The End of the Party

by Andrew Rawnsley

  The conflict was enormously expensive in both blood and treasure. It claimed the lives of 179 British military personnel and left more than 800 seriously wounded and disabled by the time the last of them finally withdrew altogether in May 2009. The cost approached £10 billion. More than 4,000 American troops were killed. There had been anything between 100,000 and 650,000 Iraqi deaths – the precise number is not known. Rather than water the flowering of democracy in the Middle East, as Blair, Bush and the neo-cons had once imagined, the war emboldened and strengthened Iran, the power that most menaced Western interests.

  On his final visit to the denuded British force in Basra, Blair thanked them for performing ‘absolutely brilliantly’. Even as he spoke, a mortar blast shook the ceiling.

  In late May, further foreign travel took him to a part of Africa where his liberal interventionism was a success. In Sierra Leone, where democracy had been rescued with British military help from the murderous thugs of the RUF,75 he was greeted as a hero.

  Blair timed his departure so that he could attend one last G8 Summit at Heiligendamm in Germany in early June. The main product, for which Blair deserved some of the credit, was a declaration that negotiations on a new climate change treaty should have as their start point the goal to halve global emissions by 2050. Climate change animated him during the final years of his premiership. It was progress to persuade Bush to put his signature on such an ambition. But it was more of an aspiration, and an undetailed one at that, than a commitment. Serious progress was going to have to wait on a change of President.

  The final item of foreign business was a difficult European Council at the end of June which agreed a new treaty in the wake of the rejection of the constitution. Blair was better at selling Britain and its pro-reform agenda to Europe than he was at selling Europe and the European ideal to Britain. Liberalisation and enlargement, two big goals of British foreign policy, were achieved during his premiership. The failure to join the euro turned out to be less weakening of his position in the EU than Blair originally feared and the malignant isolation of Britain during the Tory years was ended. At home, he consistently stuck his neck out for a pro-European position of positive engagement whether it was giving early admittance to workers from Poland and elsewhere in eastern Europe or backing the Amsterdam, Nice and constitutional treaties. As Steve Morris, one of his European advisers, says: ‘It was a massive vote loser, but he did it because he thought it was the right thing to do.’76 What he did not succeed in doing was draining Europhobia from the body politic. Britain’s ambivalent relationship with its continent remained unresolved.

  Straight from the European Council, he was flown to Rome for an audience with Pope Benedict XVI. This visit to the Vatican prompted a burst of speculation in the media that Blair was planning to become a Catholic. The President of Poland asked if the stories were true. Blair deflected him by replying: ‘You’re not having that in the Constitution as well.’77

  Throughout his time in office, Blair masked both his denominational allegiance and the true level of his convictions. His religion was ‘a huge part in Tony Blair’s life’, says Peter Hyman, an aide who was a practising Jew, and influenced him in ways which ‘people consistently underestimated’. Hyman once offered to get Blair some modern novels to read on holiday. ‘No, thanks,’ replied the Prime Minister. ‘It’s Cherie who likes that sort of thing.’ He instead asked the Number 10 library to order him a book on twelfth-century Christianity. ‘His main reading matter was religious books of various kinds.’78 No Prime Minister since William Gladstone read the Bible more regularly.

  On the night before one conference speech, Blair waited until the nonbelievers on his staff had left the room before asking Hyman to find a quote from Proverbs. ‘I want to end the speech with it.’ Hyman was pleased with himself the next morning when he presented the quote. Blair responded: ‘You’ve done pretty well, but I am sure there are more poetic versions than this. Have you looked at the King James bible?’79

  Once he had left Number 10, he set up the Tony Blair Faith Foundation and voiced regret that religious conviction was seen as ‘a personal eccentricity’ in ‘an age of aggressive secularism’. He argued that ‘people should be proud of their Christianity and able to express it as they wish.’80 He went even further in a speech to a ‘prayer breakfast’ in America, a country where talking about God is not only much easier for politicians than in Britain but almost compulsory. He declared that faith should be restored ‘to its rightful place, as the guide to our world and its future’.81

