The End of the Party

by Andrew Rawnsley

  On Tuesday, 8 May 2007, a remarkable ceremony took place in the Palladian grandeur of the parliament building at Stormont. On the flight over to Belfast the night before, Blair turned to his staff and asked: ‘This is going to happen, isn’t it?’139 They were still pinching themselves the next day when Ian Paisley came forward to be sworn in as the First Minister of Northern Ireland. He read out the oath in his familiar booming bass, taking his time, milking the moment by pausing between words as if he expected them to be chiselled in marble. Then it was the turn of Martin McGuinness to be sworn in as Deputy First Minister, including the oath to uphold law and order. McGuinness had been a commander in a terrorist organisation which killed nearly half of the dead of the Troubles. Paisley’s DUP and Free Presbyterian Church did not directly kill anyone, but for decades he unleashed incendiary bombast. The former IRA leader and the former Dr No were now going to sit together at the pinnacle of the new government, these two warriors and their communities brought to a better place by the peace process. They were watched from the gallery by Blair and Ahern, the two Prime Ministers whose productive and trusting relationship was so important. With them was the former Taoiseach Albert Reynolds, who had begun the process with John Major. Also gazing down from the gallery was Jonathan Powell, the most important British contributor to the success after Blair. Powell later recorded that ‘I felt dizzy and slightly faint, as if I had just finished pushing a very large boulder uphill. If anyone had ever asked me in May 1997 whether I ever expected to see Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness sharing power in Stormont I would have thought they were mad.’140

  Sitting just a few feet away from the two Prime Ministers were a group of middle-aged, greying men, some of whom looked thin and frail. Only after the ceremony did Blair and Powell discover that these men were the high command of the IRA who had between them served more than fifty years in jail and were always ‘an invisible presence at the negotiating table during all our talks’.141 They too had come to witness this last, momentous act of the peace process.

  The Assembly elected a Speaker and an entire cross-party ministerial team without a single cry of dissent. The two Prime Ministers then took tea with the new, improbable partnership. Paisley laughed to Blair: ‘You’re a young man of fifty-four going out of office and I’m an old man of eighty-one coming in.’ A decade before, Blair would never have dreamt that he would feel better about losing power because Paisley was gaining it.

  The four walked together into the Great Hall, where they made speeches from its marble steps. Paisley began by saying: ‘I would have been totally disbelieving’ if anyone had told him that ‘I would be standing here today to take this office.’ His oratorical power, so often before a divisive and destructive force, now spoke of reconciliation and healing. He quoted Solomon from the Old Testament: ‘To everything there is a season … A time to kill and a time to heal. A time to break down and a time to build up … A time to love and a time to hate. A time of war and a time of peace.’142

  Martin McGuinness quoted Seamus Heaney and the poet’s counsel not to talk too much of Others. They must all, he said, ‘get to a place through Otherness’.143

  It was nine long years since Blair rushed to Northern Ireland to save the Good Friday Agreement. At that time he said: ‘Now is not the time for sound-bites’ before promptly delivering one of his most famous: ‘I feel the hand of history on our shoulders.’ In his speech in the marble hall, he echoed that phrase by declaring: ‘Look back and we see centuries marked by conflict, hardship, even hatred among the people of these islands. Look forward and we see the chance to shake off those heavy chains of history.’144

  The praise Blair offered to the contribution of Ahern was reciprocated when the Irish premier lauded his partner’s determination to stick with a process that never ‘promised quick or easy rewards. He has been a true friend of peace and a true friend of Ireland.’145

  Paisley and McGuinness, the arch-demagogue of Unionism and the former Republican gunman, this oddest of political couplings, began governing together. To general amazement, they seemed to establish a real rapport and were dubbed ‘the Chuckle Brothers’. Powell received a surprise call from a civil servant in Northern Ireland. Such calls had previously been a thing of dread because they were to report an atrocity, the outbreak of rioting or, at best, the breakdown of talks. On this occasion, the civil servant was calling to report that First Minister Paisley was rather tired that day because he had been up late the night before Scottish-Irish dancing with Martin McGuinness.146

