One of Blair’s thoughts was to bring Mandelson back into the Cabinet. That encountered too much resistance from John Prescott, Jack Straw and others to make it feasible. Mandelson instead became Britain’s new European Commissioner. It was a glittering consolation prize, but also a form of exile. He left for Brussels sharing everyone else’s belief that he would never again have a role in the front rank of British politics.
Seeking someone else to strengthen his arm against Brown, Blair turned to Alan Milburn. They shared the same ideas about the future direction for New Labour and Milburn exceeded Blair in hostility towards the Chancellor. Initially, the former Health Secretary played hard to get, turning down a first offer in July. He was still scarred by Blair’s failure to support him in the battles over the NHS with Brown. His friends were telling him that he would suffer the same fate if he came back. Blair persisted, even ringing up Ruth, Milburn’s partner, to lobby her.
On 8 September, four of the core Blairites – Stephen Byers, Tessa Jowell, John Reid and Milburn himself – gathered to discuss what to do. They met first at Reid’s home near Smith Square and then convened in Byers’s room in Portcullis House. Byers told his friend it would be a mistake for Milburn to put himself back on the bloody chess board between Prime Minister and Chancellor. Whatever Blair promised now, Milburn would end up being sacrificed again. It was a consistent feature of the Blair years that his best supporters did not trust him not to leave them twisting in the wind. If Milburn was going to return, the quartet agreed, it would have to be on tough terms. ‘We all knew how weak Tony could be and how badly Gordon would behave,’ said one present at the discussion. ‘Alan had to be made bombproof from Gordon.’35 They drew up a list of demands about powers and job titles for Milburn to present to the Prime Minister. Rather to their surprise, nearly all of them were met. Blair released a statement announcing that Milburn would direct the work of the Number 10 strategy and policy units as well as being in charge of the election campaign and getting a seat on the National Executive Committee.
This was a triple whammy to the Chancellor. It displaced one of his people, Douglas Alexander, from the campaign co-ordinator role. Even more woundingly to Brown, who had chaired Labour’s election news conferences in both 1997 and 2001, it deprived him of his status as the chief election strategist. On top of that, it was obviously designed to freeze him out of discussion about the next manifesto.
Brown’s circle had found him ‘very depressed, very inactive’ since the summer, when he realised that Blair was not going to hand over in 2004.36 The return of Milburn re-energised him, at least with fury. Within the Brown camp, ‘Milburn assumed the Mandelson status of number one hate-figure.’37 The appointment was ‘like poking the angry bull in the eye with a sharp stick. Brown was completely outraged,’ observed the Cabinet Secretary.38
This was Blair’s most nakedly aggressive act against Brown since 1997. The Chancellor and his court took it to be ‘a declaration of war’.39. They interpreted the recall of Milburn as meaning that Blair wanted to campaign solo at the next election, unencumbered by any obligations to Brown, so that he could claim the next victory as a totally personal mandate. They were correct: that was exactly the intention. Blair told one Cabinet colleague: ‘I am sick of government by perpetual negotiation with Gordon.’40 Philip Gould observed to a friend: ‘Tony wants to win on his own next time.’41
The Cabinet Secretary saw the strategy: ‘All the people in Number 10 – particularly Jonathan Powell, Sally Morgan, Matthew Taylor and John Birt – were telling him to go it alone: get to the point where you are powerful enough to sack Brown or powerful enough to dictate the terms on which he can stay. This is what they all pushed him to do. That is what he wanted to do.’42
The build-up to the Labour conference in Brighton was feverish with speculation about their relationship and what it meant for the Government’s prospects. Labour had slipped just behind the Tories in the opinion polls. Reports from Hartlepool suggested that Labour would win the imminent by-election triggered by Peter Mandelson’s departure to Brussels, but the majority was going to be savagely slashed in this very safe seat.43
Iraq cast a dark shadow. Ken Bigley, a 62-year-old engineer, was one of more than 140 foreigners who had been taken hostage. His terrorist captors released a harrowing video tape of their British hostage pleading for the Prime Minister to save him. In a pre-conference interview for the Observer at Chequers, Blair complained about the terrorists’ ability to ‘manipulate the modern media to gain enormous publicity for themselves’, betraying his anxiety that they were making a hostage of his conference too. In sharp contrast to his optimistic assertions of just a year before, he talked about Iraq being convulsed with ‘terror and chaos’ and likened the conflict to the darkest days of the Second World War. This was a telling insight into his state of mind.
