The fall of Blunkett came six years on from the first resignation of Peter Mandelson. It was the latest example of the Curse of the Blairites. There seemed to be a jinx on those ministers in whom Blair invested the greatest expectations.
All four of the key ‘delivery’ ministers that he appointed in June 2001 had crashed and burned. Stephen Byers resigned as Transport Secretary in May 2002.32 Estelle Morris quit as Education Secretary that autumn.33 Alan Milburn jumped ship from Health in June 2003.34 On the eve of Christmas 2004, Blunkett, the last of this gang of four, was gone too.
Excluding Blair himself and Brown, just four of the original Cabinet of 1997 were still standing.35 This high casualty rate in pivotal positions was one reason why New Labour struggled to shape and sustain a consistent strategy towards the public services. Another important factor was Blair’s fidgety habit of moving ministers around before they ever mastered their departments. ‘He moved people far too quickly,’ observes one senior mandarin. ‘Experience was not a valued quality.’36 The endless musical chairs meant that the average tenure of ministers fell to less than eighteen months, an insufficient time to grip policy areas, implement decisions and establish authority over civil servants. John Reid, who was moved around so often that he barely had time to hang up his coat, held seven different positions in eight years.37 Charles Clarke thinks Blair’s ‘biggest failure as Prime Minister was that he didn’t use people well. He didn’t think properly about his personnel policy.’38
Mario Cuomo, the American politician, once said that politicians ‘campaign in poetry, but govern in prose’. Blair was unmatched at the theatre of politics from his instant reaction to the death of Diana to his faultless response immediately after 9/11. Confronted with big moments like these, he was superb at rising to the occasion.
He was much less accomplished when it came to the grinding prose of day-to-day administration. He was an acrobat politician not an engineer politician.
‘His eyes rather glazed over’ when Sir Robin Butler, his first Cabinet Secretary, tried to talk to him about the mechanics of governing. ‘He said it was the job of people like me to run the machine.’39
‘The truth was that a lot of government bored him,’ agrees Sir Richard Wilson, his second Cabinet Secretary. ‘If you used the word “management”, he’d look at his shoes. I found that the only way to get his attention was to say: “What Margaret Thatcher would have done …” ’40
As a lawyer, Blair came from a background in which the emphasis was on individual skill rather than managing a team. ‘He thinks about his own performance,’ noted Charles Clarke. ‘He doesn’t think well enough about how organisations operate.’41 On top of which, he had never been a departmental minister.
Blair’s reluctance to engage in personal confrontation also weakened his ability to make his writ run through Whitehall. ‘It’s part of the attractiveness of Blair that when you meet him you think he’s agreed with you,’ says Frank Field. ‘But everyone then has a different view of what the Prime Minister has agreed. While that’s a wonderful technique for keeping people together, it ain’t the best technique if you want to be an effective, radical Prime Minister.’42
His style was not to be ‘fussed about the hierarchy’, whether it was within Number 10 or Whitehall as a whole. Peter Hyman says Blair thought he could ‘just get people to do whatever was on his mind at any given time’.43 Alan Milburn ‘gradually realised that it suited Tony not to have clear lines of accountability because he was a magpie – he liked to pick one thing from here and another from there’.44
Big organisations, in which hierarchies do matter, cannot be successfully run like that. He suffered from the illusion that he just had to click his fingers and action ought to follow. Butler observed that
the attitude of Tony Blair and New Labour was that it was their job to have the concept. They would define the New Jerusalem. It was the civil service’s job to get there. So if one failed to achieve everything that the Government wanted, this was somehow the fault of the technicians, the civil service. Of course, it’s not as simple as that. Objectives require resources, organisations, discussions about capacity.45
Even after several years in office, Blair had not learnt. His third Cabinet Secretary, Sir Andrew Turnbull, says: ‘Tony thought that if you said to someone “reduce crime” or “improve the health service”, they would just go away and do it.’46
It was wrong to say that he never did detail. ‘He could do detail if he decided to do the detail,’ says Jonathan Powell. ‘Like the barrister he is, he’d get into it. He had to be interested in it.’47 Richard Wilson saw that he ‘got into a frenzy’ when a subject fired his imagination or was causing a furore in the media. For a time, ‘he got very active on juvenile crime’, calling together summits on the subject in the COBRA emergency room.48
