The End of the Party

by Andrew Rawnsley

  The restaurant encounter lasted barely more than an hour; the consequences of the deal would remain undigested for more than a decade. Many of Blair’s friends later concluded that he committed a cardinal error which compromised his premiership from the beginning. ‘I think that the greatest mistake that has been made in politics in my lifetime was the deal struck between Blair and Brown that culminated in the Granita agreement,’ argues Robert Harris.

  In the end, it ruined Blair’s premiership. It ruined it politically and it ruined it for him personally. It was an act of supreme folly to allow Brown to get away without having to fight a leadership election. He almost certainly would have come third. He would have been beaten by John Prescott.

  Blair would have been ‘master in his own house from day one’. By doing the deal, he allowed ‘Brown to put his heel on his throat’.47

  Charles Clarke agrees that it would have been much better had Brown run and been beaten by Blair. ‘Tony would have defeated Gordon overwhelmingly. That would have meant that Tony did not owe him a debt.’48 Frank Field reflects: ‘It shows Tony’s inherent weakness, which only really became apparent later.’49 It was ‘a massive mistake’, says Philip Gould. ‘There should have been a contest. Gordon should have stood against Tony. The alternative to a contest was an arrangement. That encumbered Tony with responsibilities to another member of the Cabinet which were not consistent with good Government. Gordon was encumbered with a sense of entitlement which was bad for his personality. It brought out the worst in both of them.’50

  The deal did not assuage Brown’s dark wrath that he was denied the crown. It helped to feed the grievance which corrupted their friendship. He convinced himself that he was somehow cheated out of the leadership. From it came the toxic myth of the ‘stab in the back’ which was assiduously spread by the Chancellor’s lieutenants.51 Even great supporters of Brown such as Ed Balls came to agree that the deal was a great mistake. ‘Tony gave away far too much and Gordon wanted to believe it too much,’ says one of Brown’s closest allies at that time and to this day. ‘The history of the rest of their relationship is Tony trying to claw it back and Gordon trying to hang on to it.’52

  When New Labour came to power, it was a commonplace cliché to describe Blair as ‘presidential’. It was more accurate to see the Government as a dual monarchy. Power was carved into two hemispheres. ‘There were Tony’s subjects and there were Gordon’s subjects,’ says Andrew Turnbull. ‘Tony did foreign affairs, Northern Ireland and education. Gordon did the economy, overseas development and welfare.’ They sparred for control over health and Europe. ‘No-one ever really looked after transport. It was a very low priority in the first term.’53

  Blair allowed more latitude to Brown than any previous Prime Minister conceded to a Chancellor. Cabinet ministers saw ‘Gordon roam throughout the Whitehall forest’.54 In the eyes of Derek Scott, his own economic adviser, Blair surrendered ‘an unprecedented amount of prime ministerial authority to the Chancellor that went well beyond the normal and inevitably central position played by the Treasury in all administrations … it soon became known throughout Whitehall that … the Chancellor could defy the Prime Minister with impunity.’55

  Blair was repeatedly warned that this undermined his authority and capped his ambitions. In response, he would say: ‘You’ve just got to get on with your Chancellor. If you look at governments which fall apart, it is because the Prime Minister and Chancellor fall out. Whatever happens, I’ve got to get on with my Chancellor.’56

  That made Blair frightened of confrontations with Brown. General Sir Charles Guthrie, the Chief of the Defence Staff, discovered ‘to his horror’ that Brown wanted to take a large bite out of the defence budget after everyone thought it was all agreed. The General went to Number 10 to protest: ‘This is putting me in an extremely difficult position.’ The Prime Minister said he agreed with the complaint, but felt unable to take on Brown. ‘Will you go and argue with him about it?’ asked Blair. Guthrie was astounded. ‘Surely you should tell him,’ said the soldier. ‘This is politics. I don’t think I should be doing it. You should tell him what you want because you agree with us.’ ‘It’s very difficult,’ responded Blair. ‘You know, I don’t think I can do it.’ ‘Well,’ said the amazed Guthrie. ‘It does seem very wrong that I have got to do it.’ The defence budget was eventually saved, but only after Guthrie had a blazing row with Brown and made it clear to Blair that he was on the brink of resignation.57

