Cabinet's Finest Hour

by Owen, David;

  An article in Management Today in 2005 saw Blair wanting to act like a chief executive: “fast on his feet, flexible in his thinking and able to make quick decisions, often taken on the hoof, in shirtsleeves, on the sofa, caffé latte in one hand, mobile phone in the other, running Great Britain plc as if it were a City investment company”. But the role of Prime Minister is not that of a chief executive and the UK Government is not a company making profits for shareholders.

  While Thatcher had sought to accrete more power in No. 10, she worked within the existing Cabinet structures to do so. She made considerable use of a personal foreign affairs adviser, Charles Powell, then a serving diplomat, but the Cabinet Secretary remained a powerful and independent figure. By contrast, Blair decided on a formalised and progressive destruction of the Cabinet system. Immediately on taking office he appointed a political Chief of Staff, Jonathan Powell. Exceptionally, both Blair’s press secretary, Alastair Campbell, and Jonathan Powell were granted the powers of civil servants. This was a novel, far-reaching and ultimately disastrous change; a practice that should now be examined in light of the lessons learnt and arguably banned by the Civil Service Commission. Both Campbell and Powell progressively undermined the authority of the Cabinet Secretary and the new power structure undermined collective Cabinet responsibility. This was noted by Bernard Donoughue, Head of the Policy Unit in No. 10 under Harold Wilson and close advisor to James Callaghan, as early as 13 November 1997: “Met Jack (Cunningham) back from Cabinet and he said nothing of importance now happens there, quite different from 20 years ago. All policy decisions taken by Blair and Brown outside the Cabinet.”9

  In 2001, after winning the general election, Blair, with no prior parliamentary examination or scrutiny, changed the whole basis of Cabinet government as it had historically related to matters of foreign and defence policy. A Cabinet Office system which had evolved during the First World War was swept aside without a single serious objective study – no Green paper, no White paper, no Select Committee scrutiny. This was not modernisation but a hubristic act of vandalism for which, as Prime Minister, Blair alone bears responsibility. Shockingly there was little public or parliamentary recognition of the importance and significance of these changes.10 If we are to learn from the mistakes that were made we need to examine how such changes could have been introduced without any parliamentary authority. This new structure was designed deliberately to ensure Blair could exercise similar powers to those of a US President over international policy. The Cabinet Office method of handling foreign and security matters had, until then, been designed to serve the Cabinet as a whole. From the summer of 2001 onwards, the key officials and their staff on foreign affairs, defence and the European Union were brought into the political hothouse atmosphere of 10 Downing Street in two new secretariats.11 There they still remain, not serving the Cabinet.

  The two diplomats chosen were David Manning, to deal with foreign affairs, like Iraq, and Stephen Wall, dealing with the European Union. Both exceptionally able but now untethered from departmental control, whether from ministers or Permanent Secretaries. One of the arguments used for this development was related to the UK’s membership of the EU – the number of Presidents who attended meetings of the Heads of Government meant it was claimed as inevitable that No. 10 should develop this new structure. In 2016 the UK, having voted to leave the EU, it is a good time to reconsider Presidential Prime Ministerships and revert under Theresa May to a Cabinet Office structure which for a century served us well. It would be a welcome sign we were bringing back democratic control of our country.

  A few months after these two secretariats were in place in No. 10 the new structure provided Blair with the means to project his very personalised response to 9/11. This directly and inexcusably led to the disastrous handling of the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq chronicled in the Iraq Inquiry. With few, if any, departmental papers circulated for debate, the War Cabinet system was bypassed in favour of informal agreement. The last time this was done so comprehensively was by Lloyd George after the Paris Peace Treaty until he was toppled by the 1922 Committee.

