by Tom Bower
Shortly after the first presentation began, he apologised and departed. ‘We were left talking amongst ourselves,’ said Sikora, ‘and two hours later we’re back on the street. We thought this was silly … It was clearly orchestrated hype and there was nothing at the end to show for it.’ Cancer survival in the UK was worse than in Estonia. Blair omitted mentioning Dobson’s decision to abandon the Tory scheme targeting cancer. The White Paper was quickly forgotten, and cancer treatment did not improve.
Centralised commands and collaboration were evidently not working. Blair expected Alan Langlands to resolve the problem. One morning, he summoned the chief executive to meet Bill Gates.
‘Bill can make the NHS paperless in five years,’ Blair said.
‘How can I help?’ asked Langlands, bemused by the prime minister’s credulity. After a pointless exchange, Langlands departed.
The next day, he met Blair after a meeting chaired by John Prescott to discuss seventy-seven NHS targets. ‘All this is nonsense,’ Langlands had exclaimed during the meeting. ‘The NHS is too complex for this.’ The meeting had ended in disarray. Blair gave a wry smile. ‘I hear that David Sainsbury saved you,’ he said, implying that the official’s job depended on the support of one junior minister, albeit one of the party’s wealthier benefactors.
‘The current system’s broken,’ said Langlands. ‘There needs to be another way.’
Raising his eyes, Blair agreed that ‘There are too many targets,’ but as so often he offered no solution.
Langlands subsequently told a conference of NHS accountants, ‘Blair, Brown and Dobson could not agree what to do.’
Those three politicians were united in ignoring one reality: the majority of Britain’s mentally ill and elderly citizens had been placed under the good care of the private sector, while some patients in NHS institutions were complaining about abuse. Private care did not necessarily mean exploitation. The market was producing the best health care for the richest members of British society for approximately the same cost as the NHS, so why should the private sector not provide a similar service for the poorest? Labour’s stock answer was that fragmentation would fatally undermine the NHS, but by July Blair’s dissatisfaction with Dobson overrode that ideological riposte. To protect the sacred principle that health treatment should be free, he once again considered the NHS partnering with the private sector. ‘I’ve got the feeling’, Dobson told a trade union leader, ‘that Tony is in favour of a mixed economy in health care, but I’m not sure.’
Nor was Blair. Already under fire from the British Medical Association for conjuring gimmicks rather than funding improvements, in mid-1999 he was lambasted for waiting lists that had again risen above the 1997 level. Blaming the Tories was one option, but it did not explain why the extra billions of pounds were making no difference.
The authority of the premiership, Blair persuaded himself, was illusory. Taxpayers’ money was being poured into health and education, laws were being passed and there were speeches explaining the new world, and yet real influence clearly lay somewhere else. ‘A new prime minister’, wrote Jonathan Powell, ‘pulls on the levers of power and nothing happens. That feeling of powerlessness goes on. The centre of government is not too powerful but too weak.’
Blair’s anger with Richard Wilson’s breed exploded when he addressed a group of venture capitalists on 6 July. ‘You try getting change in the public sector and public services,’ he told his audience. ‘I bear the scars on my back after two years of government.’
‘Scars’ dominated the next day’s media. In a noisy world, the prophet was thrilled by the headlines, despite the evidence being so thin. He was comfortable with humiliating civil servants. The staff in Downing Street were less excited. Some feared he had alienated too many public employees and politicised the NHS just as the country’s health authorities were being increasingly run by Labour supporters (in 1998, Labour had appointed 288 party activists and forty-nine Conservatives). Blair dismissed their criticism. He needed to redefine The Project, he said, with 1997 set as year zero.
‘Just think,’ Langlands told Blair soon after the ‘scars’ speech, ‘who are the people who work in the NHS? Ideologically, they must be those who support the NHS. You’ve just demoralised a million people.’ Blair did not reply. In his opinion, he had identified a convenient enemy.
Some in the party were unconvinced. ‘The speech wasn’t true,’ said Tom McNulty, a Labour MP. ‘He just wanted a good line. So he set up a straw man, a bogey. Foolishly, he alienated the public-sector workers. His speeches were substitutes for action.’ Only later would Blair confess, ‘I knew nothing about how tough it really was, nothing about how government really works.’
