Broken Vows (30 page)

On ‘Devolution Day’ (but also April Fool’s Day) 2002, Milburn’s White Paper was published. Politicians spoke about ‘building capacity’, ‘transformational change’ and the ‘big bang’ of health reforms. Blair mentioned that NHS employees should feel part of the ‘culture of the community’. NHS pressure groups dismissed such jargon as gibberish intended to conceal the ultimate betrayal of the service’s ideals. Others scoffed that Blair was not devolving authority because Whitehall retained control. Unsure about his final destination, Blair could not spell out a complete vision. In a display of ideological contradiction, he spoke about ‘empowering the individual’, but also said that ‘the weaknesses of free markets are clear’.

A key adviser in Downing Street realised that Blair ‘was muddle-headed. He could not describe a coherent and complete model of what he wanted to achieve. So he could not explicitly tell Nigel Crisp what to do.’ But for the moment his team – Barber, Milburn, Stevens and Paul Corrigan, a special adviser on the NHS – were all agreed on the same ‘line of travel’. They would push through the first changes from Whitehall, then decide on the next step.

Two weeks later, Gordon Brown delivered his Budget. Conscious that the image of Blair was fixed behind him in the TV camera’s frame, Brown’s publicists presented the occasion as the coronation of the king-in-waiting. To Labour’s cheers, the chancellor flourished a record
8.6 per cent increase on that year’s NHS spending. The Tories’ glum faces helped cast Brown as the hero.

Blair did not question the chancellor’s claim that, despite the extra spending, he would stick to his ‘golden rule’ of balancing the budget over the economic cycle; nor did he query his pledge to keep government debt below 40 per cent of GDP. He seemed unaware that the Budget broke both assurances. Knowing that there was no prospect of financing the additional spending by private wealth creation or by increasing productivity in the private sector, Brown borrowed money from China and other countries, without any prospect of immediate repayment. To protect himself from criticism, he redefined his ‘golden rule’ for balancing his budgets.

The technical terms fooled Blair. But, unlike Barber, who praised Brown’s ‘new discipline established over public expenditure’, he suspected chicanery. Although he could not master economic detail and thus prevent Brown’s overspending, he did understand that the electorate would damn the chancellor’s latest stealth taxes on savings, pensions, petrol, stamp duty and allowances as ‘broken promises’. To avoid an argument, he retreated. ‘I have a floppy PM on NHS costs,’ Simon Stevens told Julian Le Grand.

Nor had Blair understood Milburn’s reorganisation. In the nature of his government, well-meaning but fearful civil servants did not dare mention their foreboding. Suspicious ministers, they knew, disliked being told to ‘read the game’. Within months, however, Milburn came to recognise his errors. He should have approved ten strategic health authorities instead of twenty-eight, fifty PCTs instead of 302 and eleven ambulance authorities instead of forty. He started another wasteful bout of restructuring, propelling 30,000 administrators into a merry-go-round of expensive redundancies.

During his regular meetings with Barber about the NHS, Blair never asked about these costly mistakes. Targets focused on crude numbers, not fundamental policies. The sessions gave Blair the opportunity to pose questions prepared by his staff that reassured those summoned
about his being in full command. Although Jonathan Powell liked to boast that Blair possessed the ‘barrister’s ability to soak up vast amounts of paper while at the same time remaining focused on the big picture’, the experts could see through the performance.

Improving the NHS depended largely on Nigel Crisp, but by then he and Milburn were arguing regularly. Milburn disliked Crisp’s attitudes and upper-crust style, while Crisp resented Milburn’s persistent questioning, which he regarded as interference. Others had become disillusioned with the NHS chief, not least George Alberti, who had originally nominated him. ‘He was affable and smooth,’ recalled Alberti, ‘but I realised after two weeks that nothing was going on.’ The health chief, he suspected, was ‘anti-clinical’.

To Crisp and his departmental team, the NHS Plan 2000 was sacrosanct. Billions of additional pounds to erect new hospitals, hire additional staff and improve regulation were a nirvana, but to revolutionise the service according to the plan devised by Stevens and Milburn was, Crisp believed, unacceptable. The chief executive resented Blair’s reintroduction of the internal market, but he did not oppose the 2002 White Paper outright. Instead, he cherry-picked from the new plan by approving ‘limited choice’.

