The End of the Party

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The End of the Party Page 44

by Andrew Rawnsley


  As asylum-seekers dropped down the agenda, general immigration was pushed up it. The large influx of workers from Poland and other entrants into the EU was a surge which the Government failed to anticipate. Labour’s broad policy towards immigration was liberal, but it rarely had the courage to boldly make the case that bringing in young, skilled and motivated workers was beneficial for the economy. It was also vulnerable to the charge that the country’s borders were laxly controlled. In an interview with me early in 2005, Blair made an admission, which was widely seized on, that he did not know, even roughly, how many people were illegally in Britain.86 The Government moved to a new points system under which the more skilled and desired applicants from outside the EU would be more likely to be allowed entry.

  The Government was by now pumping unprecedented increases in funding into the key public services. The NHS was employing many more nurses and doctors. New hospitals and medical facilities were appearing across the country. In April 2005, hospitals were given greater incentives to control costs and deliver more care. Money would in future follow patients, who were to gain wider choice about where they received their treatment. Both waiting lists and waiting times fell dramatically. In 2000, more than 250,000 patients waited more than six months for an operation in England. John Reid, who had succeeded Alan Milburn as Health Secretary, now felt confident enough to promise that they would have that figure down to zero by the end of 2005.87

  So it was not true to say that all the money was wasted. What was moot was whether all the additional resources were efficiently spent. Productivity in the NHS fell. Much of the extra health spending was absorbed by higher wages. Milburn and Reid, the two supposed hard men of health, proved to be a soft touch for the doctors. GPs and consultants were given remarkably generous new contracts which allowed them to earn more for less work.

  There were some groups of public sector workers that New Labour was prepared to take on in the struggle for reform. The firefighters foolishly provoked Government interest in their unmodernised practices when they took brief industrial action in the winter of 2002. There were other workers for the state whom the Government recoiled from confronting. The police were over-ripe for reform, but that was a casualty of 9/11 and Blair’s shyness of the battle. He told colleagues: ‘We don’t want to be seen at war with the police.’88 About 15,000 extra police officers were recruited, which took their numbers to record levels and they were supplemented by new community support officers. Overall levels of crime fell, not least because of sustained prosperity. Increases in some high-profile violent offences, especially gun and knife crime, and the propensity of the media to highlight them, kept the public mood on edge.89

  Blair rightly saw that state education was failing many pupils and moved towards devolving budgets to individual schools and encouraging specialisation and excellence. The school building stock, which had been neglected for a generation by parties of both stripes, was renovated.

  ‘Now you can’t move in this country without finding refurbished or entirely new schools, the same with hospitals, the same with police stations,’ notes Sir Michael Barber.90

  After incremental improvements in standards, by the end of the second term progress was hitting a plateau. Blair set more radical reform of schools as one of the pre-eminent goals of the third term.91

  Progress was sporadic and patchy in part because New Labour did not have a fully thought-through model for how public services should be reformed for the twenty-first century. The creation of foundation hospitals and City Academies was a tentative shift away from top-down command and control towards a more decentralised system. It had a long way to go before the health service and schools were truly accountable and responsive to their users.

  Even when the Government had achievements to its name, the public was made cynical by spin. Voters were also left unengaged by the technocratic language of reform. No-one was emotionally stirred by phrases like ‘purchase– provider splits’.

  Towards the end of the second term, two senior figures at Number 10 reflected thoughtfully on New Labour’s flaws as a project for government. Peter Hyman spent six years in Downing Street before leaving to teach in an inner-city school. He lamented that New Labour emphasised ‘momentum, conflict and novelty’ when ‘empowerment, partnership and consistency’ were required to get product on the ground. He now realised that ‘real delivery is about the grind, not the grand.’92

  Geoff Mulgan regretted that they had been too scared ‘of taking on major public professions’ and too cautious about reform that might arouse opposition from powerful interests such as ‘the London media, the super rich, big business and the City’. As a result, New Labour had turned out to be ‘mainly a way of winning elections rather than a transformative government project’.93

  They say that no man is a hero to his valet. No Prime Minister is a hero to his former advisers. Yet there was force in both critiques. Towards the end of the second term, Blair himself acknowledged to me that he had not been sufficiently ‘radical’ or ‘fundamental’ in reform. ‘I would have liked to push further and quicker.’94 He would do better, he promised both interviewers and himself, once he had secured a third term.

