by Tom Bower
To scotch his branding as a ‘liar’ manufacturing spin and deceit, he would portray that moment in the arena as an example of him being ‘utterly transparent’. However, in that contest he fell at the first hurdle, and to the newspaper he feared more than any other – the Daily Mail.
‘Why did you authorise the leaking of the name?’ he was asked by Paul Eastham, a political reporter.
‘That is completely untrue,’ replied Blair, apparently forgetting his comment to Kevin Tebbit on 8 July that ‘Alastair will explain to you what we’ve decided.’
‘Have you got blood on your hands?’ Eastham went on.
Blair’s face froze and, without saying a word, he terminated the interview.
In subsequent speeches, he characterised the media as a ‘feral beast just tearing people and reputations to bits’. The greater transparency introduced by him since 1997, especially the Freedom of Information Act and his regular press conferences, had, he believed, only increased distrust. He was oblivious to the backlash by Daily Mail journalists over Campbell’s manipulation of the newspapers and also their irritation at the pro-Labour bias in the BBC’s newsroom, a direct legacy of John Birt’s eight years as director of the corporation.
The television pictures of Blair arriving in Japan portrayed a shattered man who, the unkind would observe, was clinging to the wreckage. In London, Campbell’s staff blamed the Daily Mail, the BBC and the rest of the media for provoking Kelly’s suicide. Privately, Campbell was angry that Blair ‘dropped us in it like that’ for hinting that it was he who had released Kelly’s name.
Blair was realistic. In a telephone call to Lord Levy, he ‘sounded utterly devastated’. ‘When will all this end? What am I going to do?’ he asked. His chief fund-raiser offered no answer.
Blair returned to London intent on changing Downing Street. Those who were writing him off would discover that he was to be relaunched. At Carole Caplin’s suggestion, Cherie had allowed Marie Claire magazine to publish photographs of her in her bedroom having lipstick painted on, with her knickers, cosmetics and tights scattered about the dressing table. Few could understand what impression the prime minister’s wife intended to convey. Fiona Millar’s scorn had provoked an argument, and Cherie decided that Millar, always dithering about the date of her departure, should finally leave.
After urging Campbell to stay and fight, Blair realised his spokesman’s tenure was also coming to an end. ‘It’s gone too far,’ he told Mandelson. ‘He’s totally headstrong. In the end, I think he’s just got too big for his boots.’ In the future, Blair would be relieved that Campbell no longer had the opportunity to ‘rampage through the media like a mad axeman’. Next, he summoned Tebbit. He wanted the permanent secretary to know, he said in a five-minute conversation, that the MoD had been ‘wrongly put in the frame as part of a conspiracy’. He added, ‘You acted honourably, and I take full responsibility.’ Tebbit did not place a cynical interpretation on Blair’s expression of faith. On the contrary, he was grateful for the recognition.
Michael Howard, the former Tory home secretary, would recall Campbell’s era without nostalgia. Blair’s publicity king, he said, looking directly at his target during a television discussion, ‘lied and bullied his way across our political life and has done more than anyone else to lower the tone of British politics in the last ten years’. Campbell did not flinch. Blair, he knew, had changed the nature of British politics and won. The result was what mattered.
For six years Blair’s instinctive savvy had dominated the Labour Party, humbled the Tories, charmed Fleet Street and enthused the electorate enough to bring him two landslide victories, but now he needed a new team to fashion a major revival. Campbell was replaced by David Hill, an unemotional operator. To find new strategies that would reunite the party, Blair also appointed Geoff Mulgan to replace Andrew Adonis. The prime minister had difficulty in harnessing all the ideas offered by the dozens of task forces and policy units, and the irrepressible Mulgan was eager to deliver what he called a ‘long-term strategy on policy’ to restore people’s trust. But the bad news kept on coming.
