The End of the Party

by Andrew Rawnsley

  The Prime Minister’s wife was one of those concerned about the direction in which he was headed. In a speech that summer, Cherie said: ‘It is all too easy for us to respond to terror in a way which undermines our most deeply held values and convictions and which cheapens our right to call ourselves a civilised nation.’82

  That argument had no traction on her husband. He returned from his August holiday determined to overrule the doubts of the Home Office and the opposition of the many who thought he had become completely cavalier about the principles of justice. The Queen’s Speech of 2005 produced yet more legislation of an authoritarian flavour. Blair had always been obsessed with crime as an influence on voters’ allegiances. He ‘got into a funk’ about anti-social behaviour and binge drinking which was ‘led by the politics of it’.83 He also became frustrated by what he saw as the liberalism of the Sentencing Guidance Council.

  ‘Why can’t we get a grip on them?’ he complained to his aides. Matthew Taylor had to point out that the Government had invented the Council. ‘Oh, bloody hell,’ groaned Blair.

  More than 3,600 new criminal offences were put on the statute book during New Labour’s time in office and the prison population reached record levels. As a satirical joke, Phil Collins wrote a memo proposing that everyone should start life in prison and have to work their way out. Blair quipped: ‘That’s a great idea.’84

  The central proposal of the latest anti-terror legislation was to permit the detention of suspects without charge for up to ninety days, a huge increase on the existing fourteen-day limit, which was already one of the longest in the democratic world. The Prime Minister claimed the support of the police, but the only senior officer to really argue the case for it was his namesake, Sir Ian Blair, the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, and he later finessed his position.

  Ninety days had not been asked for by the intelligence services. They were, in fact, privately against detention without charge for such a long period. The head of MI5, Eliza Manningham-Buller, was the opposite of a hand-wringing liberal. A robust, commonsense, ‘no bullshitting’85 intelligence veteran, she was her father’s daughter and his soubriquet was ‘Bullying Manner’. She saw the ninety-day legislation as counter-productive, fearing that it would make it harder to gather intelligence from within an alienated Muslim community. Her opposition would remain secret until she retired from the service.

  Charles Clarke and his Permanent Secretary, John Gieve, were sceptical, not least because they were very doubtful from the start that it could be got through Parliament.86 Both the Attorney-General, Peter Goldsmith, and the Lord Chancellor, Charlie Falconer, were opposed to ninety-day detention. The Chief Whip, Hilary Armstrong, warned Number 10 that she simply didn’t have the numbers to secure a majority in the Commons. ‘We knew we were going to get hammered.’87 Blair’s senior staff ‘never thought we were going to win’.88

  Brinkmanship was becoming a more pronounced streak in Blair’s character. He ignored the fears of the head of MI5, the opposition of the Lord Chancellor, the apprehensions of his whips’ office and the concerns of the Home Office. He pulled the rug from underneath Clarke’s attempts to find a compromise with the Opposition parties and swept aside suggestions from his own aides that they should settle for sixty or forty-five days.

  The moment of truth came on Wednesday, 9 November, and it was clear by now that Blair had over-reached. The whips nevertheless made a frenzied effort to get as many Labour MPs as they could into the ‘yes’ lobby even if it meant calling senior ministers back from abroad. The day before the vote, Gordon Brown was on his way to the airport to fly to Israel. The Chief Whip called him with a warning that he might have to return. From Heathrow, the Chancellor rang up his Tory opposite number, George Osborne. Brown wanted a ‘pairing arrangement’. When MPs from opposing parties are ‘paired’, both agree not to vote, thus cancelling each other out.

  Osborne was in Pizza Express having dinner with David Cameron when Brown called. ‘George, it’s Gordon. Just confirming that we’re paired.’ The Shadow Chancellor responded that he had already twice told Brown’s office that he couldn’t be paired for this vote. That set Brown off. He raged down the phone: ‘I’ve never heard anything more ridiculous in the twenty-two years I’ve been in Parliament!’89 Brown flew on to Israel. Within minutes of landing, he was told he would have to come back. He fumed to his team that the Government could not carry on like this.90 His return would make no difference anyway.

