by Tom Bower
Education did give Blair headlines. Thanks to Labour’s numeracy and literacy hours, Michael Barber told him, the results of the key stage two tests for primary schoolchildren in 1999 and 2000 showed a ‘big leap’. The rises of 5 per cent in reading and 10 per cent in maths were beyond even Barber’s dreams.
Barber credited his Standards and Effectiveness Unit for Labour’s ‘most conspicuous delivery success’. England’s eleven-year-olds had been placed ‘among the best in the world’ in an assessment survey of literacy and numeracy conducted by PISA, a respected OECD organisation. ‘In just over two years,’ Barber would write, ‘the face of primary education had been changed forever.’ With an acute sense of his place in history, Blair did not question Barber’s opinion that England’s primary schools had suddenly leapt in quality to rank third in the world. Labour could also take the same credit, said Barber, for PISA’s glowing report on England’s fifteen-year-olds, although the government had left secondary schools untouched so far. Insiders quipped half in jest that the triumph should satisfy Alastair Campbell’s lust for the newspaper headline ‘Sir Gets a Sir’. No one mentioned that Labour’s literacy hour was just one year old and the numeracy hour had not yet started.
Money, Blair believed, was curing his appalling inheritance from the Tories. No fewer than 424 failing schools, he told the public, were being closed down. In 2000, spending on education increased to £56.9 billion, 8.3 per cent more than the previous year. The figure in 2001 would be £62.4 billion, up 9.5 per cent in a year. Since the number of schoolchildren was falling and classes were getting smaller, the government could boast that spending per child would rise within the first parliament by 78 per cent. Pertinently, in 2001 Labour spent less on education as a percentage of GDP than John Major in 1995.
The good news provided Blair with a smokescreen to break an election pledge. He was again tinkering with structures. Two years after the 424 condemned schools had been reopened under Fresh Start, a rebranding programme, Estelle Morris, the junior education minister, told Blunkett that none of those schools was improving. To rescue them, Blair could have adopted Chris Woodhead’s proposal to dismiss failing teachers. Instead, he approved a Tory plan to hand the schools over to private sponsors and a board of governors, naming them ‘city academies’. He agreed to the same rebranding for failing comprehensives. They were to be recategorised with a designated speciality and given extra funds.
As usual, Blair’s espousal of structures, not standards, dissatisfied Woodhead. The chief inspector also criticised Blunkett as ‘a table-thumping bully’. The tension between them, Blair decided, had finally become too destructive. ‘It’s time for Woodhead to leave,’ he pronounced. Fortunately, revelations about Woodhead’s allegedly inappropriate relationship with a young woman some years previously had surfaced and would limit any political damage. So Woodhead left – a relief to Blair’s educationalists and causing no harm politically even when, three months later in the Daily Telegraph, the deposed chief criticised Blair for ‘not seeing anything through, especially the reforms’. Woodhead also blamed Blunkett for ‘wasting taxpayers’ money’ on endless initiatives that ‘encapsulated the worst of the discredited ideology with educational claptrap and wacky initiatives’. His worst moment, the educationalist disclosed, was a serious discussion to rename teachers ‘learning professionals’. Blair’s defence was Barber’s statistics. They were Labour’s trump card.
Woodhead’s successor at Ofsted, appointed by Blunkett, was Mike Tomlinson, a former chemistry teacher who had been an inspector of schools for twelve years. Aligned to the left, Tomlinson agreed with Blunkett that Ofsted’s rigorous inspections of schools should be softened. His priority, he said, was no longer to focus solely on inspections but to work in partnership with teachers. ‘Inspections’, he told the schools, ‘will be done with you rather than to you.’
Blair remained displeased. The primary-school key stage tests, he knew, did not reflect improvements across the whole of education. He demanded ‘results’. Blunkett urged patience. ‘It was deeply frustrating that progress was so slow,’ he would admit. ‘We couldn’t accept in our heads that it would take so long.’ Only later did both men understand the cause of their disappointment. ‘We’d started out in 1997 with a real sense of momentum,’ Blunkett reflected, ‘but we weren’t ready for the next step. We’d thought of stage one but not thought of the next stage, of reinforcing primary and secondary schools.’
