The End of the Party

by Andrew Rawnsley

  Blair had given private indications to Brown that he now planned to leave Number 10 in the summer of 2007. That did nothing to reassure the Chancellor. Brown was not going to take Blair’s word for it ‘after so many previous broken promises’.67 He was probably wise not to. Others heard Blair suggesting he fully intended to stay at least until 2008.68

  Brown feared that Blair’s true intention was to squat in Number 10 for as long as it took to deny his chance to the Chancellor. Ed Balls and Nick Brown, the most belligerent voices around the Chancellor, believed that they had to use brute force. ‘Blair doesn’t want anyone to succeed him,’ the impatient Balls would angrily complain to other members of the Chancellor’s court.69 He argued to Brown that he had to say in unambiguous terms that the transition should begin at once. A more cautious view was taken by Douglas Alexander, Ed Miliband and Sue Nye, who feared that an assassination attempt would leave everyone drenched with blood.

  Brown was, as ever, torn. His seething fury that Blair would not give way to him was tempered by his habitual fear of the consequences if he was too obvious about trying to oust Blair. The day after the elections, the Chancellor appeared on Radio Four’s Today in the programme’s prime interview slot immediately after the eight o’clock news. The elections had been a ‘warning shot for the Government’, he said. That was a fairly mild interpretation of Labour’s worst defeat in more than two decades. ‘We have to renew ourselves,’ he went on. ‘It must start now.’70 That was more naked. It did not take the skills of GCHQ to decode that as meaning Blair should go. But it was not the direct and explicit challenge to the Prime Minister that Brown’s hawks wanted and Number 10 feared.71 The sense around Blair was that Brown had ‘pulled back’.72

  Andrew Smith, a former Cabinet minister close to Brown, led calls for Blair to set a date for his departure.73 But the Brownites could not press hard without a clearer lead from the man they were trying to get into Number 10. The Chancellor took the aggression up a few notches in subsequent days. His most menacing remark was to make a direct comparison between Blair’s position and that of Margaret Thatcher, who had been ejected from Number 10 by her own party in 1990.

  ‘Remember when Mrs Thatcher left,’ he told a breakfast television programme on Tuesday of the following week. ‘It was unstable, it was disorderly and it was undignified.’74

  The defenestration of Thatcher had often come up when Brown and Blair argued behind closed doors. ‘You’ll end up like Thatcher,’ Brown routinely told Blair. Blair did indeed shudder about that fate, telling confidants: ‘I don’t want to leave like her’ and ‘I don’t intend to be dragged out by my fingernails.’75 So when Brown waved Thatcher’s blood-stained, tear-smeared shroud, he turned a private warning to Blair into a very public threat. For the first time, he was visibly putting himself at the head of those wanting to tear down the Prime Minister.

  This first attempt at a coup failed. The Brownites were not sufficiently well-organised, and their leader was too hesitant about going for the jugular, to make a success of it. Blair had also seen it coming. In an attempt to pre-empt them by seizing the initiative, he announced a Cabinet reshuffle the day after the May elections. He could not move against Brown: Blair’s position was far too fragile to even think about that. He did strike against some Cabinet ministers who were sliding into Brown’s camp. Jack Straw gave a thumbs-up as he walked along Downing Street only to emerge from his reshuffle interview having been sacked from the Foreign Office and demoted to Leader of the House, the same manoeuvre Blair executed on Robin Cook after the 2001 election. Straw angrily asked Blair why he had not at least given him advance warning.76

  Even more furious was Geoff Hoon, removed as Leader of the House after just a year in the job, and deprived of his Cabinet rank and salary. Hoon left his reshuffle interview thinking that he was going to be Secretary of State for Europe. Only afterwards, in a phone call from Ruth Turner at Number 10, did he discover he had been demoted to a Minister of State with only visiting rights to Cabinet. He was so angry that he wrote out a resignation statement.77 He planned to make a speech with revelations about the Kelly Affair that he told friends could trigger the instant downfall of the Prime Minister. Hoon thought better of quitting, but he was now thoroughly disaffected. He told his friends that he was now going to ‘make an application to become a Brownite’.78