  In preparation for it, he instructed the ministers in the key public service departments to draw up five-year plans. This was his latest attempt to set a Blairite agenda for domestic policy and wrest control away from Gordon Brown.95

  The five-year plans were kept almost entirely hidden from the Treasury before publication for fear that Brown would try to unpick them. Brown believed that his spending reviews were the real Five Year Plans.96 Prime Minister and Chancellor were now effectively running two rival governments that barely spoke to each other. ‘The Treasury were much better at critiquing the ideas that we put forward than they were at sharing ideas that they were developing,’ regrets Matthew Taylor. ‘One of the dysfunctional aspects of the hostility at the end of the second term around the Five Year Plans was that too much policy development was taking place in Number 10 and the Treasury that was being hidden away from the other side. You wouldn’t know what they intended until the day before it was published and they felt the same way about us.’97

  On the account of Sally Morgan, by now Blair ‘had absolutely had it with Gordon. He was organising rebellions in the PLP. There was the constant briefing of the press. It was open warfare.’98

  Number 10’s most secret plan was to cut the Treasury back down to size after the election. Worked up by John Birt, the former Director-General of the BBC who had joined Blair as an adviser, the plan envisaged a ‘new Chancellor’ after the election who would have a ‘lack of personal investment in previous policies’ and be good at ‘teamwork’, none of which described Gordon Brown.99

  ‘I’m taking no more crap from across the road,’ the Prime Minister would routinely declare to his inner circle. He swore to them that he would finally be master of his Government in the third term.

  ‘I don’t believe you’ll ever do it,’ said Alan Milburn. Jonathan Powell expressed similar scepticism. Sally Morgan agreed: ‘It’s a complete waste of time. You won’t do it.’

  ‘I’m going to do it. I will do it,’ responded Blair. ‘I will.’100

  18. The Ugly Campaign

  In the first week of the New Year, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown made television appearances on the same day at the same time to speak about the same catastrophe that was transfixing the world. This was not, though, positive synchronicity between the two most powerful men in the Government. They were literally and metaphorically hundreds of miles apart. One spoke in London; one in Edinburgh.

  More than 200,000 people lay dead, the victims of the tsunami that inundated swathes of Asia on Boxing Day. Multitudes were in desperate need of aid. Tony Blair smarted from criticism that he had not returned early from his Christmas break in Egypt. That absence was unflatteringly contrasted with other leaders and the early-years Blair who would offer ‘emotional leadership’ at the drop of a tear on any s
ubject from the death of Diana to the imprisonment of a fictional character in Coronation Street. ‘He thought his Princess Di phase was over,’ explains Sally Morgan. ‘The public had had enough of that.’1

  Gordon Brown saw an opportunity and decided he could use a speech long scheduled for 6 January to present himself as the man leading the British response. Blair then hurriedly called a news conference at Number 10 timed for exactly the moment when Brown started to speak.

  Rolling news channels split-screen the rival performances. Interactive viewers could mute Blair and turn up Brown or vice-versa. No longer was there even a vestigial pretence that their rivalry was merely the confection of over-excited journalists or the product of over-aggressive briefing by their entourages. This was their competition for glory and control at its most naked and unedifying. There was no difference of philosophy or policy. When it came to the tsunami and aid issues more generally, there was nothing of substance over which they disagreed. This was a monstrous clash of egos. It looked grotesque to be conducting that fight over the corpses of the tsunami victims.