Michael Bichard agreed. After four hectic years, they had hit the buffers, with no new ideas. Millions of pounds had been poured into ‘process’ and, like the rest of Whitehall, the education department had fought ferociously over structures and relationships, but too little time had been spent discussing the quality of the service. ‘You can’t run the system with targets from Whitehall’, Bichard realised, ‘because you often set the wrong targets.’ The department had spent money on new buildings and on raising teachers’ salaries. They had spoken about schools being accountable for standards, but too little had been achieved.
Blunkett half agreed. Aware that he would go to the Home Office after the election, he regretted that Blair was irrevocably glued to targets and regular inspections. The prime minister, he thought, had been sucked into centralised intervention; after all, he had refused to abolish the LEAs’ supervision of education, and still spoke about the advantages of collaboration and against the Tories’ promotion of competition and autonomy. Blunkett had moved on. ‘For the second stage,’ he realised, ‘we needed an exit policy.’ To ease the change of policy, embracing Tory ideas without admitting any mistakes, required deft management.
Unknown to his minister, Blair had arrived at a similar conclusion. Just as ‘choice’ had been introduced into the argument about the NHS, he had been converted to actually embrace ‘the parents’ right to choose’ from a range of schools. But he was nervous of publicly mentioning markets. That would confirm his critics’ suspicions that he was heading towards both private education and American-style payments for health care rather than continuing the NHS’s free treatment.
Influenced by his experience at the Oratory, Blair acknowledged that the destruction of grant-maintained schools had been a serious mistake. Good schools had been sacrificed to please ideologists. He decided to change course. He had been persuaded that 2,000 comprehensives (nearly half the total) should be converted from schools offering a general education to providing special courses in arts or science by 2005; and although 7,000 of the country’s 25,000 state schools were faith schools, he would create even more of them. At a Christian Socialist Movement conference, he preached the virtues of church schools as a pillar of the education system ‘valued by very many parents for their faith character, their moral emphasis and the high quality of education they generally provide’.
In 1997, a quarter of England’s primary schools (that is, 6,384) and one in twenty secondary schools (589) were run by Christian churches. The Church of England was urged to open another hundred secondary schools within five years. Blair’s enthusiasm was opposed by many Labour MPs. Faith schools, he was told, would inevitably lead to Muslim establishments with segregated classrooms teaching Islamic studies and embracing Muslim values. They would separate themselves from the community. The first two Muslim schools approved by Labour in January 1998 had been condemned by the Church Society as ‘a foot in the door’. Blair was unimpressed by the protests of what he called ‘entrenched interests’ who wanted to return to old Labour rather than loosen the government’s monopoly and devolve. Schools have to stop treating all the children the same, he told Campbell. His spokesman went public, and immediately incited an argument by disparaging ‘bog-standard comprehensives’.
Blair’s attitude to education was hardening. ‘What gives me real edge’, he told an adviser, ‘is that I’m not as Labour as you lot.’ Thatcher, he was not afraid to admit, had been partly right. The solution was to mix the best of socialism with Thatcherism. There would be top-down directives to meet tar
gets and, at the same time, he would introduce market mechanisms. Adding to that confused ideology, he now advocated changing structures. He made no pretence of being consistent. Prime ministers were allowed to change course, he felt.
Just before the election, there came another shift when Bichard was replaced by David Normington, a skilled Whitehall operator. In an early conversation with Blair, Normington sensed that the prime minister no longer believed in centralisation, and so Blunkett’s departure would remove a barrier. He was mistaken. Blair passionately believed in Whitehall’s control over local education by using targets. Blair also agreed with Andrew Adonis that the governance of schools should be decentralised, yet both men insisted on keeping centralised control over teachers. They did not trust school principals to dismiss bad teachers, nor did Blair want a battle with the unions about standards. To his senior civil servants, the position made little sense, but Barber, with limited interest in the ideological battle, said nothing. He believed that his new delivery unit – the epitome of centralisation – would solve all the problems.
