The End of the Party

by Andrew Rawnsley

  One day, Sir Richard was taking a group of visitors around Number 10. Cherie materialised. ‘Who are these people, Sir Richard?’ she demanded. The Cabinet Secretary explained that they were from his village in Buckinghamshire.

  Cherie glinted: ‘I hope they’ve noticed the state of the carpet, Sir Richard.’ She turned to the group: ‘Look at the state of the carpet! Ask Sir Richard about the state of the carpet!’12

  Her view was that the spouses of foreign leaders, ambassadors’ wives and the Queen’s ladies-in-waiting were given financial assistance to help them dress well for official duties. But she got no further with this argument when Sir Richard was succeeded as Cabinet Secretary by Sir Andrew Turnbull.

  Another of Cherie’s frustrations was that she was never allowed to enjoy the sort of high-profile and quasi-official role taken by her friend Hillary Clinton. Barry Cox, close friend of the Blairs, says: ‘She hated being told by the Number 10 machine what she should and shouldn’t do.’13 Officials were happiest if she was rarely seen and never heard. Fiona Millar, Alastair Campbell’s partner, took over managing Cherie’s public profile. This superficially cosy arrangement was a mistake because it made the internal workings of Number 10 less professional and more soap-operatic. ‘Relationships are so complicated when you’ve got two couples working that closely together,’ observes Jonathan Powell. ‘Your parallelogram goes wonky.’14 Campbell himself now acknowledges that ‘when the personal and the political collide it is not a healthy place to be.’15 Fiona sought to prevent Cherie from writing a book about the previous first ladies of Downing Street for fear that she’d be accused of taking advantage of her position.

  The book writing was an attempt by Cherie to deal with the feelings of loss of identity and privacy that were the result of her position. She lamented that ‘a political wife … is disenfranchised’ because ‘you cannot afford to express any separate views’ or ‘be seen to have any power’.16

  She was understandably upset when even her most personal and harrowing experiences were subordinated to the obsession with the media which consumed her husband and Campbell. In August 2002, she suffered a miscarriage. Before he had even seen his distraught wife, Blair phoned up with Campbell also on the line for a conference call so they could discuss how they would handle the media. ‘I couldn’t believe it,’ she complained. ‘There I was, bleeding, and they were talking about what was going to be the line to the press.’17

  She never formed a comfortable bond with any of the female aides closest to her husband. Her relationship with Anji Hunter was ‘diabolical’ and ‘disastrous’.18 The flirtatious Hunter first met Blair when they were rebellious teenagers at school in Scotland. It was often rumoured, but always denied by both of them, that they had been lovers in their youth. One of Hunter’s roles was to give emotional succour to Blair when he was down. This was hard for Cherie: the constant and intimate presence of a woman who had known her husband for longer than his wife. ‘She’d go up to the flat and find Anji on the sofa talking to Tony and it made her mad.’19 There was a colossal row between the Prime Minister and his wife in his den when he kept Hunter on at Downing Street after the 2001 election. When Hunter changed her mind about staying and left later in the year, Cherie walked around with a huge smile on her face.20

  Sally Morgan returned to Number 10 to assume the role of Blair’s most influential female aide. She was a much more self-effacing figure than either Hunter or Campbell and yet Morgan outlasted both of them. After a stint as a primary school teacher, she had worked for the Labour Party since her mid-twenties. She was utterly loyal, tough in a matter-of-fact way, highly astute and fiercely protective of Blair and his image. Her relations with Cherie were also complicated by the damage done by the money issue. ‘We all hated the freebies and all that,’ says Morgan. ‘When we tried to raise it with Tony, he just didn’t want to do anything about it. He didn’t want the row, the confrontations with Cherie.’21

  Truth be told, he was interested in money himself. ‘He was just a bit better at concealing it,’ observes a senior official.22

  Both the Blairs liked to spend. ‘Their children had designer clothing. Not just any old designer clothing, the top-of-the-line stuff.’23 They both enjoyed expensive travel to exotic climes and Michelin-starred food. They looked enviously at those who could effortlessly afford the finest things in life.

