Small Wars, Big Questions
In December 1993 John Major stood outside the black-painted, steel-armoured door of Number Ten Downing Street with the affable Taoiseach of the Irish Republic, Albert Reynolds. He declared a new principle which offended many traditional Conservatives and Unionists. If both parts of Ireland voted to be reunited, Britain would not stand in the way. She had, said Major, ‘no selfish strategic or economic interest in Northern Ireland’. Thus a long strand of Tory thinking, which was that the party was dedicated to the United Kingdom, consciously and proudly biased in its favour, was torn up. There was more. If the Provisional IRA, which had so lately bombed the very building Major was standing in front of, and murdered two young boys in Cheshire, renounced violence, it could be welcomed into the sunlight as a legitimate political party.
In the run-up to this Downing Street Declaration, the government was also conducting top-secret ‘back channel’ negotiations with the terrorist organization. The Provisional IRA leadership proved slippery and frustrating but in August 1994 they declared ‘a complete cessation of military operations’ which, though it was a long way short of renouncing violence, was widely welcomed. It was followed a month later by a Loyalist ceasefire. A complicated dance of three-strand talks, framework documents and arguments about the decommissioning of weapons followed. The road to peace would be tortuous, involving many walk-outs and public arguments. On the streets, extortion, knee-capping and occasional murders continued. But whereas the number of people killed in 1993 had been eighty-four, the toll fell to sixty-one the following year and nine in 1995. The contradictory demands of Irish republicanism and Unionism meant that Major failed to get a final agreement, even on paper. That was left for Tony Blair, unfinished business. But Major’s achievement was substantial: he was a good peacemaker.
And he made a dramatic bid for peace at home. In July 1995, tormented by yet more rumours of right-wing conspiracies against him, Major riposted with a theatrical coup all of his own, one his music-hall father would have applauded. He resigned as leader of the Conservative Party and invited all comers to take him on. He told journalists gathered in the sunshine in the Number Ten garden it was ‘put up or shut up’ time. If he lost, he would resign as Prime Minister. If he won, he expected the party to rally around him. This was a risk, for there were other plausible leaders. One was Michael Heseltine, who had become Deputy Prime Minister and who loyally supported Major. Another was Michael Portillo, then a pin-up boy of the Thatcherite right, whose supporters prepared a campaign headquarters for him but who decided against standing. In the event the challenger was John Redwood, the Welsh Secretary, known to many as ‘the Vulcan’ because of his glassy extraterrestrial demeanour but a highly intelligent Thatcherite. At a catastrophic press launch of his campaign he was surrounded by a celebratory, luridly dressed collection of supportive MPs swiftly dubbed ‘the barmy army’. Major won his fight, though not gloriously. In the end 109 Tory MPs failed to back him. Nevertheless, in a clever political operation, victory was swiftly declared and he lived to be defeated finally by the real electorate two years later. By then defeat had been made inevitable by the self-destructive European war of the previous years.
Major was also a cautious warmaker. Blair would inherit not only the Northern Irish peace process but also the bubbling ethnic wars breaking out in former Yugoslavia, following the recognition of Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia as independent states in the early nineties. The worst violence followed the Serbian assault on Bosnia and the three-year siege of its capital, Sarajevo. The term ‘ethnic cleansing’ was heard for the first time as woeful columns of refugees fled in different directions. A nightmare which Europeans thought had vanished in 1945 was returning, only a couple of days’ drive away from London. Major asked his military advisers how many troops it would take to keep the sides apart and was told the answer was 400,000, three times the total size of the British Army. He sent 1,800 men to protect the humanitarian convoys that were rumbling south. Many British people proved ready to collect parcels of food, warm clothes, medicine and blankets, which were loaded onto trucks and driven south by volunteers. A London conference tried to get a peace deal and failed.
This new war went on, ever nastier. Many in the government were dubious about Britain being further involved. But the evening news bulletins showed pictures of starving refugees, the uncovered mass graves of civilians shot by death squads, and children with appalling injuries. There was a frenzied campaign for Western intervention. But what kind? In the United States President Clinton was determined not to risk American soldiers on the ground, but a swelling of outrage about the behaviour of the Serbs persuaded him to consider less costly alternatives, such as air strikes and lifting the arms embargo on the Bosnians. This would have put others who were on the ground, including the British, directly in the line of fire when the Serbs retaliated. There were rows between London and Washington. Hideous attacks in Sarajevo, notably a mysterious mortar strike at the market, finally provoked the Nato air strikes. In response the Serbs took UN troops hostage, including British soldiers who were then used as human shields. The Serb capture of the town of Srebrenica was followed by disgusting slaughter, and renewed demands for full-scale military intervention.
It never came. After three years of war, sanctions on Serbia and the success of Croats in fighting back, a peace agreement was finally made in Dayton, Ohio. Major was the first British Prime Minister of the post-Cold War world, grappling with what the proper role of the West should be. The Balkan wars, a result of the fall of communism, showed perfectly the dangers and limits of intervention. When a civil conflict is relayed in all its horror to tens of millions of voters every night by television, the pressure to do something, to separate the sides and succour the suffering, is intense. But mostly this requires not air attacks but a full-scale ground force, which will be drawn into the war, and must be followed by years of aid and rebuilding. Will the same voters be happy to keep paying, and keep accepting the casualties that follow? Major and his colleagues were accused of moral cowardice and cynicism in allowing the revival of fascist behaviour in one corner of Europe. This was nobody’s finest hour. Yet Western leaders were wary about whether their voters would have accepted a full-scale war and the thankless neo-colonial responsibilities that would follow. They may have been right.
A Very English Coup
Tony Blair was an Establishment figure, more so than Thatcher, Major or Smith. He had been a mild teenage rebel, worn his hair long, broken school rules and imitated Mick Jagger in a rock band. His father had been brought up by a Communist on Clydeside and had suffered an early and severe stroke which brought his children uncertainty and a bump down in the world. Far more importantly, though, Blair was the son of a Tory lawyer and went to a preparatory school in Durham, then the grand fee-paying boarding school Fettes in Edinburgh, then Oxford University, and then the Bar, before becoming an MP. There was more Gothic architecture in his early history than in most volumes of Pevsner’s architectural guide. Though he rebelled, the lessons of politeness, deference and a quiet knowledge about where power lay, were in place from the start. Gifted with a natural charm, infectious good humour and a great skill in acting, he was a young man whose seriousness and principle were also evident. His father’s stroke had happened when he was still young: he lost his adored Irish-born mother when he was a student and turned increasingly to religion, in its activist, not contemplative form.
Much ink has been spilled about why he joined the Labour Party rather than the Conservatives. It is not a ridiculous question. Falling for a young Liverpudlian socialist called Cherie Booth sharpened his politics but he had joined Labour before he met her. There is a widespread belief that it was mere calculation. In the early eighties, the Tories were awash with bright lawyers looking for seats and political careers while Labour seemed on its last legs. If you wanted to get into the Commons and then rise, Labour offered an easier if riskier route. While this is possible, joining Labour at its lowest ebb would show uncanny prescience for a pure careerist. The likeliest explanation is simply that he believed in political action and that, though flawed, Labour’s belief in social justice was nearest to the Christian social views he had formed. Once in the party, working his way through local branches in London, he displayed the full kit of soft-left beliefs of the time, being hostile to the European Community and privatization, pro-CND and high taxes, the rights of illegal immigrants and greater freedom for the press. He would ditch all of these views later but this does not mean they were insincerely held at the time; for the Labour Party of Foot’s time they were considered moderate, and Blair was always opposed to the hard-left Bennite and Militant groups.
After fighting a hopeless by-election, Blair won a safe Labour seat in the north-east of England with his combination of chutzpah and charm and, in the Commons from 1983, quickly fell in with another new MP. Gordon Brown was much that Blair was not. He was a tribal Labour Party man from a strongly political family, who had barely glimpsed the crenellated English Establishment which produced Blair. Brown had been Scotland’s best-known student politician and a player in Scottish Labour politics from the age of twenty-three, followed by a stint in television. Yet the two men had some things in common. They were both Christians and they were both deeply impatient with the condition of the Labour Party. For seven or eight years they seemed inseparable, working mostly from a tiny, windowless office they shared. Brown tutored Blair in the darker ways of politics, treating him like a sweetly naive kid brother. (He would learn.) Blair was also a vital sounding-board for Brown, however, teaching him what the mysterious English middle classes might be thinking. No working relationship in politics was closer. Brown summed it up in 1991: ‘I think Blair could well be leader of the party after me.’ Together, they made friends with Westminster journalists, together they matured as Commons performers, together they shared their frustration about older Labour politicians, together they worked their way up the ranks of the shadow cabinet.
Then Blair began to pull ahead. After the 1992 defeat he made a bleak public judgement about why Labour had lost so badly. The reason was not complicated, but simple: ‘Labour has not been trusted to fulfil the aspirations of the majority of people in a modern world.’ As shadow home secretary he began to try to put that right, promising (in words borrowed from Brown) to be ‘tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime’. His response to the horror of the 1993 murder of the toddler James Bulger by two young boys, which provoked a frenzy of national debate, was particularly resonant. In general Blair tried to return his party to the common-sense language of morality. He drank deep from the mix of socially conservative and economically liberal messages used by the great communicator Bill Clinton and his team of ‘New Democrats’.
So too did Brown. But he had a harder brief, since as shadow chancellor his job was to demolish cherished spending plans and say no to Labour MPs. Brown’s support for the ERM meant he was ineffective when Major and Lamont suffered their great defeat. The Brown and Blair relationship was less close than it had been earlier but it was still strong. Together they visited the United States to learn a new political style from the Democrats. Awkwardly for Brown, it relied heavily on leadership charisma. At home Blair pushed Smith aggressively over reforming the party rulebook, falling out with him badly. Watching media commentators and some Labour MPs began to tip him as the next leader, Brown’s team began to ask whether Blair was now manoeuvring and briefing against his old mentor. It was a grim time for Brown and he did not bother to reach out, or show a sunny side. Slowly but perceptibly, Brown-Blair was turning into Blair-Brown.
The days after John Smith died have produced more analysis and speculation than almost any other short period in modern British politics. But the basic story is clear. Blair decided almost immediately that he would run as leader. Brown, perhaps more grief-stricken than Blair or perhaps more cautious, hesitated. But he had assumed he would inherit and when he heard Blair’s plans, he was aghast. In at least ten face-to-face meetings in Edinburgh and London, the two men argued. On Blair’s side were opinion polls showing him much more popular, the support of greater numbers of Labour MPs and greater backing in the press. This was not all a plot by Peter Mandelson, as Brown people later claimed; it was a widespread assessment come to independently by many people who disagreed about other things. Crucial to the case for Blair was that he was a well-spoken Englishman who would reassure those parts of the country which were the main electoral battleground. On Brown’s side were his deeper knowledge of Labour, stronger support among the unions and his more thought-through policy agenda for change. Had the two fought each other, given Labour’s complicated electoral college it is impossible to say just what would have happened. Blairites say their man would have crushed and ‘humiliated’ Brown; Brown’s people reply that his formidable campaigning skills would have taken the metropolitan Blairites by surprise. On only one subject were they both agreed. For the two modernizers to fight would be disastrous. Personal attacks would be impossible to avoid. If Brown had any hope of winning, he would have to attack Blair from the left.
So Brown came to a deal, culminating in a notorious dinner at the chic, now defunct Islington restaurant Granita. (Some sense of the cultural gap between the two men can be drawn from the fact that Brown had to go and have a proper meal afterwards.) Again, the outcome is much disputed, except that Blair acknowledged Brown’s authority over a wide range of policy which he would direct from the Treasury, including the ‘social justice’ agenda. Did he also promise to limit his prime ministership to seven years and then make way? It would be an extraordinarily arrogant thing for one Opposition politician to say to another; the Conservatives would be in power for years yet. But probably some form of words about a transition in power was exchanged, if only to salve Brown’s hurt. Looking back many years later it can be seen that the true significance of the Granita deal and the meetings that preceded it, was that it gifted Britain’s mightiest government department, the Treasury, even more power than it had in the Conservative years. Blair would be, as Prime Minister, more concerned with foreign affairs than he could ever have guessed, and Brown’s Treasury would become a grand Department for British Affairs, beyond its mandarins’ wildest dreams. Gordon Brown would be the Treasury’s final victory over George Brown.
The Killer Cows of Old England
John Selwyn Gummer, a devout Christian and environmentalist, was one of the nicest men in British politics. On a sunny May morning in 1990, he paraded his daughter Cordelia before the cameras in Suffolk and tried to persuade her to eat a beefburger. The four-year-old Cordelia was nobody’s fool and absolutely refused. Gummer quickly swallowed his embarrassment, and then the cooling burger too, pronouncing it ‘absolutely delicious’. He was of course trying to make a political point. There was rising disquiet about a mysterious and unpleasant disease of the brain found in cattle, which caused them to stagger, fall over and expire. It was called BSE, for bovine spongiform encephalopathy. The disease was being found all across Britain at the rate of 300 cases a week. The Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, with Mr Gummer at its head, was more the department of farmers than the department of shoppers and it discouraged alarm about the new disease. Could it be spread to humans? At that stage the answer was no. Still, because it seemed to be spread by the use of mashed-up cow offal in feed, a kind of grisly if unwitting cow cannibalism, new rules were put in place. Farmers were told to destroy BSE-infected cattle. Gummer’s stunt was intended to show how safe British beef, even in beefburgers, now was. Prior to Cordelia’s rejected burger, cow brains, spleen, tonsils and gut had already been banned for human consumption.
But the problem would not go away. Among those refusing to eat British beef were the Germans, some schools, and a majority of doctors. Various other animals, including a cat, a cheetah and a monkey, died of BSE. By the mid-nineties, the government was spending tens of millions on compensation for farmers who were burning or burying their dead cattle. The line that humans could not contract the brain disease was beginning to crumble. Victoria Rimmer, a teenager from North Wales, was dying of Creutzfeld-Jakob Disease (CJD) which was closely related to BSE and said to have been caused by eating infected beef. More human cases were reported, from, amongst others, farmers, butchers and people who had had blood transfusions. It began to be clear that many slaughterhouses were not following the new rules and that some BSE-infected cattle still ended up for human consumption. The EU started to take a close interest. In March 1996 ministers admitted that a new form of CJD had been found in ten people, of whom eight had died, and that this was probably due to BSE being in food.
There was, rightly, an eruption of anger and the credibility of the department was questioned. British beef was banned by the EU. New rules about the deboning of beef before it was eaten were introduced and a massive programme of slaughtering all cows over thirty months began. Beef on the bone was off the menu and parts of the British countryside were studded with oily pyres of swollen dead corpses, an unappetizing spectacle. The slaughter was extended to 147,000 animals but Europe remained steely, and extended the ban to exported British beef outside the EU as well. ‘Mad cow disease’ became as emblematic of the end of the Tory years as union militancy or punk rock had been of the late seventies. The government’s anger was mainly directed at continental Europe, seen as gleefully exaggerating the lethal infection in the Roast Beef of Old England in order to sell their own meat. Yet the anger might have been as profitably directed elsewhere – to the farming-dominated government department that had acted slowly, the farmers who had refused to report the full extent of the disease, the sloppy slaughterhouses and, in general, a form of industrial farming that fed dead cows’ brains to cows, apparently heedless of whether this was nice, safe or healthy. The science was still sketchy and the media was hysterical, but government and industry were to blame as well.
The Sword of Truth
For British voters, the Major years were remembered as much for the sad, petty and lurid personal scandals that attended so many of his ministers, after he made an unwise speech remembered as a call for old-style morality. In fact ‘back to basics’ referred to almost everything except personal sexual morality – he spoke of public service, industry, sound money, free trade, traditional teaching, respect for the family and law, and a campaign to defeat crime. ‘Back to basics’, however, gave the press a fail-safe headline charge of hypocrisy whenever ministers were caught out, and caught out they were. A series of adulteries exposed, children born out of wedlock, a sex death after a kinky stunt went wrong, rumours about Major’s own affairs (truer than was realized, though the press had the wrong person) and then an inquiry into whether Parliament had been misled over the sale of arms to Iraq, were knitted together into a single pattern of misbehaviour, which got an old name, ‘sleaze’.
In 1996 a three-year inquiry into whether the government had allowed a trial to go ahead against directors of an arms company, Matrix Churchill, knowing that they were in fact acting inside privately accepted guidelines, resulted in two ministers being publicly criticized. It showed that the government had allowed a more relaxed regime of military-related exports to Saddam Hussein even after the horrific gassing of 5,000 Kurds at Falluja, and revealed a culture of secrecy and double standards. Other ‘sleaze’ related stories were more personal. One of the more flamboyant Thatcherite MPs, the bow-tied and flippant Neil Hamilton, was accused of taking cash in brown paper envelopes from the owner of Harrods, Mohamed al-Fayed, to ask questions for him in Parliament. In a libel case which followed he vociferously denied this, but lost the action and was financially ruined. Jonathan Aitken, a Treasury minister, was accused of taking improper hospitality from an Arab business contact. He resigned to fight the Guardian over the claims, with ‘the simple sword of truth and the trusty shield of fair play’, was found guilty of perjury and served eighteen months in prison.
