The End of the Party

by Andrew Rawnsley

  His closest allies, especially the pro-Europeans among them, saw this for the reverse it was. ‘The Tony Blair I knew pre-Iraq would never have done this. He would never have conceded to a referendum. It’s a sign of him being defensive and weakened,’ one of them told me that week.28

  As things turned out, battle never was joined because French voters rejected the constitution in their plebiscite and the Dutch then did the same. This subsequently presented the Government with an excuse to wriggle off the referendum hook. Blair was not to know this in the spring of 2004, so his retreat on a referendum was emboldening to his enemies and alarming for his friends. ‘We were all absolutely furious.’29 The day before the statement to Parliament, Charles Clarke bearded Blair at Number 10 and told him he was making a monumental error. Alan Milburn and Stephen Byers, his two most reliable cheerleaders outside the Cabinet, despaired. No-one was angrier than Peter Mandelson, who told Blair he had made the single worst decision of his premiership. ‘Tony regrets this already,’ Mandelson let it be known that weekend. ‘But, then again, that is typical Tony.’30

  Graphic pictures of American soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners first began to surface in the US media on 28 April. They were broadcast on network television the next day and then carried around the world.31 In one of the most shocking photos, a female American soldier, Lynndie England, was shown with a cigarette dangling from her mouth giving a thumbs-up sign while pointing at the genitals of a naked and hooded young Iraqi who has been ordered to masturbate. In another, a prisoner was put on a box and wired up. In a third, naked prisoners were piled in a human pyramid. The abuse was committed at the Abu Ghraib prison, one of Saddam’s torture chambers near Baghdad, which added to the ghastly symbolism. The iconic image of Iraq was no longer the toppling of the tyrant’s statue. It was a female American soldier holding an Iraqi detainee on a leash. Soon afterwards, the Mirror published pictures purporting to show British troops committing abuses. When these were exposed as a fraud, the paper’s editor, Piers Morgan, was forced to resign. Damage was already done and, in any case, there was nothing fake about the terrible evidence of abuse at Abu Ghraib.

  After many months of ignoring warnings from Amnesty International and others who had gathered allegations about torture and killings, Tony Blair was forced to respond. He called himself ‘appalled’ and declared: ‘Nobody underestimates how wrong this is or how wrong this will seem to be.’32

  His brother in arms, George Bush, claimed to feel ‘deep disgust’, though it was only forty-eight hours after the torture story went televisual on 60 Minutes that he got round to expressing his revulsion. ‘I do not like it one little bit,’ said the President. ‘That’s not the way we do things.’33

  In fact, it was the way things were done and they were done with the effective authorisation of the President. Prisoner abuse, along with much more brutal forms of degradation and illegal imprisonment, became a semi-official American policy after 9/11. The Red Cross unequivocally concluded that there was systematic torture.34

  Torture was green-lighted by Bush in February 2002 when he signed a memorandum declaring that the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners of war did not apply to members of al-Qaeda and the Taliban.35 The Office of Legal Counsel reinterpreted the legal definition so as to sanction US intelligence and army personnel to use some forms of torture, of which water-boarding – simulated drowning – became the most notorious. Senior figures in the administration gave the go-ahead for the CIA’s plans to use what was euphemistically called ‘enhanced interrogation’.36

  From this flowed the outrages in the cells of Abu Ghraib and the cages of Guantanamo, at the Bagram air base in Afghanistan, and CIA ‘black sites’ in Europe and around the world. From that sprang ‘extraordinary rendition’, the Orwellian term for state-licensed kidnap. Why America turned to the dark side was briskly explained by Joseph Cofer Black, a head of the CIA Counter Terrorist Center. ‘There was a world before 9/11 and there was a world after 9/11,’ he told a Congressional hearing. ‘After 9/11, the gloves came off.’37

  The ‘War on Terror’ became such an absolutist mission for both George Bush and Tony Blair that the noble cause of protecting liberal democracies from murderous extremists became the justification for using the most repulsive means. This was explicitly so in the case of the Bush administration, which barely attempted to be secretive about it. Dick Cheney declared that these were necessary evils in the ‘tough, mean, dirty, nasty business’ of ‘keeping the country safe’.38

  The American and British intelligence agencies were so enmeshed with each other that it was impossible to believe that no-one in London knew what was being perpetrated in the name of the alliance. After years of denials, it was finally officially admitted in 2009 that Britain was involved in at least one case of rendition.39 Following allegations that MI5 agents were complicit in torture, a police investigation was announced.

