‘I’m not having that,’ came back Blair, the temperature in the room racing towards boiling point. He was not going to allow the announcement to be made in the middle of the Iraq war, and without any Cabinet debate. Brown repeated that he was going to announce his verdict next week. In utter exasperation, Blair lost it with his Chancellor. This had happened many times before, but it was a rarity for him to get this angry in front of witnesses. ‘If you are not going to give me what I want, then you will have to consider your position,’ said Blair. Brown responded: ‘I’ll do just that.’ The Chancellor banged out of the room, his team trailing after him.46
Back at the Treasury, Brown had a council of war with Balls, Spencer Livermore, Sue Nye and his other closest advisers. ‘Everyone was uncertain what had just happened. Had he resigned? Had he been sacked?’47 They concluded that they would have to wait and see what Blair did. The two men had reached a very perilous place and people on both sides knew it. For Brown to quit would have been the end of his Chancellorship and quite probably his hopes of becoming Prime Minister. There was a matching jeopardy confronting Blair. Beginning to face an increasing backlash over the war as he was, it would be a major risk to lose his Chancellor over the unpopular cause of the euro. Both men contemplated the abyss overnight. Then they drew back for fear of mutually assured destruction. At a meeting the next day, they had sufficiently calmed down to agree that Balls and Heywood should try to work out some language that would at least mask their differences. They spent most of the night haggling and ‘Jeremy came back with about four rather minor changes, poor guy.’48 It was now starkly apparent to Jonathan Powell that they had been ‘boxed in’ by Brown.49
Blair won a small tactical victory over Brown by prevailing about when the announcement should be made. He also successfully insisted that senior ministers should be consulted, an exercise he hoped would force more concessions from the Chancellor. Instead of having an open discussion in Cabinet, which would have nakedly exposed the differences between Prime Minister and Chancellor, ministers were called in individually to discuss the assessment with Blair and Brown. The pro-euro Charles Clarke had ‘a lively argument’ with the Chancellor.50 Another pro-European Cabinet member, Alan Milburn, told colleagues the exercise was a farce. He was given just ten minutes to discuss an assessment which was 1,982 pages long.51 The Cabinet did not provide Blair with a counter-force against Brown, not least because several crucial figures agreed with the Chancellor. David Blunkett was against a referendum on the euro. So was Jack Straw. John Prescott was also sceptical. That powerfully aligned the Home Secretary, Foreign Secretary and the Deputy Prime Minister with the Chancellor. The Prime Minister was ‘very isolated right at the top of his Government’.52 Jonathan Powell reflected later: ‘One of the strange things is that Tony never thought about building coalitions in his Cabinet.’53 This demonstrated a major strategic failure of Blair’s premiership. One of the reasons he was thwarted in his European ambitions was that he had surrounded himself with sceptics in the most senior positions in the Cabinet.
In late May, Peter Mandelson let slip a few incautious remarks at a lunch with female journalists. He said Blair had been ‘outmanoeuvred’ over the single currency because the ‘obsessive’ Brown thought politics ‘24 hours a day, seven days a week’.54 Mandelson hit a very raw nerve and came under venomous attack from all sides. Brown sent out Ed Balls and Damian McBride to brief against his old foe, who was labelled ‘poison’; Blair authorised his officials to dismiss his old friend as a mere ‘backbencher, no more’. Mandelson’s real crime was to have spoken too close to the truth.55
The euro verdict was to be announced in the House of Commons on 9 June. Though the meat of the issue was now settled, and against the Prime Minister, there was one final power struggle between Blair and Brown over which of them should make the statement. The Cabinet Secretary notes: ‘Blair realised that he couldn’t get the verdict he wanted so it then became all about the language of how close we were to entry.’56
This dispute was no less ferocious just because it was only about presentation. The Prime Minister did not trust his Chancellor with the statement and vice-versa. Brown was now at his most aggressively assertive. Balls sent a message to Number 10 via Heywood that ‘if the Prime Minister wants to make the statement, he can find himself a new Chancellor.’57 Blair blinked.