Inevitably, his tactics created contradictions. On the one hand, he criticised the lack of incentives for hospitals to treat more patients, which caused ‘a sense of drift’, but then he scorned incentives because ‘there are limits to markets’. Not that he was blind to his Janus-like pronouncements. Rather, in his heart Crisp resented the politicians for generating the problems. Blair and Milburn, he observed, failed to understand ‘the difference between wanting to change things and making things happen’. He went further: ‘The NHS Plan was a plan of action which I could implement, while the 2002 White Paper was just more political developments.’ To stymie any return to the Tories’ blueprint, he created an unbridgeable chasm between the two plans. With the help of John Bacon, his deputy and the director for performance, he gathered the traditionalists in Richmond House to entrench top-down
controls, prevent the devolution of powers and sabotage the loathsome internal market.

Crisp’s rejection of profound change incensed Milburn, a volatile politician. The official was accused of being ‘too laid-back, wishy-washy and not on top of his brief’. ‘I had a simple and rather unsophisticated management model in my head,’ Crisp would later explain. Blair, he believed, had ‘a naive notion that you can change things from the centre. The problem with politicians is they’re restless and push things on.’ He spoke with pride about remaining remote from the political battles, biding his time, watching Blair and Milburn steel themselves to outwit Brown. He could count on the chancellor to stymie Blair.

In Crisp’s portrayal, Milburn was not a true moderniser but was ‘still very wedded’ to the model of a centrally controlled NHS and ‘very nervous’ of going beyond old Labour’s orthodoxy. ‘There’s already enough political blood on the floor,’ Crisp recorded Milburn saying in an argument about change. Milburn denied that recollection but admitted being caught in the middle between Blair and Brown. In frustration, he appealed to the public by writing in
The Times
that Labour needed to seize diversity and choice from the Tories, just as it had taken over traditional Tory territory on the economy and crime.

As Crisp anticipated, Brown opposed the NHS contracting any privatised services or there being any dilution of Whitehall’s control. He picked on foundation hospitals as his battleground, refusing to allow them to borrow money. These hospitals, he said, would fragment and eventually destroy the NHS. By contrast, an inflexible, monopoly NHS with no competition, no devolved powers and no patients’ choice would preserve the values established in 1948. He rejected the evidence that competition was producing positive results in other countries.

By the beginning of June, Blair’s self-confidence was being pummelled. Two days before a Cabinet meeting, he asked his close advisers whether he should announce that he would not contest the next election. ‘Tony has to face up to the fact that Brown is killing him,’ said Milburn. Blair was persuaded to fight. The showdown at an unusually
dramatic Cabinet meeting on 13 June exposed the fractures. ‘Our mettle is being tested,’ Blair told his ministers during a discussion described by Richard Wilson as ‘a big bad moment’. Brown brooded silently, stoking the division he had created.

Over a weekend at Chequers, with the help of officials Blair wrote a twenty-page note explaining the advantages of foundation hospitals. For once, his endorsement of Milburn’s disdain for Whitehall’s micro-management showed a better grasp of the detail than that shown by officials in the Department of Health. Brown ignored the note. He never engaged with Blair over ideas on how to improve NHS treatment. In retaliation, an eyewitness observed, Blair ‘egged Milburn on to fight Brown’. ‘Don’t hold back,’ he told the minister. Foundation hospitals, he stipulated, would be independent of the Treasury’s control. ‘If independence is good enough for the Bank of England,’ Milburn had said brazenly to Brown in Cabinet, ‘then it’s OK for schools and hospitals.’ His audacity, other ministers rightly assumed, had been blessed by Blair.

Unknown to Milburn, at that delicate moment Blair was preparing for war in Iraq. Over the following three months, his appetite for a power struggle over foundation hospitals disappeared. His weakness was revealed at the confrontation on 9 October with Brown, Milburn and Prescott. Brushing Milburn contemptuously aside, Brown refused to surrender the Treasury’s control over every hospital’s budget. His hatred for Milburn, sitting right next to him, was undisguised.

Blair retreated. In what one eyewitness called ‘split the baby’, he ruled, ‘Your hospital plan and Gordon’s financial plan.’ Contrary to Milburn’s blueprint, hospitals would not have their own budgets or benefit from financial incentives for good performance. Of course, in his remarks to the media Campbell would present ‘new-style foundation hospitals’, but they would not be financially independent nor would they embrace choice and competition. ‘They’ll be free to innovate,’ was the best the Downing Street spokesman could say. Simon Stevens wrote out the agreement, with Andrew Turnbull looking over his shoulder. In a prearranged move, as soon as Brown left the room
Campbell issued a press statement praising the plan but omitting any hint that Brown had won. The chancellor was furious. Blair was consoled that, although the policy was lost, he had at least scored a victory with the press release.