‘There is disillusion and disappointment. That’s politics,’ he said, acknowledging his unpopularity while not surrendering to it. ‘What you’ve got to do is not buckle under it, but go out and make your case.’
He attempted to reassure people that he wasn’t becoming as mad as a Thatcher. He wasn’t going to ‘get into this on and on and on business’. Asked what arrangement he had come to with Brown, he baldly denied there had ever been one: ‘You don’t do deals about jobs like this.’44
That same weekend, there was ample evidence that a deal was precisely what Brown thought he once had. A glossy, full-dress profile of the Chancellor was published in the Guardian’s Saturday magazine. He posed in a manner that projected him as a leader in waiting for whom the waiting was almost over. Brown gave a rare glimpse of the personal, saying that he was so devastated by the death of his daughter in 2002 that he couldn’t bear to listen to music for a year. He shut down when asked whether he felt betrayed by Blair over the leadership. Brown refused to answer the question, calling it ‘not helpful’. 45 In other words, the answer was yes.
When he addressed the conference on Monday, Brown presented himself as the man who wanted to heal and unify. He implied that Blair’s agenda for public service reform was divisive and aligned himself with the Prime Minister’s critics by declaring: ‘There are values beyond those of contracts, markets and exchange.’46
The next day, Blair riposted that choice for all citizens regardless of wealth was ‘precisely what the modern Labour Party should stand for’. The speech was the flattest and least oratorically extravagant conference performance of his premiership. For the first time he openly acknowledged that ‘the problem of trust’ flowed from ‘the decisions I have taken’ over Iraq. Some in his team urged him to make a show of contrition to give disaffected Labour supporters ‘a way home’. He was good as a Prime Minister at offering apologies for things which were not his fault and about which he could do nothing, such as the slave trade or the Irish potato famine. His stubborn streak rarely allowed him to admit to his own mistakes. There was a half-sorry.
‘The problem is I can apologise for the information that turned out to be wrong,’ he said. ‘But I can’t, sincerely at least, apologise for removing Saddam. The world is a better place with Saddam in prison not in power.’47
As he delivered the speech, the conference centre was besieged by protestors. Those howling about the war competed to generate more decibels than several thousand baying huntsmen and their hounds, who massed to protest about the outlawing of blood sports.
It was the potential for an uprising inside that made Blair’s team most apprehensive. A mass protest by the delegates, in the form of a walk-out during his speech or a demonstration from the floor, would have been very damaging to his authority. His team pre-prepared ripostes for the heckling about Iraq that they expected to interrupt the speech.48 There were some scattered shouts of ‘You’ve got blood on your hands’ which momentarily froze his performance. But Labour’s instinctive tribal loyalty kicked in for the leader. ‘Every year, as you come up to conference, he’s going to be killed. Then, you get to conference and they a
re kneeling wanting to touch the hem of the gown,’ remarks one of Blair’s friends in the Cabinet.49 They did not actually kneel. They did give him his usual long standing ovation.
Blair referred to Brown in his speech as ‘a personal friend for twenty years and the best Chancellor this country has ever had’.50 That was warm, laudatory and entirely deceptive.
On the penultimate day of the conference, Wednesday, 29 September, the two men had another confrontation. At 3 p.m., Brown went to see Blair in his suite at the Metropole Hotel. Brown continued to rage about the recall of Milburn – ‘that fucker’, as the Chancellor called him.51 Blair countered that he had every right ‘to bring my people in’. It was down to Brown, said Blair, to show that he was serious about repairing their relationship. ‘You’ve got to stop working against me and start working with me,’ he said, as he had said many times since 2001.52
Then and ever after those closest to Blair say Brown might have had the premiership earlier if he had been less obstructive. ‘Gordon was always his own worst enemy. He would have become Prime Minister much sooner if he’d only worked with Tony.’53
To Brown and his camp, the opposite was obvious: Blair would never voluntarily surrender the premiership. The demand that Brown should ‘work with me’ was simply another way of stringing him out.54
Both men afterwards told their respective intimates that it was ‘a very bad’ or ‘an absolutely awful’ conversation.55
After the Chancellor’s stormy exit, Blair called in his most senior aides to tell them what he had just concealed from Brown.
