In the autumn I had to face a rather difficult Lib Dem Party Conference, as rumours and some well-sourced reports began to emerge about my talks with Blair. One of the techniques I had learned from my days in the Royal Marines was to fire off a few rounds in the general direction of an enemy, so they would fire back and reveal their positions (the French call it sending up un ballon d’essai, a trial balloon). I decided that I needed to gauge the extent and location of Lib Dem opposition to what Blair and I were planning, so just before the Party Conference I gave an interview to the New Statesman in which I deliberately, if rather obliquely, mentioned the word ‘coalition’. It worked all too successfully, producing a furious reaction from many of the new MPs and a lot of our activists. I had quite a struggle to fend off a determined attempt to close the door on any deeper relationship with Labour at the Conference, but in the end concluded that, while there was no doubting how strong the opposition would be in some quarters of the Party, if it came to it I could still (just) win overall support for a coalition, provided there was a firm commitment to PR and a proper policy agreement, including lots of things Lib Dems could support.
It was about this time that I decided that, if we did go ahead with a coalition Government, I would not take a Cabinet position in it, so that I could argue the case with the Lib Dems without being seen to have something personal to gain. I also believed that, in the early days of such an enterprise, it would be better for me to manage the relationship from outside government rather than involving myself in the day-to-day action. This would, in addition, leave me freer to step aside when the relationship between the two parties in government had been properly stabilised.
By October, however, it was clear that Blair wanted to delay again, this time until the spring, because, he said, opposition from within the Cabinet, especially from Brown and Prescott, was too strong. To make matters worse, in mid-October, in a famous leak made in the Red Lion pub in Westminster, Charlie Whelan (Gordon Brown’s spokesman) made it clear that his boss was not prepared to let Britain join the Euro ‘in this Parliament’. This effectively undermined one of the key planks of the policy agreement I had drafted in my daughter’s garden in France over the summer holidays. What followed was the establishment of the Brown criteria for entry into the Euro, which in effect passed control of this key element of Blair’s European agenda from No. 10 Downing Street to No. 11, where it remained until Blair left No. 10 and Brown moved in.
Though I did not realise it at the time, I can now see that the best (perhaps the only) chance of creating the conditions for a coalition government along the lines Blair and I had discussed ended in October 1997. For this was the last moment when the Blair government was still sufficiently popular and unsullied by mistakes for me to have been able to argue to the Lib Dems that it was to our advantage to join with them. It was also, probably, the last moment when Blair’s personal authority in his own Cabinet and Party was high enough for him to have been able to carry them. Roy Jenkins had it right when he warned Blair, at a dinner we attended with him at the end of October, ‘If you seize the moment, you can shape events and not have events shape you.’*
This is not to say that I should have abandoned the relationship at this point – there were still too many things of benefit to be gained from it, not least in relation to Scotland, Wales, voting reform, a Bill of Rights and Freedom of Information. But I should have realised in October that the last chance to resuscitate the opportunity we had lost on 2 May effectively died with Prime Minister Blair’s decisions to delay until the spring of 1998.
In a conversation with Tony Blair some months before he became Prime Minister, he had told me that if he succeeded in being elected, then his greatness or otherwise as a Prime Minster who genuinely transformed the landscape in Britain, as Mrs Thatcher had done, would depend on three things. First, on whether he was able to change the fundamental political geology of Britain by reuniting the Centre Left. Second, on whether he could reconnect Britain to Europe and make us central to the conduct of European affairs. And, third, on whether he could, by spreading opportunity, narrow the chasm in the country between the very rich and the very poor. Whilst Blair was in my view a good Prime Minster, he did not fulfil any of his self-established criteria for greatness. By the time he left Downing Street the best opportunity we shall ever have to reunite the Centre Left had gone. The country was not more pro-Europe but more anti-Europe than when he came to power. And the gap between rich and poor has not narrowed; it has widened to an unprecedented level. I also believe that, despite his formidable abilities, basic decency, courage and a remarkable clear-sightedness on many things, nearly all the faults that were eventually to undermine public confidence in Tony Blair’s government were there and plain to see by the autumn of 1997:
1. The hesitation on domestic affairs, which prevented him from seizing the moment when he needed to (curiously, this did not apply to international affairs, as we shall see);
2. His fatal attraction to the ‘spin agenda’, which I am sure was why, for example, he insisted on going ahead with the disastrous Millennium Dome project, inherited from the Tories, even against the overwhelming opinion of his Cabinet;
3. His overestimation of the power of his charm when it came to moving his most senior colleagues;
4. The susceptibility of his Government (and Blair himself) to the influence of those who were successful and had money, as shown in the affair of Bernie Ecclestone and Formula One; and
5. His ambivalent relationship with Gordon Brown, in which he always sought to smooth over rather than confront. When I complained about this at around this time, he told me that the key relationship in any government was that between a Prime Minster and his Chancellor, and therefore, whatever Gordon did, he had little option but to keep him sweet.
