The End of the Party

by Andrew Rawnsley

  John Prescott argued with Blair that he should snuff out the endless speculation by announcing a departure date. ‘They’ll salami-slice me,’ Blair replied. ‘If I say I’m going in two years, they’ll say make it one year.’26

  Blair still believed that he might achieve his ambition of serving a full third term, but did not spell that out in public for fear that it would make his Chancellor ‘explode’.27 He could dangle the possibility of an earlier handover in front of the Chancellor as a potential reward for being cooperative. To Neil Kinnock, Blair said: ‘I’ve told Gordon I’ll be his campaign manager when the time comes.’28

  In the run-up to that year’s party conference, Cabinet ministers closely associated with Blair were publicly warm about Brown in an effort to convince him that he could relax because they would not try to impede his way to Number 10. David Miliband and Tessa Jowell spoke of a Brown premiership as if it were a foregone conclusion. Even Charles Clarke, whose relations with the Chancellor were always extremely pungent, described a Brown succession as ‘very likely’ and predicted that he would be ‘a very good Prime Minister’.29

  Clarke was, in fact, viscerally antagonistic to the idea of Brown becoming Prime Minister. Miliband was highly wary. Jowell wanted Blair to carry on for as long as possible. All were among the many sceptics in the Cabinet that Brown had the temperament required to be a successful Prime Minister.

  There was a state of armed truce between the two camps at the party conference in Brighton. Brown’s speech superficially lauded his rival. ‘I believe Tony Blair deserves huge credit not just for winning three elections, but for leading the Labour Party for more than a decade,’ said the Chancellor. By pointedly reminding everyone how long Blair had been in the job, this pat on the head was also a shove in the back.

  Brown offered to give Labour back its ‘moral compass’ and dwelt heavily on the need to restore ‘trust’.30 Everyone understood that he was arguing that only a change of leadership could restore the trust lost by Blair. That passage so infuriated the Prime Minister that some of his aides suggested that he should insert a line into his speech the next day saying that he had changed his mind and would be running for a fourth term after all. It would be worth it, they joked, ‘just to see the look on Brown’s face’.31

  Brown concluded his speech by announcing that they had ‘to begin to plan ahead’ and declared that he would tour all the regions of Britain to ‘listen, hear and learn’ and discuss ‘economic, social and constitutional changes’,32 with the clear implication that he expected Blair to have his bags packed by the time he had completed this twelve-month regal progress. His camp were determined that they would have Blair out of Number 10 by the next year.33

  On the afternoon after Brown’s speech, David Hill told journalists what they could expect to hear from Blair the next day. Hill briefed that it would be a speech showing that the Prime Minister had ‘plenty of work’ to do ‘for a couple of years or more’.34 Brown reacted violently to that and interpreted the briefing as a malevolent attempt to reduce the press coverage of his own speech. His people went into attack mode. Damian McBride denigrated Hill to reporters. He was also heard nakedly ‘slagging off Tony’. McBride operated incautiously. He was venting spleen against Blair so aggressively to some journalists at the conference hotel bar that he did not notice that one of the Number 10 staff was in the group.35

  Cherie enjoyed tweaking Brown’s tail. Asked when the Blairs would be leaving Number 10, she cried: ‘Darling, we are a long, long way from that!’36

  Her husband opened his speech with the declaration: ‘I stand before you as the first leader in the Labour Party’s history to win three full consecutive terms in office.’ The ‘full’ was deliberately emphasised. He talked rather mistily about ‘the patient courage of the change-maker’. He was more crisp about the imperative to drive on reform of public services. Blair often used the process of writing speeches to ‘find out what he thought’.37 This speech contained his clearest rebuttal of the idea that choice was antipathetic to social democracy. ‘The twenty-first century’s expectations in public services are a world away from those of 1945. People demand quality, choice, high standards.’ He went on: ‘Choice is what wealthy people have exercised for centuries’ and they should celebrate and grasp the chance to extend it to the less affluent. ‘Some of the poorest families in the poorest parts of Britain’ were benefiting from specialist schools and City academies. ‘The greatest injustice I know is when good education is the preserve of the privileged. If there’s one thing that motivates me it is to redeem the pledge I made to give the chance of a first-class education not only for Britain’s elite but for all Britain’s children.’ The most revealing line was his admission: ‘Every time I’ve ever introduced a reform in government, I wish, in retrospect, I had gone further.’38 The unspoken thought was that he would have gone further had he not been thwarted by his obstructive Chancellor.

