At 3 p.m., Number 10 was told that Harman and Straw would be coming over to Downing Street shortly to see the Prime Minister. According to a Cabinet minister who was fully informed about the coup: ‘this was when they were supposed to hand the pearly handled revolver to Gordon.’18 Hoon confirms: ‘That is exactly what was planned to happen.’ Both Harman and Straw had made ‘a firm commitment’ to tell Brown that he had to resign.19
This was not known to Brown, but he was instantly suspicious. When he was told that Harman and Straw were coming together, he asked: ‘What are those two up to?’20 It aroused his paranoia – absolutely justifiably in this case. ‘Gordon was rattled.’21 He considered summoning an emergency meeting of Labour MPs for that evening in order to mobilise his loyalists to intimidate ministers. Then he thought better of that idea for fear that it would look like he was panicking.22
Mid-afternoon, one leading agitator against Brown said: ‘If more than a hundred MPs back a ballot, then Gordon is dead.’23 That didn’t happen. Most Labour MPs were keeping their heads down, waiting to see what the Cabinet would do. Most of the Cabinet were lying low, waiting to see what other ministers and Labour MPs would do. Everyone wanted someone else to pull the trigger first. Only a smattering of backbenchers publicly supported the letter. The failure of previous coup attempts had made Labour MPs shy of openly joining this one. Some senior figures who wanted rid of Brown stayed quiet for the self-centred reason that they did not want to jeopardise their chances of receiving a post-election peerage. Others had concluded that it was simply too late and risky to try to depose him. The loyalists were noisier. Hoon was conducting television interviews in the Central Lobby of Parliament. As he did so, he was barracked by Brown supporters. ‘Disgraceful,’ hissed one Labour MP. ‘Loser!’ heckled another.
Before Straw and Harman went over to Number 10, they talked in her room at the Commons, where they were joined by Alan Johnson. That was a pretty irresistible combination, and more so when joined by Miliband, if they all resolved to tell Brown to resign. Johnson would not do it. He had concluded that to try to save some seats at the election by changing leader would be regarded with such cynicism by the voters that it might do more harm than good.24 Harman and Straw had earlier met the Parliamentary Labour Party committee and witnessed a vitriolic reaction to the Hoon– Hewitt letter from Brown loyalists. Straw, as he had before, recoiled from doing the deed. Shortly after his meeting with Harman and Johnson, the Justice Secretary spoke to Mark Davies, his senior aide, and said: ‘Regicide is not the answer.’25 Harman lost her nerve. According to a member of the Cabinet: ‘At the last minute, Harriet looked over the edge and decided she didn’t want to jump.’26
When they turned up to see Brown at Number 10, Straw came into the room wearing a long black coat and a wide-brimmed black hat. Brown later joked to aides that the Justice Secretary looked like the Grim Reaper. The Prime Minister was not aware that this was precisely the role Straw was supposed to have played. But he did not wield the scythe and neither did Harman. They did not tell the Prime Minister to resign for the sake of the party; they instead spent the meeting venting their grievances about how he was running the Government and afterwards had it briefed that he had given yet more promises of better behaviour.
Straw appeared on television in the early evening. He condemned the coup attempt and flatly denied he had anything to do with it. A watching Hoon was ‘utterly taken aback’.27 Loyalty statements finally began to trickle out. It was at 6.53 p.m., more than six hours after the letter had gone public, when the Foreign Secretary issued the lukewarm words: ‘I am working closely with the Prime Minister on foreign policy issues and support the re-election campaign for a Labour government that he is leading.’28 His contorted statement expressed Miliband’s inner angst. He felt he could not enthuse about Brown, not when so many people knew what he really thought about the Prime Minister, without looking hypocritical. Yet he could not move more boldly when there was little visible support for a dethronement, and Harman, Johnson and Straw wouldn’t act. Miliband would again face the accusation that he was a bottler; the truth is, they all were.