There is no logical link between a minister who forms improper links with a sexual partner, and a minister who forms improper links with a businessman. Never mind. All of this was expertly packaged together by the New Labour Opposition, working closely with the media. In the late nineties, sleaze was as ubiquitous and smug a word as ‘spin’ would be later. It set the tone of the times. One of the more dramatic episodes in the 1997 election was the overwhelming defeat of Hamilton in his Tatton constituency by the former BBC war reporter, who had been badly injured at Sarajevo, Martin Bell. Clad in his familiar white suit, helped by a decision to stand aside by the Labour and Liberal Democrat candidates, and advised by the Labour spin doctor Alastair Campbell, Bell succeeded in overturning Hamilton’s enormous majority, emerging with an 11,000 majority of his own. He became Britain’s first independent MP for nearly fifty years. It is worth recalling that there was a time not so long ago when it seemed that white suits, if not swords of truth, would cleanse British politics.
By the end of Major’s government, it seemed that some lessons had been learned about politics in Britain, broadly defined. The European Union was perilous, a potential party-splitter. Their single currency was as toxic as our beef. There was a mood of contempt for politicians. The press had lost any sense of deference. Busy reforms directed at the health service, police and schools had produced surprisingly little improvement. The post Cold War world was turning out to be nastier and less predictable than the days of the ‘peace dividend’ had promised. And finally, when your luck turned, it turned dramatically. There was, in all this, material for a thoughtful and wary Opposition to reflect on. How might the country be better governed? What was the right British approach to peace-keeping and intervention now that the United States was the last superpower left standing? How could the promises of an end to cynicism be fulfilled? But by 1997, New Labour had no time to reflect on all that. It was moving in for the kill.
Team Tony
The 1997 general election demonstrated just what a stunningly effective election-winning machine Tony Blair now led. New Labour won 419 seats, the largest number ever for the party and comparable only with the number of seats for the 1935 National government. Its majority in the Commons was also a modern record, 179 seats, and thirty-three more than Attlee’s landslide majority of 1945. The swing of 10 per cent from the Conservatives was yet another post-war record, roughly double that which the Thatcher victory of 1979 had produced in the other direction. A record number of women were elected to Parliament, 119 of them, of whom 101 were Labour, ‘Blair’s babes’. The party also won heavily across the south and in London, in parts of Britain from which it had recently been hardly represented. Yet among this slew of heart-stopping statistics, which had Blair shaking his head with disbelief and exclaiming ‘it can’t be real’, there were some small warning signs. The turnout was very low, at 71 per cent the lowest since 1935. Labour had won a famous victory but nothing like as many actual votes as the reviled John Major had won five years before. Still, as the sun came up on a jubilant, celebrating party there was much wet-eyed rhapsodizing about a new dawn for Britain. Alastair Campbell had assembled crowds of party workers and supporters to stand along Downing Street waving Union Jacks as the Blairs strode up to claim their inheritance. Briefly, it looked as if the country itself had turned out to cheer.
The victory was due to a small group of self-styled modernizers who seized the Labour Party, and then took it far further to the right than anyone expected. The language used tells its own story. New Labour was to be a party of the ‘left and centre left’, then one of the ‘centre left’, then the ‘centre and centre left’ and in Blair’s later years simply of ‘the centre’. Blair was the leading man in this drama but he was not the only player. He needed the support and encouragement of admirers and friends who would coax and goad him, rebuke him and encourage him, and do his will, whether he knew what they were up to or not. Who were they? There was Mandelson, the brilliant but temperamental former media boss, by now an MP. Once fixated by Gordon Brown, he was adored by Blair and returned the sentiment. Yet he was so mistrusted by other members of the team that his central role in Blair’s leadership election was disguised from them under the name ‘Bobby’ (for Bobby Kennedy, working to Blair’s JFK: modesty was never a hallmark of the inner circle).
There was Alastair Campbell, Blair’s press officer and attack-dog. A former journalist, natural propagandist, ex-alcoholic and all-round alpha male, Campbell would chew the ears of everyone who criticized Blair and helped devise the campaign of mockery against Major. He behaved in private towards the Labour leader (and on one occasion was filmed doing so) with the cheery aggression of a personal trainer working over a nervous young housewife. There was Philip Gould, a working-class boy whose admiration for US political techniques knew no bounds; he would bring his focus group expertise, his polling and ruthless analysis to the party. There was Derry Irvine, the rotund, intimidating, brilliant and surprisingly sensitive Highlands lawyer who had first found a place in his chambers for Blair and Cherie Booth. He advised on constitutional change and would become Lord Chancellor. And there was Anji Hunter, the contralto charmer who had known Blair as a youth and who remained his best hotline to Daily Mail-reading middle England.
These people, with Brown and his team working (almost) alongside them, formed the inner core. The young David Miliband, whose father was a famous Marxist political philosopher, provided research help. They would be joined by Jonathan Powell, a diplomat who had been observing the Clintons in the United States, and whose older brother Charles had been one of Thatcher’s most important aides. By the end of the Blair years, with so many others fallen by the wayside, he was undoubtedly the second most important man in Downing Street. Among the MPs who were initially close were Marjorie (better known as Mo) Mowlam and Jack Straw. The money for Blair’s leadership campaign was raised from a clutch of mainly media millionaires, including Greg Dyke, later Director General of the BBC, and Michael Levy, a record promoter who would later be ennobled and later still face a police investigation and arrest on conspiracy charges. The first striking thing about Team Blair is how few elected Labour politicians it included. The second is how many of its original members would later fall out with him. He had a capacity to charm and pull in people whom he needed, and then to drop them briskly once they were surplus or embarrassing.
Blair had won 57 per cent of the vote in the leadership election, easily beating two more left-wing candidates, one of whom, John Prescott, was elected as his deputy. In his campaign Blair had stuck mostly to generalities about modernization and the instincts of the British people, but had sounded approving of the regime of centralized testing and quangos the Conservatives had pursued in public services. To that extent people had due warning. By the time the party congregated again for its annual conference, the Labour Party had become ‘New Labour’. In his first conference speech Blair made a veiled reference to the need for an up-to-date statement of Labour values. What he actually meant was that he planned to scrap clause four of its constitution, which declared that public ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange was necessary to ‘secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruit of their industry’. Clause four, part four, was a household god for Labour, its 1918 commitment to destroy capitalism, which sat in a corner covered in cobwebs. Hugh Gaitskell had wanted to abolish it, but had drawn back and the ambition had slumbered for decades. Blair killed it. His new statement of aims began with the assertion that ‘the Labour Party is a democratic socialist party’ which, by then, was going it a bit. In his next conference speech Blair used the word ‘new’ fifty-nine times, referred to socialism just once and omitted to mention the working class at all.
Though politics is a serious business, there is an undeniably comic side to the Blair coup. With his impish grin he suddenly behaved as if everything was possible, and no political allegiance was impossible to shift. He became the playful magician of political life. He took to warmly praising Margaret Thatcher. He opened private talks with the Liberal Democrats about some grand new alliance of the centre. In Fleet Street he took to charming every rheumy proprietorial troll and crusty prophet of the right he could lay his smile on. Later he would continue the practice in government, appointing Tory statesmen to big jobs, gleefully ushering in defectors and keeping close for a while to the Lib-Dem leader Paddy Ashdown, and its elder statesman Roy Jenkins (though he would later disappoint both by his conservatism). He went to visit Rupert Murdoch’s News International team in Australia and impressed them too. What manner of man was this Tony Blair? Where did he stand? Where were his limits? There were not many. In the election campaign the pro-European Blair cheerfully put his name to an article in Murdoch’s Sun, ghost-written by Campbell, promising ‘to slay the dragon’ of federalism. Later relations would be so close that Murdoch would complain of the amount of time he wasted in London drinking tea with Blair and coffee with Brown. He searched out Lord Rothermere, proprietor of the Daily Mail, traditionally Labour’s bitterest critic in the British press, and dined him privately, promising him that he abhorred high taxes, uppity unions and sleaze. It was as if, freed by winning the leadership, Blair was rattling the handle of every door in town to see if it opened. As he was on a roll and Labour was desperate to win at all costs, the traditionalists looked on in silent, helpless disbelief. Was nothing sacred? Apparently not.
Yet when it came to serious policy formation, the story was less amusing. Blair talked of his priority being ‘education, education, education’, of his ambition to make Britain a ‘young country’ and of his own belief in ‘power for a purpose’. He identified the broad areas he wanted to concentrate on, but when it came to clearer proposals said little. Blair has been mocked so richly since for the airy blandness of his promises that it is worth recalling an example of the ‘optimism-lite’ rhetoric which was taken at least half-seriously in 1997. A few early sentences from Labour’s manifesto give a flavour of this:
I believe in Britain. It is a great country with a great history. The British people are a great people. But I believe Britain can and must be better: better schools, better hospitals, better ways of tackling crime, of building a modern welfare state, of equipping ourselves for a new world economy. I want a Britain that is one nation, with shared values and purpose, where merit comes before privilege, run for the many not the few, strong and sure of itself at home and abroad. I want a Britain that does not shuffle into the new millennium afraid of the future, but strides into it with confidence.
Britons would stride with a purpose, and in their hands they would hold New Labour’s first pledge card, a credit-card-sized rectangle of coloured cardboard. Produced in time for the election, its five pledges were rather clearer than the early rhetoric. In government Labour would cut class sizes to thirty or below for five- to seven-year-olds, by scrapping the assisted places scheme that helped people from poor families go to private schools. It would speed up punishment for persistent young offenders, halving the time from arrest to sentencing. It would cut health service waiting times ‘by treating an extra 100,000 patients as a first step’ paid for by cutting red tape (the last resort of political accountancy). A quarter of a million young people would be put to work through a windfall tax on the privatized utility companies. There would be no rise in income tax rates and inflation and interest rates would be kept ‘as low as possible’. The last seemed entirely meaningless since no government has tried to raise inflation, but now seems like a coded reference to Gordon Brown’s decision to hand control over interest rates to a committee of the Bank of England. Looking back, the pledge card revealed a lot about the strengths and weaknesses of New Labour. It was modest in promise, and costed. Its promises, however, were so simple they often turned out to be damaging in practice; the waiting times pledge was one example. And there was a yearning for numerical simplicity – all those suspiciously round numbers – which suggested the purpose of the pledges was propagandistic, not governmental, easy ideas to spoon into voters who could not be bothered to concentrate.
Most damaging of all for a campaign which so relentlessly accused the Conservatives of deceit and destroying people’s trust in politics, Labour made promises which it would promptly break when it won power. It promised not to privatize the air traffic control system, but did so. It promised not to levy tuition fees for students and a year later did exactly that – and would repeat the trick with student top-up fees during the 2001 election. It promised an end to sleaze and to deception. It implied that the overall tax burden would not increase, yet it would. The most important pledges were the negative ones, coming from Brown and his Treasury team; that there would be no increase in rates of income tax, while for two years a New Labour government would stick to the Conservatives’ spending totals. Those promises were stuck to, though there were big and unmentioned stings to come.
But why were so many other pledges broken? Team Tony, the group who put together the New Labour ‘project’, were intelligent people who wanted to find a way of ruling which helped the worse off, particularly by giving them better chances in education and to find jobs, while not alienating the mass of middle-class voters. They exuded a strange, unstable mix of anxiety and arrogance. They were extraordinarily worried by newspapers. They were bruised by what had happened to Kinnock, whom they had all worked with, and ruthlessly focused on winning over anyone who could be won. Yet there was arrogance too. They were utterly ignorant of what governing would be like. The early success of Blair’s leadership victory and his short time as Opposition leader produced a sense that everything was possible for people of determination. If they promised something, no doubt it would happen. It they said something, of course it was true. They weren’t Tories, after all. The pity of all this was that they were about to take power at a golden moment when it would have been possible to fulfil the pledges they had made and when it was not necessary to give different messages to different people in order to win power. Blair had the wind at his back. The Conservatives would pose no serious threat to him for many years to come. Far from inheriting a weak or crisis-ridden economy, he was actually taking over at the best possible time when the country was recovering strongly, but had not yet quite noticed. Blair won by being focused and ruthless, and never forgot it. But he also had incredible, historic luck, and never seemed to realize quite what an opportunity it gave him.
Celebrity Life, Celebrity Death
Tony Blair arrived in power in 1997 in a country spangled and sugar-coated by a revived fashion for celebrity. It offered a few politicians new opportunities but at a high cost. The glamour industry had always been with us, under different names, but had become super-charged during the sixties when rock stars, Hollywood actors and television performers were feted by the tabloid press and a new generation of women’s and urban magazines. Such interviews and profiles spread more widely during the seventies and eighties but it was not until 1988 that the shape of the modern celebrity culture became fully apparent. That year saw the first of the true modern celebrity glossies in Britain when Hello! magazine was launched on 17 May. It was the English-language version of the Spanish magazine Hola! which had already made its owner Eduardo Sanchez Junco a multi-millionaire. Its success is often credited to the exotic Marquesa de Varela, who allegedly owns 200 dogs and has four luxury homes in Uruguay, as well as New York and London. The Hello! formula be would copied by OK! from 1993 and many other magazines, to the point where yards of coloured mimicry occupied newsagents’ shelves in every town and village in the country. It sheds a sidelight on Britain’s changing public culture.
The essence of its sweetheart deal was that celebrities would be paid handsomely to be interviewed and photographed, in return for coverage that was generally fawning and never hostile. Hello! allowed the flawed-famous to shun the mean-minded sniping of the regular press, while it scooped up access to the most famous names, time after time. The sunny, good-time, upbeat, airbrushed world of Hello! was much mocked. In the real world the relentless optimism of its coverage of grinning couples and their lovely homes was inevitably followed by divorces, drunken rows, accidents and ordinary scandals. But it was hugely successful. People seemed happy to read good news about the famous and beautiful even if they knew in their hearts there was more to it than that. In the same year as Hello! arrived, 1988, the BBC put the Australian soap opera Neighbours into a prime teatime slot. At its height this show, which had been a failure on its home patch, was attracting 15 million British viewers. It too portrayed a youthful, sunny alternative to grey Britain8 and its early stars, notably Kylie Minogue and Jason Donovan, went on to become celebrities themselves. In the same year as Hello! and Neighbours, ITV launched the most successful of the daytime television shows, This Morning, hosted from Liverpool by Richard Madeley and Judy Finnigan, a live magazine programme of frothy features and celebrity interviews. Daytime television had existed since 1983 when BBC One’s breakfast show with Frank Bough and Selina Scott arrived alongside the independent TVam. These, though, were high-minded and mainstream compared to the more popular This Morning show, television’s celebrity breakthrough moment.
What did this celebrity fantasy world, which continued to open up in all directions in the media through the nineties, have to do with anything else? For one thing it re-emphasized to alert politicians, broadcasting executives and advertisers the considerable if recently unfashionable power of optimism. Mainstream news in the nineties might be giving the British an unending stream of bleakness, burning cattle carcasses, awful murders and disasters on railway lines; millions turned all the more urgently to celebrity. They did not think that celebrities had universally happy lives, or always behaved well, or did not age.
But in celebrity-land, everyone meant well, everyone could forgive themselves and be forgiven, and there was always a new dawn breaking over the swimming pool. The celebrity who emoted, who was prepared to expose inner pain, enjoyed a land of power. And in eighties and nineties Britain, no celebrity gleamed more brightly than the beautiful, troubled Princess Diana. For fifteen years she was an ever-present presence. As an aristocratic girl, no intellectual, whose childhood had been blighted by a bad divorce, her fairytale marriage in 1981 found her pledging her life to an older man who shared few of her interests and did not seem to be in love with her.
The slow disintegration of this marriage transfixed Britain, as Diana moved from china-doll, whispery-voiced debutante, to painfully thin young mother, to increasingly charismatic and confident public figure, working crowds and seducing cameras like a new Marilyn Monroe. As eighties fashions grew more exuberant and glossy, so did she. Her eating disorder, bulimia, was one suffered by growing numbers of girls. When she admitted later to acts of self-harm, she sounded like teenagers and young women in many less privileged homes. When plagues and cruelties of the age were in the news, she appeared as visual commentator, hugging AIDS victims to show that it was safe, or campaigning against land-mines. Rumours spread of her affairs. Britain was now a divorce-prone country, in which ‘what’s best for the kids’ and ‘I deserve to be happy’ were batted across kitchen tables. So Diana was not simply a pretty woman married to a king-in-waiting, but became a kind of Barbie of the emotions, who could be dressed up in the private pain of millions. People felt, possibly wrongly, that she would understand them. Her glance was as potent as the monarch’s touch had once been for scrofula. A feverish, obsessive quality attached to her admirers, something not seen before by the Royal Family, who found all this uncomfortable and alarming. They were living symbols. She was a living icon.
