The End of the Party

by Andrew Rawnsley

  That was supposed to suggest that he was not going to repeat Margaret Thatcher’s fatal mistake of thinking she could. Yet he was actually announcing an audacious ambition to remain in power for even longer than her. Three full terms would beat her record by giving him at least twelve years in power. In his first coup de théâtre as Labour leader in 1994, he sprang upon an unsuspecting party his plan to rewrite its constitution. Ten years later, he was redrafting the British constitution.

  He was either conning himself or trying to fool everyone else if he really thought this was going to appease Gordon Brown. ‘I don’t think it rules out Gordon in any shape or form,’ Blair insisted in the interviews that night. ‘He will be younger than many Prime Ministers have been if he took over at the end of a third term.’82

  This offered absolutely zero consolation to Brown. It was always his nightmare that he would get the premiership too late to make a success of it. There was no appeal to being a brief epilogue to a long Blair era. He feared sharing the fate of other premiers who have followed long-serving and dominant occupants of Number 10. Brown did not want to be Rosebery to Blair’s Gladstone or Chamberlain to Blair’s Baldwin or Callaghan to Blair’s Wilson.

  Blair’s astounding gambit could very well mean that Brown wouldn’t even achieve that meagre distinction if Labour lasted three terms and then lost power. Only one party under universal suffrage had ever won four continuous terms.83

  Blair had not given a scintilla of a hint of his grand plan to Brown when they met at the Metropole the day before. Nor did he subsequently phone Brown, supposedly his ‘close personal friend of twenty years’, to warn him about what he was going to do. He also knew that Brown was flying across the Atlantic that day to a meeting of the IMF in Washington.

  As they sat in the den that afternoon, Jonathan Powell teased Blair: ‘Don’t you have to phone Gordon?’ ‘No,’ responded Blair. ‘You tell Gordon.’84 They scanned the room looking for someone else to do the deed. Everyone laughed except the official on whom their gaze alighted. It fell to Ivan Rogers, the Prime Minister’s Principal Private Secretary, to ring James Bowler, the Chancellor’s PPS, who was with his master in Washington. ‘I’ve got three interesting pieces of news, and you’ll have to think carefully how you’re going to relay this to your boss,’ said Rogers to Bowler. ‘Good luck.’85

  Brown duly detonated. It was ‘an African coup’ raged one of his camp. Ed Balls later told friends that this was not him, ‘but it was an accurate summary of what we all felt’.86 Once he had calmed down a little, Brown put a sardonic face on his fury, saying to his circle: ‘Perhaps I should announce how long I intend to remain as Chancellor.’87 Beneath their angry complaints, he and his circle despaired about ‘a fait accompli’ which had caught them entirely by surprise.88 ‘Gordon’s lot were stunned,’ says a senior official at the Treasury.89 Paradoxically, while many civil servants and most of Blair’s supporters thought he had committed a grave error, the Chancellor and his acolytes at first feared it was a masterstroke. ‘Everyone was quite stunned,’ confirms one of Brown’s intimates. ‘We thought: “Fuck, he’s outmanoeuvred us. He’s not going anywhere. He’s here for another election.” Then we started asking ourselves: is Gordon viable for another three to four years?’90

  On 1 October, Blair went into hospital for the operation on his heart. He was ‘quite scared’ about it.91 The surgeon asked him: ‘Would you like me to explain the procedure to you?’ Blair, never interested in procedural details and squeamish about surgery, told the surgeon to just get on with it: ‘You do your job and I’ll do mine.’92

  The procedure was a success. His staff thought he was ‘visibly better and more energetic’ afterwards.93

  On 5 October, Brown returned from his foreign tour for a confrontation with Blair in the den. That morning’s Guardian had a story saying Blair wanted Brown to chair Labour’s election news conferences – an attempt to offer a bit of an olive branch. Brown threw it aside with contempt. If Blair wanted to fight the election on his own, so be it. He would arrange his own independent tour of the country.

  He furiously asked why Blair had concealed his intentions when they had met in Brighton the day before the announcement. ‘I told you that before,’ replied Blair, which he really had not.94 They started yelling at each other. It was a ‘foul and ugly conversation’.95

  For the ten years since their partnership first became poisoned by Brown’s thwarted ambition, Blair had attempted to contain the other man by stringing him along about a handover. That strategy of accommodation and appeasement had reached the end of its life. So had the power-sharing deal they had agreed a decade before. The Granita agreement was already tattered. Now it was shredded.