  Immediately after the conference, a sequence of controversies suggested that discipline in the Government was breaking down. The most incendiary erupted around the proposal to ban smoking in public places. John Reid, a reformed smoker, had put forward a partial ban when he was Health Secretary. He argued that working-class folk, like his mother, should not be denied their pleasures. Patricia Hewitt, who had succeeded him at Health, wanted to strengthen the policy into a total ban. Blair did not regard this as ‘any great point of principle’ or part of his ‘core agenda’ so it did not much register on his radar.39 It was one of those disputes within Cabinet that he was content to leave to his deputy to resolve. Whatever his faults, John Prescott had a talent for forcing colleagues to stay in a room until they compromised. But Prescott was away when the domestic affairs subcommittee of the Cabinet met on Monday, 24 October. Jack Straw took his place in the chair. The Foreign Secretary was just off a plane from America and confessed to the committee: ‘I’m not well briefed on this issue.’40

  Reid and Hewitt clashed fiercely. Straw took Reid’s side. Tessa Jowell, whose department had responsibility for pubs and clubs, aligned herself with Hewitt. Blow-by-blow accounts of the battle were extensively briefed to the press by the warring ministers. There was an irony here. For years, many Labour MPs and much of the media attacked Blair for imposing a stifling conformity on his Cabinet. When the ‘control freak’ relaxed his grip, leaving ministers to sort out their differences between themselves, they spun against each other and generated headlines about the Government whirling into chaos. Some in Number 10 also put this anarchic spasm down to ministers being more likely to take a ‘sod it attitude’ when they knew he was going.41

  Reid ultimately lost and Hewitt won. A total ban on smoking in enclosed public spaces became law after a free vote in the Commons produced a majority of 200 in favour. The ban was introduced in July 2007 to much less opposition than had been feared. At no cost whatsoever to the taxpayer, the ban was one of the single most effective measures passed by New Labour to improve public health.

  This storm in an ashtray split three of the core Blairites: Hewitt, Jowell and Reid. That breakdown in discipline was shortly followed by the down fall of an ally. David Blunkett had spent just six months on the backbenches between his resignation from the Home Office and his restoration to the top table as Secretary of State for Work and Pensions. That was a sign of the Prime Minister’s esteem and affection. Blair told Blunkett that he hoped a resumption of ministerial responsibilities would help him to shake off depression and ‘sort out his head’.42 It was a risk to use ministerial office as a form of psychological therapy for a damaged friend.

  Salacious, and often untrue, stories about Blunkett’s private life continued to dog him. It was an exclusive in the upper end of the press that tripped him up at the end of October. The Independent on Sunday revealed that he had breached the Ministerial Code by not seeking the advice of the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments before becoming a director of a DNA testing firm while he was out of office.43 The Cabinet Secretary conf
irmed, and Blunkett accepted, that he had breached the code.44 He was forced to quit, making him, after Peter Mandelson, the second double resignee from Blair’s Cabinets.

  The legislative flagship of this parliamentary session was Blair’s latest attempt to reform Britain’s schools. There were useful improvements in the first term in Blunkett’s happier and more productive days as Education Secretary. These achievements were mainly concentrated in primary schools, where standards of literacy and numeracy rose. The biggest leaps in attainment were in the areas of highest poverty. By the second term, experience of office was evolving Blair’s thinking. He saw that it was impossible for ministers and civil servants sitting in Whitehall to try to improve thousands of individual schools by centrally imposed diktat. He proclaimed the ‘post-comprehensive era’ and made incremental progress towards giving good schools more autonomy over their budgets and scope to innovate. The physical fabric of schools, neglected for a quarter of a century before New Labour came to power, was renovated. Shiny new facilities replaced the decaying buildings inherited from the Tories. Class sizes came down. There were 32,000 more teachers than when Labour came to power. Those teachers were better rewarded, which led to improvement in the calibre of entrants into the profession. The amount of money spent per pupil doubled between 1997 and 2008. GCSE and A level scores rose, though they were subject to accusations of grade inflation.