Gordon Brown was never going to heed pleas to depart voluntarily, as Jowell had discovered. ‘Gordon was like an old mafia boss,’ says one of his advisers. ‘The only way to get rid of him was to take him out.’29 The Cabinet were too scared to execute the hit. Hoon and Hewitt were left to swing in the wind: branded as treacherous by Brown loyalists, disowned by the ministers who had encouraged them, and berated for their ineptness by journalists. On Newsnight, Hoon was jeered at by Jeremy Paxman: ‘If you were Brutus, Caesar would have been fine, wouldn’t he?’30 Hoon and Hewitt, and their fellow conspirators in the Cabinet, had achieved the opposite of what they had intended. The leadership issue was settled once and for all: it was now certain that Brown would take them into the election.
A central characteristic of New Labour had been its appetite for power, the burning conviction that there is nothing to be said for the impotence of Opposition. Historians will ask why the party chose to go into an election with an atrociously unpopular leader with severe deficiencies as a communicator whom every senior colleague thought was taking them to an awful defeat. One explanation was the sheer incompetence of the regicides. All three attempted coups against Brown – in autumn 2008, spring 2009 and January 2010 – were botched. Key ministers did not organise with decisive ruthlessness from a mixture of cowardice, fear of a bloody split and a pessimistic assumption that defeat was unavoidable. ‘Alistair was fatalistic,’ says one close colleague about why Darling did not act. ‘He was resigned to the fact that we were going to go into the election with Gordon and resigned to defeat. He thought trying to remove Gordon would do more harm than good.’31 As for Straw, he felt: ‘It was just too late. We would look incredibly split if we deposed our leader four months before an election.’32
Mandelson had the power to mobilise the Cabinet to remove Brown. The weekend after the coup attempt, Mandelson even phoned Hoon to commiserate. ‘He basically called to say he rather regretted it hadn’t happened.’33 Mandelson had conflicting feelings. Blairite friends were angry with him for protecting Brown and he was uncomfortable knowing that ‘some people in the party felt that by bolstering Gordon’s position and keeping him in place, I contributed to our electoral defeat.’ He offered a variety of excuses. He later admitted: ‘One reason I did not take action was partly selfish: I did not want to be accused of “treachery” all over again.’ He was also doubtful that ‘a change of leadership could have been easily, bloodlessly or quickly achieved’.34 Asked around the time of the final coup attempt why he did not depose Brown, he privately offered a differently nuanced explanation: ‘I’m not sentimental about Gordon. You know me. I’m ruthless enough to do it. I would do it if I thought there was anyone better.’ Miliband’s agonising had led Mandelson to the conclusion that ‘David doesn’t have the lead in his pencil.’ As for Alan Johnson, the other potential replacement leader, Mandelson didn’t think he was up to it.35 Neither did the Home Secretary himself. At the height of the agitation against Brown the previous summer, Johnson had sat on the frontbench watching Brown at PMQs and thought to himself: ‘Christ, that could be me next week.’36 Johnson suffered from a paralysing lack of self-confidence. Brown clung on to the premiership for much the same reason that he had seized it in the first place: he always wanted it most. His party had neither the will to do the deed nor sufficient faith that any alternative would be better. Labour had succumbed to a fatalism that invited the defeat portended by the polls.
Gordon Brown was lifted. In the eyes of his staff, the Prime Minister’s confidence visibly improved now it was certain that he was not going to be dethroned before the election. He was further buoyed because the Tories were having a bad start to the New Year. For a few weeks, he enjoyed what one senior official considered to be ‘a bit of a golden period’.37
An opportunity to be prime ministerial was offered by Northern Ireland. On Monday, 25 J
anuary, he dashed across the Irish Sea. The power-sharing executive in Belfast was at risk of unravelling. That was a threat to the hard-won settlement. Dissident Republican terrorists remained a menace. Earlier in the month, they had exploded a bomb under the car of a young, recently married, Catholic, Irish-speaking police officer.
Two crises were feeding on each other. One was the long-burning dispute between the Unionists and Sinn Féin over the final phase of devolution: the transfer of responsibility for policing and justice to Belfast as envisaged in the St Andrews Agreement. Much of Unionist opinion was still not fully reconciled to sharing power with men like Martin McGuinness, the former IRA commander, and the Sinn Féin minister, Gerry Kelly, who had been convicted for the bombings of the Old Bailey and Scotland Yard in the 1970s. Unionists recoiled at allowing former terrorists to have a say over law and order.
