Broken Vows (33 page)

The foreword made mention four times of ‘WMDs to be ready within forty-five minutes of an order to use them’. Blair’s words were
reviewed and approved by Scarlett, but no subsequent inquiry has asked Blair whether he actually read the final report.

Blair knew publication was a risk, but the odds, he believed, were stacked in his favour. ‘Moral luck’ would conceal the risk once the WMDs were found. (‘Moral luck’ is if two drunken men drive away from a pub and one kills a pedestrian. The other driver had ‘moral luck’.) Scarlett’s silence about the foreword deceived Whitehall insiders. ‘We didn’t realise how misleading the first dossier was,’ said Omand.

Despite the certainty of war in Washington, the prospect was dividing public opinion in Britain. To show their strength, many of Blair’s British opponents joined a 400,000-strong protest march through London by the Countryside Alliance on 22 September. The demonstration showed the deep schism between the metropolitan Blairites and those Britons who inhabited the countryside. The marchers detested Blair’s betrayal of British values. To them, the encouragement of immigration and the criminalisation of fox-hunting pandered to English self-hatred. Leaked minutes of a meeting between Prince Charles and Blair recorded Charles repeating a farmer’s complaint that ‘if we as a group were black or gay, we would not be victimised or picked upon’. For opposite reasons – the betrayal of British values and of Labour’s core values – the antagonism towards Blair came from the right and the left. To his credit, Blair had been persuaded that a hunting ban would damage the countryside, and had relied on Anna Walker, a civil servant, and Alun Michael, a non-confrontational Labour MP, to find a third way, with the help of a report by Terry Burns. But, faced with his party’s opposition to the war, he decided after the march to drop any compromise solution on hunting.

One hurdle in his plan for war was the Cabinet, which met the following day, 23 September. This was to be the ministers’ first serious discussion about Iraq since March. Once again, Blair forbade the Cabinet Office to prepare any papers with the latest assessments. ‘The Cabinet will be informed by the media,’ he told Turnbull, confident that his decision would not be challenged. Reports by Campbell that Straw and
the Foreign Office were particularly ‘paranoiac’ confirmed his calculation about a possible backlash. There were to be no leaks until the public were persuaded that his cause was valid. Blair’s passion for speed and secrecy, Turnbull realised, was ‘not a bad habit he and Powell had slipped into, but how they wanted to operate from the start’.

The Cabinet meeting was desultory. ‘They never asked for a discussion on the options for war,’ observed Turnbull about the approximately twenty-five ministers in the room. ‘They bought into Blair’s challenge to Saddam.’ Following that tune, his ministers regarded the dossier as one more step to persuade Saddam to allow UN inspectors full access. They agreed to focus on the legitimacy of the UN route as their best method of justifying the war – if it occurred – to their constituents.

The highlight of the meeting was a question from Robin Cook about the military options. Blair replied that no decision about joining the invasion had been made. Manning and Powell, who were both in the room, knew this was not the complete truth, as did Hoon and Straw, but the overwhelming majority of ministers remained unaware that Blair was committed to invading Iraq the following year. Turnbull, attending his first meeting as Cabinet secretary, was surprised by the denial. Cook himself suspected Blair had decided to go to war but few, he knew, would accept his own conviction that his leader was ‘deluded’ and ‘a fantasist’ pursuing some higher moral purpose. To Blair’s good fortune, Cook was a loner who played his cards close to his chest. He sought no allies, nor did he challenge the dossier’s authenticity. No one asked Blair whether he believed the intelligence, and any discussion in what Cook would later describe as a ‘grim meeting’ was kept to a minimum. At Blair’s request, the few critical questions were removed from the official minutes. Cosmetics concealed the meagre trace of a dispute. In hindsight, Cook pinpointed that meeting as the birth of Blair’s Messiah complex, while others would call the moment the collapse of proper government. Blair could run his domestic agenda relying on Powell, Sally Morgan and other cronies, but those were not the people to manage the machinery of a democracy undertaking a war.

