The End of the Party

by Andrew Rawnsley

  He did not have any illusions about Gaddafi. The Colonel wanted to come out of the cold because his wrecked economy was screaming for relief from sanctions. He had long been an enemy of al-Qaeda, who had previously tried to kill him. One valuable product of the visit was Libyan agreement to provide intelligence on al-Qaeda.85

  Back at the British embassy, Blair hailed the moment as an example of how his foreign policy of force and engagement was winning the most unexpected allies for the ‘fight against al-Qaeda extremism and terrorism’. Michael Howard sought to make political capital by attacking the handshake in the desert. That backfired on the Tory leader when the trip was endorsed by Sir John Major, who agreed with Blair that it ‘was the right thing to do’ to bring Libya in from the cold.86

  This was a coup for Britain and a desperately needed filip for Blair. Libya’s admission that it had pursued WMD demonstrated that the threat of rogue states developing frightening arsenals was not just a figment of his imagination. It also sent a message to the White House that diplomatic engagement could sometimes be a successful alternative to war. To other states in the neighbourhood, it dangled before them the potential rewards for engaging with the West. To Britain as a whole, it reasserted Blair’s belief that his country and its Prime Minister could play a pivotal role in global affairs.

  He and his officials in Number 10 were still trying to convince themselves that even in Iraq ‘lots of things were going OK.’87 An interim constitution was agreed in March. This guaranteed to Iraqis democratic rights, freedom of religion and freedom from torture. It also reserved a quarter of seats in the Iraqi parliament for women, which was an advance towards equality between the genders greater than had ever been achieved in either the US Congress or the House of Commons. The trouble was that they were trying to build an enlightened democracy on foundations that were violently unstable because of the calamitous errors made in the year since the toppling of Saddam. Sentient members of Bush’s own administration like Richard Haas could see that ‘things weren’t working, but policy never caught up with the reality.’88

  At the end of March, a convoy of 4x4s carrying American security contractors was ambushed as they drove through the centre of Fallujah. Gunmen sprang out to rake one vehicle with AK-47s. It was then set alight. The corpses were still smouldering when a frenzied mob dragged them from the car and hacked at them with shovels. The grisly ritual was still not quite over. The blackened bodies were tied to the back of cars and dragged around the streets. Two of the corpses were then hung from their feet from a green metal pontoon bridge over the Euphrates.89 TV cameras were there to record horrifying images which were soon playing on Arab satellite channels. Edited versions were shown on British and American television. It was no longer possible for either the White House or Downing Street to deny the brutal ferocity of the insurgency.

  America’s fierce response, unleashed without consulting the British and against the protests of the Iraqi Governing Council, was a bloody offensive as US marines assaulted the towns of Fallujah and Najaf. That was the ‘key point’ when Downing Street finally woke up to ‘the full horror of the insurgency’.90 Jack Straw had no choice but to publicly acknowledge that the ‘lid has come off the pressure cooker’.91

  This was the bloody backdrop to Blair’s mid-April visit to the United States. He came away empty-handed from a meeting with Kofi Annan in New York. The Secretary-General was not to be persuaded that the UN should re-engage in Iraq. Blair’s visit to the White House the next day was an opportunity to express the high alarm of the British about the perils of fighting on two fronts against both the insurgency and the Shia militias.92 The British were also horrified by the Americans’ use of white phosphorus bombs in the offensive on Fallujah, partly for fear of retaliation against their own soldiers in Basra.93 That tension was masked when Bush and Blair came out for the cameras to utter their now familiar expressions of mutual regard. ‘The American people know that we have no more valuable friend than Prime Minister Tony Blair,’ declared Bush as they stood next to each other in the Rose Garden. ‘As we like to say in Crawford, he’s a stand-up kind of guy. He shows backbone and courage and strong leadership.’ Blair reciprocated by declaring that the ‘friends and allies’ would carry on ‘standing side by side’.94