  In their early years in power, Blair remained deferential to Brown on many issues. ‘For all his faults, Gordon is crucial to me,’ he would say. Colleagues and civil servants were astonished by the vast amounts of time he devoted to managing the other man. ‘He mediates, he negotiates, he defuses, he cajoles, he rails, he shouts, he hugs, he flatters,’ one Cabinet minister explained.58

  On those quite rare occasions when Brown didn’t get his own way, he could not bear it. Frank Field saw ‘The Chancellor almost physically exploding with rage and the Prime Minister would behave as though this was an adolescent child who he was kindly dealing with with untold patience.’59 Officials were astonished that Blair ‘spent more time and effort managing the relationship with his Chancellor than on any other issue’.60 He felt obliged to keep Brown supporters in ministerial jobs even when they were clearly inadequate for fear of ‘a war with GB’.61 Blair so often conceded to Brown in the first term that Roy Jenkins was prompted to write him notes telling him ‘not to be so frightened of your Chancellor’.62

  Blair at first didn’t want to listen to Cherie, Campbell, Powell and friends like Charlie Falconer when they warned him that Brown’s propagandists were spinning to the media to undermine him and Cabinet colleagues. ‘Even as the shit was pouring out of the Treasury, Tony persistently refused to believe that it was coming from Gordon.’63 A member of the Cabinet notes: ‘There is a bit of Tony that always likes to see the good in people whether it is Bush or Brown or Berlusconi. He was in denial about how awful Gordon was because he’d have to do something about it.’64 Frank Field, whose ministerial career was one of the many casualties on this battlefield, is another who believes that Blair made a fatal mistake. ‘There has been this disgraceful behaviour from day one of Blair’s leadership. When you’re up against a Chancellor that wants to shoehorn you out every day of every year, you are in an enfeebled position.’65

  One consequence of having a twin-peaks Government was to make all other ministers look small. On this Blair and Brown were agreed: the Cabinet was not a forum for making decisions. Sir Robin Butler, the first Cabinet Secretary to Blair, ‘had the impression that they took into Government the habits of Opposition. And the habits of Opposition had been that the New Labour centre, the revolutionary cell within the Labour Party, fixed what the line was going to be. And they continued to do that in Government.’

  He noted:

  From the start, the proceedings were very informal. Tony Blair wasn’t interested in setting an agenda and working through the items. Even I as Cabinet Secretary didn’t know what was going to be the business taken that day. And certainly Cabinet ministers were not encouraged to raise issues themselves. If anybody raised an issue, then that was not welcome.66

  One long-standing and senior member of the Cabinet, Geoff Hoon, thought: ‘Tony was paranoid about differences being expressed and exposed around the Cabinet table.’67 It was also temperament. When Blair played football at Chequers with his staff, he was ‘a bit of a lone striker. He was not a great passer. He used to zip down the wing and then almost invariably shoot rather than pass the ball or cross it.’68

  Brown was even more of a political ball-hogger than Blair. The Chancellor did not treat the Cabinet as his equals. He viewed other ministers as rivals to be crushed, nonentities to be disdained or satraps to be controlled. ‘Brown exerted a very strong grip,’ comments Andrew Turnbull. ‘He had been given a mandate to be the dominant figure on domestic policy. He did not allow any member of the Cabinet to make a public policy commi
tment without reference to him.’69 Believing that he could always prevail over ministers – and indeed the Prime Minister – if he had them one-on-one, Brown thought his power would be more easily challenged if he allowed it to be scrutinised by the Cabinet as a collective.