  Blair was obsessed by presentation and needed to put himself visibly at the centre of events. This had already become evident when a private memo he wrote to his staff in 2000 was leaked. In it he urged them to search around for “two or three eye-catching initiatives … I should be personally associated with as much of this as possible”.12 The biographer of another inexperienced Labour Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald, wrote of Blair’s ten years in office:

  The true origin of his tragedy lies in an intellectual deformation that is becoming more and more prevalent in our increasingly paltry public culture. The best word for it is ‘presentism’ … His fascination with fashionable glitz, his crass talk of a ‘New Britain’ and a ‘Young Country’ and his disdain for the wisdom of experts who had learned the lessons of the past better than he had were all part of the deadly syndrome.13

  The world after 9/11 provided Blair with endless opportunities for such eye-catching initiatives as he indulged in considerable posturing and pursued a frenetic schedule. He held fifty-four meetings with foreign leaders, and travelled more than 40,000 miles on some thirty-one separate flights.

  The British press were encouraged by No. 10, with its new foreign affairs and defence secretariats, to exaggerate the extent of the UK’s early involvement in Afghanistan. The UK launched a few cruise missiles and made a contribution from its SAS. The attack was, however, first and foremost an American operation. Yet to reinforce the impression of his own central role, Blair flew into Kabul in early January 2002, just eight weeks after the Taliban-controlled capital had fallen to the Northern Alliance.

  By now there was little pretence but that British foreign policy was being run from 10 Downing Street, with the Foreign Office and Defence Ministry increasingly sidelined. The British Ambassador in Washington, Christopher Meyer, recorded this: “Between 9/11 and the day I retired at the end of February 2003, I had not a single substantive policy discussion on the secure phone with the Foreign Office. This was in contrast to many contacts and discussion with No. 10.”14

  The truth is the UK did not have to go to war in Iraq. Donald Rumsfeld made it very clear at a late stage that the United States was willing to go into Iraq alone, without the British. President Bush also offered to ease the way for any decision to not involve British troops in the invasion. Harold Wilson when Prime Minister had faced a similar choice on whether to contribute British forces to the Vietnam War. He chose not to, believing he would not have sufficient influence on the handling of that war because of President Johnson’s nature. In December 1964 President Johnson wanted Wilson to send the Black Watch, a Scottish regiment, to Vietnam, for primarily presentational purposes. He revealed that to be his underlying attitude by actually saying to Wilson that even a few pipers would be better than nothing! Nevertheless, apart from measured criticism in a speech in the White House in February 1968, Wilson supported an American presence in Vietnam and knowingly risked the jibe that he was “the tail-end Charlie in an American bomber”.15

  No British Prime Minister in wartime, not Asquith, Lloyd George, Churchill or even Eden, let alone Major on the first invasion of Iraq, made strategic decisions as Blair did over Iraq, personally and without systematically involving senior Cabinet colleagues. There are important safeguards in the pre-circulation of strategy papers. It ensures the views of military commanders and key diplomats in the field are made known. There are considerable advantages to the Cabinet making collective decisions and a smaller group of ministers reporting regularly to the full Cabinet. This was the way Margaret Thatcher conducted the Falklands War in 1982, with a War Cabinet, and the way John Major took decisions over the Gulf War in 1991. It was not the way in which the Iraq War was conducted by Blair.

  The Iraq Inquiry chaired by Sir John Chilcot was published in July 2016. Commonly referred to as the Chilcot Report, it provides both a history and a forensic analysis of the Iraq Wa
r. The Report considers there should have been collective decisions made on eleven specific occasions before the invasion.16 But the full Cabinet was never properly informed, in effect acting only to rubber stamp decisions that Blair and a small coterie of selected colleagues and advisers had already taken in often unminuted meetings in No. 10 on strategic policy. What was even more unusual was that a somewhat similar procedure was operating out of 11 Downing Street, home of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, for many of Gordon Brown’s decisions on economic policy. This ‘dual President’ arrangement, meekly accepted by the British Cabinet from 1997 but most markedly after the 2001 general election, meant that the Cabinet was comprehensively bypassed throughout Blair’s premiership.