  Throughout it all, Blair insisted that unswerving public unity with the Americans was the way to maximise his private influence over the President. Sucking up to Bush was how he got suction on the White House. A mounting number of sceptics, including members of his own Cabinet, asked for evidence of this fabled influence. To visitors to Number 10, the Prime Minister’s usual response was to claim that he had been instrumental in persuading the White House to issue the vaunted ‘road map’ to peace in the Israel–Palestine conflict.95 So it was a sharp humiliation when Bush rolled up that map in the very week that Blair was his guest in Washington. The previous day, the Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, was at the White House. He came to America with his unilateral and aggressive plan to build a ‘Security Fence’ which would effectively annexe a big chunk of Palestinian land on the West Bank. Though this was also accompanied by a promise to withdraw some forces from Palestinian territory, the Sharon gambit suggested that the Israelis never had any intention of withdrawing to their 1967 borders, the basis on which the Middle East peace process was founded. The White House endorsed the Sharon plan. That left Blair trapped when he stood side by side with Bush in the Rose Garden. He felt compelled to swallow his own forebodings and voice public support for the Israeli plan rather than open a transparent breach with the American President. Cabinet members watched and winced. For all Bush’s clichés about his British ally being ‘a stand-up kind of guy’, Blair was being publicly knee-capped. Even some of his most loyal allies privately groaned that the Prime Minister appeared incapable of indicating that Britain might have a foreign policy in any way independent of that set in the White House.96 Soon afterwards, fifty-two former British diplomats wrote an open letter denouncing the Government’s policy towards the Middle East as hopelessly subservient to the Americans.97

  By that spring, Blair’s strategy of hugging close to Bush looked increasingly bankrupt even to some of the Prime Minister’s best friends. While he tried to maintain a public face of confidence about Iraq, he could no longer deny to himself that it was being engulfed by mayhem and death. He ‘felt quite powerless’, says Sally Morgan. ‘He didn’t know what to do about it.’98

  Sir Jeremy Greenstock came to Number 10 at the end of his service in Iraq to give a final briefing to the Prime Minister. Greenstock knew that his ‘very gloomy assessment’ had made him highly unpopular with some in the building who would be ‘happy to see the back of that kind of pessimism’. Some at Number 10 tried to keep him away. They feared the impact on Blair’s crumpling morale of a candid account of what was happening to Iraq. As they sat in Blair’s den, Greenstock warned the Prime Minster that the situation now looked ‘unbelievably bad’ and was going to get more desperate in the months to come. ‘What can we do?’ despaired Blair. ‘We have told them again and again what we think is necessary. If it doesn’t happen, what can we do?’ Greenstock was left with the image of the Prime Minister ‘tearing his hair’ over Iraq and ‘throwing his hands in the air’.99

  15. The Long Dark Tunnel

  The wall of the staircase which sweeps up from the ground floor of Number 10 to the first is lined with portraits and pictures of all its previous occupants, the still famous and the long-forgotten men and one woman who have ruled Britain from Downing Street. They are in chronological order. At the bottom of the stair is Sir Robert Walpole, the first and longest-serving Prime Minister. At the top, a hanging space waited for Tony Blair. When he was in a mordant mood, he would draw the attention of a visitor to the spot. He would say: ‘That’s where they put you when you’re done.’1

  By the spring of 2004, he felt done. The amazing run that began with his election to the leadership in 1994 and swept him through two landslide victories
was definitively over. His morale was collapsing, his health was deteriorating, his unpopularity was spiralling, and many of the ambitions of a badly wounded leader seemed to have crumbled to dust. He had hit the rock bottom of his premiership.

