Broken Vows (31 page)

Both, however, were horrified by the slowdown of Britain’s economy. Gordon Brown admitted his forecasts were worthless. The country would need to borrow an additional £20 billion over two years to pay for increased welfare benefits and the pay hikes for public-sector workers, including increases of 21 to 40 per cent over three years for some NHS employees. Others would have to pay for that largesse. Later generations would have to repay the PFI debt, already fixed at £15 billion and heading higher.

‘Will you push through university top-up fees?’ was Blair’s only question to Clarke during their first meeting. Neither mentioned the breach of the manifesto pledge that Blair cursed as short-sighted. Soon after the election, the leaders of the Russell Group, Britain’s best universities, had asked him to introduce the fees to prevent Britain’s leading colleges fading in the world’s league tables. Blair agreed that ‘co-payments’ – the government’s euphemism for tuition fees – would, in his words, ‘modernise’ Britain’s education system. He hoped to rely on Clarke to persuade Labour MPs to support the government.

‘I’ll go through it and let you know,’ replied his education minister. Blair, he found, was always willing to discuss problems. The glitch was whether anything happened thereafter. Two days later, as a warning to Clarke, and sensing Blair’s weakness after Morris’s resignation, Brown sent a forty-four-page letter to Cabinet ministers attacking foundation hospitals and opposing university tuition fees. With little effort,
he made John Prescott ‘furious’. Blair tried to reason with Brown, but the chancellor adamantly opposed anything provided by the private sector. On reflection, Clarke agreed that compelling wealthy graduates to pay for their education retrospectively seemed sensible. He also agreed with Blair that the alternative – Brown’s proposed graduate tax – was unworkable because universities would need to wait fifteen years for their money. As anticipated, his conclusion provoked a battle with Brown. Clarke won the first round, but Brown kept on coming. Ignoring the chancellor’s behind-the-scenes manoeuvring, on 22 January 2003 Clarke published a White Paper advocating tuition fees. In retaliation, on Brown’s initiative 160 Labour MPs pledged to vote against the bill. ‘People have been licensed by Gordon to rebel,’ Blair told Peter Mandelson.

‘Don’t worry,’ Clarke reassured Blair. ‘Gordon’s a paper tiger. I don’t think he’s got the support on the back benches.’ Blair looked at the signatures on the opposition list and disagreed. His tolerance for political pain was inconsistent. Mindful of Alan Milburn’s fate, Clarke told Blair, ‘I won’t give in to Gordon.’

Blair was struggling to understand why, since the start of his second term, he had been stuttering, failing to recover from the disappointment of the first. He had publicised his conversion to abandoning state monopolies in the NHS and education, and had declared his support for ‘the consumer’ and ‘diversity of supply and choice’, but little was happening. He wrote about building ‘New Labour around the ideas of traditional values – solidarity, social justice, opportunity for all – applied entirely afresh to the modern world’, but Labour stalwarts were scathing. He even advocated a debate about his support for ‘greater interdependence plus greater individuality’, a baffling proposition that was greeted with silence. What more did he have to do?

In July 2002, Blair hosted a generous farewell dinner in Downing Street for Richard Wilson, the retiring Cabinet secretary. Over the course of the evening, both men ignored the consequences of their fraught relationship. Wilson did not mention his regret that the traditional machinery of good government had been abandoned, while Blair showed no guilt for regularly humiliating Wilson by excluding him from meetings. On the contrary, he intended to also exclude David Omand, the newly appointed security and intelligence co-ordinator, from any involvement in Britain’s defence and intelligence operations.

Within weeks of his appointment, Omand realised that he was not invited to Blair’s meetings with Richard Dearlove or the other intelligence chiefs, or those with Admiral Mike Boyce. Instead, Jonathan Powell would sit with Blair. ‘Powell regarded us with contempt,’ noted Andrew Turnbull.

