Berlusconi that there was ‘no such thing as a painless war’.39

  He was energised in the weeks after 9/11 because Blair was always happiest when he was ‘on a big stage trying to achieve grand things’.40 With his tremendous powers of persuasion, his experience of office and his range of international contacts, he believed he had a unique value to both Washington and the rest of the world. He also thought that 9/11 was evidence of a talent for prophecy. ‘You know, I saw this coming,’ he would say.41 He meant that he had foreseen that a radically altered foreign policy was required in the interdependent world of the twenty-first century where boundaries had been melted by globalisation. Before 9/11, Blair was already reaching for a different philosophy of international relations from the traditional one that had held since 1945, namely that states did not interfere in each other’s internal affairs. He first tried to formulate a theory in justification of liberal interventionism two years earlier, in April 1999, during the NATO action in Kosovo. In a speech delivered in Chicago at the height of that conflict, Blair tried to give intellectual underpinning to his interventionist instincts by formulating what he called ‘the doctrine of the international community’. He argued the case for military action against sovereign states when they threatened their own citizens, their neighbours or the rest of the world.42 In the changed world after 9/11 and in order to build support for action against the Taliban, he now amplified that doctrine, the most consistent belief of his premiership.

  His most impassioned statement about interventionism was the speech he gave to the truncated party conference in Brighton at the beginning of October, three weeks after the atrocities. Blair usually agonised about his conference speeches, engaging his staff in endless discussions about themes, phrases and content and was rarely entirely satisfied even when he had won his usual standing ovation. This time was different. ‘That speech wrote itself,’ he told me. ‘I knew what I had to say.’43

  The final text was not substantially different to a first draft that he had written one evening the previous week. It was his most definitive statement of the case for moral imperialism when confronted by global terror.

  First, he further hardened the commitment to fighting alongside the Americans. ‘We were with you at the first. We will be with you at the last,’ he declared. While this was the sort of oratorical flourish which Blair loved, it was also writing another large blank cheque to George Bush before the British Prime Minister knew exactly where ‘the last’ might take him.

  There was then the importance of drawing a distinction between terrorists like the IRA, with whom he had negotiated for peace in Northern Ireland, and those like al-Qaeda, with whom he said there could be no bargaining. ‘There is no possible compromise with such people,’ he said. ‘Just a choice: defeat it or be defeated by it.’

  This presented al-Qaeda as a more lethal foe than they actually were. While unquestionably ambitious to inflict as much death as they could, bin Lad
en’s murderous network did not represent an existential menace to Britain on a par with the Nazis in the Second World War or the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

  He issued a direct threat to the regime in Afghanistan. ‘I say to the Taliban: surrender the terrorists or surrender power.’44 He put stress, in a way his American ally never did, on the need to reconcile Islam with the West. It had by now become quite well known that he travelled with a copy of the Koran nestling alongside his Bible in his luggage. It was not so well known that he read three different versions of the Koran in the quest to find passages that could be used against Islamist extremism.45

  The main aim of the speech was to develop his thesis about international affairs in such a way that his current actions were located and legitimised in a grander moral design for the world.

  ‘This is a moment to seize. The kaleidoscope has been shaken. The pieces are in flux. Soon they will settle again. Before they do, let us re-order the world around us.’46

  He contrasted Kosovo, where military intervention stopped an attempt at ‘ethnic cleansing’, with the absence of international action in Rwanda, where a million people were slaughtered in the mid-1990s. The speech dwelt on Africa, ‘a scar on the conscience of the world’.

  That was sincerely meant. Ever since the British intervention in Sierra Leone, Blair was preoccupied with the state of Africa. As so often with him, high ideals were married with low politics. There were already voices in his party, and beyond it, protesting against saddling up to join George Bush’s Afghan posse. To one member of his Cabinet, Blair’s conference speech was also ‘a piece of triangulation’. He knew he was going to war so he wanted to project himself as ‘a generous and caring person on Africa. It doesn’t mean there wasn’t sincerity in it, but he was positioning himself.’47 Blair was hoping to ease apprehension about Bush by placing the campaign against the Taliban in the context of a grander cause of global renewal.

  ‘The starving, the wretched, the dispossessed, the ignorant, they are our causes too,’ he proclaimed in a passage designed to link his moral imperialism with traditional Labour values and concerns. He roped together climate change, the Middle East peace process and free trade into his theme of ‘the moral power of the world acting as a community’.

  The speech then soared off into passages that might have been accompanied to the tune of ‘the whole world in his hands’. He took up as his cause ‘those living in want and squalor from the deserts of northern Africa to the slums of Gaza to the mountain ranges of Afghanistan’.48

  One half-awed, half-apprehensive member of the Cabinet to whom I spoke afterwards described it as ‘the inaugural speech of the President of the World’.49 Colleagues regarded it as a stunning piece of oratory, but the moral fervour of the speech also fed a worm of concern that Tony Blair was beginning to exhibit a messianic tendency.

  This had always been present in his character. It was made manifest during the Kosovo conflict, when he went much further than other Western leaders in his zeal to defeat the Serbian dictatorship. But the messianic Blair was largely concealed in the first term behind the cautious, popularity-hoarding dimension of his personality. It was in his second term that the conviction-driven Blair would be thrust to the foreground, transforming how the world looked on him and how he looked on the world.