What Blair lacked was a sustained interest in the mechanics of delivery. ‘He latched on to issues,’ observes Sir Stephen Wall. ‘But he didn’t have a really determined follow-through.’49 Margaret Jay coined a phrase for the boredom in Blair’s eyes when he was forced to listen to the ‘nitty gritty’ of policy. She called it ‘the garden look’. His ‘gaze would shift’ and look longingly through the window and out into the back garden of Number 10.50 Philip Gould once challenged Blair to his face to admit that he found foreign affairs much more energising than domestic policy.51
Sir Michael Barber, the head of the Delivery Unit, agrees: ‘It’s true to say that Tony Blair was much more interested in the vision and the strategy and the direction than he was in the details of delivery. If you’re not going to get involved in the details and structures of implementation, what you need is a machine that will do that for you.’52
In his first term, he was ‘almost wholly uninterested in civil service structures and the machineries which turn a policy idea into reality in schools and hospitals on the ground’, observes Geoff Mulgan.53
‘Early on, Tony was in awe of the civil service,’ says Sally Morgan. ‘There was a nervousness about taking on the establishment. We let them bully us.’ He was frustrated in his attempt to open up senior Whitehall positions to outside competition in order to bring in talented managers. ‘When he tried to appoint a Permanent Secretary from the outside, Tony was given a bloody hard time by all the others.’54
Awe turned into angst. When Sir Richard Wilson became Cabinet Secretary, he found the Prime Minister seething with frustration about his inability to master Whitehall. ‘I feel like I’m sitting in a Rolls-Royce and I can’t find the key,’ Blair complained to Wilson. ‘Well,’ the mandarin replied smoothly, ‘what you shouldn’t try to do is get out and push it yourself. You need a chauffeur.’
Seeing himself as that person, Wilson responded by sending a series of carefully crafted minutes suggesting how the Prime Minister might get more performance out of the Cabinet and Whitehall. He never received any evidence that Blair bothered to read them. ‘I certainly never received a reply.’55
Wilson argued that using the Cabinet and its committees in the traditional manner was ‘the way to get action from the Whitehall machine’. Jonathan Powell warned the Cabinet Secretary that he would never get anywhere with this argument because ‘Tony equates committees with nothing happening.’56
Blair preferred to deal with ministers one-to-one at stock-taking sessions. Estelle Morris believed these were quite rigorous, saying it was like being subject to the equivalent of ‘your own personal Ofsted inspection in the Cabinet Room’.57 Some officials were sceptical. ‘Blair’s meetings were usually dreadful because he was not remotely interested in government.’58
By the second term, Blair ‘had become much more interested in the underlying wiring of the system’.59 He felt underpowered, especially in comparison to the mighty machine that Gordon Brown had at the Treasury and the large bureaucracies run by departmental ministers. Sir Michael Barber believed that Number 10 was ‘not at all as strong as much of the commentary would have you believe’.60
; Blair concluded that the answer was to meld Number 10 and the Cabinet Office into a version of the White House: an Office of the Prime Minister in all but name. He invited Richard Wilson to sit with him in the flat above Downing Street, where Blair tempted the civil servant with the idea that he would become the supremo of this new powerhouse at the centre. Wilson refused. This traditionalist saw it as his job to try to sustain the old checks and balances of Cabinet government. He told colleagues: ‘I am not going to have Blair moving into presidential mode and finally dismantle all collective responsibility.’61
Wilson grew more anxious about Blair’s trampling over conventions that were sacred to the mandarin. The Prime Minister and his team became ‘very fed up’ with what they saw as the Cabinet Secretary’s ‘nit-picking’.62
Blair got together a group of the Permanent Secretaries and told them that he wanted them to stop being ‘classic administrators’ and turn into ‘social entrepreneurs’. He exhorted them: ‘I want you to be people who achieve change.’ Geoff Mulgan was present and thought ‘half of them got what he was on about. The other half were completely baffled.’63 As the Government became frustrated by its inability to deliver the results it had promised, ‘the Prime Minister and others started to blame the civil service and a tension built up,’ says Peter Mandelson.64 The civil service became, in turn, alienated from its political masters. Towards the end of his time as Cabinet Secretary, Wilson was openly withering of Blair’s weaknesses.
