The demise of Blair would mean the succession of Brown, an outcome more terrifying than war to Blunkett, Hewitt, Hoon, Reid and several others in the Cabinet. So they went round the table expressing support for the Prime Minister, a loyalty ritual designed to bind them to the decision, to dip their hands in the blood.99 Through the sheer force of his position, his personality and conviction, Tony Blair had driven his Cabinet to a place where few if any of them would have individually gone. Only a couple of junior ministers resigned along with Cook.100
Two days of great theatre began in the House of Commons. Previous conflicts had been started without a vote or on the basis of ‘take note’ motions. Some in Number 10, knowing how difficult it was going to be in the Commons, wanted to avoid a vote if they could possibly get away with it.
They were delusional. This conflict was already hugely contentious. To have proceeded into it in the absence of both explicit sanction from the UN and the House of Commons would be ‘a disaster’, Jack Straw argued with Blair. The Foreign Secretary’s argument was one of both principle and pragmatism. They needed the sanction of the Commons to get ‘full and effective legitimacy’ for the war. If MPs were denied a proper vote, he contended: ‘People will go berserk.’101
Straw had deliberately boxed in Blair by making public commitments that there would be a formal Commons vote, as had Robin Cook, before he resigned as Leader of the House. ‘Jack effectively bounced us into it,’ said one Cabinet colleague.102 On this point, at least, the Foreign Secretary prevailed.
On Monday lunchtime, Blair phoned Bush to tell him: ‘I think I can win. But I don’t want the Tories to be able to say “without us, you would have lost”.’103 He wished Bush luck with the televised address he was making that night in which the President delivered a final ultimatum by inviting the Iraqi dictator to flee: ‘Saddam and his sons must leave Iraq within forty-eight hours. Their refusal to do so will result in military conflict commenced at a time of our choosing.’104
Blair’s problem was his own party. He could win in the Commons with Tory votes, but his moral authority as Prime Minister would be fatally compromised if he could not secure the support of a majority of Labour MPs. He believed ‘he’d have to go if he hadn’t got a majority of the party’, says Sally Morgan.105 The Chief Whip, Hilary Armstrong, agrees: ‘We knew that he would resign. We knew it was high stakes.’106 Jack Straw feared that the entire Government would be ‘in a completely impossible position if we’d plainly lost the confidence of our own side. The Cabinet would have had to resign if a majority of Labour MPs voted against us.’107
That weekend Blair sat down with his three oldest children and explained to them that he might no longer be Prime Minister by the end of the week. He said later: ‘In the end, if you lose your premiership, well, you lose it’, but it was better to ‘lose it [for] something you believe in’.108 He always had a taste for self-dramatisation, but in this case he was utterly serious. ‘He’d have resigned if he lost,’ says his faithful constituency agent, John Burton.109 His old friend Barry Cox agrees: ‘Certainly he said: “This could cost me my job.” He knew it, he absolutely knew it. He was still prepared to do it.’110 ‘He was putting his political life on the line,’ says David Manning. ‘If he fell in the process, he would have gone down thinking: “Well, I went down but I tried to do the right thing.” ’ 111 The Shadow Cabinet discussed what the Tories would do if the Prime Minister fell. ‘There was a clear sense that Blair could go,’ says Iain Duncan Smith, though he was also conscious that ‘he played it up to increase pressure on Labour MPs.’112 Sir Andrew Turnbull, the Cabinet Secretary, wasn’t so convinced that it would come to that, but he nevertheless took the precaution of checking the procedures for handling a sudden prime ministerial resignation.113
Gordon Brown joined the ‘ferocious work’ to win the vote. Once Brown had committed himself, Blair could not fairly question his Chancellor’s loyalty on this occasion. He and his people became ‘part of the team’. Even Sally Morgan, inveterately mistrustful of the next-door neighbour, noted how ‘they worked very closely together refining the arguments’ and ran the operation ‘almost like an election campaign’.114 Douglas Alexander and Pat McFadden, a Brown acolyte and a Blair aide who would normally be highly suspicious of each other, worked in tandem writing briefings for Labour MPs. The Chief Whip ‘gave him [Brown] a list of people he could work on’.115 Brown put pressure on those of his supporters who were sceptical about war.116 The whips ran an intense operation to beg, borrow and bully votes from Labour MPs. Frank Dobson had been twice promised by Blair that he would become British High Commissioner in South Africa. He was warned by Number 10: ‘If you don’t vote with the Government, you can forget about South Africa.’117 Cherie threw herself into the fray. On some civil liberties issues, she fiercely disagreed with her husband. But she was implacably his supporter on Iraq. When they had dinner with Robert Harris – the novelist was an opponent of the war – there was a ‘Fawlty Towers moment’ when the topic of Iraq came up. ‘Don’t mention the war in front of Cherie,’ Blair cautioned the author.118 She called up some women Labour MPs to cajole them into the Government lobby.
