One combustion was about the size of Britain’s contribution to the European Union. This had to be renegotiated because of the enlargement of the EU. Brown ‘was always very difficult’ over Europe. ‘It was like negotiating with an extra member state.’25 Shortly before the European Council in December 2005, the Prime Minister’s entire negotiating strategy was leaked to the Daily Telegraph, which published it under the headline ‘Blair ready to surrender EU rebate’.26 It was widely believed inside Number 10 that this was an attempt by Brown to sabotage the negotiation, undermine Blair and curry favour with the Europhobic press.
The negotiations in Brussels were ‘tortuous and arduous’.27 They were injected with additional venom because of Jacques Chirac’s bitter feelings towards Blair. These talks occurred during Britain’s turn in the chair of the Council, so it was for Blair to announce the budget package when the intense bargaining was finally concluded late on the second night. At around 10.30 p.m., Blair sat with his team of officials from Number 10 and the Foreign Office preparing the statement that he was scheduled to deliver an hour later. ‘Like a bolt from the blue’ they were told that Chirac had already started his own news conference, claiming credit for the deal and presenting it as a victory for the French.28 Blair sighed: ‘He really is a cunt, isn’t he?’ Then, with a slightly apologetic glance at the female officials in the room, he put his hand over his mouth.
The British concession on the rebate amounted to about £1 billion each year. That was a reasonable bargain. There was bound to be some price to pay for the enlargement which had always been one of Britain’s pre-eminent foreign policy goals. Brown’s camp aggressively briefed that Blair had given away too much, which encouraged more hostile headlines about ‘surrender’.29
In February, Labour lost the Dunfermline and West Fife by-election to the Liberal Democrats even though the third party was leaderless at the time in the wake of the chaotic defenestration of Charles Kennedy. Blairites and Brownites offered competing interpretations of the loss in the seat where the Chancellor kept his Scottish home. Proof of how unpopular Blair was, said Brownites. Evidence that Brown could not win in his own living room, said Blairites. The Prime Minister then had to throw a protective arm around Tessa Jowell, who was caught in a sleaze eruption. She separated from her husband, David Mills, when he was charged with taking a bribe from Silvio Berlusconi.
Alastair Campbell and Philip Gould tried to cast themselves as peacemakers. They cajoled Blair and Brown to agree to talks about repairing their relationship and working towards a handover of power. Jonathan Powell refused to have anything to do with it, predicting that it was futile.30 Campbell and Gould began to sense that he was right when Ed Balls was brazenly rude to the Prime Minister. More shocking in its way was the behaviour of Ed Miliband. Blairites had regarded him as the most reasonable member of Brown’s court. At Number 10, the other Ed was known as the ‘emissary from Planet Fuck’. To the Prime Minister’s face, and more than once, Miliband demanded: ‘What is to be gained by you staying on for another six months?’31 Blair turned on Campbell and Gould for embroiling him in an exercise he found hateful. The talks were fruitless when all trust between the two principals was incinerated. They collapsed.