Brown made the statement. At a news conference afterwards, their body language screamed fury at each other. As a sop to the Prime Minister, some of the language rejecting the euro was softened. To maintain the fiction that Britain was still serious about entry, a series of studies were commissioned about how to make Britain more compatible with the euro-zone. Number 10 tried to camouflage Blair’s retreat by declaring that there would be a new push to make the case for the single currency with a ‘euro road show’ in the autumn. This was far from the first time they’d pledged themselves to that sort of exercise. Only the serially gullible were taken in. ‘What about the road shows?’ Wall asked Powell, who ‘looked at me as if I was an idiot’.
‘Forget that,’ Powell laughed bitterly. ‘It’s not going to happen.’58
Euro entry was killed by Brown and with it one of Blair’s great ambitions for his premiership. Britain was not going to enter the single currency while he was at Number 10 or at any foreseeable time afterwards. His pro-European allies in the Cabinet ‘gave up after that’.59 Peter Hyman quit Number 10 soon afterwards and Stephen Wall, realising ‘that was the end’, left a year later.60
‘All the fizz went out of it,’ says a senior civil servant. ‘Iraq became all-consuming and the euro just faded away from that point.’61
Gordon Brown was not the only reason for this failure. It was also the result of an inability to soften the Euroscepticism of public opinion and the phobia of much of the press; the apparently superior performance of the British economy at this time; the distraction and the consequences of the Iraq war; and the disintegration of Blair’s relations with key European leaders because of the conflict. The consensus view among economists in the years that followed was that Brown did Britain a favour by vetoing euro entry because interest rates in the euro-zone were inappropriate for the British economy. ‘It would have been a complete and utter disaster had we joined,’ says Blair’s own Cabinet Secretary of the time. ‘To this day, I’d say Gordon Brown was absolutely right.’62 That argument looked slightly less persuasive when sterling plunged against both the euro and the dollar during the financial crisis of 2008–9.
One side of Blair’s brain reconciled himself to this latest defeat at the hands of Brown as probably a sensible outcome in the circumstances. The other side of him knew that he had failed one of the big challenges that he had set for his premiership. It was convenient for him, but not altogether wrong, to blame the death of his dream on the Chancellor. More than ever, Blair now looked on Brown as a deadly rival dedicated to sabotaging his premiership.
On the morning of Thursday, 12 June, ministers started to troop up and down Downing Street, where they were greeted by cheery inquiries about their political health from the ghouls of the media. The very British ritual of the reshuffle was underway. The theory goes that the reshuffle is the ultimate expression of a Prime Minister’s power of career life and death over his colleagues. In the case of Tony Blair, it would as often turn out to be a demonstration of his weaknesses.
Sally Morgan, a presence by his side at many reshuffles, says he found it ‘painfully difficult’ to sack people. ‘Hated it, absolutely hated it.’63 He would complain: ‘It’s like drilling teeth.’ On one occasion, a minister came into his office under the misapprehension that she was about to be promoted, which made it more difficult for him to tell her that she was being relieved of her job. She burst into tears. ‘It made me feel like Stalin,’ he groaned afterwards.64
Blair was ‘a very poor personnel manager’ in the view of Neil Kinnock. ‘He didn’t like demoting or displacing people. Really hated it.’65 For a period, he experimented wi
th giving advance warning to ministers facing the chop in the hope that this might let them down gently. He abandoned that practice because, as he told Jack Straw, ‘they go out and brief and fight back.’66 Peter Mandelson thought Blair was ‘not actually a very good butcher as a Prime Minister’ even though he twice slit Mandelson’s own throat.67 Blair’s dislike of being disliked and his aversion to personal confrontation were a big part of the problem. ‘He never liked grasping the personal nettle,’ noted one of his Cabinet Secretaries.68
During one reshuffle, Blair spent half an hour telling Keith Vaz that he was doing a wonderful job as Minister for Europe. Vaz left the study smiling only to be stopped on the way out by Jonathan Powell, who had to break it to him that he was being sacked.69
Blair’s weakness also expressed itself in his habit of making promises that he didn’t keep, with the result that colleagues came to think of him as dishonest. Geoff Hoon emerged from Number 10 during one reshuffle believing that he still had a seat in the Cabinet.70 Only afterwards did Hoon discover that he had been stripped of his Cabinet rank. ‘I never thought to ask,’ Hoon ruefully told friends later. ‘I should have asked. Knowing Tony as well as I do, I should have asked.’71
Charles Clarke reckons ‘a multitude of individuals felt let down by Tony. They didn’t know why they left government. They didn’t know why they were never in government. He always got it very, very badly wrong.’72
In the reshuffle in the summer of 2003, Blair settled some small scores with his Chancellor by refusing to give promotions for Brown’s abler acolytes, Douglas Alexander and Yvette Cooper, wife of Ed Balls. He finally sacked Nick Brown from the Cabinet, something he had wanted to do for a long time. But he left the Chancellor and his powerbase at the Treasury largely untouched.