After the birth of her second son Harry in 1987 Diana’s marriage was visibly failing. In 1992 the journalist Andrew Morton, to general huffing, claimed to tell Diana – the True Story in a book which described suicide attempts, blazing rows, her bulimia and her growing certainty that Prince Charles had resumed an affair with his old love, Camilla Parker Bowles, something he later confirmed in a television interview with Jonathan Dimbleby. In the December after Morton’s publication John Major announced that Charles and Diana were to separate. A wily manipulator of the media, Diana became simultaneously a huntress in the media jungle, pursuing stories that flattered her, and the hunted, both haunted and haunting. Then came her revelatory 1995 interview on Panorama. Breaking every taboo left in royal circles, she freely discussed the breakup of her marriage (‘there were three of us’), attacked the Windsors for their cruelty and promised to be ‘a queen in people’s hearts’. Finally divorced in 1996, she continued her charity work around the world and began a relationship with Dodi al-Fayed, son of the owner of Harrods. To many she was a selfish and unhinged woman endangering the monarchy. To millions her painful life-story and her fashionable readiness to share that pain, made her more valuable than formal monarchy. She was followed with close attention all round the world, her face and name a sure seller of papers and magazines. By the summer of 1997 Britain had two super-celebrities. One was Tony Blair and the other was Princess Diana.
It is therefore grimly fitting that Tony Blair’s most resonant words as Prime Minister and the moment when he reached the very height of his popularity came on the morning when Diana was killed with Dodi in a Paris underpass after their car crashed. Blair had been woken from a deep sleep at his Trimdon constituency home, first to be warned about the accident, and then to be told that Diana was dead. He was deeply shocked, and worried about what his proper role should be. After pacing round in his pyjamas and having expletive-ridden conversations with Campbell, Blair spoke to the Queen, who said that neither she nor any other senior would make a statement. He decided he had to say something. Later that morning, standing in front of his local church, looking shattered, and transmitted live around the world, he spoke for Britain. ‘I feel, like everyone else in this country today, utterly devastated. Our thoughts and prayers are with Princess Diana’s family – in particular her two sons, her two boys – our hearts go out to them. We are today a nation in a state of shock . . .’ As he continued, his hands clenched, his voice broke and he showed he understood why she achieved her special status: ‘Her own life was often sadly touched by tragedy. She touched the lives of so many others in Britain and throughout the world with joy and with comfort. How many times shall we remember her in how many different ways, with the sick, the dying, with children, with the needy? With just a look or a gesture that spoke so much more than words, she would reveal to all of us the depth of her compassion and her humanity.’
Looking back at the words many years on, they seem strangely close to what might be said of a religious figure, someone about to be declared a saint by the Catholic Church a holy figure whose glance or touch could heal. At the time, though, they were much welcomed and assented to. Blair went on: ‘People everywhere, not just here in Britain, kept faith with Princess Diana. They liked her, they loved her, they regarded her as one of the people. She was – the People’s Princess and that is how she will stay, how she will remain in our hearts and our memories for ever.’ These are the sentiments of one natural charismatic paying tribute to another. Blair regarded himself as the people’s Prime Minister, leading the people’s party, beyond left and right, beyond faction or ideology, a political miracle-worker with a direct line to the people’s instincts. And in the country after his impromptu eulogy to Diana, astonishingly, his approval rating rose to over 90 per cent, a figure we do not normally witness in democracies.
Blair and Campbell then paid their greatest service to an institution which represented Old Britain, or the forces of conservatism, the monarchy itself. The Queen, still angry and upset about Diana’s behaviour, wanted a quiet private funeral and wanted, also, to remain away from the scenes of public mourning in London. She stayed at Balmoral, looking after her devastated grandsons. This may well have been the grandmotherly thing to do, and the best thing for them but it could have been disastrous for her public image. There was a strange mood in the country, a frantic edge to the mourning which Blair had predicted from the first. The lack of publicly mourning Windsors, the lack of a flag at half-mast over Buckingham Palace, any suggestion of a quiet funeral, all seemed to confirm all Diana’s most bitter thoughts about a cold and unfeeling Royal Family. With Prince Charles’s full agreement Blair and his aides cajoled the Palace first into accepting that this would have to be a huge public funeral so the country’s grief could be expressed, and second that the Queen should return to London. She did, just in time to quieten a growing mood of anger about her behaviour.
This was a generational problem as well as a class one. The Queen had been brought up in a land of buttoned lips, stoicism and private grieving. She now reigned over a country which expected and almost required exhibitionism. To let it all loll out had become a guarantee of authenticity. For some years in Britain the deaths of children, or the scenes of fatal accidents, had been marked by little shrines of cellophane-wrapped flowers, cards and soft toys. In the run-up to Diana’s funeral parts of central London seemed Mediterranean in their public grieving. There were vast mounds of flowers, people sleeping out, holding placards, weeping in the streets. Strangers hugged strangers. If Blair’s words in Trimdon suggested Diana was a living saint, a sub-religious hysteria responded to the thought. People queuing to sign a book of condolence at St James’s Palace reported that her image was appearing, supernaturally, in the background of an oil painting.
The funeral itself was like no other before, and will never be mimicked. The capital was at a standstill. Among the lucky ones invited to Westminster Abbey, gay men in matching sado-masochistic leather outfits queued up with members of the Household Cavalry, in long leather boots and jangling spurs. Campaigners stood with earls, entertainers shared programmes with elderly politicians as the worlds of rock music and aristocracy, charity work and politics, jostled together. Elton John performed a hastily rewritten version of ‘Candle in the Wind’, his lament for Marilyn Monroe, and Princess Diana’s brother Earl Spencer made an angrily half-coded attack from the pulpit on the Windsors’ treatment of his sister. This was applauded when it was relayed outside, and then disloyal clapping was heard in the Abbey itself. Diana’s body was driven to her last resting place and showered with flowers all the way.
In another echo of Marilyn Monroe, Diana’s death would begin a worldwide rumour that she had been murdered, either because she was pregnant by Dodi or because she was about to marry a Muslim. Wild theories about British secret service agents would ripple through cyberspace, reappearing regularly in newspapers. Those same papers, implicated in the hounding of Diana by paparazzi photographers whose work they bought eagerly, were more obvious to blame. Less was said about that. Nearly a decade later an inquiry headed by a former Metropolitan Police commissioner concluded that she had died because her driver was drunk and trying to throw off pursuing photographers; this was greeted by the conspiracy theorists as another Establishment cover-up. The Queen recovered her standing after making a grim live broadcast about her wayward former daughter-in-law. She would later rise again in public esteem to be seen as one of the most successful as well as longest-serving sovereigns for centuries. A popular film about these events sealed the verdict. Blair never again quite captured the mood of the country as he did that late summer. It may be that his advice and help to the Queen in 1997 was vital to her, as well as being, in the view of some officials, thoroughly impertinent.
What did Tony Blair take from the force of the Diana cult, and of charismatic celebrity generally? His instinct for popular culture when he arrived in power was uncanny. He too would soon launch himself onto daytime television programmes, spinning an engaging and chirpy story about his life and interests, not always accurate in every detail. The New Age spiritualism which came out into the open when Diana died, with its shrines and its charms, its wide-eyed-ness, was echoed by the influence of people such as Carole Caplin in Blair’s Downing Street circle. But it went further. What other politicians failed to grasp, and he did grasp, was the power of optimism expressed by the glossy world of celebrity, and people’s readiness to forgive their favourites not just once, but again and again. In celebrity-land, if you had charisma and you apologized, or better still, bared a little of your soul, you could get away with most things short of murder. Interesting. But the world of politics would prove to be a little tougher.
Days of Hope
Optimism was the only real force behind the Northern Ireland peace process. Too often, this is now remembered by one of Blair’s greatest soundbites as the talks reached a climax: ‘This is no time for soundbites . . . I feel the hand of history on my shoulder.’ While irresistibly comic, it would be a horribly unfair thing to hold on to from one of Blair’s biggest achievements. As we have seen, John Major had been tenacious in trying to bring Republicans and Unionists to the table but there had been a stalemate contributed to by both IRA bloody-mindedness and his own parliamentary weakness. Encouraged by Bill Clinton, Blair had decided in Opposition that an Irish peace settlement would be one of his top priorities in government. He went to the province as his first visit after winning power and focused Number Ten on the negotiations as soon as the IRA, sensing a new opportunity, announced a further ceasefire. In Mo Mowlam, the pugnacious, earthy and spectacularly brave new Northern Ireland Secretary, he had someone prepared to eff and blind at Unionists and coo or hug Sinn Feiners in pursuit of a deal. Mowlam was, after Blair himself, the nearest the new government had to a charismatic celebrity.
Quite soon the Ulster Unionist politicians found her a bit much, and suspected she was basically ‘Green’. She concentrated her charm and bullying on the Republicans, while a Number Ten team run by Blair’s chief aides concentrated their work on the Unionists. Blair would emphasize his own family’s Unionist roots to try to win trust. As under Major, there were three separate negotiations taking place simultaneously. There was direct talking between the Northern Irish political parties, aimed at producing a power-sharing assembly in which they could all sit. This was chaired by former US Senator George Mitchell, and was the toughest part. There were the talks between the Northern Irish parties and the British and Irish governments about the border and the constitutional position of Northern Ireland in the future. And finally there were direct talks between London and Dublin on the wider constitutional and security settlement.
The story of the negotiations in detail is gripping but cannot be given here. Suffice it to say that this was a long, intensely difficult process which appeared to have broken down at numerous points, and was kept going mainly thanks to Blair himself. His advisers grumbled that he spent a ludicrously disproportionate amount of time on Northern Ireland, expending charm, energy, long days and late nights for months at a time. He also took big personal risks, as when early on he invited Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness of Sinn Fein, the latter also a top Provisional IRA commander, to Downing Street. Some in the Northern Ireland Office, as well as in Unionist politics, believe Blair personally gave too much away to the Republicans, particularly over the release of terrorist prisoners. His former Northern Ireland Secretary and friend Peter Mandelson later said as much. But he spent most of his time trying to keep the Unionists with him, having moved Labour policy away from a position of support for Irish unification and in Washington, Blair was seen as too Unionist. At one point, when talks had broken down again, Mowlam made the astonishing personal decision to go into the notorious Maze prison herself and talk to Republican and Loyalist terrorist prisoners. Hiding behind their politicians, the imprisoned hard men still called the shots, at a time when this was not a metaphorical expression.
Given a deadline for Easter 1998, after last-gasp setbacks, a deal was finally struck. Northern Ireland would stay part of the UK for as long as the majority there wished it. The Republic of Ireland would give up the territorial claim to Northern Ireland, amending its constitution. The parties would combine in a power-sharing executive, based on a new elected assembly. There would be a new North–South body, knitting the two parts of Ireland together in various practical, undramatic ways. The paramilitary organizations would surrender or destroy their weapons, monitored by an independent body. Prisoners would be released. The policing of Northern Ireland, long a sore point, would be made fairer. This deal involved much pain, particularly for the Unionists. It was only the start of true peace and would be threatened frequently afterwards. The horrific bombing of the centre of Omagh a few months after the signing of the Good Friday Agreement was the worst setback. A renegade IRA splinter group murdered twenty-nine people and injured two hundred. Yet this time the extremists seemed unable to stop the rest from talking.
Once the agreement had been ratified by referendums on both sides of the border, the decommissioning of arms proved an endless and wearisome game of bluff. Though the two leaders of the moderate parties in Northern Ireland, David Trimble of the Ulster Unionists and John Hume of the SDLP, won the Nobel Prize for Peace, the agreement was to elbow both their parties aside. With electorates nervous, they lost out at the ballot box to the harder-line Democratic Unionists of Dr Ian Paisley and to Sinn Fein, under Adams and McGuinness. This made it harder to set up an effective power-sharing executive and assembly in Belfast. Yet, astonishingly, the so-called ‘Dr No’ of Unionism, Paisley, and his republican enemy, Adams, would eventually sit down together. The thuggery and crime attendant on years of terrorist activity has not yet disappeared. Yet because of the agreement hundreds of people who would have died had the ‘troubles’ continued, are alive and living peaceful lives. Investment has returned. Belfast is a transformed, cleaner, busier, more confident city. Large businesses increasingly work on an all-Ireland basis, despite the existence of two currencies and a border. Tony Blair can take a sizeable slice of the credit. As one of his biographers wrote: ‘He was exploring his own ability to take a deep-seated problem and deal with it. It was a life-changing experience for him.’9
The Tartan Pizza
If the Good Friday Agreement changed the UK, Scottish and Welsh devolution plans changed Britain. Through the Tory years, the case for a Scottish parliament had been bubbling north of the border. Margaret Thatcher was seen as a conspicuously English figure imposing harsh economic penalties on Scotland, which considered itself inherently more egalitarian and democratic. This did not stop Scots buying their council houses (when she came to power the proportion of people living in state housing was higher than in many Eastern European countries under Communism), nor did they send back their tax cuts or fail to use the new legislation to choose which schools their children went to. But Scotland did have a public culture further to the left than that of southern England and the real action came from the respectable middle classes. A group of pro-devolution activists, including SNP, Labour and Liberal people, churchmen, former civil servants and trade unionists formed the Campaign for a Scottish Assembly. In due course this produced a ‘Constitutional Convention’ meant to bring in a wider cross-section of Scottish life behind their Claim of Right. It argued that if the Scots were to stand on their own two feet as Mrs Thatcher insisted, they needed control over their own affairs.
Momentum increased when the Scottish Tories lost half their remaining seats in the 1987 election, and when the poll tax was introduced there first to stave off a rebellion among homeowners about higher-rates bills. Over the next three years a staggering 2.5 million summary warrants for non-payment of the poll tax were issued in Scotland, a country of some five million people. The Constitutional Convention got going in March 1989, after Donald Dewar, Labour’s leader in Scotland, decided to work with other parties. The Convention brought together the vast majority of Scottish MPs, all but two of Scotland’s regional, district and island councils, the trade unions, churches, charities and many more – almost everyone indeed except the Conservatives, who were sticking with the original Union, and the SNP, who wanted full independence. Great marches were held. The newspapers became highly excited. A detailed blueprint was produced for the first Scottish parliament since 1707, very like the one later established.
Scottish Tories, finding themselves increasingly isolated, fought back vainly. They argued that ‘Thatcherism’ bore a close family resemblance to many of the ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment. Was not Scotland’s time of greatness based on thrift, hard work and enterprise? One of the cradles of Thatcherism more recently had been in Scotland, at St Andrews University. They pointed out that if a Tory government, based on English votes, was regarded as illegitimate by the Scots, then in future a Labour government based on Scottish constituencies might be regarded as illegitimate by the English. In the 1992 election, John Major made a passionate plea for the survival of the Union. Had the four countries never come together, their joint history would have never been as great: ‘are we, in our generation, to throw all that away?’. He won back a single Scottish seat. Various minor sops were offered to the Scots in his years, including the return of the Stone of Destiny, with much ceremony. In 1997, the party, which had once had a majority of seats in Scotland, had not a single one left.
So by the time Tony Blair became leader, Labour’s commitment to devolution was long-standing. Unlike most of Labour’s commitments this was not a manifesto promise by a single party. It had been agreed away from Westminster, outside the New Labour hub, with a host of other bodies. John Smith, whose funeral in Scotland was a great gathering of the country’s establishment, united in grief, had been a particularly passionate supporter. Dewar, now in charge of the project, was Smith’s great friend. Blair could not simply tear this up. He was not much interested in devolution or impressed by it, particularly not for Wales, where support had been far more muted. The only thing he could do was to insist that the Scottish Parliament and Welsh assembly would only happen after referendums in the two countries, which in Scotland’s case would include a second question as to whether the parliament should be allowed the power to vary the rate of income tax by 3p in the pound. This proved to be a great service to devolution, because it entrenched the legitimacy of the parliament. In September 1997, shortly after the death of Diana, which interrupted campaigning, Scotland voted by three to one for the new Parliament, and by 63.5 per cent to 36.5 per cent to give it tax-raising powers. The vote for the Welsh assembly was far closer, indeed wafer-thin. The Edinburgh parliament would have clearly defined authority over a wide spread of public life – education, health, welfare, local government, transport, housing – while Westminster kept taxation, defence, foreign affairs and some lesser issues. Wales’s assembly had fewer powers, and no tax-raising rights. Only six Labour MPs said they would leave London and make a career in politics at home.