Bust-ups in the den were now routine. Brown would thunder round to Number 10, the door on Blair’s study would close and yelling at dispatch box levels began almost immediately. ‘The noise was so loud you could hear the screaming and shouting from the other side of the door,’ says one member of the Cabinet.32
Shortly after breakfast, officials and advisers held an 8.30 a.m. planning meeting in the Cabinet Room. It was not unusual for these meetings to take place to the background noise of high-decibel swearing coming from the nearby den. Blair and Brown were rowing so violently that sometimes the words were audible to the staff in the Cabinet Room. ‘The shouting was so loud you could hear it. Everyone would be pretending to focus on what we were discussing and the entire room would be earwigging the conversation next door.’33
The most epic struggle between Prime Minister and Chancellor of this period was about pensions. Blair had commissioned a report into pension reform by the former Director-General of the CBI, Adair Turner. That was an intrusion into territory which Brown regarded as his exclusive fiefdom. He was even more maddened by the appointment of John Hutton as Work and Pensions Secretary. Hutton was the first occupant of the job to strike out independently of the Chancellor. He agreed with Blair in favouring Turner’s recommendation to restore the link with earnings which would make the basic pension more generous. This ran counter to the entire means-tested approach to pensions pursued by Brown since he became Chancellor. He tried to kill Turner’s proposals by declaring them unaffordable. There were months of ferocious argument and corrosive leaking to the press. On one occasion, Hutton came to Number 10 for a meeting and was left sitting outside the den for ninety minutes while the Prime Minister and Chancellor rowed with each other.34
An especially venomous confrontation over pensions took place in the den on the morning before Dromey intervened on the peerages. On Blair’s account to his friends, this fight climaxed with Brown making a direct threat. On a mild version of what took place, Brown left the den issuing the parting shot: ‘You haven’t heard the last about these peerages.’35 Cabinet ministers and other politicians and advisers very close to Blair say that Brown was more directly menacing than that. Brown said: ‘I’ll get you over the peerages.’36 Afterwards Sally Morgan was told by Blair: ‘For the first time, I’m scared. He’s going to bring me down.’37 Blair was so stunned and disturbed by Brown’s behaviour that he called in the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Gus O’Donnell. He asked O’Donnell, who was very shocked by what Brown had said, to make an official note of Brown’s threat.38 Blair told O’Donnell that he was afraid that ‘Gordon is going to do something very unconstitutional.’39
Dromey absolutely denies that he was an actor in a Brown plot to knife Blair. ‘It is utterly preposterous. I did what was right not what I was being encouraged to do by anyone else for political reasons. I had no discussion with Gordon Brown about this at all.’ That claim, he says, was a product of ‘this extraordinarily dysfunctional relationship. They and their courtiers saw shadows.’40
Blair remained utterly convinced that Brown had stabbed him in the front. To one close friend in the Cabinet, Blair called it ‘the single most treacherous act ever committed by Gordon’.41 According to another member of the Cabinet: ‘Tony absolutely believes that Gordon did that. This was one of a whole variety of threats that Gordon issued.’42 Blair told his nonpolitical friend Barry Cox that Brown was behind it. ‘He believes that that was a put-up between Harman, Dromey and Brown. He did say specifically that this was a set-up. That was the time that he began to believe that Brown was behaving truly badly. Cherie would say the scales took a long time to fall from his eyes,’ recounts Cox. ‘He did begin to believe the worst of Gordon Brown.’43
The ‘cash-for-coronets’ affair sharpened the questions about how long Blair could survive. They pursued him across the Pacific during a trip to Indonesia, Australia and New Zealand in late March. This was, in the words of David Hill, ‘the craziest foreign tour of them all’.44 The Conservative John Howard in Australia and Labour’s Helen Clarke in New Zealand were also long-serving leaders. They were as one in believing that Blair made a terrible error when he pre-announced the end of his premiership. When Clarke and Howard talked it over, ‘John and I agreed that we would never make the mistake of announcing when we were going in advance.’45
In an interview for Australian television, Blair remarked: ‘It was an unusual thing for me to say, but people kept asking me the question so I decided to answer it. Maybe it was a mistake.’46
David Hill vainly tried to explain that the interviewer interrupted before Blair could make clear that he meant his mistake was to believe that it would end speculation about his departure date.47 It set off another press frenzy about just that.
Though he didn’t
want to admit it publicly, Blair now realised that his friends were right: it had been a strategic blunder to pre-announce his departure. Neil Kinnock was ‘certain that Tony regrets having said it’.48 He had weakened his authority over colleagues and fed speculation about how much longer he could last without doing anything to contain Gordon Brown.