‘Sorry about this,’ he smiled to Sally Morgan and Jonathan Powell as they sat down in the hotel suite. ‘I’ve got three things to tell you. First, I’m going to say that I will fight the next election and serve a full term, but I will not fight a fourth election.’ Before they’d fully absorbed that, he went on: ‘Second, I’m going into hospital tomorrow.’ While they tried to process that, he added: ‘And I’ve bought a house.’56 Morgan burst out laughing. Powell was not sure what to think.
None of this sensational information had he revealed to ‘his personal friend for twenty years and the best Chancellor this country has ever had’. In fact, Blair had discussed his plan with hardly anyone at all. He’d talked about it with Cherie in Barbados and with his friend Barry Cox. They’d turned over the idea during a walk through the countryside around Chequers in late August. ‘He discussed with me whether he should say it or not. He was pretty well decided that he should say it and, in so far as I had any influence, I agreed with him.’57 No previous premier in British history had pre-announced his departure in this fashion. That very novelty was one reason the stroke attracted Blair, who always liked to be a game-changer.
The germ of the idea came from José María Aznar, who served two full terms as Prime Minister of Spain and then handed over to a successor just before the next election. That example appealed to Blair, though it was not an encouraging precedent for Labour: Aznar’s party lost the subsequent election.
Another strand of Blair’s reasoning was that the pre-announcement of his departure would forestall plots against him. ‘There’s no point them coming after me if I’ve already said I’m going,’ he would explain.58 Why try to stab Caesar if he’s already said he will hang up his toga?
Added to that was the belief that he had to clarify his intentions; otherwise the next election would be ‘completely impossible’. Unless he ended the uncertainty, the campaign ‘was going to turn into a nightmare’, with questions about his intentions dominating ‘to the exclusion of everything else’.59
One of his closest associates also reported: ‘He thinks it is very difficult to stand at the next election while in your head saying: “Well, I’m only here for two years.” ’60
This was married with Blair’s conviction that he needed to snuff out the Tory slogan: ‘Vote Blair, Get Brown’. Blair believed that Brown would not be an electorally appealing leader. The only way to secure Labour’s future chances was either to have someone else at the head of the party or to create a very short gap between Brown taking over and an election.
Brown was also on his mind in another respect. By publicly setting an end-date on his premiership, even if it was one in the distant future, he thought it might somehow make it easier to control his rival at the Treasury. According to Barry Cox: ‘He wanted to give Brown something, some sense that he was just not going to go on and on and on.’ Blair thought ‘it might calm Brown down’ and ‘stop the trouble’.61 If Blair truly believed that, he was utterly deluded.