  Sir Robin Butler was astonished when he learnt that the Prime Minister and Chancellor had agreed to give control over interest rates to the Bank of England without consulting any of their colleagues. ‘Surely the Cabinet should take this decision,’ Butler protested to Blair. ‘Oh no,’ responded the Prime Minister. ‘That’s not the way we do things. They will agree. The Cabinet won’t dissent from it.’ Butler tried to marshal a new argument against pre-empting Cabinet discussion. ‘I think people outside will expect that a decision of this importance should be endorsed by the Cabinet.’ Blair finally offered a sop to the Cabinet Secretary by saying: ‘We’ll telephone round to them.’70 Robin Cook and John Prescott were rung in advance, but the rest of the Cabinet were taken completely by surprise. On many other issues, Butler would ask Blair: ‘Won’t the Cabinet want to discuss this?’ to be told that, even if they did, they weren’t going to get the opportunity.

  Butler’s successor fared no better in trying to persuade Blair to restore collective responsibility. ‘This ought to go to Cabinet,’ Sir Richard Wilson routinely protested to the Prime Minister. ‘Why?’ ‘Because you need collective agreement. You’ll leave yourself vulnerable if you don’t have it,’ argued Wilson. Blair stared at him: ‘No, I won’t.’71

  Cabinet meetings were ridiculously brief to begin with and only became a little longer because commentators started to remark on their embarrassing brevity. ‘Nothing was being decided,’ says Clare Short. ‘It was a way of using up the time and pretending we were doing Cabinet government.’72 On the account of Jack Straw:

  We used to discuss a lot of things in Tony’s Cabinet, but often they were discussing how we present policies. It was a lot to do with discussing the effects of decisions after in practice they’d been taken. It didn’t mean that Tony was a one-man band, but it did mean that the decision-making tended to take place in bilaterals and in Tony’s so-called den.73

  Cabinet was merely ‘an opportunity to put down a marker or express a view’, agrees Estelle Morris. ‘I never saw it as a place where decisions were made.’74 Paradoxically, this marginalisation of the Cabinet worked to the advantage of the Chancellor more than the Prime Minister. Most of the Cabinet greatly preferred Blair both as a person and as a leader. As a close ally put it to me in the summer of 2001: ‘If Tony went and was replaced by Gordon, the Cabinet would be divided between those who feared they would be shot that night and those who knew they would be shot that night.’75 By failing to use the Cabinet, he did not deploy it as the counter-weight to his mighty rival that it could have been. That was a further reason why Gordon Brown became the most powerful Chancellor there has ever been in British history.

  Civil servants witnessed the already tempestuous relationship ‘get much more difficult’76 the moment they were re-elected for a second term. Blair was restless to do more with his premiership, which meant confronting Brown in areas that the Chancellor regarded as his sovereign territory. Brown was obsessed with becoming Prime Minister, which meant getting rid of Blair.

  A theme of Blair’s private conversation during this period was that he did not want to be remembered as another Harold Wilson who won four elections out of five and talked a lot about modernising Britain but wound up with a lacklustre historical reputation.77 He wanted his second term to be bigger and bolder than his first. ‘In the first term, he was, if you want to be cruel, Mr Focus Group and Mr Spin,’ observes Clare Short. ‘By the second term, he was thinking: “What’s my place in history?” He started to take more control of policy direction. It was a different Tony Blair second time around, more confident, more determined to be in control and to find his legacy.’78

  The serious opposition was not the Conservatives, who had just gone down to their second landslide defeat and seemed suicidally determined to be out of contention for years to come. To replace William Hague as leader, the Tories passed over the boisterous weight of Kenneth Clarke and the born-again moderniser Michael Portillo to select Iain Duncan Smith, a former army captain who had never been a minister. The Conservatives were so riven with infighting that they made the inhabitants of Sicily look like rank amateurs at feuding. The Tories could not find a voice – literally so in the case of their leader. At Prime Minister’s Questions, his nerves were betrayed by the rasping choke that came out of his mouth – ‘the croak of doom’, one cruel Tory called it.79 As things went from bad to worse for the Conservatives, it was joked that IDS stood for ‘In Deep Shit’.