In 1999, after nearly 300 years, Scotland got her parliament with 129 MSPs, and Wales her assembly, with sixty members. Both were elected by proportional representation, making coalition governments almost inevitable. In Scotland, Labour provided the first ‘first minister’ (‘prime minister’ being considered too provocative a title). He was Donald Dewar, a lanky, pessimistic and much-loved intellectual who looked a little like a dyspeptic heron. He took charge of a small pond of Labour and Liberal Democrat ministers. To start with, Scotland was governed from the Church of Scotland’s general assembly buildings, the forbidding gothic affair in Edinburgh. Later it would move to a new building by a Catalan architect, Enrico Miralles, who died of a heart attack at an early stage. A brewery opposite the Palace of Holyroodhouse was demolished and the complex new structure, with a roof meant to look like overturned fishing boats, was finally ready for use in 2004. It is architecturally impressive with a lightness and openness millions of miles removed from Westminster, but it was originally budgeted to cost £55 million and ended up costing £470 million, producing a vitriolic public argument in Scotland about wasted money. Dewar never lived to see it opened, collapsing and dying from a brain haemorrhage in 2000. Wales got her new assembly building, by Richard Rogers, in Cardiff Bay, in 2006 with much less controversy.
Few predictions about the Scottish Parliament proved right. It was said that it would cause an early crisis at Westminster because of the unfairness of Scottish MPs being able to vote on England-only business, particularly when the cabinet was so dominated by Scots. This did not happen, though it may yet. It was said that home rule would put paid to the Scottish National Party. Under Alex Salmond, their pugnacious leader, they were by 2007 so popular they were ousting Labour from its old Scottish hegemony. It was assumed that the Scottish Parliament would be popular in Scotland. A long and tawdry series of minor scandals, plus the cost of the building, meant that it became a butt of ridicule instead. This too may change, as Scots experience new laws it has passed. Among the policies the Edinburgh parliament has implemented are more generous provision for older people; no up-front top-up fees for students from Scotland, though English students at Scottish universities must pay; new property laws to allow Highland communities to compulsorily purchase the land they occupy; and a ban on smoking in public places. In all these Scotland has reinforced her reputation for being to the left of England, though extra taxes have not yet been levied on the Scots.
The most striking change, however, has been how quickly Scottish public life has diverged from that of the rest of Britain since the parliament was established. Scotland always had a separate legal system, schools, newspapers and football leagues. Now she had separate politics too, with her own controversies and personalities, a news agenda increasingly different from that of England. This part of post-war Britain’s story is still developing. Like England’s, Scotland’s economy has moved steadily towards services and away from manufacturing. After many years of decline, Scotland’s population has begun to rise gently since 2003, with net immigration from the rest of the UK. When large numbers of asylum seekers began arriving in Britain those who were sent to Scotland found that the Scots were considerably less welcoming than their piously democratic self-image suggested they would be. And anti-English feeling was not much quietened by home rule.
Wales too has her own politics, but feels not radically different, a change of emphasis, not direction. Scotland feels more like a different country, and London now seems a lot more than 400 miles from Edinburgh. By the winter of 2006–7 some polls showed more than half of Scots prepared to vote for independence. This may be a blip, a reaction to an unpopular government in London. There had been earlier warnings of a coming break-up of Britain, a great topic of debate from the late sixties, when the oil was discovered, right through to the final years of John Major’s administration in the mid-nineties. It may be that a slow, soft separation is now taking place instead. There has been no constitutional chopper coming down to separate Scotland and England. It is more like two pieces of pizza being gently pulled apart, still together but now connected only by strings of molten cheese.
The Dawning of a New Era?
Margaret Thatcher had been a celebrity strictly on her own terms, never big on forgiveness or peace-making but always understanding the importance of optimism. Blair was learning from her. He quickly invited her back to see him in Downing Street and during his first years in office showed that he had picked up some of her bad traits too. She was unreasonably suspicious of the civil service. So was he. She was unimpressed by her first cabinet. He felt the same about his. Like her, when it might have voted him down on a pet idea, he simply went round it. Like her, he toyed with and then discarded the ideologies of intellectuals as he saw fit. With Thatcher it was the radicals of the new right, urging her to sell off hospitals or motorways. With Blair, it was the more gentle spirits urging him to adopt ‘stakeholding’ or ‘communitarianism,’ novel ways of reordering or taming capitalism. For their authors these were new political philosophies, for New Labour, briefly useful fads. Blair was no more of an intellectual than she was. He shared middle-class instincts, just like her. She took to praising him, if in qualified terms. They were really quite similar. Yet when Thatcher became Prime Minister she had years of Whitehall experience. Blair had none. She may not have enjoyed the boozy male clubbiness of Parliament but she respected the institution. Blair gave every sign of disliking the place intensely.
But the biggest difference between the two was Blair’s obsession with journalism. Thatcher did her best to cope with the media, a little flattery here, a blunderbuss-blast from Bernard Ingham there. Blair during his first years in power was a fully engaged media politician. She sailed on the stuff, he swam in it. She knew who her press enemies were, and who were her friends, and more or less kept both throughout. Blair tried to make everyone his friend, and would lose almost all of them. Campbell was more powerful in the Blair court than Ingham had been in the Thatcher one. Again it was a generational thing: she had come into politics when newspapers were comparatively deferential and it was beneath a rising minister to court journalists. Blair learned the dangers of schmoozing media people, but slowly. More a problem of his early years, his relationship with the press and his misused press briefings hurt him and his reputation badly.
One example of how, came in the debate over British membership of the euro, the single currency finally taking shape at the beginning of 1999. Though never a fanatic on the subject, Blair’s pro-European instincts and his desire to be the lead figure inside the EU predisposed him to announce that Britain would join – not in the first wave, perhaps, but soon afterwards. He briefed that this would happen. British business seemed generally in favour. But, as the former Liberal Democrat leader Paddy Ashdown revealed in his diaries, Blair had a problem. According to Ashdown, Roy Jenkins told Blair in the autumn of 1997: ‘I will be very blunt about this. You have to choose between leading in Europe or having Murdoch on your side. You can have one but not both.’ Ouch. Pro-euro journalists went to see him and came away thinking he was on their side. Anti-euro journalists had the same experience. He had a pro-euro adviser, Roger Liddle. But he also had an anti-euro adviser, Derek Scott. The briefing and guesswork in the press was completely baffling. Lord Simon, the former BP boss now in government working on euro matters, held up a wodge of papers at one evening speech, announcing that they represented the speech about the euro that had been written for him, before putting it down and confessing that he would not bother to read it; it had been completed an hour before so the policy had probably changed. It was a joke, but meant to sting.
Gordon Brown, who had been generally in favour of the euro, munched his way through Treasury reports. For him, stability came first. He concluded that it was not likely Britain could safely enter in the first Parliament. He warned Blair. The two argued. Eventually they agreed a fudge. Britain would probably stay out during the 1997 Parliament but the door should be left slightly ajar. Pro-European business people and those Tories who had lent Blair and Brown conditional support, as well as Blair’s continental partners, should be kept on board. So should the anti-euro press. The terms of the delicate compromise were meant to be revealed in an interview given by Brown to The Times. Being more hostile to entry than Blair, and talking to an anti-euro paper, his team briefed more strongly than Blair would have liked. By the time the story was written, the pound had been saved from extinction for the lifetime of the Parliament. When Blair discovered this he was aghast and began to phone desperately around until he reached Brown’s press officer, the affable Charlie Whelan (a man Blair detested and had tried vainly to have sacked earlier in the year). Whelan was in the Red Lion public house in Whitehall and cheerfully confirmed to the Prime Minister on his mobile phone that his government’s policy was indeed that Britain would not enter during the lifetime of the Parliament. As Whelan put it later, ‘he was completely gobsmacked’. Blair told him to ‘row back’. Whelan replied it was too late.
The chaos surrounding such an important matter was ended and patched up by Brown as he and his adviser Ed Balls quickly produced five economic tests which would be applied before Britain entered the euro. They required more detailed work by the Treasury; the underlying point was that the British and continental economies must be properly aligned first. Brown then told the Commons that though it was likely for economic reasons Britain would wait until after the next election, there was no constitutional or political reason not to join. Preparations for British entry would begin. It all gave the impression, not least to Blair, that once the tests were met there would be a postelection referendum, followed by the demise of sterling. In 1999, with tantantaras and a full-scale public launch at a London cinema, Blair was joined by the Liberal Democrat leader Charles Kennedy and the two former Tory cabinet ministers Ken Clarke and Michael Heseltine to launch ‘Britain in Europe’. This was to be a counterblast to the anti-euro campaign, ‘Business for Sterling’. Blair promised that together they would demolish the arguments against the euro, and there was alarmist coverage about the loss of 8 million jobs if Britain pulled out of the EU.
But this expensive, brightly coloured and crowded bandwagon was going nowhere at all. The real significance of the Red Lion kerfuffle was that the power to decide over membership of the euro passed decisively and for ever from Blair in Downing Street to Brown, whose Treasury fortress became the guardian of the economic tests. Brown would keep Britain out, something which won him great personal credit among Conservative press barons. There would be no referendum in the Blair years, however much the Prime Minister fretted. During his second administration, according to the former cabinet minister Clare Short, Blair offered Brown an astonishing deal: he would leave Number Ten soon if Brown would ‘deliver’ the euro. Brown brusquely rejected the offer, telling Short that he didn’t make policy that way and in any case, could not trust Blair to keep his side of a bargain.
But other historic changes went ahead. Both devolution and the Irish peace process reshaped the country and produced clear results. So did other constitutional initiatives, such as the expulsion of most hereditary peers from the Lords, ending its huge inbuilt Conservative majority, and the incorporation of the European human rights convention into British law, allowing cases to come to court here. Neither produced the outcomes ministers expected. The Lords became more assertive and more of a problem for Blair, not less of one. British judges’ interpretation of the human rights of asylum seekers and suspected terrorists caused much anguish to successive home secretaries; and the ‘human rights culture’ was widely criticized by newspapers. But at least, in each case, serious shifts in the balance of power were made, changes intended to make Britain fairer and more open.
Other early initiatives would crumble to dust and ashes. One of the most interesting examples is the Dome, centrepiece of millennium celebrations inherited from the Conservatives. Blair was initially unsure about whether to forge ahead with the £1 bn gamble. He was argued into the Dome project by Peter Mandelson who wanted to be its impresario, and by John Prescott, who liked the new money it would bring to a blighted part of east London. Prescott suggested New Labour wouldn’t be much of a government if it could not make a success of this. Blair agreed, though had the Dome ever come to a cabinet vote he would have lost. Architecturally the Dome was striking and elegant, a landmark for London which can be seen by almost every air passenger arriving in the capital. Public money was spent on cleaning up a poisoned semicircle of derelict land and bringing new Tube and road links. The millennium was certainly worth celebrating. But the problem ministers and their advisers could not solve was what their pleasure Dome should contain. Should it be for a great national party? Should it be educational? Beautiful? Thought-provoking? A fun park? Nobody could decide. The instinct of the British towards satire was irresistible as the project continued surrounded by cranes and political hullabaloo. The Dome would be magnificent, unique, a tribute to daring and can-do. Blair himself said it would provide the first paragraph of his next election manifesto.
A well-funded, self-confident management was put in place but the bright child’s question – yes, but what’s it for? – would not go away. When the Dome finally opened, at New Year, the Queen, Prime Minister and hundreds of donors, business people and celebrities were treated to a mishmash of a show which embarrassed many of them. Bad organization meant most of the guests had a long, freezing and damp wait to get in for the celebrations. Xanadu this was not. The fiasco meant the Dome was roasted in most newspapers and when it opened to the public, the range of mildly interesting exhibits was greeted as a huge disappointment. Far fewer people came and bought tickets than was hoped. It turned out to be a theme park without a theme, morphing in the public imagination into the earliest and most damaging symbol of what was wrong with New Labour: an impressively constructed big tent containing not very much at all. It was produced by some of the people closest to the Prime Minister and therefore boomeranged particularly badly on him and the group already known as ‘Tony’s cronies’. Optimism and daring, it seemed, were not enough.
Squeeze, Relax: New Labour Economics
The events described so far were all, in different ways, secondary to the transformation of Britain that Blair had promised. Northern Ireland was a crisis needing solving. Scotland and Wales were inherited commitments which did not engage much of the Prime Minister’s time, nor any of his passion. The Dome was also inherited, a sally of optimism and opportunism which went terribly wrong. The death of Diana was one of Macmillan’s ‘events’, brilliantly handled. But none of this was what New Labour was really about. Its intended purpose was a more secure economy, radically better public services and a new deal for the people at the bottom. And much of this was in the lap not of Tony Blair, but of Gordon Brown. The saturnine Chancellor would become a controversial figure later in the government too but his early months in the Treasury were rumbustious, as he overruled mandarins and imposed a new way of governing. Like Blair, Brown had no experience of government and, like Blair, he had run his life in Opposition with a tight team of his own, dominated by his economic adviser (later an MP and Treasury minister) Ed Balls. Relations between Team Brown and the Treasury officials began badly and stayed frosty for a long time, rather as other civil service bosses resented the arrival of the rule of special advisers at Number Ten.
Brown’s handing of interest rate control to the Bank of England was a theatrical coup, planned secretly in Opposition and unleashed to widespread astonishment immediately New Labour won. Other countries, including Germany and the United States, had long run monetary policy independently of politicians, but this was an unexpected step for a left-of-centre British Chancellor. It turned out to be particularly helpful to Labour ministers since it removed at a stroke the old suspicion that they would favour high employment over low inflation. It reassured the money markets that Brown would not (because he could not) debauch the currency. In a curious way this gave him more freedom to tax and spend. As one of Brown’s biographers put it, he ‘could only give expression to his socialist instincts after playing the role of uber-guardian of the capitalist system’.10 The Bank move has gone down as one of the clearest achievements of the New Labour era – tellingly, like the devolution referendums, actions taken immediately after winning power. Brown also stripped the Bank of England of its old job of overseeing the rest of the banking sector. If it was worried about the health of commercial banks but also in sole charge of interest rates, the two functions might conflict. His speed in doing so infuriated the Bank’s governor Eddie George who came close to resigning and so spoiling Brown’s early period as Chancellor.
Labour won an early reputation for being economically trustworthy. Brown was the granite-and-iron Chancellor. Then a bachelor, his only mistress was the pinched-cheeked, pursed-mouthed Prudence. Income tax rates did not move. The middle classes could relax and feel free to vote Labour a second time, as they duly did in their droves in 2001. Even when Brown found money growing on trees he did not spend it. In 2000, at the most iridescent swollen glossiness of the dotcom bubble, when Britain was erupting with childlike candy-coloured names for companies promising magical profits, when anyone would pay anything for anything allegedly digital, Brown sold off licences for the next generation of mobile phones for £22.5 bn, vastly more than they were soon worth. The fruit went not into new public spending but into repaying the public debt, £37 bn of it. By 2002 government interest payments as a proportion of its income, were the lowest since 1914. Brown’s stock soared.
Another consequence of the early squeeze was more immediately controversial. What became known as ‘stealth taxes’, like the stealth bomber itself, made a lot of noise and did not always hit the targeted area. Stealth taxes included the freezing of income tax thresholds, so an extra 1.5 million people found themselves paying the top rate; the freezing of personal allowances; rises in stamp duty on houses and a hike in national insurance (both of which provided huge new tax streams in the Labour years); the palming off of costs onto council tax, which rose sharply; and most famously the removal of tax credits for share dividends in 1997. This was sold at the time as a sensible technical reform, removing distortions and encouraging companies to reinvest in their core businesses. In fact it had a devastating effect on the portfolios of pension funds.
By 2006, according to a paper for the Institute of Actuaries, this measure was responsible for cutting the value of retirement pensions by £100 bn, a staggering sum, more than twice as much as the combined pension deficits of Britain’s top 350 companies. Pensioners and older workers facing great holes in their pension funds were outraged. What is more, Treasury papers released in 2007 showed that Brown was given ample warning of the effect. The destruction of a once proud pension industry is a more complicated story than the simple ‘blame Brown’ charge. The actuarial industry, rule changes in pensions during the Major years, a court ruling about guaranteed pay-outs and Britain’s fast-ageing population are also part of the tale. But the pension fund hit produced more anger, directed personally against Brown, than any other single act in his time as Chancellor.
Longer term, perhaps the most striking aspect of Brown’s running of the economy was the stark, dramatic shape of public spending. For his first two years he stuck fiercely to the promise he had made about continuing Conservative spending levels. These were so tight that even the former Chancellor Ken Clarke said he would not have actually kept to them had he been re-elected. But Brown brought down the State’s share of public spending from nearly 41 per cent of gross domestic product to 37.4 per cent by 1999–2000, the lowest percentage since 1960 and far below anything achieved under Thatcher. He was doing the opposite of what earlier Labour chancellors had done. They had arrived in office, immediately started spending, and then had to stop and raise taxes later on. He began as Scrooge and quietly fattened up for Santa. Then there was an abrupt and dramatic shift and public spending soared, particularly on health, back up to 43 per cent. So there were the lean years followed by the fat years, famine then feast, squeeze then relax.
