The End of the Party

by Andrew Rawnsley

  In this, his last case, the judge had exculpated the politicians, the civil servants, the spin merchants and the spooks. Lord Hutton discharged Tony Blair, Geoff Hoon and Alastair Campbell without a stain on their characters. He crucified the BBC. At every twist and turn of the Kelly Affair, Hutton heaped opprobrium on the corporation’s journalism, its editors, its executives and its governors.

  ‘Two things saved Tony Blair’s bacon,’ believed Sir Andrew Turnbull, the Cabinet Secretary. ‘One was the absolutely magnificent performance by David Omand, the security co-ordinator, who realised that you had to create an account of what happened that was coherent. The other was the retention of Jonathan Sumption as our QC. He did a wonderful job for us both by demolishing the BBC and presenting a case why it was entirely reasonable to reveal the name of David Kelly.’7

  There was disbelief of a different kind the next day when the judge appeared at the Royal Courts of Justice to unveil his verdict to the public. A leak to that morning’s Sun gave forewarning of what was in store.8 Yet there was still astonishment as Hutton read out his conclusions in his Ulster baritone. As the judge drily returned his pro-Government findings, some of the journalists in the court room shook their heads in disbelief. There were sniggers at the judge’s observation that ‘the desire of the Prime Minister to have a dossier which was as strong as possible … may have subconsciously influenced Mr Scarlett.’9 By the end, some in the court were snorting with open derision that his scant six pages of conclusions seemed so unrelated to much of the evidence.

  Alan Milburn was one of the Blair loyalists primed to swarm on to the airwaves to proclaim a victory for the Prime Minister. But they hardly needed to bother, says David Hill. ‘There was no need to spin Hutton. It spoke for itself.’10

  The BBC had also been given twenty-four hours’ advance notice, but its leaders were paralysed with bewilderment at the savagery of the judge’s verdict against the corporation for its lack of editorial controls and stubborn refusal to acknowledge error. Expecting a balanced assessment criticising both them and the Government, the BBC had no contingency plan for dealing with such a one-sided result. While the BBC’s own news bulletins reported the judge’s flagellation of their journalism, the corporation fielded no-one to defend its reputation. Hours went by and its senior ranks of highly paid executives remained entirely mute. Britain’s largest media organisation had lost its voice. Not until Newsnight was on the air did anyone of stature appear for the defence of the BBC and that was Sir Christopher Bland, a former chairman of the corporation.

  Floundering also was the Leader of the Opposition. In the build-up to the publication of the report, Michael Howard made a defining issue of Blair’s integrity. At successive bouts of Prime Minister’s Questions, the Tory leader raised the stakes by suggesting that Hutton would prove his opponent to be mendacious. ‘He has … effectively accused me of telling lies,’ said Blair.11 Howard thought Hutton would supply him with a sword. He was the one skewered by it. On the afternoon of publication, the Tory leader drowned to the sound of Labour MPs hissing and jeering as Blair flipped it into a question of his opponent’s character. ‘What you should understand is that being nasty is not the same as being effective,’ he crushed Howard. ‘Opportunism is not the same as leadership.’12 It was Blair’s best day in the Commons for a considerable time.

  What it did not provide was the catharsis that he was looking for. Jonathan Powell was right about it being ‘too good to be true’, a line that Blair repeated to allies like Stephen Byers when they discussed how it should be presented. ‘He meant that it would be very hard to make it look credible to the public.’13 The verdict was so disappointing for the Tories, so generous to the Government and so excruciating for the BBC that it was soon joked that its ghost writer must have been Alastair Campbell. Many press commentators, and not just those who had always been hostile to the war, expressed incredulity that the judge could ignore so much of the evidence that had been revealed during the inquiry. ‘No amount of judicial laundering’ could remove the ‘stains on their character’, wrote the historian and journalist Sir Max Hastings.14 Matthew d’Ancona, a pro-war commentator not unsympathetic to Blair, observed: ‘Hutton’s verdict invited scorn upon the very notion that such inquiries are any more trustworthy than the politicians who commission them.’15

