The launch was at a city academy in Hackney in east London. That also represented a significant shift by Brown, who had previously refused all invitations to visit an academy. The Treasury was resistant the previous November when Blair announced a final push on academies, doubling to 400 the target for the number to be built by 2010. In another volte-face, Brown embraced that target as his own and let it be known that he would keep Andrew Adonis, the ultra-Blairite proselytiser for academies, in his ministerial post. One senior aide to Brown observes: ‘Gordon had to give all sorts of pledges to Tony. Despite the weakness of his position, Tony found one last turn of the screw.’39
It was only as they travelled together to this event that Brown disclosed to Blair the secret income tax cut he had planned for the Budget forty-eight hours later. On this occasion, Blair was pleased with a Brown Budget surprise. He had been arguing with the Chancellor that he needed to display New Labour credentials.40
As it would turn out, both Blair and Brown were wrong about this Budget. Brown was about to commit a major error, though few grasped just how massive until a year later. His eleventh Budget was delivered on Wednesday, 21 March. There was little room for fiscal manoeuvre because of his past decisions to open the spending taps. Yet he needed a flourish for a Budget that was both his final performance as Chancellor and the overture for his premiership. He was especially anxious to demonstrate to Middle Britain – or, at any rate, to the newspapers that claimed to be its representatives – that he could be just as New Labour as Tony Blair.
The previous autumn, Brown started to toy with a plan to abolish the 10p income tax band to finance a cut to the basic rate. Spencer Livermore, his most senior adviser on tax policy, successfully argued him out of it on the grounds that this would create a lot of losers among the less affluent. Ed Balls was also opposed. Brown dropped the idea of announcing it in his Pre-Budget Report. In the New Year, he returned to the plan. There was a big pre-Budget meeting with officials in February – ‘the sort of set-piece meeting that Gordon always hated’.41 The officials again cautioned that abolishing the 10p band would create many losers. Livermore maintained his opposition. Balls, a much more powerful figure at the court of Brown, now flipped in support.42
When he presented the Budget, Brown saved the 2p cut in the headline rate to the end for a theatrical climax. He won cheers from Labour MPs and rave reviews in some of the press. ‘The powerhouse Chancellor’s bold 2p cut was as sensational as it was audacious,’ trilled the left-wing Daily Mirror.43 ‘He can hold his head justifiably high,’ gushed the right-wing Daily Mail. ‘His stewardship of the nation’s finances has been remarkable.’44 The Mail’s political commentator, Peter Oborne, hailed ‘a great Chancellor’ whose ‘political dominance and intellectual mastery’ made him the equal of David Lloyd George and William Gladstone. Oborne predicted that ‘historians will look back at the Brown years and marvel.’45
For one day’s good notices, Brown committed a blunder that would later bite him savagely. The change didn’t come in for a year and only a small minority fully foresaw the consequences of abolishing the 10p band. One of the few was Frank Field. The MP for Birkenhead combined a serious intellect with an impish sense of mischief. This veteran antagonist of Brown tabled a series of parliamentary questions about how many millions of the less well-off would lose out, questions which the Treasury refused to answer. On the last day of the Commons debate on the 2007 Budget, Brown barked at Field: ‘I want to see you.’ They met in the Chancellor’s room at the Commons. When Field arrived, Brown was hovering outside in deep conversation with Ed Balls. They went inside to find Hazel Blears sitting there, picking at a bowl of nuts as she waited for an audience with Brown about what job she might expect in his Cabinet. Brown ushered Field into an adjacent box room cluttered with chaotic piles of files. ‘I’m moving,’ the Prime Minister-elect excused the mess. ‘I know you are,’ smiled Field. Brown rounded on Field for putting down an amendment demanding a compensation package for poorer workers. ‘There will be no losers,’ he insisted. If that was really the case, responded Field sarcastically, the Government ought to be able to support his amendment. Brown demanded: ‘Are you going to push your amendment?’ ‘Yes,’ replied Field. ‘Unless you make some concessions.’ Brown grew angry: ‘I’m not going to do that.’ ‘I’ll move my amendment then,’ retorted Field. He stood up to leave. Brown thrust his face into the other man’s and yelled: ‘You’ve always been against me!’46
Field got nowhere. The Conservatives voted for the abolition of the 10p rate. Only the Lib Dems, a handful of Labour MPs, and a single Tory supported Field’s lonely stand. Brown had primed a bomb which would detonate under his premiership a year later.