Half a victory did not thrill Milburn: ‘Once again Tony had said he would get rid of Gordon and endlessly, as usual, he didn’t.’

At the end of Michael Barber’s first year as head of the Delivery Unit, Blair was still excited by the regular stock-takes about the ‘performativity’ of the five priorities – crime, health, transport, immigration and education. Barber was basking in the glow of a Progress in International Reading Literacy Study about the reading standards of ten-year-olds in 2001. English primary schools had been ranked third out of forty countries. Part of the credit, eulogised Barber, was owed to Labour’s ‘excellent’ reforms of Britain’s teacher-training programme. His own credibility, Barber hoped, would be further enhanced by the 2002 results. But there was a hiccup. In June, on the morning of a critical World Cup match, he walked into Estelle Morris’s office. ‘It’s a disaster,’ he cried. ‘England are playing a crucial match tonight and they’ll go to bed too late.’ The following day, eleven-year-olds were due to sit their SAT examinations, and Labour’s political reputation would suffer if the targets were not met. Barber’s fears were justified. ‘Panic in the Department of Education,’ was the eyewitness observation of Margaret Brown, a professor of mathematics education at King’s College, London. That one day’s results showed there had been no improvement in maths or English. The government’s target of 80 per cent of eleven-year-olds achieving level 4 in maths was missed.

In his subsequent post-mortem with Blair, Barber fluently recited the disappointing statistics supplied by the schools and test boards. He heaped the blame on teacher training and on teachers failing to understand Whitehall’s strategies. In searching for other culprits, he even
blamed Chris Woodhead’s resignation and Whitehall for ‘losing its edge at every level’.

‘The results will improve next year,’ said Blair with conviction.

‘I’m more worried that the media will rubbish the process,’ said David Blunkett.

‘Should we change our strategy?’ Morris asked.

‘No,’ replied Barber. ‘It worked with the previous children, so we’ll do more of the same.’

Barber was in denial about the research presented by the statisticians. The dramatic improvement in level 4 maths had started in 1996. The best results were in 1998 and 1999 – before Labour’s £80 million programme began – and the results would remain static after 2002 for another six years. ‘We could not understand why the results plateaued,’ said David Normington, the education department’s permanent secretary. ‘We never got an answer.’ The standards among the poorest children, who did not benefit from the government’s strategy, actually declined.

Margaret Brown knew the reason. She criticised cheating teachers and Labour’s introduction of ‘whole-class teaching’. Maths teachers trained under the Tories had divided classes into sets by ability. In those schools where numeracy skills had jumped between 1999 and 2002 from 33 per cent to 45 per cent of children meeting the high grade, many children had been specially coached for the tests. In 1998, Blunkett had ordered a dramatic change. Maths was now taught to mixed-ability classes by teachers who pitched their lessons at the middle, dragging down the results for those at the top. Innumeracy among children, Brown discovered, was growing. Even the best students no longer showed a deep understanding of maths.

Margaret Brown’s criticism was particularly directed at Barber and his political masters. With Blair’s agreement, Barber had ordered teachers to follow ‘lesson plans’ drafted in a rush and, in part, by a non-mathematician, just as schools faced an unexpected shortage of maths teachers. Labour had ended teacher training in universities, and the new intake was not specially trained in maths. The chance to improve
teaching, Brown wrote, was being wasted by the politicians’ distortions. ‘In some cases, research evidence was disregarded for political reasons,’ she said. ‘Barber even suggested that computers should replace bad teachers,’ she recalled.

Barber was particularly dismayed by the literacy results. His target had been for 80 per cent of eleven-year-olds to reach level 4 by 2002. He failed. In 2000, 75 per cent of children reached that level, but standards would rise no further. Indeed, many children could not sustain their progress and their reading skills deteriorated. Barber struggled to find an explanation. He had underestimated, he pleaded, the power of the educational establishment and had forgotten to champion parents. He also blamed the slowdown on ‘a failure to understand sufficiently the nature of the challenge’. ‘Too often’, he wrote, ‘it felt like a revolution without enough revolutionaries.’ Bemused by his verbosity, others blamed the guru himself. They were suspicious of the tests and realised that a credulous prime minister had misunderstood how Barber’s graphs failed to measure the human factor.

