Following considerable debate within Number 10 about whether it was safe to leave Britain, that weekend he flew out to Jerusalem. He was in a suite at the King David Hotel on Saturday night when his staff brought him news of Watson’s visit to Brown on the eve of the coup. ‘Cherie was right all along,’ Blair remarked bitterly to one civil servant with him.109 Michael Levy was also present. ‘That’s when I really saw him lose it about Brown. Tony got angrier and angrier. He kept saying he’d never realised how duplicitous Gordon was – and what a “liar”.’110
Many of Blair’s staff and friends wanted to ‘kill the bastard’ that weekend by exposing all of Brown’s dreadful behaviour over the years.111 Blair would not sanction it. He told Wegg-Prosser to cease his briefing operation and phoned allies to tell them ‘not to go for Brown’.112 He might have liked to take his revenge, but his position was too fragile to risk another eruption of open warfare. As ever, he preferred to hide the animosity between them both for his own sake and for that of the party.
In the immediate aftermath of the coup, no-one at the top of Government quite knew what they should say, even behind closed doors. The Prime Minister had just been putsched by his Chancellor. Yet at the next meeting of the Cabinet they carried on with business as usual. One official present says: ‘They acted as if nothing had happened.’113
There was not much evidence that the coup would do Labour any good. The party’s poll ratings were at a nineteen-year low, a deficit to the Tories which had helped fuel the rebels. But the polls also suggested that replacing Blair with Brown would make scant difference. Blair’s approval rating was still the best of any party leader among his own supporters.114 According to one poll just before the coup, Labour support would be only one point higher with Brown as leader; according to another poll on the eve of the party conference, Labour’s position was going to be worse if Brown took over.115 The divisions exposed and feelings of treachery aroused during that week in September injected toxin into Labour’s bloodstream as well as giving credence to David Cameron’s claim that the Government was ‘in meltdown’.
The Labour conference met in Manchester at the end of September. Nervous delegates were not sure whether they would be witnesses to an outbreak of civil war. The poison between the camps was still suppurating through the bandages. The rival gangs circled each other in the conference hotel lobbies, bars and restaurants, just as they had for year after year, but with more edge than ever. One of Blair’s closest and most veteran aides described Brown as ‘unstoppable but unelectable’.116 The breakdown of relations was so total that the two men gave interviews and made their speeches without having any idea what the other man would say.
Gordon Brown was Prime Minister-presumptive. But the events of September inflicted serious damage on him. Polls cast him very unfavourably against David Cameron, especially when voters were asked who would be most likely to stab colleagues in the back.117 Martin Kettle, the astute commentator of the Guardian, noted: ‘When Labour delegates cheer the Chancellor, as they will, there will also be a voice in their heads reminding them that the public sees Brown as arrogant, dishonest, selfish, treacherous and unpleasant.’118
Brown’s speech to the conference on the Monday was regarded by one member of his team ‘as the most important and difficult in ten years’.119 He sweated over it for days, devoting himself to little else during a pre-conference trip to the Far East. He would either seal his dominant position or make himself vulnerable to a competitor for the succession. What emerged was a typical Brown speech in which he pounded out points like a machine gun and pummelled his audience into clapping. He got his loudest applause when he declared that he ‘would relish the opportunity to take on David Cameron’.120 He name-checked thirteen Cabinet colleagues in an attempt to show that he was not the bullying Stalinist of Whitehall legend. Peter Mandelson interpreted that with a typically double-edged compliment to his old enemy. He saw a man with ‘all sorts of flaws and shortcomings’ who was nevertheless ‘coming to terms with the need to change to a more collaborative and unifying style’.121
The Chancellor embalmed the victim of his putsch with praise. Brown said of Blair: ‘It has been a privilege for me to work with and for the most successful ever Labour leader and Labour Prime Minister.’122
The hypocrisy of this was too much for the stomach of one listener. Cherie chose to snub the Chancellor’s speech by declining to sit in the conference hall. She was instead making a tour of the stands in the exhibition area. Hearing a broadcast of Brown’s claim to have been privileged to work with her husband, she could not stop herself blurting: ‘Well, that’s a lie!’ The outburst was overheard by a journalist from the financial news agency, Bloomberg. By the time Brown was enjoying his ovation, the conference was already beginning to buzz with rumour that Cherie had called him a liar.