  Alastair Campbell went on a vengeful rampage. ‘Alastair couldn’t control himself.’16 Blair did not attempt to stop him. The former spin king was almost certainly beyond restraint anyway.17 He called his own news conference that afternoon at the headquarters of the Foreign Press Association in St James’s, where he angrily demanded that ‘heads roll’ at the BBC. ‘If the Government had faced the level of criticism that Lord Hutton has directed at the BBC, there would clearly have been resignations by now, several resignations at several levels,’ fulminated Campbell.18

  He was rapidly granted his wish for rolling heads. The BBC’s Chairman, Gavyn Davies, volunteered his neck to the governors in the hope that this would save anyone else at the corporation from resignation. Within twenty-four hours, the governors also sent the protesting Director-General, Greg Dyke, to join the Chairman on the chopping block. This unprecedented double decapitation plunged the BBC into the most severe crisis of its existence.

  While this slaked the vindictive Campbell’s thirst for scalps, it was of no benefit to the Government. Scenes of BBC staff mobbing a tearful Dyke at TV Centre made it seem as if the defenestrated D-G was the hero of the hour. Many gagged at the spectacle of Blair’s former propagandist issuing decrees on media ethics. The resignations, which looked like they had been bullied out of the prostrate BBC by the marauding Campbell, moved public feeling against the Government. One astute minister noted: ‘The sight of us walking away from this entirely unscathed offends people’s sense of fair play. It could even make some hate us more.’19 Tessa Jowell, the Culture Secretary, pointed out to Blair that people didn’t just look at the BBC as a news organisation. Campbell’s angry campaign against the corporation risked alienating the large constituencies that loved The Archers, tuned in for EastEnders or admired the BBC for its nature documentaries, costume dramas and many other areas of output.20 Blair eventually prevailed upon his former spinmeister to shut up, but not before more damage had been done.

  Opinion polls published in Hutton’s wake indicated that most of the public thought the report was a whitewash and that the judge was wrong to clear Downing Street of ‘sexing up’ the dossier.21 Voters still invested far more trust in the BBC than they did in the Government. The number who thought Blair had lied about exposing Kelly was barely changed by the report.22

  Blair yearned for the Hutton verdict to give him closure on Iraq and produce a springboard for recovery. In that hope Number 10 was confounded: ‘It didn’t give us the fresh lease of life we were looking for.’23 The judge might have pronounced him innocent of all charges, but the Prime Minister was still in the dock in the eyes of the jury of public opinion.

  Within weeks of the verdict of one inquiry, he was compelled to concede to pressure for another. It was no longer possible to sustain the line that WMD would be found in Iraq. In January, the American head of the search team, David Kay, admitted defeat. While they had found some evidence that Saddam had ambitions to possess WMD, Kay conceded that an intense quest to find stockpiles of deadly weapons had turned up nothing. ‘I don’t think they exist,’ he admitted to a Congressional hearing. ‘We were almost all wrong.’24

  This was bad for Bush, but it was worse for Blair, who had based his case for war so heavily on the claim that Saddam menaced the world. On 2 February, the White House was forced to announce a commission to review US intelligence. Two days later, Blair was compelled to set up the Butler Inquiry into his use of intelligence.

  The public might have been more forgiving that the war was sold on a false prospectus if there were compensating signs that Iraq was moving towards the better and more peaceful future that Blair had promised. The reverse was the ca
se. In July 2003, Jack Straw flew out to Baghdad and was taken aback by ‘the primitive security’ around the British embassy and other key buildings when it was clear that Iraq was increasingly violent.25 The first big warning came in mid-August, when the United Nations headquarters in Iraq, based at a hotel on Canal Street in Baghdad, was devastated by a colossal truck bomb. Twenty-three people died, among them the UN’s chief envoy to Iraq. Straw later realised that this ‘really marked the time when authority started to be difficult to exercise and you got the beginnings of the terrorism and the sectarian violence’.26 Ten days later, terrorists demonstrated their growing capacity to wreak death on a large scale when they bombed the Iman Ali mosque in Najaf, killing eighty-three people. The UN relocated to another hotel in Baghdad. In mid-September, the new HQ was targeted by a massive car bomb. Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary-General, ordered the withdrawal of his 600 staff. With the UN bombed out of Iraq, all the energy expended by Blair trying to internationalise the reconstruction effort was rendered futile. America and Britain would now have to cope with the consequences of their invasion alone.