The stakes were vertiginous in Parliament. An institution that had often been treated as an irrelevance during the New Labour years was suddenly again a place of supreme importance and electric theatre. ‘It was extremely tense, extremely fraught,’ remembers Ed Owen.119 The cockpit of British democracy was more packed than it had been at any time since Labour’s victory in 1997. There were two outstanding performers. Cook delivered a fine resignation speech, which earned him a convention-breaking standing ovation from anti-war MPs. He declared that ‘history will be astonished’ at the ‘miscalculations’ that led to conflict. ‘I cannot support a war that has neither international agreement nor domestic support.’ The claims about WMD were merely ‘suggestive’.120 That speech reads even better today because we now know that he was even more right than he then knew about the absence of a WMD threat. On the day, the impact of his speech and resignation was partly neutralised by the volte-face of Clare Short. She had booked a slot to make a resignation speech immediately after Cook, but now cancelled it.121 Blair made a human shield of Short. When she came into the Commons for the debate, she was told to move up the frontbench to sit by the Prime Minister so that he could display his prisoner of war to other waverers.
Blair made two speeches on the climactic day, one a private address to Labour MPs and then another in the Chamber. He quietly dropped some of the assertions made in the September dossier. There was no mention of the 45-minute claim which he now knew to be unreliable. He nevertheless painted Saddam as a growing menace. ‘Our fault has not been impatience. Our patience should have been exhausted weeks, months and years ago,’ he declaimed.
‘The only persuasive power to which he responds is 250,000 allied troops on his doorstep. To retreat now would be to put at hazard all that we hold dearest. If we do act, we should do so with a clear conscience and a strong heart,’ he went on.122
Many years later, Cherie would say that invading Iraq ‘was one of those 51/49 questions’, but her husband was ‘very good at then convincing everyone else that it was a 70/30 decision all along’.123 Turning on the opponents of war he implied that they were making the same mistake as appeasers of Hitler in the 1930s, a line he insisted on including against the advice of Peter Hyman and others on the speech-writing team, who feared it would ‘wind up’ Labour MPs.124
Blair was always at his most effective in a tight spot. ‘He’s hopeless when you give him a wide-open goal and a roaring crowd,’ remarks Paddy Ashdown. ‘He doesn’t know which goal to shoot at. But put his back against the wall, fighting for his life, and he’s absolutely magnificent.’125
That speech had to be ‘extraordinary’ in the view of David Blunkett because ‘he wasn’t just winning MPs, he was addressing the nation.’126
Stan Greenberg, soothsayer of public opinion and an opponent of the war, ‘watched in so
me awe as he set out the case to the country and moved the numbers until the country was supportive of going into Iraq at the time they went in’.127 A young Tory MP called David Cameron was so wowed by Blair’s ‘masterful’ speech that he circulated it to his constituents.128
The Daily Mail, which was sceptical about the war and loathed Blair with a greater intensity than any other newspaper, lauded the performance as:
the speech of a lifetime from Tony Blair, one of those rare Parliamentary performances that can change hearts, minds and votes. If last night’s backbench revolt was not nearly the meltdown predicted by some, the credit lies with a Prime Minister at the peak of his powers, willing to lay his future on the line for a cause in which he passionately believes.129
From the anti-war Mirror: ‘We do not question his belief in the rightness of what he is doing.’130
The anti-war Independent called it ‘the most persuasive case yet made by the man who has emerged as the most formidable persuader for war on either side of the Atlantic’.131
The Daily Telegraph reckoned he had the best cards and played the hand ‘brilliantly, giving the country a rare reminder of what a first class parliamentary performer he is’.132
For the equally pro-war Sun: ‘With passion in his voice and fire in his belly, Tony Blair has won his place in history alongside Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher.’133
He had never before, and he would never again, get such universally glowing press notices over Iraq. At the climax of his speech, Blair rhetorically conflated everything that had happened since 9/11. ‘We will confront the tyrannies and dictatorships and terrorists who put our way of life at risk. To show at the moment of decision that we have the courage to do the right thing.’134
Though some of the factual content of the speech would turn out to be either suspect or false, the emotional power and rhetorical force of the performance was of a very high octane. It was regarded as his parliamentary career best even by some who thought the decision was the worst of his premiership.