The two men were forced into each other’s company in the first week of April when they shared a car journey to the launch of Labour’s campaign for the local elections. As they sat in the back of the limo, Blair attempted to engage Brown in conversation. Brown responded by taking out some papers and burying himself in them. He refused to reply to every overture until Blair eventually gave up trying to make conversation. The journey passed in bitter silence.49
The media had fallen into a compulsive habit of labelling troubled times for the Government as ‘Blair’s worst week’. This became a weary joke within Number 10. ‘It’s the worst week since the last worst week,’ they would shrug. Amidst the fierce competition for that accolade, the last week of April 2006 was a strong contender. The Government found itself ‘in the eye of three storms at once’.50 The first blew up over health. On Monday, 24 April, Patricia Hewitt faced a hostile reception when the Health Secretary tried to defend the Government’s record in a speech to UNISON, the largest of the public sector unions. Hewitt was a less swaggering figure than her two self-consciously macho predecessors at the department, Alan Milburn and John Reid. She was also arguably braver than either of them in tackling some of the structural problems of the NHS. Large sums had been poured into health, but many hospitals were still finishing the financial year in deficit, at which point they had to be bailed out. Hewitt set about ending the persistent deficit problem. This generated a rash of predictions, for the most part alarmist, that it would lead to swingeing job losses. On top of that, the clumsy launch of reforms to primary care trusts were electrifying the nerve endings of this natural Labour constituency. Despite the large numbers of extra staff recruited to the NHS, the unions and professional groups rarely struck a note which was anything but sour towards the Government.
Hewitt’s successor at Health, Alan Johnson, would later thank her for his inheritance, a rare example of comradeliness between colleagues. He would enjoy the political benefit of the record public satisfaction ratings that the NHS eventually received. At the time, Hewitt was an unpopular figure trying to implement contentious reforms to an organisation which had long ago fallen out of love with its political masters. Her presentational style grated. In Cabinet, she would talk about ‘the silly doctors’.51 Though born in Australia, she could come over in public as the worst sort of condescending upper-middle-class Englishwoman. Audiences felt as if they were being addressed by a teacher who thought she was talking to a class of especially slow five-year-olds. She was a New Labour case of the substance being better than the style.
Two days after Hewitt’s mugging at the UNISON conference, she was mauled even more severely when she addressed the Royal College of Nurses in Bournemouth. The RCN had just published an inflammatory survey suggesting that 13,000 nursing posts might be lost. This was not the best environment for Hewitt to claim that the health service had never been in better shape.52 The 2,000 nurses in the audience refused to clap a word as the Health Secretary, croaky with flu, spoke. The mood of the angels then turned really evil. They booed and jeered. As Hewitt came off stage, Blair rang her to sympathise.
An even greater tempest was brewing at the Home Office. This was the most severely dysfunctional and serially incompetent department in White hall throughout the Labour years. Its latest horrendous bungle concerned foreign citizens who were in British jails. Having served their sentences, they were supposed to be considered for deportation. On Tuesday, 25 April, Charles Clarke called a news conference at which he was obliged to admit that 1,023 foreign convicts had been released without being considered for deportation. He was never able to give a coherent explanation for why this debacle happened because his officials could not supply one. The real reason was discovered many months later, though it was never revealed publicly. I later learnt from a Home Office minister that the files relating to these prisoners were eventually found by accident piled up and languishing unnoticed on the desk of a civil servant who had long since moved on from the Home Office.53
The failure was emblematic of one of the Government’s persistent flaws. It was mad for writing new laws, but bad at ensuring that existing legislation was applied effectively. Clarke was first warned about the foreign prisoners in July 2005. When the controversy broke publicly, he responded in typically bullish fashion. Hoping to get on the front foot and demonstrate he was in charge of the situation, he declared that things had gone ‘horribly wrong’ in his department, but ‘very, very few’ foreign prisoners had slipped through the system since he found out about it.54 That very night it was revealed that he was wrong: 288 foreign criminals had been freed since he was alerted. Worse, it would emerge that a small number had gone on to commit further serious offences, including crimes of violence and sexual attacks.55 The morning after his Newsnight performance, Clarke was on the airwaves again, saying that Blair had turned down his offer to resign.56
In the Commons at noon, the Tories seized on this as evidence of an enfeebled Prime Minister presiding over a ramshackle Government. David Cameron lacerated him: ‘When a Prime Minister cannot even deport dangerous criminals in our jails, aren’t the public entitled to say enough is enough?’57 New Labour had always sold itself as professional. ‘What matters is what works’ was one of Blair’s favourite mantras. His Government was not delivering even the most basic levels of competence.
