The End of the Party

by Andrew Rawnsley

  Low clouds of anxiety encased Blair. He remained sunk in pensive silence for much of the plane journey, deadening the atmosphere for those who were in a mood to celebrate. Alan Milburn, who had hitched a ride to London with his partner and children, tried to cheer up the Prime Minister. ‘For God’s sake, we’ve won,’ said Milburn, trying to shake the other man out of it. ‘Three terms. That’s fucking awesome.’8 Yet Milburn had made his own contribution to Blair’s depression. He had already told him that he did not want to serve in government again. Once they touched down in London, his Jag whisked the Prime Minister to Labour’s victory party at the National Portrait Gallery, overlooking Trafalgar Square. His arrival there at shortly after five in the morning was heralded by yet another blast of ‘Beautiful Day’, the U2 anthem that Labour had taken as its campaign theme tune. There was some chanting of ‘Four more years!’

  Yet few there were feeling terribly uplifted that night despite the historic achievement of winning three elections in a row. The Blairites worried that the big reduction in the majority meant their leader’s days were now foreshortened. Others could not suppress the feeling that, with a strong economy and record sums going into public services, they would have won another landslide but for the war.

  Blair made a few brief remarks to the party. ‘There are good comrades who have fallen,’ he said, an exceptional use of the c-word from him. ‘First time, third term. Let’s make the most of it.’9

  Many previous Prime Ministers would have relished a majority of sixty-six. It was, from one perspective, a remarkable comeback for Blair, who had taken his country into a highly unpopular war with a terrible aftermath and come close to resigning a year earlier. He had inflicted a third successive defeat on the Tories, once the hegemonic party of British politics. Michael Howard announced he would be quitting as Tory leader. There was now something of the goodnight about him. He was the fourth Tory leader to be seen off by New Labour. Blair was indisputably one of the greatest election winners in British history and his party’s most electorally successful leader by a long way.

  Yet it was also evident from the result that the electoral sorcerer had lost his magic. He knew that his personal authority, which rested so heavily on his ability to win votes, was damaged by the result. His original coalition was fragmented by voter disaffection and pincered from left and right. The haemorrhaging of the Labour vote and the loss of forty-seven seats made it feel like a severe retreat and a very reluctant endorsement after the two back-to-back landslides of 1997 and 2001. Worse still for Labour morale, the Tories had won a larger share of the vote in England and Labour only just clung on by its fingertips in many seats which had now become super-marginals. Only 9.5 million people voted Labour in 2005, 4 million fewer than in 1997.

  ‘We didn’t win the 2005 election because people loved us, we won the 2005 election because people were willing to tolerate us and they didn’t really fancy the look of the Tory party,’ comments Matthew Taylor. ‘So we had a hell of a job to do to reconnect with people.’10

  Under no other system but first-past-the-post would Labour have got anywhere near a parliamentary majority. It had won the election with just 35.2 per cent of the vote, barely more than Neil Kinnock achieved when he went down to defeat in 1992. It was the lowest share for a party winning a majority of parliamentary seats since the 1832 Reform Act. Factoring in the low turn-out, barely one in five of those eligible to vote put a cross beside the name of a Labour candidate.11 Rarely had Britain returned a government with such a palpable lack of enthusiasm. It was a victory that tasted like defeat.

  That was reflected back at Blair in the next morning’s headlines. He was the only Prime Minister of modern times other than Margaret Thatcher to win three consecutive terms. Yet the press concentrated on Labour’s losses.

  ‘You did give him a bloody nose!’ gloated the Daily Mail.12 ‘Blair limps back’, declared The Times.13 The Guardian saw it as a blow to Blair’s ambitions to stay at Number 10 for another four years with the interpretation: ‘Time is running out’.14 That was encouraging for Brown and his camp, who ‘wanted the spotlight to be on Tony winning by the skin of his teeth’.15 The press coverage further blackened Blair’s mood and amplified his disappointment that he had not won the victory that he hoped for.16 The next morning, he was asking miserably: ‘We did win, didn’t we?’17

  Speaking to the cameras in Downing Street he struck a note of humility rather than celebration: ‘I have listened and I have learnt. And I think I have a very clear idea of what the British people now expect from this government for a third term.’18

  It was a downcast address from a Prime Minister who had just been elected for a third time.