Prudence was a stern mistress. The first consequence of her reign was that the 1997–2001 Labour government achieved far less in public services than it had promised. During the 2001 election Blair was confronted outside a Birmingham hospital when a postmistress called Sharon Storer exploded with rage at him over the poor care being given to her partner who had cancer. Vainly he tried to stem the flow and usher her away from microphones and cameras. New Labour’s choreography was usually slick but for once Blair was pinned down and harangued by someone who was no longer prepared to hear his excuses. John Prescott had promised a vast boost in public transport, telling the Commons in 1997, ‘I will have failed if in five years’ time there are not many more people using public transport and far fewer journeys by car. It’s a tall order but I urge you to hold me to it.’ Because of Prudence, and Blair’s worries about being seen as anti-car, Prescott had nothing like the investment to follow through and failed completely. Prudence meant that Brown ploughed ahead with cuts in benefit for lone-parent families, angering Labour MPs and resulting in a Scottish Labour conference vote which called them ‘economically inept, morally repugnant and spiritually bereft’.
Reform costs money, and without money it barely happened in the first term, except in isolated areas where Blair or Brown put their heads down and concentrated. The most dramatic programme was in raising literacy and numeracy among younger children, where Number Ten worked closely with the Education Secretary, David Blunkett, and scored real successes. But unequivocally successful public service reforms were rare. And the real drawback of the squeeze-then-relax Brown guide to fiscal fitness was that he did not entirely conform to it himself. Some new money had to be raised and it was.
One curious thing a time-traveller from the seventies might notice in the Britain of the early twenty-first century would be unfamiliar uniforms and symbols in public offices, by roadsides, in hospitals and outside schools. The men and women on security duty in the Treasury in not-quite-official caps and jackets, the badges on construction workers’ jackets and helmets, the little logos of jumping manikins, bright flowers, bean-like blobs, and the new names, Carillion, Vinci or Serco, were all visual hints about the greatest change in how government was working. The name for it, public finance initiative, or PFI, was dull. Yet the change was big enough to arouse worry even outside the small tribes of political obsessives. The underlying idea was simple. It had started life under Norman Lamont, five years before Labour came to power, when he experimented with privatizing public projects and allowing private companies to run them, keeping the revenue. A group led by the Bank of America built and ran a new bridge connecting the Isle of Skye to the mainland. There were outraged protests from some islanders about paying tolls to a private consortium and eventually the Scottish Executive bought the bridge back. At the opposite corner of the country, another bridge was built joining Kent and Essex across the Thames at Dartford, the first bridge across the river in a new place for more than half a century; it was run by a company called Le Crossing and successfully took tolls from motorists.
To start with Labour hated this idea. PFIs were a mix of two things, the privatization of capital projects, with government paying a fee over many years; and the contracting-out of services – waste-collection, school meals, cleaning – to private companies, which had been imposed on unwilling socialist councils from the eighties. Once in power, Labour ministers began to realize that those three little letters were political magic. For the other thing about PFI is that it allows today’s ministers to announce and oversee exciting new projects, and take the credit for them, while the full bill is left for taxpayers twenty or fifty years in the future. Today’s spending on schools or hospitals is a problem that will eventually land on the desk of an education minister who is presently still at primary school, or a Chancellor who has not yet arrived at the maternity unit. This was government on tick. It was invented in Britain. And for better or worse, it is now spreading round the world. PFIs were particularly attractive when so many other kinds of spending were so tightly controlled by Prudence. At the same time large swathes of money for new schools, hospitals, prisons and the like were declared to be investment, not spending, and put to one side of the national accounts. Was this clever, or merely clever-clever? The justification was that private companies would build things and run them so much more efficiently than the State, that profits paid to them by taxpayers would be more than compensated for.
There is no doubt that sometimes this has been so, but assertions tail off into guesswork because they depend on misty unknowables – how well a modern civil service might have run such projects itself, whether the contract was drawn up tightly enough to fully protect the taxpayer, and so on. Committees of MPs certainly thought they had found incompetence and inefficiency in PFI deals. Ministers, pressed against a wall, tended to reply that since without PFIs Britain would not have got the shiny new school buildings or health centres that were so desperately needed by the late nineties, it was by definition a good thing. It was certainly a big thing. By the end of 2006 a total of £53 bn of such contracts had been signed, with another £28 bn in the pipeline, for fire stations, army barracks, helicopter training schools, psychiatric units, prisons, roads, bridges, government offices, computer programmes, immigration systems, as well as hundreds of schools and hospitals. The biggest was for the modernization of the London Underground, hugely expensive in legal fees and hugely complex in contracts. Tellingly, the peak year for PFIs was 2000, just as the early Treasury stringency on conventional spending had bitten most.
The cost of the forward contracts for running these places, sometimes half a century ahead, is hard to estimate but there is certainly over £100 bn of rent due to be paid by tomorrow’s taxpayers. In the private sector lawyers, company managers and accountants began to specialize in PFIs. A whole new business sector arose. In the public sector civil servants struggled to grapple with the new skills they would need to negotiate with unfamiliar private sector partners. There is an obvious problem about defining the real risk of these projects. If a firm is commissioned to build a prized new hospital at a certain budget and falls behind, to the point where failure looms unless the taxpayer intervenes again, is it likely the hospital will simply be abandoned? Risk is a routine business idea but means something else in politics. How do you blend the culture of ministerial promises and that of construction and IT firms? Yet another white-collar industry arose to try. And by the mid-2000s the number of PFI contracts being sold on from one company to another, a booming secondary market in subcontracted government, was well over four-fifths of the total. How to keep a grip on sold-on PFIs? Another mini-profession popped up to try that, too. All of it, of course, paid for by the taxpayer.
Yet, PFIs did not make quite the noise one might have expected. Most politicians from most parties reflected that one day, they too might find them useful.
The Moment of Truth
So when did Brown’s great shift in policy happen? When did straightforward, on-balance-sheet, old-fashioned public spending, financed by old-fashioned taxes, return to the political agenda? And why did the great romance between Gordon and Prudence end? It occurred, appropriately, just as Brown’s real-life romance with Sarah Macaulay, a very bright public relations businesswoman, was becoming public. They would marry in August 2000, six months after Prudence had been told to make other arrangements. And despite Sharon Storer’s disappointment the following year, it was indeed the National Health Service which triggered the change of pace. In its first election manifesto New Labour promised to ‘safeguard the basic principles of the NHS, which we founded’. It protested that under the Tories there had been 50,000 fewer nurses but a rise of no fewer than 20,000 managers – red tape which Labour would pull away and burn. Though critical of the Tory internal market, Blair promised to keep a split between those who commissioned health and those who provided it. The overall message was less fiddling and a bit more money.
Under Frank Dobson, Labour’s new Health Secretary, a staunch traditionalist and the man with the filthiest sense of humour in British politics, this is what happened. There was little reform but there was, year by year, just enough extra money to buy off the winter crises. But then a quite different crisis hit the headlines. As often happens, it began with individual human stories which rapidly came together and expanded toward a general truth. First there was a particularly awful case of an old lady whose cancer was made inoperable after repeated delays. Then came a furious denunciation of his elderly mother’s treatment by Professor Robert Winston, the Labour peer and fertility expert much admired by Blair. Winston said that Britain’s health service was much the worst in Europe, was getting worse still, and that the government had been deceitful about the true picture. This set off something close to panic in Whitehall not only because Winston was about the most authentic witness anyone could imagine but also because he was, in general terms, right. And Labour’s polling showed the country knew it. So after a difficult haggle with Brown, Blair declared on Sir David Frost’s Sunday morning television show in January 2000 that the NHS badly needed more money and he would bring Britain’s health spending up to the European average within five years.
That was a huge promise, a third as much again in real terms (close to what actually happened). Gordon Brown was unhappy. He thought that Blair had pre-empted his decision, had not spoken to Frost enough about the need for health service reform to accompany the money, and according to Downing Street rumour, had ‘stolen my bloody budget’. Brown made up for this on the day itself when he promised that from then until 2004 health spending would rise at above 6 per cent beyond inflation every year, ‘by far the largest sustained increase in NHS funding in any period in its fifty-year history’ and ‘half as much again for health care for every family in this country’. The tilt away from tight spending controls and towards expansion had started. There was more to come. With an election looming in 2001, Brown also announced a review into the NHS and its future by a former banker called Derek Wanless.
As soon as the election was over, broad hints about necessary tax rises began to be dropped. When Wanless finally reported, he confirmed much that the winter crisis of nearly two years earlier had shown. The NHS was not, whatever Britons fondly believed, as good as health systems in other similar countries, and it needed a lot more money. Wanless also rejected a radical change in funding, such as a move to insurance-based or semi-private health care. Brown immediately used this as objective proof that taxes had to rise to save the NHS, something Wanless felt a little uneasy about. Was he being used, in the words of one writer, as Brown’s human shield? At any rate, in his next Budget of March 2002, Brown broke with a political convention which had reigned since the eighties, that direct taxes may never be put up again. He raised a special 1 per cent national insurance levy, equivalent to a penny on income tax, to fund the huge reinvestment in Britain’s health.
Public spending shot up, above all on health. In some ways, it paid off. By 2006, there were around 300,000 extra NHS staff compared to 1997. That included more than 10,000 extra senior hospital doctors (about a quarter more) and 85,000 more nurses. But there were also nearly 40,000 managers, twice as many as Brown and Blair had ridiculed the Conservatives for hiring in the days when they were campaigning against red tape. An ambitious computer project for the whole NHS became an expensive catastrophe. Meanwhile, the health service budget rose from £37 bn to more than £92 bn a year. That vast investment produced results. Waiting lists, a source of great public anger in the mid-nineties, fell by 200,000. By 2005, Blair was able to talk of the best waiting list figures since 1988. Hardly anyone was left waiting for an inpatient treatment for more than six months. Death rates from cancer for people under the age of seventy-five fell by 15.7 per cent between 1996 and 2006 and death rates from heart disease fell by just under 36 per cent. The public finance initiative meanwhile meant that new hospitals were being built around the country.
If only that was the full story. ‘Czars’, quangos, agencies, commissions, access teams and planners hunched over the NHS as Whitehall, having promised to devolve power, now imposed a new round of mind-dazing control. By the autumn of 2004 hospitals were subject to an astonishing 100-plus inspection regimes. A great war broke out between Brown in the Treasury and the Blairite Health Secretary, Alan Milburn, about the basic principles of running hospitals. Milburn, backed by Blair, wanted more independence and competition. Brown asked how you could have competition when for most people there was just one big local hospital. If it lost the competition, it could hardly shut down. Polling suggested that in this Brown was making a popular point. Most people wanted better hospitals, not more choice. Blair’s team responded that they would only get better hospitals if there was choice. A truce was eventually declared with the establishment of a small number only of independent, or foundation, hospitals. Britain was back to the old argument. Do you try to run everything from the centre, using targets as your flails and unelected quangos as your legionaries? Or do you mimic the private sector, allowing hospitals to rise and fall, expand and close?
By the 2005 general election, Michael Howard’s Conservatives were attacking Labour for wasting money and allowing people’s lives to be put at risk in dirty, badly run hospitals. Just like Labour once had, they were promising to cut bureaucracy and slash the number of organizations inside the Health Service. By the summer of 2006, despite that huge increase in money, the health service was facing a cash crisis. The amount of money involved was not large as a percentage of the total budget but trusts in some of the most vulnerable parts of the country were on the edge, from Hartlepool to Cornwall to London. Across Britain, 7,000 jobs had gone and the Royal College of Nursing was predicting 13,000 more would go soon. Many expensively qualified new doctors and specialists could not find work. After the great spending U-turn of 2000–2 and historic amounts of new money, it seemed that wage costs, pricey new drugs, poor management and the vast bureaucratic expense of endless ‘reforms’ had resulted in a health service which was irritating people as much as ever. Less fashionable health causes, such as mental health, felt left out and outside the NHS there was a vast growth in the reach of private insurance and private health. Bupa, the leading private operator, was covering around 2.3 million people in 1999. Six years later the figure was more than 8 million. This partly reflects greater affluence but it is not a resounding vote of confidence on the success of Labour’s investment in the NHS.
A parallel story could be told about schools. Here too traditional socialists wanted a single system for every child, comprehensive across the country, and run directly from Whitehall (except, of course, in now-devolved Scotland and Wales). Those dangerously semi-independent institutions, the Tories’ grant-maintained schools, though there were few enough of them, were abolished. In education the government did everything that enthusiasm, hard work and determination could, to improve things from Whitehall. First under David Blunkett, and then his successors, a stream of plans on every aspect of school life poured out of the department. By 2001, in a single year, 3,840 pages of instructions were being sent to schools. One headteacher settled down and counted 525 separate targets for his school. This, literal, wheelbarrow-load of paperwork no more transformed the schools than the revised NHS bureaucracy was transforming hospitals. Blair tried a new tack and returned to the idea of semi-independent schools. There were already ‘specialist schools’ in the state sector with say over their admissions but this was to be at a different level. Businesses, faith groups and rich local businessmen would endow part of the cost and be allowed some involvement in their ‘ethos’. As with hospitals, there was great Labour resistance. Did this not mean a possible return to some kind of selection? Another great battle began and, under pressure from Labour MPs, it was written into law that such schools could not select by academic ability. Links with local education authorities were also to be kept.
Yet it seemed possible in the early years of the new century that Britain was moving back towards an educational model half remembered from long ago. Schools were being sponsored by evangelical Christians, computer companies or firms of accountants. Was this so different from the ancient schools set up by local worthies, livery companies and religious orders? Some even favoured a teaching of life’s origins which edged Darwin aside in favour of the Bible. There was a great growth too in Muslim schools, closed to faithless outsiders. The government tried to make faith schools open up a little to people from other communities but were forced to pull back. For some this was a betrayal of the idea of one nation implicit in comprehensives, a retreat to ghetto schooling. Others asked, if locally elected councillors oversaw such independent schools, and if they were restrained from being too aggressive in ramming doctrines down young throats, was that such a bad thing? Polls suggested parents were less worried about structures than lax discipline and too-easy exams. Such schools are certainly a decisive break from the direction of education in the sixties and seventies, and far nearer the dreams of Thatcher and her Conservative successors. As in health, private schools boomed.
As the public spending had begun to flow during the second Blair administration, vast amounts of money had gone in pay rises, new bureaucracies and on bills for outside consultants. Ministries had been unused to spending again, and did not always do it well. There were other unfortunate consequences. Brown and his team resorted to double and triple counting early spending increases to give the impression they were doing more for hospitals, schools and transport than they actually could. They were, rightly, roasted for it.
A fascinating insight into the problems faced by the Blair government in public service reform came in 2005 when a former spin doctor published a book. Peter Hyman, a young, serious-minded man, had worked for Tony Blair since he became leader, rising to head the Number Ten strategic communications unit. He wrote speeches, spun for him, argued with him and saw the power game at its highest, most exhilarating level. In 2003, after sweating hard at Blair’s conference speech, he decided it was time to make the favoured buzzword ‘renewal’ personal. He resigned and became a teacher at a tough inner London comprehensive school, Islington Green. His book about the reality-jolt this produced remains one of the best texts on modern British politics available. Late on, he is arguing with a pupil about why when the Prime Minister says something, it does not just happen: ‘I look him in the eye and say, “When Tony promises to deliver on education what needs to happen is that you pass your exams. How can he guarantee that? You may not even turn up for them.” ’ Hyman reflects that his old way of doing politics, dealing frantically with 24-hour media, is useless for delivering a better school. Instead of conflict and novelty, consistency is needed; not battles but partnership. ‘Now, looking through the other end of the telescope I see how unequal is the relationship between politicians and the people . . . Those at the centre relish ideas and, in the main, are bored by practicalities. Those who suggest better ways of making policy work are too often dismissed as whingers . . . Why can’t politicians acknowledge that those on the front line might know more?’11
It is a good question. In trying to achieve better policing, more effective planning, healthier school food, prettier town centres and a hundred other hopes, the centre of government ordered and cajoled, hassled and harangued, always high-minded, always speaking for ‘the people’. The railways, after yet another disaster, were shaken up again. In very controversial circumstances Railtrack, the once-profitable monopoly company operating the lines, was driven to bankruptcy and a new system of detailed Whitehall control was imposed. At one point Tony Blair boasted of having 500 targets for the public sector, and later his deputy had found five times that number for local government and transport alone.12 Parish councils, small businesses and charities found they were loaded with directives – not as many as schools or hospitals, but always more, interfering with much of what they wanted to do. The interference was always well meant but it clogged up the arteries of free decision-taking and frustrated responsible public life. Blair famously complained, early in his time as Prime Minister, that he had ‘scars on my back’ from trying to get reform in the public sector. Perhaps with a little less auto-flagellation and a little more conversation, both he and the country would have been happier.