On the eve of the dossier’s release to the press, Powell had asked, ‘What will be the headline in the
Standard
?’ He was answered at 10.30 a.m. on 24 September, as the London paper was distributed across the capital. At eight o’clock that morning, Charles Reiss, the
Standard
’s veteran political editor, had been allowed to read the dossier, thirty minutes before the deadline for the first edition. After a speed-read, Reiss was left in no doubt that ‘45 minutes’ to deploy a weapon carrying WMDs should be the tabloid’s lead. After all, it appeared in the text four times, and a preceding section mentioned Iraq’s ‘strategic missile systems’. He juxtaposed the two and sent his copy to the newspaper for instant publication, without speaking to Campbell. The newspaper’s editor supervised the front-page headline, ‘45 Minutes to Attack’, above a map showing the rocket’s range, which stretched across Israel to British troops in Cyprus.

The effect was as dramatic as Blair had anticipated. Taken in conjunction with official advice that Britons should store tinned food and new batteries for their torches, the majority of the population was convinced that Saddam possessed deadly weapons. At Downing Street’s eleven o’clock briefing, Reiss was not approached by a government spokesman to correct the mistaken impression he’d given of a long-range rocket armed with WMDs. ‘They’d have come fast enough if I’d got it wrong,’ observed Reiss, a veteran eyewitness to Campbell’s intimidation.

Blair’s masterful speech to the Commons later that day reflected Dearlove’s assurance about the strength of a new source of intelligence: ‘His weapons of mass destruction programme is active, detailed and growing. The policy of containment is not working. The weapons of mass destruction programme is not shut down, it is up and running … Documents show that some of Iraq’s WMDs could be ready for use within forty-five minutes.’ Going further than the dossier itself, and far beyond the JIC’s ‘sporadic and patchy’ evidence, Blair told the country that the intelligence reports describing Saddam’s WMDs were, ‘I believe … extensive, detailed and authoritative’. The public were assured that the dispatch of UN inspectors to specific locations in Iraq would
protect them from the deadly missiles. While most Tory MPs approved the dossier without criticism, the professionals reacted coolly. In their opinion, Scarlett’s report revealed nothing new.

Eight years later, Blair would write, ‘The infamous 45-minute claim was taken up by some of the media on the day but not referred to afterwards and was not mentioned by me at any time in the future … So the idea that we went to war because of this claim is truly fanciful.’ He added, in an unintended self-revelation, that after publication the ‘45 minutes’ was universally ignored. Blair had forgotten the million anti-war protesters who marched through London on 28 September. The forty-five-minute claim was alive for them – as it was for Dearlove. During those days, the MI6 chief was feeling, he later said, ‘extremely uncomfortable’ because he knew that the dossier had misrepresented an artillery gun as a rocket, but he remained silent. He would also discover that the new source of intelligence personally revealed by him to the prime minister in Downing Street was bogus. But he did offer Blair another trump card: MI6 and the CIA hoped to persuade an Iraqi general to kill Saddam and take control of the country in a swift coup. Blair voiced no doubts about the scenario.

The protest in central London was mirrored by opposition to the war at the Labour Party conference in Blackpool. As usual, Blair spoke fluently, but his passionate sentiments about dictators fell flat. The audience packed into the Winter Gardens had not devoted their lives to the party in order to approve an imperialist adventure. But without Brown, an Atlanticist who would not want to oppose the American president, or even Cook offering themselves as alternative leaders, they were powerless.

Not that Brown was quieted. Once again, he was demanding a date for Blair’s departure, with foundation hospitals his new battleground. His rallying cry in his conference speech was, ‘We’re best when we’re Labour.’ Overnight, Blair’s team invented the riposte, ‘We’re best when we are boldest,’ and recited that the reforms were not ‘the betrayal of the public services, but their renewal’.

For the first time, Blair failed to inspire passion among the faithful. His magic had faded. Five years earlier, he had shaped a moment in history, speaking for the majority of Britons about responsibility and honesty. Since then, dozens of quangos had been established to transform Britain into Blair’s image of a fairer country. In his moral equivalence, creating fairness in Britain was no different to doing so in Iraq. His conscience acquitted him of wrongdoing for secretly planning a potentially illegal war. His miscalculation was underestimating his audience’s anger.

