The End of the Party

by Andrew Rawnsley

  There was extra edge to the ritual that autumn. Blair looked more vulnerable than at any previous time in his premiership. On the eve of the conference, he admitted to me that he had taken a ‘battering’ from ‘an onslaught’ which had left him ‘knocked about’ in the months since the war.4 Polling suggested that half the public wanted him to resign.5 Sixty per cent of his own party members said he was wrong to go to war and approaching half of them wanted him to quit immediately or at the next election.6 In quick succession, he had lost Alan Milburn, one of his closest allies in the Cabinet, and Alastair Campbell from Number 10. He had been defeated on the euro after the April Fool ambush by his Chancellor and then made a botch of the summer reshuffle. He was forced to appease his party by agreeing to legislate a ban on hunting – which he had never wanted to outlaw. He toyed with bringing Peter Mandelson back into the Cabinet, but he was too weak to overcome the resistance to that idea from John Prescott, Jack Straw and, of course, Gordon Brown. He settled for giving Mandelson a more prominent position in the ‘kitchen Cabinet’ at Number 10. The furore over the death of David Kelly and the relentlessly grim news from Iraq were taking a huge toll on his standing. Labour was hammered by the Lib Dems in the Brent East by-election, the first by-election lost since he became leader, ripping another tear in the suit of invincibility that had once armoured him against his internal critics. Public support for the war was crashing, as was voter trust in the Prime Minister. Few now believed him when he insisted that people should ‘just wait and see’ before they concluded there never were any WMD.7 The findings of Philip Gould’s focus groups were bleak. ‘It had been a bad year.’8

  Matthew Taylor, a new recruit to Number 10 from the Institute of Public Policy Research, came up with the idea of launching ‘the big conversation’ – one attempt of many to try to reconnect Blair with voters. His agenda for public services was encountering mounting resistance with a series of parliamentary rebellions against the health reforms.

  The Chancellor watched all this and felt both emboldened and desperate. Desperate because he feared he would inherit a wrecked Government if he did not force out Blair. That was his ‘nightmare scenario’.9 Emboldened because his rival was now looking weak, Brown saw himself as a strengthening figure in comparison with a shrinking Prime Minister.

  On the Monday in Bournemouth, Brown implicitly attacked Blair for dividing the party over Iraq and public service reform. He presented himself as the unifying prince in waiting, the man ‘never losing sight of Labour’s vision’ who was ready and able to save the party and its ‘soul’. He pulled all the stops in his oratorical organ in a speech in which he deliberately never once used the phrase ‘New Labour’. It was ‘an alternative personal election manifesto’, noted an admiring Daily Mirror. ‘The Chancellor will never be the orator that Mr Blair has trained himself to be … but only Mr Brown hits the real Labour G-spot.’10

  He also delivered a barely coded call to arms. His speech ended by giving a parodying twist to Blair’s ‘at our best when at our boldest’ phrase of the year before.

  Brown punchlined his speech: ‘This Labour Party, best when we’re united – best when we are Labour.’11 He had for years received help with speeches from Bob Shrum, an American political consultant. The line was invented at a speech-writing session in Shrum’s office in Washington during Brown’s pre-conference trip to a meeting of the World Bank. He ‘angsted and agonised to the last minute’ about whether to use it.12 In his camp ‘everyone was absurdly excited’ when he went for it, thinking: ‘Aren’t we terribly clever?’13

  One unfactional member of the Cabinet was sitting in the audience with delegates from his constituency party. ‘They may not be the most sophisticated people in the world, but they instantly knew what Gordon was doing. They didn’t need the press to interpret it for them. And they were angry.’14

  Others were delighted to see Brown unfurling a standard for disgruntled trades unionists and disaffected party activists to rally around.