‘The system of government was obviously corrupted,’ recalled Omand. ‘Turnbull and I tried to get it changed, but we were blocked by Manning.’ David Manning would deny the accusation: ‘I had no say over who had access to the prime minister.’ The other possible culprit was Powell. In either case, the exclusion of representatives of honest government from critical meetings resulted in what Omand later called ‘a failure of statecraft’.

The newcomer’s fate was not surprising. During his last days in Downing Street, Wilson’s suspicions had grown. At one point, he noticed Blair was writing a conversation note for a forthcoming telephone exchange
with President Bush about Iraq. ‘We will be with you come what may,’ was the summary. Wilson’s surprise was shared by Manning, who advised Blair, ‘You can’t say that because you’re committing the British army to an invasion which no one else knows about.’ Blair appeared unmoved.

Those who assumed that the prime minister had been seduced by Bush in Crawford misunderstood his attitude. Blair was not the president’s poodle but his partner. However, unlike Bush, he could not legally reveal their joint plan to pursue regime change. Iraq’s possession of WMDs could be the only justification for Britain’s participation. Manning, a reporter rather than an innovator, resisted raising the alarm by appealing to Turnbull for advice. Instead, he moved closer to Blair’s inner circle alongside Powell and Dearlove, excluding any potential critics. ‘I got “keep out” vibes from Manning,’ recalled Turnbull. ‘He had the Stockholm syndrome – complete loyalty.’

Boyce was struck by the prime minister’s unyielding conviction. ‘I don’t want to look at myself in the mirror in ten years’, said Blair, ‘when he has used WMDs again and know I could have stopped that.’ He did not welcome the admiral’s scepticism, especially his questions about what would follow Saddam’s defeat.

In his report in July, Dearlove had highlighted the absence of any American plan for post-war occupation, a warning that was repeated by Jack Straw. The foreign secretary now introduced Michael Williams, a Middle East specialist, to Blair. Williams explained that Iraq’s stability owed everything to Saddam forcibly keeping the Shias and Sunnis apart. Once this control disappeared, peace was unlikely. ‘That’s all history, Mike,’ said Blair. ‘This is about the future.’

Another warning was delivered by Peter Ricketts, the director of the Foreign Office’s Middle East department. He predicted Saddam’s overthrow would lead to turmoil. He also cautioned that the scramble ‘to establish a link between Iraq and al-Qaeda is so far frankly unconvincing’. Since Ricketts’s advice did not appear to be endorsed by either Michael Jay, the Foreign Office’s chief, or Straw, Blair avoided any response. He also sidestepped the legal advice offered by Peter Goldsmith, the
attorney general, that regime change without the approval of the UN would be illegal. ‘Well …’ Blair replied, his voice trailing off. He had decided to accept his lawyers’ advice that in public statements ‘we focus on WMDs and we do not mention regime change’. Any suggestion that this amounted to deception would be fiercely denied by him.

On 24 July, Blair met David Owen, the former Labour foreign secretary, for dinner. Although restless, he spoke with certainty about war, despite the difficulties. His enthusiasm was explained by some as a way to sabotage Gordon Brown’s attempts to make him resign; others, like Peter Mandelson, anticipated that a victory would seal his reputation, as the Falklands had for Thatcher. Few could understand why he was so focused on Saddam, whose rule posed no risk to Britain nor an immediate threat in the region, on top of which there was no proof that he possessed WMDs. Yet Blair had brushed these factors aside and told Bush that Britain was committed to the invasion. Nothing could interfere with his crusade against evil.

One result was immediate. ‘The Americans are raising the shutters,’ Britain’s army liaison officer in Tampa reported to military headquarters in Northwood, north London. Shortly after, a team of American planning staff arrived at Northwood to describe the invasion plan. Boyce and the chiefs intensified their discussions about the size of Britain’s commitment, or ‘package’.

Britain could enter the war, Blair knew, only with the public’s support. Putting British lives at risk and spending billions of pounds could be justified by defining the military and political objectives as vital to the national interest. He realised that ‘force for good’, the original policy, would meet those criteria, so long as Saddam’s WMDs threatened world peace. The JIC, he decided, should publish a dossier bringing together all the intelligence. Giving the public what Powell called a ‘sort of Rolls-Royce information campaign’ would be judged as honourable.