  Blair arrived in the Commons for Prime Minister’s Questions at noon on the day of the vote already aware that he was heading for the first major parliamentary defeat of his premiership. He defiantly told MPs: ‘Sometimes it is better to lose and do the right thing than to win and do the wrong thing.’91

  That exemplified how office changed him. The pre-Iraq Tony Blair never believed there was anything to be said in favour of losing. Losing was for losers. Here he was deliberately courting defeat.

  The Government lost by 323 votes to 290. A total of 49 Labour MPs voted with the Opposition. A compromise of twenty-eight days, a deal that Blair could have embraced much earlier and emerged looking like a winner, was passed. At twenty-eight days Britain would still have the longest period of detention without charge in the Western world.92

  When the tellers read out the results, Blair gave a theatrical shake of his head. ‘They’ll live to regret this,’ he muttered.93

  In terms of political positioning, Blair calculated that he was in the correct place. He believed he was outflanking the Tories by making himself look tougher on terror. No-one would be able to point the finger in his direction and say he hadn’t done all he could to stop terrorism. Opinion polls suggested the public were much readier than MPs or judges to support detention for ninety days. Blair later condemned Parliament for being ‘deeply irresponsible’, speaking less like a Prime Minister operating in the environment of a parliamentary system of government and more as an American President might scorn an obstructive Congress.94 He had regularly detached himself from his party. He was now seeking definition from his opposition to Parliament. Aides noted the growing inflexibility in his attitude, one of ‘there’s nothing you can do to me because I’m not standing for another election so I’m going to do what I think is the right thing to do.’95

  Yet he was too insouciant about the high political cost of losing his first parliamentary vote, especially when he had ignored the advice of so many senior colleagues and deliberately hurled himself at defeat. He’d long since abandoned the Third Way. Now there was only My Way.

  ‘Tony is becoming wilful and impetuous,’ Jack Straw worried to a senior colleague.96

  The defeat undermined his authority and lessened respect for his judgement among both Labour MPs and senior ministers. The rebellious on the backbenches had bitten the Prime Minister and relished the taste of his blood. Gordon Brown fretted to his intimates about inheriting a party in which discipline had entirely collapsed.97 To Cabinet colleagues, the ninety-day defeat underlined the hazards of being led by a Prime Minister who would not be fighting another election. He could afford to be careless of risk; they could not.

  Tony Blair once regarded winning as everything. Now he was acting like a man with nothing to lose.

  21. Back to School

  ‘This is going to be interesting,’ mused Tony Blair as he sat in the den preparing for his first encounter with a new opponent at Prime Minister’s Questions. He was now a veteran of this form of parliamentary mouth-to-mouth combat. During his final bout with the outgoing Michael Howard the week before, Blair taunted the Tories by reminding them that he had seen off four Conservative leaders. Blair mastered them all: the defeated John Major, the ridiculed William Hague, the hapless Iain Duncan Smith and the unpopular Howard. The first was Tory leader for six years; the second for four years; the third for two years, one month and sixteen days. Blair jeered at the exiting Howard: ‘The right honourable and learned gentleman has lasted just two years and one month.’1

>   Since they could not beat Blair, the Tories finally decided to copy him. At thirty-nine, David Cameron was two years younger than Blair when he became Labour leader. Cameron won the Conservative leadership on the basis that he would be their Blair: a fresh and youthful moderniser to take them back to power after many years in the wilderness of Opposition.

  The Prime Minister left Number 10 for the Commons accompanied by the voluminous, burgundy folder of briefing notes on any subject that might conceivably come up at PMQs. Placed inside the folder was a piece of paper with a patronising welcome, a pre-prepared put down to squelch his new opponent. Yet when they faced off at noon, Blair did not use the stinger. It was Cameron who pierced Blair. In an accomplished debut, the neophyte Tory leader made an audacious slash at the long-serving Prime Minister. He was ‘stuck in the past, and I want to talk about the future’, said Cameron. ‘He was the future once.’2 The Tory benches cheered the jibe while some Labour MPs winced in sympathy with their leader.