  Blair made a revealing aside during a Davos summit where the wealthy, the famous and the powerful annually cluster in the Swiss Alps. Blair found himself seated between Bono, the stupendously loaded rock star, and Bill Gates, the billionaire computer software magnate. Contemplating his neighbours, Blair groaned out loud that he had chosen ‘the wrong career’.

  This was not the first time, and nor would it be the last, that the superrich provoked him into expressions of awe and jealousy. In private conversation, the Prime Minister would often wistfully dwell on the wealth of his university contemporaries.24 Sometimes he would even express this in public, telling one interviewer: ‘It’s amazing how many of my friends I was in school and university with, they ended up so rich. There’s a mate of mine I ran into the other day – we used to run discos together and things – now he’s worth millions.’25 He sometimes seemed to dream of another life in which he was a stonkingly rich actor, rock star or entrepreneur.

  The Prime Minister was very affluent compared with most of those whom he ruled. Moreover, he could look forward to making huge sums in his post-prime ministerial life from bank boards, the international lecture circuit and memoir-writing. In retirement, he would join the lower leagues of the super-rich himself.26 As Prime Minister, he felt impecunious when in the company of the billionocracy. I once asked one of his intimates what lay at the root of the Blairs’ blind spot over money. ‘They spend too much time in the company of very rich people,’ she replied bluntly.27

  Their desire to live the life of the super-rich was most obviously expressed in their choice of grand holidays, which invariably generated mockery in the press, especially if there was a flavour of the freebie about them. Paddy Ashdown, in many other respects an admirer, was scornful of Blair’s penchant for ‘surrounding himself with human bling’.28

  Sir Cliff Richard was wholesome enough as a holiday host. The Bee Gees were harmless. Silvio Berlusconi was not.

  Blair’s aides often wished that they could persuade him to take holidays which were more like those of the average voter. The Prime Minister, usually so well attuned to Middle Britain, was defiant about his holidays. ‘We, as his advisers, would much rather that he’d taken holidays at Center Parcs,’ says Matthew Taylor. ‘But you can understand. He worked incredibly hard, he needed a proper break, if you do a job like that, if you’re under that sort of pressure, aren’t you entitled to have a holiday somewhere where you’re not constantly besieged by people stopping you and arguing with you?’29

  His sojourns with the rich and sometimes infamous did not make Blair happier. He would return from breaks in wealthy men’s villas to moan to his intimates about how it made him feel poor. Here he was, someone with all the responsibilities of leading a G8 nation, and yet he had little money compared with these billionaire businessmen and rock stars. The aides who were exposed to this whingeing had a declining tolerance for it, not least because they, like most people, had to pay in full for their holidays. Braver members of his staff like Sally Morgan would respond to these outbursts of self-pity by reminding the Prime Minister that he was better off than most Britons and had gone into politics for public service, not to get rich enough to buy Caribbean hideaways, Tuscan villas and super-yachts.30

  The New Labour period coincided with and helped to fashion an era in which the super-rich increased in both their visibility and influence. The billionocracy rarely had any great allegiance to either ideology or country. A new class of big money held many politicians in their thrall, not least those leading New Labour.

  Blair was given a first warning about dangerous entanglements with wealthy men during
the Ecclestone Affair early in his first term. He ought never to have exposed himself again to the charge that donations could be traded for favours.31 That red flag went unheeded and he continued to be reckless with his reputation when it came to fund-raising. In February 2002, there was another sleaze eruption when it was revealed that Blair had written a letter to the Prime Minister of Romania in support of a bid by LNM to take over the Romanian state steel company. LNM was owned by Lakshmi Mittal, who had given £125,000 to Labour for the 2001 campaign and would donate greater sums for the 2005 campaign. Small change to that billionaire created an enormous stink for the Government. Blair subsequently insisted that he did not know that the tycoon was a donor even though they had mingled at a party organised by his fund-raiser.

  There were respects in which this saga was worse than the Ecclestone Affair. At least when the Formula One boss got his exemption from a ban on tobacco advertising, he could muster an argument that it might jeopardise the jobs of British workers in a high-tech industry. Lakshmi Mittal was not British. Nor was his business. Contrary to Downing Street’s initial protestations, the company was registered in a tax haven in the Dutch Antilles and barely a thousandth of its workforce was employed in the UK.