  One very senior member of the Cabinet subsequently admitted to me that they had got ‘fragments’ of information about the ghost prisons and dark operations being run by the CIA.40

  Yet Blair never once raised his voice in protest. The use of torture defiled the allies’ reputation for respecting human rights and following the rule of law with a crippling effect on their claims to moral authority. By torturing prisoners, some of whom were implicated in horrendous terrorist crimes, the United States also made it impossible to bring them to justice so they were left in the indefinite limbo of the Guantanamo camp.

  General Charles Guthrie was one of those appalled. Guthrie was no-one’s idea of a bleeding-heart liberal. He served with the SAS and was commandant of the Intelligence Corps before he became Chief of the Defence Staff. As he put it, torture was immoral, illegal, ineffective, cruel and counter-productive. ‘Western use of torture to counter terror has been a propaganda coup for al-Qaeda and a recruiting sergeant for its global jihad. Our hypocrisy has radicalised our enemies and corroded the power we base on our proclaimed values.’

  Blair’s favourite general delivered a resounding verdict: ‘We have condoned with our silence the torture committed by others.’41

  This was arguably the largest personal moral failure of Tony Blair’s premiership.

  The full extent of the barbarity was not yet publicly revealed in 2004. But the pictures from Abu Ghraib were quite appalling enough to add to the crisis of Tony Blair’s premiership that spring. Already facing relentless accusations that he was mendacious about the WMD, these revelations ate into the moral case for the war. The head of the Foreign Office, Michael Jay, regarded it as hugely detrimental.

  ‘You have to conduct foreign policy in accordance with the values you espouse. If you don’t do that, you lose an enormous amount of moral authority.’42

  The British commanders in Iraq feared the ‘psychological effect’. In the words of General Mike Jackson, it was ‘very damaging to the coalition position and cause. Not only is it unlawful to do these things, besides immoral, it’s operationally stupid because you are hurting your position.’43 In the view of Sir Jeremy Greenstock, this marked the point where the allies ‘had no hope remaining of winning the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people. We lost them during that period.’44

  Tony Blair only ever discussed when he might quit with those very closest to him and his mind was in regular flux on the subject. To his friend Barry Cox, he had quite often expressed the view that ‘ten years is long enough for anyone.’45 On other occasions, he had been heard to say: ‘Two terms is all you get these days.’46 Two years earlier, in 2002, he had flirted with the idea of announcing that he wouldn’t run for a third term. Campbell, Mandelson, Morgan and Powell, all his closest advisers, thought that was a terrible idea. Cherie told her husband that it was ‘mad’. They do not seem to have found it that hard to talk him out of it.

  There were other times when he indicated an ambition to beat the modern record of eleven and three quarter years that Margaret Thatcher clocked up in Downing Street.47 His ideas about how
long he wanted to be in Number 10 changed with the political climate of the moment, the state of his relationship with Gordon Brown and his fluctuating morale. That had never been in a deeper pit than in the spring of 2004.

  ‘He got down because of the aftermath of Iraq,’ says Peter Mandelson. ‘There was a temporary lapse of morale, spirit, heart. He was prepared at that moment to walk away from it all.’48 Philip Gould agrees that it was ‘Iraq – the enormity of it weighed him down.’49 Tessa Jowell, a Cabinet minister very close to Blair, says: ‘He was very low, he was very lonely and he was very tired.’50 ‘It wasn’t a spasm,’ believes another ally, Stephen Byers. ‘He was wobbling for a while.’51 David Blunkett felt Blair ‘was really down and needed lifting … when things are going badly you sometimes go into a black hole’.52 Peter Hain agrees that it ‘was a period of tremendous darkness for him’.53 Alan Milburn reckons: ‘He’d lost confidence, the Government had lost direction, he looked very vulnerable.’54 A senior member of the Cabinet who had known Blair for years says:

  This was a very bleak part of Tony’s premiership. The war had changed the whole atmosphere of British politics. The north London liberal middle class where he came from was turning viciously against him over Iraq. He was utterly miserable and the neighbour was saying: ‘When the fuck are you going?’55

  Cherie was consumed by anxiety that they would find themselves out on the street if her husband suddenly quit. With his agreement, she secretly arranged the purchase of a £3.6 million house in Connaught Square. ‘A mortgage the size of Mount Snowdon’ was guaranteed against his future earnings in retirement.56

  ‘It was all coming in on him at once,’ comments David Hill.57 In the words of Sally Morgan: ‘Iraq was a quicksand swallowing him up. The atrocities. Those terrible photos. And he started losing people who had supported him throughout. He was stuck in this long, dark tunnel and could see no way out of it.’58

  The Cabinet Secretary saw it eating away at the Prime Minister: ‘The justification for the war didn’t stand up. In terms of making Iraq a more decent place to live, was it? No, it was in a worse place.’59

  The Chancellor and his circle took a more clinical and cynical view of Blair’s desperate condition. ‘He was talking about resigning because he didn’t think he could win the next election.’60 Blair previously believed that he had a special connection with the public. Iraq ‘seemed to take him down step by step’, says his pollster Stan Greenberg. ‘He knew that when weapons of mass destruction weren’t found there would be a broken bond of trust that would be very hard to rebuild. That bothered him more than anything.’ This was ‘a good part of the reason why there were doubts whether he would run again for that third term’.61

  The Tories were advancing on Labour in the polls and Blair’s personal ratings dropped to the lowest of his premiership. Those of Brown sparkled in comparison. The Chancellor consolidated his position with a 2004 Budget that increased spending on health and promised a further £8.5 billion over four years for education. ‘Gordon was at his peak,’ comments Philip Gould.62 Brown also found more money for pensioners. This was what the average Labour MP had come into politics to do rather than fight a disastrous war in the Middle East alongside a very right-wing President. A typical poll had more than a quarter of Labour supporters saying they might switch their vote because of the war.63 Polling indicated that Labour would have a much bigger majority at the next election if Blair was replaced with Brown.64

  Cabinet colleagues had rarely seen Brown so cheerful. ‘Gordon has got such a spring in his step, he’s so whistle-while-you-work,’ noted one minister. ‘Something about the succession must have been said.’65 John Prescott knew that something had been said. In the early spring, Blair rang up his deputy and confirmed: ‘I’m going in June.’66

  The Chancellor’s camp grew in confidence that they were about to take over. Ed Miliband returned from a sabbatical at Harvard in the expectation of becoming the head of the Number 10 Policy Unit in a Brown premiership. He and Ed Balls planned a new government. Blair encouraged allies like Philip Gould to ‘reach out to the other side’.67 Gould and Spencer Livermore for the Brown team ‘spent a lot of time together’ on transition planning.68 Aides and allies of the Chancellor cancelled their holidays in anticipation of an imminent take-over.

  The full story was not detected by the media, but hints began to bubble to the surface. In an interview in May, Prescott remarked that ‘plates appear to be moving.’69 This was interpreted as being a reference to tectonic plates. In fact, Prescott later explained, he was using a phrase from his seafaring days. ‘Plates move’ in stormy seas. The remark was also aimed at Jack Straw, who was very obviously shifting towards Brown.70 There was some more media excitement when it was reported that Prescott had discussed the succession with Brown in the back of Prescott’s official Jaguar in the car park of the Loch Fyne Oyster Bar in Argyll.