After the foreign prisoners fiasco, a ‘Securing Your Streets’ campaign, which was planned to be the centrepiece of Labour’s local elections effort, had to be ‘completely pulled’.58
The third blow of triple whammy Wednesday was delivered by that morning’s Mirror. John Prescott’s infidelity had caught up with him. The day before, Number 10 learnt that the Mirror had discovered Prescott’s affair with his Diary Secretary, Tracey Temple. The Deputy Prime Minister slipped into Number 10 accompanied by his aide, Alan Schofield. Waiting for them in the Prime Minister’s den were Blair and David Hill. Prescott was shocked to have been found out and most anxious about the reaction of his wife, Pauline. Blair was cold. ‘Go away and manage it,’ he told them.59
Given what the Mirror already had, their only hope was to try to do some sort of deal with the paper’s editor, Richard Wallace. In a bargain typical of its kind, Prescott gave a confessional interview to the Mirror. ‘Prezza: My affair’60 was the front page of the Labour-supporting red top the next morning. Many more pages inside were lavished on the story in grisly detail. Readers were treated to gruesome images of a Christmas party at which Prescott cavorted with Temple like a mastodon on heat.
There was more savaging of the 67-year-old Deputy Prime Minister when the Mail on Sunday bought up Temple’s ‘diary’ of the affair for a rumoured £250,000 in a deal brokered by Max Clifford, purveyor of sleaze stories to the tabloids. The squalid details included accounts of how they had sex in Prescott’s official residences and in his ministerial office while civil servants were outside. ‘Anyone could have walked in,’ said Temple. One encounter took place minutes after the Iraq war memorial service at St Paul’s. On another occasion, Prescott and his mistress had sex in a Southampton hotel while Pauline waited downstairs to meet him for dinner. Prescott underlined an old rule: the less a politician resembled George Clooney, the more likely he was to confuse himself with a sex god. The paper said he ‘exploits his power for his sexual gratification’.61 His old soubriquet of ‘Two Jags’ was updated to ‘Two Shags’. According to Temple’s account, power was not always a reliable aphrodisiac. Prescott often had difficulties performing. Humiliated, he went to ground at his Gothic pile in Hull. Prescott had endured mockery for years and yet still managed to retain significant influence within Labour. Now he became a figure of national ridic
ule stripped of any moral authority he might have once wielded in the party. Serious questions were raised about the propriety of him remaining in office. It was pointed out that a senior officer in the army or police who had sex with a junior in his office on the taxpayers’ time would be fired.
On one thing the Prime Minister could agree with the Chancellor: neither wanted an immediate election for the deputy leadership so both tolerated Prescott’s survival.62 The downside of allowing him to continue as Deputy Prime Minister was that it made the Government seem simultaneously arrogant, shameless, incompetent, sleazy and ridiculous. Within Number 10, the survival of this ‘absurd figure with no job’63 was viewed as the most damaging event of that spring ‘in terms of the overall credibility of the Government’.64
Philip Gould was warning that the local elections were going to be dire even before the mauling of Hewitt, the storm around Clarke and the disgrace of Prescott. The Prime Minister took himself off to bed early on the night of Thursday, 4 May. He woke up to learn that Labour had won just 26 per cent of the national vote. That left them in third place behind the Lib Dems on 27 per cent. The Conservatives, reinvigorated under David Cameron, hit a psychologically important mark by winning 40 per cent. It was their best performance since the original Tory ‘Black Wednesday’ in 1992. For Blair, this was another downward lurch in his position. Inside Number 10, ‘it felt precarious and panicky’65 and they feared there was ‘a pretty high chance’ that Gordon Brown would finally go for the Prime Minister.66
Brown had disappeared during the final days of the election campaign by taking himself off to Africa. Though he had often proclaimed the continent to be one of his great causes, this was, in fact, his first visit to Africa. The friendly journalists he took with him portrayed Brown as unusually relaxed. He was even seen out of a suit and wearing chinos. They depicted him as a confident man growing into the role of Prime Minister presumptive. It drew a contrast to his advantage with the besieged incumbent back in Britain.
The End of the Party Page 53