Areas of northern Iraq had become an inferno. Every week, rival religious armies – Shias against Sunnis – were killing hundreds of civilians. Across Whitehall, officials reflected that Blair had relied on an ideological American president who had deluded himself about the aftermath of war. The assurances to Bush by his military chiefs, intelligence agencies and secretaries of state were dust. Yet, in exchange for supporting America, Blair’s influence was waning. His huge risk, officials noted, had produced nothing in return. On the contrary, Britain’s relations with leaders in Europe and the Middle East were suffering.
In 1999, Blair had protested that in the past the West had talked too much about exit strategies: ‘But having made a commitment we cannot simply walk away once the fight is over.’ Now, despite diminishing influence in Washington, he refused to restore Britain’s status by funding any more than 9,000 British troops stationed in southern Iraq, compared to Washington’s deployment of 130,000 soldiers in the north. He was ignoring Colin Powell’s homily that ‘If you break it, you own it.’ Contrary to a pledge he had made in November 2002 to the three Iraqi experts he had consulted, he was unwilling to spend the additional billions of pounds required to stabilise southern Iraq. His only concession was to consider delaying the final withdrawal. In Westminster, Blair appeared to be isolated, standing practically alone.
THIRTY-FOUR
Sabotage and Survival
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Governing meant being able to defuse any media outcry, not least over how many people should be allowed to enter Britain. To Blair’s relief, David Blunkett was finally bringing the immigration controversy under control. Not by reducing numbers – more migrants were arriving than ever before – but by announcing raids on bogus colleges, exposing sham marriages, closing Sangatte and converting illegal asylum-seekers into legitimate employees with work permits. In 2003, the official number of asylum-seekers had fallen by 40 per cent from the previous year to 61,050, but this was still three times higher than targeted and was costing the country over £2 billion every year. Naturally, Blair would not mention that the amnesty for 50,000 asylum-seekers had been quietly extended during the year to include over 150,000 foreigners living illegally in Britain. Managed migration was working.
His next step was to allow entry from the eight countries that would be joining the EU in 2004. Other EU countries had decided to place a seven-year delay on allowing A8 nationals entry to work. Blair and Blunkett decided to ignore that restriction. In October 2003, Beverley Hughes, the new minister responsible for immigration, directed IND officials in Sheffield to ‘wave through’ applications for work permits, even on the spurious grounds that the migrants intended to establish a business in Britain. This lack of proper scrutiny, Hughes believed, had been approved by Bill Jeffrey, who was still IND’s director. He would later deny knowing about his department’s decision.
As thousands of East Europeans arrived, Blunkett embraced immigration expert Sarah Spencer’s argument, hoping to ‘shift the debate into positive attitudes towards migrants’. That November, he arranged to appear on Newsnight. For the first time, he would not pander to the public’s anger. ‘There is no obvious upper limit on migration,’ he told his astonished audience. Britain, he said, was always ‘crowded’ and the net inflow of 172,000 was sustainable. In fact, that calendar year the net increase was 350,000. An uproar followed. ‘I made a mistake going on Newsnight,’ he would later admit.
At the time, Blunkett’s appearance reflected an unseen crisis in Blair’s relationship with his chancellor. Gordon Brown expected the combination of the failure to find WMDs and Brian Hutton’s report to terminate Blair’s premiership. Despite the growing economy and improvements in the NHS, he planned finally to dispatch the besieged leader. His punchline during a subversive speech at the 2003 party conference – ‘We are best when we are Labour’ – had electrified dissatisfied loyalists. B
lair’s evangelical performance the following day – ‘We are best when we are boldest’ – and an appeal to support modernisation sealed their irreconcilable schism by starkly omitting any reference to Brown. The polls, for all Blair’s personal unpopularity, showed Labour’s lead rising. So long as Blair led the party, the economy remained strong and Iain Duncan Smith remained the unimpressive alternative prime minister, the Tories had little chance of success.