This error was illustrated by the appearance of Bill Clinton on the Blackpool stage and a colourful story in the media about the former president eating a McDonald’s hamburger late at night in the deserted seaside town. Clinton excited the party faithful, but others wondered why Blair, at the moment when his credibility was to be tested, would want to stand alongside a proven liar whose alleged abuse of state funds in Arkansas, association with high-profile criminals and receipt of kick-backs for favours cast him as an irrefutably corrupt politician. ‘He’s the only man’, a wag sniped, ‘who can cry out of one eye.’ Blair replied that Clinton’s presence showed that ‘I counted, was a big player, was a world, not just a national leader … Our alliance with America gave Britain a huge position.’ In turn, Clinton queried why Blair had aligned himself so closely to Bush, a question that Boyce was also asking. Answering Clinton was easier than responding to the admiral, not least because Blair had been told that the army was dissatisfied by Boyce’s ‘marked reluctance’ to commit beyond package one.

Under that package, the British army would enter Iraq after Saddam’s defeat to act as peacekeepers. That scenario, General Mike Walker, the chief of the army, told Tebbit, was ‘profoundly unsatisfactory’. Following Operation Swift Sword, the army’s recent training exercise in the Omani desert, Walker was insistent that 42,000 British soldiers supported by ships and planes should be integrated into the US forces according to package three. ‘This is what we have to do if we are to deliver,’ he said. Britain needed to share the risk with the Americans and bear the casualties. The global status of the country’s military depended
upon close involvement with the US. Without full collaboration, the British would be denied future access to American intelligence, new equipment and planning.

In response, Blair quibbled. He did not reject Walker’s opinion but wanted to delay his decision until the last moment. He agreed to the purchase of some equipment for an invasion. He also agreed with Walker’s criticism of Boyce. Tebbit had been agitating against the admiral, who had been complaining about the permanent secretary’s failure to secure sufficient funds to re-equip the military. ‘I hadn’t hidden my contempt,’ Boyce admitted. Blair had no reason to defend an officer critical of the war.

Hoon’s invitation to Boyce to ‘drop in for a cup of coffee’ seemed unremarkable to the admiral. Soon after the first cup was poured, Hoon delivered the bombshell: ‘We’ve decided not to extend your tour of duty beyond two years, and in fact would like you to retire by February.’ He noticed the admiral’s usually inscrutable face registering shock. ‘I was surprised,’ admitted Boyce later.

Boyce’s reply, when it came, was categorical. To dismiss a chief of the defence staff on the eve of war would be careless, even irresponsible. ‘You would be making a mistake,’ he said, explaining the complications of a handover in the midst of preparing the army for an invasion 3,000 miles away. Hoon was easily persuaded that neither he nor the prime minister had thought through the consequences, and agreed that Boyce should remain until the end of the war.

Blair’s position was unprecedented. No other British prime minister had planned to start a war while distrusting his chief of defence, the permanent secretary at the MoD, the Cabinet secretary, the foreign minister, the defence secretary and most of his Cabinet ministers.

For Blair, relying on Margaret Beckett was particularly distasteful. In July 2002, the minister responsible for the environment and agriculture had been summoned to Downing Street to discuss Dr Iain Anderson’s report on foot-and-mouth disease. Blair’s successful resistance to demands for a public inquiry had been vindicated, as Anderson’s conclusions were devastating. Each chapter’s headlines, including ‘panic’, ‘erratic’ communications, ‘haphazard and messy’ decision-making and criticism about Blair’s thirty-one-day delay while he reorganised the Cobra machinery, punctuated the chronology, which described the successive mistakes that ended up costing the country £8 billion.

Fortunately, unlike the £30 million inquiry into BSE, which had triggered a witch-hunt against named culprits, Anderson had been persuaded not to pick out individuals. Instead, he blamed incompetent civil servants for being ‘insensitive’ towards farmers and paralysed by a ‘fear of personal risk-taking’. By default, Blair had failed the test of leadership by allowing the crisis to run out of control for the first month, but he himself escaped criticism.