  In a curious sort of way, both men talked afterwards as if they were liberated. Brown no longer had to pretend that he felt any loyalty or trust towards Blair. Blair believed he could now unchain himself from the incubus at the Treasury and slip the surly bonds of Brown.

  17. Another One Bites the Dust

  ‘Hi, Euan,’ said Tony Blair, glad to hear from his son. The Prime Minister was in jeans, casual shirt and bare feet, relaxing with a beer in a suite at the Caledonian Hotel in Edinburgh. His eldest was ringing from university for Dad’s help with a history essay. Blair told his son that he’d phone back later with more thoughts; he had to change and leave for a dinner. As he was driven through Edinburgh in his Daimler, there was another call, this time on the car phone. SWITCH, the Number 10 switchboard, connected the Prime Minister to a frantic Home Secretary.

  ‘I understand, David, I understand,’ said Blair, verbally mopping the other man’s brow. ‘I don’t think you’ve done anything wrong.’ There followed another long burst of self-justification from the Home Secretary. ‘Don’t worry,’ replied the Prime Minister. ‘I believe you, I believe you, David.’ Blair put the phone back in its cradle and frowned.1

  The extraordinary misadventures of his Home Secretary came to a head at the end of 2004. It was both a shock and a blow. Blair prized David Blunkett as one of the heaviest hitters and shrewdest players in his senior team. ‘Canny operator, David,’ he had often been heard to say. When Blunkett took over as Home Secretary in 2001, he boasted: ‘I will make Jack Straw look liberal.’ His was a tough voice on crime and terrorism that shared Blair’s disdain for ‘the liberati’. Blunkett’s personal odyssey from leader of the socialist republic of Sheffield in the eighties to hard man of the Home Office was an essential metaphor for how Labour changed under Blair. Antisocial behaviour orders might be scorned in the chambers of liberal lawyers, but not among those on the rough end of disorder on crime-ridden council estates. ‘It’s the vulnerable who always suffer from crime,’ argued Blair. ‘Crime is very much a working-class issue.’2

  Underneath the calculated populism of Blunkett, there were some liberal aspects to his regime. He presided over the removal of laws discriminating against gay men and lesbians, relaxed the policing of cannabis, reformed the law on domestic violence and opened new legal routes for economic migrants. But the tender side of his record was out-shouted by the tough. He presented no fewer than six new pieces of legislation, including one – to introduce identity cards – which split the Cabinet, in that autumn’s Queen’s Speech. This was the latest instalment of an annual slew of Home Office legislation which was generally characterised by authoritarianism. He shared Blair’s obsession with guarding Labour’s right flank from the Tories. The complaints of judicial and liberal opinion sounded soft to a man who had had it rough.

  Sightless since birth, at the age of just four Blunkett was packed off to a boarding school for the blind where his teachers thought the limit of his ambition ought to be training as a piano tuner. He lost his father to a horrible industrial accident at twelve and grew up in bread-and-dripping poverty when his mother was denied compensation. It was testimony to his talent and tenacity that he had risen to such heights. Along the way, he developed a taste for some of the finer things in life. He was always especiall
y delighted if a vintage Burgundy was ordered with dinner. Yet he still managed to retain one of the more authentically working-class voices among the middle-class metropolitans of New Labour.

  This made it the more bewildering to his party and the more comic for satirists when it was revealed that he had been having an affair with Kimberly Fortier, the American publisher of the Tory Spectator magazine and the wife of the managing director of the fashion glossy Vogue. Of their first encounter in a restaurant, Petronella Wyatt wrote: ‘Mr Blunkett and I ate Dover sole. Ms Fortier ate Mr Blunkett.’3 Even Blunkett could see the peculiarity of this dangerous liaison between the socialist from Yorkshire and the socialite from New York. They had a child: ‘the little lad’, Blunkett called William when appealing for public sympathy. By November 2004, it was public knowledge that Mrs Quinn, as she was now called, was pregnant again.