  Unusually, Blair missed Brown’s conference speech because he was away attending the funeral of Gareth Williams, the Leader of the Lords who had died very suddenly. Though Blair feigned insouciance about the attack when he returned to the conference, he was ‘absolutely furious’ when he was told about Brown’s unmasked lunge.15

  Alastair Campbell had been replaced by David Hill, an older figure and a calmer one, who had a reputation among journalists for being decent and straight. Hill had two central aims: to kill the Government’s reputation for spin by ‘instilling a different style’ and to repair relations between the communication operations at the Treasury and Number 10. Brown’s open thrust at Blair made it impossible for Hill to sustain a pretence of amity between the two men. ‘It was too deliberate to deny. To stories about things that were going on between them behind the scenes, you could say, “I know nothing about that.” You couldn’t say that about this speech because everyone had sat in the hall and watched it happen.’16

  In a furious battle of spin and counter-spin, the Blairites sent out the message that Brown had made a strategic blunder by trying to position himself as the leader of the left. But the main answer would have to come from Blair himself the next day.

  At midnight on the Monday night – ‘it happened every year, you could set your watch by it’ – he gathered his advisers around him in his hotel suite to complain about the latest draft of his speech. ‘This is rubbish,’ he said, going through the text. ‘This doesn’t work. This has not got enough argument. I need a better joke here. The middle bit is boring.’17

  He sent them off to find new facts, sharper applause lines and more amusing punchlines. Peter Hyman, his principal speechwriter, has an abiding memory of ‘the Prime Minister sitting there in the early hours of the morning in his loosely tied bathrobe, with his hair dishevelled, his glasses perched on the end of his nose, a half-eaten banana somewhere on the table in front of him, surrounded by hundreds of little bits of paper that he’s ripped off previous drafts, and he’s trying to join them together and he knows how they join together, but no-one else does.’ Only after ‘hours and hours’ of this did he finally go to bed at three in the morning the night before the conference speech. It was crazy and yet somehow it nearly always worked.18

  After about three hours’ sleep, Blair got up at six to finish putting the speech together. Sally Morgan suggested that he needed to ‘tickle the tummy’ of his party to win back their affections. ‘Have I ever been any good at that?’ he asked smiling in reply. ‘Well, I could start with: “Comrades, speaking as a socialist …” ’19

  The message he delivered that afternoon was essentially defiant. ‘I would make the same decision on Iraq again today,’ he asserted. He sounded a note of equal implacability about public service reform, deriding the temptation to retreat into ‘a left-wing comfort zone’ and declaring: ‘Forward or back. I can only go one way. I’ve not got a reverse gear.’20 Some around him were apprehensive about including that phrase on the grounds that Blair had reversed in the past and would no doubt need to do so in the future. ‘Tony, are you really sure that you are never going to need a reverse gear?’ asked Peter Mandelson. Blair insisted on delivering the line nevertheless. It would be used to taunt him when, as was inevitable, he did find subsequent need to retreat.

  Where Brown had semaphored his dissent from the choice and diversity agenda and emphasised ‘equity’, Blair answered him by contending that the ‘demand of the twenty-first century consumer’ was for ‘excellence’. Blair had torn out of his speech any reference at all to Brown, the first time that had ever happened.

  The Chancellor was warned by his aides that the cameras would be trained on him during Blair’s speech in the hope of catching Brown with a sulky face. He tried to look interested, but he was too poor an actor to sustain the pretence for the full fifty minutes. The newspapers got the picture they wanted: an occluded Brown with frozen hands while the rest of the Cabinet applauded. By the close of the week, the general verd
ict was that Brown over-reached on the Monday and Blair did an effective job of putting his Chancellor in his place on the Tuesday. One neutral member of the Cabinet observed that ‘Gordon has made himself look disloyal, opportunistic and isolated.’21

  In the Brown camp, they fumed: ‘We put up with three days of being told that using the word Labour was using a dirty word.’22 In Blair’s court, every move made by Brown was seen as an attempt ‘to destabilise Tony out of his job’.23 At all levels, personal and political, tactical and strategic, the two men were now in collision. ‘Gordon won’t let me do anything’ was Blair’s regular refrain to his intimates as he felt relentlessly sabotaged by guerrilla attacks on the reform legislation by the Chancellor’s allies on the backbenches.24

  An opportunity for Blair to take some petty revenge presented itself on Guy Fawkes’ night. As Prime Minister, he had the right to make three nominations to ex officio seats on the Labour Party’s National Executive Committee. In the past, he had done this in consultation with Brown; not now, not any more. Blair had little time for the NEC, a once powerful body which had been emasculated during his time in office, but appointments to it could be symbolic. On 5 November, Blair proposed seats for Hazel Blears, one of his most avid supporters, and Ian McCartney, the party Chairman and a close ally of John Prescott. For the third seat, he nominated not the Chancellor, but one of Brown’s junior acolytes, Douglas Alexander.