  The speech enjoyed adulatory reception in the hall and in the next day’s press. He was laurelled in admiring headlines from both left and right. The Daily Telegraph’s leader hailed it as ‘Blair’s finest hour’.50

  The speech had a sweeping panorama and was a most eloquent expression of his personal credo. It was visionary, idealistic, inspiring, tremendously well delivered and pumped with moral uplift. It was also unanchored from much realism about his capacity to deliver the utopian world that he described. In the quieter, domestic passages, he conceded that many of the basics of British public services were still deeply unsatisfactory after four years of Labour government. ‘Parts of the railways,’ he admitted, were ‘a disaster’. There was a disjunction between his admission that they couldn’t get the trains to run on time at home and his vaulting claim that they could heal the world of conflict, poverty and disease.

  I could not resist mocking the more overblown passages, writing in the Observer: ‘Missionary Tony will cleanse the planet of disease, poverty and conflict. The sun will never set on the Holy British Empire. The tough and tender third way will rule from Kinshasa to Kabul.’51

  Looking back at it now, the speech is the most ambitious attempt by any politician of that time to visualise building a better world order from the ruins of the Twin Towers. But it also reads as the quintessential example of Blair’s weakness for oratorical over-reach, to promise much more than he could conceivably deliver. ‘I thought at the time that it was a bit high-flown,’ says Sir Christopher Meyer. ‘You read it now, it is sheer hubris. It is bonkers.’52 The slums of Gaza are still the site of endless conflict. British soldiers still fight the Taliban in Afghanistan. The deserts of Africa are still stained by genocide. He left office having got nowhere close to realising the dream world that he presented as within reach in the autumn of 2001.

  At the end of the party conference week, Blair flew to Pakistan to lobby its leadership to break with the Taliban. The trip was made against the advice of those responsible for his security and in the face of protests from Cherie, who had become highly strung about her husband’s personal safety. Having failed to argue him out of the trip, she turned on Campbell. ‘Do you want to be a martyr or what?’ she cried, her bottom lip trembling with rage.53

  They flew to Islamabad in an elderly RAF VC-10, an aircraft despised by Blair and his staff for the antiquity of its communications equipment and the embarrassingly old vintage of the plane compared with those employed by other leaders. Even in good aircraft, Blair was frightened of flying. Few knew about this fear except those closest to him who had watched him battle the phobia. ‘He hated flying, but he had taught himself to live with it.’54 Downing Street frequently toyed with ordering a better aircraft for the dedicated use of the Prime Minister, only to be stymied by a combination of penny-pinching by Gordon Brown and his own fear that the media would ridicule him for desiring to possess a ‘Blair Force One’.

  As the old plane rattled towards the capital of Pakistan, he had with him Campbell, Hunter, Powell and Tom Kelly, along with two of the intelligence chiefs, Scarlett of the JIC and Dearlove of MI6. The fear was that terrorists might use surface-to-air missiles to bring down the VC-10. Some on board kept their spirits up by cracking black jokes about being hit by a stinger. The pilot implemented evasive manoeuvres, throwing the plane into a steep, twisting and sickening dive on the approach to the airport. ‘That was probably the scariest journey into a major capital we ever did. It was a corkscrew descent followed by a journey through a city on the edge.’55

  As was often his habit, the Prime Minister was sitting up in the cockpit, which afforded the best view, with Anji Hunter next to him for company. Blair was usually quite sanguine about physical danger, but he suddenly became ‘very morbid’ as the plane corkscrewed towards the tarmac. ‘Tony started talking about his own death, something I’d never heard him do before,’ one of those on the trip told me later.56

  Safely conveyed to his meeting with the President of Pakistan, Blair delivered the message: ‘You’ve got to choose which side you are on.’ He was pleased to extract from Pervez Musharraf an assurance that Pakistan was abandoning its support for the Taliban and offering intelligence to assist against al-Qaeda. The British believed it ‘corralled Musharraf in the right place’, which gave Blair the feeling that this hazardous trip was worthwhile.57 The most important pressure on Pakistan was from the Americans, who mixed menaces with promises of dollars to induce the General to be co-operative. Pakistan proved to be a highly unreliable ally and its short term co-operation a tactical ruse to appease the United States. It secretly helped North Korea with its nuclear programme. Two months after Blair’s visit, Mu
sharraf released two Pakistani scientists who had been detained for providing bin Laden with information about making weapons of mass destruction.

  Blair flew on to India and then back to Britain, where he landed at lunchtime on Sunday, 7 October. He was in the car on his way back from RAF Northolt when the Downing Street switchboard put through a call from George Bush. Tony Blair might make himself sound like the man in charge of Western policy, but he was about to get a reminder that the shots were called from the White House. The American President told him that the first air strikes against al-Qaeda camps and Taliban forces in Afghanistan were commencing that evening.

  ‘None of the leaders involved in this action want war,’ Blair declared as the first bombers were reaching their targets. ‘None of our nations want it. We are peaceful people … We only do it if the cause is just, but this cause is just.’ The Taliban had it coming: ‘They were given the choice of siding with justice or siding with terror and they chose to side with terror.’58

  At their dinner at the White House, Bush had told Blair that bombers would come from all directions. Now they came, B-1, B-52 and Stealth bombers, supplemented by cruise missiles fired from a naval task force. Some of the missile salvos were launched from Triumph and Trafalgar, two British nuclear submarines which Admiral Boyce had secretly moved into position. The British contribution was not essential to the military effort, but a symbolic act to show that this was not an entirely American campaign.

  Shortly after the bombs and the missiles came the first insertion of ground troops in the form of American Special Forces and their British counterparts.