  Brown could not resist boasting about his new allies. ‘Gordon would torment Tony by telling him which ministers had defected,’ says a Cabinet member very close to Blair. ‘He’d tell him about all the double-dealing Jack was doing. He’d tell him about Geoff too.’79

  Blair was making new enemies. He also disappointed his friends. Many of his senior staff pressed the Prime Minister to promote David Miliband to the Foreign Office.80 Miliband was not a wholly true Blairite, being some degrees to the left of the Prime Minister. He was loyal, he could work with colleagues, he had bright ideas about how to renew the Government, and he needed to be built up if he was going to be a serious potential rival for the leadership to Brown. After some prevarication by Blair, he denied Miliband such rapid advancement. ‘The argument was that David was too young and it would damage him to promote him too early,’ says Jonathan Powell. ‘Gordon would come and kill him.’81 Miliband was instead moved to Environment and Blair astonished Westminster by handing the Foreign Office to Margaret Beckett. She arrived at the audience with the Prime Minister apprehensive that he might be about to clear her out to make way for fresher faces. When he told her that she was getting one of the big offices of state, she conveyed her shock with one word: ‘Fuck.’82

  The big casualty of the reshuffle was Charles Clarke, who was almost alone in thinking that he could soldier on at the Home Office after the furore over foreign prisoners. Blair, the reluctant butcher, did not want to lose this solid ally altogether. He even told Clarke that, before his troubles, he was planning to move him to the Foreign Office in order to build up him and John Reid as competitors to Brown.83 Blair offered Clarke a move to Defence. Clarke turned that down and other offers from Blair. Stubbornly believing he should stay at the Home Office, and that he could convince Blair to change his mind, he went round to Number 10 the night before the announcement of the reshuffle and demanded to see the Prime Minister. Blair came down from the flat above wearing jeans and a T-shirt. Clarke again argued that he should be kept on as Home Secretary. ‘No, Charles,’ responded a chilly Blair who reckoned he had been generous to offer him alternative positions. ‘My mind is made up. That’s it.’84 Clarke was replaced at the Home Office by Reid, who infuriated his predecessors and many of his civil servants by promptly declaring that the department was ‘not fit for purpose’.85

  The reshuffle was intended by Blair to be ‘the launch pad for his final glorious period’86 but it did not succeed in bolstering his authority or increasing his longevity. Frank Dobson reached for a briny cliché and decried it as ‘rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic’.87 The Blairites felt increasingly isolated. Stephen Byers and Alan Milburn travelled on a train together to watch Newcastle play Chelsea. They morbidly joked that if the train crashed there would be no Blairites left.88 The Prime Minister was not as friendless as that, but his position was weakening. At a meeting of the parliamentary party on 8 May, Labour MPs demanded a timetable for his departure. He did not feel strong enough to reassert his right to serve a full third term. He had to promise them that he would give a successor ‘ample time’, which surrendered ground while fuelling a new bout of speculation about how long was ample.

  This reshuffle was seen by many ministers as his last shot. Another disappointed member of the Cabinet was Peter Hain, who thought he was on a promise of promotion from the Northern Ireland Office. Like many such Blair promises, it didn’t prove to be bankable. At their interview, Blair tried to soften the other man’s disappointment with the usual patter about not wanting to move a vital minister at a critical period. ‘I’ll make it up to you next time,’ said Blair. Hain responded sardonically: ‘But
there won’t be a next time, Tony. Everyone knows this is your last reshuffle.’89

  At ten o’clock on the morning of 12 July, Michael Levy, peer of the Labour realm, Middle East envoy for the Prime Minister, and the party’s principal fund-raiser, presented himself with his lawyer at Colindale police station in north London. By 10.30, he had been arrested and booked. Levy was walked down the police station’s dirty magnolia corridors and seated in an interview room where forty-eight hours of interrogation began. ‘Cash-for-coronets’ thus moved into an entirely new category of affair which now menaced Number 10 even more directly. ‘No-one thought it would come to this and no-one knows where it is going,’ groaned one of Blair’s closest confidants.90

  Levy told the police that he had supported recommendations for peerages, but it was ultimately the Prime Minister and his inner circle who decided who got honoured. He denied being any part of a cash-for-peerages deal.

