by Tom Bower
‘Call me Tony,’ said Blair as they sat on the sunlit terrace of Downing Street’s garden.
‘I shall call you Prime Minister,’ replied Guthrie.
Blair, who had avoided serving in the cadet force at school, was receptive to the blood-and-guts aura the general had acquired over his years of service, which included a tour as the SAS commander during a guerrilla war in Yemen. For his part, Guthrie understood the politician’s ambition to change the world. The Tories’ hesitation over intervening in the conflict in Bosnia, which had ended two years earlier after 200,000 deaths, or in Rwanda in 1994, where at least half a million were murdered, had aroused Blair’s anger. Under New Labour, explained the forty-four-year-old, Britain’s military power would be deployed to save mankind.
The men soon bonded over a mutual enjoyment of tennis and agreement about a newspaper article describing the Blair doctrine. ‘If good men do nothing,’ Blair had written, adapting Edmund Burke, ‘evil prospers.’ Neither Blair nor Guthrie anticipated how those seven words would transform British politics.
Guthrie had raced to London on 2 May to greet George Robertson, his new boss. Labour’s manifesto had pledged an exhaustive review of Britain’s military forces. Ever since the end of the cold war in 1989, successive Tory defence ministers had orchestrated incoherent policies, and the defence budget had been savagely cut, leaving the underfunded military floundering amid a ‘what-should-we-do?’ syndrome. Guthrie, like all the military chiefs, welcomed Labour’s commissioning of the first serious strategic review since 1990 to decide the purpose of Britain’s annual £21 billion military budget.
Unlike in previous reviews, Labour invited hundreds of experts to participate in an unprecedented roadshow aimed at conceiving the new ‘defence diplomacy’. Emphasising idealism rather than money, Blair abandoned Britain’s tradition of fighting wars only to protect the national interest. Instead of pursuing its policy of promoting peace, the country would in future wage war to improve the conditions of foreign people, even if there was no direct benefit to Britain.
At the outset of the review, the MoD was tasked with examining thirty scenarios that might redefine Britain’s global role. ‘Can you give me some guidance on the nature and scope of future military operations?’ Rear Admiral Nigel Essenhigh, a chief in the defence staff, asked Robertson.
‘That’s above my pay grade,’ replied the politician.
‘They haven’t thought about the political circumstances of committing Britain to war,’ realised Essenhigh.
Soon after this conversation, Blair’s resolve was tested. On 10 July, while he and Guthrie were discussing the review in Downing Street, a message was brought to the general on a silver platter.
‘What does it say?’ asked Blair.
‘Apparently the SAS have just killed a Serbian warlord,’ said Guthrie, describing an unplanned shoot-out while three fugitives were fishing. After aborting dozens of similar missions, Guthrie was pleased by the success, but Blair became agitated. Worried about the possibility of the deaths being declared unlawful, he ‘showed real fear’. The tension was relieved by Alastair Campbell. ‘We can turn this to our advantage. We can say, “Evil Srebrenica warlords killed.”’ Blair looked relieved. And so it came to pass. Disaster was averted, and reports duly described the Serbs as murderers who had opened fire first.
‘We must do this more often,’ Clare Short told Guthrie, pinning the general to the wall at the next Cabinet meeting.
‘Clare’s sound on killing people,’ Guthrie observed.
A day or two later, Blair asked Guthrie about the SAS entering Zimbabwe to deal with Robert Mugabe, who had threatened to seize all white-owned land without compensation and persecute the farmers. Guthrie demurred: ‘Without support in a land-locked country our men will all get eaten up.’ Logistics, explained the general, was the key to successful operations.
Blair nodded. ‘How about Angola?’ he asked. ‘We should stop the atrocities there.’
‘We could dispatch a few troops to help logistics at the port for a few weeks,’ suggested Guthrie.
Undeterred, Blair mentioned reports of another war: ‘I’m very worried about the massacres around the great lakes in the Congo.’
‘We’ve got nothing left except the Black Watch,’ Guthrie replied. ‘They’re seven hundred very fine men, but they can’t stop a war in an area the size of Europe.’
Agitated by Africa’s plight, which he would call ‘a moral scar on the conscience of the world’, Blair’s reliance on Guthrie did not stop his pushing for a ban on the use of anti-personnel mines, despite the army’s protests. But, in consolation, he sided with the military against the Foreign Office on another hotly debated issue.
