Broken Vows (57 page)

Once more, Blair looked disappointed. He appeared to enjoy warfare.

In December 2006, the prime minister, while visiting Kuwait, darted across to Basra on a day trip. Operation Sinbad was in disarray. Not only was the army failing to defeat the Shia killers, but there was also a breakdown in relations between the military and officials from the Foreign Office and DFID. British civil servants were refusing to work together or share transport around the city. DFID’s officials would not leave ‘Basra Palace’, while Foreign Office officials marooned themselves fifteen miles away. The antagonism that Blair had failed to resolve in London had erupted as a turf war in the midst of a real one.

The prime minister was greeted by the soldiers as a celebrity, and they were grateful when he posed with them for photographs. The odd man out was Shirreff. ‘We’re just dribbling,’ he complained to Blair, the only person who could resolve the problem. Under Shirreff’s command, nineteen British servicemen had been killed and 121 wounded. The casualties were higher than in the preceding months. ‘More could be done if you’d help with troops and resources,’ Shirreff told the prime minister.

‘Why don’t you write to me?’ replied Blair, speaking, Shirreff thought, ‘in a detached manner, as if he was a bystander chatting in a pub over a pint’.

Shirreff continued, ‘And there’s no co-operation between the army, Foreign Office and DFID. It’s so dysfunctional.’

‘Write to me,’ repeated Blair, staring into the distance.

Shirreff duly wrote, but his letter was never acknowledged. He returned to Britain soon after.

On his final trip to Iraq in 2007, Blair was asked by a reporter, ‘How long will it take for it not to be a mess?’

‘I dunno,’ he replied. ‘You can’t tell. It will resolve itself, it just will. People will get sick of the killing.’ The health ministry in Baghdad estimated that 150,000 Iraqis had died since the invasion.

During this latter trip, Blair also met General George Casey, the US commander in Iraq. America had committed 140,000 troops to a ‘surge’ aimed at destroying the militias, while Britain’s soldiers – soon to be reduced to 5,000 and embarrassed by the US’s technical superiority in counter-insurgency operations – wanted to leave. But Blair was waiting for Washington’s agreement. ‘We’re loyal supporters,’ he told the general, ‘and we’ll do what you want.’ For General Jonathan Shaw, Shirreff’s successor, Blair’s message symbolised the hopeless predicament he had created. To the public, in a television interview Blair declared that ‘the progress in Iraq is remarkable’.

Stirrup decided that Shaw should reverse Shirreff’s strategy. Rather than having to survive a further six months of attacks, the army would retreat to Basra airport, leaving the militias in control of the city. ‘I was redeployed not knowing who was left in charge,’ complained Shaw. ‘The withdrawal was dishonest.’ The British had been defeated, but Blair refused to admit it. Relations among the chiefs in London had deteriorated so badly that Stirrup refused to tell Dannatt that MI6 had brokered a deal with Muqtada al-Sadr, a terrorist leader in Basra, to protect the withdrawal. ‘You’re not security-cleared,’ Stirrup eventually told the chief. ‘It’s not a military operation.’ The one bonus for Dannatt was that more soldiers would be heading for Afghanistan, which, Blair belatedly recognised, ‘was just beginning to be a bigger problem’.

Four years later, unrepentant about invading Iraq, Blair wrote: ‘I was left with the feeling that had we believed in our mission more and not despaired so easily … we would have had a far greater part in the final battle.’ He did not admit that, as the supreme commander, he bore the entire responsibility for the military’s mood and resources.

The deadline was agreed. During the countdown of the last nine months of his premiership, Blair demanded a frenzied schedule in order to prove himself as the master of his destiny. He would campaign in the May local elections, then announce his resignation and, on the eve of his departure on 27 June, attend two international summits. He would allow the curtain to fall only after his ‘reform’ agenda had been firmly established. This would both fix his legacy and tie Gordon Brown in to a winning programme for a fourth-term victory. The third, unspoken objective was to lay the foundations of a new career.