‘The trouble is that you have no-one around you who has got any experience of managing anything,’ the Cabinet Secretary said to the Prime Minister’s face and in front of witnesses.
‘What do you mean? There’s me,’ responded Blair, slightly stunned. ‘I’ve managed the Labour Party.’
‘You didn’t manage the Labour Party, you led it,’ came back Wilson. ‘There’s a big difference.’ Blair needed to learn that there was more to delivering change than throwing out orders to officials.
This was uncharacteristically unsmooth of the Cabinet Secretary. ‘He was very cross by now,’ says Jonathan Powell. ‘He was near the end of his time and didn’t care any more.’65
Wilson was made to pay for his lèse majesté.
An ugly scene ensued at Cabinet in March 2002. The Cabinet Secretary was sitting, as usual, next to the Prime Minister. Seemingly from nowhere, John Reid launched into an angry tirade against Whitehall. He declared that he had ‘never been able to trust my officials’ when he was at Transport. Other ministers weighed in to roast the civil service. ‘We all enjoyed ourselves.’66 It culminated in a prolonged and scathing contribution from David Blunkett about the incompetence of civil servants at the Home Office, where Wilson had previously been Permanent Secretary. They were still operating, said Blunkett, as if they were ‘back in the nineteenth century’. Wilson was promoting a Civil Service Bill to protect officials from being misused by ministers. Blunkett dripped with sarcasm: ‘What we need is a Bill to protect ministers from civil servants.’67
For Wilson, forced to sit there taking the official minute as his profession was savaged, this was the most searing experience of his long civil service career. ‘I was shocked. It was humiliating for me. It was a very bad moment for me. I had no right of reply.’68 He thought about speaking out, but feared that he might say something ‘too violent’ and the scene would become even nastier.
When this ritual humiliation was complete, Blair summed up. He did not speak up for the civil service; nor did he offer the Cabinet Secretary an opportunity to defend the honour of his profession. The Prime Minister made light of it. ‘Well, I’m sure Sir Richard will record that the Home Secretary is thoroughly satisfied with the performance of his civil servants.’ Everyone cracked up. Everyone except a bleak-looking Sir Richard.69
By the end of his time, Wilson was so frozen out of Blair’s inner counsels that he had to resort to sneaking peeks at the Prime Minister’s diary to try to find out when important meetings were happening. He would then pop into Blair’s den uninvited and ask: ‘Can I be helpful?’
