The End of the Party

by Andrew Rawnsley

  On page 30 of the Labour manifesto there was the offer of a guaranteed place in sixth form, college or training for every sixteen- to nineteen-year-old. On page 30 of the rival Tory manifesto there was a blank space because that was the back cover of a Conservative prospectus that had already run out of things to say. Michael Howard offered a list of things to hate rather than a blueprint for government.

  Charles Kennedy got into a terrible muddle trying to explain his party’s plans for a local income tax. The Lib Dem leader admitted he could not win and the Tories did not behave as if they had any expectation of becoming the Government. Labour continued to fret that it could nevertheless lose its majority.

  Blair reluctantly agreed to continue with the masochism strategy. One woman in a television audience complained about the lack of NHS dentistry and opened her mouth in front of a wincing Prime Minister to expose the empty gums from which she had extracted her rotten teeth. He looked like his teeth were being pulled without benefit of anaesthetic when he appeared on a special edition of Question Time, chaired by David Dimbleby. All three leaders appeared on the programme, but separately, Blair having ruled out a leaders’ debate. Charles Kennedy went first and received a fairly easy half-hour. Then came Michael Howard, who experienced a rougher ride. One questioner asked him how it felt to be less trusted than the Prime Minister he was calling a liar. As Blair headed into the ring, he groaned: ‘God, this is going to be grim.’65 By the time he was in the hot seat the temperature in the studio had become sauna-like and the audience was boiling over. During a sustained bombardment about Iraq, he was told that he should resign. He was then badly thrown by a woman with a question about how Government targets had actually made it harder to book an appointment with a GP. ‘I’m absolutely astonished,’ Blair floundered. ‘That’s news to me.’66 Under the tropical heat of the TV lights, he broke into a Nixonian sweat. He was booed. He was jeered. The audience was near riotous by the end. Blair looked numbed. It was ‘the low spot’.67

  Jonathan Dimbleby – it was part of Britain’s unwritten constitution that hereditary Dimblebys must host election programmes – was in the chair when Blair faced another battering on ITV’s Ask the Leader. One striking moment illustrated how he had changed. During the Ecclestone Affair in his first autumn at Number 10, he asked people to believe that he was ‘a pretty straight kind of guy’. The Blair of eight years later would no longer make an appeal like that. ‘I’m not going to stand here and beg for my own character. People can make up their minds whether they trust me or not.’68

  Brown, who was always averse to going into any environment which he could not completely control, did not subject himself to any close encounters with the voters. While the Prime Minister took all the heat and the hits, the Chancellor magisterially floated above the fray. This was cunning and cowardly in equal measure.

  Iraq, the worst territory for Labour, dominated the final stretch of the campaign. For the first time, in an interview with the Observer, Blair acknowledged: ‘There is a question about the judgement of the decision.’ He now simply asked people to appreciate the dilemma that faced him at the time: ‘Whichever way it went, it was not going to be easy.’69 Controversy about the legality of the war was reignited when extracts of the Attorney-General’s advice were leaked to the Mail on Sunday and Channel 4 News, which finally compelled the Government to publish Goldsmith’s document in full after two years of trying to keep it secret.70 It swamped Labour’s launch of its business manifesto at the headquarters of Bloomberg the next morning. Brown made a key intervention. Asked if he would have gone to war the same way as Blair, there was a dramatic pause before he simply said: ‘Yes.’ The answer received a smattering of applause from the businessmen in the audience. ‘I not only trust Tony Blair, but I respect Tony Blair for the way he went about that decision,’ the Chancellor declared.71 Blair looked relieved, but it was also a painful reminder of his dependency on the other man.

  Michael Howard directly accused the Prime Minister of lying his way into Iraq. ‘He’s told lies to win elections,’ sniped the Tory leader. ‘On the one thing where he’s taken a stand in the eight years he’s been Prime Minister, which was taking us to war, he didn’t even tell the truth about that.’72 The Conservatives put up posters with the slogan: ‘If he’s prepared to lie to take us to war, he’s prepared to lie to win an election.’