‘We’ve been stitched up by Cook,’ protested Guthrie, after Robin Cook had agreed that British soldiers should be subject to the International Criminal Court rather than British justice. ‘I’m a simple soldier,’ he continued. ‘I just tell people the truth.’
Blair halted his ‘pompous’ foreign secretary’s scheme, and further vetoed Cook’s ‘ethical’ decision to ban arms sales to Indonesia and Saudi Arabia.
His other critic had also declared herself. ‘You don’t understand central Africa, Tony,’ said Clare Short from the end of the Cabinet table.
‘Well, thank you, Clare,’ replied Blair with a smile.
Those early exchanges provided little help to the officials grappling for a new purpose for the military. In previous generations, Whitehall officials brandishing PhDs would have rigorously scrutinised Blair’s ideas. But ever since the Tories had virtually eliminated that breed of expert from the Ministry of Defence, none of the chiefs was served by staff officers with the intellect to question the shift from fighting defensively in Germany against the Russians to a global commitment to impose liberal values. Whitehall’s defence specialists had heard about von Moltke and von Clausewitz, Germany’s famed military strategists, but, unlike the legions of academics employed by the Pentagon in Washington, few had actually studied the subject or read more than the basic military manuals. They were unable to examine the wisdom of Blair’s directive that the military would no longer sit in Dover waiting for the enemy but instead should be equipped to fight across the world in support of moral causes.
Not surprisingly, the ministry’s first draft was rejected as ‘wholly inadequate’ by Kevin Tebbit, a senior official in the Foreign Office who was about to become the director of GCHQ, the intelligence agency responsible for intercepting signals and cyber-traffic. ‘It’s been written by people who don’t know what’s needed,’ Tebbit told his colleagues. ‘I’ll write the foreign-policy framework myself.’
The problem was that for over sixty years the bulk of Britain’s military – its tanks and infantry – had been deployed with the aim of resisting a Soviet advance across West Germany. The British plan was to retreat towards the Atlantic until, at the last moment, nuclear weapons would be fired at Russia from submarines, and the world would be changed for ever. After the collapse of Soviet communism, that scenario was barely imaginable, but the mindset and education of Britain’s senior military officers had not evolved.
Blair envisaged Britain executing Cook’s ethical foreign policy from the Baltic to the Balkans and across the Middle East to the Indian subcontinent. Alternatively, to win universal praise he would seize the chance to repeat an operation similar to Thatcher’s Falklands victory. ‘Blair’s ideas’, noted Essenhigh, ‘filtered down by osmosis’ for Tebbit to turn into what Essenhigh would call ‘an elegant and commendably brief document’. Under the headline ‘Expeditionary Warfare’, Tebbit provided the blueprint for Blair’s foreign and defence policy. In ringing Blairite phrases, he described Britain’s armed services being speedily transported across the globe to engage in a ‘just war’ or to provide humanitarian relief as ‘a force for good’.
No one from Guthrie down questioned whether ‘a force for good’ was an intellectually coherent military strategy that matched Britain’s resourc
es or merely a bumper-sticker slogan, while no one in the Foreign Office or MoD asked whether Britain had sufficient money to pay for Blair’s ambitions. Rather, there was uniform relief that he was seeking to give the military a new purpose. With some joy, Guthrie began brokering between the three services, defence officials and the politicians to produce a shopping list of the equipment needed to realise Blair’s philosophy.
‘Expeditionary warfare’, Guthrie recorded, required new helicopters and vehicles for the army, new aircraft for the RAF and two new aircraft carriers for the navy. Despite being in supreme command, Guthrie decided not to oppose the navy’s demand for the carriers to land troops supported by aircraft. He suspected that the carriers’ estimated cost of £3.7 billion by the time of their anticipated launch in 2012 was deeply unrealistic. He also presumed that the protection of the carriers at sea would be beyond Britain’s capability, but accepted that the politics behind their creation was overwhelming. George Robertson was keen because the ships would be built in Scotland, while Blair never questioned whether spending an increasing amount on the navy at the army’s expense made sense. Experts predicted that the true cost for the carriers throughout their service would rise to over £50 billion, and in addition the navy would need to buy new aircraft. In those heady days, not everything made sense, but for the new prime minister Guthrie’s presence was reassuring.