After his speech, Blair sat in his office behind the Speaker’s chair doing frantic, last-minute lobbying of Labour MPs. ‘By the end, we were just pouring alcohol into them.’135 Jack Straw, disguising his own doubts, wound up the debate. As 10 p.m. grew nearer, whips dashed round the corridors and lobbies telling the wobblers that they risked bringing down the leader who had delivered them two landslides. They even tried to terrify Labour MPs with the thought that if Blair went, he would take the entire Cabinet with him and there would be a general election, a threat which was the whips’ ‘most devastating weapon’,136 though not an entirely credible one. As the tellers clutched papers bearing the result, Hilary Armstrong, the Chief Whip, came into the Chamber, crouched by the Prime Minister and whispered to him that the revolt had just been contained. ‘So it’s ok,’ he sighed with relief.137
The number of Labour MPs who voted against the war was 139, a record revolt in modern times. But to his ‘deep relief’138 he had carried enough of them to claim the support of the majority of his party and Number 10 somehow managed to spin that as a resounding victory.
An exhausted but relieved Tony Blair returned to Number 10 that night with Parliament’s sanction for war. He made ‘a euphoric phone call’ to Bush.139
Admiral Boyce picked up the phone to his opposite number in America to tell General Myers: ‘The vote is yes.’140 Forty thousand British troops, airmen and sailors were now committed in the seas of the Arabian Gulf and in the deserts 3,000 miles away. An allied force of some 300,000 in all waited for the final order to invade. Blair’s destiny and the fate of his Government were now irrevocably entwined with what George Bush had planned for Iraq. Tony Blair had taken epic responsibility for a war over which he would very soon discover he had virtually no control.
10. Squandered Victory
At just after midnight on Thursday, 20 March, Tony Blair answered the phone in the flat above Downing Street. There was a mild, familiar voice on the other end of the line. ‘It’s begun,’ said David Manning, who was calling from his office downstairs in Number 10. Manning had just spoken to a faintly apologetic Condi Rice, who informed him that there was ‘a little change’ in their plans: American military action was already underway ahead of the previously agreed timetable. US intelligence had informed the President that Saddam and his sons were located at a farm near Baghdad. The Americans wanted to try ‘to decapitate the regime there and then’. Manning agreed: ‘You have to take the shot.’ Not that the Americans needed or waited on British agreement. Cruise missiles were already flying. Special Forces were in. Stealth bombers were airborne. The full ‘shock and awe’ designed to batter the regime into rapid submission would follow.
The starting gun was fired a day earlier than Bush, who’d spoken to the Prime Minister less than fifteen hours before, had led Blair to believe. But the Prime Minister took the news calmly. It was hardly ‘a huge surprise’.1
The next morning, Blair convened a meeting of the War Cabinet at eight and then chaired the Cabinet at ten. Cabinet was even briefer than usual. There was just long enough for Blair to tell his ministers two things. One they already knew: the war had begun. The other most of them didn’t: the Americans had gone early to try to assassinate Saddam.
At 4 p.m. in London, Bush called. He thanked Blair for being understanding about the last-minute change of plan. ‘I kind of think,’ Blair mused to the President, ‘that the decisions taken in the next few weeks will determine the rest of the world for years to come.’2 They would certainly determine much of the rest of his premiership.
Once the conflict was underway, Blair and Bush did not have so much to do. Blair’s first day of the war was occupied with preparing the broadcast to the nation he was going to deliver that night. His team gathered on the sofas in the den to help him work on the text.