  Even some senior Tories thought this was counter-productively aggressive.73 It also looked hypocritical coming from a party that enthusiastically supported the war. Charles Kennedy observed that criticism from the Tories was ‘laughable’ when ‘they were the principal cheer-leaders for George Bush and Tony Blair.’74

  The Tory assault on Blair did little for Michael Howard’s reputation, but Iraq certainly had an effect. One post-election analysis found that a quarter of defecting traditional Labour voters cited the war as the reason.75 The ‘heavy onslaught on Iraq’ ate into Blair’s already low morale.76 Even after so many toughening years at the top, his skin was pierced by attacks on his personal integrity. ‘He hates it if people question his character or whether he’s been honest,’ says Sally Morgan.77

  In the last week of the campaign, he groaned to me: ‘A very, very direct character attack, day after day after day – who knows what the impact is? The question is whether some of the mud sticks. The honest answer is, I don’t know.’ He feared that it might so depress the Labour vote that it could cost him his majority or even let the Tories ‘get in by the back door’.78

  The electoral sorcerer knew that his powers were fading. In conversation, he did not deny that there was a section of the electorate who did not want to vote Labour because they simply hated him. ‘They’ve got to make up their minds whether that is enough for them to reject the whole Government.’79 The maestro who once invited people to vote Labour because of him and in spite of the party now asked people to vote Labour because of the party and in spite of him.

  ‘It was an ugly election,’ says Matthew Taylor.80 Blair usually relished campaigning because he thought it was something at which he excelled. He hated this campaign. When he joined Peter Hain at an election rally in south Wales, the minister could see ‘he was clearly not enjoying it; it was a pretty unpleasant experience for Tony.’81 ‘It was an awful campaign,’ says Alan Milburn. ‘We were playing a very defensive game and counting the days for it to be over.’82

  The campaign was not just psychologically painful for Blair; he was also in physical agony because of an injury incurred in the gym. He was suffering from a slipped disc, which he couldn’t get treated without alerting journalists. It was masked from the media at the cost of Blair spending the campaign in severe physical distress, made worse because he refused to take painkillers.

  ‘If you offered Tony a pill he reacted as if you were trying to get him to take heroin,’ says one of his staff.83 He was persuaded to dose himself up with Nurofen to get through the campaign. In its last week, he also went down with a heavy cold.

  ‘I think you’ve got be pretty abnormal not to be affected if somebody’s calling you a liar repeatedly and in a very aggressive way,’ says Sally Morgan. ‘He was also in pain, which didn’t help. The combination of having a bad back and being called a liar doesn’t make you feel great.’84

  Cherie came into campaign headquarters forty-eight hours before polling day and berated Philip Gould for giving her husband too much bad news about how things were looking. ‘I’m just trying to tell him the truth,’ protested Gould. ‘Well, you shouldn’t be,’ said Cherie. ‘It’s depressing him.’85

  There was a rising panic about Labour voters expressing disenchantment by switching to the Lib Dems or staying at home in high numbers. Alastair Campbell tried one of his old tricks by leaking an internal memo which detailed Labour’s anxieties about the election. He planted it with the Sunday Times. The idea was to scare Labour supporters to the polling stations with the thought that they might accidentally let in Howard. This attempt at ‘reverse spin’ backfired when t
he Sunday Times gave the story the headline: ‘Campbell: we’re home and dry’, precisely the opposite of what he had intended.86 Tricks from the New Labour playbook no longer worked as they once did.

  Most of the press gave a grudging vote for Labour. The Sun, having played a game of tease about its intentions, released red smoke over Wapping. Since they also had the support of the Mirror, the two biggest-selling red-top tabloids were both voting Labour. The black tops, the Express and the Mail, backed the Tories. ‘Give Blair a bloody nose,’ yelled the Mail, a headline which acknowledged that the Tories weren’t going to win.87 Most of the qualities, including the Financial Times for a third election in a row, supported Labour.

  That gave the party a solid advantage in the press, but editorial endorsements were much more qualified than they had been in 1997 and 2001. Many papers wrote of Blair as damaged goods and the lesser of two evils. Reflecting the mood of the general public, there was no yearning for the return of a Tory government, but no enthusiasm for Labour either.

