The End of the Party

by Andrew Rawnsley

  Powell failed to pull that off. One reason was because so much of ‘the evidence’ supplied by the CIA turned out to be what the diplomat Sir Christopher Meyer undiplomatically calls ‘bollocks’.51 The Secretary of State also called the UN’s attention ‘to the fine paper that the United Kingdom distributed yesterday, which describes in exquisite detail Iraqi deception activities’.52 This was not the dossier published the previous September, but a piece of propaganda confected by the Campbell spin machine. It was exquisite only in its shabbiness. The ‘fine paper’ was cobbled together by a few of Campbell’s gofers. ‘Given haphazardly to a few journalists on the basis that it would be a good story for the next day … it really damaged the overall impression that people had about government information on Iraq,’ says Ed Owen, another of New Labour’s senior spin doctors.53 ‘It was the Alastair operation at its worst,’ observed one member of the Cabinet.54 Blair, apparently unwittingly in this case, represented it to MPs as ‘further intelligence’.55 In fact, much of it was made up of unattributed quotes from a twelve-year-old Ph.D. thesis written by a student in California which had been cut and pasted off the internet and then embellished with stronger language. The British intelligence services were livid at the suggestion that this ‘dodgy dossier’ had their imprimatur. Even Campbell regarded it as a ‘bad own goal’.56 Jack Straw would later publicly describe it as ‘a complete Horlicks’. He rightly feared that ‘it undermined our overall credibility.’57 In private, the Foreign Secretary’s language was stronger. He was ‘furious, absolutely furious’ about this ‘fuck-up’.58

  There was a carnival atmosphere in Edinburgh’s Caledonian hotel on the evening of St Valentine’s Day. The downstairs bar heaved with rugby fans becoming enjoyably beered in anticipation of the Scotland–Ireland game on Saturday. The mood was much less relaxed in the presidential suite upstairs, where the Prime Minister was holed up working on the speech he would deliver to his party’s spring conference the next day. Nick Ryden, lifelong friend and godfather to Leo, dropped in with his wife for a drink. They were shocked by the state of the Prime Minister.

  ‘It was a real contrast between the Tony Blair we’d known and the Tony Blair sitting in front of us in the presidential suite. The contrast was quite staggering. He looked drawn. He wasn’t sleeping. He hadn’t been eating properly. There was no-one looking after him. There was no energy about him.’59

  Others had noticed that Blair appeared wrecked. The official line was that he had a bad bout of the flu which he couldn’t shake off. The reason he couldn’t beat off the flu was because he was so utterly shattered by anxiety over Iraq. ‘He wasn’t sleeping,’ says Sally Morgan. ‘He looked terrible.’60 Heavy applications of make-up concealer turned his face the colour of terracotta for public performances, but it couldn’t entirely mask the crow’s feet splayed under his darkened eyes, the hollowing of his cheeks and the deepening frown lines carved in his brow. The strain was engraved over a man whose biggest marketing feature was once a light and cheesy grin. Many others who saw him at close quarters were worried about the toll on his health taken by long days and sleepless nights.

  His drained, red-eyed appearance shocked one of the party leaders present when he briefly flew out to Belfast in early March. ‘The first morning was a shambles. He just wasn’t up to speed, he wasn’t focused. Jonathan Powell had his head down, frantically writing notes. Blair was completely worn out.’61

  A Cabinet member noted: ‘He lost weight and became quite gaunt. You could see that he was under great strain. He was throwing all his authority at it and desperately trying to hold the thing together.’62 On Saturday, 15 February, Alastair Campbell and Sally Morgan joined him in Scotland. Neither originally planned to make the trip to the spring conference. Morgan decided to fly north when Blair rang her the night before ‘sounding desperate’.63 Campbell got a similar call. Neither thought they dare leave him on his own. He confessed to them that he had again slept badly. They mordantly joked that it might be his last speech as party leader.64 The speech needed to be a compelling answer to his opponents, who were planning to take to the streets for anti-war protests the like of which the world had never seen before. Millions were going to take part in some 600 mass demonstrations around the world, the largest global peace protest ever staged.