  It was spun to the press on Brown’s behalf that he had been insultingly treated and ambushed while on paternity leave in Scotland after the birth of his son John. Blair scoffed to his aides that this was typical of Brown’s petulant tantrums about trivial status issues.25 On the account of one of Brown’s own senior staff, ‘Gordon was not remotely bothered really about the NEC. It was seized upon to make Tony look unreasonable. The desire to be strong is a determining factor in Gordon’s personality. And yet at times he was very willing to play the victim. This gave him the opportunity to play the victim.’26

  The next day, the Chancellor gave a television interview in which he publicly attacked Blair for excluding him from the NEC and baldly declared that he expected to be in charge of the next election campaign.27 Headlines screamed about a new low in their relationship. It had become so dysfunctional that the inconsequential was taking on an importance that seemed ludicrous to rational observers. It was also self-destructive. The Tories had just knifed Iain Duncan Smith and replaced him with Michael Howard, who was elected unopposed. For once, the Conservatives were presenting a united face. Labour planned an onslaught on the new Tory leader as ‘Mr Poll Tax’, a throwback to the past, a creature from the Thatcherite lagoon. This was wrecked by the eruption between Blair and Brown.

  That night, the two men were due for dinner with John Prescott. The Deputy Prime Minister had appointed himself to the role of peacemaker. Prescott would not be most people’s ideal of a marriage guidance counsellor, but he liked to see himself as the mediator between the warring couple of Downing Street. ‘I was ideally suited to it. I am instinctively the trade unionist looking for agreement.’28 At various times when their relationship was bad, he brought them together to try to get the two men to thrash out their differences, meetings which Prescott put in his schedule as ‘Bed and Breakfast’, his cipher for Blair and Brown.29 Prescott was anxious, and was far from alone in the Cabinet in being so, that the TB-GBs were becoming so toxic that they were on the brink of a final and catastrophic implosion. Prescott was often nagged by the fear that there was not much of a personal legacy to show for his years in government. He would be Deputy Prime Minister for longer than Herbert Morrison, Willie Whitelaw, Michael Heseltine or any other politician, Labour or Tory, who had held the position. But historians would struggle to locate many notable achievements from his time in power. He had helped to save the Channel Tunnel rail link in the first term, but was otherwise a failure as transport supremo. In the second term, Blair allowed his deputy to pursue his hobby horse of elected regional assemblies. They were disparaged as ‘JP’s toy’ in Number 10. Blair correctly anticipated that they would get nowhere.

  Looking for his place in history, Prescott dedicated himself to being the man whom people might credit with saving the poisoned political marriage at the top of the Government.

  That November evening, the three men met at the Deputy Prime Minister’s grace-and-favour apartment in Admiralty House with its splendid views of the Mall and Trafalgar Square. Prescott typically liked to serve his guests with steak and kidney pudding.

  Brown arrived in a foul temper. When they sat down for dinner, the Chancellor complained that his seat wasn’t high enough. Prescott went off to find another. ‘Do you want a different chair as well, Tony?’ he asked. ‘No, it’s all right,’ responded Blair sardonically. ‘Gordon has always looked down on me.’30

  On Brown’s subsequent account to his camp, Blair admitted that he was in a deep hole. ‘I won’t turn it around before the election,’ he said. If Brown was co-operative and helped to ‘get me through the next six months’, Blair pledged he would hand over the premiership in the summer of next year. ‘Naive as always about Tony, Gordon believed him,’ says one of Brown’s closest confidants.31 He left the dinner more certain than before that he had a promise of a handover.