The mood in January 2007 was not conducive to a finale accompanied by rapturous applause. ‘I want to get on with the job,’ he said on television, oblivious to the hostility he was arousing. ‘I want to finish what I’ve started.’ With pride, he would describe himself as being ‘on top form … The only meaning was in being true to myself.’

Labour’s poll ratings were falling. In the media and the Commons, the government appeared indecisive about overcrowded prisons and whether Roman Catholic agencies should be banned by law from arranging adoptions because they discriminated against gay couples. Blair’s vulnerability as an undeclared Roman Catholic illogically added fuel to another Commons rebellion by ninety-four Labour MPs against modernising the Trident nuclear weapons programme. Once again, Blair was saved by Tory votes. However, after another passionate debate, Labour MPs did support Blair and voted against a comprehensive inquiry into the Iraq war. A week later, Saddam Hussein was sentenced to death, a judgement Blair opposed.

In parallel, the police were providing a running commentary to journalists about their investigation into loans for peerages. Senior officers regularly stoked the public’s anger. Ruth Turner was arrested in a publicised dawn raid, and certain members of the Downing Street staff were questioned under caution. To Gus O’Donnell’s dismay, the police were given access to Downing Street’s sensitive email servers. Soon after, a police source revealed the discovery of an email from Turner to Jonathan Powell. She had reported Michael Levy’s request for her ‘to lie for him’ that he had no role in the honours system; for his part, he denied any wrongdoing. Journalists quoting ‘police sources’ said that at least three Downing Street staff were likely to be charged. In that febrile atmosphere, Blair was formally interviewed on 26 February by two police officers. It was the second time. Throughout the interview, Blair casually dismissed their questions.

True to form, to bury the bad news, on the day of the interview the government media machine issued fourteen announcements. They included the long-awaited report by Lord Stevens, a former Scotland Yard chief, into the death of Princess Diana in Paris; the closure of 2,500 post offices; and Blair’s order to terminate in the ‘national interest’ a two-year investigation by the Fraud Office into alleged bribes paid by British Aerospace to Saudi Arabian power brokers to secure a huge weapons contract. Blair’s helpmate in closing down that controversy was once again Peter Goldsmith, the attorney general. Blair also chose that moment not to renew the contract of Alistair Graham, the surefooted chairman of the Committee on Standards in Public Life. The sleaze-buster was replaced by Rita Donaghy, a long-standing member of the TUC council. Her appointment symbolised Blair’s swift descent from the moral high ground. In 2000, Labour had passed legislation to prevent secret donations to political parties; and, in 2002, the government had outlawed bribes paid by corporations to foreign governments to win commercial contracts. Both acts had been circumvented. The public were disturbed. To Blair’s surprise, sleaze had made the British noticeably ungrateful for the benefits of his decade in power.

An hour after the police left Downing Street, their interviewee flew to Davos to mix with billionaires at the World Economic Forum, thence on to the Middle East, another certain location for his new life. He left behind an indignant party. Eleven weeks before the local elections, the opinion polls placed the Conservatives on 40 per cent and Labour on 29. The party was predicted to lose 600 seats and perform badly in Scotland. Blair urged Labour not to be rattled and told the public, ‘I have taken absolutely no decision about my future at all.’ Single-minded, he appeared oblivious to all the distractions, although the symmetry of his life, described as the ‘final phase’, was not exactly following the scenario composed six months earlier by his Downing Street staff.

Blair’s farewell had been mapped out by Ben Wegg-Prosser, helped by Matthew Taylor and Philip Gould. Called ‘Reconnecting with the Public – A New Relationship with the Media’, the five-page memorandum proposed the orchestration of a glorified departure. Conjuring up images of a Hollywood melodrama, Blair was scripted to float on a wave of national euphoria. ‘He needs to go with the crowds wanting more,’ suggested Wegg-Prosser. ‘He should be the star who won’t even play the last encore. In moving towards the end, he must focus on the future.’ In searching for high visibility, the author suggested, ‘He needs to embrace open spaces, he needs to be seen to be travelling on different forms of transport, he needs to be seen with people who will raise eyebrows.’ There would be many newspaper interviews and TV appearances on
Blue Peter
and
Songs of Praise
. The downside, Wegg-Prosser anticipated, was Brown’s fury, while he described Iraq as ‘the elephant in the room, let’s face up to it’. He concluded, with remarkable honesty, ‘His genuine legacy is not delivery, important though that is, but the dominance of New Labour ideas – the triumph of Blairism.’