  In office, though, he ignored the Bible’s injunction that the believer should not hide his light under a bushel. He almost never discussed religion with his staff nor even with colleagues who were also practising Christians.82 His faith was an enigma to them, never mind the voters. This concealment was partly for fear of exposing himself to more satirists after Private Eye’s ‘Vicar of St Albion’ lampooned him as a preachy hypocrite. He later admitted that he avoided talking about his religious views because he feared voters would think of him as ‘a nutter’ who made decisions after a ‘commune with the man upstairs’.83

  Thanks to laws passed by his Government, his period in office saw an unholy boom in lap-dancing clubs, an explosion in internet gambling and twenty-four-hour licensing of bars and pubs. His most senior aides were virtually all non-believers. The atheist Campbell famously stopped an interviewer from asking Blair about religion by interrupting: ‘We don’t do God.’84 According to Tim Allan: ‘That was as much Tony’s view. He did not want to make religion a big part of his public persona.’85

  In the build-up to the war in Iraq, both David Frost and Jeremy Paxman tried to get a rise out of him by asking whether he prayed with George Bush. Blair reacted as if the question was ludicrous, though it was perfectly reasonable to ask, given that both he and Bush were professed Christians.

  The devout Anglican Frank Field thinks that ‘part of his strength’ was to understand that ‘the Church of England survived because it realises how much religion the English will take, which is not very much.’86

  His religion, like much else about Blair, was contradictory. He had a ‘big tent’ view, believing that Christians, Jews and Muslims were all essentially children of the same God. He often told me about the latest inter-faith book that he had read on holiday or was keeping by his bedside.87 He was antifundamentalist. To his credit, he did not seek to serve his political interests when making Church appointments. In 2002, he chose Rowan Williams as Archbishop of Canterbury even though the Welsh cleric had described the war in Afghanistan as ‘morally tainted’ and was volubly opposed to the invasion of Iraq.

  To Matthew d’Ancona, the only journalist to get Blair to talk at length and on the record about his faith before he became Prime Minister and closed down on the subject, he described himself as an ‘ecumenical Christian’ with ‘deep respect for other faiths’.88 His friend Barry Cox found Blair ‘fascinated by other religions and, kind of characteristically, he spotted common links in all of them which made him think they could all work together’.89

  Yet it was only six months after his departure from Number 10 that he finally came out as a Roman Catholic, a more dogmatic faith than Anglicanism. He told a Catholic conference in Italy that it felt like ‘coming home’.90

  During his time at Number 10, he repeatedly denied any intent to leave the Church of England, but he was a quasi-Catholic for many years. He regularly went to Mass at St Joan of Arc in Islington in the 1990s and continued to do so as Prime Minister until he was asked to desist by Cardinal Basil Hume. Blair wrote back agreeing to stop, but protesting: ‘I wonder what Jesus would have made of it.’91 He attended Mass at Westminster Cathedral, prompting more protests, this time from the then Archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey. Blair replied to Carey with reassurances that he was not about ‘to defect’.92

  A variety of priests, including Father Michael Seed, from Westminster Cathedral, who had prepared other Anglican politicians for conversi
on, paid backdoor visits to Number 10 and to Chequers. When at the country retreat, Blair attended services at the Catholic Church of the Immaculate Heart of Mary at nearby Great Missenden. On a visit to the Vatican on the eve of the Iraq war, he took Catholic communion at a Mass in the Pope’s private chapel presided over by John Paul II. This was never publicised at the time. After Blair had said his final thanks to the pontiff, the frail Pope cried: ‘God Bless England!’93

  Britain had never had a Catholic Prime Minister. Jonathan Powell says Blair did not convert while in office not so much for fear of a negative reaction from the public or the potential impact on the Northern Ireland negotiations: he held back primarily because of the ‘constitutional complications’.94 One of these was that the Prime Minister appointed Anglican bishops.