SEVENTEEN
Unkind Cuts
* * *
‘This is what we can do,’ General Charles Guthrie told Blair in the Downing Street flat just after Leo’s birth. Wearing a nightdress, Cherie sat silently near by. Bored by his paternity leave, Blair was nervous.
In March 2000, Sierra Leone, an impoverished former British colony, was in chaos. Rebels were usurping the civilian government, and an inept UN force was unable to protect the population. Blair had agreed that General David Richards should lead a small military group to secure the airport and organise the evacuation of about 400 British citizens.
In a war for blood diamonds, marauding rebels were cutting off limbs as punishment for voting, and murdering helpless civilians. ‘I am morally outraged by the amputations,’ Richards reported to London from Sierra Leone. In a direct conversation with Robin Cook about imposing an ethical foreign policy, he asked for permission to kill the rebels. The foreign secretary’s status, as the army knew, had been dented by his messy divorce and an embarrassing statement to the Commons about his officials’ misconduct in allowing Sandline, a private British company, to supply weapons to Sierra Leone; an inquiry would show that Cook had distorted the truth about his officials’ proper conduct regarding the arms sale. Cook embellished his ready agreement with Richards by mentioning Blair’s interest in a country where his father had worked.
‘It’s the right thing to do,’ declared Blair to a meeting of excited officials. Some 5,000 heavily armed soldiers were dispatched in a naval task force – including a frigate, an aircraft carrier with Harrier jets and an amphibious assault ship with helicopters – that would assemble off the coast of Sierra Leone and confront an ill-disciplined gang of marauders. Within days, the troops had killed the rebels without losses. Richards returned to Britain, leaving behind a group of Royal Irish Rangers to train the Sierra Leone army. Shortly after, some soldiers carelessly allowed themselves to be caught by the West Side Boys, a murderous gang of drug-dealers, and were hauled off into the jungle.
‘We must do something,’ Guthrie told Blair.
‘Will there be casualties?’
‘If we do nothing, they’ll all be killed or skinned and tortured,’ said Guthrie, fearful that the prime minister might go ‘limp-wristed’. ‘If we try and rescue them, there might be a few casualties, and there could be forty if the helicopter is shot down.’
Blair flinched but, to his relief, the SAS rescue mission was a success. Most of the gang were killed, all the hostages were saved and just one SAS soldier died. Soon after, Blair was given a pop star’s welcome in Freetown, the country’s capital. Few in London disputed the proportionality of 5,000 troops and a naval task force combating a small group of drug addicts, or questioned Cook’s ethical imperialism. Rather, Blair was praised for another military success.
And there would be another. In the wake of Kosovo and Sierra Leone, 300 Gurkhas and a group of SAS troops under Richards’s command had policed a peace agreement following riots in East Timor. Blair had found a useful ally in the military. In particular, he liked how the army welcomed a challenge and appreciated leadership. Orders were given, the ranks obeyed and results were delivered. His respect for Guthrie and General Mike Jackson and his suspicion of civil servants gave the armed services an unusual advantage in Whitehall’s turf wars.
In the aftermath of these minor engagements, countless position papers criss-crossed Whitehall articulating Blair’s doctrine of military intervention to save humanity. No one voiced doubts about the British military’s capability or compared the triviality of those engagements with any serious operation. The euphoria of success silenced scepticism. By the end of 2000, the Foreign Office had produced a strategy for a foreign policy that described the military’s enhanced capability to execute Blair’s blueprint for intervention. Beneath the title, the authors’ script failed to anticipate the nature of the conflicts Britain might be fighting. Since there was no precise plan, there was no description of an objective. There was only ‘strategy’, that frequently misused word in Labour’s lexicon.