  The accusation of opponents and the press that favours had been bought by a steel tycoon would not have had such traction had they not seemed to fit a pattern of behaviour established from Ecclestone onwards.

  Part of the problem was psychological: Blair was brilliant at persuading himself that he was a man of sparkling integrity whatever the evidence to the contrary. The nobility of his ends, as he saw them, blinded him to how others might see his means as squalid.

  Challenged about the Mittal donation at Prime Minister’s Questions, he blustered away that it was all ‘garbagegate’.32

  He railed at the Tories that he would take no criticism from them when two of their number had gone to jail.33 What a falling off that was from the ideal he had once expressed to ‘restore faith in public life’. He was now reduced to defending his Government on the basis that at least none of its members had yet been sent to prison.

  Downing Street was so repetitively hit by sleaze stories that Godric Smith, one of the Number 10 spokesmen, would wearily sigh that it was ‘groundhog day’ when another one burst into the headlines. Even Peter Mandelson acknowledged that the Government was damaged by ‘the appearance that has been created of an overly cosy relationship with business’.34

  Very soon after the furore over the Mittal money, it emerged that the Prime Minister had embraced a pornographer. Four months before the election, Labour took a donation of £100,000 from Richard Desmond, who presided over a fortune generated in part from magazine and television pornography. The donation was made within days of the then Trade and Industry Secretary, Stephen Byers, giving the go-ahead for Desmond’s Northern & Shell group to take over Express newspapers.35 This ignited a blazing row within the Labour Party and another hail of accusations of impropriety from the rest of the press. Blair squirmed when he was asked how he reconciled his professed Christian convictions with taking money from a merchant of porn. The Vicar of St Albion had been caught with Horny Housewives, Big Ones and Very Best of Mega Boobs sliding out of the pages of his Bible. An even worse taste was left in the mouth by the way in which this behaviour was defended. ‘We have acted with integrity,’ insisted John Reid, the Northern Ireland Secretary. ‘If you are asking if we are going to sit in moral judgement on those who wish to contribute to the Labour Party, then the answer to that is no.’36

  Tony Blair once claimed that his Government would be pureness exemplified. Here was one of his Cabinet loyalists apparently arguing that there were no ethical boundaries which Labour would not cross to get money.

  Labour spent the donation on buying campaign adverts in Desmond’s papers. In fact, Labour paid £120,000 to his company, more than the size of his donation. They didn’t just look very seedy; they looked extremely stupid as well.

  Philip Gould, his interpreter of public opinion, reported to the Prime Minister that the country was ‘in a pessimistic mood’ and viewed its Government with ‘distrust and cynicism’.37 Alastair Campbell, who by now had developed an almost indiscriminate loathing for his former trade, blamed journalists. Number 10’s über-propagandist sometimes had a good case when he said that the Government was ‘more spinned against than spinning’. His myopia was not seeing how the presentational culture he had been so instrumental in creating had encouraged the press to put the most negative construction on government.

  While Campbell was at the throat of journalists, Blair had as often been at the knees of the panjandrums of the media. Editors, proprietors and leading commentators were regular guests for drinks, lunches and dinners at Number 10 and Chequers. One tabloid editor, Piers Morgan of the Mirror, recorded his astonishment that ‘I had 22 lunches, 6 dinners, 6 interviews, 24 further one-to-one chats over tea and biscuits, and numerous phone calls with him.’38

  That didn’t stop Morgan turning on the Government over the Afghan and Iraq wars. Relations with Morgan were soured by the Mirror’s resentment at Downing Street’s closeness to the Sun. He was especially aggravated that Blair and Campbell gave so many scoops to his rival.