  ‘Even I am a bit worried about this one,’ Blair declared to his aides about the size of the marches which were planned for London and major cities across Britain.65 A million people, men, women and children, young, middle-aged and old, marched through the capital that Saturday. They massed in Hyde Park, where they were addressed by Tony Benn, the veteran old general of the left; Charles Kennedy, who had found a cause for his leadership of the Liberal Democrats; and celebrity warriors against war such as Harold Pinter and Bianca Jagger. From Edinburgh to Cardiff, protestors were marching with banners and T-shirts emblazoned with ‘not in my name’.

  ‘Getting rid of murderous dictators used to be a left-wing cause!’ Blair would rail within the walls of Number 10.66 He was taken aback to learn from aides and ministers that many of their friends, and even family members, were on the march against him. His personal pollster, Stan Greenberg, had become ‘very much involved in the anti-war effort in the US.’67

  Accustomed to being popular, the Prime Minister was both staggered and bewildered by the scale and passion of the opposition he had aroused. One of his senior aides notes: ‘He’s not a table thumper, he doesn’t throw things, he doesn’t kick things. It’s more: “Why can’t they see my point of view?” ’68

  Blair’s mode in his first term was to be a big-tent politician who tried to corral everyone behind him with his easy charm and chameleon politics. That had made him an unprecedentedly popular Prime Minister. The maestro of sweet consensus was transformed by Iraq into a leader who bitterly divided his country. The cautious calibrator of the odds had become a risk-taker ready to ‘bet the farm’, as one of his Cabinet allies put it.69 The pop star premier of the first term became the conviction-driven lone warrior of the second term.

  Helicopters clattered overhead and armed police surrounded the building when Blair arrived from Edinburgh at the Clyde Auditorium in Glasgow. Music from Atomic Kitten, a curious choice, boomed from the sound system as delegates to the conference came into the hall. They were largely silent when Blair spoke. ‘I ask the marchers to understand this: I do not seek unpopularity as a badge of honour. But sometimes it is the price of leadership. And the cost of conviction,’ he declared.

  ‘The moral case against war has a moral answer,’ he went on, namely that the absence of war would also lead to death and suffering, not least of the Iraqi people themselves. A million were marching in London but ‘that is still less than the number who died in the wars that he started’, Blair argued. ‘Ridding the world of Saddam would be an act of humanity. It is leaving him there that is inhumane.’70

  This speech was his most eloquent riposte to the claim that all the moral arguments belonged to opponents of war. In retrospect, when it became evident that WMD were a false prospectus for the invasion, it became a consensus view among his allies that ‘he should have emphasised more the regime change justification’71 and ‘emphasised the humanitarian case more’.72 Some of the Cabinet, though, were ‘uneasy’ that weekend to find that they were being asked to suddenly shift the argument from WMD to regime change. They questioned why.73 What they were not to know was that MI6 had already secretly withdrawn as unreliable some of the claims in the September dossier.74

  Some found Blair a more impressive politician for the conviction that was now on fervent display. The right-wing polemicist and future Conservative MP Michael Gove wrote a piece for The Times swooningly entitled: ‘I can’t fight my feelings anymore: I love Tony.’75 Others were roused to equally passionate hate. Philip Gould, his personal pollster, later lamented to others in the inner circle that ‘Iraq bent Tony out of shape.’76

  Another way of dealing with the fierce opposition to war was to confront it hea
d on by making his case on television before hostile audiences. His team dubbed this ‘the masochism strategy’. One televised bruising was filmed in the Foreign Office Map Room. Under the gaze of portraits of Wellington and Nelson, Blair was attacked from all sides. ‘How many innocent victims are you going to kill?’ one woman challenged him. ‘Don’t do it.’ This encounter ended badly when the Prime Minister was slow handclapped by some of the audience.77

  ‘Who the fuck fixed that up?’ he steamed to his staff afterwards. ‘Thanks very much guys.’78 None of his aides wanted to ‘own up’.79 On another occasion, he took up an invitation from the Political Editor of ITN, Nick Robinson, to argue his case with six sceptical members of the public. When the cameras finished recording, Blair took the six into the Cabinet Room and carried on debating with them for a further half-hour, much to the agitation of those responsible for his schedule. From the campaign to ditch Clause Four with which he had begun his leadership of his party through two election victories, he had grown accustomed to winning arguments. Such was Blair’s faith in his own magic, he seemed to believe that he could win round the country through the sheer power of his persuasion.