During those monthly stock-takes, Blair asked probing questions, but disappointing answers did not lead to any recriminations. In his world, post-mortems were rare. Neither Blair nor Barber would admit the reason for the plateauing – namely, that the snap improvement was a reflection of the Tories’ achievements, which Labour’s policies had stymied.

‘Should we do more phonics?’ Blair asked once again.

‘No,’ replied Barber.

‘What’s next?’ asked Blair, referring to the day’s agenda. Dabbling with statistics and passing over phonics in a brief sentence suggested little appreciation of pedagogy.

In public, he never challenged teachers’ skills or questioned the slide in standards. Some assumed he was avoiding political pitfalls, while others sensed his obliviousness to the educational establishment’s passion for ‘child-centred’ classrooms that followed the National Literacy Strategy (NLS). In his newspaper commentaries, Woodhead blamed the NLS for perpetuating illiteracy.

Blair also preferred to ignore those who scorned Barber for using data produced by educational institutions that was likely to confirm his own success. The critics suspected that he disregarded data collected from eleven sources by Professor Peter Tymms of Durham University that contradicted Barber’s statistics showing ‘success’. Tymms questioned whether Barber understood the discipline of statistics, as his own research showed schools were failing to improve literacy and numeracy. ‘Barber’s world is in the shadow between the idea and reality,’ commented Michael Little, another academic critic. ‘We can never be sure what happened.’ Such criticism made no impression. Barber had won respect across Whitehall. His energy and organisational skills were admired, and that counted in a zone where, in Blair’s assessment, talented officials were rare.

Blair’s approval lulled Estelle Morris into not questioning Barber’s target for secondary schools to improve their GCSE grades from D to C, especially in maths and English. No official warned Morris that setting such targets was complicated. When the teachers complained that the new demands would cause chaos in school tests, they were ignored. Morris was focused on enacting the 2002 Education Bill, an important landmark for Blair.

Under the bill, schools would be given more freedom, more faith schools would be approved and private sponsors would be welcomed for the new academies. The change reflected Blair’s abandonment of ‘standards not structures’. Structures – whether the school was a comprehensive, a city technology college or a specialist school – were important, he now acknowledged. After the first three academies were opened, Morris urged Blair, ‘You must take the teachers with you. We need their support.’ He ignored her advice but approved Andrew Adonis’s search for more sponsors for the academies, a 50 per cent increase in teaching assistants, the recruitment of 25,000 more teachers, and Teach First, an innovative scheme to encourage graduates to teach in disadvantaged schools. With over 600,000 teachers and assistants employed in English schools – now better paid in a profession that had become
more popular – the odds were stacked in favour of outstanding results. The doubters included senior officials in the Department of Education, who were not convinced that money would buy success. And Morris herself had become depressed.

Adonis was another problem. ‘Andrew’s as bright as a button’, Morris told her confidants, ‘but a nightmare to work with.’ Many in the party, she knew, disliked him as a right-wing, self-aggrandising nerd.

Adonis was criticising Morris for being ‘nervous’ about taking on the left-wing educational establishment. ‘That is untrue and makes me furious,’ she retorted. He also questioned her understanding of education after she allowed, with Blair’s agreement, fourteen-year-olds to abandon learning foreign languages.

The two officials were moving in opposite directions. Behind Morris’s back, Blair told Adonis to ignore her and just secure the support of the department’s officials. Without her agreement, Adonis regularly visited the department to give orders that contradicted her own. ‘You can’t do that,’ he was told by the senior civil servants. With Blair’s blessing, Adonis ignored their instruction, blatantly challenging Morris’s authority.

‘Adonis is running his own education policy,’ a senior official told Morris.

‘What shall I do?’ she asked Barber.

‘Just listen to him,’ he replied enigmatically. Morris was powerless to challenge Blair.

Overseeing the bureaucracy was proving too much for a fragile woman with low self-esteem. Blair rarely engaged with her personally. He was unaware, she complained, of her anguish over failing schoolchildren and his refusal to meet teachers or understand their complaints. Isolated from Blair and irritated by Adonis, she was also critical of her ‘inadequate’ civil servants. Vulnerable, she winced about the imminent parliamentary battle to introduce tuition fees for university students, which had been explicitly excluded from the party’s election manifesto. Finally, she wilted, overcome by the failure to meet the government’s literacy and numeracy targets.