That November, Blair wanted to publicise his commitment to rescuing the oppressed in Europe. Accompanied by Guthrie and Campbell, he flew with a group of journalists on a day trip to meet British troops in Bosnia. During his brief visit, he was enthused by the military’s support and discipline. They would provide the backbone to his ambition to lead Europe. On the return flight to London, fired by his foreign fame, Blair began briefing the journalists.
‘He doesn’t have a clue what he’s saying,’ an aide warned Campbell, as Blair stood near by.
‘Fuck off, Tony,’ snapped Campbell, pushing Blair aside. ‘Let Charles do this.’
Blair returned meekly to his seat. ‘Is that OK, Alastair?’ he asked, as Campbell thrust Guthrie forward to ‘exaggerate the military’s capabilities and disguise the problems on the ground’.
‘Now there’s a real politician,’ Cherie would say about Guthrie, unaware that, despite the general’s loyalty, he had voted Conservative in 1997.
The whirlwind of summit conferences soon after the election had encouraged Blair’s vainglory. Never before had he stood in the midst of such famous fans, with even Campbell looking on awestruck from the sidelines. Blair flew 25,000 miles in the first seven weeks, enjoying the congratulations of the elite club of fellow world leaders in Brussels, Amsterdam, Denver, Hong Kong and Madrid – topped by Bill Clinton telling him that Helmut Kohl had crowned him his natural heir as Europe’s leader.
Any doubts about his place in world affairs had been swept aside during the Amsterdam summit, as hundreds of cameras followed him as he coolly cycled past, waving to the German chancellor. Well prepared for the meeting, Blair had basked in his rivals’ tolerance of their differences and the media’s praise. The Europeans’ applause was loudest for his decision that Britain would sign the social chapter, a list of regulations to protect and enhance the rights of employees that the Tories had resisted. Despite the extra costs imposed on British businesses, Blair denied any contradiction between this and his constant enthusiasm for a more flexible labour market. His ambition, he confided to his aides, was to metamorphose from national politician to charismatic global statesman. ‘Believes that he was the big player who could take over the whole show,’ noted Campbell in his diary. ‘He loved this stuff.’
Over a three-hour private dinner at the Pont de la Tour restaurant by the Tower of London – chosen to headline the two Blairs bonding with the two Clintons – Blair swallowed his ‘older brother’s’ sermon about leading the new world. Tarnished in America by allegations of his harassment of women, Clinton spoke of Blair as his natural successor who would shape their new ‘progressive’ agenda across the world. Casting aside old alliances and ideologies, Blair’s ‘soulmate and political ally’ declared that the new prime minister should follow the trail he himself had blazed. Boosted by images and slogans of hope, their new politics would lead the world to ‘modernisation’ – that word again. Pertinently, in comparing Cherie Blair to Hillary Clinton, ‘the most reviled presidential spouse in the history of the United States’, Tim Hames in The Times wrote sympathetically that Cherie ‘is unlikely to endure such a fate … Try as her husband’s political opponents might, the mantle of dragon lady will not fit his wife. The public reaction here is more likely to be sympathy bordering on affection.’ During the honeymoon period, the infighting within Downing Street between Cherie and her husband’s closest confidants remained unknown to the public.
Shortly after, Blair flew by Concorde to Denver for a summit of the G8 heads, the elite of the elite. Warmly greeted by the leaders of China and Japan, and loudly cheered in a rodeo stadium, Blair mentioned to Jonathan Powell that the public adulation reinforced his wish of ‘wanting to make Britain count for something again’. He was the idealist who could ‘no longer ignore what happens in other countries, but would intervene to end human rights abuses’. In Moscow, Boris Yeltsin’s toast was ‘To a young energetic leader who is so popular in his country’.
‘The world needs our leadership,’ Blair convinced himself. The opinion polls showed Labour’s support up from 44 per cent at the election to 58 per cent, with no fewer than 72 per cent of those asked expressing their satisfaction with Blair. The balloon was momentarily deflated on 1 July during an uncomfortable ceremony marking the end of British rule in Hong Kong that had Blair standing in a monsoon downpour near the snivelling governor, Chris Patten, mourning the end of British rule, and Cherie, who was complaining about her sodden clothes. On top of that, the discussions with China’s leaders were disappointing.