  Blair had lavished attention on Paul Dacre, the editor of the Daily Mail, who had initially declared himself to be ‘enthralled by this man [Blair]’ in the apparent belief that ‘he was going to devote his Government to restoring the family.’39

  The Mail turned viciously on what its editor regarded as ‘anti-family’ policies such as equalising the age of consent for gay sex. By the second term, the Mail had entirely reverted to right-wing type as Labour’s most vitriolic press enemy. Blair expressed private regret – ‘I feel ashamed,’ he confided40 – that he had once tried to court Dacre. Animated by the editor’s intense personal dislike of the Prime Minister, the Mail portrayed Blair as the most despicable character ever to inhabit Number 10 and unflatteringly contrasted him with Gordon Brown, whom Dacre saw as a more ‘moral’ man. Cherie was flayed in his pages as an avaricious witch addicted to crackpot ‘New Age’ therapies.

  The Daily Mail spearheaded the attack when the tabloids demanded to know whether Leo had received the MMR vaccine. There was some history of autism on Cherie’s side of the family. Alarmist claims that the vaccine could cause autism, claims spread by the Mail above all else, generated a public panic which the Government had to spend large sums of taxpayers’ money trying to calm. The health ministers would have been greatly assisted by confirmation that the Prime Minister and his wife had followed the advice of his own Government and given the MMR vaccine to their youngest child. Parents might not necessarily have followed the Blairs’ example, but they were less likely to trust the Government’s advice when the country’s leader was furtive about his own child.41 The Blairs did, in fact, get Leo vaccinated. But Cherie had become so bloody-minded about the press that she would not let Number 10 confirm that this was so.42

  Much of the press was now turning on the Government. One paradoxical reason for that was the weakness of the Conservatives. Campbell had a point when he complained that much of the media saw it as their task ‘to stand up and try to do the job the Opposition was failing to do’.43

  The Government was pincered. It was attacked from the right because it was Labour and from the left because of the alliance with Bush. Rupert Murdoch’s Sun and Times were the only daily papers which offered consistent support. Cynicism about spin deepened when it was revealed that Jo Moore, a spin doctor to Stephen Byers, had sent an e-mail on 9/11 suggesting: ‘It is now a very good day to get out anything that we want to bury.’44 This was a suggestion revolting even by the debauched standards of some of the spin merchants. Moore was regarded by her fellow practitioners as a tough and able member of their profession. She wrote that memo not because she was bad at her job, but because she was too good at it. It required a terrifying dedication to spinnery to be able to watch the Twin Towers burn and conclude that i
t was a glorious opportunity to manipulate the news flow.

  Once the awful e-mail was exposed, Moore discussed her position with her boss. She, Byers and Campbell rapidly agreed that she would have to go. Moore had ‘her bags packed’ when the Prime Minister intervened.45 In public, Blair condemned her behaviour as ‘horrible, wrong and very stupid’.46 Privately, it was he who insisted that she should stay in the Government’s employment. Blair did not want to give her scalp to the media and even less did he want to hand it to the civil servants who had leaked the e-mail. ‘If they get her, every special adviser will be vulnerable to leaking by the civil service,’ Blair told Byers, overruling the minister. ‘It will be open season. We have to protect them.’47

  Blair’s intervention only served to prolong the furore over Moore, who was eventually forced to quit four months later. During a further uproar about spin, Sir Richard Mottram, Permanent Secretary and Knight Commander of the British Empire, howled to a fellow civil servant: ‘We’re all fucked. I’m fucked. You’re fucked. The whole department’s fucked. It’s been the biggest cock-up ever and we’re all completely fucked.’48 It was Byers who ended up in that condition. He made a reasonable start as Transport Secretary by trying to tackle years of neglect of the railways, but ceased to be able to function as a minister when his truthfulness became the central focus of media interest. Byers was no more or less mendacious than the average politician, but it got to the point where he could not utter a sentence without it being pored over for evidence of deceit. The Opposition and sections of the press dismembered his character by serially branding him a liar, a label especially favoured by the tabloids because it was a close rhyme with Byers. In mid-May, I concluded a column with the observation that he looked doomed because ‘he is rendered incapable of even selling good news.’49

  On 28 May, Byers quit. ‘I’m going to pack it in,’ he told Blair. He felt he had become ‘a liability to the Government and a liability to him’. Blair said his resignation statement should be made from Downing Street, ‘so you are still seen as a friend.’50