A prevaricator about dealing with foes, Blair was paradoxically at his most icily decisive with his friends. Asked what was the greatest quality that a politician could possess, François Mitterrand answered: ‘Indifference.’ It was often his closest allies and most loyal supporters who felt the chilliest side of Blair. ‘Tony was as hard as nails when it came to his survival,’ says Michael Levy. ‘Look what he did to Peter, someone who loved him, sacking him twice. Tony’s interests always came first.’73
By the summer of 2003, he was becoming persuaded that he would have to move against a senior minister with whom he’d had a relationship since his early twenties. Derry Irvine gave Blair his first job in legal chambers and introduced him to Cherie. He’d been both mentor and matchmaker. The Lord Chancellor regarded himself as fireproof. Moreover, the Prime Minister encouraged him to think that he was invulnerable. ‘Tony had given reassurances to Derry that he would remain as Lord Chancellor so long as he remained Prime Minister,’ says a Cabinet minister who would know.74 Blair said that to try to bolster Irvine when he was depressed after the arrest of his son in the United States. It was a characteristically kindly gesture by Blair to make that promise, as it was also rather typical that he ended up breaking it.
He tolerated the embarrassments generated by the Lord Chancellor in the first term, with his expensive taste in wallpaper and fondness for comparing himself with Cardinal Wolsey. That was a price the then novice Prime Minister was willing to pay to have Irvine’s counsel and experience. He was much less indulgent in the second term, when ‘Tony became a more confident Prime Minister’75 and Irvine caused further furores by taking a large pay rise and a big boost to his pension. Irvine never properly adjusted to the change in their relationship. He was no longer the pupil master and the Prime Minister was no longer a trainee barrister. Yet the Lord Chancellor would still address the Prime Minister as ‘Blair’ or ‘young Blair’, sometimes in front of an audience. ‘Why don’t we have a drink? Get us a drink, Blair,’ he demanded on one occasion at Chequers to the astonishment of other dinner guests.
Another problem was not of Irvine’s making. He had remained a liberal on crime and judicial issues while his former pupil inexorably moved in a more authoritarian direction. There was consternation in Number 10 when Irvine took to the airwaves to say that there were too many people in prison and courts should consider alternatives to jail for first-time burglars. His proudest legislative achievement was the Human Rights Act, which judges were now using to thwart the Government’s attempts to trample on their independence. He stood up for the rights of the judiciary when David Blunkett, with Blair’s encouragement, was increasingly at war with the bench.
It wasn’t the progressive side of Irvine that finally did for him; it was the reactionary aspect. He stood in the way of reforming the position of Lord Chancellor. Among constitutional reformers it had long been thought indefensible for one peer to wear three hats: as the senior judge who appoints all the other judges; as the presiding officer of the House of Lords; and the highest-paid member of the Cabinet. Andrew Adonis, the head of the policy unit, had taken this up as a reforming cause, as had Pat McFadden, another key Blair aide. They had an enthusiastic ally in the Cabinet Secretary, who agreed that the position of Lord Chancellor ‘was riddled with conflicts of interest’.76
Blair’s zeal for constitutional reform was never great in his first term and was indistinguishable from zero by his second. His indifference and antidemocratic instincts helped stymie attempts to complete reform of the Lords. ‘Totally unenthusiastic’ is how one senior member of the policy unit of the time describes his attitude to constitutional reform.77 He developed a great reverence for a couple of ancient British institutions: the armed forces and the monarchy. He couldn’t really care less about the House of Lords other than using peerages as a reward for friends and supporters.