  ‘By then, it was just total war,’ says Morgan. ‘Things had broken down completely.’2 Geoffrey Robinson agrees it was ‘the nadir of the competitiveness between the two of them’.3 Gwynneth Dunwoody, a redoubtable Old Labour select committee chairwoman, spoke for many of her colleagues when she told the pair of them to ‘grow up’.4

  A few days later, more of the poison in the relationship seeped into public view when the Sunday Telegraph5 began to serialise Robert Peston’s biography of Brown, the latest salvo in the long war of the books which had begun early in the first term with another Brown biography, by Paul Routledge. Peston was extensively briefed by Ed Balls and other senior Brownites. The book had a dynamite quote: ‘Brown routinely says to Blair, “There is nothing that you could ever say to me now that I could ever believe.” ’6

  The Tories gleefully stuck that on their campaign propaganda. Brown had indeed repeatedly accused Blair of lying to him, as Blair had repeatedly accused Brown of sabotaging him. The only oddity about the quote was that it did not contain an expletive.

  The Prime Minister summoned some of his closest confidants to meet him at Number 10. Pat McFadden, Philip Gould, David Hill, Alan Milburn and Sally Morgan gathered in the flat above Downing Street, where they were witness to an extraordinary spectacle. Blair did not often lose it in front of large numbers of people, but on this occasion ‘Tony was in as angry a mood as is possible.’7

  He fulminated at length about how Brown had undermined him for years and raged against the other man for imperilling Labour’s election chances. Then he declared to the startled group: ‘That’s it. I’m taking no more of this shit. Let’s smoke him out. Let’s have a leadership contest.’8

  Blair presented them with an astonishing plan to stage a contest between him and Brown in order to settle once and for all which of them was the master. At that moment, Blair seemed serious. He even asked them to go away and look into the rules for a contest. It never, of course, happened. ‘None of us really thought he meant it,’ says one in the room. ‘These were rantings born of utter frustration.’9

  With just a few months to go before the general election, the headlines were screaming about the split at the top of the Government, and even then the media didn’t know the tenth of it.

  There was both bewilderment and anger among Labour MPs, who had been given years of lectures about discipline from Blair and Brown only for their election prospects to be endangered by the fratricidal struggle between the men at the top. Prime Minister and Chancellor faced the fury of their MPs when they made a joint appearance before the Parliamentary Labour Party. Dale Campbell-Savours demanded that Brown disavow the remark about Blair: ‘We can’t go into the election with that on the record.’ Barry Sheerman, a select committee chairman and mainstream MP, warned them that if they carried on in this fashion: ‘You won’t be forgiven.’ Prime Minister and Chancellor were ‘given a bollocking the like of which I have never previously witnessed’, one senior backbencher recorded in his diary.

  ‘I hear what you say,’ said Blair, glancing at Brown, who sat in silence just three feet away from him. ‘We all have, and we will act on it.’10

  The rivalry often rendered the Government dysfunctional and frequently generated headlines, but it had not prevented them from winning two landslide victories. There was even a case to be made that the TB-GBs gave the impression that all the big political debates took place within the Government, which helped to cast the Tories as irrelevant. Now, though, the vicious competition threatened Labour at a time when its prospects seemed fragile.

  The general election was gridded for 5 May. Few bookies, commentators or pollsters fancied the chances of the Tories. Even a damaged Tony Blair enjoyed approval ratings which easily bettered those of Michael Howard. His Tory colleague Ann Widdecombe memorably remarked that there was ‘something of the night’ about the vampiric Tory leader. Howard said: ‘I didn’t come into politics to be liked.’ Good job, because he wasn’t.

  That didn’t stop New Labour being neurotic about the election. They were riddled with anxiety in 1997 and 2001 when heading for landslide wins. So they were scared when not a single published poll in January put Labour above 40 per cent. One poll placed them as low as 34 per cent. All put Labour ahead of the Tories, but often only by a slender margin.11 This was frightening to a party accustomed to going into general elections with handsome advantages over its opponents. Blair’s personal ratings had plummeted, especially for trust. The Iraq war did not just discredit him with a segment of the electorate; it also undermined the credibility of claims he made about anything else: 63 per cent of voters thought the Government was not ‘honest and trustworthy’.12