  Consummate actor that he was, Blair was skilful at concealing the severity of the descent from the public and the media. He was also adept at masking it from the great majority of his colleagues and officials. ‘He managed to disguise it from most people,’ says his Cabinet Secretary. ‘It wasn’t visible to me. I only believed in The Wobble when it became clear afterwards that there had been one.’2

  Only those closest to him could see the interior collapse of the Prime Minister. There had been few days since 9/11 when he had not been living on his nerves. He found it difficult to sleep. When it eventually came, rest often did not last long. He would wake with a start in the middle of the night to find sweat trickling down the back of his neck.3

  His hair was dramatically thinner and what remained of it was much greyer than it had been in May 1997. There was a yellow tone to his skin. ‘You look young. Why do you look so much younger than me?’ he remarked to a junior minister of a similar age. The other man responded: ‘Because I’m not Prime Minister.’4

  The make-up that was slapped on him for public appearances did not entirely camouflage the stress and exhaustion that were etched into his face. Those who saw him when he was not wearing pancake were often shocked by how he looked.

  Nights were also broken by Leo, now aged nearly four. Leo would be disturbed by the ring of the phone in the flat, or just wake up anyway, and then refuse to go back to sleep. Blair had ‘a day from hell’ when he came back from a European Council late one night to find that Leo was with Cherie in their bed. The Prime Minister ended up trying, and failing, to get his own rest in Leo’s little bed in the nursery.5 During a short break in Bermuda at Easter, another holidaymaker thought Leo was the Prime Minister’s grandson. That commentary on how old he was looking made Blair sigh: ‘I obviously need to get to the gym.’

  He had tried to deal with the stress by taking up a fitness regime about which he had become quite fanatical. He would work out at Number 10 and use the running machine in the gym in the police guardhouse at Chequers. The result was to make him look thinner and more haggard. He would complain of exhaustion to close friends, groaning: ‘I’m so tired.’6

  His heart condition was worrying both him and Cherie. In October 2003, he had a scare while spending the weekend at Chequers. His chest was gripped with pain and on Sunday evening he was rushed to Hammersmith hospital in London to be given emergency treatment and placed under supervision for five hours. An irregular heartbeat was diagnosed. He and his aides were frightened that this intimation of his mortality would weaken his political authority. That Sunday night, David Hill arranged to rush the Government’s chief medical officer, Sir Liam Donaldson, to an interview for The Westminster Hour in order to deliver reassurances that the condition was neither life-threatening nor incapacitating.7 That did not entirely succeed in smothering speculation about the Prime Minister’s health. There was more reason to be anxious than the media knew. Blair cut down on coffee, but perversely refused to take the pills that were prescribed for his condition. His heart would suddenly and scarily start to race, most alarmingly when he was performing at news conferences and in the Commons. ‘I had the feeling that he was only operating at sixty to seventy per cent or so of his capacity,’ thought one of his intimates.8 He confided to one of his most trusted aides that he even ‘spaced out’ several times in the middle of Prime Minister’s Questions.9

  There was a further toll on his family. Blair was ‘utterly aware of the fickle nature of people’s adulation and people’s hatred’, says his friend Charlie Falconer. He tried to insulate himself and his children by ‘preserving an ordinary family life’.10 Leo was too young to be aware of what was happening to his father. Not so Euan, Nicky and Kathryn. The Blairs’ children had to make a difficult adjustment. Their dad had been a hugely popular leader in his early years and they had largely enjoyed the celebrity that went with that. Now the children had a father who was widely loathed for the war, not least by their own age group.

  An emotional trauma with one of the children came as a terrible shock to both the Blairs. As one of his aides says: ‘He’s a decent human being. He’s a very good dad. It shook him very deeply.’11

  Blair got some comfort from another member of the New Labour inner circle who had been through something similar. That confidant says: ‘It profoundly affects your confidence and your sense of self-worth.’12

  The Prime Minister rang the editors of national newspapers to ask them not to report the story. Cherie also made calls to editors with whom she was on friendly terms. Sir Christopher Meyer, in his new role as Chairman of the Press Complaints Commission, successfully urged restraint on the media. In the absence of any published account of the episode, some of the speculation in the media and Westminster villages ran wild. There was even a fantastic rumour that the incident involved the fraudster Foster’s dodgy dieting pills.

