by Tom Bower
On his return from holiday at the end of August, the prime minister shrank back from the opportunity for a reassessment. ‘Blair held workshops on education and immigration’, recalled Browne, ‘but never held a single day’s conference on Iraq or Afghanistan.’
By September, the British army was facing a crisis. Soldiers in Afghanistan were dying, and those who were injured were receiving poor treatment from the NHS on returning to Britain. (One of Gordon Brown’s cuts had led to the closure of the military’s specialist hospitals.) The absence of American troops in Helmand and British reluctance to request help from other NATO armies aggravated the plight of the 1,500 British troops, who were fighting with insufficient helicopters and driving vehicles with inadequate armour. ‘Whatever package they want,’ Blair said about the army’s demands, ‘we will do.’ Since Brown refused to approve additional money, the promise remained unfulfilled. At that moment, Britain’s exit from Iraq – fixed for the end of 2006 – was being questioned by Washington. His country’s continued presence there, Blair agreed without a proper explanation, was essential to protect national security. General Walker’s assurance to Reid that engagement in two locations was ‘doable’ had proved to be mistaken.
And it got worse. Major-General Richard Shirreff had arrived in Basra for his six-month tour in July 2006. Faced by an uprising among the militia armies, Britain’s 7,200 soldiers, alongside 7,000 NATO troops, were cowering. Some 150 British soldiers were available to patrol the whole of Basra, a city of 1.3 million people. Belfast had been controlled by a force of 10,000. ‘It’s like a self-licking lollipop,’ said Shirreff. ‘Everyone’s just guarding themselves.’ The army’s effort was devoted to supplying and protecting their three bases in a lawless city plagued by corruption and Shia death squads. Acting as neither the world’s policemen nor its social workers, British soldiers were risking their lives just to survive, without any chance of changing Iraq’s fate. Stirrup, who prided himself on understanding that wars should be fought only to fulfil a strategy, as set out by Carl von Clausewitz, the famous Prussian militarist of the nineteenth century, looked to Blair to define the purpose of continuing their mission. He received no meaningful reply.
Before he left Britain, Shirreff had presented Operation Salamanca, aimed at removing Basra’s criminal elements, to Generals Jackson and Dannatt over dinner at Bulford Manor in Wiltshire, the army chiefs’ headquarters. Shirreff suggested a ‘surge’ to counter-attack the militias, retake control and build a ‘better Basra’.
‘Absolutely right, we’ll go for that,’ agreed Jackson.
The ambitious plan was presented to the two other chiefs and to Houghton in Northwood. Success would require money and more British troops in Basra, and also the support of Nouri al-Maliki, the Iraqi prime minister.
‘We need a winning strategy to exit,’ Shirreff told Houghton. The plan, noted Shirreff, went down with his superior ‘like a lead balloon’.
Houghton was still seeking a policy from Downing Street, but instead of a reply there was only silence. Blair refused to decide on the fate of British troops. His only order to Stirrup was to bring peace to the British zone, but he offered no ideas on how achieve that Elysium.
Although Blair appeared to be fully engaged at their regular discussions, Stirrup sensed that Downing Street was languishing in a ‘fin de siècle atmosphere’. At one meeting, Blair agreed with the air marshal that the army should leave Iraq, then refused to name the date, as if he had no power to influence events. Adding to the confusion, Stirrup admitted, ‘I didn’t know whether Houghton supported Operation Salamanca.’ Yet, before flying to Basra, Shirreff had the impression that Blair had given his approval. The general arrived expecting 5,000 more British troops and additional funds. He had not anticipated a conversation in Downing Street between the chief of the defence staff and Blair.
‘Prime Minister,’ Stirrup said, ‘it is clear that Maliki will not support the army’s operation.’
Blair voiced surprise that Iraq’s leader did not want the gangs wreaking havoc across Basra to be neutralised. ‘Can’t we do something about it?’ he asked in the tone of a motorist looking at his flat tyre. Without Maliki’s support, Shirreff’s hopes would be dashed.
‘I had kittens,’ Stirrup admitted during his first visit to Basra following Shirreff’s arrival. Sending reinforcements, he told the major-general, had not been approved. ‘More British troops won’t alter the strategic outcome.’