  He became a Catholic even though he disagreed with or openly flouted many of that Church’s doctrines. Cherie used contraception and Tony was certainly not a virgin on his wedding day. He voted the liberal line in the Commons on abortion. He also did so when his Government equalised the age of consent, legalised gay marriage and permitted adoption by gays. He evidently did not believe in papal infallibility since he ignored the opposition of John Paul II to the Iraq war.

  It is the certainties and rituals of Catholicism, as well as the influence of Cherie, that seemed to attract him. What he got from religion was not so much a set of precise beliefs or even a firm guide to moral behaviour: Blair found in religion a motivator and a consolation.

  His friend Charlie Falconer believes faith gave Blair ‘his strong sense of good and evil.’95 John Burton, his constituency agent, thinks that ‘Christian fervour’ was the best explanation for the Warrior Blair. The many military interventions were ‘Tony living out his faith’ in the belief that it was ‘all part of the Christian battle; good should triumph over evil’.96 His aide Robert Hill, himself an evangelical Christian, agrees that faith shaped Blair’s conviction that the Iraq war was ‘a crusade for good’.97 When it went bad, Blair told the journalist Peter Stothard: ‘I will answer to my Maker for the people who died.’98 It was never entirely clear whether he anticipated a more forgiving verdict from the Almighty than from his contemporaries. It was from his religion that he got ‘the sense that there is meaning to the world and his part in it’, says Geoff Mulgan. Blair was ‘an extraordinarily resilient person … I suspect his resilience comes from his faith.’99

  On 12 June, Blair delivered another valedictory speech, this one about the media. ‘The media as a collective absolutely loathed him by this stage’ and ‘he couldn’t be bothered to try to charm them any more.’100 Compared with some Prime Ministers, Blair did not have that much to complain about. He enjoyed the support of the majority of the press at all three of his elections, enthusiastically in 1997, more lukewarmly in 2001 and very grudgingly in 2005. He used the broadcast media with much more intensity than previous Prime Ministers to conduct a continuous conversation with the electorate. As the shrewd Steve Richards of the Independent put it:

  In terms of communication, he was a revolutionary. Blair chose to be our round-the-clock guide, responding within seconds to every event, from the death of Princess Diana to the imprisonment of Deirdre Barlow in Coronation Street. He was a rolling commentator on his leadership and an eternal advocate.101

  His ubiquity and skill set a standard which Gordon Brown and other successors would find very difficult to match.

  As he matured as Prime Minister, Blair acquired a more composed attitude, but he never entirely shook the habit of chasing headlines, with especially terrible consequences over the Iraq dossier and the death of Dr David Kelly. The phrase that leapt out of his speech was ‘feral beast’ and came in a passage attacking the media for ‘just tearing people and reputations to bits’. He complained that it sapped ‘the country’s confidence and self-belief’ and claimed that ‘it reduces our capacity to take the right decisions’ by which he was reflecting at least somewhat on himself.102

  There was power in his critique, but he was the person least well placed to make many of the criticisms. It was also disingenuous to focus on the Independent, the quality paper with the lowest circulation, and say nothing about the Daily Mail, the paper that he and Cherie most loathed. The speech was most interesting for its confessional aspect. He admitted that he and his staff had been ‘complicit’ by giving ‘inordinate attention to courting, assuaging and persuading the media’. He correctly identified many of the faults of the modern media: its craving for novelty, its hunger for sensation, its tendency to trivialise. Yet New Labour had encouraged those bad appetites by pandering to them and running government as if it were a twenty-four-hour newsroom. Blair had fed ‘the feral beast’. It was too late now to complain that he felt bitten by it.

  ‘A new dawn has broken – has it not?’103 So he had said on the May morning when he first brought New Labour to power. In the following decade, Blair dominated the British political landscape like few other leaders. Labour was ahead of the Tories, often by intimidatingly big margins, throughout the first term and into the second. It did not lose a single by-election for his first six years. Even from 2003, when the consequences of the Iraq war began to consume his premiership and devour his popularity, his mastery continued. It was a supremacy challenged only by Gordon Brown.