  ‘He didn’t look like a newly elected Prime Minister full of the joys of spring. There was no spark,’ thought his friend Stephen Byers.19 ‘He was in a very bad place,’ according to one of his intimates.20 Some of his circle tried to gee him up. ‘It’s a very good result,’ Philip Gould endeavoured to encourage Blair. ‘If anyone had told us back in 1997 that we were going to win three terms, we would have said they were mad.’21

  If anything, though, Blair’s mood became more occluded in the days immediately after the election. ‘It was inevitable that he felt a sense of personal rejection. It took him a bit of time to come out of it, to come to terms with it,’ says David Hill. ‘After two landslides, he had to psychologically retune himself to the fact that the electorate had changed their view of him.’22

  The shrinkage of the majority meant tougher battles ahead with his parliamentary party to get through the domestic reforms he had set his sights on as his legacy. ‘He thought it weakened him politically in the party,’ says Jonathan Powell. ‘He was worried about rebellions.’23 It had been hard enough to get the health and university reforms through the previous Parliament with a majority of more than 160. It would now only require thirty-five of the rebellious or the irreconcilable to combine against him and threaten defeat. Sally Morgan agrees that ‘he was worried that it would be harder to do the next stages of reform and was going to affect the ability to govern. He also thought Gordon would come and get him.’24

  It did not help that some of his allies refused to serve alongside him. Milburn wouldn’t come back. ‘After everything that had happened, Alan didn’t trust Tony to stick up for him.’ Stephen Byers also said no.25 ‘The Friends of the Man know the game is almost up,’ one senior MP recorded in his diary.26

  There was a widespread feeling that Labour would not have lost so many seats had Blair given way to Gordon Brown, an idea that was aggressively pumped around the party’s bloodstream by the Chancellor’s supporters. It became common currency in the media. The Daily Mail and the Guardian rarely agreed on much, but it was a shared theme of their commentators that Labour owed its salvation to the Chancellor.

  Blair thought that a third win would strengthen his hand against Brown and the big beasts of the Cabinet. He found the opposite when he embarked on a reshuffle on Friday morning. He was defied by bolshy ministers at almost every turn. The first showdown was with John Prescott. He had no more managed to make sense of his departmental empire in the second term than he had in the first. Blair wanted to take away communities and local government from Prescott and hand them over to a returning David Blunkett. Prescott blew up into a terrific rage. In the face of his deputy’s resistance, Blair backed down. Blunkett was instead resurrected as Work and Pensions Secretary in place of Alan Johnson. He shifted to the DTI, which was rebranded as the Department for Productivity, Energy and Industry, a title rather redolent of the corporatist seventies. As satirists were quick to spot, it could also be turned into the acronym ‘PENIS’. A few days later, Johnson protested to Blair that the department was becoming a laughing stock.27 So the nameplates were all changed back, encouraging the media to treat this as another chaotic Blair reshuffle. Ruth Kelly, a relatively junior member of the Cabinet, dug her heels in when Blair tried to move her out of Education. Peter Hain was aggrieved to be made N
orthern Ireland Secretary when he had been hoping for something grander. Blair tried to sweeten the posting by remarking: ‘You get a castle, you know.’28 Other ministers refused to move or briefed the press about their disappointment with what they’d been offered.

  With hindsight, many at Number 10 felt it would have been better had Blair postponed the reshuffle until he was feeling physically and mentally stronger. ‘He was still in incredible pain and he had just gone through the most awful experience,’ says Jonathan Powell.29

  Jack Straw was now regarded with considerable suspicion inside Downing Street, having been sliding into Brown’s camp in the eighteen months before the election. Blair toyed with moving Straw from the Foreign Office and replacing him with Charles Clarke. But that was too fidgety even for Blair. Clarke had been Home Secretary for just six months and it made sense to keep Straw where he was for the moment, when there was the Gleneagles Summit and tricky European business immediately ahead.