Rebel British
Meanwhile the British people, the end-point of this frantic activity, proved as unpredictably stroppy as they always had been. In general, it was moral and cultural protest that took the place of the economic controversies of earlier decades. Through most of the Blair years the fox-hunting struggle engorged month after month of parliamentary time and unbelievable amounts of political energy. Polling suggested the country cared almost as little about it as the Prime Minister – plenty of people had views, but few held them strongly. Behind this, though, was the determination of animal rights activists to get something out of an avowedly radical government, while the Countryside Alliance (which expanded its campaigning to include fishing, organic food and much else) represented a feeling that part of the historic nation was being ignored, that there were people of all classes who did not fit into the New Labour world-view.
Fox hunting was a country pursuit since medieval times; the poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight contains a description from around the year 1370 which is recognizable in its essentials today. By the 1670s, its rituals, red coats, language and literature were a part of British culture known around the world. Only a part, however: hunting always had its detractors. In the eighteenth century, the fox-hunting Tory squire, red-faced and stupid, was a staple of urban Whig propaganda. (The hunting nickname for the fox, Charlie, refers to the great Whig radical Charles James Fox.) Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the thunderous passage of whooping huntsmen became an emblem among radicals of oppressive aristocracy riding roughshod over the people. In Oscar Wilde’s phrase they were ‘the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable’. Little followed from this until the arrival in the middle of the twentieth century of a militant animal rights movement, determined to frustrate hunting by using scent sprays, horns and human barriers. The first example of saboteurs at work seems to have been in August 1958 when members of the League Against Cruel Sports (which had been founded much earlier, in 1927) used chemicals to try to disrupt the Devon and Somerset Staghounds. Direct action like this began to be used against fox hunters too, with the North Warwickshire and the Old Berkeley at Amersham confronted in 1962–3. In December 1963 the Hunt Saboteurs Association was formed by a young journalist in Brixham, Devon, and the practice quickly spread.
Confrontations between hunt supporters and ‘Sabs’, often violent with the police in full pursuit, became a regular feature of country life from then on. Sabs would compare themselves to the hunters, needing quick wits, courage and good tactics to confuse the hounds and allow the fox or stag to escape. They were accused of thuggery. They accused the hunt supporters of being brutal to them, and many bones and noses were broken in the bracken. There was a bit of class conflict and of city-against-country in it all. Over time it became clear that while the Sabs might save some foxes, they were unable to stop the hunts, so animal rights activists turned increasingly to Parliament to get it banned. Labour voters and MPs tended to be against hunting, and the party took a £100,000 donation from the animal rights lobby before the 1997 election. When New Labour won with a massive majority it was clear that a parliamentary move to ban hunting with hounds was inevitable. With so many MPs committed, it would probably become law. This directly affected the 200,000 people who were hunting regularly and with those who watched and supported them, perhaps half a million in all. A new organization, the Countryside Alliance, was formed to campaign against a ban and held its first big rally, with 120,000 people present, at Hyde Park, six weeks after the election.
From then on pro-hunting protests were continual and varied. There were marches at Labour Party conferences, in Scotland where a separate and earlier ban was being passed, outside Parliament and in many other towns throughout Britain. People had always been on the march about something, but whereas before it had been students in duffel-coats, coalminers or left-wingers in leather jackets, this time it was ruddy-faced women in tweed skirts, farm-workers and former public schoolboys – Boden and loden, Barbour and brogue. In the Blair years, the sound of hunting horns, the excited yelping of hounds and even the clatter of hooves became part of the backdrop of parliamentary life. After a noisy march in Bournemouth, Blair himself joined in the argument, telling his conference in 1999 that he would sweep away the ‘forces of conservatism’ and branding the Conservatives ‘the party of fox hunting, Pinochet and hereditary peers – the uneatable, the unspeakable and the unelectable’.
This was a rare and quickly regretted Blair incursion into the language of leftism. He never much cared about hunting one way or another, and wished the issue would vanish. It did not. John Prescott, more of a class warrior than his leader, enlivened the 2001 election when a burly Countryside protester threw an egg at him during a visit to Rhyl, Wales, and was rewarded with a hefty punch. After the election Labour MPs pressed ahead while on the other side, vigils were mounted, topless women delivered petitions to Whitehall and a thousand horses rode through Leicester as part of a ‘summer of discontent’ in 2002. That September, the Alliance claimed more than 400,000 supporters in its biggest ‘Liberty and Livelihood’ protest outside the Commons, a protest which saw violent confrontations between the police and angry young men in tweed caps and waxed olive jackets.
On 18 November 2004 a law banning hunting with hounds finally passed its parliamentary hurdles. After legal challenges it became law the following February though the many loopholes, allowing riders with hounds to flush out foxes, which could then be shot, meant hunts carried on across England and Wales. The day after the ban took effect, thousands were out again and ninety-one foxes were killed. There, as in Scotland, the hunts continue and Sabs still follow with cameras, trying to find evidence of law-breaking. There have been very few prosecutions. Bloody predictions of masters of foxhounds shooting their dogs and then hanging themselves, a nightmare hanging over Labour spin-doctors for several years, were never realized. The fox hunting story can serve as a symbol for much else in the New Labour years: a long and noisy confrontation at Westminster, which in the end had surprisingly little effect on the ground.
The first intimation that protest could go further under New Labour than noisy pro-hunting demonstrations came in 2000, when a nationwide revolt by truckers against high petrol prices brought the country to a standstill. The automatic increase in fuel duty had in fact been briefly halted, but rising world oil prices and the high petrol taxes already in place meant unheard-of prices at the petrol pumps. A group of irate truckers, men who owned their own lorries, held a protest meeting in Wales and decided to mount a brief blockade of a giant oil refinery in Cheshire. They attracted widespread news coverage and an enthusiastic reaction from ordinary drivers. To begin with, Blair and his ministers concluded that it was not a serious challenge and continued with their plans. A command centre was established at Cobra, the bland meeting-room below Downing Street from where national crises are directed.
The Prime Minister himself went ahead with a tour of the English Midlands, due to end with a celebration of John Prescott’s thirty years in Parliament in a Hull Chinese restaurant. On the way, officials and journalists noted V-formations of slow-moving lorries blocking motorways in other parts of the country and followed reports of petrol stations in the north of England running dry, or being besieged by queues of panicky motorists. More refineries were blockaded. Still Blair and his team insisted that nothing was really wrong and the tour would go on. He would not be diverted. By that evening, with Prescott in a Hull town hall surrounded by countryside protesters, he was getting a different message. Told that he could not be guaranteed a getaway from the splendid Chinese restaurant, he apologized to his deputy and headed for Sheffield, still insisting the show would go on. On the following morning, after overnight briefings, he gave in, turned tail and sped back to London to take charge.
Blair was generally good in a crisis and began trying to knock heads together. But this time the oil company bosses would not help him by ordering drivers of petrol tankers, who were both self-employed and sympathetic to the fuel protesters, to break through the pickets. Blair raged, threatened and begged. Now all across Britain, petrol stations ran dry. Wherever petrol remained, vast queues formed. It was all perfectly good-humoured but the crisis was spinning out of Blair’s hands. Food shortages were reported. Bread was going, milk was going and the nation’s egg-laying chickens were in danger. What was left of Britain’s manufacturing industry was close to being forced to suspend working. Yet all tests of public opinion showed the majority of the country was with the protesters not the government. Brown repeatedly refused to pre-announce his March Budget by promising cuts in fuel taxes, in response to blackmail by two thousand to three thousand hauliers. There was private talk of bringing in the army, forcing the blockades. Panicky-sounding government papers were leaked and Blair came close to begging the protesters to stop: ‘This is not on, you know. This is just not right . . .’ Eventually, after health service managers had warned that people would soon die, and with even the anti-Blair press telling the protesters that enough was enough, the blockades were lifted and life returned to normal. Brown made a crabwise but generous-enough move on petrol duty in his Budget and something close to honour was restored. Yet Britain had come very close to the kind of collapse not seen since the winter of 1978–9.
The country quickly bounced back – there was no threatening undertow in the 2001 election. The combination of early Prudence and the public spending promised had played well with the electorate. John Major was succeeded as party leader by the most talented Tory of his generation, the young, bright, bald and witty Yorkshireman, William Hague. A natural Thatcherite since his schooldays and a political obsessive, he had done his best to make his leadership seem trendier and more in touch with modern Britain, donning a baseball cap and visiting the Notting Hill carnival. He was mocked for it, and learned. Hague was a man of some political experience, having been with Norman Lamont at the Treasury and later Welsh Secretary, and his greatest achievement was that he stopped a bewildered and defeated party tearing itself apart. At his best in the Commons, he had been a sparkling Opposition leader, discomfiting Blair and leading the charge on Labour ‘stealth taxes’, the Dome and the new issue of bogus asylum-seekers. But heavily concentrating his election campaign on saving the pound, promising voters ‘we will give you back your country’ and attacking the still-popular Blair as a slimy liar, he allowed New Labour to portray his party as xenophobic and nasty. By any standard, the Tory attack failed. Labour was returned with a majority of 166, having lost just six seats net, and the Conservatives, after all their energy and hard work, managed a single net gain. It was an important election because it cemented the New Labour achievement of 1997 and showed the country had moved towards Blair’s agenda. Yet this general election will be remembered for one other ominous statistic too. The turnout was – just – below 60 per cent. Since Britain had first become a democracy, the public had never been less interested in voting.
Pre-Iraq Wars and Foreign Policy
The Iraq War will remain for ever the most important and controversial part of Tony Blair’s legacy. But long before it, during the dog-days of the Clinton administration, two events had taken place which primed his response and explain some of what followed. The first was the bombing of Iraq by the RAF and US air force as punishment for Saddam Hussein’s dodging of UN inspections. The second was the bombing of Serbia during the Kosovo crisis, and the threat of a ground force invasion. These crises made Blair believe he had to be involved personally and directly in overseas wars. They caused dark nights of self-doubt, and toughened him to criticism. They emphasized the limitations of air power and the importance to him of media management. Without them, Blair’s reaction to the changing of world politics on September 11 2001 would have been different.
Evidence of Saddam Hussein’s interest in weapons of mass destruction was shown to Blair soon after he took office. He raised it in speeches and privately with other leaders. Most countries in Nato and at the United Nations security council were angry about the dictator’s expulsion of UN inspectors when they tried to probe his huge palace compounds for biological and chemical weapons. But the initial instinct was for more diplomacy. Iraq was suffering from sanctions already; Saddam eventually allowed the inspectors back. He was playing cat and mouse, however, and in October 1998 Britain and the United States finally lost patience and decided to smash Iraq’s military establishment with missiles and bombing raids. In a foretaste of things to come, Blair even presented MPs with a dossier about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction. Again, at the last minute, the Iraqi leader backed down and the raids were postponed. The United States soon concluded this was another trick and, in December, British and American planes attacked, hitting 250 targets over four days. Operation Desert Fox, as they called it, probably only delayed Saddam’s weapons programmes by a year or so though it was sold as a huge success. As later, Britain and the United States were operating without a fresh UN resolution. Among their publics there was a widespread suspicion that Clinton had ordered the raids to distract from his embarrassing ‘Monica-gate’ travails. Congress was debating impeachment proceedings during the attacks and did indeed formally impeach Clinton on the final day of the raids. Over this episode, however, Blair faced little trouble in Parliament or outside it.
The second bombing campaign happened as a result of the breakup of Yugoslavia in the later stages of the long Balkan tragedy that had haunted John Major’s time in office. Kosovo, a province of Serbia, was dominated by Albanian-speaking Muslims but was considered almost a holy site by history-minded Serbs, who had fought a famous medieval battle there against the Ottomans. The Serbian ex-communist leader Slobodan Milosevic had made himself the hero of the minority Kosovar Serbs. The Dayton peace agreement had calmed things down in 1995 but the newly formed Kosovo Liberation Army triggered a vicious new conflict, marked by increasingly savage Serb reprisals from 1998–9. Despite the use of international monitors and a brief ceasefire violence returned with the slaughter of forty-five civilians in the town of Racak, provoking comparisons with Nazi crimes. Ethnic cleansing and the forced migration of tens of thousands of people across wintry mountain tracks produced uproar around the world. In Chicago Blair declared a new ‘doctrine of the international community’ which allowed ‘a just war, based . . . on values’. When talks with the Yugoslavs broke down, Nato duly launched a massive bombing campaign. British and American jets attacked targets first in Kosovo and then the rest of Serbia, hitting factories, television stations, bridges, power stations, railway lines, hospitals and many government buildings.
It was, however, a complete failure. Many innocent civilians were killed and daily life was disrupted across much of Serbia and Kosovo. Sixty people were killed by an American cluster bomb in a market. An allegedly stealthy US bomber blew down half the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, causing a huge international row. Meanwhile, low cloud and the use of decoys by Milosevic’s generals limited the military damage and he used the attacks to increase his ethnic cleansing massively. The death squads went back to work. Hundreds of thousands of people were on the move – eventually roughly a million ethnic Albanians fled Kosovo and an estimated 10,000–12,000 were killed. Blair began to think he might not survive as Prime Minister if nothing was done. (So Downing Street staff said at the time: if they were right, the reader will notice that Mr Blair believed he might be ousted much more often than any level-headed observer might have predicted.) The real problem was that only the genuine threat of an invasion by ground troops might convince Milosevic to pull back; air power by itself was not enough. Blair tried desperately to persuade Clinton to agree. He visited a refugee camp and angrily said: ‘This is obscene. It’s criminal . . . How can anyone think we shouldn’t intervene?’
It would be the Americans whose troops would bear the brunt of a new war, since the European Union was far away from any coherent military structure and lacked the basic tools for carrying armies to other theatres. There was alarm in Washington about the British Prime Minister’s moral posturing and it was only after many weeks of shuttle diplomacy that things began to move. Blair ordered that 50,000 British soldiers, most of the available army, should be made available to invade Kosovo. This would mean a huge call-up of reserves and if it was a bluff, was one on a massive scale, since other European countries had no intention of taking part. For whatever reason, the Americans began to toughen their language and finally, at the last minute, the Serb parliament buckled. The Americans and Russians worked together to apply pressure and Milosevic withdrew his forces from Kosovo and accepted its virtual independence, under an international mandate. Blair declared a kind of victory. Good had triumphed over evil, civilization over barbarism. Eight months later, Milosevic was toppled from power and ended up in The Hague charged with war crimes.
First Desert Fox and then Kosovo are vital in appreciating Blair’s behaviour when it came to the full-scale Iraq War. They taught him that bombing rarely works. They suggested that, threatened with ground invasion by superior forces, dictators will back down. They played to his sense of himself as a moral war leader, combating dictators as wicked in their way as Hitler; something that was underpinned by the successful, life-saving intervention in Sierra Leone in 2000. After working well with Clinton over Desert Fox, he worried that he had tried to bounce him too obviously over Kosovo. He learned that American presidents need tactful handling. He learned not to rely on Britain’s European allies very much, though he pressed the case later for the establishment of a European ‘rapid reaction force’ to shoulder more of the burden in future wars. He learned to ignore criticism from the left and right, which became deafening during the Kosovo bombing. He learned to cope with giving orders which resulted in much loss of life. He learned an abiding hostility to the media, and in particular the BBC whose reporting of the Kosovo bombing campaign infuriated him. The Irish peace process had convinced him of his potency as a deal-maker. Desert Fox, Kosovo and Sierra Leone convinced him of his ability to lead in war, to take big gambles, and to get them right.
Dubya
Most of those around the Prime Minister, certainly including his wife, had hoped that the Democrats’ Al Gore would win the 2000 presidential election. Blair himself had been careful to open up early lines of communication to George W. Bush, sending diplomats to his ranch and passing a friendly message to the Texan governor via his father, ahead of the election campaign. His first phone conversation with the new President had been friendly enough but Blair was uneasy. With reason; he had enjoyed extraordinarily close relations with Clinton, an intellectual romance with the charismatic reshaper of Democratic politics which had survived their disagreements and the embarrassment of the Lewinsky affair. Bush had been elected to wipe away all that. Blair’s first visit to see Bush at Camp David in February 2001 has been remembered for an uneasy photo-opportunity stroll when Blair was wearing embarrassingly tight jeans, and for Bush’s awkward joke that the two of them did agree about issues – they both used the same brand of toothpaste, Colgate.
Away from the cameras, however, something more significant had happened. The two had established a relaxed private relationship which would grow into one of mutual trust, close enough to be controversial right around the world. Blair agreed to back Bush’s proposed new US missile defence system, opposed by most European leaders and most Labour Party people. He would allow the upgrading of sites in Britain necessary to make it work. Bush, in turn, grudgingly agreed to support the latest British-French defence initiative to create a rapid reaction force in case of future Kosovos. More important than this bargain though, was the chemistry. Blair’s aides were almost star-struck by the quality of Bush’s team, particularly Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld and Colin Powell. Blair found the new President clear, businesslike, brisk and easy to do business with – rather easier in fact than the loquacious, undisciplined Clinton. Even Cherie Blair, who had arrived on the plane still asking crossly why they had to be nice to ‘these people’, did her best to get on with Laura.