  The real Leader of the Opposition to Blair was his next-door neighbour. Brown was equally fixated with his place in history. ‘Gordon was intent on not just being another Chancellor or another Cabinet colleague,’ says his ally, the MP and owner of the New Statesman, Geoffrey Robinson. ‘He was intent on showing that he was the man to succeed. Gordon was expecting an easy, agreed transition.’80 To Brown and the Brownites, it was ‘an article of faith that there was a promise by Blair to hand over’.81 When a date did not materialise, it became Brown’s repeated and angry complaint to Blair that ‘he was welshing on the deal.’82 The Chancellor was driven more demented after 9/11, when Blair’s evident relish for his role on the world stage indicated to him and his intimates that ‘Tony wasn’t planning to go anywhere.’83

  On the account of one of his circle, Brown was ‘in a state of perpetual anger’.84 There were regular episodes of throwing things at walls, the floor and occasionally other people. He would sit in Cabinet scribbling furiously rather than make contributions. Brown was fixated by his coverage in the press. The Chancellor once called his friend Alistair Darling at six o’clock in the morning on Boxing Day. ‘Have you seen today’s Telegraph?’ Brown growled down the line. ‘No,’ replied Darling, confident that no-one else would have seen it either. Brown ‘then went on to complain about something on page 422 or something like that’.85

  He came into a meeting and hurled a pile of newspapers on the floor, yelling: ‘Look at these fucking papers!’ Philip Gould picked them up, glanced at the headlines and said gently: ‘These are yesterday’s papers, Gordon.’86

  A senior Cabinet minister observed to me at the time that if Blair went on to do a third term: ‘It will be too late for Gordon or most of the rest of us.’87 This was both plausible and hateful to Brown: he might be denied the crown or not get it until Labour’s time in power was drawing to a close. Andrew Turnbull observed that Brown was eaten ‘with a sense of grievance’ and crazed by the question: ‘When is it my turn?’88

  From the moment they won the 2001 election, Brown began to pound Blair with demands for a date. On the account of a Cabinet minister and close friend of Blair: ‘All their confrontations between 2001 and 2006 are about Gordon saying: “Why haven’t you fucking gone?” ’89 One of the few people the Prime Minister fully confided in was Barry Cox, who could be trusted because he was a very old friend who was not part of the Westminster world. Cox is a reliable and compelling witness. ‘It became truly difficult after the 2001 election,’ he says.

  In the summer of 2001, we had a long conversation, Cherie, Tony and I, about how difficult Brown had turned and what he was doing and the behaviour, the petulant way he was demanding that Tony resign and let him take over. Ever since then, it was continuous. He wanted to be Prime Minister. He wanted to be Prime Minister now. There was nothing else. It was running since 2001.90

  There were only two ways to resolve this impasse, but Brown wasn’t going to resign and Blair ever hesitated over sacking him. The senior Number 10 official, Sir Stephen Wall, thought it always unlikely: ‘The prospect of Gordon Brown as a king over the water on the backbenches with a team around him capable of making mischief was too much to contemplate.’91 ‘Tony feared what Brown would unleash – what he would do to the party,’ says Michael Levy.9
2 Alan Milburn agrees: ‘The most telling factor of all was that Tony really thought Gordon would burn the house down.’93

  Blair’s attitude to Brown was also conditioned by mournfulness about the withering of the relationship. ‘Gordon is the only friend I have ever lost,’ he once lamented.94 ‘Even when it was really bad, Tony was never black and white about Gordon,’ says Alastair Campbell.95 According to Barry Cox:

  He used to take the line: ‘Look, political ambition is legitimate for major public figures. It’s entirely legitimate for Gordon to want to be Prime Minister.’ He would try to be understanding about it and lay it off. Many other people would not have tolerated what Gordon Brown was doing. His anger and irritation with Brown was always matched by this generosity towards him, this understanding of why he behaved like he did.96

  There were still occasional moments of warmth. According to one person on the Brown side who often witnessed meetings or listened in to phone calls, ‘there were times when it was strangely intimate – like a husband and wife on the phone.’97

  Even during the rockiest stretches of the marriage, Blair tried to conceal how bad things were. ‘Tony was very discreet about keeping it away from the staff. He didn’t do it in front of the children,’ says the Number 10 official Steve Morris. ‘When everyone around him was really angry about something Gordon had done, Tony was nearly always the calmest. It was that strategy of magnanimity that kept the relationship on the road for so long.’98