Too many of his ministers were making ‘a mess’. On the eve of leaving for his summer holidays, he decided on a reshuffle. John Prescott was mismanaging transport but, as deputy prime minister and Labour stalwart, he was untouchable. A raft of more junior ministers would be fired, but that still left Dobson, Beckett, Cook and others.
On 28 July, Blair sat with Jonathan Powell, Anji Hunter, Alastair Campbell, Richard Wilson, Sally Morgan, Downing Street’s political director, and David Miliband, a special adviser.
‘The chancellor has his tanks parked on your lawn,’ said Wilson, surprised by Blair’s unwillingness to reduce Brown’s influence.
‘I know,’ replied Blair. ‘I want to appoint my people but I’m not spoiled for choice. There’s so little talent.’ Even his few good ministers were struggling. Each person in Blair’s office was given a sheet of paper. On the left was the department and the existing minister; the right side was blank. By the end of the session, the pack had been reshuffled and a few deadbeats removed. Blair departed for his holiday feeling depressed. He seemed unaware that the only unqualified loyalists supporting his government were those he most disparaged – the civil servants.
TEN
Frustration
* * *
‘You need to dismiss bad teachers,’ Chris Woodhead said firmly. He was urging Blair to cross the Rubicon and support him against David Blunkett, Michael Barber and Michael Bichard. ‘You must confront the poverty of expectations in the classrooms and the abysmally low performance of schools. Choice is essential. Bad schools should be allowed to go to the wall.’
‘Absolutely,’ replied Blair.
Bichard gave the opposite view. ‘People want quality, not choice.’
‘Yes,’ replied Blair.
Choice was only possible, Bichard continued, if there was spare capacity – and spare capacity meant a waste of resources.
Woodhead despaired. Blair was facing every possible way, looking for excuses to avoid the bottom-up battle, classroom by classroom, school by school. Although Blair spoke about addressing parents’ concerns, not only did he refuse to dismiss bad teachers, close bad schools or neutralise the LEAs, but he had agreed that disruptive pupils should not be expelled from classrooms, bowing to the new Social Exclusion Unit’s demand that troublemakers should be protected. In Woodhead’s opinion, Blair flinched from an outright battle both with the trade unions and with the educational establishment.
In reply, Blair denied cowardice. Success, he said, would be delivered by persuasion. The eighteen task forces established by the Social Exclusion Unit mirrored his conviction that poverty and other social disadvantages like debt, addiction, mental ill health and bad housing caused poorly educated children, not bad teachers. Reflecting his confusion, Blair also agreed with his senior education officials that ‘great’ head teachers should be supported by removing bad teachers.
His inconsistency was repeated in his annual speech to Labour’s new National College for Teaching and Leadership. He urged his audience to improve teaching by using his party’s new performance assessments, an initiative that allowed head teachers to reward good teachers with bonuses and sack bad teachers. His hopes would be dashed. During 1999, no teacher lost their job and most were paid a bonus. Annual salaries would increase by 6.6 pe
r cent. Blair fell back on his only weapons to cure underperforming schools: Blunkett’s directives and Barber’s targets.
He still wanted to tinker. ‘Should we do more phonics?’ he asked Barber at a meeting also attended by Bichard and Blunkett in which he mentioned the success of phonics in teaching reading in Scotland.
‘No,’ said Barber.
‘It’s not right to force schools,’ agreed Blunkett, deferring to Barber.
Bichard also agreed, favouring the so-called ‘Trendy Wendy’ methods. Although the former director of the benefits agency lacked expertise in children’s learning processes, he recognised Blair’s detachment about phonics. ‘We all know so little about how to expedite learning,’ he said. Blair did not disagree.
‘I think you should challenge teachers to use phonics,’ countered Woodhead, angered by their complacency.
‘They assumed’, he would recall, ‘that everything was perfect and they just needed to bang on a bit longer.’ The chief inspector of schools’ persistence irritated Blair. With a hectic schedule, classroom activities distracted him from making headlines about hitting targets. The others, Blair knew, wanted the intransigent Woodhead dismissed. He expected the tough-talking Blunkett to solve the fallout.