David Hill went through the motions of trying to deny it, suggesting that she might have said something like ‘I need to get by’. It is as likely that she said: ‘I’ve just swallowed a fly.’
The team working on Blair’s speech for the following day wrestled with how they could deal with Cherie’s remark. His main speech-writer, Phil Collins, had brought with him a large compendium of jokes from which he extracted a Les Dawson gag about wives and next-door neighbours. This was then customised for the speech in a brainstorming session with Alastair Campbell and David Bradshaw, another of the communications team. It was not in the text handed out to the press beforehand. Only at the last moment did Blair finally decide that he would begin the speech with the crack.123 Having thanked his children and wife for their support over the years, he said: ‘I mean, at least I don’t have to worry about her running off with the bloke next door.’124
Over the years, it was his speech-writers’ lament that Blair was bad at delivering jokes prepared for him. There was no cause for complaint this time. The crack brought the house down. ‘It released all the tension,’ says David Hill.125 It also effectively confirmed the loathing the Prime Minister’s wife felt for his Chancellor and implicitly suggested that Blair did not disagree with her assessment of Brown.
His speech was formally quite lavish in its compliments to the other man. ‘I know New Labour would never have happened, and three election victories would never have been secured, without Gordon Brown. He is a remarkable man, a remarkable servant to this country.’126
What he did not do was endorse the other man as his successor. Blair was keeping back one of the high-value cards left in his hand. Nor was he any more precise about exactly when he would leave Number 10.
‘This is a changed country,’ he declared and listed some of the positive ways in which it had been transformed. His central intention was to impress on everyone what had been achieved since 1997, drum home how much the party owed to him, suggest he would be a very hard act to follow and leave them wondering what they were going to do without him. It was a success at all those levels. The speech was a virtuoso display of his gifts for apparently effortless eloquence and conversational charm. There were the customary ‘y’knows’, ‘I means’, choked-up pauses and clever applause lines. As he meant it to be, the performance was an intense 56-minute reminder of why he had been such a formidable leader. It demonstrated his talent for delivering meticulously prepared speeches full of deft switches from the light to the serious in a way that was good-humoured, strong on argument and rich with policy. Even one of his assassins, Siôn Simon, hailed it as ‘a great speech’ from ‘the greatest Prime Minister we have ever had’.127
One of the most striking aspects of the speech was that Labour’s most electorally triumphant leader was still, after all these years, having to explain himself to his party. ‘They say I hate the party, and its traditions. I don’t. I love this party. There’s only one tradition I hated: losing. I don’t want to be the Labour leader who won three successive elections. I want to be the first Labour leader to win three successive elections.’ Counselling them to stick to the centre ground and ‘get after’ the
Tories, he declared that ‘a fourth-term election victory’ was ‘the only legacy that has ever mattered to me’.128
He had managed to avoid the fate of most Prime Ministers, which is brutal and abrupt ejection from Number 10. Even when he finally reached the end of the road, he contrived a classically Blairish Third Way compromise. He quit in slow motion. He resigned by instalments. ‘You’re the future now,’ he told the conference. Yet there would be another nine months before his final exit.