The echo of Blairism’s assumed permanence was Peter Riddell’s judgement during the September ‘coup’ that ‘Mr Blair has made Labour a party of government again. There is no going back to the 1980s.’ That was precisely Blair’s intention. His legacy was the continuous modernisation of Britain.

The obstacle, he complained, was Brown. At the end of their conversations about the transition, Blair had emerged to complain, ‘Gordon has nothing. Nothing.’ After a decade, Brown saw New Labour as a tactic to win elections, not an ideology. The chancellor, Blair knew, misunderstood why the middle class, especially in the south of England, had switched from the Conservatives to New Labour. ‘Values to improve society’, he emphasised, was the persuasive appeal. ‘Once the values are fixed,’ explained Blair, ‘the policies would flow naturally.’ To his despair, Brown resisted the lesson. His chancellor, Blair complained to his inner circle, had no ideas other than the reheated Bennism of the 1980s. Eager to reconnect the party with the trade unions and the working class, Brown still opposed Blair on foundation hospitals, academies and reforms to the welfare state. But beyond that antagonism lurked something deeper. Unlike Blair, Brown did not believe the New Labour brand could be regenerated. The problem was not marketing but the product. A section of the country harboured a deeply felt outrage towards Blair. Combined with their anger at Cherie, Alastair Campbell and Iraq, the poison could not be drained away by rebranding. Brown classified Blair not as a victor but as the victim of his own convictions.

Saving face had become a political necessity. Reluctantly, Brown agreed to accompany Blair to the Mossbourne Academy in Hackney to praise the success of the academy movement. Together, they pottered around smiling at the cameras and pupils, and for fifteen minutes served meals. Ofsted rated Mossbourne as the one outstanding academy out of forty-six. By the end of the year, Blair expected there would be about ninety-five in existence, and his ambition was for 400 by 2010, accounting for 10 per cent of all secondary schools. Brown refused to endorse that ambition, not least because David Bell, the permanent secretary at education, criticised academies for failing to improve basic skills. Too many were based in expensive, complicated new buildings. In one east London academy, no one knew how to open the windows after the maintenance man unexpectedly died.

A more searing indictment of the Labour decade was the enrolment
of 40,000 more children in private schools than in 1997. Parents gave up their savings to avoid the bad discipline and poor teaching in state schools. Ignoring that ‘vote’ by dissatisfied parents, Blair would nevertheless praise his achievement, writing, ‘In schools, standards up across the board.’ Not for the first time, international statistics contradicted his self-congratulation. Writing for the Sutton Trust, a Blairite educational group, Alan Smithers reported that his research had unearthed ‘a long trail of under-achievement’ across all levels in primary schools, especially in maths. In 2009, PISA, the international monitor, placed English secondary schools twenty-seventh out of sixty countries in maths, and eighteenth in the three Rs and science. In 2009, PISA, the international monitor, placed English secondary schools twenty-seventh out of sixty countries in maths and eighteenth in the three Rs and science, while in 2016 an OECD report ranked English sixteen-to-nineteen-year-olds and undergraduates as the worst of twenty-three developed countries in literacy and second worst in numeracy.

To Brown, all that was irrelevant. Despite Blair’s pleas, he refused to look beyond the Treasury. Blair acknowledged his impotence. As usual, on Budget day he sat on the front bench to cheer his chancellor, and found himself surprised by Brown’s 2p cut in income tax and the abolition of the 10p band for the lowest earners. Blair’s genuine praise placed him in good company. ‘His stewardship of the nation’s finances’, gushed the
Daily Mail
, ‘has been remarkable.’ The newspaper’s political columnist Peter Oborne hailed Brown as ‘a great chancellor’ and predicted that ‘historians will look back at the Brown years and marvel’. As usual, the man himself had ignored warnings that the abolition of the 10p threshold would increase taxes for the poorest. Blair also discounted the alarm. Like the majority of the country, he assumed that Brown had stuck to his pledge of ‘no more boom and bust’ and did truly believe he had produced ‘the longest period of economic growth for over 200 years’. The self-styled Iron Chancellor disregarded the rise of the public debt from 30.4 per cent of GDP in 2001/2 to 36.8 per cent, which was accurately predicted to soar the following year to 44.6 per
cent, then 65.9 per cent in 2010/11, tipping Britain into recession. Those who forecast disaster were ignored.