The new review empowered the generals to become proactive, influencing Britain’s foreign policy rather than awaiting orders. Without anticipating the consequences, both the Foreign Office and Blair encouraged the military to accept their ascendant influence. In a government driven by overpromising, any voice of caution was made to feel unwelcome. The change was signalled by the reduced status of Kevin Tebbit, the new permanent secretary at the MoD. His predecessors, such as Frank Cooper, had been Whitehall giants, intellectually equipped to guide and challenge the military and politicians with their recognised expertise. During the Second World War, Cooper’s RAF plane had been shot down over Italy. Within twenty-four hours, he had escaped imprisonment and returned to his base. Such bravery counted in the MoD. Tebbit was not in the same position to question ambitious generals like David Richards, who evangelised about Blair’s ‘force for good’ turning Britain into a global troubleshooter. ‘Once the military became used more regularly,’ Richards believed, ‘the civilians could not second-guess the military.’ Others rejected that explanation – but silently.
In 2001, Guthrie, fed up with his minister, refused to extend his service as chief of the defence staff, despite Blair’s efforts. ‘Hoon’s a lightweight,’ the general declared, and retired. His disenchantment with Geoff Hoon, Robertson’s successor as defence minister, was duplicated by his replacement, Admiral Mike Boyce, a taciturn submariner. Despite playing squash with Hoon, Boyce scorned him as ‘a bearer of little brain’; he also disliked Tebbit for protecting Hoon rather than championing the military’s interests. Neither man, in Boyce’s judgement, appreciated the absolute nature of war: risk was endemic, men would die, and nothing should be allowed to obstruct total victory.
With hindsight, Hoon understood that Boyce was ‘too straightforward and didn’t like the confederation of politicians’. The unusually intelligent admiral agreed: ‘I don’t do chummy.’ Unlike Guthrie, he made little effort to disguise his rational, unemotional approach. The solitariness of submarines was not the best preparation for charming the prime minister, and in turn Blair was displeased at how Boyce chilled rather than warmed the room. The whirlpool of fraught relationships was further complicated by Jonathan Powell’s antagonism towards Tebbit ever since the two men had served together at the embassy in Washington. Powell’s sentiments influenced Blair, a misfortune for the permanent secretary at the MoD.
Boyce took over in the midst of a Whitehall storm. Gordon Brown’s underfunding of the defence budget, the chiefs had discovered, was worse than the £200 million shortfall they had concealed in 1998. ‘We are £900 million short every year,’ they were told by a vice air marshal reporting to the chiefs. The result was shortages of manpower, equipment and training. ‘Blair’s championship of “prevention diplomacy” as described in “Defence Planning Assumptions”’, the vice air marshal continued, �
��doesn’t stand the reality test. The question is whether there is a political will to fix it.’
Admiral Nigel Essenhigh, the financial architect of the defence review, suspected the worst. The annual budget, he estimated, was in reality ‘£2 billion light’. At Blair’s request, the chiefs were making plans based on assumptions that Britain could not afford. The army was funded to prepare for war but not to fight one.
In 2001, Brown directed that the MoD should make further cuts. Officials began compiling a ‘cut list’ of equipment, frigates and planes. Disturbed that the 1998 defence plan would be fundamentally undermined, Essenhigh urged Tebbit to consider ‘less damaging savings’ by ‘smart procurement’ and identifying waste. ‘Cutting the front line is a flawed approach,’ Essenhigh told him. ‘We should aim for the flabby costing.’
Tebbit did not agree. He had already made substantial efficiency savings, but Essenhigh was unconvinced and turned to Hoon. ‘You’re being poorly advised,’ he told the minister. ‘You’re being misled by your officials that we can make savings only by cutting the front line – frigates, RAF squadrons and the army. There are huge savings in the soft underbelly – the bureaucracy, management and procurement.’ In Essenhigh’s opinion, he was regarded by Hoon as an embarrassment for having the facts at his fingertips.
The minister didn’t want to listen and wished Essenhigh would go away. As a last bid, the admiral urged Hoon to tell the prime minister. Hoon refused. Blair, he knew, ‘had little control over the Treasury’.
It was Boyce who agreed to confront Blair. Their conversation was predictable. ‘You can have all the money you want,’ replied Blair courteously, ‘but you’ll have to ask Gordon.’
The outcome of Boyce’s meeting with the chancellor was similarly preordained. ‘The military needs at least an extra £500 million every year,’ he told Brown, but he had hit a brick wall. ‘He offered £150 million,’ he recalled later.