  Levy never tried to pretend that the thought of honours didn’t come into the equation, later writing: ‘The reality was that very few of the businessmen who gave large-scale donations to any of the parties did so without at least the vague hope that they might get some honour in return.’91

  The hope didn’t have to be that vague. It was a squalid but open secret of British politics for years that offering a big sum to a party massively advanced a rich man’s chances of being cloaked in ermine and acquiring a seat on the claret-coloured benches in the Lords. It was true under the Tories as it was under Labour. Analysis showed that large donors to the Labour Party were 1,657 times more likely to receive an honour than a non-donor and 6,969 times more likely to receive a peerage.92 The bargain did not need to be made explicit, which was what Yates of the Yard would need to prove to get a successful prosecution under The Honours (Prevention of Abuse) Act of 1925. That Act was passed after David Lloyd George made the sale of honours so brazen that there was even a price list. The Act did not legislate against the nudges and winks which were more often the British way of corruption. Only one person – Maundy Gregory, Lloyd George’s bagman – had ever been jailed under the 1925 Act.

  For month after month, the coronets affair nevertheless produced a torrent of bad headlines for the Government. Many of the lenders expressed their bitter dismay as their reputations were trashed in the media. They turned on Downing Street. Sir Gulam Noon, a prominent philanthropist who had openly supported Labour for more than a decade, said: ‘I would have given them the money, but they wanted to do the loan.’93

  Sir David Garrard complained: ‘I bailed the Labour Party out and now I am in the worst position I have ever been in my life.’

  The police believed they had uncovered a key piece of evidence when they got hold of a diary kept by Sir Christopher Evans, the biotech entrepreneur and Labour donor. An entry referred to him and Levy discussing a ‘K or a P’, meaning a knighthood or a peerage. But this was still not enough to prove a crime: discussing honours was not illegal unless explicitly linked to the exchange of money.94

  Yates steadily worked his way towards the one person who had indisputably known about the hidden loans and made the honours recommendations. In December, Blair himself was interviewed for two hours, one of the least attractive firsts of his premiership. At the dispatch box, David Cameron jeeringly invited the Prime Minister ‘to speak for the benefit of the recording’. Some newspapers mocked up pictures of Blair in handcuffs. Jonathan Powell was questioned twice under caution. ‘Is Daddy going to prison?’ one of his daughters asked his wife before bursting into tears. Powell says: ‘It absorbed a huge amount of time and emotional energy which made it difficult to do other things.’95 For David Hill, ‘cash-for-honours was the most difficult, unpleasant and debilitating thing during my time at Downing Street. You couldn’t get into arguments with the police. You couldn’t say where the leaks had come from. You were stuck in totally defensive mode.’96 In January, Levy was arrested again, this time on suspicion of perverting the course of justice. He let it be known that he feared being ‘hung out to dry’ by Downing Street.97

  On Friday, 19 January, Ruth Turner, the Director of Government Relations at Number 10, was arrested during a dawn raid on her flat. That was the ‘single darkest moment’ at Downing Street.98 The only consolation was that it attracted accusations that the police were becoming increasingly theatrical, heavy-handed and desperate. When the investigation was over, Sarah Helm, a journalist and Powell’s wife, attacked that arrest as ‘Gestapo tactics’.99 Number 10 itself was ‘shocked, really shocked. It looked like part of a pattern to terrorise people.’100

  Blair would sit in his den and explode about the police tactics: ‘This is fucking ridiculous!’ He felt ‘outraged’ but also paralysed ‘because things were out of his control: he did not know what was going to happen next.’ He told his staff: ‘We can’t attack the police because we will not win in the court of public opinion.’101

  To most people, Blair adopted a mien of injured innocence and insouciant confidence about the outcome. When Sir Gus O’Donnell had to tell the Prime Minister that the police wanted to interrogate him for a second time, Blair responded: ‘The rotters!’102 As the headlines grew ever blacker, the Cabinet Secretary felt obliged to warn Scotland Yard about the size of the stakes. They were told: ‘You need to realise this is a very big thing and think very, very carefully.’ Were the detectives to treat Blair as a suspect by interviewing him under caution, they would force his resignation as Prime Minister.103