‘You can’t go on for ever,’ he said in Manchester as if he were reconciled to what had happened. The truth was that he had been forced to depart earlier than he intended. Though some in his camp claimed later that he always planned to leave in the summer of 2007 anyway, those very closest to him say that his true ambition was to remain at Number 10 at least until 2008.129 He was serious in his original ambition to serve most of a full third term, but he was denied it by a mixture of his own tactical and strategic mistakes combined with the inevitable disaffection towards any leader who has been dominant for so long. That depressed support in the opinion polls which then fed back into the mood among Labour MPs. The Brownites had exploited, but were not solely responsible for unleashing, the furies. ‘Two years of pent-up anger with Tony suddenly erupted,’ said one Cabinet minister.130 The easy dominance of Blair’s early years had left many in his party ill-equipped to cope with being behind in the polls. It was notable that those Labour MPs who had known the truly miserable years of Opposition before 1997 were steadier than those elected then and later. His brand of political stardust had reached its sell-by date. Though it was an unprecedented achievement to secure a third term for Labour, it was a sullen victory won with an exceptionally low proportion of the vote. Public trust and party support for him bled away with every returning bodybag from Iraq and Afghanistan. His handling of the Lebanon crisis was the last straw for some Labour MPs and a perfect excuse for others who wanted to be rid of him. He was again swirled in corrosive allegations of sleaze. The prospect of the Prime Minister being interviewed by the police over ‘cash-for-coronets’ added to the fin-de-siècle aura around his premiership. He had pushed his party as far as it was willing to go on public service reform and was now effectively operating without a parliamentary majority for his ambitions. At the dark heart of the coup was the long struggle with Gordon Brown. ‘Gordon wouldn’t take him on trust when he said he was planning to go in 2007,’ said one of the Prime Minister’s friends.131 Even some of Blair’s allies would admit that he had too often made promises to Brown that weren’t worth the paper they were not written on. He had become so weakened that in the end Brown overcame his natural caution and went for a clumsy kill.
That did not efface Blair’s achievements. At the end of his speech, with the audience on its feet, he left the stage while a stirring video montage reminded them of some of the highlights of his years: the landslide of 1997, the Good Friday Agreement, the spending on public services, and a third election victory in 2005. He came back out, like a rock star milking his encores, to work the crowd to the sound of rhythmic applause.
Yet the same hands had also clapped with approval when he said it was ‘right to let go’. The voters did not force Tony Blair into early retirement from Number 10. He was not driven out by the tormenters he complained about in the media, many of whom were rapturous about his speech. ‘Phew! What a superb performance,’ gasped the Mirror.132 The speech ‘set a new and very high standard for his successor’, thought The Times.133 ‘A vintage performance from the greatest actor-politician of our time,’ said the Daily Mail.134 ‘Has Labour gone stark staring mad?’ wondered the Sun. ‘It is hard to reach any other conclusion after seeing the party stand and cheer the most successful leader they’ve ever had – the man they’ve forced out of office.’135
It was not the media nor the Tories nor the voters who did for him. Tony Blair’s premiership was brought to a premature termination by his own party.
Many of them, if not most, were relieved that he was leaving. What was slightly ominous for Labour was that the Conservatives were even gladder to see the back of the man who had beaten the Tories three times in a row. David Cameron and George Osborne watched Blair’s final conference speech on television. They were awestruck. Cameron remarked soon afterwards: ‘I must be one of the few people left in the country who still thinks Tony Blair is a brilliant politician.’136 Osborne texted a friend: ‘Thank God he’s going.’137
25. Miracle Worker
At seven o’clock on the Friday morning, Jonathan Powell returned to the Prime Minister’s suite at the Fairmont Hotel in St Andrews. Powell stood at the bedroom window looking out at the golf course and the grey-green North Sea. An unshaven Tony Blair sat limply on the sofa in his pyjamas. Their latest attempt to broker agreement between Northern Ireland’s quarrelsome politicians was foundering. Both men had barely slept. In the remaining months left to him at Number 10, Blair craved above all else to achieve the goal to which he had dedicated so much of his premiership. Yet these talks in Scotland in October 2006 seemed stuck up another dead end. Gloom shrouded the Prime Minister. ‘It’s hopeless, isn’t it?’ he groaned from the sofa. He began to take out his frustration on Powell by blaming his Chief of Staff for not properly preparing. ‘Don’t be so stupid,’ Powell responded sharply. ‘We have to remain patient.’1
From the beginning to the end, Powell was Blair’s closest collaborator in the peace process. Oftentimes, the roles were reversed. Powell would be the one in despair; Blair would be the optimist insisting they’d find a way through. Powell ‘lost count of the number of times I came back from exhausting all-night sessions with Gerry Adams or David Trimble to tell him it was all over, and Tony would refuse to give up, saying I had to get back in touch with them and start again.’2
This time was unusual because both men were feeling simultaneously hopeless. ‘The situation was grave,’ Powell confided to his diary. ‘Both sides had pulled well back from their opening positions and were now too far apart to allow us to close the gap.’3 Down that gap threatened to tumble all their hopes of finally securing a settlement.