The second crisis was the scandal which had exploded around Peter Robinson, who had succeeded Ian Paisley as leader of the DUP and First Minister. It was a juicy scandal by any standards and stunning to the most socially conservative and religious part of the UK. Iris Robinson, sixty years old and a prominent political actor in her own right, had had an affair with the son of a butcher who was nineteen at the time. She subsequently made an attempt on her own life. The steamy tale of the First Minister’s wife and her teenage lover was shocking enough to the Christian fundamentalists who were the bedrock of DUP support. It was compounded by allegations of cronyism, nepotism and financial impropriety. Iris Robinson quit all her political offices and was placed under psychiatric care. Her husband stood down as First Minister for six weeks to fight for his survival as head of the DUP. Sinn Féin threatened to collapse power-sharing if the Unionists did not come to terms on the devolution of justice.
Brown arrived at Hillsborough Castle to find that things were so bad between the parties that they ‘were not talking to each other’.38 He was joined by Brian Cowen, the Irish Taoiseach. The two leaders presided over three days of exhausting negotiations. They stayed up until 3 a.m. one night and to 5.30 a.m. the next. Brown and Cowen, who had established a relationship when they were both finance ministers, worked well together. On Wednesday, the Prime Minister claimed they had made ‘enormous progress’.39 At first, this looked hopelessly optimistic. As Brown returned to London, the province’s politicians were calling the talks a failure and trading recriminations about who was to blame.
The DUP sounded unyielding, but it was under enormous pressure to compromise when London and Dublin were agreed that it was time for the final act of devolution. Voters of all complexions in Northern Ireland did not want to see a collapse of the Assembly, now regarded as a valuable bulwark against a return to the Troubles. In the estimation of Stewart Wood, the Prime Minister’s senior adviser on Northern Ireland, Sinn Féin was ‘incredibly patient’ while Robinson ‘played a blinder’ in bringing round his hardliners.40 As had often been the case in Northern Ireland, it took a crisis to catalyse progress. One Irish diplomat observes: ‘In a funny sort of way, the scandal helped. Robinson needed to show he could still make things happen.’41 The Unionists were warned that the fall of the executive would be followed by snap elections for the Assembly. That scared them with the prospect that Presbyterian voters would punish them for the Iris Robinson scandal. ‘The nightmare for the Unionists was that, if there were elections, their vote would split and Sinn Féin could become the biggest party and get the position of First Minister.’42
At shortly before midnight on Thursday, 4 February, the DUP leader came out of the decisive meeting of his party to phone Shaun Woodward, the Northern Ireland Secretary. The news was positive: they had a deal. Brown returned to Belfast on Friday to set the seal on the agreement. It was made easier for Unionists to swallow by giving them concessions on the issue of Orange parades. Another incentive was money, always a lubricant in Northern Ireland. Westminster would provide £800 million for security and the White House helped by promising new investment from the US.
For once, Brown had some positive news to announce, and he was palpably grateful. Calling the day ‘momentous’, he declared: ‘This is the last chapter of a long and troubled story and the beginning of a new chapter after decades of violence, years of talks, weeks of stalemate.’43 This agreement was a coda to the labours for peace of his predecessor, but it was understandable that Brown hoped to earn his own ‘Good Friday moment’.
At 7.30 a.m. on Friday, 29 January, a two-vehicle motorcade swept up to the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre in Westminster and conveyed its passenger to the side entrance. Arriving a full two hours before he was due to give evidence, witness number 69 used the cover of pre-dawn darkness to cheat the demonstrators at the front with their placards calling for the prosecution of ‘Westminster War Criminals’, their T-shirts with the legend ‘Jail Tony’ and their chant: ‘Blair lied! Thousands died!’
It was partly to avoid such hostility that Tony Blair now spent little time in Britain. He had even made a point in interviews of saying that he was rarely resident in the Connaught Square mansion or the £5.75 million country home in Buckinghamshire that he and Cherie had purchased as a facsimile of Chequers. He preferred to fly the world in private jets and first class cabins. He felt he was accorded much more respect abroad than he received in his home country. Foreign audiences were also willing to pay up to £200,000 for the privilege of listening to him speak. These fees helped to pay the wage bill of the more than a hundred people who worked for Blair. He would sometimes boast that he had more staff now than he had had at Number 10.
