The End of the Party
Page 49
Blair was then connected to COBRA by conference call. Clarke told him that they were now pretty certain that there had been several explosions and that it was a concerted terrorist attack. ‘We can handle it,’ he told the Prime Minister. If Blair didn’t want to abandon the G8, he did not need to. But it was his advice, said the Home Secretary, that the Prime Minister should come back to London.46 This chimed with Blair’s own instinct always to be seen taking personal charge of a crisis.
Up in Gleneagles, he appeared before the cameras at midday. He was flanked, in a show of unity, by the presidents and prime ministers, supplemented by more heads of state and government from the ‘plus 5’ who had been invited to the summit. As usual, Blair placed most emphasis on the will to defeat terrorism. His consistent theme since 9/11 was echoed again on what became known as 7/7.
Our determination to defend our values and our way of life is greater than their determination to cause death and destruction to innocent people in a desire to impose extremism on the world. Whatever they do, it is our determination that they will never succeed in destroying what we hold dear in this country and in other civilised nations throughout the world.47
Jack Straw was ‘told to get in a helicopter’ to g0 to Scotland.48 Michael Jay took the chair – ‘Help!’ he messaged other officials – in the interregnum between Straw’s arrival and Blair’s departure. Though the Prime Minister hated travelling by helicopter, speed was of the essence and so was security. He used two choppers to get him back to London, one from Gleneagles to Dundee airport. From RAF Northolt he was then choppered to the Chelsea barracks as the fastest practicable way to get him into central London.49 By mid-afternoon, he was back in Downing Street for a reconvened COBRA. In the eyes of his Chief of Staff: ‘He was always good in a crisis. When there was no crisis, he could be fuzzy and all over the place. In a crisis, he gets steely and gets things under control rather than floundering around.’50
The meeting discussed how the emergency services were coping with the bombings and what contingency arrangements were in hand to deal with the further attacks that they feared. As the day progressed, the death toll became clearer. The four bombers had killed fifty-two people as well as themselves. Some 700 people were injured, many of them very seriously. The emergency response was generally magnificent and vindication of the contingency planning done since 9/11. They had practised ‘every conceivable war game’, says Ken Livingstone, including ones which envisaged multiple attacks on transport coinciding with the Prime Minister being away, the Mayor of London killed and Scotland Yard demolished. ‘The response was designed so it would work even in a decapitation scenario.’51
When COBRA broke up, Blair delivered another statement, his third of the day, this one outside Number 10. He declared that ‘we will not be divided and our resolve will hold firm.’ There would be ‘the most intensive action to make sure we bring those responsible to justice’.52 He did not know yet that those responsible had blown themselves up too.
In the late afternoon he called in at the operations centre at Scotland Yard, a visit without much practical purpose, but it did allow him to thank the police and be seen thanking them by the television cameras. After a debate with his aides, it was decided that he should not visit any of the locations of the atrocities on the grounds that this ‘would give the terrorists the pictures they wanted’.53
Then he flew back up to Gleneagles, tired and by now very hungry, to deliver his fourth statement of the day. Against a background of flags flying at half-mast, he declared that the summit would go on. ‘Here the world’s leaders are striving to combat world poverty and save and improve life. The perpetrators of today’s attacks are intent on destroying human life.’54
It was never established how strongly the G8 summit featured in the minds of the bombers when they planned the attacks. Paradoxically, this atrocity helped to make a success of Gleneagles by creating an aura of gravity and injecting a sense of urgency. There were serious fears within Number 10 beforehand that the summit might fall laughably below the expectations Blair had raised for it. ‘We could crash and burn and very publicly,’ Sir Nigel Sheinwald, his foreign affairs adviser, had warned the Prime Minister.55 The Americans were difficult throughout the pre-summit process. Their regular refrain was: ‘Don’t think we owe you just because of Iraq.’56 During a business dinner between the British and US pre-summit negotiating teams two weeks before Gleneagles, ‘the American sherpas were just blocking everything.’57 Michael Jay made an appeal to the Americans which was untypically passionate for a senior mandarin. ‘Think of your children! What will your children think if you don’t do this?’ the head of the diplomatic corps proclaimed, flourishing a text on financial assistance for Africa so vigorously that he waved the document too close to a candle and it went up in flames. The head of the American delegation sardonically remarked: ‘Pity it wasn’t the climate change text as well.’58
The Make Poverty History campaign pushed the G8 leaders to make commitments on aid and write off debt for Africa. The terror attacks amplified the pressure on the leaders to display a united front. ‘They were all frightened that they were going to be accused of failure,’ noted one official.59 Jacques Chirac was ‘unbelievably gentlemanly’ despite his loss of the Olympics. Not so Gerhard Schröder, who still hated Blair because of Iraq. When Blair returned to Gleneagles, his officials briefed him that they still hadn’t secured the aid agreement. Blair went down to the hotel bar where Schröder was drinking with Vladimir Putin. ‘Tony got him up against the wall and twisted his arm.’60
The debts of the world’s fifteen poorest nations were entirely wiped out, saving them an annual interest bill of around $1.5 billion. Gordon Brown had worked very productively on that for weeks. ‘You see how good he can be,’ Blair remarked to one of his aides.61 In the estimation of one senior official who closely observed both of them: ‘Gordon and Tony were a brilliant double-act. Gordon got everyone lined up into position for the summit and then Tony finished it off. Tony really pushed Bush over the line.’62 This showed what could be achieved when Brown’s technical skills and Blair’s advocacy were combined in the same cause, though it didn’t stop some unseemly spinning by their rival entourages about which of them most deserved the credit. The British also tried to set up mechanisms to ensure that the G8 lived up to its commitments to double aid. That was less successful. While Britain made good on its pledges, others did not. What it is fair to say is that this G8 had much more meaningful product than most summits.