The final decision to execute the plan was made under the pressure of events. David Hill discovered on the Wednesday of the conference that Andy Grice, the resourceful Political Editor of the Independent, was on to the Blairs’ secret purchase of the £3.6 million house in Connaught Square. That revelation would bring attention to The Wobble earlier in the year. When the world also learnt that he was going into hospital the combination would ‘make him look vulnerable’.62
It was Cherie who had arranged the operation. Anxious about her husband’s reluctance to get proper treatment for the atrial flutter in his heart, she took things into her own hands. Without telling him, she had rung up the surgeon and booked the operation for that Friday.63
When he had sprung his triple whammy on his senior aides, Sally Morgan thought that Blair’s announcement plan was ‘the right thing to do’ on the grounds that it might counter the accusation that he was turning into a Thatcher-like ‘obsessive leader’ and deflect attention from the house and the operation.64 Jonathan Powell had always been against setting a public end date on his premiership because ‘he’d reduce his power.’ But the Chief of Staff found it harder to resist in these circumstances.65
At the end of the conference at lunchtime on Thursday, Blair and his team were driven along a ‘weird route’ through the backstreets of Brighton on their way back to London. They continued to discuss the logistics of making the announcement.66
Back in Number 10, on Thursday afternoon Blair shared the plan with more of the team. ‘Sorry about this,’ he smiled to this larger group. ‘I’ve got three things to tell you …’ and he dropped the triple bombshell on them. No-one argued. They could all see that ‘his mind was made up.’67
There was very little time to break the news to the Cabinet and senior officials, who had been kept entirely in the dark. Stunningly, Blair had not even bothered to discuss it with the Cabinet Secretary, who was out of town at the civil service college at Sunningdale. Sir Andrew Turnbull’s mobile began to ring as he was in the middle of addressing all of the Permanent Secretaries. ‘He can wait,’ thought Sir Andrew and decided to ignore the Prime Minister’s call until he had finished his speech. When he rang back, the Cabinet Secretary was flabbergasted to hear the Prime Minister say: ‘I’ve got three things to tell you …’ and then list the heart operation, the house and not standing for a fourth term. Turnbull was even more astounded to discover that he was only hearing it two hours before Blair intended to go public.68
That evening, he and his fellow mandarins had a dinner at which virtually the only topic of conversation was what this would mean for the orderly running of government. Most of the civil servants concluded that Blair’s plan would boomerang on him by undermining his authority. ‘It was obvious that he wouldn’t go into a fourth term so he had to find some way of exiting,’ Turnbull reflected later. ‘But I thought it was a bit unrealistic to think he could do a full third term. These things don’t work like that. The economist in me thought: if you announce you are going to devalue the currency in three and a half years, the devaluation happens now.’ 69
David Blunkett was ‘astonished’ when Blair told him.70 Tessa Jowell was ‘hopping mad’.71 Peter Hain, the Leader of the House, was among the many Cabinet members both gobsmacked by the decision and angry that there had been no consultation. ‘We were all pretty astounded. It was a shock to the system of government and to all party members. Everybody was taken aback. A lot
of his closest colleagues thought it was a terrible mistake.’72
Even Peter Mandelson ‘wasn’t given a lot of warning’. He was in the minority of Blair’s close allies who thought it the right move.73
‘Why didn’t you talk to me?’ asked a horrified Stephen Byers. ‘I didn’t want to get talked out of it,’ replied Blair.74 Neil Kinnock warned Blair: ‘What you’re doing is giving up control of your own future.’ Briskly, Blair responded: ‘It had to be done,’ speaking with ‘a certainty that he’d done the right thing’.75 Alan Milburn exploded: ‘You’re fucking mad.’ Later explaining why, Milburn said: ‘It was a very foolish and indeed mad thing to do. You never pronounce your own demise.’76
He and many other allies feared that Blair would become a self-lamed duck. But their protests and warnings were to no avail; it was too late. David Hill and Tom Kelly briefed the Political Editors of the national papers, taking ‘a slightly sadistic pleasure in telling them the news’ one hit after another.77 Even the veterans of political surprises in the Westminster lobby were stunned. Hill’s partner, Hilary Coffman, another member of the Number 10 team, talked to Blair’s consultant so that they could provide the media with every detail of the operation and pre-empt any suggestions that anything was being hidden from the public.78 When Coffman offered to brief Blair about the operation ‘Tony squirmed. He didn’t want to know.’79
Hill called in Adam Boulton, Andrew Marr and Nick Robinson, the Political Editors of Sky, the BBC and ITN. He told them, with masterful understatement, that he had ‘something important to tell you’. They stayed only for so long as it took them to pick their jaws off the floor. ‘They wanted to get away and report it.’80
TV crews were then brought into Number 10 from 7 p.m. to record interviews with the Prime Minister for the ten o’clock bulletins. ‘If I am elected, I will serve a full term. I do not want to serve a fourth term – I don’t think the British people would want a Prime Minister to go on that long,’ he said. ‘I’m not going on and on for ever.’81
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