By the autumn of 1997, however, none of this was evident, except perhaps to the most discerning. And I was far too close to a relationship which still had much to deliver, including perhaps the ultimate prize, to be one of these. I was acutely aware that I was presented with the best opportunity any leader of Britain’s Liberal Party had had for the last fifty years to do what all of them had wanted to do – initiate a process of deep constitutional reform and realign the Centre Left around a broadly liberal agenda. I had no option but to take every last chance and go every last mile to do this, while being very conscious that, if I failed to achieve it all, my useful time as leader of the Party would be over and I would have to stand down.
At the end of December we took the next step along the road we had set out on Novosibirsk, when Blair announced the Independent Commission on Electoral Reform under the chairmanship of Roy Jenkins, which was to report within a year. It was also at this time that Blair asked me to see Gordon Brown and John Prescott, explaining that they were the biggest obstacle he faced in moving forward, and that if they could hear some of what we were planning from my lips, it might help.
I saw Brown in early December. He seemed comfortable with the general idea of a coalition, but, whereas Blair’s interest was chiefly in how this would affect the positioning of the Government, Brown’s obsession was with matters of policy. We spent much time talking about the concurrence of ideas between New Labour and the Lib Dems, about the need for an intellectual framework for our joint approach and about what the policy portfolio for any partnership would be.
Prescott, whom I saw in February in his tiny and chaotic Commons office, surrounded by cardboard boxes, was much more down-to-earth. He thought that what Tony and I were discussing was ‘airy fairy’ and beyond Blair’s ‘room for manoeuvre’. He was completely opposed to PR for Westminster and would say so publicly if it came to the crunch:
I am a tribalist, pure and simple. I think the tribe we have is the tribe we must hang onto, and I think the business of reforming and becoming part of a larger and broader tribe carries huge dangers which will only give our enemies opportunities. I want to preserve the Labour Party for my children, not break it up.*
> In March of 1998, Blair said he needed to delay again – this time until the following November, after the Jenkins Report had been published. Again, the reason was opposition from Brown and Prescott. It was at this meeting that I told him that if full coalition government went ahead then I would stay on as Lib Dem Leader to see it bedded in. If it did not, then I would resign immediately, so as to give my successor time to prepare for the next election, at which I would also stand down as an MP.
But by now external events were also beginning to impose themselves both on Blair’s agenda and on mine. In a conversation with Blair in January 1998 he told me that he was getting very worried about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein in Iraq. He had seen some weapons inspectors’ reports which led him to be ‘quite convinced that there was some very nasty weaponry hidden away in [Saddam’s] presidential palaces’† and that military action would probably have to be taken to stop him. I cautioned against this, saying that I didn’t think he had made the case to the public for war, that there were no clear aims for this action and that all diplomatic routes to restrain Saddam had not yet been exhausted. He told me that if I had seen what he had seen in the intelligence reports I would understand the threat.
My attention at this time, however, was focused not on the Middle East, but back in the Balkans.
The Bosnian war was now over, and a peace treaty had been signed at Dayton. Meanwhile the UN had established a special war crimes tribunal, the International Criminal Tribunal in former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague, charged with bringing to justice war criminals from all the wars in ex-Yugoslavia. But, despite these steps, peace was far from secure in the region. Milošević, thwarted in Bosnia, had turned his attention to the Serb province of Kosovo, where the majority Albanian population was being increasingly persecuted and denied basic human rights, such as access to health care and schooling for their children in their mother tongue. By early 1998 I had become convinced that war in Kosovo was inevitable, and that I should go there to see for myself what was happening.
My original intention was to go in the spring, but the trip had to be delayed because of key Parliamentary debates. And a good thing it was, too, for in April 1998 another crisis broke much closer to home, when a newspaper leaked the information that the police had placed a well-known self-confessed paedophile, Sydney Cooke, in Yeovil police station for safe-keeping. Angry and threatening mobs, mostly of local people, but with some outside agitators and even criminal elements, started to gather outside the local police headquarters, followed by a feeding frenzy of rage and sensationalism in the national and local Press. I privately appealed to the local paper to calm things down and rang key members of the local clergy, asking for them to give a moral lead. Then I made a public statement calling on the crowds to disperse and leave the issue for the police to handle. To my horror, our chief local paper the Western Gazette, far from calming things, published a highly inflammatory editorial that, among other things, included an attack on me for not understanding the public mood. I rang the editor and, I am afraid, rather lost my temper with him, following this up with a highly critical letter for publication.
There was a vociferous public outcry against me for defending a paedophile and a flood of very angry letters from my constituents. One local school, whose spring fete I had promised to open, even asked me to reconsider the invitation, because parents had said they would not attend if I did. All this, the police told me gratefully, had the effect of making me, rather than them, the lightning-conductor for public anger, and I received very nice messages from Home Office ministers thanking me for standing up to the mob, etc. But this did little to diminish my discomfort or the anger of my constituents, as I discovered at a public meeting I called with the protesters: one of the most unpleasant and difficult I have ever attended. (What hurt most is that some of these people were my friends, most had been supporters, and a few had even worked to get me elected.) After a while, though, reason prevailed, and public anger subsided enough for the police to move Sydney Cooke, who had by now become seriously frightened for his life, quietly away to another secret location.