  Blair had known about the affair almost from its inception, some three years before. He was never terribly judgemental about the affairs of his ministers. One senior aide notes: ‘He was surrounded by many couples who weren’t married or who were on second or third relationships.’4

  The media maelstrom around Blunkett grew fiercer when he and his former lover became locked in an increasingly sulphurous paternity battle over the boy. This was a world first: a politician trying to prove that he was the father of an illegitimate child. For day after day, the press served up drooling accounts of the consuming love of a powerful but lonely man for the voracious Kimberly.5

  This typified the evolution of politics and its relationship with the media in the New Labour era. In an age when ideological differences were de-emphasised, more attention was paid to the character of politicians than their convictions. That induced the media to dwell more heavily on the soap operatics. The Blunkett saga had every ingredient of a lurid TV drama: class, money, power, adultery, blind love and blind hate. It was later turned into both a piece of television and a stage play.6 There was also the added spice of treachery. Blunkett had assiduously courted the editors of the right-wing press. He found that this was no protection when they decided his life was their story.

  It was a fatal blurring of the personal and the political that would do for the Home Secretary. The saga developed a career-threatening dimension on 28 November, when the Sunday Telegraph splashed with accusations fed to the paper by ‘friends’ of his former mistress that he had provided her with first-class rail travel at the taxpayers’ expense and used his Government chauffeur to ferry her to Derbyshire for weekend trysts. Most dangerously, the Home Office was charged with arranging the ‘fast-tracking’ of a visa for the boy’s Filipina nanny so that she could stay in Britain indefinitely.7

  That Sunday, Blunkett hotly denied the charge and was in an exceptionally wrought-up state when he rang his Permanent Secretary, Sir John Gieve. ‘Are you really sure you want to set up an inquiry?’ asked Sir John, worrying where it might lead. ‘We must have it,’ responded Blunkett. ‘We must announce it by Monday morning.’ Gieve assumed that Blunkett had to be absolutely sure of his ground.8

  He seemed bullish that he could endure ‘the shitstorm’ that the press labelled ‘Nannygate’. The following day, Blair put the protective arm of Number 10 around his Home Secretary. ‘I have absolutely every confidence in him,’ the Prime Minister declared, loudly pre-judging the result of the inquiry. ‘He has been, is, will continue to be, a first-class Home Secretary.’9

  Gieve discussed the inquiry with the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Andrew Turnbull. They decided to put it into the hands of Sir Alan Budd, an old friend of Gieve and a former chief economist at the Treasury who had become Provost of Queen’s College, Oxford. Sir Alan had no background as ‘a forensic investigator’. He was chosen because he was ‘a completely unimpeachable guy’.10

  When the allegations first surfaced, his senior colleagues stood solidly behind the Home Secretary. ‘David hated half the Cabinet and they hated him,’ said one of his aides.11 Even so, convention demands that Cabinet ministers behave like a loyal band of brothers in the eyes of the public and keep hidden their real feelings about each other. Support for Blunkett began to crumble when it was revealed that he had trampled over that convention by scorning a variety of his colleagues in conversation with a biographer, Stephen Pollard. It was sensationally reckless of Blunkett to have committed to Pollard’s recorder the view that Tony Blair ‘tolerated more from Gordon than he ought to’, Jack Straw bequeathed him ‘a giant mess’, Charles Clarke had ‘taken the foot off the accelerator’, Patricia Hewitt didn’t ‘think strategically’ and Tessa Jowell was ‘weak’.12 That was a very poor reward for all the support Jowell had given him over the years. Stupidly, Blunkett had kicked his colleagues when he was down.

  ‘Blunkett had got into this pattern of behaving unreasonably,’ remarks the Cabinet Secretary.13 The Home Secretary’s senior aide, Huw Evans, knew the foul side of his temper, but even he was ‘shocked’ by the extent to which he had ripped into Cabinet colleagues. ‘It annoyed his friends and empowered his enemies. Prescott saw the opportunity to brief against him.’14 The egotistical, bad-tempered and cavalier side of Blunkett was exposed just at the moment when he most needed support. He had to phone round grovelling apologies to all the aggrieved Cabinet members he had abused. ‘He’d pissed them all off just at the moment when he needed their help.’15

  He’d also supplied the Tories with ammunition. Blair was taunted at Prime Minister’s Questions by Michael Howard, who hurled Blunkett’s caustic remarks about the Cabinet across the dispatch box – and chucked over a copy of the book as well.