He had resisted commissioning an inquiry until pressure from Brian Bender, the permanent secretary, overwhelmed his objections. The result matched his fears. Clearly nervous, Blair told Beckett and Bender, ‘I don’t want any leaks.’ Looking at Alastair Campbell, he then ‘read the riot act’. All the potential political pitfalls were to be covered, he ordered. ‘No one was to misbehave,’ was the message. There was to be no mention about the waste of £8 billion. ‘Well, Margaret,’ said Blair as
Beckett rose to leave, ‘I’ve got great confidence in you. You’re the safest pair of hands in the government.’ He spoke through gritted teeth.

Bender had already reported that the merger of the Ministry of Agriculture into the Department of the Environment had overstretched Beckett’s skills, and the department had become ‘messed up’, just as Blair’s relabelling of the DTI, her old stomping ground, had proved a costly embarrassment. ‘Reorganisation won’t magically make anything better,’ Bender noted. Rearranging departments, like changing ministers, Blair discovered, made little difference.

Beckett’s opposition to nuclear power remained the biggest obstacle to the security of Britain’s energy supplies. Until September 2001, Blair had ignored warnings that the country could face future blackouts. Convinced it was safe to continue relying on the market, the government praised itself in its 2001 manifesto for having ‘brought full competition to the gas and electricity markets’. The reality was the opposite.

The original privatisation of the electricity-generating companies had been the idea of Stephen Littlechild. Later, as the first electricity regulator, Littlechild had encouraged the generating companies to earn big profits, in the hope of attracting more competition into the market. However, after 1998, his model crumbled. With the government’s approval, several of Britain’s energy companies were bought and integrated into three giant foreign electricity suppliers. The DTI had not protested over the fact that EDF, the state-owned French energy monolith, now dominated the supply of electricity in southern Britain, or that privatised British companies had been renationalised by foreign-owned corporations, or that British industry was being stripped of the engineers needed to design and build future power stations. Simultaneously, as the independence of British companies diminished, cheap French energy was being imported through cables beneath the English Channel and undercutting British electricity.

Competition was shrinking, but Blair’s staff appeared unconcerned. Geoff Norris, the prime minister’s adviser in Downing Street, and the DTI’s energy experts were convinced that an energy market would
permanently guarantee low prices. The department approved the creation of NETA, a new regulator to supervise the trading of electricity. NETA’s rules were too complex for any politician or civil servant to understand, an incomprehension that pleased the accountants of the electricity companies, whose increasing profits went unquestioned by Ofgem, the new regulator created to protect competition.

Blair had not understood the problems he was entrusting to his new team of ministers at the DTI under Patricia Hewitt. His instructions to her in 2001 had been perfunctory: ‘You know about business. Just do what’s to be done and build the economy.’ He remained uninterested in energy. His distraction extended to forgetting to tell her that she was also the minister for women.

In the weeks after the election, oil prices rose and gas supplies from the North Sea fell. For the first time in a decade, Britain was a net importer of energy. Reluctantly, Blair considered the implications. He was persuaded by David King, the government’s chief scientific adviser, that Labour’s 1997 moratorium on new power stations had diminished the safety threshold that protected Britain from blackouts. The country, said King, could not rely in the future on wind and solar energy, which together contributed only a small fraction of its needs. Nuclear power, Blair knew from his time as Labour’s shadow energy minister, was the only environmentally safe way to guarantee Britain’s electricity supplies over the next fifty years, but building new nuclear stations would require complicated negotiations and guarantees for private investors.

Blair’s commitment was supported by Brian Wilson, his new pro-nuclear energy minister. Norris convinced Wilson that, as ‘Blair’s vicar on earth’, he should deliver ‘the tablets of stone on nuclear’. One obstruction, Wilson knew, was Hewitt, who, like Robin Young, her permanent secretary, was anti-nuclear. Further down the chain, Wilson believed the DTI’s energy directorate was unqualified to steer the argument in the direction Blair wanted. But the major problem was Beckett. Wilson and Norris attended a succession of ministerial meetings with the minister. ‘We went round and round in circles’, recalled Wilson, ‘watching
Beckett, supported by Peter Hain, killing off nuclear energy, which had become her life’s work.’