For the moment, the deceptive tax theatrics of the Budget assisted his inexorable campaign to stitch up the succession. A few voices continued to resist the juggernaut – one of the sharpest belonging to Peter Mandelson. The day after the Budget, Mandelson made a jibing intervention that made it clear he was far from reconciled to a Brown premiership. ‘I don’t know whether this is going to come as a disappointment to him, but he can’t actually fire me,’ said the European Commissioner in the course of a thinly cloaked attack. ‘Like it or not, he will have to accept me as a commissioner until November 2009.’ To deny Brown the pleasure of refusing to nominate him for a second term, Mandelson said he would not seek one.47
His was an isolated and exiled voice of dissent. It required the signatures of forty-four Labour MPs to nominate a candidate for the leadership. Stephen Byers, the Blairite former Cabinet minister, was gathering names in a notebook. By Easter, he had thirty-eight backers for John Reid and twenty-four behind Miliband. He could not persuade many Reid supporters to switch behind Miliband or vice-versa. Byers found: ‘There was a belief that Gordon was going to win anyway so why have a divisive election and there was a worry that if you backed the losing candidate Gordon’s people would do for you.’48 Many Labour MPs feared they would be signing a career suicide note if they provoked Brown’s wrath by backing a challenger. In the words of one Cabinet minister: ‘It is impossible to overestimate the scale of the terror there was of the Gordon machine.’49 A backer of John Reid found that ‘the Brownites were very good at getting up the idea that Number 10 was Gordon’s right.’50
It was also true that many Labour MPs sincerely thought Brown deserved to become Prime Minister. Peter Hain encapsulates their view: ‘He was Tony Blair’s natural successor. There was nobody else with his stature, his grasp and his strategic vision.’51
The sceptics about Brown lacked a standard to rally around in the absence of a declared challenger. Nor was there any encouragement from the top of the Government. At least eight members of Cabinet harboured grave doubts about Brown becoming Prime Minister, but not one put his or her head above the parapet. ‘As a group, we were pathetic,’ laments one Blairite member of that Cabinet. ‘We will be caned for this by history.’52 Reflecting on it two years later when the Brown premiership unravelled, one of Blair’s closest allies sighed: ‘The reason that we are where we are is in large part Tony’s fault because there was no succession plan.’53 Blair could almost certainly have created a challenge to Brown had he given it any encouragement. ‘Ultimately, it was down to Tony,’ says one of his most senior staff. ‘If he’d got John Reid and David Miliband and some others together for dinner and said: “I want there to be a challenger”, there would have been one.’54
Soon after the Budget, Blair sat on the back patio at Number 10 with Phil Collins. ‘They’ve worked it out, haven’t they?’ said Blair despondently. ‘Yes, they have,’ responded Collins. ‘The country, they don’t like Gordon, do they?’ sighed Blair. Yet Collins found it fruitless trying to engage Blair with the idea of creating a contest. ‘Tony, if he had wanted to, could have said to David Miliband: “This is your moment and I’ll back you.” He didn’t want to hear about it, he didn’t want to talk about it.’55 To Michael Levy, he said on several occasions: ‘Gordon can’t beat Camer
on.’56 Among his own staff, there were those who felt Blair had let down both his party and the country:
Some will say that Tony behaved disgracefully. He knew that Gordon was incapable of communicating with the public, incapable of handling anything which he had not had months to prepare for and incapable of making a swift decision. Tony knew better than anyone that Gordon was bonkers and would be a disastrous Prime Minister and yet he was prepared to let the Labour Party and the British people live with the consequences.57
Jonathan Powell ‘wouldn’t use those words’, but believes that Blair’s handling of the succession ‘will be a bigger criticism of Tony than the Iraq war’.58
At the end of April, Miliband formally announced that he would not be a challenger with an article in the Observer in which he declared: ‘I will vote for Gordon Brown … No-one is better qualified to lead.’59 Miliband was not really sure whether he was doing the right thing, fearing that his generation of younger Labour politicians might grow old and grey in Opposition if their worst fears about Brown were realised. Miliband backed out partly because he feared that the character assassins in the Brown spin machine would make a contest dirtily personal. There had already been some media nastiness about his adopted son which ‘unnerved him’.60 He was worried that the party would split whether he won or lost. He was uncertain that he was ready. Most of all, he simply did not think he could win. By that weekend, Nick Brown had already secured for his namesake and master the declared support of more than 200 Labour MPs, well over half the parliamentary party. John Reid then formally took himself out of contention.