In his Mansion House speech that year, Brown praised the City’s ‘ingenuity and creativity’ in inventing new forms of finance. The banks’ success, he boasted, was thanks in part to a decade of Treasury support for light-touch regulation. Brown’s City audience applauded themselves. Blair appeared beyond caring that Britain’s productivity remained poor and personal debts were increasing. He failed to catch that the cost of working tax credits was heading towards £20 billion, forty times more than Brown’s original estimate. New Labour’s achievement was not only the considerable redistribution of wealth so that poverty among children and pensioners had been reduced, but also that many people still appeared not to resent paying higher taxes to improve society. Yet Blair did appreciate that the limit would soon be reached. The cost of increased debt and ever-increasing stealth taxes contradicted New Labour’s ideals. Brown’s ‘prudent’ image was beginning to fade.

For the first time, Blair read the Treasury’s official records recounting the abolition of the annual £5 billion tax credits on dividends for pension funds. In 1998, he had called Brown’s edict ‘brilliant’ for making Britain ‘fair, modern and strong’. The official records from that year revealed a different judgement. Released in 2007 after a long freedom of information battle, the papers recorded Treasury officials accurately warning Brown that Britain’s unique private pension system would be wrecked by the loss of tens of billions of pounds. Nine years later, Blair publicly supported Brown’s ‘right decision to make for investment and the future of our pension system’. In private, his fears were reconfirmed.

Brown, he knew, was incapable of defeating David Cameron, but Blair had failed to nurture a network of party loyalists to support any alternative. In Powell’s judgement, Blair was acutely sensitive that any ‘mishandling’ of the succession would attract ‘bigger criticism of Tony than the Iraq war’. Out of either self-interest or a sense of obligation, he had tolerated Brown’s destruction of any potential leadership rival. Alan Milburn, Charles Clarke and John Reid had been
effectively undermined by Damian McBride’s poisonous briefings to journalists. With Brown’s tacit approval, McBride, who described himself as ‘a cruel, vindictive and thoughtless bastard’, had peddled stories about sexual affairs, alcoholism and personal peccadilloes. ‘Tony never showed loyalty,’ recalled Geoff Hoon. ‘He spent no time to make sure there was a successor to entrench his brand of politics. He just looked after his enemies and damaged his friends.’

That left David Miliband as the sole Blairite flag-carrier. In some ways, back in 1992 the thirty-two-year-old had been similar to Blair – articulate, charming and intelligent. Hampered by Blair’s refusal to make him education secretary in 2005 or foreign secretary in 2006, Miliband had limited experience of government, which made him a casualty of Blair’s desire to control everything. Some believed that Blair feared the young man’s opposition on schools and foreign policy. In truth, his misgivings went much deeper. After recognising Miliband’s manifold weaknesses while he worked as the head of the policy unit in Downing Street after 1997, Blair had orchestrated his snap adoption as the Labour candidate for the South Shields constituency on the eve of the 2001 general election in order to propel him from his office. In those circumstances, he refused to encourage Miliband’s challenge to Brown.

Miliband’s own indecision exposed another serious defect: his lack of courage or, as Peter Mandelson would later put it, of ‘lead in his pencil’. Accordingly, on 22 April, Miliband surrendered and pledged his vote to Brown. ‘Then Tony handed over the government to the one man who hated him,’ said Hoon. In the short term, by conceding the crown to Brown, Blair knew that the party would not split. But, beyond the smooth transition, he feared for its fate. The absence of influential Blairites at the head of the party threatened to bring about the demise of New Labour.