While concentrating on Northern Ireland’s problems in Belfast, Blair accepted Norris’s suggestion that, instead of entrusting a Cabinet committee to reconcile the differences within his government, he should ask Nick Hartley in the Policy and Innovation Unit to discover whether Britain was permanently guaranteed cheap energy and how soon the country could reduce carbon emissions by 60 per cent. Five months later, on 22 February 2002, Hartley published a sanguine report. Blair’s adviser saw no reason to abandon the policy enshrined by Nigel Lawson in 1982. ‘The process of privatisation and liberalisation’, wrote Hartley, ‘seems to have succeeded well.’ Britain’s competitive energy markets, he enthused, ‘should continue to form the cornerstone of energy policy’. Relying on markets, he predicted, was not a risk. In any future crisis, high prices or shortages would be benignly resolved by ‘efficient … price shocks’, which, thanks to the perfect operation of the market, would reduce consumption. The government, Hartley advocated, should remain detached and ‘monitor’ events while Britain increasingly relied on imported oil and gas.

Hartley’s faith chimed with Blair’s championing of competition. During summit meetings with his fellow European leaders, Blair urged them to depoliticise energy by relying on the market. Gas prices across the EU, he argued, would be kept down in liberalised markets. His arguments were universally rejected. Europeans regarded electricity as a political, not a private, business. Blair’s energy advisers in Downing Street noticed his lack of interest in such nuances. Distracted from domestic policies by frequent trips abroad, he misunderstood how Labour was interfering in Britain’s energy market and had inadvertently politicised the country’s energy. New environmental taxes and government subsidies for coal, wind farms and solar panels had distorted the market, while the proliferation of additional agencies that enforced laws to fight climate change had deterred the generating companies from building power stations. As energy prices slowly increased, the
government was indecisive. Blair accepted Hartley’s conclusions but ignored the author’s myopia regarding the dearth of private investment.

Brian Wilson took the opposite view. If an energy policy were not developed, he believed, Britain would face a serious shortage. The solution to Hartley’s blind optimism, he suggested, was a White Paper – the first since 1989 – in which the DTI should advocate nuclear power. With Blair’s support, Wilson presented drafts to Hewitt. ‘The meetings went again round and round in circles, with Hewitt doing nothing,’ Wilson complained. ‘It’s ridiculous,’ he told Hewitt. ‘This White Paper will have a huge hole in it – which is nuclear energy.’ The problem returned to Downing Street.

Previous governments had discussed the issue in a Cabinet committee supplied with briefing papers to support a structured debate. Blair disdained that forum. First, Downing Street talked to journalists to produce suitable headlines like, ‘Blair Set to Put Nuclear Power Back on Line’. Next, to overcome Beckett’s opposition, in late 2002 he invited Gordon Brown for another ‘chat’ in his office. Blair hoped that Brown would broker a deal with Beckett and Hain.

The chancellor arrived in a thunderous mood. As usual, Blair did not reckon on Brown’s self-interest. Most recently, they had argued once again over his refusal to share Blair’s enthusiasm for the euro. Blair suspected that Brown’s stubbornness was the prelude to a coup. ‘He’s behaving outrageously,’ Blair had told Mandelson. ‘This time he’s gone too far.’ But as usual, he had resisted dismissing his chancellor. Although the abuse was as bad as in 2001, when Brown had called him ‘a crap prime minister’, he had not organised his supporters effectively. Fearful of the party and of Brown himself, he had refused to strike.

Now, Brown fumed while Norris and Joan MacNaughton, the DTI’s director of energy, explained that, without new nuclear stations, by 2020 Britain would rely on gas for 70 per cent of its power, and 90 per cent of that gas would be imported. Britain’s energy security would, therefore, be jeopardised. At the end of the explanation, Blair hoped that Brown would pledge his support. Instead, he got up and walked
out without revealing his intentions. To those left in the room, Blair appeared to underestimate his authority as prime minister. But he could only blame himself. He was semi-isolated within his own government.