After all those years during which Brown thirsted for the prize and was tormented by the thought that it would be snatched from him again, the long-distance runner looked over his shoulder to find there was no-one there after all.
On Tuesday, 1 May 2007, the tenth anniversary of the election that brought New Labour to power, Tony Blair finally gave an endorsement of sorts. ‘Within the next few weeks, I won’t be Prime Minister,’ he said at a Labour rally in Edinburgh. ‘In all probability, a Scot will become Prime Minister … someone who, as I’ve always said, will make a great Prime Minister for Britain.’61
Forty-eight hours later, Labour was given a tremendous kick in the ballots. There had been some Brownite agitation for Blair to quit before the spring elections, but they had not pressed hard because it suited Brown to let Blair take the hit. Labour lost more than 500 council seats and eight local authorities in England. The most seismic result was in Scotland, where the Scottish National Party made enough gains in the Edinburgh Parliament to put it just ahead of Labour. Alex Salmond became the First Minister at the head of a minority government.
The Cabinet met on Thursday, 10 May. Blair briefly outlined his plan to go to his constituency later in the day and confirmed that he would finally announce a timetable for his departure – a joke intended for the benefit of Gordon Brown. Blair claimed he did not want ‘a big song and dance’ made out of it.62 Yet he managed to squeeze every ounce of media attention. He flew 250 miles from London to Trimdon, creating a reverse echo of the journey he took in the small hours of the morning in May 1997 when he first became Prime Minister. The speech he delivered in the Labour club in his constituency was a classic Blair synthesis. It was simultaneously defiant and apologetic, aggrandising and self-deprecating, rueful and proud, authentic and manipulative as he defended his record while acknowledging that many were disappointed by it.
Twenty-four hours later, Brown formally announced his candidacy at an event that instantly confirmed that he would never be a master thespian. It looked bad on television because of the primitive presentational error of allowing his face to be obscured by the autocue so that he appeared to be addressing the nation through frosted glass. Brown tried to flip his handicaps into virtues. ‘I have never believed presentation should be a substitute for policy,’ he declared in an obvious attempt to seek definition from a contrast with the man he would soon replace. ‘I do not believe politics is about celebrity.’ He talked about the ‘new challenges’ for a ‘new government’ as if temporarily forgetting that he had been Chancellor for a decade. He claimed his guide was his ‘moral compass’. He pledged to run a ‘humble’ government that sought ‘consensus’ and would ‘give power away’.63 With no competition, he was running against his own reputation. Humility, consensuality and sharing power had never been the hallmarks of his treatment of colleagues.
On 17 May, his team announced that they had secured nominations from 313 Labour MPs. This made it mathematically impossible for any challenger to get on the ballot. Even his fiercest foes – Milburn and Byers – felt compelled to nominate him and kiss the ring. He would be the first person to become Prime Minister without any competition since Winston Churchill was succeeded by Anthony Eden more than half a century previously.