The candidates to succeed Wilson were told to write a manifesto on how they would modernise Whitehall. The winner was Sir Andrew Turnbull, the Permanent Secretary at the Treasury, who broadly agreed with the critique that civil servants should be more focused on delivery. He inherited a mess. To try to get round Wilson’s resistance to a presidential system, Blair created ‘a parallel organisation’ of special units working at Number 10 and the Cabinet Office. These included the Office of Public Service Reform, the Delivery Unit, the Strategic Communications Unit and the Future Strategy Unit. As Turnbull puts it: ‘There were dozens of these units. It was like the Bird and Fortune sketch. The Social Exclusion Unit was for those who hadn’t got a job in any of the other units.’70
Blair never had an ‘entirely satisfactory relationship’ with any of his Cabinet Secretaries, says Peter Mandelson.71 Powell later concluded that ‘we were lousy’ at civil servant appointments.72 Blair’s relations with Butler, Wilson and Turnbull were ‘pretty awful’ in the view of another senior civil servant.73 There were differences of both temperament and age. When Gus O’Donnell succeeded to the job in 2005, Blair remarked to him: ‘You’re the first person I’ve had who I feel is of the same generation as me.’74
The proliferation of units at Number 10 was supposed to focus the civil service on delivering change, strengthen the Prime Minister’s command and challenge the domination of the Treasury. With the partial exception of the Delivery Unit, they did not fulfil these goals because they tripped over each other and muddled the lines of authority. Charles Clarke and other Cabinet ministers complained that there were ‘a thousand people’ claiming to speak for the wishes of Number 10.75 Michael Barber agrees it looked ‘a bit chaotic and confusing’ to the rest of the machine. ‘There could be several bits of Number 10 or the Cabinet Office intervening in a department at a given moment.’76
The relationship between the higher mandarinate and the politicians soured as they developed a mutually disdainful view. Clarke believed that the entire research wing of the Home Office, which cost as much to run as the University of East Anglia, could be abolished and no-one would notice. He regarded the lack of civil service reform as ‘one of our greatest failures’, as did senior Number 10 staff.77
One Permanent Secretary whose department was publicly notorious for its incompetence had to be secretly paid off to the tune of around £1 million to get rid of him.78 Towards the end of Blair’s time in power, the Prime Minister’s Chief of Staff came to the conclusion that their mistake was ‘not to be brutal enough’. Says Jonathan Powell: ‘We should have got their attention by making civil servants responsible and accountable and sacked some people.’79
Peter Mandelson laid more of the blame on the politicians, lamenting that it was ‘a mistake not to embrace the civil service’.80
As the relationship got worse, some officials leaked material damaging to ministers. Beverley Hughes, praised by Blair as ‘first class’ and a minister who seemed destined for Cabinet rank, was forced to resign in the spring of 2004. The Shadow Home Secretary, David Davis, destroyed her by dribbling out a series of damaging e-mails from dissident immigration officials and disgruntled diplomats, orchestrating their release to cause maximum impact in the news bulletins. Her fatal error was to deny that she was aware of fraudulent visa applications from Bulgaria and Romania when leaked correspondence from a fellow minister showed that he had written to her about precisely that.
In the dictionary of New Labour speak, there was no more well-used word than ‘strategy’. This was not a Government satisfied with publishing a plan for the railways. It had to be a ‘Ten-Year Strategic Rail Plan’. In fact, the Government published two such ten-year plans in the space of just eighteen months. Commuters would have been happier had the trains been as snazzy and appeared with the regularity of the plans. In the case of rail, the constant use of the word strategy only underlined the absence of one.
Transport was
a cinderella department because Brown only looked to it for revenues and Blair was not interested at all. Britain’s railways were crying out for the long-term strategic thinking that equipped Germany, France, Italy and Spain with superb high-speed networks. The first eight years were instead expended trying to make workable the hopeless privatised structure inherited from the Tories.81 Blair had a fatalistic attitude towards sorting out the railways, once telling a Cabinet colleague: ‘There’s nothing that can be done about them.’82
He was much more preoccupied by immigration, which regularly exploded into the headlines throughout the second term. New Labour was torn between liberal opinion and the authoritarian instincts of the tabloids and many voters, for whom they could never crack down hard enough. Blair had a weakness for thinking that the answer to any controversy was to pass a law. ‘The trouble with Tony was that he thought that legislation was the solution to every problem,’ reflects one minister.83 What was actually needed was not more law but reform of the appallingly inadequate immigration bureaucracy that was overwhelmed by a backlog of applications.
The numbers of asylum-seekers peaked in the last three months of 2002 amidst a massive tabloid clamour. In February 2003, without first bothering to consult the Home Office, Blair made a pledge to halve the numbers in six months.84 The target was hit and the numbers dropped to 7,000 by the first quarter of 2005, the biggest fall of any country in the EU. Even so, it took until the first half of 2006 before Britain was finally managing to deport more failed asylum-seekers than were entering the country.85
The End of the Party Page 43