  In the final stretch of the campaign, Blair was ‘absolutely exhausted’ and ‘very, very jumpy’.88 The last two days were ‘ghastly’ and ‘totally Iraqdominated’.89 With forty-eight hours to go, much of the media coverage was focused on the young widow of a soldier killed in Basra who personally blamed the Prime Minister for his death. When David Blunkett talked to the Prime Minister, he found Blair worried ‘that it was slipping away’ and fearing ‘he may have lost us an overall majority’ because of the war.90

  Blair’s desire to win with a convincing majority was not just driven by a hope that an emphatic victory would smash Michael Howard’s style of Conservatism and draw a line under Iraq. He was as much concerned, if not more, to win a victory that would make him safe from backbench revolt and the predatory Brown.

  May the 2nd was a sunny Bank Holiday Monday. The two men began a campaign day together in south London, where they unveiled a poster warning: ‘If one in ten Labour voters don’t vote, the Tories win.’ Blair slipped off his tie to look more relaxed than he felt. Brown kept his tie round his neck. Visiting the Kent marginal of Gillingham, they exchanged compliments. Blair hailed Brown as ‘my friend, our Chancellor, a fantastic asset for our country’. Brown urged voters to ‘put Tony Blair in Downing Street on Friday’.91

  Blair strolled over to an ice-cream van to buy a couple of 99s. ‘’Ere, Gordon!’ he said, calling on the other man to get his cornet. Watching the pictures on television, Jonathan Powell wanted to ‘throw up’.92 Others who knew the true state of the relationship laughed.

  ‘You lick my ice cream and I’ll lick your ice cream,’ chuckled Andrew Turnbull. ‘I don’t think Blair was much of an ice cream person and Brown certainly wasn’t.’93 Cherie hated to see Brown given co-star status. Her constant refrain was: ‘Can’t Tony do more things on his own?’94

  Off camera, the big chill was again descending between the two men. ‘In the last week of the campaign, the shutters came down again,’ says one of the leading Brownites in election headquarters. ‘All conversation stopped.’95

  Both men were now looking beyond the election. ‘It always went cold when Tony was about to become Prime Minister again and Gordon wasn’t,’ says Philip Gould.96 They both saw the future – and it hurt. Blair would be manacled to a Chancellor he didn’t want and Brown would be back with a Prime Minister he craved to replace.

  The view around Blair was that 100 was the benchmark figure for a Labour majority that would permit him to stay for a full third term.97 A majority of less than fifty would make it very difficult for him to withstand pressure to quit Number 10 much earlier. Majorities in between were a grey area in which anything might happen.

  There was the traditional frantic hurtle around the country on the last day which saw Blair and his wife campaign in London, the Midlands, the northeast of England and the west of Scotland. Cherie was insistent that ‘she wanted the last day to be her and Tony together.’ And no Brown.98 On the morning of 5 May, the Blairs and their children walked to their local polling station in Sedgefield and then spent the rest of the day at Myrobella. Most of the core of the old gang was there: Alastair Campbell, Sally Morgan and Jonathan Powell. They were joined by Bruce Grocott, the Labour Chief Whip in the Lords, who’d spent the campaign with Blair. Powell hoped they would use the day to plan a third-term government. But the usual combination of nerves and not wanting to tempt fate meant that this did not happen. Nor could they be sure whether Cabinet ministers in more marginal seats – such as Charles Clarke and Ruth Kelly – were going to hold on.99 Instead of studying the proposed ministerial changes, a ‘gloomy’ Blair kept ‘pacing around’, refusing to believe Grocott’s reassurances that it would turn out all right.100 He obsessed over a list of marginal Labour seats. ‘Election night was very tense,’ says Sally Morgan, whom Blair ‘compelled to make endless phone calls which produced very little information because nobody really knew’.101

  As it grew darker, the house began to fill with friends and local activists. The gang sat with Blair around the kitchen table. There was soon alarm shading into terror that the election had gone horribly wrong. Morgan was getting word from the counts around the country texted to her mobile phone. Around eight in the evening, she was receiving alarming reports that Labour was staring at defeat in a sweep of key marginals. ‘We would have lost our majority. That’s how it looked relatively early in the evening.’102