  Blair reacted with a slight lift of his eyebrows and a mild smile, the practised professional of the art of parliamentary jousting appreciating the artistry of a younger thruster, even if the sally was at his expense. Talking to his staff afterwards, he wryly shrugged off the barb: ‘As I’d expected, Cameron is going to be a contender.’3 By this stage of his premiership Blair was ‘much more sanguine’ about this sort of thing.4

  Not so Gordon Brown. He was sitting next to the Prime Minister on the frontbench and grew increasingly aerated. He shouted and gesticulated in evident frustration that Blair was not going for the kill. Brown’s agitation became so great that it almost propelled him off the green leather bench and up to the dispatch box. His body language screamed: let me at him then.

  The many quarrels between the two men were now supplemented by a clashing view about how to engage with Cameron. Blair and Brown differed in their assessment of what the new Tory leader represented as they disagreed about how he should be dealt with.

  Blair was intrigued by this new opponent. On the way to the Tory leadership, Cameron survived a media maelstrom of questions about his youthful drug habits. I was the first to pose this question during an interview with Cameron at that year’s Tory conference in Blackpool. The grandly named Baronial Hall – in reality, a function room in the Winter Gardens – was packed to overflowing with Tory activists wanting to see their party’s coming man. ‘Did you use any drugs at Oxford?’ I asked. Amidst nervous laughter from the audience, he answered by not answering: ‘I had a normal university life.’ I pressed: ‘So that’s a yes then?’ ‘There were things I did as a student that I don’t think I should talk about now that I am a politician.’ I suggested: ‘I can take that as a “yes”.’ He did not argue.5

  There was a media furore over the following days as other journalists took up the question.6 Blair was privately impressed that Cameron successfully held to his line that he wouldn’t talk about his life before politics.7

  The Prime Minister could not help but see some of his younger self in Cameron, another presentationally adept, rhetorically fluent, only part-formed public school charmer, a pragmatic moderniser who had risen rapidly and without much trace to seize the leadership of his party from under the noses of older colleagues who thought they were much better qualified to do the job.

  Blair’s private claim had been: ‘I could sort out the Tory party in five minutes.’8 What he meant was that he would make the Conservatives sound moderate, look modern and move them to the centre ground, where British elections are won and lost. Cameron followed this Blair-approved prescription. In an interview with me shortly after he became leader, Cameron said: ‘What I want to do with the Conservative Party is get it into the mainstream of British politics, broadly appeal as a party.’9 That was precisely the approach described in almost identical language that Blair took when he refashioned the Labour Party as New Labour. In his early years as leader, Blair enjoyed a eulogising media because he could do a few headers on the football pitch. Cameron got rave reviews for being capable of riding a bike and smiling at the same time. The media was enjoying the novelty of reporting a Tory leader with a whiff of hope and a dusting of charisma. In further echoes of Blair circa 1994–7, Cameron said: ‘I’m not a deeply ideological person. I’m a practical person and pragmatic.’10 His blueprint for renewing the Tories was a Blairprint. He adopted the New Labour mantra of ‘social justice and economic efficiency’ as his own. At a dinner with journalists from the Daily Telegraph during that year’s Tory conference, Cameron even declared: ‘I am the heir to Blair.’11

  The Cameron generation of Tories were mesmerised by Blair. He had dominated the formative years of their political lives and subjected their party to a hat-trick of defeats. They regarded the Prime Minister with much more respect and awe than did many in the Labour Party. Cameron’s claim to be the son of Blair might be arguable, but it paid homage to the Prime Minister.