The tension increased after an argument about A-levels. With Blair’s agreement, Barber and Bichard had made these exams easier. Studying for them, Barber and Bichard believed, should be a pleasure. Children should not be limited to ‘just one chance and then you’re out’. Modules had been introduced to replace one-time examinations, and schoolchildren could endlessly retake these new forms of examination to improve their marks.
‘You need to release children’s potential,’ Bichard told the chief inspector. In his view, Woodhead did not want education to be enjoyable, but to his distress Blair failed to recognise that he, Bichard, was not an educationalist but a polemicist preaching equality.
‘So you want every child to do a bit of an A-level?’ Woodhead asked the prime minister. Blair’s engaging smile concealed his confusion. His mantra was ‘standards, not structures’, but by supporting Bichard he was pursuing the opposite.
Unexpectedly, Blunkett was also critical of Blair. ‘It’s no use’, he told Bichard, ‘to keep on hitting my head against a brick wall.’ They argued about structures and what happened in classrooms. ‘Tony wanted speedy results and relied on centralisation and directives,’ Blunkett observed. ‘As a teacher, I wanted to rely on improving teachers’ skills and leadership.’
Blair’s mixed messages were compounded by the fact that his two sons attended the London Oratory. In 1999, John McIntosh, the school’s head teacher, asked the parents of his 1,340 pupils to donate £30 a month for the ‘extras’ because Blunkett had cancelled the additional money paid to schools that enjoyed grant-maintained status. Like all England’s 1,198 grant-maintained schools, wrote McIntosh, the Oratory’s unique achievements in music and other activities were ‘in jeopardy’. Blair paid the money to solve a problem he had created. More directly, to avoid a battle with the Left, he agreed with Andrew Adonis, his education adviser, that new grant-maintained schools should be created, labelled as academies and given extra money and more independence. The Tories dismissed Adonis’s ‘invention’ as simply a rebranding of their city technology colleges, introduced in 1988. Once again, Blair was tinkering with structures.
One day, he agreed to Blunkett’s suggestion that failing schools in Bradford and Rochdale, if they were to survive, should be transferred to the private sector, and soon after agreed that the seventy-three schools branded as Education Action Zones should be abandoned as not worth saving. Despite financial support, educational standards in the EAZs had not improved and truancy remained ‘disturbingly high’. EAZs were replaced by ‘beacon schools’ – another of Blunkett’s gambits – to spread the standards of the best schools around a locality. ‘Blair’s taken in by Blunkett’s and Barber’s whacky initiatives,’ complained Woodhead. ‘Some men’, he said, quoting Max Beerbohm, ‘are born to lift heavy weights and some are born to juggle golden balls. Blunkett and Barber were born to do neither.’
The mish-mash of conflicting ideas among the five men was aggravated by two innovations. Before the election, Blair had been persuaded by Blunkett and Tessa Jowell to upgrade his interest in pre-school education. Both wanted a manifesto commitment to launch Sure Start, a plan to finance mothers to create and run groups for children from poor families. Sure Start supported their ambition to halve the number of children in poverty by 2010, so that ‘everyone has an equal chance to achieve their full potential’. The civil service, they agreed, could not be trusted to pioneer the new idea. Blunkett appointed Naomi Eisenstadt, an independent expert, to establish Sure Start and summoned a conference of interested parties.
Some 250 people representing thirteen Whitehall departments, government agencies and pressure groups demanded representation to plan ‘a completely new way of working’. ‘I want to smell the babies,’ said Jowell, hoping that mothers from poor backgrounds would flock to learn how to nurture their children. Blunkett presented the report, describing ‘partnerships’ and ‘trail-blazing districts’ to Blair, and sensed the prime minister’s interest wane as he flicked through the conference’s working papers. Blair was willing to announce that child poverty would end within a generation and would happily speak about stopping teenage pregnancy, but the detail was too much.