  There was a question mark for the longer term about the ultimate sustainability of power-sharing built on political blocs still largely defined by religion and history. For the moment, the executive ran with a remarkable smoothness and continued to do so after Paisley’s retirement. In March 2009, cross-community revulsion greeted a spasm of the terrorist past when a police officer and two soldiers were murdered. The leadership of the DUP and Sinn Féin joined voices in condemnation. The terrorists were ‘traitors to the island of Ireland’, declared McGuinness.147

  The British had an Irish problem – or perhaps it is fairer to say that Ireland had a British problem – since the Earl of Pembroke landed at a rocky headland near Waterford in 1170. A settlement of peace and justice had eluded kings and prime ministers ever since. The problem defeated William Gladstone and beat David Lloyd George. A resolution to the gruesome and apparently eternal cycle of sectarian violence that broke out in the 1960s was beyond Harold Wilson, Ted Heath, Jim Callaghan, Margaret Thatcher and John Major. Peace in Northern Ireland was Tony Blair’s crowning claim to have achieved something of enduring and historical greatness with his premiership.

  26. The Long Goodbye

  ‘The next election will be a flyweight versus a heavyweight,’ Tony Blair jabbed at David Cameron during the debate on the Queen’s Speech on 15 November 2006. ‘However much he may dance around the ring, at some point he will come within the reach of a big clunking fist and, you know what, he will be out on his feet, carried out of the ring.’1

  Gordon Brown, taking himself to be that big clunking fist, beamed with pleasure and thumped the Prime Minister’s shoulder with gratitude. He had finally got the craved endorsement – or had he? In so much as this was a commendation, it was a double-edged one. Brown’s brutalist style was among the reasons that Cabinet colleagues feared his succession both for their own sakes and because rule by clunking fist might repel voters. The Tories, who wanted to present Brown as a psychotic thug, regarded it as a gift. One senior member of their frontbench commented: ‘We’ve spent a lot of time trying to come up with an analogy that would capture and maximise Gordon Brown’s unattractiveness to women and his authoritarianism. The Prime Minister, with his usual brilliance, has now done it for us.’2 ‘That will stick,’ one of his aides remarked to Blair afterwards. The Prime Minister smiled.3

  Blair was a mess of ambivalence about the prospect of handing over to Brown. ‘It’s obviously going to be terrible,’ he sighed to one of his closest friends in the Cabinet around Christmas. To the same minister, Blair remarked a few weeks later: ‘Maybe he’ll change.’4

  There were three potential challengers. One was Alan Johnson, the Education Secretary. The former postman was an engaging personality with a biography that offered a potent contrast with the Old Etonian David Cameron. On the negative side, he had no known philosophy and little reputation for developing original policy. He told Desert Island Discs that he didn’t feel up to the job, which was refreshingly modest but not good for his credibility. He made a poor speech to the party conference that suggested that he was not a serious contender.

  David Miliband also gave a lacklustre speech in Manchester which failed to seize the opportunity to promote himself to the party activists, trades unionists and MPs who would elect the next leader. The Environment Secretary was young and unfactional and fizzed with bright ideas. He also had a sharper appreciation of the scale of the challenge of renewal than the many in Labour’s ranks who fo
olishly assumed it would be sufficient to segue from Blair to Brown. Miliband saw that Labour would have to ‘defy political gravity’ in order to win a fourth term and presciently forecast on Question Time: ‘I predict that when I come back on this programme in six months’ time or a year, people will be saying: “Wouldn’t it be great to have that Tony Blair back because we can’t stand that Gordon Brown.” ’5 Members of the Cabinet urged him to run, as did many of Blair’s staff. Yet Miliband was scared of the Brown machine and apprehensive about becoming Prime Minister after just two years in the Cabinet. He told friends that the thought of assuming responsibility for Iraq brought him out in ‘night sweats’.6 Blair told him ‘to think about it’ but ‘didn’t want to press him’.7 According to one Number 10 official: ‘Tony’s attitude towards David was that he’s got to show that he’s up for it.’8

  The third potential challenger was John Reid. The Home Secretary did deliver an effective speech to the conference, but he was a Marmite politician: people either loved him or hated him. He could do the maths of the electoral college and was privately sceptical that he could make a meaningful contest of it with Brown, never mind beat him.9

  Media speculation about potential competitors ebbed and flowed. This mightily wound up Brown without actually producing a challenger to the big clunking fist. Reid fiddled with his gumshield. Miliband hesitated to enter the ring. Johnson threw in the towel before he had even tried on the gloves.