  To Gordon Brown, Cameron was not a compliment; he was a threat. Refusing to accept that the Conservatives were changing, the Chancellor wanted to define him as a ‘new gloss on the same old Tories’. To visitors to Number 11, he would pour contempt on Cameron as a fake, a lightweight, ‘a namby pamby’ and ‘a libertarian’.12 One who witnessed the private debates between Blair and Brown says: ‘Gordon’s view was that you’ve got to crush this little Lord Fauntleroy from day one and Tony wouldn’t do it.’13 A close friend of Brown says: ‘Gordon could only be more contemptuous of Cameron if he were a lawyer.’14 The lawyer Blair disagreed. ‘We would just leave ourselves open to ridicule if we launched an over-the-top attack,’ he argued. ‘Some massive personal attack’ on Cameron wouldn’t work. There was ‘no point denying’ that he represented some sort of change.15 Blair could not anyway attack Cameron for being an Old Etonian when he was a product of Fettes, the Eton of Scotland. ‘Who cares if Cameron is an Old Etonian?’ he remarked to one Cabinet colleague. ‘It doesn’t matter if he comes over as classless.’16

  Blair recognised that the advent of Cameron was an important development in their opponents. ‘You’ve got to accept that they are trying to make big changes.’17

  Speaking to me at Chequers shortly after Cameron became leader, Blair contended that Labour should be celebrating the fact that ‘the Conservative Party is trying to reinvent itself in order to become a party of government again. Put the flags out. This is a great moment for us.’ It confirmed that ‘progressive politics is in the ascendant. When you read what the Tories are trying to do, it is the most enormous compliment to what we have achieved in the past eight years.’18

  Brown’s proposed line of attack reminded Blair of how the Tories had tried and failed to demonise him when he was Leader of the Opposition.

  There were deeper, more psychological impulses at work in this argument between them. It was natural for Blair to be flattered when he was imitated by the Tories. He would like to leave Number 10 with the thought that his final and most comprehensive victory over the Conservatives was to force them to emulate him. It was equally natural that Brown did not want it to be true that the Tories were finally grasping what they needed to do to become competitive for power. A more appealing and centrist Tory party was going to be harder to beat. Extra edge was given to their argument by Cameron’s early honeymoon. Within days of his election as leader, the Tories vaulted into their first, albeit narrow, opinion poll lead over Labour for years.19

  That wasn’t Blair’s problem: he was not going to fight another general election. It was Brown’s. He had once before been denied the crown by a younger, smoother public school rival. He was gnawed by the fear that it might happen yet again if he was kept waiting for the premiership any longer.

  The Tory leader’s jibe – ‘the future once’ – had increasing resonance. When Blair said he wouldn’t fight any more elections, he calculated that he’d gain a kind of counter-intuitive authority. Colleagues would not see the point of plotting against him when they knew he was going anyway.20 That was a misreading of the
chemistry of politics. Just as most of his allies feared, he had weakened himself by putting a sell-by date on his premiership. It was a source of instability that every minister, civil servant, Labour MP, journalist and other actor of influence now knew that the Prime Minister’s days were numbered. ‘We know he is going,’ one minister complained that autumn. ‘The problem is we don’t know when he is going.’21

  It was another source of destabilisation that the media interpreted almost every act of government in terms of how it might affect the timing of Blair’s departure. In the immediate aftermath of the election, many put his end date at 2006. In the resurgence that followed, the clock was put back to 2008. As the public mood turned sour again, the assumed end date crept forward in the collective consciousness. One loyalist minister feared: ‘It’s beginning to dribble away from Tony.’22 Gordon Brown and his allies saw it the same way. As one of the Chancellor’s inner circle puts it: ‘From the 2005 election onwards, there is a general sense that power is draining away from Blair to Gordon. The tide is flowing our way.’23

  To fight that tide, Blair tried to prove that he was not a diminishing Prime Minister who was merely working out his notice. He returned from his holiday that summer to fire off a long memo to his staff telling them ‘the next six months are vital.’ They had grown accustomed to receiving such instructions. One senior aide jokingly groaned: ‘It would be more of a surprise if he came back from holiday and sent us a memo saying the next six months aren’t that important.’24

  The Cabinet was increasingly torn between trying to serve their present master and positioning themselves for their next. Ministers who had grappled with the Chancellor in the past were becoming blackly humorous about their prospects under a Brown regime. There was little loathing lost between Gordon Brown and John Reid. Reid drily commented that if Brown took over: ‘I confidently expect to become chairman of the catering committee.’25