The vacuum was filled by Gordon Brown. To take control of social policy, in July 1998 the chancellor announced that the government was advancing £452 million for 250 Sure Start programmes. To Blunkett’s dismay, Brown ‘watered down the idea of creating child centres. It became a numbers game’. Eisenstadt gave each self-appointed group about £1 million to design a local service for children up to the age of three. In the rush to meet Brown’s target of 250 groups, those who suggested trials to test how the money should be spent were ignored. By October 1999, only two groups had been created.
At that moment, Blair moved Tessa Jowell, a passionate supporter in the health department, to the Department for Education. Instead of letting her keep control of Sure Start, Blair bowed to Brown’s insistence that Yvette Cooper, the new health minister, take control. To Eisenstadt’s disappointment, Cooper started a tug of war. Jowell wanted to concentrate on poor children, while Cooper, on the Treasury’s behalf, wanted Sure Start to provide childcare for single mothers seeking work. Jowell was sidelined, while neither Blair nor Blunkett offered to protect the original idea. ‘The honeymoon is over,’ Eisenstadt reflected.
Encroaching further into Blair’s territory, Brown had seized upon the government’s promise to increase the education of poor eighteen-to-thirty-year-olds by 50 per cent in 2010. To ‘develop in everyone a lifelong commitment to learning’, he came up with Independent Learning Accounts. One million adults, he said, would be entitled to receive £150 in cash from the government if they subscribed to a recognised education course. He spoke about putting individuals ‘in control of realising [their] potential and destiny’. With Barber’s endorsement, Treasury officials were ordered to launch the scheme by September 2000 – without ever running a pilot.
Blair did not object. Uppermost in his mind was his fear of losing the next election if the public were not persuaded that Labour had delivered all-round improvements. He had two years in which to achieve good education results.
In his monthly presentations to Blair during 1999, Michael Barber presented graphs with the lines all going the right way. His delivery unit showed that the government’s targets were being met. In 1998, the number of eleven-year-old children achieving level four in maths had risen by 10 per cent.
‘Why haven’t they gone up more?’ Blunkett asked.
‘They will next year,’ Barber replied.
In public, Blunkett took the credit for this small success. Newspaper headlines splashed that Labour was making a difference. Seventy per cent of schools that had instantly adopted Labour’s daily numeracy hour, said Blun
kett, had met the target. He failed to mention that nearly all English schools had introduced the same numeracy-hour scheme in 1996, or that Barber was using the national pupil database set up by the Conservatives.
‘Targets and glowing announcements,’ snapped Woodhead in frustration. Blair’s reliance on Barber drove him mad with rage. Barber relied only on tests. His data ignored whether the quality of teaching was improving children’s education. ‘Blair is gullible thinking that Barber’s initiatives will make a difference,’ Woodhead carped, before echoing Blunkett: ‘It’s like banging my head against a brick wall.’ Once again, he urged Blair to challenge the unions and change the teaching profession. Once again, Blair demurred.
‘We can’t be in a permanent war with the teachers,’ Blunkett told Blair. ‘I don’t want to take on each school and teacher.’
Blair feared where this was leading. ‘If you go against Woodhead,’ he cautioned Blunkett, ‘the public won’t understand. Go soft on him.’
Bichard disagreed. He disliked Woodhead’s right-wing attitudes and in his annual appraisal refused to award him an ‘A’. In a personal confrontation, he blamed the chief inspector for failing to improve conditions in the classroom. Woodhead angrily appealed to Blair, who refused to overrule Bichard. With Blunkett’s encouragement, he began to engineer Woodhead’s departure.
The argument over Woodhead’s fate triggered a discussion between Blair and Bichard about the government machine. The two men had become close after Blair had closeted himself with Bichard in the Cabinet room. While ministers waited noisily in the lobby, Blair expressed his concern over Bichard’s health. That genuine interest persuaded the civil servant that he might eventually be appointed as the new Cabinet secretary, tasked with resolving Blair’s frustrations about the government machine. ‘You missed your opportunity in 1997,’ Bichard thought, ‘and the “scars speech” sent mixed messages.’ They could continue the conversation, he hoped, after Blair’s return from Italy in September 1999.