Shirreff’s operation was duly watered down. Its replacement, Operation Sinbad, was a series of low-level hit-and-runs to protect the beleaguered British soldiers. The official policy was to protect the stalemate. Blair’s decision to withdraw by the end of 2006 and in the meantime reduce the number of soldiers from 7,200 to about 3,500 was, Stirrup knew, ‘not feasible’. He returned to London undecided on how to tell Blair that the position was hopeless.
‘We need political involvement and a political solution,’ he eventually reported. ‘The army cannot fix the problem alone.’
Blair looked without confidence at the two ministers at the meeting: Des Browne, whom he disliked, and Margaret Beckett, whom he had appointed mainly to make ignoring the Foreign Office easier. ‘Try and persuade Maliki to approve the removal of the Shia militias,’ he told Beckett. Nothing happened.
‘The levers of government and the Foreign Office don’t deliver,’ Stirrup discovered.
Shirreff’s final orders were to ‘give it a go’. He was to ‘surge to get the Iraqis into a position to take over’ and, at the same time, ‘to ramp it down’. The attacks began in October. Within days, British soldiers were under heavy fire. In London, General Dannatt, the new army chief, was aggrieved. According to Whitehall rules, he was excluded from direct involvement in the Iraqi operations by Houghton and Stirrup.
Dannatt attracted mixed feelings. ‘He’s too Christian,’ was a common complaint among his fellow officers.
‘Dannatt never took advice except from God, and God isn’t very good on defence,’ observed General Charles Guthrie.
In theory, Blair should have found much in common with his new senior officer. ‘God’s on our side in Helmand,’ the general told an RAF officer. ‘We’re doing the right thing.’ But Dannatt had also told Desmond Bowen, the MoD’s policy director, that ‘We need to be shedding more blood to show that we’re in there with the Americans.’ That eccentricity caused Stirrup to dislike Dannatt, and the sentiment was mutual. ‘When you’re in a cockpit flying at the speed of sound,’ Dannatt observed, ‘you don’t have to decide who lives and who dies and pick up the body parts.’ At the chiefs’ weekly meetings, at 10 a.m. every Wednesday, he found himself isolated. ‘Stirrup’s not prone to consultation,’ the new chief complained, ‘even though the army is fighting two wars.’ He found that the two other chiefs ‘played games’. Stirrup, he felt, spoke in bursts of ‘grandstanding’ and refused to discuss the detail of the war or the army’s request for more money. ‘When I need you,’ Stirrup told Dannatt, ‘I’ll call for you.’
The mutual antipathy between the chiefs was aggravated by Dannatt’s search through the formal minutes of his predecessors’ discussions. He found no mention of their discussing the army’s commitment to Afghanistan. Dannatt had himself supported the Afghan expedition, but his influence had become minimal.
The solemnity of the hearses regularly carrying fallen soldiers past guards of honour magnified media reports about the casualties and depressed morale in the MoD. Instead of the government following tradition and burying the dead where they fell, every soldier’s death had become the focus of a coroner’s public inquiry to fix the blame. Gordon Brown in particular was held responsible for ignoring the army’s demand for reinforcements, helicopters and bombproof vehicles. ‘War is not clean,’ an official told Bill Jeffrey at the climax of a public storm about the army’s lack of body armour. Neither Des Browne nor Jeffrey was suited to presenting to the public or the Cabinet the reality of modern warfare.
The politician
s did not bear all the blame. The army had spent months inconclusively bickering among themselves about the ideal bombproof vehicle. On the other hand, Blair had agreed to allot billions of pounds to two unaffordable aircraft carriers, which automatically reduced how much the army had to spend. ‘We have a huge hole in our budget,’ Paul Drayson, the minister of procurement, had been informed by his officials. ‘There’s no money,’ Browne had also been told. Britain could not afford the ‘expeditionary’ war set out in the 1998 defence review.
The officials in the MoD’s logistics department presented their financial predicament to Jeffrey. ‘You’ve got to ask for a formal direction,’ he was told. That imperative would ultimately have forced Blair to justify the lack of money. ‘Jeffrey stayed silent,’ recalled one official. ‘He should have asked for a formal direction from the minister, but he didn’t want a public row. We were cheerleaders, and we were strongly discouraged from giving ministers unwelcome advice.’