Recently, though, he had been compelled to spend time in Britain so that he could re-immerse himself in all his arguments justifying the Iraq war. An inquiry into the conflict had been pledged by Gordon Brown when he first took over as Prime Minister. He thought then that this would be a cost-free device to disassociate himself from his predecessor. Brown had finally made good on that promise in the summer of 2009 when his premiership was imperilled and he was desperate to appease Labour MPs. To internal critics, this was another example of Brown making a gesture in a panic to save his own skin at the expense of Labour’s wider interests. The inquiry threatened to reopen the wounds of Iraq in the run-up to the election. Blair privately complained that it would turn into ‘a show trial’ of himself. On his behalf, Jonathan Powell ‘passed the message’ to Sir Gus O’Donnell that the inquiry ‘should be private’ and conducted ‘Franks-style’: held behind closed doors as was Lord Franks’s investigation of the Falklands War. Blair himself later directly contacted Brown to argue the same.44 When it was announced that it would not be a public inquiry, there was an uproar. Protests came not just from the media and opponents of the war, but also from former senior civil servants and generals.45 In less than twenty-four hours, Brown had done a U-turn and his briefers then sought to suggest it was all his predecessor’s fault. Powell comments acidly: ‘You take a decision. Then reverse yourself and blame someone else. Straight from the Gordon playbook.’46
Sir John Chilcot, a former Permanent Secretary who had previously been entrusted by the Government with a series of harmless reviews, was appointed chairman. Usha Prashar, a peeress known as the ‘Quango Queen’, was recruited to the inquiry along with Sir Roderic Lyne, a former ambassador in Moscow. The panel was completed by two historians, Sir Lawrence Freedman and Sir Martin Gilbert. This quintet of establishment worthies lacked cutting edge. This was not so much because they were sycophants to power, but because they often demonstrated an absence of the forensic skills required to extract the truth from witnesses. Yet the inquiry still made an impact. The parade of senior figures being asked to justify the decisions they took generated prolonged and sometimes intense media coverage. The difference between this inquiry and the earlier ones by Butler, Hutton and parliamentary committees was that then the officials and politicians broadly stuck together. Now the daggers were out, most of them pointed in the direction of Blair. There was considerable confirmatory testimony that he had secretly commi
tted himself to regime change a full year before the invasion; that he had ignored the weight of advice that a war would be illegal without a second UN resolution; that he had committed British forces heedless of warnings that the intelligence was not sound; and that the Allies were stunningly ill-prepared for the aftermath.47
Blair looked taut when he took his seat before the panel. His hands trembled a little when he opened a bottle of water and then fluttered over the lever arch files of documents that he had brought with him. In preparation for his testimony, he had ‘read files and files and files of stuff about Iraq’.48 His nerves settled and soon the most consummate performer of his era was into his stride. He expressed again the evangelical certainties that had led Britain to war in the first place. He yielded no substantial ground on why he sent British troops into Iraq to disarm Saddam Hussein of weapons that did not exist. The panel had access to the 125 files containing classified documents about Iraq held in a strongroom in Admiralty Arch. Sir Roderic, the former man in Moscow who had a dry line in disdain, had earlier remarked that the panel were ‘struggling’ to find any evidence in those files to support Blair’s pre-war claim that Saddam was such a ‘current and serious threat’ that it justified an invasion.49 Confronted with the fact that his own officials had warned him that the intelligence was ‘sporadic, limited and patchy’, Blair defiantly insisted that he had been right when he wrongly told his country that Saddam possessed an ‘active, detailed and growing’ WMD programme. ‘What I said in the foreword [to the dossier] was that I believed it was beyond doubt. I did believe it, frankly, beyond doubt.’
Yet at another point in the hearing he said something significantly different. ‘The calculus of risk’ had been changed by 9/11. ‘It wasn’t that objectively he [Saddam] had done more. It was that our perception of the risk had shifted.’ This was much closer to the truth.
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