  The impact of the debilitating affair was not ultimately legal. Sixteen months after the investigation began, the Crown Prosecution Service concluded, to the chagrin of Yates, that it could not bring any charges against anyone. The impact was political. In the assessment of Blair’s own Cabinet, ‘it cast a very damaging shadow over the end of his premiership.’104 It completed a transformation from the first term’s Teflon Tony, the Prime Minister to whom nothing really stuck, to the Toxic Tony, whom the voters saw as presiding over a sleazy regime. Polls indicated that a majority believed peerages had been traded for cash and he had dishonoured his promise to clean up public life.105

  Blair paid a huge price for his folly in raising campaign funds through loans and not disclosing them to the Lords Appointments Commission. The consequences corroded his reputation, humiliated his chief fund-raiser and several of his senior staff by making criminal suspects of them during the investigation, and trashed the reputations of rich admirers, who would demand their loans back and never want to help the party again. The Labour Party came close to bankruptcy.106 Blair had taken money from plutocrats in pursuit of his goal of ending Labour’s financial reliance on union money. As rich men abandoned the party, Labour ended up almost entirely dependent on the unions. It was massively weakening of Tony Blair for crucial months when he was under siege from Gordon Brown. The Chancellor’s acolytes unremittingly briefed that only a change of Prime Minister could reinvest the Government with integrity and purpose. The police investigation ate away at Blair’s position throughout his remaining time at Number 10. Not only was his premiership stained by ‘cash-for-coronets’: the affair played a large part in bringing it to an end long before he had served the full third term he had once promised himself.

  23. Bad Vibrations

  The helicopter flew fast and extremely low: hugging the ground, hopping power lines and yawing this way and that as the pilot executed continuous evasive manoeuvres. The speeding Chinook was loaded with chaff to be fired if the faintest flash of light from the ground suggested an incoming surface-to-air missile. By May 2006, it was more hazardous than ever to fly into the fortified Green Zone in the centre of Baghdad. Even for those who enjoyed this form of travel, the ride was hair-raising. For Tony Blair, phobic about flying, it was his worst nightmare. Staff who accompanied him saw ‘how he had to psyche himself up. He would grip the seat. You’d see his knuckles go white.’1

  Blair wanted to go to Baghdad to be the first Western leader to endorse the newly installed Iraqi Prime Minister and
his optimistically named ‘National Unity Government’. At a news conference with Nouri al-Maliki, Blair talked about ‘a new beginning’.2 In some respects, there was evidence of that. Iraqis defied the threat of bombs and shootings by insurgents and sectarian killers to turn out in their millions to approve a new constitution the previous October.3 There was another impressively high turn-out, larger than was usual in elections in either America or Britain, when 12 million Iraqis took part in the national elections in December.

  What these displays of democracy did not produce was a stable government or a peaceful country. The violence escalated to a higher pitch. The hundredth casualty among British service personnel occurred at the end of January, when a remote-detonated roadside bomb, the insurgents’ weapon of choice, blew up a convoy. On 22 February, al-Qaeda terrorists disguised themselves as police to bomb the al-Askari mosque in Samara, a ninth-century shrine and one of the most revered Shia sites in Iraq. The collapse of its famous golden dome marked another savage lurch into civil war. By nightfall that day, more than a hundred Sunni mosques had been attacked by vengeful Shia mobs.

  The conditions in the capital during Blair’s visit underlined how distant Iraq was from being the peaceful oasis of democracy in the heart of the Middle East that he and Bush had promised would be the outcome of the invasion. Even the Green Zone was no longer regarded as entirely safe for the Prime Minister. On previous visits, he was able to go out in the streets. On this occasion, he was confined inside for fear of assassination. There was even anxiety that extremists might have infiltrated the Iraqi presidential guard of honour which was presented for his inspection. The honour guard were all given a full body search before they were allowed anywhere near Blair.