  The deplorable decision-making of the Blair Government over Baghdad in the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq is chronicled in some detail in the Executive Summary of the inquiry’s published findings, on pages 88 and 89. A more detailed account of the failure to move British troops from Basra to Baghdad can be read in the chapter on ‘Bush, Blair and the War in Iraq’ in my book In Sickness and in Power. Blair should have made a military deployment that would have impacted politically in Washington.17

  The House of Commons should concentrate on Tony Blair’s written statement issued on 6 July 2016 when the Chilcot Report was published. It cannot be left unchallenged. Defiance is the only way to describe his words: “If I was back in the same place with the same information I would take the same decision.” A leading article in The Times published the following day charges that we went to war

  on the basis of intelligence on weapons of mass destruction that remained privy to the Prime Minister and his closest aides but which he insisted, in private as well as public, was incontrovertible. It was anything but. Still defiant 13 years on, Mr Blair insisted in a written statement that the Chilcot report alleged “no falsification or improper use of intelligence”. In fact the report states that the intelligence “was not challenged and should have been”. Many will conclude that amounts to improper use.18

  It is for Parliament now to consider whether Blair’s continued defiance brings Parliament into disrepute. In my view it does. The use Blair made of the available intelligence, quoting it inaccurately and ignoring caveats and concerns, should now be scrutinised carefully with a view to using the contempt procedure. The trouble is that MPs are, or many feel they are, complicit. They do not wish to appear to be scapegoating. So it may be that, in a dereliction of duty by MPs, it will be left to the civil courts to determine whether to hear a case from civil society. It seems fairly certain that the relatives of troops killed or injured in the Iraq War will assert that Blair committed ‘misfeasance in public office’ and the Report provides a saga of hubristic incompetence and levels of ignorance that will back such a charge up.

  As long ago as February 1906 Lord Sanderson, just retired as the senior diplomat in charge of the Foreign Office, wrote an internal memorandum that touched on impeachment in circumstances with many parallels to those of almost a century later. Describing his call on the French Ambassador M. Chabon, which he had undertaken on the instructions of the Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey, and having with him Grey’s own account of the meeting the previous day, Sanderson wrote:

  …as I was no longer an official, I might speak to him quite freely … on my own personal views … I told him that I thought that if the Cabinet were to give a pledge which would morally bind the country to go to war in certain circumstances, and were not to mention this pledge to Parliament, and if at the expiration of some months the country suddenly found itself pledged to war in consequences of this assurance, the case would be one which would justify impeachment, and which might even result in that course unless at the time the feeling of the country were very strongly in favour of the course to which the Government was pledged.

  On the face of it Tony Blair committed an impeachable offence in 2002 in his letter to President Bush of 28 July. He wrote “I will be with you, whatever.” That both David Manning and Jonathan Powell advised him not to use those words showed they shared some of Sanderson’s caution. It was only eight days after this expression of support from Blair to President Bush that the path to invasion had been set, if not in concrete terms at least in the minds of the key decision-makers in Washington and London. It can never have been constitutionally legitimate to exclude from meetings held before the Prime Minister wrote that note, not only the deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott, but also Lord Irvine of Lairg, the Lord Chancellor, and even perhaps the Home Secretary. A War Cabinet of six senior Cabinet ministers, the same number on which Churchill relied in May 1940, could easily have been formed and would have allowed Blair to exclude his Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, whom he already did not trust.

  Other occasions, too, were identified by Chilcot in the investigations of important messages written or said to President Bush. In October 2015, a revealing cache of emails held on a private server belonging to Hillary Clinton, the former US Secretary of State, were released on orders from the US courts. One of them was written by Colin Powell, then US Secretary of State, in March 2002 to President Bush. Chilcot could not have expected this internal US document to have been available to him; he was promised only access to all UK documents, along with summaries of meetings and telephone conversations. The document is therefore both an unexpected and crucially important insight into Blair’s commitment as early as April 2002. Headed ‘Subject: Your meeting with United Kingdom Prime Minister Tony Blair, April 5–7 at Crawford’ the key paragraph was the first:

  Blair continues to stand by you and the US as we move forward on the war on terrorism and on Iraq. He will present to you the strategic, tactical and public affairs lines that he believes will strengthen global support for our common cause.