  Many things pointed to Brown’s inevitability: his heft, his experience, his record, his superior organisation, his pre-eminence over the rest of the Cabinet, the sense in Labour’s ranks that his long wait deserved its reward. That made him the overwhelming favourite. Yet there were compelling arguments for a contest. After a decade in power, the Government needed a serious examination of its achievements, its failings and its post-Blair direction. A contest would be an opportunity to test Brown for flaws rather than wait for his weaknesses to be exposed once he was at Number 10. It was at least arguable that Labour needed to move on from both Blair and Brown by finding a fresher figure to take on David Cameron. Polling in the first quarter of the year put Labour about ten points behind the Tories. More ominously, polls often indicated that the Conservative lead would increase when Labour was led by Brown.10 ‘We never got a grip on the fact that we needed to move on from the Tony–Gordon generation to a new generation,’ says one Cabinet minister.11

  Philip Gould sent a stream of memos to Brown arguing that a contest was ‘essential for your own sake’. He was going to be an unelected Prime Minister. ‘Without a contest, you will have no legitimacy.’12 Brown told me and other interviewers: ‘I would welcome a contest.’13 This was the opposite of the truth. He contemplated having a contest with a fringe left-winger whom he could crush and even then wasn’t keen on the idea.14 His paranoia about rivals and his sense of entitlement meant that he wanted to leave nothing to chance. He desired not a contest but a coronation. Nor was Blair ever really going to fight a handover to Brown. There remained the vestiges of what one Cabinet minister called ‘a complicated love’.15 Shortly after the September coup, Matthew Taylor predicted – to Blair’s face – that ‘you’re going to end up backing him, because that is what you always do.’16 Jonathan Powell thinks Blair ‘still felt some guilt’ about taking the leadership in 1994. ‘Tony thought Gordon was the biggest figure in the party. He never saw anyone who was a rival to that stature.’17 Even during some of their worst episodes, says one of Brown’s court, ‘they could still pick up the phone to talk political tactics and it would be like two brothers having a chat.’18 Philip Gould agrees: ‘Tony could not cure himself of his ambivalence towards Gordon. He had this view of the younger brother to the older brother. Gordon was still a politician of substance. Tony knew the situation, but he couldn’t rid himself of that feeling.’19 ‘Rightly or wrongly, Tony always felt it was going to be Gordon,’ says Alastair Campbell.20 Phil Collins ‘never thought he was serious’ about finding an alternative to Brown. ‘He tried to persuade himself that Gordon could change and that Gordon would be OK. There was this blood brother connection. They were still umbilically joined. At some level, he was sorry for Gordon and felt guilt that he usurped his position all those years ago.’21

  Blair held back from endorsing Brown not because he thought it ever likely that there would be a supportable alternative, but because this was one of his remaining psychological pressure points on the other man.22 Blair’s objective during his final months in office was to try to prevent a deviation away from New Labour. He wanted to ‘cement things in place’23 and get Brown to ‘sign up for New Labour policies’.24 Blair initiated a policy review, entitled ‘Pathways to the Future’, which was supposed to map a course for the next decade. This exercise could have had a valuable purpose for a Government which needed renewal after ten years in office, but it foundered on the hostility between Numbers 10 and 11. Brown was affronted and suspicious. ‘Gordon’s lot didn’t want to have anything to do with it.’25 He saw Blair’s review as an attempt to bind his hands as Prime Minister and further delay his succession. When I asked him in an on-the-record interview whether Blair had ‘hung around too long and damaged you in the process’, he tellingly replied: ‘Yes, well, that, you have, you have to establish.’26 In private, it was Brown’s routine complaint: ‘We shouldn’t have a handover in the fucking summer.’27

  From Blair’s side of the divide, he nominated Pat McFadden as the minister who would oversee the policy review process. Brown provocatively proposed Ed Balls, the figure regarded with most fear and loathing at Number 10. Things improved only a little when he was replaced by Ed Miliband. The Brownites regarded it as ‘ridiculous that McFadden and Miliband were supposed to write the manifesto for the next ten years’.28 There was little incentive for Cabinet ministers to engage with the exercise when Brown was so obviously hostile to it.