Dannatt decided to rattle the cage. ‘The army is running hot,’ he told Browne. The 7,200 soldiers in Iraq, he explained, were part of the problem and not the solution. With limited resources, the British army would be defeated. ‘We are fighting for our lives.’ The army could retrieve its reputation only if everything were thrown into Afghanistan. Dannatt wanted a political decision. Until the army withdrew from Iraq, reinforcements could not be sent to Afghanistan. ‘Browne could not understand,’ he concluded. ‘I got no positive outcome from him.’
In turn, Browne was irritated by his senior officer: ‘It was always about Dannatt.’ In the general’s opinion, it was about soldiers risking their lives. ‘I had to struggle in Whitehall to get the army’s voice heard,’ he said. ‘It was very frustrating.’
Repeated attempts to arrange a meeting with Blair were ignored by Downing Street. The general was furious. The army, he believed, needed protection from a prime minister who was deaf to complaints and who was the begetter of dysfunctional chiefs.
Unwilling to listen to conflicting opinions, and weary of the generals’ familiar antagonism, Blair would talk only to Stirrup. In his opinion, the more important battle at that moment was his own fight for survival against Gordon Brown and his supporters.
On his return from his summer holidays, Blair was told by Alastair Campbell, Jonathan Powell and Sally Morgan that support for him in the party was ‘haemorrhaging’. With the party conference approaching, his support for Israel in Lebanon, he heard, was jeopardising his survival as prime minister. To reassert his authority, he invited Philip Webster, the political editor of The Times, to interview him at Chequers.
Eight times during their conversation Webster asked Blair when he intended to leave, and each time Blair refused to answer. He pledged only to give his successor ‘ample time’ before the next election and urged his party to ‘stop obsessing’ about the leadership. He arranged for himself to be photographed with a mug listing the traits of anyone with the name Anthony. Among them was, ‘You’re a man who’s in charge, others follow your lead.’
To gauge the reaction of Labour MPs, Webster asked Blairite loyalists for their comments about their leader’s silence. He heard that even they were ‘demanding a timescale for his departure’. The newspaper’s headline on 31 August was ‘Blair Defies Party Over Departure Date’. There was uproar. Blair was accused of destroying the party by clinging on to power. Even Blairites were switching to Brown.
Brown was incandescent but, as always, dithered, resisting Ed Balls’s demands for blood. He would not be seen publicly to wield the knife. Instead, he asked his closest supporters to organise the coup.
On 4 September, a group of MPs, with the chancellor’s support, delivered an ultimatum to Downing Street: ‘Sadly it is clear to us – as it is to the entire party and entire country – that without an urgent change in the leadership of the party it becomes less likely that we will win the next election. This is the brutal truth. It gives us no pleasure to say it. But it has to be said and understood. We therefore ask you to stand aside.’ Over a hundred Labour MPs echoed the demand, led by Tom Watson, a junior minister, that he leave by summer 2007.
Instinctively, Blair wanted to fight back against what some insiders called a coup. While he sat in his office being consoled by political lightweights like Tessa Jowell and Charlie Falconer, his staff contacted Blairite MPs to sign a loyalist statement. ‘We need to get people to start using the expression “blackmail”,’ urged Powell. The sympathisers’ voices were smothered.
Through his own short-sightedness, Blair had lost his key supporters in the Cabinet. And his reliance on Stephen Byers and Alan Milburn to write newspaper articles criticising Brown, or David Miliband coyly suggesting that Blair would resign on his tenth anniversary as prime minister in May 2007, only fired the chancellor’s anger. He wanted Blair to make a public statement, immediately.
At 7.45 a.m. on 6 September, Blair walked through the connecting door into 11 Downing Street and entered Brown’s study. He implored Brown to be patient. They argued for an hour. Blair accused Brown of orchestrating an attempted coup, while Brown accused Blair of lying about his departure. Blair eventually left, unaware that Watson, a thuggish Brownite, had delivered a blistering letter urging him to depart ‘for the sake of the legacy … I have to say that I no longer believe that your remaining in office is in the interest of either the party or the country.’
Blair was furious about the ‘student’s coup’. Watson, he spluttered, was ‘disloyal, discourteous and wrong’. A meeting was arranged with Brown at 2 p.m. that same day in No. 10. Just minutes after their discussions began, the media were informed that four more MPs had resigned from junior positions in the government. They would describe their co-ordinated initiative as a ‘spontaneous insurrection’ aimed at obtaining a timetable for their leader’s going. More resignations would follow, Blair was told, unless he announced his departure. ‘He’s got hours left,’ said one rebel. ‘He has been very foolish and arrogant. Tony is going to be told it is moving time.’