In May, Blair asked me to go to Northern Ireland to join the campaign for a Yes vote in the referendum on the Good Friday agreement. Apparently William Hague, the Tory Leader, had insisted on going, and Blair was worried that he might come across as ‘too English’ and ‘establishment’. On the other hand, he argued, my Northern Ireland background might mean that I was listened to a bit more. I replied that I rather doubted it but would go nevertheless. Campaigning in the Protestant heartland of the Shankill Road in Belfast a few days later, I stopped one man on the street and asked him for his opinion on the Good Friday Agreement. He replied in a very thick Belfast accent, ‘The Good Friday Agreement? The Good Friday Agreement? I’ve just got two words for that: RID-DICULOUS!’
Later that day I went to see an old Northern Irish friend, Ronnie Flanagan, then the Chief Constable, and expressed puzzlement as to why the Protestant community were opposed to the Agreement. Ronnie reminded me of the old Ulster story of two men walking down the street, and one saying to the other, ‘I like yer coat!’ The other replies, ‘Well, I’ll give to you,’ to which the first responds, ‘Ach I’ll not have it if you give it to me!’ It was an attitude which, I was to discover, was by no means unique to Northern Ireland; I was to see it again and again when, in due course, I found myself trying to help bring peace and stability to Bosnia.
I finally found space in my programme for a trip to the Kosovo area in June 1997, embarking on a six-day tour of the region with one of my staff, Roger Lowry. Our trip took us first through Macedonia, on to Tirana, the capital of Albania, and then by helicopter over the mountains to Bajram Curi, in the Albanian badlands on the edge of the 6,000-ft mountain ramparts that mark the Albanian/Kosovo border. At the time this was the headquarters of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) as well as the jumping-off point for their main supply route for arms into Kosovo. I was warned, both by the Foreign Office before leaving and by the British Embassy in Tirana, that it was a very lawless area and could be dangerous. But we were looked after by some Albanian friends, so I knew we would be safe enough. During my visit I had the chance to speak to Kosovar families, including young children who had been driven across the mountains by Serb attacks on their villages. Many of them had been wounded by small-arms fire and artillery bombardments, which the Serbs had concentrated on the high mountain passes through which they had had to travel. We also visited one of the Albanian ‘weapons bazaars’ where local and international arms traders sold weapons to the KLA, who, as we watched, loaded them onto mules and donkeys for the long, hazardous journey over the mountain passes into Kosovo. One day, in the company of some official European military observers, we followed the KLA arms trail up the mountain onto a high ridge overlooking the plain of Kosovo, from where, after crossing over the border a short way, I was able to observe, just below me,
Milošević’s tanks, mortars and infantry attacking what seemed to me completely defenceless Kosovar Albanian farmsteads and villages.
On our return I put in a report to Blair and the Foreign Office, saying that it was obvious that a war was coming unless we acted quickly and proposing a plan which included sanctions on Milošević’s Government if he continued to use force to drive out the Albanian Kosovars; helping Albania to cut off the KLA arms supply; and stationing a token EU or NATO force along the Albanian/Serbian frontier to seal it. A few days before leaving for this trip, at Blair’s request, I saw Ibrahim Rugova, the rather other-worldly Kosovar Albanian leader, who was visiting London and asked him if such a deployment would help calm the situation. He said it would – very much. But nothing happened, as usual. As I was to find later, the international community finds it easier to reach an agreement to fight a war than to act early to prevent one.
Over the remaining summer months Blair continued to swither back and forth, not only on the question of timing, but now also on his attitude to the central question of PR. Me
anwhile I continued to warn him that delay was deadly. If we waited beyond November, the opportunity would be lost.
I also managed to grab a little time off to go and see my daughter Kate in France. Sitting at a pavement café in Paris with a carafe of wine and a book watching the world go by, I suddenly realised, after eleven years of leading the Lib Dems, how attractive ordinary life could be.
Meanwhile, of course, the Kosovo situation steadily deteriorated towards war.
In September, just before the Lib Dem Party Conference, I drove to Chequers for a very long private meeting with Blair to resolve the remaining issues blocking the way forward. In the course of this I told him that we had reached the crunch moment – if we did not go ahead with his plan for a coalition Government after Roy Jenkins produced his report on electoral reform in October, then I would conclude that this part of the project had failed, and I would stand down as Party Leader early in the New Year. Blair, for his part, made it very clear that the price he wanted for agreeing to the Jenkins proposals was a full merger between the two Parties. I said I could not countenance an imposed top-down merger, because I did not think it would work and would never get the support of my members. I had been involved in one forced marriage (with the SDP) and had no desire to try another. But I would not discount an eventual ‘organic’ merger of the two parties after a period of partnership in Government, if that was what the members of both parties wanted. We eventually agreed a form of words, based on his agreement to put the Jenkins proposals to a referendum coupled with his personal tacit support for electoral reform. We also discussed Kosovo. I told him that I would make another visit soon, and he suggested I should carry with me a personal letter from him to Milošević, urging restraint. I left once again believing that the log jam was broken and that we had, at last, reached an agreement to move forward.
A Fortunate Life Page 41