‘How should I start?’ asked Blair. Alastair Campbell was in a mocking mood. ‘What about “My fellow Americans …”?’ he suggested.
Blair didn’t find that funny. ‘What about the end?’ he asked impatiently. ‘I want to end with “God bless you.” ’
A cacophony of voices protested that this was not a good idea. ‘Don’t be absurd,’ said Sally Morgan. ‘That’s awfully American, Prime Minister,’ sniffed one of the civil servants. ‘We don’t want any God stuff,’ said someone else. Blair looked around the room: ‘You are the most godless lot I have ever known.’ Peter Hyman, who was Jewish, interjected: ‘Count me out. I’m not godless.’
‘That’s a different God,’ said someone.
‘Oh no,’ responded Blair. ‘It’s the same God.’3
When the text was finished, he went up to the White Drawing Room on the first floor of Number 10 to record the broadcast.
‘Tonight British servicemen are engaged from air, land and sea,’ he said, borrowing phrasing used by Winston Churchill in May 1940. ‘Their mission: to remove Saddam Hussein from power, and disarm Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction.’ Looking lined and faintly red-eyed, he read the address from autocue, though by now he knew all his arguments by heart.
The threat to Britain today is not that of my father’s generation. War between the big powers is unlikely. But this new world faces a new threat: disorder and chaos born either of brutal states like Iraq, armed with weapons of mass destruction, or of extreme terrorist groups. Both hate our way of life, our freedom, our democracy. My fear, deeply held, based in part on the intelligence that I see, is that these threats come together and deliver catastrophe to our country and the world.
He told the Iraqi people that they were not the enemy. The allies were coming to liberate them from their ‘barbarous rulers’. He returned to ‘the courage and determination’ of ‘our troops’ on whom ‘the fate of many nations rests’. He ended with a non-religious ‘Thank you’.4 The ‘godless lot’ had got their way.
That night Royal Marines and echelons of the Special Boat Service launched an aerial and amphibious assault on ‘Red Beach’ at the head
of the Gulf, where the al-Faw peninsula met the Shatt al-Arab waterway. Royal Navy submarines contributed to the ‘shock and awe’ by launching cruise missiles at Baghdad. RAF Harriers and Tornados flew bombing missions.5
Following the campaigns in Sierra Leone, Kosovo and Afghanistan, this was Blair’s fourth war. He had sent British forces to fight and die in more theatres than any other Prime Minister since Churchill, whose wartime rhetoric he consciously strained to echo in that address to the nation.
That he should find himself with such a record was a surprise most of all perhaps to himself. His friend Barry Cox once said to him: ‘I never thought you were going to be a warrior Prime Minister.’ Blair replied: ‘Neither did I.’6
As a rebellious teenager at school, he loathed the period of compulsory service in the Fettes cadet force and quit as soon as he could. ‘We hated the cadets,’ says one of his schoolfriends. ‘We ended up painting old people’s homes instead.’7 One of his teachers at the school remembers a Remembrance Day service during which the young Blair engaged him in a passionate argument in favour of pacifism.8 The most remarked upon role of his school acting career was as Captain Stanhope, the whisky-soaked, disillusioned officer in Journey’s End, R. C. Sheriff’s classic play about the First World War. ‘That play had a real effect on me,’ he remarked on the eve of the invasion of Iraq. ‘You have to isolate yourself when people are dying from what you have yourself decided to do. You have to put barriers in your mind.’9
There was little trace left of the teenage pacifist. One of the first briefings Blair received when he became Prime Minister was from the Chief of the Defence Staff about Britain’s nuclear deterrent. The neophyte Prime Minister’s ‘eyes opened’ and he went ‘rather quiet’ as Charles Guthrie laid out the responsibility for the awesome power of the nuclear arsenal.10 Blair was a nervous warrior at the beginning of the Kosovo conflict in 1999. He insisted on being briefed about every bombing run, fretted about hitting hospitals, and wanted to count each British plane out and back. By the end of that conflict he sometimes sounded more cold-blooded about the costs of war, saying of civilian casualties: ‘Mistakes will happen from time to time.’11 That conflict hardened him. It also swelled an admiration for the military, whom he thought of as more can-do types than most of the civil servants who worked for him.
The End of the Party Page 26