  For all these improvements, there were wild variations in performance. While Britain had some excellent state schools, many of its children were appallingly let down. Approaching half of eleven-year-olds still left primary school without an adequate grasp of the 3Rs. Less than half of secondary school pupils secured five good GCSEs if Maths and English were included. Thirty thousand teenagers left school every year without any qualifications to their names.45

  That was why so few working-class children were getting to university, with a freezing effect on social mobility. The culprit was not so much bias in university admissions. Not enough working-class children were doing A levels. Much of Britain was still waiting for the ‘world class’ schools that Blair had again declared to be a soaring ambition of his premiership in his party conference speech.

  ‘He had a vision of a completely transformed education system that would be so good that people who had the wealth to choose the private system would still choose the public system because it was good enough for their children,’ says Sir Michael Barber, the head of the Delivery Unit.46 The hope was that Britain would eventually emulate Europe, where state schools were sufficiently attractive to the affluent that only a tiny minority of parents educated their children privately.47 That vision was a long way from being realised. The numbers paying to escape state education actually rose. Under Labour, a record proportion of children were now in private schools and not all of them for reasons of parental snobbery. In London, a rich city served poorly by state education, approaching a fifth of children were educated privately.48

  Blair was an admirer of faith schools and the independent sector and what they achieved for their pupils. Had he not become a Labour MP, it is almost certain that he would have done the same as his friend Charlie Falconer and sent his children to private schools. Euan and Nicky, his two oldest sons, went to the London Oratory, a selective state school where the masters wore gowns. One of Euan’s friends described it as ‘a state school trying to pretend to be a private school’. Blair’s boys received private tuition for their A levels and university entrance by masters at Westminster public school.

  Blair believed local education authorities were at the heart of the problem with state education because their default position was to defend the performance of their schools, however poor, rather than champion achievement. If he had not faced too much resistance to try, ‘he’d have got rid of local education authorities altogether.’49

  Blair envisaged a new world in which schools were largely autonomous units, competing to show that they could offer the best. By this late phase of his premiership, Blair had fully bought into the idea that enduring improvement in the public sector could not be achieved by ‘bureaucratic flat’ from the centre and they had to create ‘self-sustaining incentives’.50 Blair ‘fastened on to that model’ in the hope that ‘competition and choice will drive continuous improvement.’51

  He looked to social democratic Sweden where local authority schools competed with state-funded but independent schools run by charities and other non-profit-making organisations. There was other international evidence that this worked. He could also point to the American charter schools and the Dutch education system. Blair’s desire to pursue excellence through diversity and choice put him on a collision course with the many in the Labour Party still wedded to uniformity even when it also meant mediocrity.

  On 25 October, the reform plan was unveiled in a White Paper entitled ‘Higher Standards, Better Schools for All: More Choice for Parents and Pupils’. Publication had been postponed until October to avoid galvanising opposition at the party conference, where the teaching unions were strongly represented among the delegates. The word ‘choice’ was in itself inflammatory for the many in the Labour Party attached to an egalitarian vision of education.

  The foreword to the White Paper, which appeared to promise the introduction of a version of the Swedish system, bore Blair’s signature and was largely written by Andrew Adonis, the former Head of the Policy Unit whom he had made an Education Minister to drive the reforms. Adonis was an example of the social mobility that Labour often talked about. His father was a Greek Cypriot waiter; his mother abandoned him when he was very young. He was brought up in a north London care home. He had risen a long way from those roots. Intense, hard-working, courteous and soft-spoken, Adonis looked like the Oxford academic that he had been. He was an evangelist for city academies as a means to provide more ladders of advancement. The legislation also envisaged creating ‘trust schools’. Ben Wegg-Prosser, who became a senior member of the Number 10 staff in the third term, says the idea was that trust schools would enjoy similar freedoms ‘without all the palaver of creating academies’.52 The problem was that Adonis was virtually the only person at the Department of Education who was a true believer. The other ministers and their officials feared that anarchy would result from liberating schools.