To conceal his embarrassment, Blair summoned Hewitt to hear her proposals. Like Beckett and Wilson, she was unaware of her leader’s latest fracas with Brown. ‘Do you want a row in Cabinet about nuclear?’ she asked. ‘Do you want a fight with Beckett?’ Since any new nuclear station required fifteen years to plan and build, she continued, he should abandon the idea. Instead, she described her passion: a carbon-trading scheme operating across Europe that would commit governments to lowering carbon emissions and encourage the greater use of renewable energy.

‘I’ll think about it,’ Blair replied.

Even before Nicholas Stern, a civil servant, published an error-strewn review in 2006 warning about the dangers of climate change, Blair had been hooked on the political importance of controlling emissions. Labour’s 1997 manifesto had pledged to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 20 per cent by 2010. No other country burdened itself with a mandatory law on climate-change targets. A law like that in a country like Britain, which refused to plan its energy supplies, was particularly dangerous without nuclear energy. And Brown was vetoing that development.

The deadlock gave Blair every reason to ponder Brown’s obstruction to reform. The chancellor’s track record was transparent. Contrary to his assertion that the New Deal’s £3.6 billion welfare-to-work programme was helping 1.2 million young people find employment, by February 2002 just 3 per cent of unemployed youths had found jobs. Two years later, at a total cost of £5.2 billion, only 130,000 young people had moved into unsubsidised employment.

Other indicators exposed the poor value of Brown’s redistribution of wealth. The number of people claiming incapacity benefits rose by 1 million to 2.7 million in 2004, costing taxpayers £19 billion a year. Unemployment was also rising: 7.8 million people of employable age – a
fifth of the total – were not working, not least because since 1997 a million jobs had been lost in manufacturing. Despite all the new skills councils, development agencies and apprenticeship schemes, British industry invested less and produced less than its competitors. Brown’s forecast of an economic miracle was not materialising. Instead, the country was being transformed by his relentless increase in welfare benefits.

The proportion of the population receiving more in welfare than they paid in tax was rising towards 53 per cent, 10 percent higher than in 1997. Quite intentionally, the Blair government was overseeing the creation of a nation dependent on state welfare. Not only was work made less attractive than government handouts, but Downing Street’s task groups encouraged the disadvantaged to expect an equal stake in society. With the government’s blessing, a new majority of Britons classified themselves as victims. In Blair’s opinion, the growth of welfare dependency confirmed Britain’s transition towards a fairer society. His satisfaction was shaken only by his chancellor’s stubbornness.

On Brown’s instructions and with Blair’s support, John Prescott had begun the part privatisation of the London Underground. The Tube’s managers are ‘useless’, declared Brown, convinced that private companies would perform better. While the network would still be owned by the state, he proposed that private companies take over the maintenance and renewal of the track, rolling stock and stations. Incapable of mastering his brief, Prescott quickly lost control of the process to a group of businessmen, consultants and lawyers whose fees would total over £1 billion. Prescott was replaced by Shriti Vadera, a favourite banker close to Brown. Lacking any experience in such ventures, Shriti ‘the Shriek’ Vadera produced a 28,000-page contract that allocated the profits to the private companies and the risk to the state.

Suspecting that Vadera’s solution was chaotic and costly, Blair summoned Bob Kiley, the American manager of the Tube, to Chequers. Kiley arrived to discover the privatisation contract strewn over Blair’s desk. He confirmed the prime minister’s fears. Brown’s hubris ‘would cost’, said Kiley. The disaster, Blair was told, could have been averted
by issuing bonds to borrow the money. Neither man could foresee that the final bill for taxpayers would be about £30 billion. Instead of confronting Brown with that considerable waste of money or highlighting the contradiction of his positions on the Tube and the NHS, Blair supported his chancellor’s scheme ‘as the only way to get massive investment into the ailing network’. He spoke with genuine conviction. Out of similar ignorance – or fear – he would also break a manifesto pledge in support of his chancellor and sell Britain’s air-traffic-control system to private owners.