The End of the Party

by Andrew Rawnsley

  The Prime Minister was risking everything trying to persuade his party and the British people of the value of the Atlantic alliance and the imperative to tackle Saddam. Here was the US Defense Secretary casually saying that they could easily do without the British.

  Looked at another way, this presented Blair with one final opportunity to extract himself from the war. Manning, Morgan and Straw made further attempts to persuade Blair to pull back. He was having none of it, dismissing them almost without bothering to argue the case. ‘This is really dangerous,’ Morgan warned him.

  ‘You don’t have to do this, you really don’t have to do this,’ Manning argued.

  ‘No, David, I really do have to do this,’ responded Blair.42

  Any hope of securing a second resolution at the UN evaporated altogether when Jacques Chirac gave an interview in which he declared that France would wield its veto at the Security Council against the British and the Americans. ‘Whatever the circumstances,’ said the French President, ‘France will vote “Non” because we believe, tonight, that there are no grounds to wage war.’43

  Chirac’s ‘Non’ destroyed what remained of the already tiny chances of getting agreement at the UN. There was no incentive for the Swing Six to expose themselves by supporting another resolution if the French, probably joined by the Chinese and the Russians, were going to wield the veto.

  Blair professed outrage, saying in front of a journalist: ‘This is just a foolish thing to do at this moment in the world’s history.’44 At a packed meeting with Labour MPs, he tore into Chirac and the French. ‘It is a wrecking tactic, done with absolute calculation,’ he told them, claiming that ‘until a couple of days ago I thought I had a majority.’45

  Chirac’s intervention was a crisis in which Blair spotted a glimmer of opportunity. He now showed the low cunning in his character. Sir Stephen Wall witnessed Blair and Campbell in a Number 10 corridor discussing how they could cast Chirac as the bad guy.46 On the 11th, and again on the 13th and the 19th of that month, Blair had phone conversations with Rupert Murdoch.47 The day after the first of those calls, the Sun, always eager for any excuse to froth up Francophobia, ridiculed Chirac as ‘Le French Worm’ and a ‘cheap tart who puts price before principle, money before honour’.48

  As Number 10 orchestrated the campaign to blame Chirac, the French were infuriated. Their ambassador in London, Gérard Errera, complained in person to Number 10 and was met with the response: ‘But it’s working like magic!’49

  Francophobia also served to solidify the Cabinet when it met on Thursday. When Blair bade them a good morning, some of the ministers chorused back, in the manner of a primary school French class: ‘Bonjour, Prime Minister.’ David Blunkett prompted further mirth by suggesting: ‘We can all agree that Chirac has been completely reckless’, enjoying himself by poking Clare Short in the eye as well. When she made a remark about ‘megaphone diplomacy’, Charles Clarke jeered across the Cabinet table: ‘Like on the radio.’50 Gordon Brown had often stayed opaquely mute during earlier Cabinet discussions about Iraq. The Chancellor now made a significant intervention. He declared to the others that ‘we pin the blame on France for its isolated refusal to agree in the Security Council.’51 Afterwards, some of the Blairite ministers muttered darkly that the Prime Minister’s position must really be imperilled if the Chancellor was now calculating that it was time to sound loyal.52

  Of all the people around the Cabinet table, Gordon Brown posed the greatest menace to Tony Blair. The Chancellor’s opposition to war would either have stopped it or forced Blair to resign and quite possibly could have achieved both. Brown had not advertised any dissent, but neither had he been conspicuously supportive. ‘He was nowhere to be seen for most of the time,’ says Sally Morgan. ‘He was very nervous about it.’53 The cautious Chancellor felt impaled on a dilemma. There was a temptation to strike at Blair’s moment of extreme vulnerability and some of his camp were urging him to do just that. One of his allies in the Cabinet, Clare Short, thought he was ‘willing to wound but afraid to strike. Gordon was always worried that if he really struck, the Labour Party might divide in the way that it has historically done and that would weaken his time when he came to power. His fear was the divided party.’54

  Greatly though he lusted for the premiership, that craving was always tempered by his terror of inheriting a wrecked government. He would additionally face the ferocious hostility of the pro-war Murdoch press and other newspapers if he struck down their hero, Blair.55