  A slim consolation was that other European leaders who had allied with the Americans were even more embattled. In a phone conversation, José María Aznar remarked that only 4 per cent of Spaniards supported war. ‘Crikey,’ replied Blair. ‘That’s even less than the number who think Elvis Presley is still alive.’80

  He faced another rough ride at the hands of an almost uniformly hostile television audience in Newcastle assembled by Newsnight. To one woman, who said she couldn’t support a war which didn’t have the sanction of the UN, he revealingly replied: ‘But with a second resolution?’81

  As February grew older, securing that second resolution was becoming ever more essential and ever more difficult. As the Foreign Secretary’s senior aide notes: ‘Getting a second resolution was crucial in terms of getting a proper political consensus behind military action. That’s why they invested so much effort in it.’82 Manning was becoming ‘more and more pessimistic’ that it could be achieved.83

  America and Britain were opposed by the other three permanent members of the Security Council. Russia, China and France supported the weapons inspectors’ request for more time and resources to do their job, especially after Hans Blix’s team destroyed some seventy missiles. ‘These are not toothpicks,’ declared the lugubrious Swede who headed the inspectors. The split at the UN was widened by his second and third reports. Blix would never give the cut-and-dried assessments that America and Britain so desperately wanted from him. His commentaries on the inspections process resembled the end-of-match analysis of his fellow Swede, Sven-Göran Eriksson, the England football manager: ‘The first half, Saddam was good. The second half, he was not so good. We look forward to the next match.’ Blix was trying to be judicious, but the effect of his ambiguities was that the rival powers could interpret his reports to suit their own prejudices. ‘The trouble with Blix is that he doesn’t want to be blamed for starting a war’ was Blair’s exasperated explanation to himself and his aides.84 It had not occurred to him or anyone with influence over events that the WMD might simply not be there at all. To the Americans and the British, the failure to locate WMD was proof that the duplicitous Saddam was up to his old tricks of concealment.

  ‘Saddam Hussein had been given specific responsibilities, and it did not appear that he had the interest or the will to do that which the world demanded,’ says George Bush’s Chief of Staff. ‘The clock was running out. When the clock runs out, what is the consequence? The consequence would be war.’85

  The clock was also running out on Tony Blair’s diplomacy. One of his fatal assumptions during this period was his belief that he could win round other major European leaders through his gift for persuasion. ‘Tony thought the force of his own personality would bring people along and find a way through,’ says David Manning.86 Blair had always believed that he could conquer the world with charm. He invested huge faith in his ability to talk his way out of trouble, round problems, through dilemmas and into alliances. He did indeed have a talent for it which he had been exploiting since he was a teenager, but now he hit the limits of his ability. Paddy Ashdown observes: ‘One of Blair’s failings is to over-estimate the power of his charm. It is an exceedingly powerful weapon in his hands, but it is not as powerful as he thinks it is.’87

  Two of Blair’s key relationships in Europe were in tatters. He was bitterly though unreasonably angry with Gerhard Schröder, the Chancellor of Germany. He should have known that the Germans would not be allies for the use of force in Iraq. During the Kosovo conflict, Schröder explained to Blair why his country could not engage in military intervention. The British ‘like fighting’, he told Blair, but Germany had become ‘essentially pacifist’.88 Schröder had turned round his domestic fortunes by opposing a war. Having narrowly won re-election in September, he would have destroyed himself if he did a volte-face now. ‘Germany doesn’t matter,’ Jonathan Powell would sniff about Europe’s richest country. ‘It hasn’t got a veto.’89

  France did possess a veto on the Security Council. For a long time, Blair told himself and tried to convince others that Jacques Chirac would ultimately fall into line. ‘The French always do this – they’ll come round in the end,’ he would say.90 From the moment that Chirac ordered a French aircraft carrier to stop steaming towards Iraq and reverse course in mid-January, it should have been clear that this time France was not going to come round.