  As always, the most tempestuous and protracted negotiations were with his Chancellor. ‘He’s gone off to form his Cabinet again,’ Brown sourly remarked to Philip Gould. ‘Do you know what is in it?’

  Brown too was in a post-electoral depression.30 He believed that he would have won a much better victory for Labour and was maddened by the thought of having to carry on waiting for the premiership. He retreated to his private flat in Great Peter Street with Ed Balls, Spencer Livermore and Sue Nye to wait for Blair to call. ‘Tony took a long time to ring Gordon to confirm him as Chancellor.’31 That further blackened his mood. ‘Gordon was genuinely hurt. He had rescued the election. He had surgically attached himself to Tony. He’d said he’d have done the same thing on Iraq. He expected more co-operation.’32

  When Blair did finally call, he made an astonishing remark that he had only been playing games before the election. ‘I’m sorry about all that Alan stuff. I was just messing about. I never meant it to get that serious, Gordon.’33

  The two men had a running, vicious row over Friday and into the weekend. Blair tried to push a diluted version of the plan to reduce the powers of the Treasury. Brown simply said no; Blair was not strong enough to insist. ‘It would never work unless he moved Gordon,’ observed the Cabinet Secretary. ‘Given the way the campaign had been conducted with them getting double-billing, I never believed for a moment that Blair would be in a position to dictate terms to Brown.’34 So it proved. Even Jonathan Powell realised that ‘after the ice cream, it was impossible.’35

  Blair wanted to give the job of Chief Treasury Secretary to John Hutton, a former flatmate of Milburn and very Blairite. Brown vetoed Hutton and a series of other candidates proposed by Blair until they eventually compromised on Des Browne.

  The Chancellor demanded instant ministerial jobs for Ed Balls and Ed Miliband, who had just been elected as MPs. Blair refused, arguing that it ‘wouldn’t be good for them’.36 Brown fought back when the Prime Minister attempted to fire some of the Chancellor’s less impressive ministerial acolytes. ‘Isn’t it at last time to sack Dawn Primarolo?’ Blair wearily asked. Brown wasn’t having that. ‘We fired Dawn Primarolo about ten times,’ says Jonathan Powell. ‘And every time Gordon insisted we put her back.’37

  Brown angrily protected his clan. ‘It was a case of you take one, you take all,’ remarks one of his inner circle.38

  Brown ‘genuinely thought it was going to be a dual premiership’ in which Blair would share power for a year or two before ceding Number 10.39 Most of the Brownites had never taken the idea that Blair would serve a full third term seriously. As it became clear that Blair was not interested in having any conversation about a transition, Brown began to rage about another betrayal.40

  The Chancellor’s team gave aggressive briefings to political journalists that Blair had broken a pre-election promise to consult him about Cabinet appointments. They set about actively trying to undermine the reshuffle.

  Blair was going to make Andrew Adonis, the head of his policy unit, a member of the Lords so that he could insert him as the Minister of State at Education in order to drive through the reforms planned for the third term. When Brown got wind of this, his team briefed the press in order to whip up opposition among the many Labour MPs who regarded Adonis with suspicion. The Observer reported that Brown was ‘fiercely resisting the appointment amid signs that Downing Street was backing down. “Gordon will never let this happen,” said one well-placed source.’41 Adonis had to settle for the lesser rank of Parliamentary Under Secretary. He went on to be a highly effective minister and one whom Brown himself eventually promoted to the Cabinet. Rarely did the infighting about positions have much to do with the quality of the individuals in question. It was all about who wielded the power and was seen to do so. The impression that Brown had a veto over appointments was sapping of Blair’s authority. So was the general air of acrimony around the reshuffle. Blair seemed weaker. Brown looked more menacing than ever.

  There had not been a true peace between the two men during the election campaign. There had only been an absence of war. The armistice was now over.