Those who have not met him underrate Bush’s instinctive skill with people and his ability to dominate a room. Kosovo had already taught Blair the importance of sticking with the US President if he wanted to fight ‘moral’ conflicts. Clinton himself had told Blair to make Bush ‘your best friend’. Blair decided he liked Bush (but then, did he have any choice?) and rebuked anyone from then on who described the US President as stupid or badly informed. Relations between a US President and a British Prime Minister can never be between equals, but the groundwork had been done. At the time it all seemed rather humdrum. The consequences would be awesome.
When the al Qaeda attack on New York and Washington took place, Blair was on the point of addressing the TUC in Brighton about his public sector reforms. It seemed an important speech. Campbell had been briefing journalists that he would confront the dinosaur instincts of the unions; it would be a ‘belter’, and highly dramatic. Just then the 24-hour news channels, which had become a feature in every ministerial office and wherever journalists gathered, began showing repeated film of a burning building. As speculation spread about some dreadful accident involving a light plane, the second tower was hit. Blair reacted to the news like everyone else, with disbelief. He was quickly advised that this was a terrorist attack on an unprecedented scale. Whatever his failures of analysis, Blair is very fast on his feet and, as Diana’s death had shown, quick to find words for moments of drama and grief. Inside the TUC there had been scenes of farce as journalists and others began taking phone calls and leaving the room. Its president rebuked them and called for order, only to find ripples of horror and speculation all round. When Blair arrived he said he was cancelling his speech, briefly described what had happened, expressed his great sympathy and support for America, and sped back to London by train with his advisers.
There, he found little preparation to defend the capital from a similar attack, which might be imminent. The airspace over London was closed, RAF jets were sent up on patrol, and the thinking began in the secure basement below Downing Street. Throughout the crisis Blair would work more closely with his military and intelligence advisers than he would with his ministers. He found he could not reach Bush by phone for more than twenty-four hours and there was a flurry of anxiety in London that the President had panicked or ‘gone AWOL’. But as soon as contact was made with Bush at lunchtime on 12 September Blair was able to present not only his sympathy but also his hastily gathered briefing and thoughts about Osama bin Laden. The two resumed their mutually admiring partnership, emotionally charged by what had happened. This was a time when American flags fluttered across London, the band outside Buckingham Palace played ‘The Star Spangled Banner’, a carpet of flowers appeared outside the US embassy and the Last Night of the Proms became an act of solidarity with New York. Not since 1945 had America been as popular in Britain.
By phone, Bush had promised that he was not going to act precipitously – ‘pounding sand’ – but told Blair he would make no distinction between the terrorists and those who harboured them. This implied first an ultimatum to the Taliban in Afghanistan and then a war. Blair agreed and made clear to the Commons soon afterwards that he believed the rules had changed, and that ‘rogue states’ harbouring terrorists, who might use chemical, nuclear or biological weapons, now had to choose whose side they were on. This emphatically did not mean that Iraq was to be attacked, certainly not by Number Ten’s reckoning. We now know that at Camp David, four days after the September 11 attacks, Bush was advised by Donald Rumsfeld, his Defense Secretary, that he had an opportunity to attack Iraq but decided, for then, to concentrate on Afghanistan.
Nine days after the attack, in the midst of a frenzy of diplomacy, talking to the Germans, French, Chinese and Iranians, Blair went to pay tribute to the victims of what was already being called ‘9/11’, struggling through torrential rain to the still-smoking ruins of ground zero and making an emotional cathedral oration for the British dead. In Washington afterwards, Bush told him that Iraq was for another day. Then in his speech to Congress laying out America’s new ‘war on terror’ Bush warned that he would start with al Qaeda but not end there – another reference to Iraq. He also publicly praised Blair for showing such solidarity, turning to him theatrically, and saying: ‘Thank you for coming, friend.’ Congress rose to give Blair an ovation. Blair was using all his political capital, and the accumulated knowledge of the Foreign Office to help the United States, beyond the commitment of any other country and was receiving the emotional thanks of a President who now divided the rest of the world into friends and enemies. It was a high point of British prestige in America, certainly on a par with the Reagan–Thatcher age. Whether the mutual affection was truly influential is a moot point. For now, it encouraged the Americans to involve other countries in the attack on Afghanistan.
The strikes on the Taliban were launched less than a month after September 11, beginning with British submarines’ cruise missiles and heavy bombing by US aircraft. Immensely destructive weaponry was dropped on al Qaeda training camps and Taliban defenders, including the notorious ‘daisy-cutter’ bombs. On the ground the war was conducted by the Northern Alliance and Afghan warlords, paid and supplied by the Americans and aided by Special Forces. This was a war of the twenty-first century against the nineteenth and it was over quickly, Kabul being deserted by the Taliban just five weeks after it had begun. The several thousand remaining al Qaeda Arab fighters and their Taliban hosts retreated to a cave complex near the Pakistan border, at Tora Bora, where even the Americans were unable to dislodge and capture all of them. Bin Laden, after calling for a war by the Muslim world against the West, disappeared. Throughout this, Blair had continued his diplomacy, helping win Pakistan round to the American cause and protesting to a wide range of Arab and Muslim leaders that the conflict was emphatically not aimed at Islam. In Oman, Egypt, Syria and Palestine, he and his aides assured everyone who would listen that there would be no further war against Iraq unless evidence was uncovered of a link between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. Meanwhile, Blair’s attempts to bring the other main European leaders nearer to close support for President Bush, and to kick-start a new phase of the peace process between Israel and her neighbours, were largely unsuccessful.
During these weeks of frantic activity, Blair was trying to build support for the new ‘war on terror’ but also to begin to give substance to his remarkable speech at Labour’s conference in October, when he suggested the ills of the globe could be addressed in the aftermath of September 11. It remains the single most important speech he made and the best reference point for his failures and successes as a foreign affairs Prime Minister. Though advisers contributed key phrases, the thrust of the speech was his own, the product of the Christian moralism he had developed as an Oxford student, a growing belief in his personal ability as a global leader, and a hot concentration of excited thinking, utterly unlike his vaguer grasp of domestic policy. The Twin Towers attack had simply been a turning point in world history, he told his party. After movingly describing the aftermath in New York, he tied war-making and aid-giving together as Bush certainly would not have done. Defeat the terrorists, was his message, and then deal with the refugees; take on poverty and the terrorism would drain away. From the slums of Gaza to Africa itself which he was already describing as ‘a scar on the conscience of the world’, a new world could be made:
‘From out of the shadow of this evil should emerge lasting good: destruction of the machinery of terrorism wherever it is found; hope amongst all nations of a new beginning where we seek to resolve differences in a calm and ordered way; greater understanding between nations and between faiths; and above all justice and prosperity for the poor and dispossessed.’
Some laughed in disbelief; others felt their eyes mist and their hearts beat faster. Blair was in some areas specific. He promised to make the Middle East peace process a personal priority from now on. But mostly he was visionary. The starving, the wretched, the dispossessed, the ignorant, could be saved. ‘This is a moment to seize. The kaleidoscope has been shaken. The pieces are in flux. Soon they will settle again. Before they do, let us reorder the world around us.’ It was an undeniably powerful act of rhetoric. But was Blair already reaching too far, allowing the intoxicating moral certainty of the hour to persuade him that he could play a messianic role round the world, part Gladstone, part Gandhi? Iraq was the bloody rock which would shatter these hopes, though Blair pursued his aims doggedly in Israel and Africa too.
The Joy of Trivia
Throughout the Blair years, Alastair Campbell would berate journalists for their tiny-minded obsession with trivia rather than substance. By trivia he meant a series of scandals involving ministers and money or, less often, ministers and sex. Resignations from government punctuated the Blair years. Perhaps the most single damaging thing Tony Blair ever said was this: ‘We are on the side of ordinary people against privilege. We must be purer than pure.’ There were few instances of personal corruption but in trying to raise money for politics without going cap in hand to the trade unions, the Blair circle became deeply enmeshed with business and privilege, a world where favours were exchanged without anything explicit necessarily being said. The Blairs themselves enjoyed luxurious surroundings and the company of wealthy people. And after the huge endorsement of the 1997 election, lacking any restraint from a threatening opposition party, a certain swagger was soon apparent among the inner circle. From the word go, New Labour’s high command, nose in the air, eyes aglitter with opportunity, was riding for a fall.
The Bernie Ecclestone affair of 1997, when the diminutive owner of Formula 1 racing around the world won an exemption from a tobacco advertising ban for his sport after giving a £1m donation to Labour, was the first rebuke to ‘purer than pure’. In Opposition, Blair had been driven round the Silverstone racing circuit as the crowd waved Union Jacks at him; the two men were acquaintances.13 The suggested link between a let-out clause in government policy for motor racing and Ecclestone’s personal influence on him was hotly denied by Blair in public. Behind the scenes, he and his advisers knew how it looked. There was panic. Though nobody could finally prove wrongdoing, lies were told as Number Ten tried to cover up the detail of the story. On Campbell’s advice Blair allowed himself to be interviewed by the BBC’s premier attack-dog interviewer John Humphrys, to whom he made a lame half-apology and appealed to viewers: ‘I hope that people know me well enough and realise the type of person I am to realise I would never do anything to harm the country or anything improper . . . I think that most people who have dealt with me think that I am a pretty straight sort of guy.’ Blair got away with it at the time, just about. But a dangerous impression had been left that the fresh-faced new administration which had so vigorously attacked Tory sleaze was not quite as clean-handed as it had seemed.
If Blair could still play his public reputation for niceness, the same could not in all fairness be said of Peter Mandelson. He had revelled in his reputation as ‘the sinister minister’, the all-seeing, omnipresent Machiavelli of New Britain. He could be stagey, camp, bullying, charming and for a man supposed to swirl around in the dark, was rather touchingly attracted by the spotlight. It was said that his arrival in a restaurant could turn soup to ice as he passed enemies, while he could raise an ally’s blood temperature with just the flicker of a smile. He was less efficient than overwrought enemies thought him. As a dark manipulator he had his Inspector Clouseau moments. Yet in the early days of New Labour, Mandelson and the people around him felt they were masters of the universe. One of his aides, Derek Draper, boasted darkly to someone working undercover for a newspaper about ‘the Circle’. There were, he said (no doubt tapping the side of his nose) only ‘seventeen people who count’. Perhaps the Mandelson circle was sending itself up just a little; but it was setting itself up too. Mandelson himself had a strongly developed taste for good living and had borrowed £373,000 to buy a house before the election from Geoffrey Robinson, a cheery MP and supporter of Gordon Brown’s. Robinson had a fortune secreted offshore in a Channel Island tax haven, money from a long business career and also from the bequest of a Belgian widow, happily called Madam Bourgeois. In government he became Paymaster General and in due course Mandelson became Secretary of State for Trade & Industry, the job which meant he was in overall charge of investigations into – among others – one Geoffrey Robinson, the man to whom he was indebted for his West End home.
There was an obvious conflict of interest. Mandelson tried to deflect enquiries about where he had got the money. But the Brown camp both loathed him and knew the truth. So it was bound to come out. When it did so Blair was furious, not least because his close friend Peter had said nothing to warn him; nor had any of his staff. After a tearful scene with two Downing Street press officers, and Blair off-stage looking cross, Mandelson agreed that he would have to resign. The Prime Minister, though determined to see him go, then had him and his partner to stay at Chequers and gave him advice about rebuilding his life and the art of making friends. Characteristically, Mandelson’s sad but noble letter of resignation and Blair’s memorably moving reply were both written by Alastair Campbell. Then Robinson went too. So in due course did Charlie Whelan, Brown’s press officer and the man blamed by Mandelson for revealing the story of his loan.
Had that been all it would have been bad enough. The mantra was established that nothing wrong had been done, but because of the appearance of wrongdoing, resignation was called for. But there followed a roll-call of scandals, all different in their detail, together devastating in their effect. Blair was accused of lying when he denied knowledge of any connection between a Labour donation made by Lakshmi Mittal, an Indian businessman, and his help for Mittal in trying to buy a Romanian steel company. Mandelson returned to government just ten months after his resignation and threw himself into the new job of Northern Ireland Secretary. Then came questions about whether two Indian businessmen who had helped fund the Dome had tried to obtain British citizenship via Mandelson. He was later cleared of wrongdoing but had to resign again. After Blair again showed himself entirely steely about this, Mandelson, who eventually turned up again as Britain’s Commissioner in Brussels, felt badly betrayed. (Connections between ministers and business people who ‘know the form’ and protect one another by never explicitly asking or offering, depend on a shared culture. It is interesting that so many of the rows that broke surface concerned Asian business people. They did not know the form. They could speak English, but not Unspoken English.)
For the same cabinet minister to have to resign twice within a year was unheard-of. But in the Blair years, twice happened twice. David Blunkett, the blind, tough-talking former leader of Sheffield council who had been Blair’s enforcer in education, had to resign as Home Secretary in 2004 after a row over whether he had asked his private office to fast-track a visa application for his lover Kimberley Quinn’s nanny. He had not exactly rallied colleagues to his side by confiding in a journalist his derisive views on much of the rest of the cabinet, duly published in a biography to his embarrassment and their fury. Press interest in the ‘nannygate’ story was whipped to fever pitch by Quinn’s role as well-known publisher of the Tory-supporting Spectator magazine and the revelation that she had had a child by him. Even Blunkett described it as the tale of the socialite and the socialist. There followed a bitter custody battle between Quinn, supported by her long-suffering husband, and the increasingly agitated Blunkett. It was a story from the wilder years of the eighteenth century and was used as the subject of a musical, which hurt Blunkett very much, as well as a television drama. He was brought back into government after the 2005 election as Work & Pensions Secretary but had to resign again after a row over shares in a DNA testing company he had purchased while out of the government. His taped diaries which were published in 2006 then revealed divisions at the heart of government before the Iraq War, his coruscating views on senior civil servants, and implied that Blair had considered sacking Brown if he failed to properly support him over it.
The Blunkett and Mandelson ‘doubles’ were the most celebrated resignations of the Blair years but were only part of the story. Ron Davies, the Welsh Secretary, went after ‘a moment of madness’ involving another man on Clapham Common. Estelle Morris, Education Secretary, went after a ‘moment of sanity’ – thoroughly honorably, she decided she was not up to the job. There were the Iraq resignations, first of Robin Cook, then Clare Short, the loss of a badly bruised Lord Irvine of Lairg as Lord Chancellor after Blair overruled him on constitutional reform, and the departure of Alan Milburn, Health Secretary, to spend more time with his family. Stephen Byers, a former hard leftist from the north-east of England, had been one of Blair’s most trusted and loyal ministers. He was badly damaged when his special adviser Jo Moore callously emailed colleagues telling them 9/11 was a good day ‘to bury bad news’, not the most sensitive response to the murder of thousands. Then as Transport Secretary Byers ignited a huge row when he forced Railtrack into liquidation and took control of it back, without paying the compensation to its shareholders that straightforward nationalization would have entitled them to. They felt robbed and cheated, though Labour MPs were delighted. Byers was attacked for lying to Parliament about this, and about what he said to a meeting of survivors of the horrific Paddington train disaster about the railway’s future. He resigned in May 2002.
The dirty tide washed through Number Ten too. Blair and his wife Cherie had been the butt of many attacks for the gusto with which they enjoyed free holidays at the expense of rich friends – Geoffrey Robinson, an Italian prince, Cliff Richard, a Bee Gee, and (briefly) Silvio Berlusconi, the scandal-mired Prime Minister of Italy. Cherie had been criticized frequently for free-loading more generally; though a high-paid lawyer she was unreasonably frightened of not having enough money, which presumably dated from her insecure childhood. The Blairs were less wealthy than the Thatchers (though not, in office, the Majors or the Wilsons or the Callaghans) and had failed to capitalize on the house-price boom when they sold their private north London home. Yet they and their children were looked after in two homes paid for by the State and he was well paid by the standards of ordinary Britain. Not rich only by the standards of millennial London high society, the family was comfortable. And as soon as Blair resigned he knew that through book deals, speaking fees and corporate work he could become rich beyond the dreams of avarice. None of this seemed to cut much ice.