  There was especially panicking news coming from university seats, where opposition to student tuition fees was costing support, and crucial constituencies in southern England. ‘What is it?’ Blair demanded. He could ‘smell the anxiety’ on Morgan. She pretended that nothing was wrong, but the angst on her face gave her away. ‘It looks like we’ve got a few problems,’ she said and shared the bleak outlook with the rest of them. Campbell slumped on the table, head in hands, groaning: ‘We’ve lost, we’ve lost. It’s all over.’ Blair abruptly picked up his glass of wine, left the kitchen and walked into the garden. The others hurried out to be with him. In the words of one of those who stood shivering with him in the chilly night air: ‘It was a pretty grim hour or so.’103

  Blair started to flagellate himself. ‘It’s all my fault, it’s all my fault,’ he muttered repeatedly. He had become a liability because of Iraq. ‘I should have resigned.’104

  On the eve of the invasion of Iraq, he had declared himself prepared to pay the cost of conviction. Neither he nor most of his Government had foreseen that the toll was going to be so steep.

  PART TWO

  The Price of Ambition Third Term 2005–2010

  19. Sore Winners

  By 10 p.m., everyone at Myrobella was clustered around the television set. The moment the polling stations closed, the BBC and ITV released the results of their joint exit poll, which predicted that Labour had 3 per cent more of the vote than the Tories. It also forecast, with an impressive accuracy for which exit polls were not always renowned, that this would translate into a Labour majority of sixty-six seats. Blair remained highly agitated. There were rumours whirling around party headquarters that the exit poll was wrong.1 Another wind of fear blew through Sedgefield. ‘I can’t bear it,’ said Blair and demanded that the TV be switched off.

  There was a further surge of panic around half past midnight when a Tory victory was declared in the south London seat of Putney. ‘The first results that came in from London and the south-east were not good. If it had been at that level across the country, if it had been uniform, we would have been in serious trouble.’2 Another fright occurred when Jacqui Smith was wrongly thought to have lost her seat in the west Midlands. Bob Marshall-Andrews, the serially dissident Labour MP for Medway, popped up on TV to incorrectly declare that he had lost his seat. There were cheers at Labour campaign HQ. When he blamed Blair, they booed.3

  At half past one, a still nervy Prime Minister left Myrobella for his own count in Sedgefield. He was now reasonably confident that Labour had a majority, but unsure of what size. He feared tha
t he would be ‘in real trouble’ if the majority fell below fifty.4

  Blair looked utterly shattered when he joined the other candidates on the stage at quarter past two in the morning to hear his constituency result. ‘I know Iraq has been a divisive issue, but I hope now we can unite again and look to the future,’ he said in flat response. ‘It seems as if it is clear that the British people wanted the return of a Labour government with a reduced majority. We have to respond to that sensibly.’5 His personal majority went up, though the share of the Labour vote decreased. He sounded so deflated it was as if he was the vanquished not the victor.

  ‘He was totally exhausted,’ explains one of those with him that night. ‘He was still in pain from his back and he was worried that Keys would kick off.’6

  Reg Keys, whose son had been killed serving with the Royal Military Police in Iraq, stood in Sedgefield as an anti-war, anti-Blair candidate. When it was his turn to speak at the count, the TV cameras captured the frozen features of Blair and Cherie standing behind Keys as he denounced the Prime Minister and demanded that ‘he say sorry to the families of the bereaved’.7

  Cherie looked as though she was close to tears, though they may have been tears of anger when Keys condemned her husband for not visiting wounded soldiers in hospital. Blair had, in fact, made unpublicised visits to some of the wounded and was an assiduous writer of notes to the bereaved.

  Blair and his retinue departed to Teeside airport for the flight south. This was a very different plane journey to the one in 1997 when he and Cherie exchanged gasps of amazement as Tory seat after seat tumbled to his landslide. This time Labour was counting its casualties. The most vivid demonstration of the Iraq effect was Oona King’s loss of Bethnal Green in London’s East End to George Galloway’s anti-war Respect Party.