  On Friday, 14 March, Sir Jeremy Greenstock rang from the UN to definitively report the death of any hope of a second resolution. He and his American counterpart now switched their efforts to thwarting France and Russia from introducing an anti-war resolution. If that got majority support, they would be in the terrible position of having to use their vetoes to block it.56

  The following morning, the Prime Minister went through the connecting door between Numbers 10 and 11 for an important encounter with his Chancellor. As was often his habit on a weekend when he was not performing in public, Blair was wearing an open-necked blue shirt and chinos. His Chancellor was more formally dressed in a dark suit as they sat in a gloomy reception room. The meeting began with Hilary Armstrong, the Chief Whip, reading out the latest assessment of how many Labour MPs would vote against the Government. For all the pressure already applied by the whips, the rebel numbers were still terrifyingly large. ‘They haven’t seen the abyss yet,’ remarked Sally Morgan, trying to be more optimistic. ‘When they’ve seen it, they will come back from it.’57

  Gordon Brown sat in one of the gilded, judge-like thrones in the room. Within Number 10 he had been mocked over the preceding weeks for doing his ‘Macavity the cat’ trick of disappearing in a crisis. They also feared that he was deliberately distancing himself so that he could seize the crown if it all went wrong.58 Brown became ‘angry and frustrated’ when he read press reports that he was being half-hearted in support of Blair. The Chancellor told his inner circle this was Blair’s fault for cutting him out of all the decision-making.59 Brown’s main argument with Blair was that he was underestimating Britain’s influence over the Americans. ‘You’ve got to get them to go the extra mile at the UN,’ he contended.60

  From his gilded seat, Brown said to Blair: ‘What people ask me is, why can’t we delay it? Why do we have to do it now?’

  Blair was impatient with the question: ‘Time, time and more time.’ With the second resolution dead, they would ‘go back to 1441’ as their justification for war.

  Brown responded: ‘We’ll have to produce better language than that if we’re going to persuade people to believe us.’

  The room was frozen. As one witness to this exchange says: ‘Everybody realised that Gordon Brown was still at that stage the one person who could have stopped it.’61

  The Chancellor persisted: ‘Why do we have to go now?’

  ‘It can’t wait,’ replied Blair with the exasperation of someone who had been through this argument with so many people so many times before.

  Brown seemed to be working himself up to have another go. ‘You could see how close he was to saying: “This is wrong.” ’62 But he didn’t. He too had made his decision.

  When it came down to it, Brown did not have a fundamental disagreement in principle about Iraq. He agreed that there had to be a response to Saddam to sustain the credibility of the international order. He believed that the intelligence showed there was a genuine threat. In the words of one of his closest aides: ‘He was totally coloured by his fervent Atlanticism. His overriding position was that we can’t afford to be seen as anti-American.’63

  Members of the Cabinet noted that ‘suddenly Gordon and Tony are together again and Gordon is very engaged on Iraq, which he hadn’t been.’ Blair was boosted by having Brown securely onside. ‘Tony feels better when he’s got Gordon with him. Despite their differences, when he was in these crunches, he liked Gordon there.’64 And Brown liked to be there. According to one of his aides: �
�Gordon was childishly excited when Tony asked him to come on board and help with the strategy.’65 Clare Short was not alone in gaining the strong impression that it was Brown as much as Blair who ‘cooked up’ the plan to blame Chirac.66

  On Sunday, Blair flew out to the Azores for a final council of war with Bush. On Monday, Brown gave an unequivocal statement of public support and threw himself into the effort to win over Labour MPs. ‘In the final days, Gordon was absolutely core,’ says Sally Morgan.67

  On 17 March, the Cabinet, meeting unusually on a Monday afternoon, filed into Number 10 to take their places around the coffin-shaped table. Right on the cusp of the conflict, they were finally going to consider whether or not it was actually legal.