In 1997, Blunkett had promised to resign if his numeracy and literacy targets were not met by 2002. In March 1999, Morris had subscribed to the same pledge. On 24 October 2001, she unconvincingly denied that commitment. Months later, as a stream of negative headlines erupted about the A-level results, her undertaking was thrown back at her. She had become the target of blame for Blunkett’s failed ambitions.

In 2000, Blunkett had been accused of downgrading standards by rushing in changes to A-levels. The following year, the A-level pass rate jumped by 4.5 per cent. The disparity between examinations, course work and modules reignited complaints about fixing exams and falling standards. Researchers showed that, since 1988, high grades in the gold-standard exam had become progressively easier to obtain thanks to less demanding questions, grade inflation and the opportunity granted by Labour to take AS modules repeatedly. In anticipation of even more students passing in 2002, the fearful examination boards unexpectedly employed stricter marking to fail an unusually high number of A-level candidates. Newspaper headlines described a pass rate that had been fixed to prevent embarrassment, and an official report would later confirm limited ‘grade manipulation’. Academics appointed by Morris to resolve the problem engaged in a public dispute, then turned against her. Battered, the minister who had failed her own A-levels was accused of giving a ‘misleading’ assurance to the Commons and of undermining the authority of Mike Tomlinson, Ofsted’s chief inspector.

Blair was unaware that his minister was crumbling until about 11 p.m. on 18 October 2002, when he was told that the following day’s newspaper headlines would report a ‘fiasco’. Just after midnight, he telephoned Morris while she was being driven to her home in Pimlico.

‘Are we in trouble over A-levels?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘We are.’

There was a long silence, and then Blair tersely ended the call.

‘I knew at that moment that I had lost the confidence of Downing Street,’ Morris would later say. In truth, Blair still trusted her and had no reason to be suspicious when he was told three days later that she
was returning to London from Birmingham for an immediate meeting. After brief pleasantries, Morris delivered her bombshell.

‘I want to resign,’ she said.

‘What?’ Blair exclaimed. ‘Why?’

As she listed her failures – not least the imminent publication of the official report that fraudsters had stolen over £100 million from the Independent Learning Accounts – Blair became adamant that she shouldn’t resign. ‘You’re doing a good job,’ he repeated. The reforms she had started would work and her problems were a legacy from the first term. ‘I want you to go away and think about it,’ he said. ‘Tell me tomorrow morning that you will not resign.’ Alastair Campbell’s calls over the next hours encouraging her to stay intensified her anguish. Blair, she felt, was blind to her plight.

She returned to Downing Street two days later. ‘I’m going, Tony,’ she said.

Charles Clarke was appointed education secretary in her place. The experienced political operator, characterised as corpulent, clever and occasionally boorish, was expected by Blair to trample on Morris’s critics, not least by reassuring teachers that the education budget would increase annually by 9.2 per cent, raising expenditure to £70.9 billion in 2003/4. In their brief conversation, Clarke and Blair did not discuss standards. In Clarke’s opinion, doctrines about education attracted obsessives. Phonics was unimportant. He would even decry studying classics at university and tell a parliamentary committee that blaming a child’s poor performance on the parents ‘makes me weep’. His response to bad teaching would be to refuse the invitation to attend the teaching unions’ annual conferences. The differences between him, his predecessors and Adonis undermined those attempting to explain Blair’s education policy. Like health and welfare, the only consistency was constant change.

The undisputed result of the turmoil in education policy was the growing dissatisfaction of the aspiring middle classes. Although Labour had built new schools, appointed a record number of teachers and reduced class sizes, more children than ever were going to private
schools or receiving private tuition to improve their chances of entering Oxbridge, including the children of the prime minister’s friends, advisers and ministers in his government. Blair’s two sons would also apply for Oxbridge from a specially endowed school. Many inner cities had become immigrant ghettos, and a large number of young parents who could not afford school fees were fleeing from the cities to state schools in the shires. In response, Morris had launched London Challenge, a successful programme to reverse that trend through extra money and better teachers, but other cities had not followed suit. Neither Blair nor Clarke identified that as a priority.