  History will always recall Blair as a winner. The electoral magician dispelled Labour’s historic hex. He took a party that had lost four elections in a row and turned it into a serial victory machine. He achieved what no leader of his party had done before and won not just two full terms for Labour, itself a record, but three. His accumulated parliamentary majorities104 were greater even than those of Margaret Thatcher, the other hat-tricker of modern times. A decade in Downing Street was rare. Just eight previous Prime Ministers in three centuries had occupied Number 10 for a double-digit stretch.105

  One positive dimension of the Blair era was its social liberalism. There was progress on female equality, gay rights and race. The police were made subject to race relations legislation. There were black faces around the Cabinet table for the first time, more female ones than ever before and gay ministers no longer had to pretend that they weren’t. As well as the age of consent being equalised and civil partnerships introduced, the ban on gays in the armed forces was ended. Matthew Parris, the Conservative commentator for The Times who was a savage critic of nearly everything else about Blair, acknowledged that ‘Britain is a nicer place than when he entered Downing Street. Something tolerant, something amiable, something humorous, some lightness of spirit in his own nature has marked his premiership and left its mark on British life.’106

  These shifts in the culture of Britain were accompanied by changes in its centre of political gravity. Despite his personal lack of enthusiasm for constitutional reform, he left behind permanent new democratic institutions in Belfast, Cardiff, Edinburgh and London. That was not matched by a reinvigoration of democracy in a deeper sense, a lacuna that was manifest in declining turn-outs at elections. He disappointed those who had been prepared to believe his early rhetoric about a new politics. His controlling and centralising impulses made the British state even more top-heavy. Distrust of government reached record highs, not least owing to the sleaze eruptions that punctuated his premiership from beginning to end. His instinctive authoritarianism and the lack of enthusiasm of nearly all his senior colleagues stopped him embracing electoral reform, the prerequisite for the permanent realignment of British politics that he had once seen as a goal for his premiership. The historic split between the labourist and liberal traditions of the British left was not healed. That kept the door open for a return of the Conservatives on a minority of the vote once they got themselves under sensible leadership.

  He was a lucky Prime Minister. Few of his predecessors at Number 10 had the good fortune to preside over a decade of continuous growth. That cushioned him when the public admiration of the early years soured into disillusion and hostility. Doubly fortunate, he left Number 10 just be
fore that unprecedented run of prosperity came to an end. The growth dividend was spent on generous investment in health and education which reversed years of neglect of the public realm. State-funded childcare was introduced alongside the minimum wage. There was considerable redistribution, mainly the work of his Chancellor, from the affluent to the poor. Tax and benefit changes since 1997 broadly raised the incomes of the poorest fifth of society by 12 per cent and reduced them for the richest tenth by about 5 per cent.107 This was not enough to entirely counteract the global forces which were stretching inequalities and the super-rich continued to pull away from everyone else. That was compounded by New Labour’s fear of ever confronting the power centres in the City, big business or the media. He left Britain wealthier and more diverse, but not much happier than he found it.

  While he was always ready to take on his own party, Blair’s default position when dealing with powerful external forces was to accommodate rather than challenge them. This flowed from his temperamental aversion to confrontation. He was weak when dealing with strong men, a flaw which was most apparent in the two most important relationships of his premiership. A less deferential attitude towards George Bush could have shaped a better outcome in Iraq. A more assertive approach to Gordon Brown would not have tolerated a Chancellor who so brazenly sabotaged some of the Prime Minister’s key ambitions.

  Blair’s actorly gifts for communication and reinvention combined with his deft ability to escape from tight corners were crucial elements of his remarkable resilience. It was an achievement extraordinary in itself to last ten years at Number 10 under the voracious scrutiny of a 24/7 media. It was even more of a feat when he had led his party into a hugely unpopular war on a prospectus that turned out to be false. He was repeatedly pronounced doomed and as routinely he somehow managed to shimmy to safety. From the death of Diana to 9/11 to 7/7, he always had an acute instinct for emotional leadership.