  On 9 December, the Prime Minister visited Sheffield to open a sixth-form college and display continuing solidarity with the city’s most famous MP. Blunkett, knowing how easily Number 10 could have cancelled the visit, was grateful. He felt that the Prime Minister ‘could see the deterioration in my physical and emotional health. He knew that we were on a knife edge.’16

  The Home Secretary turned up at a Christmas reception for Labour MPs. He handed out songsheets with the words of the Sinatra number ‘Pick Yourself Up, Dust Yourself Off’. Then he launched into a lusty rendition of the song. Next to the line ‘start all over again …’, one cruel Cabinet colleague scribbled ‘… in Sheffield’ and held it up to general sniggering.17

  On the afternoon of 14 December, Sir Alan Budd came to see Blunkett in his ministerial suite at the Home Office. Even in the immigration service, which was not renowned for its efficient filing, Sir Alan had managed to unearth evidence. His investigations turned up a fax and some e-mail traffic. They showed that, contrary to the vehement denials issued by the Home Office, Blunkett’s Private Office had communicated with the Immigration and Nationality Directorate about expediting the nanny’s visa. ‘Sorted … no special favours, only what they would normally do – but a bit quicker’, read an e-mail to Blunkett’s Private Office from the office of the IND’s Director-General. Budd’s later report revealed that the nanny got the visa in fifty-two days, 120 days faster than the average time for processing applications from domestic workers.18

  ‘Budd managed to trace the e-mails and he did produce the smoking gun,’ comments the Cabinet Secretary. ‘Blunkett’s story fell apart.’19

  Huw Evans had been manfully defending his boss throughout the storm. As soon as he knew what Budd had discovered, this most loyal of aides already had ‘a gut instinct’ that it was all over.20

  At 2.30 p.m. on the afternoon of the 15th, the two of them went over to Number 10 to see Tony Blair. David Hill, Tom Kelly, Sally Morgan and Jonathan Powell joined the meeting in the den. Reflecting on it later, the Cabinet Secretary thought that what Blunkett should have done was send the nanny to her constituency MP for help with the visa.21 Blunkett’s critical offence was to display unhinged judgement, so often the fatal flaw in leading New Labour figures.

  Everyone in the den knew they had a hugely difficult election ahead of them in less than six months. They could not have a Home Secretary whose credibility was sh
ot. It was apparent to most in the room that the Prime Minister had already arrived at the conclusion that he had to go.22 Blair’s ‘judgement was that David would be ripped to pieces if he tried to carry on, but if he went now there would be a way for him to come back.’23

  Blair and Blunkett sat opposite each other on the sofas. The conversation was made slightly more awkward because Blunkett’s blindness meant he couldn’t read the body language of the Prime Minister and his team. Blair asked Blunkett whether he thought he could retrieve the situation: ‘Can you go on?’ Blunkett threw the question back at the Prime Minister: ‘Can you see a way of handling it?’24

  Blair was by now a veteran of losing Cabinet ministers. That didn’t mean he liked doing it. ‘Tony hated these things, hated telling people they had to go. It was Tony’s style to want people to come to the conclusion themselves.’25 Blair ‘did his usual lawyer thing’, asking Blunkett a series of questions and taking notes.26

  When Blunkett was too upset to answer, Evans did so for him.

  ‘Tony was pushing it, pushing it, so David had to confront the reality of it.’27

  Blunkett broke down and couldn’t continue. ‘He was shrinking into his suit.’28 The Prime Minister turned to Evans: ‘What do you think?’ Rather than reply directly to the Prime Minister, Evans put his arm round Blunkett and spoke to his weeping boss: ‘You know what I think. You haven’t got any choice. I think you have to resign.’29

  No-one in the room argued. Everyone except Blair and Blunkett then left the den. Blunkett choked up again, saying how sorry he was. ‘Not as sorry as I am,’ replied Blair. ‘I was relying on you.’30 As he often did in these situations, he tried to soften the blow by suggesting that he’d find a way of getting him back into the Cabinet soon after the election. That did not stop Blunkett, both a highly remarkable and deeply flawed public figure, from descending into an emotionally wretched state – ‘a very, very bad place’ – for many months afterwards.31 He was the first Home Secretary to resign since Reggie Maudling more than thirty years previously. Blair had lost both a committed supporter and a Cabinet heavyweight crucial to his electoral strategy.