Soon afterwards, Peter Hain, the Northern Ireland Secretary, arrived at the hotel suite. By now Blair had slipped on a tracksuit, but was still barefoot, unshaven and hadn’t touched breakfast. He was rallying. Hain was impressed to find him working on a new idea to save the talks from collapse.4
*
Tony Blair pursued this goal for longer and more intensively than any other challenge of his premiership. Even during the build-up to and aftermath of the Iraq war, there was rarely a day when he was not engaged with the peace process.5 Richard Haas, a US envoy to Northern Ireland, found Blair ‘extraordinarily hands on when you think of all the things a Prime Minister has on his plate – at times, his own action officer: literally thinking of what he would say, writing the speeches, writing the memos’.6 That dedication to a cause that often seemed so hopeless was the best evidence against the charge that he was only a skilful opportunist. Northern Ireland was the seat of the longest political conflict in Europe and the longest war, on and off, in world history. This bloody tribal struggle had defied every previous attempt at resolution. There were no votes in it. There was only prestige to be lost from failure.
Ancestry was one factor that drove him. Blair was more Irish than he ever appeared. Ireland was ‘in my blood’ he once explained to an Irish audience.7 His father’s adoptive parents, with their colourful background in music hall, always attracted most media attention, but the other branch of his family tree grew in Irish soil. Blair’s mother, Hazel, was from Ballyshannon. Her father was a member of the Orange Order, named after King William of Orange whose crushing of Catholics at the Battle of the Boyne in July 1690 was celebrated by marching Orangemen every summer. Blair’s maternal grandmother was a Protestant from Donegal. Most of his childhood summer holidays were spent in Ireland until the Troubles took hold. ‘It was there in the seas off the Irish coast that I learnt to swim, there that my fa
ther took me to my first pub, a remote little house in the country, for a Guinness, a taste I’ve never forgotten and which is always a pleasure to repeat.’8
On her deathbed, his grandmother said to him: ‘Promise me, Tony, you will never marry a Catholic.’9 He did marry a Catholic, his children were brought up as Catholics and he was a closet Catholic. This was not something he mentioned when he was with Unionists, to whom he emphasised the Orange in his ancestry. To John Taylor, a Unionist MP, Blair once joked: ‘John, you’ve got six children. What are you? Are you a Catholic?’10
To such an ecumenical politician as Blair, a man who regarded Christians, Muslims and Jews as equally ‘Abraham’s children’,11 there was no sense to a conflict rooted in religion. Blair would often say: ‘I simply want to stop people killing each other.’12 The Donegal connection helped him forge a bond with his Irish counterpart, Bertie Ahern, who was ‘often struck that we know much more about the English than they do about us, but that wasn’t true of Tony’.13 Ahern had militantly Republican ancestry, but he too was of a new generation, unburdened by historical baggage and keen to resolve the conflict. Their close and generally trusting relationship was a key to success.
The challenge of Northern Ireland also appealed to Blair’s conceit of himself as a politician with special gifts. ‘He liked throwing himself at that sort of challenge,’ observed his Cabinet Secretary, Sir Richard Wilson. ‘He thought he had the unique abilities to resolve problems that had defeated his predecessors.’14 Mo Mowlam, his first Northern Ireland Secretary, talked about Blair having ‘a Jesus complex’.15 A danger in his personality in other contexts, notably Iraq, this was an advantage in making peace in Ireland. Self-belief and natural optimism drove him on long after more pessimistic types would have given up.
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