  An invasion had been secretly discussed for a year now, but for all that time Blair tried to prevent discussion about its legality swimming around Whitehall. Once the Attorney-General warned him that there was no justification in international law for pre-emptive regime change, he told Peter Goldsmith not to produce a legal opinion too early. So it was not until 7 March that the Attorney formally presented Number 10 with a thirteen-page assessment. The Attorney-General concluded that a ‘reasonable case’ could be made for going to war, but that there was not a legal consensus about this. There certainly was not: the majority of experts in international law took the contrary view.68 The Attorney’s document listed six reasons why it could be argued that a war in current circumstances was a breach of international law.69

  In Goldsmith’s view, a court ‘might well conclude’ that a second resolution was required to sanction military action. Blair, with his habitually cavalier attitude towards conventions and rules, never seemed troubled by the legality question except in so much as it presented a political obstacle. During the Afghan confict, the Attorney came to the War Cabinet to explain a legal point about the rules of engagement. ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ erupted Blair. ‘We’re not going to be told what to do by lawyers.’70 He never showed much respect for lawyers even though, perhaps because, he was a lawyer himself. In the high court of his own mind, he had already delivered a verdict that satisfied him.

  Goldsmith’s equivocal document on the legality of invading Iraq was very much a problem for those to whom international law mattered. It was far too fence-sitting for the senior military officers. Sir Michael Boyce ‘made the running on this’.71 ‘More than once’, he pressed Number 10 that he had to have a much clearer statement from the law officer. ‘People doing the fighting and their families need to be sure,’ he told Blair. ‘All I want is a one-liner saying it is legal.’72 The same view was taken by Sir Mike Jackson, the head of the army, a blunt-speaking soldier’s soldier who was well regarded in Number 10. He’d got so worried he’d done ‘my own homework’ by pulling the relevant UN resolutions off the internet. General Jackson led the multinational ground force in the Kosovo conflict. The Serbian dictator, Slobodan Milosevic, was now indicted for war crimes and imprisoned at The Hague. General Jackson declared: ‘Having played my part in getting Milosevic into his cell in the Hague, I’ve no wish to be his next-door neighbour there.’73 Michael Jay, the Permanent Secretary at the Foreign Office, was another voice pressing for unambiguous legal sanction.74

  On the 14th, Goldsmith produced a second, much shorter statement, shorn of his earlier hesitations and caveats of just a week before. This paper consisted of only 337 words about an issue as complex and contentious as the legality of invading Iraq. This new, short paper unequivocally declared war to be legal. That was ‘good enough’75 for Jackson and for Boyce, who was happy that he had got ‘top cover’ from the Attorney.76

  Though it never was tested in court, it would ever be intensely controversial. The country’s most senior law lord, Lord Bingham, was the most eminent authority to subsequently declare that the war was ‘a serious violation of international law’ because it took place without proper sanction from the UN.77 All twenty-seven of the lawyers at the Foreign Office thought an invasion was illegal. The deputy chief legal adviser, Elizabeth Wilmshurst, resigned in protest. Goldsmith’s one-page summary was also the cause of many subsequent allegations – denied by all involved – that the Attorney-General had been pressured by Blair. Just the day before he produced the second document, he had a meeting with Sally Morgan and Charlie Falconer. Peter Hennessy, highly distinguished historian of post-war British politics, would later savage Peter Goldsmith as the most ‘pliable’ Attorney-General in memory.78 Goldsmith always maintained it was his ‘genuinely held independent view’.79 Charlie Falconer insists: ‘We did not lean on him. He wanted to see us to say that he’d decided it was lawful.’80 The Cabinet Secretary, Andrew Turnbull, suggests: ‘It was very obvious to him [the Attorney] at this stage what the consequences were if he came out and said there is no legal case for war.’81

  When the Cabinet sat down on the 17th, someone was missing. Just before the meeting, Robin Cook told Blair that he was going to resign; Blair then prevailed on him not to come to Cabinet, thwarting Cook’s intention to make one last plea to his colleagues not to ‘jump over the precipice’.82 Campbell escorted him out of the building the rear way in case Cook should be tempted to rush out front and make a dramatic declaration to the TV cameras on Downing Street. Cook had, in fact, already decided against ‘doing a Heseltine’. As a parting shot to Campbell, he said: ‘I hope it doesn’t end horribly for you all.’83

  Campbell returned to the Cabinet Room to take his usual seat on a chair against the wall. Goldsmith was being introduced when Clare Short flustered in late. Piquantly, the Attorney, the man declaring the war legal, had taken the seat of Cook, the man who had just resigned in protest that it was unlawful folly. Short asked what had happened to her fellow dissenter. ‘He’s gone,’ said Sally Morgan from her seat against the wall. ‘Oh my God!’ cried Short.84

  Blair invited the Attorney to start reading out his judgement. Some ministers pointed out that this was time-wasting: they all had a copy in front of them. They could read the few paragraphs that declared that Saddam’s failure to comply with Resolution 1441 gave sufficient authority for a war.