  Like nineteenth-century physicians, Labour’s strategists prescribed a purge to try to release the bad blood the public felt for the Government. The voters might get over their anger if they were allowed to vent it at the Prime Minister. So they reprised the ‘masochism strategy’ that was employed in the run-up to the Iraq war. Blair was sent out to be ritually flogged on television. In one encounter recorded for Channel 5, Neil from West Sussex was seen demanding: ‘How do you sleep at night, Mr Blair?’ Marion, a hospital worker from Brighton, demanded of the Prime Minister: ‘Would you wipe somebody’s backside for £5 an hour?’ Maria from Essex became so animated about provision for children with special needs that she leapt out of her seat at him shouting that he was ‘talking rubbish’.13

  While Blair was beaten like a punchbag, Brown sulked in his dressing room. He continued with his policy of total non co-operation. When the Conservatives published a report claiming to be able to identify £35 billion of savings from government waste, Labour needed to have an answer. Brown could have done the maths in a moment, but he simply refused to produce a response. When he deigned to come to election strategy meetings, he would sit in saturnine silence broken only by flashes of stinging criticism, usually for any idea that emanated from Alan Milburn. Matthew Taylor, seeing a grim analogy from football, dubbed the strategy group ‘the Group of Death’.14

  Brown’s team set out to destroy Milburn. Quentin Tarantino had recently released his slaughter movie Kill Bill. Brown’s character assassination squad launched an operation dubbed ‘Kill Mil’. ‘Gordon had to destroy Alan. He had done it before when Alan was in the Cabinet. Gordon thought: if Alan is the face of the campaign and it goes well, then he’ll be a threat. So we must kill him.’15 Milburn became wearily resigned to waking up most days to see another attack on the campaign, usually in the right-wing papers that Brown favoured as muck-spreaders against colleagues. Milburn said to friends: ‘It’s not pleasant having a bucket of shit flung over you, but this was inevitable from the day I walked into the job. The rod attracts the lightning.’16 The Brownites openly scorned Labour’s election slogan, ‘Forward, Not Back’, when it was unveiled in early February. Poetry it certainly wasn’t, being about as inspirational as ‘Open Other End’ or �
�This Way Up’.

  Cabinet ministers sympathised. ‘Alan is being very badly treated,’ one remarked at the time. Milburn created a professional campaign organisation for Labour which had not existed six months before. ‘He gets no credit for that.’17

  Senior staff on the campaign agree: ‘He did a very good job. He played a pretty crucial role.’18 In the eyes of Cabinet colleagues, Brown’s behaviour was ‘absolutely selfish and destructive, Gordon at his very worst’.19

  In February, the Chancellor left Britain for a tour of Africa and China, attracting the accusation inside Number 10 that he was now in ‘a global sulk’.20 Spencer Livermore, the only one of his aides that Brown would allow to go to campaign meetings, faced ‘a barrage of abuse about Gordon’s behaviour’ from Alastair Campbell, Philip Gould and Sally Morgan.21

  Huw Evans joined the campaign in the middle of March to take charge of the ‘story grid’: the schedule of events for the election. He found all the work done – except for one huge hole in the middle. ‘There was no involvement from Gordon and no contribution from his team. They’d done the work, but they were withholding it all.’22 ‘The problem was this was asymmetric warfare,’ says Jonathan Powell. ‘There was nothing we could do. We couldn’t fight back against him without damaging Labour’s chances.’23

  Philip Gould gave a presentation to the Cabinet at which he worried many ministers by saying that the key voters were the ‘Labour doubtfuls’. If enough of them refused to vote, or switched to the Lib Dems or protest parties, then the Government could be in trouble.24 Blair, more popular than his party in 1997 and 2001, was now regarded as a liability by many Labour candidates. At the last two elections, his face smiled out of nearly every campaign leaflet; at this election, many candidates airbrushed him off their literature.

  Milburn could see what was coming next, telling colleagues: ‘It’s all been about setting the stage for Gordon to race on to the scene as the saviour on a white charger.’25 He was right, according to one of Brown’s aides: ‘Obviously, we made the most of riding to the rescue.’26

 

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