  British generals grew alarmed that their American counterparts seemed ill-trained to deal with this form of conflict. ‘They are less comfortable with the messier part of conflict where it’s not manoeuvre war,’ noted General Mike Jackson, ‘where there is no clear enemy visible in the conventional sense.’27

  Blair had hoped that British-controlled Basra might be ‘an exemplar’ to both the Americans and the Iraqis.28 They were still feeling self-congratulatory about the calmer situation in the south, but in the British sector there were also signs of deterioration. On 24 June, six Royal Military Police were murdered by a mob at an Iraqi police station near Basra. On 23 August, another three red berets were killed when their taxi was ambushed in the centre of the city. British troops came under attack from protestors rioting over fuel and electricity shortages.

  Since talking to Washington seemed to be having so little traction, an increasingly agitated Blair tried to get himself ‘a direct voice on the ground’.29 Sir Jeremy Greenstock, the former ambassador to the UN, resisted taking on the job until he was personally cajoled by the Prime Minister to become the most senior British figure in Iraq from September 2003. Greenstock was a supporter of the war, though a sceptic about the way in which they had got into it. His first encounter with the reality in Iraq was when he arrived at the ‘pretty chaotic’ headquarters of Paul Bremer, the American viceroy. Based at the Republican Palace of Saddam in the centre of Baghdad, Greenstock found the place to be a ‘dusty marbled mess of military and civilians and plywood and wires and vehicles’. He got ‘an immediate feeling that we were an island in the middle of a stormy sea’.30 Bremer had all the power. Blair urged his official to ‘get close’, but the American wasn’t interested and Greenstock ‘was not valued by Bremer in the way he should have been’.31 The American occupied a smart office at one end of the building and underlined the subordinate status of his British colleague by putting Greenstock in a less smart office at the other end. The two men did not get on.32 Bremer was an intense ideologue with no feel for the country he was running; Greenstock was a pragmatic diplomat who spoke Arabic. The American emperor did not share the British representative’s belief that they were equals. The most crucial difference between them was that Greenstock did not agree with Bremer’s upbeat assessment of Iraq. Greenstock saw that 1,200 civilians were ‘hopelessly inadequate’ to the task of trying to run a country of 25 million people and yet found that the Americans weren’t willing to give Iraqis ‘responsibility to run their own country’. He knew his observations did not make him popular with the Americans, who became suspicious and scornful of ‘those mealy-mouthed Brits sitting in a corner saying all is going to hell in a handcart.’33

  Greenstock sent urgent messages to London warning that security was rapidly deteriorating and sectarian conflict intensifying. ‘Things don’t add up,’ he reported to his masters back in Britain. ‘You haven’t got on the ground what is necessary to control the situation that we’re responsible for.’34 Greenstock’s reports began to ‘stir real fear in Tony’.35 There was more blood-drenched evidence that he was right in October when the headquarters of the Red Cross in Baghdad was attacked.

  This descent made it even more imperative for Blair to convince Bush to engage with what was happening. Downing Street thought technology might help provide an answer. The two leaders started regular communication by video telephone so that they could see as well as hear each other. These video conferences commonly took place on a Tuesday, lasted for up to an hour, and were fortnightly, sometimes weekly, events.36 Yet they would only have real value if Blair was prepared to be robust with Bush about the failure of US policy in Iraq. ‘Did he ever really read the riot act?’ says one British diplomat who saw many of their encounters and read transcripts of their conversations. ‘I never saw it, I never heard of it, I never saw a record of it.’37 Andrew Card and Condi Rice did not witness one serious argument between the two leaders.38 ‘I just don’t think Blair is capable of being confrontational in that way,’ says David Manning.39 Others present at either these video conferences or their direct meetings agree. ‘Tony’s view was that if he was antagonistic to Bush, Bush simply wouldn’t listen at all,’ says Sally Morgan.40