Tony Blair’s last six weeks as Prime Minister touched on all the main points of his decade. In mid-May, he flew to Washington for a valedictory with George Bush. At their last shoulder-to-shoulder news conference in the Rose Garden, Bush was asked whether Blair’s association with the unpopular President had contributed to his demise. ‘Could be,’ replied Bush, untypically pensive. ‘Am I to blame for his leaving? I don’t know.’ They exchanged parting expressions of mutual admiration. Blair described his host as ‘unyielding and unflinching’. Bush flattered back that his guest was ‘a courageous man’ and ‘a clear strategic thinker’ who ‘can see beyond the horizon’.64 When they first met at Camp David six years before, neither had seen far enough over the horizon to this day when their special relationship would end blighted by the war that one willed and the other joined. Blair, who had wanted to be the transatlantic bridge, now had to admit: ‘In any part of Europe today, if you want to get the easiest round of applause, then get up and attack America.’ Bush chipped in that anyone who attacked him would receive a ‘standing ovation’.65
Blair still didn’t pick up the Congressional medal first awarded nearly four years earlier in the deceptively euphoric aftermath of the invasion. It was eventually hung around his neck at an awkward and furtively brief ceremony at the White House just before Bush departed in January 2009. It had also been awarded to Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Tommy Franks, the men who went to war with too few troops, and to Paul Bremer, the viceroy in Baghdad who made catastrophic errors in the first year of occupation.
In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Blair won himself a privileged place with Bush as well as heroic status with both the American public and political classes. He never maximised the influence this ought to have given him. Bush by and large took Britain for granted and the way in which Blair behaved consistently gave the President grounds for thinking he could do so. In return for helping to remove the Taliban in Afghanistan and Saddam in Iraq, Blair hoped that Bush would commit to resolving the Israel–Palestine conflict. Blair could not be faulted for his persistence. Whenever they met, Bush would say, almost with a groan: ‘I know what you’re going to say.’66 But it didn’t yield results. George Mitchell, Middle Eastern peace envoy under Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, concluded there was no ‘tangible change in US policy’ as a result of Blair’s interventions.
On at least half a dozen occasions, the Prime Minister says it is time to do something on the Middle East, President Bush says I agree, then they go their separate ways, and six months or a year later the same process is repeated. There was not the sustained, persevering effort that is necessary.67
To the end, Blair refused to hear criticism of Bush even at the most private conclaves of his inner circle. ‘If anyone attacked George Bush in a meeting, Tony would slap them down immediately,’ says one of his senior staff. ‘I never heard him express a whiff of criticism of Bush.’68 ‘He’d been a disaster, but Tony couldn’t admit it to himself.’69
Shortly after the final call on Bush, Blair landed in Iraq, scene of the great calamity of their alliance. Iraq consumed his second term and cast its baleful shadow into the third. ‘I
raq turned his hair grey,’ says Tessa Jowell. ‘He will live with Iraq for the rest of his life. He will keep on revisiting it to ask whether he made the right decision.’70 He did not join the war for ignoble reasons, but the peace was lost because of grievous errors for which he bore a share of the guilt. Even Blair now accepted that the bloody mayhem in the years since the invasion was a ‘disaster’.71 The Americans finally committed the troops necessary for ‘the surge’ led by General David Petraeus which would eventually master the insurgency. The British, once so self-congratulatory about their performance, were heading for a humiliating denouement in southern Iraq. The army was too stretched and Blair too politically weak to attempt a surge against the rampant militias. In his conference swansong, Blair publicly set his face against any ‘craven act of surrender’ in Iraq.72 This rhetoric was hollow. In February 2007, the Prime Minister announced a further cut in British forces in Basra to 5,500 with the justification that ‘increasingly our role will be support and training’.73 But it was obvious that the Iraqi army was not yet up to the task of securing order. At the end of his time at the head of the British army, General Richard Dannatt candidly regretted that the ‘early switch’ to Afghanistan meant that ‘we failed to maintain the force levels required’ in Basra, which ‘sowed the seeds’ for ‘the rise of the militias supported so cynically by the Iranians in the south’.74 The undermanned British force left in Iraq concentrated on protecting itself. The troops retreated to the base at the airport, surrendering Basra to the mercy of the militias and criminal gangs, a betrayal of the promises once made by Blair. The Americans complained that the British had ‘lost the south’. The militias were finally dealt with only after Blair left office. In March 2008 the Americans and the Iraqis launched Operation ‘Charge of the Knights’, which routed the Mehdi army and imposed the Baghdad Government’s authority on the city. The British could claim credit for training two divisions of the Iraqi army, but it was an otherwise ignoble finale.
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