Michael Levy listened to his friend’s woe: ‘Tony got angrier and angrier. More furious than I had seen him. He kept saying that he had never realised how duplicitous Gordon was – and what a “liar”.’
On David Hill’s instructions, Downing Street told journalists that a coup orchestrated by Brown’s cabal was under way. Derek Simpson, the trade union leader, was blamed for ‘a disgraceful attempt to blackmail the PM from office’. Blair’s nightmare scenario was departing Downing Street like Margaret Thatcher. To leave with dignity, he needed to regain control of events. In the City jargon, his choice was to bow to his attackers or ‘catch a falling knife’.
That afternoon, he sat with Brown in the garden at No. 10. The common sentiment, he said with shrewd foresight, was that Labour risked being out of office for the next three elections if the succession were forced, in the manner of the Tories in 1990. Brown replied that removing Blair was the party’s only hope; he was toxic.
By the end of their ninety-minute meeting, Blair had capitulated – but only partly. Rather than leaving quickly in order to allow his chancellor to establish himself at the autumn party conference and restore Labour’s fortunes in the perilous Scottish and Welsh elections, he insisted on staying until he notched up a decade, which meant May 2007, at the earliest.
Brown agreed to Blair’s compromise, which they settled should be announced the following day. He left No. 10 by the back entrance. A photographer caught him sitting in his car smiling.
Blair chose to make the announcement at Quintin Kynaston, a school in north-west London whose head teacher had been praised for exemplifying the best of Labour’s education policies. (Eight years later, she was banned from teaching for life because of financial discrepancies.) Wearing heavy make-up, Blair was surrounded by fifty hand-picked children. With the media corralled as far away as possible, he apologised to a single camera for the party’s behaviour: ‘It has not been our finest hour, to be frank.’ Then he confirmed that his speech to t
he party conference at the end of the month would be his last. And yet still he refused to give a precise date for his resignation.
While the Blairites, especially Charles Clarke, denounced the chancellor’s behaviour as ‘reckless’, ‘stupid’ and ‘madness’, Brown himself denied there was a coup and pleaded, ‘The situation is sad, regrettable and has caused us a great deal of grief.’ Fearing a backlash, he whitewashed his participation: ‘I said to him it is for him to make the decision.’
Blair’s anger mounted. He felt that his loyalty to Brown had been rewarded by treachery. Stubbornly, Brown had ignored the polls that showed only 30 per cent believed Labour could win an election under his leadership, with 80 per cent of under-twenty-fives hostile towards the prospect of a Brown government. Ben Wegg-Prosser, the head of his Strategic Communications Unit, sent an email to the staff to say, ‘There is no deal.’
That afternoon, Stephen Boys-Smith, working with the Independent Monitoring Commission responsible for disarming the paramilitaries in Ulster, visited Blair with the members of his team. Blair made no attempt to disguise his lack of interest. ‘He could not even switch on his actor’s performance,’ noticed Boys-Smith. ‘He didn’t even try to look like being on the ball.’ Two days later, Blair ordered his supporters to stop sniping at Brown. Without a ceasefire he feared the split would permanently damage the party.
At the end of Friday 8 September, Powell sent round another email: ‘Very well done over the past week or so. A remarkable performance on behalf of TB, who is not very good at saying thank you directly. Thank you very much indeed for keeping the ship afloat.’
The TUC conference on 12 September was the dress rehearsal for Blair’s farewell at the party conference. He enjoyed entering the bear pit to preach the truth. Labour’s continuing dependence on the unions, he feared, still made the party ‘the prisoner of the Left’ and could terminate any chance of re-election. His own success owed everything to minimising their power. In return, the unions had vented their anger at the man who put the interests of patients and schoolchildren ahead of the self-interest of NHS employees and teachers. He was greeted with a hostile silence and placards of ‘Time to Go’. Undaunted, he provoked boos and heckles by telling his audience the ‘brutal truth’. If they refused to understand the problems of government and compromise, he warned, Labour would spend the future ‘wasting our time in opposition passing resolutions which nobody will do anything about’. His message was rejected. Perfunctory claps was the reward for three election victories.