  Brown had, in fact, already made a colossal miscalculation two months earlier. He just didn’t know it yet. At a meeting between Prime Minister and Chancellor in March, Blair floated the idea that he should pre-announce his resignation. He told Brown that he wanted to make an Easter announcement that he would quit Number 10 that autumn. Expecting Brown to be pleased with this suggestion, Blair was surprised to find that the other man was aghast. ‘Don’t do that,’ Brown responded. ‘It would be crazy.’ Brown said he feared that Blair would make himself ‘a lame duck’. The Labour Party would be in ‘turmoil’, it would cause ‘instability’ and damage the party’s chances in the elections in June.71 Though he dressed up his objection as a concern for Blair and the Government, Brown was mainly worried that he was being set a trap. He was always obsessed with the idea of securing the crown without a contest.72 He feared that the Blairites would resist his succession and rivals might have time to establish themselves as competitors for the throne if there was a six-month interval between Blair’s announcement of his departure and actually going. ‘Gordon thought it would give challengers the time to build themselves up,’ says one of his confidants. ‘He wanted to do it by a backroom deal.’73 The Chancellor was being characteristically over-paranoid and over-calculating. He was self-defeatingly so. Had he been smarter, he would have agreed and got Blair absolutely committed to making the announcement. Brown was untainted by the war and the dominant figure of the Cabinet. It is hard to conceive that anyone would have stood a chance against him in a contest in 2004. He could have been Prime Minister that autumn. After his conversation with Blair, Brown returned to the Treasury to tell his circle that he had spurned Blair’s suggestion. Douglas Alexander, the two Eds, Spencer Livermore and Sue Nye all reacted with incredulity. ‘Why on earth have you done that?’ they asked. ‘We all said that he had made a mistake.’74 The two Eds were especially angry with their master for ‘not taking the bird in the hand’.75

  Over the road, in Number 10, Sally Morgan was hatching a quiet conspiracy to stop the Prime Minister from resigning. She would check his appointments diary. If she saw that he was due to meet a friendly face, she would ring the visitor beforehand to encourage him to pump oxygen back into the morale of the Prime Minister. She also invited allies in the Cabinet to drop by to cheer him up, call him at weekends and in the evening, and have him to lunches and dinners so that he felt less isolated.

  In late April, Tessa Jowell came to Blair’s study to offer her shoulder to him. ‘You’re going to get through this,’ she comforted him. ‘I’m fine, darling. Don’t worry about me. I’m fine,’ he responded, unconvincingly. Jowell told him: ‘Never think you’re alone. We’re here for you.’76

  Philip Gould observes: ‘He goes to women a lot at these moments: he finds it easier.’77 It was ‘women who were best at reassuring and bolstering him’, agrees Jonathan Powell, because Blair felt he could be more emotionally open with them.78

  Other callers who worked to persuade him to stay were Hilary Armstrong, David Blunkett, Stephen Byers, Charles Clarke, Charlie Falconer, Alan Milburn and John Reid, who we
re all recruited to the campaign to make Blair feel loved. ‘Our job is to sustain him until the safety of summer,’ Blunkett told colleagues.79 Patricia Hewitt, not so personally close to Blair, but no enthusiast for a Brown premiership, wrote a note urging him to stay. Peter Mandelson was an influential voice. ‘Don’t be so daft,’ Mandelson told Blair when they discussed resignation. ‘Come on. Buck up. Buck up. Think of what you have to do. Think of what you’ve got to achieve. You’re the best politician in this country by a mile. So just get on top of this.’80

  Staff at Number 10 noted that Mandelson and Morgan suddenly started to involve themselves intensely in a plan to speed up ‘Iraqisation’, the handing over of control to Iraqis. ‘They were trying to show Tony that there was a way out.’81

  Cherie was the most crucial actor in the campaign to stop her husband resigning. She had her moments of doubt about whether they could endure the pressures of power, and she worried about his health and the children. But Cherie enjoyed being the chatelaine of Number 10 and didn’t want her husband to quit while he was behind. She detested the thought of surrendering the keys to Gordon Brown.

  On the evening of Tuesday, 11 May, the Blairs had dinner with Michael Levy, old friend, fund-raiser and Middle East envoy, and Levy’s wife, Gilda. Jonathan Powell rang Levy beforehand with a warning that the Prime Minister was near resignation. ‘This is very important, Michael,’ said Powell. ‘He really needs a lift.’82 The foursome sat down in a small private dining room at Wiltons in Jermyn Street. With paintings of hunting scenes on the walls, the restaurant was a traditional haunt of old-school Tories. Levy came to the dinner with both a warning and an encouragement. The warning was that donors to the party were picking up rumours that Blair might not be around for much longer. That was making it hard for Levy to prise open their cheque books. ‘You have to make a decision, Tony,’ Levy told him.