That extraordinary seventy-two hours, from the euphoria of the Olympic victory on the Wednesday to the atrocities in London on the Thursday to the signing ceremony at Gleneagles on the Friday, encapsulated many of the features of Blair’s premiership. He displayed his lobbying skills at their most charming in Singapore, he cunningly corralled reluctant foreign leaders into signing up to the pledges at Gleneagles, and he then deployed his oratorical talents at their most unifying in the wake of the London bombings. He always looked and sounded impressive in a crisis. ‘It reminded everyone that he was fantastically good at being Prime Minister,’ says Phil Collins. ‘The rumblings against him disappeared for a while. There was a feeling that he’d bought himself some more time.’63
The national mood in the immediate wake of 7/7 was as Blair hoped it would be. Few Londoners were scared off the streets, though sales of bicycles surged as people became nervous of the tube. There was a lot of tabloid talk about London displaying a defiant ‘Blitz spirit’.
This wasn’t likely to last and it didn’t. Three of the killers were from Leeds and Dewsbury in Yorkshire. The fourth was from Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire. There was widespread horror at the discovery that these were not foreign terrorists, but Britain’s first home-grown suicide bombers. Blair had, as usual, framed the conflict as one between barbarity and civilisation. Yet it was his ‘civilised society’ of Britain that produced four young men prepared to kill themselves in order to commit mass murder.
It also u
ndermined an element of his case for the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. Those wars had not, it seemed to many, made Britain any safer from Islamist extremism. It had, many thought, rendered Britain less secure. The truth was that al-Qaeda had been committing atrocities long before the toppling of the Taliban and the invasion of Iraq, but emotion was more powerful than chronology for many of Blair’s critics.
Exactly a fortnight after 7/7, the menace of suicide bombing returned to the capital. Four more bombers attempted to replicate the first atrocity. Though this attack was foiled, the attempt to repeat the earlier devastation greatly increased apprehension about terrorism. The streets of the city howled with police sirens. Ugly concrete blocks were hastily erected outside prominent public buildings. On the 22nd, anti-terror officers put five bullets into the head of Jean Charles de Menezes, an innocent Brazilian electrician, at Stockwell tube station. The Metropolitan Police outraged civil liberties groups and Labour MPs when it was slow to confess to its mistake and prevaricated over an apology. For Blair’s critics, vocal once again, Jean Charles de Menezes joined the fifty-two innocents killed on 7/7 as casualties of his misconceived war on terror.
His characteristic response was to propose another slew of anti-terror law, which predictably courted even more opposition. After 21/7, Blair shifted into demotic gear. This was a response to the tabloids who were running noisy campaigns depicting Britain as a lawless haven for extremists and its capital as ‘Londonistan’. It was also an attempt to control the public mood. ‘I can sense that people are getting angry,’ he explained. ‘I have to respond.’64 As one of his advisers puts it: ‘He did feel instinctively that things needed to be done. He also feared that the media and the Opposition were about to turn on the Government and say “it’s all your fault.” He wanted to forestall that.’65
In early August, at a hurriedly arranged news conference at Number 10 held just before he left Britain for his summer holiday, Blair declared: ‘Let no-one be in any doubt, the rules of the game are changing.’66 He listed a ‘twelve point’ anti-terror plan of varying practicality and effectiveness. The Home Secretary would that day be publishing ‘new grounds for deportation and exclusion’ of those implicated in inciting extremism. After suggestions that preachers of hate might even be tried using fourteenth-century treason laws, Omar Bakri Mohammed fled to the Lebanon. No-one was entirely sure how the Prime Minister actually intended to deal with the rest. Both the abruptness and the content of the statement caught Charles Clarke and the Home Office by surprise.67 The Labour chairman of the Home Affairs select committee, John Denham, remarked that many of the proposals were ‘half-baked’.68 That was generous: some of them weren’t even quarter-baked. While the Home Office tried to work out which could be implemented and which would have to be quietly abandoned, the Prime Minister took off for a holiday in Barbados at Sir Cliff Richard’s Sugar Hills mansion.
When Charles Clarke first met a young Tony Blair when they were both party activists in Hackney, the future Prime Minister struck the future Home Secretary as a ‘classic liberal Labour lawyer’.69 He came across the same way to Jack Straw.70
In his first term, Blair introduced the Human Rights Act and legislated for freedom of information. This had been used to embarrass him by compelling the Government to publish details of things such as his dinner guests at Chequers. There was chortling at the revelation that these included Michael Winner and Joan Collins. ‘Remind me, whose idea was that?’ Blair would remark sourly about freedom of information. Privately he would sometimes even describe it as his worst mistake as Prime Minister.71 As for the Human Rights Act, he routinely railed against the restraints it placed on dealing with terror suspects.