  Three days before, Goldsmith’s Legal Secretary had written to the Prime Minister’s Private Secretary asking for Blair’s view. The next day, the Private Secretary responded that ‘it is indeed the Prime Minister’s unequivocal view that Iraq is in further material breach of its obligations’ to comply with resolution 1441.85

  The declaration that the war was legal therefore depended on a tautology. The Attorney-General could tell the Cabinet that the war was legal because the Prime Minister had told the Attorney-General that the war was legal.

  Cook was missed on that fateful morning in the Cabinet Room. His forensic mind would have questioned the legal advice. He might have asked whether it represented a consensus among international lawyers, which it did not. The absent Cook might also have inquired whether this was really the sum total of the Attorney’s advice. Few of the Cabinet had read the earlier, much more qualified thirteen-page document.

  Clare Short did try to start a debate. ‘Why is it so late?’ she asked Goldsmith. Did that mean he’d had doubts? She was rumbled into silence.86 The Cabinet did not want to probe the Attorney with questions because they had made up their minds to be loyal. ‘People just wanted comfort,’ comments Alan Milburn.87 Ministers troubled by the war’s legality had been squared off in advance. Only two members of the Cabinet, Alistair Darling and Patricia Hewitt, both lawyers themselves, had bothered to question Goldsmith about his opinion before the Cabinet.88

  ‘They were looking for their brief to say it was all right,’ remarks the Cabinet Secretary. ‘If my brief says this is all right, thank God for that. They were looking for reassurance rather than absolute legal advice.’89 Even Short could sense that ‘the Cabinet was impatient with me. They didn’t want such a discussion.’90 Whatever credibility she had with her colleagues had been destroyed by the ‘reckless’ interview. Short then spent a sleepless night wrestling her conscience to the gro
und. In the morning, she announced that she would not be resigning, after all. Both Brown and Blair, who had been phoning her two or three times a day, worked to keep her in the tent.91 Blair played to her vanity by saying she would be needed for the post-war reconstruction of Iraq. She wrote a pitiful letter to Labour MPs trying to explain why she now supported the war. This turned her into a discredited figure – ‘depleted Claranium’ – held in contempt by loyalists and rebels alike.

  Many of the Cabinet were convinced because they wanted to be convinced. One reason was political self-preservation. Jack Straw, whose resignation would almost certainly have stopped British participation in the war, wrote yet another of his ‘personal minutes’ urging Blair to think again only the night before. But the Foreign Secretary did not articulate his grave doubts in Cabinet and followed Blair ‘with a heavy heart’.92 John Prescott, who could also have stopped it, stuck with Blair from gut loyalty to the leader. He revelled in publicly squashing dissident Labour MPs and saw his role as sturdily defending the leader as his hero, Ernie Bevin, had buttressed Clem Attlee. ‘Whatever happens, I’ll be there all the way,’ he told Sally Morgan.93 Some ministers simply invested their faith in the Prime Minister’s superior wisdom on foreign affairs. Had he not, they talked themselves into thinking, been proved right before? ‘I just have to assume that Tony knows what he’s doing,’ said one.94

  In the view of a senior mandarin: ‘Blair was in the strongest position of a Prime Minister ever. The checks and balances didn’t work.’95

  The Cabinet did not want to make them work anyway. The fall of Blair would threaten to bring many of them tumbling down too. David Blunkett was previously a vocal sceptic about military action. When they first entered government, he would have found it ‘unthinkable and unbelievable’ that he would find himself voting to join a very right-wing President in a war against Iraq.96 Now Blunkett was doing just that. ‘Tony had put his premiership on the line, and those who were very close to him would go down with him.’97 Even Cook, the sole resignee, co-ordinated his departure with Number 10 and pledged that he would not make it a personal issue with Blair because ‘I do not want to be part of a process that sees Gordon become Prime Minister on the back of this.’98