On 5 November, Blair excluded Brown from the party’s national executive, which would be planning the 2005 general election campaign. He also telephoned Alan Milburn and, in the ex-minister’s words, ‘started playing footsie with me to get me back’ to replace Brown. Blair was set on demoting or, if necessary, dismissing Brown from his government after the election. Yet, the following day, he agreed to meet him over a dinner hosted by John Prescott to hammer out an agreement on the handover.
Brown had good reason to arrive at the meeting suspicious of his colleague’s intentions. After the fracas in 1994, Blair had agreed to leave after two terms. Now, worn down by office, the aftermath of war and by Brown himself, he appeared to be persuaded that his rival was entitled to fight the next election. At the end of their conversation, Blair agreed to resign in 2004 if Brown ‘became a better Gordon’ by fully supporting the reforms for the NHS, academies and tuition fees. Plus Brown was required to guarantee not to mention their agreement to anyone else, especially Ed Balls and Ed Miliband. Brown agreed to the conditions. Prescott, who had been absent during the haggling, was told on his return of Blair’s agreement to depart within one year. The terms, Prescott would recall, were ‘ambiguous and on condition’. Some time later, Peter Mandelson heard from Blair ‘that a deal had actually been done’.
Thirteen days later, on the next stage of the legislation to introduce foundation hospitals, the government’s majority in the Commons fell to seventeen. The media’s portrayal of Blair as weak seemed to be justified. He was also blamed for the death of soldiers in Iraq because they lacked body armour. Unable to conceal his fatigue, he admitted to the media that his plight was caused by ‘a thousand people kicking your backside morning, noon and night’.
The new blows of attrition, Blair suspected, were the result of Brown failing to keep to their agreement. Both Balls and Miliband clearly knew about the pact, and were openly encouraging Brown’s supporters to oppose the prime minister. The final test of the chancellor’s loyalty would be the vote on tuition fees. In principle, the Tories should have supported the government, but they could not resist being party to the anti-Blair plots. Although Brown had conceded that his alternative graduate tax was flawed, his lieutenants were marshalling the anti-government vote among those Labour MPs not concerned about universities’ finances but who wanted to demonstrate their distrust of Blair.
Looking at the numbers, Blair needed Brown’s support to survive. The vote was set for 27 January 2004. ‘Better to fight, lose and go down than give in,’ said Charles Clarke. Blair half agreed: he would fight to win. ‘Make or break’ was the sentiment around Westminster, and Blair’s nervousness was obvious to those listening to his ‘back me or sack me’ conversations as he fought for his survival. One hundred and sixty Labour MPs had threatened to rebel, wiping out his current majority of 161. ‘There will be absolutely no retreat,’ he told a press conference. ‘Of course my authority is on the line.’ Until the last moment, he wondered whether Brown would go over the top to defeat his own government. ‘I think politicians who cave in are weak,’ said Clarke, who had helped Neil Kinnock confront Labour’s left wing.
Although surrounded by sympathisers, Blair stood alone. Only a fellow leader, he reasoned, could understand his plight. How, he asked Bill Clinton, had he survived facing impeachment? The essence, replied the former president, was that he didn’t ‘let it dominate his view of his presidency’. Blair commented, ‘This is where [Clinton’s] resilience was so fundamental to his success and survival. He used to tell me that every day he got up, determined to carry on governing.’ He intended to copy his mentor.
On the morning of the vote, Brown discussed with Balls and Miliband whether he should defeat Blair. On the same day, a Downing Street spokesman persuaded Alice Miles of The Times to write that ‘relations between the Chancellor and the Prime Minister are said to be very good at the moment’. In the event, Blair won by just five votes. The Tories were jubilant. Overhanging Blair’s fears was the certainty that his fate in the Commons would be on the line again the next day. To his good fortune, having their divisions exposed had assuaged his party’s anger, and his MPs returned to Westminster the following day in less venomous mood.
Hutton was due to publish his report that day, 28 January. The witnesses’ testimony indicated that Blair and Alastair Campbell would be pilloried. Exactly five months earlier, Blair had returned from his summer holidays in Cliff Richard’s villa in Barbados to give his evidence. Astutely, Charlie Falconer had retained Jonathan Sumption QC, one of Britain’s most accomplished lawyers, to represent the government. He would be helped in preparing the government’s case by David Omand.