  The morning after the Prescott dinner, Brown called Spencer Livermore, Sue Nye and the two Eds together for a meeting at the Treasury. ‘Tony has said he is going to go,’ he told them excitedly. ‘We should start preparing.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ asked Nye. ‘We’ve been here before,’ remarked Balls, unconvinced. Livermore and Miliband also expressed scepticism.

  ‘It’s going to happen,’ Brown assured them. ‘He said it in terms. Prescott was there. Prescott won’t let him break the promise this time.’32

  Blair gave a rather different account of the dinner to his friends, suggesting that he’d implored Brown to be more co-operative by saying: ‘I’m happy to give you your place in the sun, but you’ve got to accept that I am Prime Minister.’ He suggested he’d done a half-deal making a handover conditional on Brown’s good behaviour.33

  Their memoirs, assuming they are even prepared to acknowledge how poisoned the relationship became, will not agree on what happened. But at this crucial meeting there was indeed a witness. Prescott believed he heard a definite promise from Blair to hand over Number 10 in 2004.34 Without going so far as to call Blair a liar, Prescott alludes to this in his memoir when he says, ‘Tony’s technique was to persuade him [Gordon]to back him on certain matters … and in return Tony would come out with the same old promise. He was definitely going in, er, six months, perhaps a year, certainly before the election. When it never happened, Gordon was furious – and the whole cycle began again.’35

  ‘I have no doubt that Tony was most to blame. He broke his agreement with Gordon, not once but several times. However, in Tony’s defence, most of his promises were ambiguous and on condition anyway.’36

  The condition was always that Brown should support rather than sabotage Blair on policy. The two big divisions at the time of that dinner were over the health reforms and student tuition fees. There had been constant rebellion by Labour MPs against foundation hospitals even in the watered-down form which emerged from the compromise of a year before. This guerrilla warfare was encouraged by Brown’s now open dissent with Blair’s approach to public services. ‘We risk giving the impression that the only kind of reform that is valuable is a form of privatisation,’ he declared earlier that year in an 11,000-word speech, part academic treatise about the vices and virtues of the market, part full-frontal assault on Blair’s idea that choice, competition and diversity were the stimulants that would deliver better health and education. The ‘consumer can’t be sovereign’ in public services, so Brown argued, because they did not have sufficient information to make sensible choices.37

  One product of the Prescott dinner was Brown’s reluctant agreement to try to stem the opposition to the health legislation. Even then, it was tight.
In the vote on 19 November, the Government majority fell to the anorexic margin of seventeen, the lowest of their time in power so far. Embarrassingly, in order to pass legislation which only applied to the NHS in England they had to rely on the votes of Labour MPs with seats in Wales and Scotland.

  The legislation on tuition fees was formally launched in the Queen’s Speech at the end of November, but there had already been many months of struggle leading up to the moment when Her Majesty announced the Higher Education Bill from the throne.

  Blair became convinced that one of his legacy projects should be putting the financing of universities on a more sustainable footing. He was vigorously lobbied by the Russell Group of top universities, who contended they needed to be able to increase their income so that they would not fall behind the rest of the world. Blair was always very receptive to arguments of this sort about backing British institutions that could be ‘global champions’ and he was very swayed by their case that something had to be done to keep them internationally competitive.38 His old mentor, Roy Jenkins, the Chancellor of Oxford University, was another voice urging him in this direction. Especially influential was Andrew Adonis, a former member of the SDP whom Blair had put in as Head of the Policy Unit to pursue a more radical agenda for public services in his second term. Blair was persuaded that the way to sort out university finances was to charge students ‘top-up fees’ of up to £3,000 a year.

  In their first term, Brown largely accepted that education fell into the Blair hemisphere. But this was about money, which the Chancellor regarded as his domain.

  Brown’s opposition to top-up fees was both personal and political. He feared that they would deter children from poorer backgrounds from attending university. He worried that there would be a backlash among the middle classes as well. He did not see, as Blair did, any need for urgency in dealing with the issue. As a student at Edinburgh, he had first made his name fighting the university establishment and didn’t have a high opinion of many dons. ‘They’ll only spend the money eating swan’ was how his friend Alistair Darling liked to mock the universities pleading for more income.39