JIC chairman John Scarlett started assembling the material, but then Blair reassessed the implications. Publication would trigger speculation. Daylight was dangerous. After a press conference in late July, his
astute performance led Simon Jenkins to write, ‘Mr Blair has no clue what America intends to do in Iraq. This is understandable since, as yet, nor does America.’ By keeping his plans in the shadows, even his most cynical critics could be controlled, as Blair discovered on the eve of his summer break. Towards the end of July, he agreed to meet Clare Short.

‘I really think we should have a discussion about Iraq,’ she said.

‘No decisions have been made,’ replied Blair, ‘but I do not want it to come to Cabinet because it might leak into the press and hype things up.’

Short appeared satisfied, and Blair left for his summer vacation resolved not to publish the dossier Scarlett was assembling.

The holiday, which included a stay at the home of Alain-Dominique Perrin, the French billionaire owner of the luxury-goods company Richemont, ended with a hike in the Pyrenees with a friend. Blair stayed overnight in a mountain hotel. At breakfast the following morning, he was tense. ‘He said he’d been up all night’, the friend told the
Financial Times,
‘because he couldn’t get to sleep. And then he said, “I’ve made some big decisions.”’

Blair returned to London at the end of August. Dick Cheney was agitating for war and declaring that Iraq was undoubtedly amassing WMDs. In Britain, Labour Party activists were threatening revolt, but Blair had decided. Any lingering doubts about his support for Bush and his fear of the Labour Party and public opinion had been resolved in favour of war.

By then, the chiefs had read the JIC’s first draft of the dossier about WMDs. Scarlett’s committee admitted that their conclusions were based on just one source and that there was ‘very little intelligence’ about Saddam’s WMD programme. ‘An overlong and rather poor cut-and-paste job,’ concluded Admiral Nigel Essenhigh. The source of the ‘intelligence’ seemed to be information drawn from the ‘red books’ – the intelligence summaries distributed among senior military staff – and material already in the public domain. Based on historic information, the draft lacked any compelling new evidence.

‘I think this is all ghastly,’ said another chief. ‘Rubbish. We don’t
need this.’ The three chiefs told Boyce they were puzzled as to why the government needed a dossier. Essenhigh in particular argued that Blair could go to war on the basis that Saddam had breached UN resolutions. ‘If the government insists that a dossier be published,’ said Essenhigh, ‘this confused version is as good as anything.’ Boyce did not repeat those messages to Blair.

By 28 August, the chiefs’ comments were redundant. Blair decided that an intelligence dossier should be published after all. Scarlett’s team under Julian Miller, the chief of the JIC’s assessment staff, began rewriting the draft. At a press conference in Sedgefield, Blair announced, ‘America should not have to face this issue alone. We should face this together.’

Since the informal decision in July, a small team in the defence staff had been compiling three options for Britain’s participation. Package one was limited to air, maritime and intelligence support of the American invasion. The second package committed ninety planes and twenty ships employing about 13,000 personnel. Package three was full-blown involvement by 42,000 personnel, including infantry and tanks, all totally integrated within the American command. Half the British army, comprising a third of the invasion force, would be committed to the full brunt of war. In September, Boyce told the army to assume its involvement would be limited to package one. The generals regarded Boyce’s decision as ‘profoundly unsatisfactory’. The army, he was told, wanted to be involved from start to finish.

One obstacle was the army’s decay, mainly as a result of Brown’s refusal to provide extra money to replace equipment. The fallacy of the 1998 strategic defence review was exposed. Essenhigh told Geoff Hoon that the budget was inadequate. ‘It’s like talking to a wall,’ he complained. Without influence over Blair and his confidants, Hoon refused to become involved. Essenhigh’s request for a meeting with the prime minister was refused.