By contrast, reflecting the carelessness with which the BBC had treated the David Kelly saga from the outset, the corporation’s case was argued by a workhorse lawyer burdened by lackadaisical BBC executives offering ill-considered testimony. Blair was assured that Hutton would be presented with a convincing argument that his administration had behaved with exemplary behaviour in exposing Kelly, a man guilty of breaking the trust he owed to the government. Regarding the dossier, Blair turned to the judge and said, ‘hand on heart’, it had not been sexed up.
Sumption’s presentation transformed the inquiry into a trial of the BBC. In cross-examination, the corporation’s executives – in particular Greg Dyke, the pro-Labour director general, and Andrew Gilligan – undermined their own case. Nevertheless, the oral and written evidence presented to Hutton by the civil servants conclusively established the corruption of the JIC’s intelligence by the authors of the dossiers to suit the government’s purpose. After Kevin Tebbit testified that at a meeting on 8 July the ‘prime minister wanted something done’ about identifying Kelly to the media, Blair had reason to fear Hutton’s judgement.
To the surprise of those who had sat through the hearings, Hutton ignored Tebbit’s testimony. In his report the judge ruled, contrary to the evidence, that ‘There was no dishonourable or duplicitous strategy by the government covertly to leak Dr Kelly’s name to the media.’ In a similar vein, Hutton disregarded the written and oral evidence describing an intense relationship between Campbell and John Scarlett. The intelligence chief, declared Hutton, had only been ‘subconsciously influenced’ by Campbell. The judge also discounted the evidence from other intelligence officials – especially Brian Jones at the MoD – that Scarlett had been warned not to exaggerate the evidence. Hutton’s only criticism about the dossier’s distortions focused on the fictitious long-range rockets armed with WMDs. That intelligence was ‘unhelpful’ but unimportant to his inquiry. In his opinion, he had to decide only whether the government, as alleged by Gilligan, ‘probably knew that the intelligence was wrong’. By focusing entirely on that narrow question, Hutton avoided the more important issues – namely, why the intelligence described in the dossier was mistaken and whether Blair had ordered Kelly to be named. To have recalled Blair to answer Tebbit’s revelation, he said later, would have been ‘simply playing to the gallery’, resulting in ‘glaring headlines’.
By wholeheartedly accepting Sumption’s narrative of events, Hutton concluded that Blair and Campbell had not deliberately ‘sexed up’ the dossier. To justify his bias that the two men had not exaggerated the intelligence, the judge used a definition of ‘sexed up’ that did not tally with the meaning intended by Gilligan. In conclusion, he praised the government, Campbell and all the civil servants for behaving with the utmost honour, honesty and professionalism, while Kelly, Dyke, Gilligan and the BBC management were excoriated. ‘Too good to be true,’ Blair said
after reading an early copy of the judgement. Some were suspicious about his sanguine reaction, and became more so when the report was given to the Sun on the day before its publication. Many suspected the source of the leak to be one person in Downing Street: Campbell.
Blair had good reason to be relieved. On the same day, David Kay, the former chief UN weapons inspector who before the war had energetically broadcast his conviction that Iraq possessed huge stores of nuclear and other WMDs, broke his silence. As director of the Iraq Survey Group, he had dispatched a thousand inspectors across the country to find the weapons. But now he shakenly confessed, ‘It turns out we were all wrong.’ Saddam, reported Kay, had effectively stopped production in 1991. That truth was irrelevant to Blair. Instead of acknowledging that he and others had made errors and moving on, he preferred to slay his critics.
His final hurdle that day was a vote in the Commons. Iain Duncan Smith had been replaced in October by Michael Howard, an accomplished lawyer seen by some as a transitional choice. Blair risked being cornered by Howard about Hutton.