There was a brief interruption in that lack of interest in the summer of 2003. Looking to soften liberal and left hostility after the Iraq war and casting around for alternative legacies following his defeat on the euro, Blair was suddenly desperate for a big, progressive reform to prove that there was life left in his premiership. Adonis and Turnbull persuaded the Prime Minister that reforming the Lord Chancellorship was ‘a desirable piece of constitutional modernisation’ which would make a splash.78
Irvine was massively resistant. He was still a believer in the triple-hatted role and was infuriated when he learnt from rumours in the press – a very New Labour way of doing business – that the Lord Chancellorship was being considered for abolition. In the seven days before the reshuffle, the old pupil master went round to Number 10 three times to confront his former trainee in the Prime Minister’s den. Irvine angrily, and with some justice, demanded to know ‘how a decision of this magnitude could be made without prior consultation with me’ or anyone else affected. At the third angry meeting, forty-eight hours before the reshuffle, he handed Blair a two-page note complaining that the Prime Minister was being ‘high-handed and insensitive’ and that ‘I personally am being cast aside’ for ‘no proven benefit’. The result, he forecast with some prescience, would be a ‘botched job’.79
Many of his staff wondered whether the Prime Minister would really summon the steel to fire his former pupil master, an act of quasi-patricide. ‘Tony was psyching himself up to do it for weeks,’ says Sally Morgan.80 ‘He found it immensely difficult’ to sack Irvine, noted the Cabinet Secretary. ‘It was classic Henry IV Part One: “I know thee not old man.” ’81
Not until the very morning of the reshuffle did Hal Blair at last brace himself for the final confrontation with Falstaff Irvine. He asked the Lord Chancellor to stay behind after Cabinet and come into the den. Irvine was astounded, bewildered, bitter and furious, bellowing: ‘You can’t do this, Blair.’ He was more angry when told that he would be replaced by Charlie Falconer, the Prime Minister’s old flatmate. ‘You are putting in another peer,’ he raged.82
Blair was ‘very shaken afterwards’.83 Irvine ‘was very hurt. He’s never recovered from it.’84 He and Blair did not speak again.85
While Blair was giving the push to Derry Irvine, Alan Milburn was about to jump. The Health Secretary was under intense press
ure from his partner to spend more time with their family on Teesside, but that didn’t entirely explain his shock resignation from the Cabinet. It was harder to argue with his partner’s demands that he leave Government when Milburn felt relentlessly undermined by Gordon Brown and dispirited by the lack of support from Tony Blair. When they tried to talk him out of it, he told the Prime Minister’s aides that ‘Tony doesn’t back his people. In the end, he always caves in to Gordon.’
Around the Prime Minister, this was felt to be ‘a big blow’, robbing Blair of a foul-weather ally and one of the few members of the Cabinet truly committed to a radical agenda for the public services.86 Over at the Treasury, there was undisguised celebration at the departure of an arch-enemy.
It was Milburn’s sudden departure that did most to throw all the reshuffle planning into chaos. After a frenzied discussion about who should move into his job, Blair settled for the loyalist John Reid. As he went over to Number 10 after lunch, it dawned on Reid what he was about to be offered. He muttered: ‘Oh fuck, it’s Health.’
The Westminster political correspondents were by now scenting that another Blair reshuffle was going awry. As long hours passed before Number 10 made any formal announcements, journalists feverishly exchanged speculations about the fate of Irvine and what really lay behind Milburn’s sudden departure. David Blunkett groaned: ‘The media have presented the reshuffle as a fiasco, but how could they not?’87
The Cabinet Secretary subsequently lamented: ‘On the day, it was a complete mess-up.’88 The judiciary reacted angrily to the removal of the Lord Chancellor for fear that they were losing their advocate in Cabinet. To Number 10’s surprise, peers were not pleased to be given the right to elect their own chairman or chairwoman. ‘We completely misjudged the House of Lords. They didn’t want a Betty Boothroyd telling them when to shut up.’89 Objections were raised to the Scottish Reid taking responsibility for the health service in England when he would not be in charge of the NHS in devolved Scotland. Number 10 announced that it was abolishing the 1,400-year-old position of Lord Chancellor without taking account of the problem that the title was embedded in about 5,000 sections of legislation which would have to be rewritten. So the title stayed even if the job description did change.
The End of the Party Page 30