  ‘Your time is up,’ warned a typical headline that weekend over stories that a growing number of backbenchers were urging the Prime Minister to resign sooner rather than later.42 Robin Cook was the most prominent of a string of Labour MPs, not all of them predictable names, who went public with demands for Blair to give a date for his departure. They were cheered on by the right-wing press who were pleased to see Labour behaving as if it had lost as well as by some in the left-wing press who wanted Blair out. Cook suggested that Labour should have a new leader by the autumn.43

  Blair’s private response was bitter: ‘I have not just gone through four weeks of hell to bugger off in a few months’ time.’44

  His staff noted with distress how the demands for his head from within his own party ‘skewed the public perception of a phenomenal third victory and instead of it being described as amazing it was a bit of a crisis’.45

  Phil Collins joined Number 10 as Blair’s principal speech-writer immediately after the election. He found ‘a subdued atmosphere. There was a palpable sense of time being short – of there being a deadline.’46 In the febrile aftermath of the election, there was even some fear that he might be vulnerable to an instant coup attempt. Anxious not to be caught by surprise while out of the country, Blair cancelled a planned trip to attend the commemorations of VE Day in Moscow, annoying the Russians, who had to make do with John Prescott.

  He had gone into the 2005 election campaign believing that he might fulfil his plan to serve a full third term, or something very close to it, and beat Margaret Thatcher to become the longest continuously serving Prime Minister since Lord Liverpool in the early nineteenth century.47 He was not yet talking to his senior staff about recalibrating his preferred timescale. ‘We’ll see how the size of the majority works out,’ he would say to them, and more darkly: ‘We’ll see how Gordon behaves.’48

  Jonathan Powell was on the maximalist end of the spectrum, believing that Blair should be aiming to be around at least until 2008. ‘If you promised to do that, you should do it,’ Powell argued.49

  Sally Morgan believes: ‘In his head, he thought it was three years rather than two’, but she was already doubtful that ‘he’d get further than halfway through the parliament’.50 Matthew Taylor also thought it more realistic to plan for two.51 Neil Kinnock agreed, telling friends: ‘Gordon will go mad if Tony makes him wait three years.’52

  On Wednesday, 11 May, both men appeared before a meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party. Blair appealed to the MPs not to ‘act like this was a defeat, not a victory’. There was applause and desk-banging from the loyalist majority in the room. Calls for his departure came from some MPs. To his face, Glenda Jackson, the MP for Hampstead and Highgate, declared: ‘I was not up against the Tories, I was not up against the Liberal Democrats, I was fighting you. I was told on the doorstep time and again that they cannot vote for me while Tony Blair remains as leader.’


  He won a laugh at the expense of Roy Hattersley, the former deputy leader of the Labour Party and a relentless critic. The bilious excretions of Hattersley were untempered by any humility about the abject and serial failure of his own time in a leadership position. ‘I was very loyal throughout three defeats,’ remarked Blair. ‘All I would ask is a bit of loyalty throughout our three victories.’ He promised that there would be a ‘stable and orderly’ transition to a new leader and he would ensure that the party had ‘time and space’ to elect someone in his place.53

  This was his first concession that he would not be able to remain as Prime Minister right to the end of the third term. Just as many allies feared when he made his announcement the previous autumn, his authority was being chipped away. ‘The moment he had made that statement in 2004 the crack was in the dyke,’ says Neil Kinnock.54 In the words of Alan Milburn, ‘the dynamic of demise’ had been set by Blair’s announcement that he would not fight another election. ‘The clock starts ticking. From the start of the third term, the only question that people are asking is: “When are you going?” ’55

  As Blair addressed the MPs, a brooding Brown sat alongside him, staring at the ceiling, rubbing his face and gazing at his watch.

  The post-election depression was somewhat lifted at the end of May when the French rejected the European constitution and were then followed by the Dutch. That provided the chance to escape from the commitment to hold a referendum that looked completely unwinnable. Blair was then boosted by a rapturous reception when he visited the European Parliament in June. ‘It was a brilliant day. He was like a film star signing autographs for people.’56 In a compelling speech to the Parliament, Blair challenged the EU to listen to ‘the trumpets around the city walls’.57