Already drifting in an authoritarian direction in his first term, in his second and third he accelerated along that trajectory. His Cabinet Secretary, Andrew Turnbull, is in no doubt: ‘He got more authoritarian from 9/11 onwards.’72
Matthew Taylor agrees: ‘I don’t think there’s any question that over Tony Blair’s time in office he became more authoritarian.’73 Phil Collins found that ‘Tony was getting really hardcore’ by the third term.74
MI5 briefed him that there could be 500 or more Islamist terrorists waiting to strike.75 When Blair inquired why they couldn’t be rounded up, he was exasperated to be told that there was not sufficient evidence to do so under the law as it stood. He would regularly explode with frustration that the law didn’t allow him to simply throw out foreign nationals suspected of terrorism. ‘This is ridiculous!’ he would erupt. ‘The public will never understand why we can’t get rid of them.’76
He was absolutely right that there was a very serious threat. In February 2003, MI5 detected an al-Qaeda plot to fire ground-to-air missiles on airliners as they took off from Heathrow. This was far from incredible: such an attack had already taken place in Kenya. In a spectacular bungle, light tanks were deployed to Heathrow. There were bitter recriminations within Whitehall about the failure to catch those terrorists who were tipped off that their conspiracy was blown.
In March 2004, another plot was exposed, its potential targets ranging from the huge Bluewater shopping centre in Kent to the Ministry of Sound nightclub in London. Five men were later jailed for life.
A great deal more money was poured into both MI5 and the anti-terror units of the police. The intelligence-led approach to the threat was successful. At least twenty separate plots to commit atrocities in Britain were detected and prevented by the intelligence services and the police during Blair’s premiership.77 Given the scale of the threat, and the murderous determination of this form of terrorism, it could be considered near miraculous that, between 2001 and 2009, the only plot to succeed was 7/7.
Much less convincing was the case for the increasingly draconian, highly contentious and often ineffective legislation introduced by the Government. A lot of it wasn’t even wanted by those hunting the terrorists, and all of it sucked power to the state and its agents at the expense of the individual.
Britain became the most watched society on the planet. It had a fifth of the earth’s CCTV cameras covering less than one hundredth of the world’s population. The number of organisations permitted to legally use invasive surveillance grew from nine in 2000 when the legislation was first passed to nearly 800 by 2009. Use of the powers was no longer confined to the investigation of serious crimes. Councils were even using them to spy on dog owners who didn’t clean up after their pets and to see if people were lying about where they lived for school catchment areas.
The Government struggled to make headway with its arguments to introduce ID cards. In the meantime, it built the largest DNA database in the world, far larger than its American equivalent. The data of 4 million people had been captured by 2009. They included both children and many people innocent of any crime.78
At the party conference that autumn, Walter Wolfgang, an 82-year-old lifelong Labour member, was grabbed by stewards and ejected for having the temerity to mildly heckle the Foreign Secretary’s speech. Both Jack Straw and Tony Blair had to offer him apologies.
‘Blair’s police state’ became a regular refrain of his opponents, especially when surveillance and anti-terror powers were abused and deployed against protestors who had nothing to do with terrorism. Britain was not ‘a police state’. The very fact that people were free to say it was proved that it wasn’t. What was true was that no British government since 1945 had taken so many powers to monitor and intrude into its citizens’ lives.
A continual problem was what to do with foreign terror suspects against whom there was not enough evidence for a trial and who could not be deported back to countries where they would be at risk of torture. The first large piece of anti-terrorism legislation was rushed on to the statute book in the wake of 9/11 in October 2001. Key planks of it were then overthrown by the Law Lords in December 2004. The judges ruled that the Government breached the European Convention on Human Rights by jailing nine foreign suspects in Belmarsh high-security prison, where th
ey had been held without trial since 2001.
Blair responded by expressing ‘mounting impatience with judges for constantly telling him what he couldn’t do and never saying what he could do’. The Prime Minister would regularly steam to officials: ‘Here I am trying to protect the country and they won’t let me lock up or deport these people.’79
Blair was contemptuous of the Law Lords’ ruling. In the words of his Home Secretary: ‘Tony got very frustrated by the way that lawyers simply looked at the letter of the law rather than at the overall national position for which he bore responsibility. Over time, he became less sympathetic to the lawyerist arguments.’80
Matthew Taylor agrees: ‘Tony was consistently confronted with the fact that the criminal justice system wasn’t working and it wasn’t addressing the really difficult issues. Over time that just made him feel: “Actually, I’ve just got to do whatever needs to be done.” ’81
The Law Lords’ ruling led to the introduction of ‘control orders’ which created a form of house arrest. Terror suspects were restricted in where they could go and whom they could meet. This neither satisfied Blair, especially when suspects subsequently absconded, nor his critics among civil libertarians, who pointed out that it undermined the presumption of innocence and the right to a fair trial.