  The foreword to the White Paper talked a good game: ‘The local authority must move from being a provider of education to its local commissioner and the champion of parent choice.’53 The rest of the White Paper was written by Ruth Kelly, the Education Secretary, and reflected her department’s wariness of radical reform. Local authorities would continue to control most of the funding and teachers’ pay would still be set centrally. The ‘trust schools’ would remain under the overall direction of councillors. The White Paper was a diluted version of Blair’s original vision, but even that was too much for many in his party. Kelly cautioned him that Labour MPs and the teaching unions would become ‘riled up’ if he wasn’t careful with his rhetoric.54 He ignored her. Blair ‘had a glint in his eye’ on the day of the launch and used language that ‘sent Labour MPs bananas’.55 He was frustrated that he had been forced to retreat. As was typical of him, he dealt with this disappointment by rhetorically compensating and presenting an evolution as a sensational revolution. ‘They spun it terribly,’ says the former Education Secretary, Estelle Morris, who was provoked into publicly opposing the reforms not so much because of this legislation but because it ‘gave the clear signal to me where they wanted to go next’.56

  Huw Evans, a member of Blair’s senior staff, agrees: ‘The launch went horribly wrong. It made it seem to backbenchers that this was another huge new reform which was too much for them.’57 It aroused their suspicions that the Prime Minister was driven by what they saw as a reckless frenzy to burnish his legacy. The effect was to turn this into a virility test of Blair’s authority.

  His opponents had support in the Cabinet. The Treasury was ‘very very sceptical both in ideological terms and cost terms, becaus
e academies are expensive to build’.58 Gordon Brown also complained to Blair that the legislation was divisive. ‘Why are you trying to destroy the Labour Party?’ he shouted at the Prime Minister.59 But the Chancellor was relatively restrained compared with the guerrilla campaigns he ran against foundation hospitals and university tuition fees in the second term. He did not do anything to support the schools reforms, but he did not actively sabotage them either. Like an alligator, Brown lay low and quietly in the water, waiting to snap, but keeping his jaws closed for the moment.

  The big obstacle was John Prescott. He viewed education through the distorting prism of his own childhood. ‘It ran very deep with him.’60 When he was at primary school, classmates who passed the 11-plus went to the smart grammar school in the leafy suburbs of Chester. Those who failed the 11-plus, as John did, went to a secondary modern in Ellesmere Port on the muddy mouth of the Mersey. ‘I felt stigmatised,’ he wrote. ‘The chip on my shoulder got bigger.’61

  Prescott had surpassed many people with much more impressive academic qualifications to become Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Yet the chip still sizzled on his shoulder. That early rejection was one of the sources of his deep and lifelong neurosis about his status. It had left him with a burning detestation of selection in education.

  When Blair argued with Prescott, he tried to persuade his deputy that the purpose was not to return to the 11-plus. The point was to increase the quality of education available to children. That didn’t convince Prescott, who feared that academies would become grammar schools with a different badge, favouring the children of the affluent.62 ‘If you set up a school and it becomes a good school, the great danger is that everyone wants to go there,’ contended Prescott.63 This was crazy logic. Yet it was a view representative of the many in the Labour Party who could only ever see choice as a friend to the affluent middle classes and an enemy of the less well-off. It was revealing that some Labour MPs denounced middle-class parents for trying to get their children into decent schools as if it were a crime for parents to want a good education for their children and as if that was not also the ambition of working-class parents. The truth about British education was that there were already multiple tiers of schools, state and private, in a system which allocated places on the basis of where someone lived, what mortgage they could afford and what religion they practised or pretended to. Yet the cry went up from the Labour benches that the reforms would create two tiers of schools as iniquitous as the old split between grammars and secondary moderns.