The military’s fate depended on Boyce making a direct appeal. Late one afternoon in Chequers, he stood in front of maps of Iraq explaining to Blair the different scenarios, packages and problems of an invasion.
‘I’m told repeatedly’, he said to Blair, ‘that we are not sufficiently funded. We are committed to do our best but we cannot do the whole mission.’

Blair nodded. The Treasury, he knew, would in the event of war fully fund an operation, but for the moment he resisted the army’s request that he commit himself to package three, and pointedly refused to permit the purchase of new equipment. ‘If you want more money,’ he said, ‘speak to Gordon.’

Following the familiar path, Boyce approached Brown twice. ‘I got no traction,’ he reported wearily.

The quickening pace posed Blair with a dilemma. Although he believed that his ‘force for good’ philosophy justified removing Saddam, none of the senior politicians in his Cabinet shared his unqualified passion or his trust of Bush. To justify Britain’s participation, he needed the president’s continued support in building a coalition of nations working through the UN ostensibly to seek a peaceful resolution with Saddam. Certain of his power to persuade America to follow his path and not alienate other countries by focusing only on an invasion, he sent Manning to Washington to convince Bush to ‘stick to the UN’, meaning that an invasion needed to be authorised by a UN resolution in order to be legal. Manning reported back that the UN was ‘not a lost cause’ and that Bush wanted to meet Blair.

During a quick trip to Camp David, where he met Bush and, to his surprise, Cheney, Blair laid out his plan to achieve disarmament through the UN. If that happened, he said, Saddam would find survival difficult. If the process were exhausted and shown to have failed, then an invasion could be justified. ‘If we get disarmament through the UN,’ said Bush, ‘we would have crated the guy.’ However, his sympathy was crushed by Cheney’s antipathy towards the British. Cheney wanted disarmament delivered by regime change, nothing less. Blair returned to London fixed on an implacable truth: regardless of Britain, Bush and Cheney were going to war.

On 23 August, the JIC had reported that we ‘know little about Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons since late 1998’. On 9 September,
the team hardened their opinion, with the latest draft stating that ‘Iraq could produce more biological agents within days … and nerve agents within months.’ This new conclusion was reached without any new proof. Despite the ‘relative thinness’ of the existing evidence, an inquiry would later decide, the JIC applied ‘greater firmness’ in their judgement.

The evidence had been sharpened after Alastair Campbell’s intercession. Four days earlier, during a committee meeting to consider the JIC draft, he had told Powell that it required ‘a substantial rewrite … It had to be revelatory and we needed to show what was new.’ Campbell relied on Scarlett, whom he called a ‘mate’, and Dearlove, who was praised as ‘really helpful’, to deliver the goods. Both met Blair in his den rather than in an austere committee room surrounded by sceptics. And both were keen to oblige.

As chairman of the JIC, Scarlett had to assess the information provided by all the intelligence agencies and present an uncorrupted conclusion. Blair was entitled to expect a judgement based on forensic examination of MI6’s sources. Accordingly, when the chairman spoke with conviction about Saddam’s WMDs, Blair in theory had no reason to harbour doubts. But what Scarlett actually said did raise questions. The intelligence agencies, he conceded, lacked hard evidence. The latest information from the European intelligence services confirmed that judgement, and some early sources on whom Dearlove depended had already been reclassified as ‘fabricators and fantasists’. Those circumstances had persuaded the Cabinet defence committee to conclude that ‘our intelligence is poor’.

Scarlett’s solution was to offer a compromise: Saddam did possess WMDs, yet intelligence to that effect was ‘sporadic and patchy’. His words of caution, he would later explain, did not carry their normal meaning. He was not challenged over his vagueness. Blair could choose what suited him. For others, the confusion Scarlett sowed was complete – not least for the defence chiefs.

Regardless of their personal opinions, Blair could depend on the
chiefs’ loyalty never to challenge a prime minister’s legal order. The only fly in the ointment of the ‘can-do’ spirit that Blair so admired was Boyce. ‘He says everything is too difficult,’ complained the prime minister. ‘He’s too negative and monosyllabic.’ The admiral reported ‘problems’ in a dry manner, without making himself amenable.