  Whilst Tony Blair was right to put the decision to go to war in Iraq to the House of Commons in 2003, it was his conduct prior to that debate that showed he was oblivious to, or never knew about, the non-disclosure to the Cabinet of the Military conversations between Britain and France between 1906 and 1911. Had he known this history he might have thought twice about failing to impart necessary information to Cabinet about his commitment to Bush in 2002 or his failure to create an official War Cabinet. Instead he relied on ad hoc Cabinet meetings with no constitutional authority – their limitations clearly exposed by the way in which he went ahead regardless of the considerable reservations expressed by both Jack Straw and Geoff Hoon – and rarely any departmental papers. Whitehall stood by impotently.

  The failures of intelligence prior to the invasion were made clear in the Butler Report of July 2004. Blair was apparently surprised that its conclusions were not more damaging, as were many others, but it was he who had deliberately limited its terms of reference. A former, loyal Cabinet colleague of Blair’s sat on the inquiry’s committee and Lord Butler, as chair, knew any criticism would have to be deftly drafted. Nevertheless the Butler Report, unusually, went beyond its remit into the area of intelligence failings before the war and commented on the nature of Blair’s decision-making process. It singled out for criticism Blair’s personalised sofa-style way of making key decisions, stating “We are concerned that the informality and circumscribed character of the Government’s procedures … risks reducing the scope for informed collective political judgement.” The language of Whitehall concealed what a damning criticism that was. But the Blair spin machine swiftly defused the Report. The question Butler apparently most dreaded at his press conference was whether the Prime Minister should resign but the press and TV commentators never asked. Yet strangely much later in 2007 in the House of Lords I watched as Butler read out from a prepared passage the word “disingenuous” about what Blair had said to Parliament on the intelligence available to him, but never used that word in 2016.19

  The most alarming circumstance of the first part of the 21st century is the way British Prime Ministers have started to assume some of the powers of a President, particularly those of a US Preside
nt. This trend was checked in the debate on 29 August 2013 after which David Cameron became the first Prime Minister in 150 years to lose a vote in the House of Commons on an issue of military deployment. Along with the Chilcot Report, it is hoped this will prove a watershed moment in which Parliament is seen to reassert its authority. That vote, against bombing President Assad’s forces in Syria without UN legal authority, may have done much to halt the growth of an imperial premiership. Perhaps the decision was to some extent inadvertent but the vote happened, and it needed to happen.20

  The traditional right of the UK Prime Minister to declare war will never be the same again. It has become, in effect, a qualified power. There is now a political imperative to involve Parliament wherever possible. There will be democratic debate and in all but the most urgent and dire circumstances Parliament must vote before the UK goes to war. That is a major curtailment of the imperial premiership model. On the 24 June 2016, having promised to implement an EU referendum decision to leave, David Cameron publicly announced that he was going to cease to be Prime Minister as soon as the Conservative Party could elect a new leader. This was a contemptuous act which might have had bad effects on economic confidence had not Andrea Leadsom withdrawn from the leadership race, allowing Theresa May to become Prime Minister without nine weeks’ constituency campaigning. Many of Cameron’s dire economic predictions following Brexit did not happen but more might have done if such a drawn out leadership campaign had been allowed to take place. What has shocked people is the realisation that the Conservative Cabinet coalition undertook no comparable assessment of the economic modelling of leaving the EU before Cameron took the decision, at the end of 2013, that there would be an in-out referendum if he won an outright victory in the general election in 2015. Nor when he then won an outright victory was any Cabinet economic assessment made prior to the legislation for a referendum being carried through Parliament. A consequence of the bypassing of government studies of the economic impact of leaving the EU meant the referendum campaign was shriller than it need have been and the high watermark for referenda has passed. Personally I would doubt there will be any further referenda on such controversial political and constitutional issues, for a few decades at least.