  There was some policy product from Blair’s final chapter, more than is often the case when Prime Ministers are in the departure lounge. He prevailed on pensions reform, perhaps his most significant victory over Brown on an issue of finance in their entire time in office. A long-term commitment was made to a new generation of nuclear power stations. The Government introduced climate change legislation, bolder than anything else in the world, which enshrined in the statute book targets for reducing emissions. This might endure beyond Blair, but he could not be sure of it. There was no guarantee that decisions that cast so far ahead would survive future events or changes of government. They were symptoms of Blair’s yearning to burnish his legacy and his reluctance to come to terms with the fall of the curtain. He would sigh wistfully that, far from being tired and ready to leave, he’d never felt fitter and more equipped to do the job.29

  Brown was right that it was fundamentally deluded for Blair to think he could lock the steering wheel of Government for the next decade. This also fed Brown’s fear that Blair would somehow even now contrive to find an excuse not to leave. The Brownites were very struck by the Wegg-Prosser strategy memo which read: ‘He needs to go with the crowd wanting more. He should be the star who won’t even play that last encore.’30 Ed Balls told other members of their inner circle that Blair didn’t really believe that he’d done his last party conference. ‘He’s hoping people will cry: “Don’t go” so he can say: “All right, I’ll stay.” ’31

  Brown announced that, as Prime Minister, he would modernise the Trident nuclear deterrent. This was widely interpreted as him sucking up to the right-wing press and getting in early with his disappointment of left-wing supporters. His main motivation was to pre-empt Blair so that his rival could not use the future of Trident as an excuse to delay his departure.32 There was a rebellion by eighty-eight Labour MPs in the Commons vote on Trident in March 2007, but the Government won an overwhelming majority thanks to Conservative support.

  Though it looked less and less likely that there would be a rival for the succession, Brown remained in a persistently foul temper. That spring, there was a
meeting of the Cabinet sub-committee on energy to hear Peter Hain, wearing his Welsh Secretary hat, make the case for financing a Severn Barrage. ‘The meeting was all civil and nice’ until Brown turned up twenty minutes late ‘stomping in like Harry Enfield’s stroppy teenager’.33 An official leapt out of a chair to make room for the glowering Chancellor. He slammed down a file, started to scribble furiously on some papers, and joined the discussion only to growl at Blair and Hain: ‘It costs seven billion. Do you have seven billion?’ A pained expression crept over the Prime Minister’s face.34

  Brown and his entourage often spoke of Blair with contempt. Yet they were simultaneously and neurotically desperate for him to anoint Brown as his successor. ‘The pursuit of the Blair endorsement became all-consuming’ for Brown because ‘he didn’t want a factionalised party, he didn’t want a challenge and he thought he needed the Murdoch press.’35

  In March, the Chancellor suddenly told Number 10 that he wanted to join the Prime Minister for the launch of the conclusions of the first policy review. This was on the subject of public service reform – the issue on which they had so repeatedly clashed. Brown was now nervous that he’d damaged his reputation with his opposition to Blair’s reforms. Even among some in his own camp, it was now viewed as ‘a strategic mistake which made him look anti-reform’.36 When the two men appeared together, Brown suddenly started speaking fluent Blairite. The Chancellor hailed the idea of ‘greater choice, greater competition and greater local accountability’.37 This was a somersault from his previous position that choice and diversity were not the way to reform public services.

  Staff at Number 10 ‘had hysterics watching that on television’.38 To them, it made his previous sabotage of health and education reform look even more cynical. Whether it was a change of conviction or mere expediency remained to be seen. It did help to reconcile Blair to being succeeded by Brown.