  As well as being a blow to Blair’s conceit of himself as a great persuader, the clear opposition to war from other major European leaders gave encouragement and ammunition to opposition in Britain. In a Commons vote on 26 February, 122 Labour MPs defied the party whip and voted for an amendment declaring: ‘The case for military action is as yet unproven.’ They were joined by 52 Liberal Democrats and 13 Conservatives. It was the largest revolt by its own MPs against a government since 1886. Many more only hung back from joining the rebellion on the basis that there would be a second UN resolution, a hope which Blair already privately knew was looking forlorn. One of the most Blairite members of the Cabinet gasped to me: ‘This could cost Tony everything.’91

  Donald Rumsfeld sneered that France and Germany were ‘the old Europe’, calling in aid the support for the Americans among ‘the new Europe’, the former Warsaw Pact countries who were largely behind the US.92 Blair could not afford to be so casually derisive of this fracture through the heart of Europe. His entire strategy had been predicated on keeping America and Europe together with himself as ‘the bridge’ between them. His bridge was now being sawn away at both ends of the Atlantic.

  The opposing gangs of New York lined up to do battle at the UN building in Manhattan. Allied with France and Germany were Russia, China and Syria. The British and the Americans could count only on Spain and Bulgaria.

  The balance of the vote on the Security Council was held by Angola, Cameroon, Chile, Guinea, Mexico and Pakistan. They were dubbed the ‘Swing Six’. Even some of his closest friends wondered how Blair had got himself into a position where his destiny might be decided in the presidential palace in Yaounde.

  Britain’s ambassador at the UN, Sir Jeremy Greenstock, lobbied furiously among the Six to try to secure a second resolution. For a while the Americans ‘tried quite hard’ to help, but Greenstock ‘didn’t believe that their heart was in it because they were doing it for us rather than their own reasons’.93 Manning became ‘increasingly doubtful that the Americans are putting enough effort in’.94 Blair threw himself at the attempt to get a second resolution ‘like a man possessed, like a mad man, he was desperate for it.’95 He was working on it ‘to the bitter end’, fearing that ‘the UN might be going the way of the League of Nations’. But he had by now ‘internalised the view that if it didn’t work then he would join military action, however difficult that was’.96

  Valerie Amos, the Foreign Officer minister, was sent off on
a tour of the three African states bearing handwritten notes for their leaders from the Prime Minister. At Number 10, ‘we were convinced that the Americans could shift the Mexicans and the Chileans – and they couldn’t.’97 David Manning flew out to Mexico and Chile – ‘the last throw’ – to solicit President Fox and President Lagos.98 It was ‘deeply discussed’ within Downing Street whether Blair himself should make the long flight to Santiago to personally lobby Lagos, but he drew back when his aides feared that he would come back humiliatingly empty-handed. That would be an ‘overt failure and wasn’t worth risking’.99

  France and Germany countered with an alternative resolution of their own, one which advocated strengthening Blix’s team and extending the inspection period to 120 days. On 5 March, they joined with Russia to make a public declaration that they would ‘not let a proposed resolution pass that would authorise the use of force’.100

  This was ‘a very significant diplomatic defeat both for the United States and the United Kingdom’ in the view of Britain’s most senior ambassador.101 America could not even get on board Chile and Mexico, countries in their own backyard. Britain entirely failed with France and Germany. It was now clear to Jeremy Greenstock at the UN that France, Germany and Russia were ‘becoming more and more obsessed about stopping the superpower taking unilateral action’.102