  Blair was increasingly doubtful that he could achieve more with the premiership. The Northern Ireland peace process, to which he had devoted commendably vast amounts of time and energy, was at an impasse. Iraq was so dire that Tessa Jowell, one of his closest Cabinet allies, publicly called it ‘a shroud over the Government’.13 Public service reform was still proving frustratingly intractable. A senior politician who saw a lot of him observed: ‘He’s not very happy. I’m not convinced he gets to the end of many weeks and thinks he has really achieved something.’14

  A threatening band of Labour MPs appeared to be in permanent revolt. ‘No Prime Minister can survive long-term with a deadweight of sixty or seventy rebels out to get him by any means possible,’ noted a member of the Cabinet. ‘If thirty more have a genuine concern about an issue, that’s a hundred against you from the start.’15

  Then there were the endless guerrilla attacks orchestrated by the impatient Gordon Brown. ‘It’s just constant psychological warfare from Gordon,’ one of Blair’s most senior aides told me at this time. ‘He will not give up until he has got Tony out.’16 Cherie was livid about the ‘constant attrition’ from Brown ‘rattling the keys above his head’.17

  Blair’s ambition to take Britain into the euro had been murdered by Brown. Worse, he was so politically weakened by the Easter of 2004 that he suddenly capitulated to the Eurosceptics by agreeing to a referendum on the new constitution proposed for the European Union. Blair originally set his face against a referendum, believing that the battle would be both a massive distraction and extremely hard to win. He repeatedly argued that the constitution should be dealt with, like previous treaties under both Tory and Labour governments, by Parliament. But he was ‘never comfortable with the argument. The politician in him knew it sounded shifty and evasive.’18 Against him was building a clamour for a plebiscite from the Conservatives and the Europe-hating press. ‘A thousand years of British sovereignty are about to be buried by Undertaker Blair,’ shouted the Sun in a campaign personally authorised by Rupert Murdoch. ‘Britain demands the right to a referendum before our country goes six feet under.’19 The Daily Mail bellowed as loudly. Michael Howard seized on the issue as an opportunity to win support among the tabloids, cast himself as the voice of the people and used the question as a populist stick with which to beat the Government. The Liberal Democrats also supported the idea of putting the constitution to a national vote, though from a position positive to the treaty. That meant that a referendum could be forced on the Government in the House of Lords by a combination of Tory and Lib Dem peers.

  The negotiations with other leaders at European Councils became ‘incredibly fierce. They were real blood-against-the-wall events.’20 Jack Straw was no admirer of the constitution, which he regarded as far too federalist and ‘full of all kinds of crap’. The Foreign Secretary referred to the negotiations as ‘a fucking fandango’.21 He started badgering B
lair to lance the controversy by commiting to a referendum.

  ‘Jack is devious, but he is straightforwardly devious,’ notes a colleague who sat with him in Cabinet.22 The previous autumn, Straw went to Chequers to argue with Blair that they would need to promise a referendum to get them through the Euro-elections in June 2004 and the next general election. As was Straw’s habit, he peppered Blair with personal minutes arguing the case. By the spring, he had important allies in John Prescott and John Reid while Gordon Brown was courting the Eurosceptic press.23

  Already groaning under the pressure of Iraq, Blair caved in. He knew it was going to look humiliating, saying to one close colleague: ‘I’m going to have to eat shit for a few days.’24

  The retreat forced upon the Prime Minister was made to look even worse when it was pre-announced in the Europhobic Sun and The Times.25 That also aroused the indignation of the many Cabinet members who had never been consulted. Nor had Blair discussed this flip-flop with any of his fellow leaders in Europe on whom it increased pressure to hold difficult referendums in their own countries. For Jacques Chirac, with whom he had previously struck a pact that neither of them would hold a plebiscite, this was another example of Blair being perfidious. Chirac was now compelled to promise a referendum to the French, the result of which would eventually wreck the constitution.26

  As ever with Blair, he was the master of disguising private weakness with the strength of public performance. He put a brave face on this defeat at the hands of his Foreign Secretary and the forces of Europhobia. He presented his panicked retreat as a bold offensive, crying to MPs: ‘Let the issue be put and let the battle be joined!’27