  Even when Bush seemed committed to action it rarely materialised. The British were gradually grasping that the Commander-in-Chief was not truly a chief in command of his own administration. ‘It was very hard to influence Bush because Bush couldn’t actually influence his own administration,’ says Jonathan Powell. ‘Rumsfeld and others were running rings around him.’ They tried having video conferences involving ‘their generals and our generals on the ground’ talking to Blair and Bush simultaneously. ‘Even doing that we couldn’t get into the nitty gritty of the decision-making.’41

  When Greenstock made a trip back from Iraq to give a direct report to Blair in his study, the envoy was the bearer of bleak news about the escalating violence. He was worried that London was ‘too focused on their role in Basra’. He warned Blair: ‘This whole thing will be won or lost in the centre. If Baghdad and the central authority isn’t strong, you can wish goodbye to Basra as well.’

  ‘Come on,’ responded Blair. ‘Let’s get the police properly trained by the end of the year.’ Greenstock pointed out that it took three years to train a police force. ‘What on earth are the Americans up to in the field of the media in Iraq?’ demanded Blair, ever more agitated that the allies were losing the propaganda battle against the extremists. ‘They don’t seem to have a media operation going.’ Greenstock believed it was clear ‘what has to be done’. The top priority was to ‘put enough resources into the security situation’. Blair responded positively to the envoy’s suggestion that he should write up a detailed note about the six most critical items. Greenstock accompanied his memorandum with a plea to Blair ‘to get President Bush to understand that more has to be put into this’.42

  In the second half of November, there was a chance for Blair to do that in the flesh. On the 19th, the American President arrived in Britain on a three-day State visit, an idea originally conceived many months previously when Downing Street expected a very different outcome in Iraq. Bush’s political strategist, Karl Rove, was already planning their re-election campaign. He was entirely frank about the advantages of capturing pictures of Bush with the Queen and with Blair, a popular figure with centrist voters in America. Robin Cook, speaking for a considerable segment of the Labour Party, asked why the Prime Minister should be ‘offering up Buckingham Palace as the mother of all photo-ops for President Bush’.43

  Bush was now wildly unpopular with much of Britain and the association was becoming increasingly toxic for Blair. Every time they were pictured together, groaned Sally Morgan, ‘it’s 100,000 votes lost.’44

  On arrival in Britain, the President declared: ‘America is fortunate to call this country our closest friend in the world.’ But he was not entirely unaware
that he was the man that millions of Britons loved to hate. In the one speech of the trip, he compared himself with the illusionist David Blaine. ‘The last noted American to visit London stayed in a glass box dangling over the Thames. A few might have been happy to provide similar arrangements for me.’45

  More than a few. Some in Number 10 agreed with Cook and thought they could have ‘done without this visit’. They feared that Bush was only really interested in boosting his image at home, while his physical proximity to Blair would incite fresh accusations of poodleism. Sally Morgan had fruitlessly lobbied to ‘stop it altogether.’46 Blair wouldn’t hear of any curtailment, according to David Hill: ‘There were constant arguments inside Number 10 about this, but there was never a time when Tony was prepared by one jot to put distance between himself and Bush.’47

  The Americans were nightmarishly paranoid about security, even trying to demand the reinforcement of the walls of Buckingham Palace and the closure of the M4 to create a security corridor into London from Heathrow. ‘They wanted to close down half of Britain.’48

  Though it was supposed to celebrate the friendship of Britain and the United States, the premium was put on limiting the potential for disaster. The pomp was constricted by the security and the ceremony constrained by the visitor’s unpopularity. Bush was moved round in a steel bubble of distant ceremonial. There was not even the traditional carriage procession down the Mall with the Queen for fear that it would attract protestors. His keynote speech was delivered to an audience of Whitehall grandees and foreign policy dons at the Banqueting House rather than to Parliament, where some MPs might have made rude noises. The speech was, as even some of his sternest critics acknowledged, more subtle, fluent and multidimensional than many anticipated. Bush tried to challenge the belief that he was a blind unilateralist. ‘Freedom is a beautiful thing,’ he said, trying to emphasise the better half of the neo-con doctrine by arguing that it was ‘pessimism and condescension’ to say the Middle East was not ready for democracy.49 He claimed inspiration from the internationalist idealism of Woodrow Wilson, the last of his predecessors to bed and board at Buckingham Palace.