Another dampener came at a summit in Luxembourg. Since Britain, according to its chancellor, was not joining the euro, Blair was excluded from discussions about the currency among Europe’s other leaders. Inevitably, Campbell would brief newspapers that Britain’s prime minister had scored a victory, leading to headlines such as ‘Blair Wins’, accompanied by Campbell’s concoction that Blair and Brown were a dream team. Brown was not pleased. ‘I have to tell you bluntly’, he told Campbell, ‘that this will be very bad if it’s seen as Tony succeeding where I have failed.’
Brown’s bigger problem erupted on 29 November. Chris Blackhurst, a respected journalist, reported in the Independent that the fortune of paymaster general Geoffrey Robinson was linked to a multimillion-pound secret offshore trust in Guernsey. Brown had repeatedly pledged sanctions against Britons who evaded tax by burying their millions in tax havens. In their conversations together, Robinson had been unapologetic about his undisclosed trust. He had reason to feel confident.
Just four weeks after the Ecclestone affair had subsided, Blair had bowed to Brown’s advice that neither of them could demand unvarnished honesty from their benefactor. Both hoped that Terry Burns, the permanent secretary at the Treasury, would lie to protect the paymaster. To their disappointment, Burns refused. While Robinson obfuscated, Blair nevertheless defended his man. ‘Geoffrey Robinson’, he told the Commons, ‘is an exceptionally able minister.’ Without asking for an investigation of Robinson’s finances, he added that it was not ‘remotely clear’ that his benefactor had avoided taxes. ‘He has probably paid more UK tax than either you or me,’ he taunted the Tories.
By Christmas, the row seemed to be over. Newspapers retreated under Robinson’s threats to sue for defamation. Polly Toynbee described him in the Guardian as ‘an honest man’; Campbell declared, ‘He is staying’; while Blair said, ‘I do not want a war with Gordon.’
Since the election, there had been no respite. After Christmas at Chequers and the anguish of seeing his father becoming speechless as a consequence of a stroke, an exhausted Blair flew with his family to the S
eychelles for a week’s holiday in a rented plantation lodge. On one evening beneath the palm trees, he was Richard Branson’s guest for a dinner prepared by the chef of the former Shah of Persia. From the beach, he issued a New Year’s message that Labour would ‘tackle the problems of poverty’. He returned on 5 January, saying, ‘We need a strategy for the party.’ He might have added, ‘And for its senior members.’ Three days later, while he was flying to Japan and writing a long memorandum to himself about education and welfare reform, Westminster was convulsed by the publication of a sympathetic biography of Brown by Paul Routledge.
The book’s sensational disclosure was that ‘Gordon Brown is convinced he could have beaten Tony Blair in a contest for Labour’s leadership and that the prime minister broke a secret pact between them.’ Routledge alleged that Blair had agreed before 1994 that Brown would be prime minister first, and only afterwards would it be Blair’s turn. Brown’s accusation of betrayal dominated the news. Blair called him from Tokyo. The chancellor repeated the denial he had already made in public: that he had not co-operated with Routledge. Unfortunately for him, his handwritten corrections were scattered across the copy of Routledge’s manuscript held by the publisher. ‘He’s a sad, sad man,’ Blair told Campbell. ‘He will never, ever get over it.’ He did not, however, publicly deny the story that day, although he would subsequently dismiss Brown’s version.
While Blair sat out the storm, news came that Margaret Cook had simultaneously published a book damning her adulterous husband Robin. ‘Do you realise’, Blair said to Campbell, ‘we are carrying the whole show, you, me, one or two others?’ Referring to Cook, he added, ‘I’m surrounded by these weak vessels who can bring the rest of us down.’ Amid the media furore, trivialising what journalist Simon Jenkins called ‘an intriguing guide to the chancellor’s dudgeons and grudge’, no one highlighted that Blair’s government was being sabotaged from within. To rectify that situation, Campbell summoned Andrew Rawnsley of the Observer. Referring to ‘someone who has an extremely good claim to know the mind of the prime minister’, Rawnsley was soon reporting that ‘It is time, in the words of the same person, for Mr Brown to get a grip on his psychological flaws.’ Naturally, when Campbell was asked about a split, he would deny ‘silly and counterproductive’ claims of a rift. A ponderous leader in The Times describing ‘a chastened chancellor’ made it clear that even the media was underestimating the battle. But the primed grenade had been thrown into the room. Now Blair and Campbell waited to see whether Brown would be silenced.