Carole Caplin, a health and beauty trainer, had known Cherie Blair from the nineties but became more influential with her after Labour won power. Disliked by Number Ten officials who regarded her as manipulative, and her New Age views as barmy, Caplin nevertheless helped Mrs Blair develop a style and self-confidence she felt she had not had before. Particularly after her pregnancy with Leo, and then a later miscarriage, a close feminine bond was established. With Blair constantly distracted by the ‘war on terror’ and domestic politics, Cherie took it more upon herself to organize family plans, including financial plans. Through Caplin, she arranged to buy two flats in Bristol where her son Euan was at university, one for him and one as an investment. The deal was negotiated by Caplin’s lover, a pantomime Australian rogue and fraudster called Peter Foster. When the story broke, Cherie Blair failed to tell Campbell the full truth. Nor did she tell Fiona Miller, Campbell’s partner, who had been Cherie’s spokeswoman and who loathed Caplin. Nor, it seems, did her husband know the complete story either. As a result, Number Ten misled the press when stories in the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday were put to them and were later forced to apologize. Stormy scenes erupted inside Downing Street when the link from Blair to a conman, via Cherie and Caplin, was finally established. It was a very bleak moment for the couple and media anger was only partially assuaged when at Campbell’s insistence Cherie made a live televised apology, blaming her busy life and maternal pressure for what had happened. Some applauded her for a courageous performance and a life of difficult juggling. Others were unconvinced.
Britain had not become a corrupt country. But a sense of let-down, betrayal or perhaps just weary disappointment was felt by millions who had hoped for better. Why had Blair and his associates failed to show themselves purer than pure? First, by deciding to live with a system of business donations to help fund politics, they opened themselves to influence-peddling. Blair always replied that he had set up rules for the disclosure of party donations and the tightest ever code for ministerial behaviour. This was true. Yet there always seemed to be another loophole and another set of questions. By the end of his time in office his fundraiser Lord Levy had been arrested in a loans-for-peerages investigation and he was facing police questioning himself.
Second, the growth of a super-rich class of business people in London in the two decades after the Big Bang gave some politicians a wholly unrealistic measurement of how ‘people like us’ live. Many did not fall for it. Brown did not. Most ministers went home to their constituencies and found themselves walking again on solid ground. But the temptation to think, ‘I run the country, or part of the country, don’t I deserve better?’ was always present. Britain seemed to have become a society which measured success merely by money, rather than by public esteem. Finally, the way politicians were really monitored had changed. It was not the smooth expressions of warning from civil servants they had to worry about, or even tough questions from fellow MPs. A self-appointed, lively, impertinent and at times savage opposition did the job instead, a class of people courted by ministers and then despised by them: the media. After brilliantly using journalism to help discredit the Conservatives, Blair and his colleagues were themselves about to feel the rough edge of a rough trade.
Into the Furnace
Blair’s biographer Anthony Seldon rightly emphasizes how worried Blair was about Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction long before Bush became President, or decided to launch his war. This was not simply something Blair worried about privately. He spoke of it again and again. He was particularly worried about a nuclear-enhanced ‘dirty bomb’ being used by Iraqi-supported terrorists. By now his earlier experiences of Saddam, and Milosevic, and to a lesser extent Mullah Omar of the Taliban, as well as his personal contact with leaders he liked, such as Bush and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, meant that for Blair foreign affairs was personal. By focusing so fully on Saddam as a man of evil, and the moral case for dealing with him, he did not focus enough on the complexities of Iraq, the country.
The hardening of views inside the White House which finally led to the decision to invade Iraq are not part of this story. In Bush’s State of the Union speech for 2002 he had listed Iraq, Iran and North Korea as an ‘axis of evil’, sending shivers across diplomatic Europe. Attempts by US intelligence to prove a link between the secularist Saddam and the fundamentalist al Qaeda failed but this hardly halted the process of lining up Iraq as next for the Bush treatment. Blair’s promises to Arab leaders about proof had no purchase in Washington. There were philosophical links between Blair’s Gladstonian speech to the Labour Party and the neo-conservatives around Bush, many of whom believed that by toppling Saddam they would bring an age of democracy and prosperity to the Middle East, solving the Palestinian problem along the way. But the dominant group around Bush were not keen on grand visions. They believed first and second in toppling Saddam. They did not believe in waiting for, or depending upon, other countries, even Britain. After 9/11 this was America’s war. They did not believe in UN inspectors or promises by Baghdad. Above all the hopes of some of the more intellectual US officials and of Britain’s Foreign Office for a detailed plan for the reconstruction of post-war Iraq would be dashed by the hawks, Cheney and Rumsfeld at their head. ‘Regime change’ meant regime change. It did not mean promises to bring clean water and food to foreigners by democratic missionaries.
From the time when he visited Bush at his dusty Texan ranch at Crawford, near Waco, in April 2002, Blair knew he intended to invade Iraq. That did not end the matter, since Blair spent much of the rest of the year arguing that Bush should go via the United Nations. Without this, under British interpretations of international law, the invasion would be illegal. The UN would also give a last chance for Saddam to disarm peacefully. Keeping the international community together would make it easier to rebuild Iraq afterwards, in the spirit of Blair’s conference speech. He also wanted Bush to commit to spending plenty of time on the Middle East peace process. On 7 September 2002 at Camp David Blair finally got Bush’s promise to go via the UN, and Bush got Blair’s promise that Britain would fight alongside America in Iraq if that route failed. Bush praised Blair for having ‘cojones’ – Spanish for balls. When Bush publicly confirmed his willingness to try for a UN resolution, ad-libbing in a speech to the General Assembly a few days later, Blair was delighted. But he was also locked in. He had spent his capital with Bush, and won a battle with the Washington hawks about the United Nations. But he had not persuaded anyone to take the post-war situation seriously. At the time it looked like a good deal.
It would turn out to be a rotten deal, not least because to Blair’s chagrin and amazement, the United States and Britain were eventually unable to get the extra UN resolution they wanted. In the meantime the U.N. route helped keep the number of Labour’s Commons rebels to fifty-six. That was still a lot. In Whitehall the Foreign Office and many ministers were growing worried about where Blair was leading them. Outside it, the anti-war movement was mobilizing. To try to win public opinion round Blair turned to a device he had used twice before, ahead of Desert Fox and after 9/11, the publication of a dossier of facts proving the case for war. This one, though, was different. The American case against Saddam was that he was a bad, dangerous guy who in the context of the new war on terror had to be taken out. The UN case was that he was failing to cooperate fully with weapons inspectors, leading to a suspicion that he was still hiding stocks of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), particularly chemical and biological weapons, though to be fair some had been destroyed. To get the resolution, it was vital to concentrate on the WMD, about which as we have seen Blair had long been worried. The dossier, therefore, had to show they existed. To win round British opinion, it would have to show they were threatening to Britain too. Thus Blair laid the central case for war not on the moral cause for removing a tyrant but on narrow and unproven assertions about the condition of the tyrant’s arsenal.
Blair’s team had already enjoyed some success with journalists in feeding them bloodcurdling lines about the damage Saddam might wreak. There is no doubt that senior intelligence and defence people believed he had WMD but was cleverly hiding them, and that he was trying to get nuclear weapons. The trouble was that Saddam’s regime of terror was so effective that there were very few sources of information from inside Iraq. Those Britain’s MI6 dealt with were untrustworthy – they were after all dissidents with a strong reason to bring forward the war. Sir Richard Dearlove, the MI6 director general, brought Blair information from an Iraqi source who said he knew where chemical agent was being made – though the source was ‘untried and untested’. Satellite intelligence, though used by Colin Powell at the UN, was unsatisfactorily unclear. Thus the dossier had to produce information from a vague and difficult source which was nevertheless hard-edged enough, at least at first glance, to fulfil a highly political role. It was drawn from a variety of sources, channelled through the Joint Intelligence Committee, which reported to the Prime Minister. Different texts were batted to and fro through Downing Street, as officials questioned parts of it, and wondered whether it was sufficiently convincing. Suspicions were raised also following the publication of a second dossier in February 2003 about the background to Iraq’s concealment programme, which was later dubbed ‘the dodgy dossier’ and proved to have been lifted without attribution from a PhD thesis found on the Internet.
Whatever the final truth about the shaping of the September 2002 dossier, something strange had happened. Suspicions had been hardened, assertions sharpened, doubts trimmed out and belief converted into proof. Nobody knew for sure what Saddam had (that was the point of the UN inspection process) but when it was published the dossier gave the impression that he had multiple weapons of mass destruction which could be ready for use in forty-five minutes and threatened, among other places, British bases in Cyprus. The forty-five-minute claim turned out to refer to some short-range battlefield chemical weapons which could not reach other countries, though maps printed in the dossier confused readers about it. And when Iraq was finally invaded, and exhaustive searches conducted everywhere, the ‘weapons’ never turned up. For years Blair insisted hotly that they would. He would be publicly mocked by President Putin, MPs and the world’s media for this. He kept telling his critics they would be proved wrong. So far they have not been.
A tense struggle at the United Nations, with British diplomats in the lead, produced Resolution 1441, declaring that Saddam was in ‘material breach’ of his obligation to show he had no banned weaponry, and giving him a last opportunity to comply or face ‘serious consequences’. The Iraqi leader fudged and dodged, letting inspectors back in but without offering a full declaration of his weapons. For the Americans, this was the trigger for war. For other countries, notably France, it merely meant that there should be another discussion at the Security Council about what to do. In February 2003, as British and US forces waited to attack Iraq from the south, there was a vast ‘Stop the War’ march through London. It was the biggest ever demonstration in the capital, a carnival of protest that put even the Suez protests in its shade. Blair, Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary who had swallowed private doubts and resolved to loyally support his boss, with their diplomatic team were fighting desperately to get a second UN resolution agreed which would give full legal cover for the attack on Iraq. This was something Blair had told Bush repeatedly that he needed to be sure of holding his party together (and by implication, staying in power). But President Chirac of France, angry at the behaviour of Washington’s hawks and worried about the impact of the war on the Islamic world generally, suggested that France would never accept a second resolution, and it collapsed. Despite everything the Prime Minister was left without the real UN cover he always thought he needed. For Blair and Straw it was a low moment.
For others, it was the last straw. Robin Cook, who as the previous Foreign Secretary had been deeply involved in Desert Fox and Kosovo, had warned the cabinet that without a second resolution he could not support this third war. He duly resigned. For the time being Clare Short, another cabinet dissenter who had publicly described Blair’s behaviour as ‘reckless’, stayed on. In the Commons Cook, its former leader, then gave one of the most icily eloquent speeches heard in the chamber in modern times. He applauded Blair and Straw for trying so hard for the second resolution, which only showed how important it had been. Many countries, not just France, had wanted more inspections before any fighting: ‘The reality is that Britain is being asked to embark on a war without agreement in any of the international bodies of which we are a leading partner – not Nato, not the European Union and, now, not the Security Council.’ The US was a superpower and could afford to go it alone, but Britain could not. Iraq probably had no weapons of mass destruction ‘in the ordinarily understood sense’ but was in fact militarily very weak: ‘Ironically, it is only because Iraq’s military forces are so weak that we can even contemplate its invasion. We cannot base our military strategy on the assumption that Saddam is weak and at the same time justify pre-emptive action on the claim that he is a threat.’ The British people, said Cook, possessed collective wisdom: ‘On Iraq, I believe that the prevailing mood of the British people is sound. They do not doubt that Saddam is a brutal dictator, but they are not persuaded that he is a clear and present danger to Britain.’ Almost uniquely, against its hallowed traditions, the Commons loudly clapped Cook as he sat down.
Blair felt he had to press ahead. Saddam had proved himself yet again untrustworthy and a liar. He had legal cover from his attorney general for the war, though it was hardly resounding, and disputed by other government lawyers, one of whom resigned. He had given his word to President Bush, who offered Blair the chance to pull out and send British troops in after the invasion, as peacekeepers. Blair turned the offer down as dishonourable and bad for army morale. He had staked his reputation on the war and felt that if he could not carry his party, he was finished as a leader. Privately, arrangements for his resignation were set in hand. In the Commons a ferocious political and media struggle began to win round doubters, emphasizing Saddam’s brutality and abuse of human rights, rather than his weaponry. A backbencher and sometime left-wing firebrand, Ann Clwyd, made a particularly influential speech about Saddam’s treatment of the Kurds and his use of torture. Eventually, after days of drama and one of his best parliamentary speeches ever, Blair won a majority of Labour MPs, though 139 rebelled. The overall Commons victory was never in doubt because of Conservative support, but Blair had been close to failing his private yardstick of being backed by at least half his MPs. With that overcome, the final barrier to war was lifted.
The war began on 20 March 2003 with a thunderous air attack on Baghdad, described with brutal clarity in Washington as ‘shock and awe’. An early attempt by Saddam’s information minister to assassinate Saddam failed. For the first weeks, calm declarations of great victories being won out in the desert by the Iraqi armed forces were broadcast almost nightly. In fact, sandstorms delayed the US advance. In Baghdad a coalition bomb killed fifty-seven people in a market-place and in Britain anger about the war grew. Yet while not quite the walkover the Pentagon had hoped, the invasion was over very quickly. By 7 April British forces had taken Basra, having surrounded it long before, and two days later the Americans were in Baghdad, first seizing the international airport and then Saddam’s famous palaces. Soon his statues were being jubilantly torn down. Before the invasion, there had been speculation about Baghdad fighting to the last, surrounded by trenches of burning oil, tank regiments and possibly artillery with chemical shells – an Arab Götterdämmerung on the banks of the Tigris. By those standards, the war had been a great, one-sided military success. The war beyond the war would be something else entirely.
In the eighties and early nineties, Labour had been savaged by much of the press. Neil Kinnock had a terrible time. When Blair became leader the people immediately around Kinnock at the time, Mandelson and Campbell, remembered it well. Campbell had worked for the Daily Mirror in the dirtiest, most cynical end of the newspaper market and came away thinking that most journalists were idle liars, as well as biased against Labour. He was tribal and assumed the rest of the world was too. Mandelson, with a background in television, was a master of image, and later of the killer briefing. So it is hardly surprising that New Labour became the most media-obsessed political party in British history. We have seen how Blair opened out to Labour’s traditional enemies in the press after becoming leader, and how he exploited ‘sleaze’ to destroy John Major’s reputation. On the way to winning power, New Labour turned itself into a kind of perpetual media news-desk, with a plan for what every political headline should say every day, an endless ‘grid’ of announcements, images, soundbites and rebuttals, constantly pressing down on journalists, their editors and owners, fighting for every adjective and exclamation mark.
It is now incontestable that the same way of thinking was brought into power and did terrible damage to the government’s reputation and that of politics generally. Bizarrely, it was assumed that rival newspaper groups with different views about say, law and order, could be kept friendly by Blair telling them what they wanted to hear – even though they would later confer. The attempted bullying of journalists, which grew much worse when some of the scandals described above began to break, was met with increasing resistance. Number Ten’s news machine began to be widely disbelieved. The word ‘spin’ was attached to almost everything it said. Diaries published by one of the former Downing Street spin-doctors, Lance Price, show how justified this suspicion was. On the first Mandelson resignation, he notes: ‘We said (quite falsely) that Peter had rung TB last night and said he wanted to resign.’ Of a Sunday newspaper interview which Blair had given calling for a new ‘moral purpose’, Price says: ‘It was totally vacuous and was made up just to give us a good story after two twelve-year-old girls were found to have got themselves pregnant. But it worked . . .’14
There are many other examples. Some, collected by the journalist Peter Oborne, include the smearing of Chris Patten, the former Tory chairman and Hong Kong governor for leaking intelligence reports, a false trail to deflect attention from the breakup of Robin Cook’s marriage; the assertion by Peter Mandelson that the Dome would feature an exciting new game called ‘surf-ball’ (which never existed); and Blair’s own deceptions, such as over Mandelson’s own plans to become an MP.15 While there are exceptional circumstances in which political leaders have to deceive, such as when soldiers’ lives would be at risk from disclosure, or when a currency was about to be devalued, journalists came to believe the currency of truth was now devalued. Anything asserted by Number Ten, and later Blair himself, was picked over in minute semantic detail. Worryingly often, the picking-over turned out to be justified. The ‘non-denial denial’ became an essential phrase in reporting New Labour. At election time statistics were twisted even beyond the normal elastic rules of political debate. There was a spiral downwards. Journalists grew more aggressive in their assertions and began consigning the (disbelieved) official denials to the final paragraph of their stories. Some ministers drew the conclusion that the press was so hostile it was legitimate to use any trick or form of words to mislead them. Others complained that every time they were frank, their words were twisted and used against them: why bother? Before long a government which had arrived in office supported by almost all the national papers, was being attacked daily by almost all of them. And the papers themselves were selling fewer copies. Ultimately, cynicism is boring.
The most infamous confrontation between New Labour and the media, however, was not with a newspaper but with a broadcaster. One of the domestic consequences of the Iraq war was the worst falling out between the BBC and the government since the Suez crisis. At issue was whether or not officials in Number Ten had ‘sexed up’ that dossier about Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction. As previously described, the dossier blended two cultures, the cautious, secretive, nuanced culture of intelligence gathering for internal government purposes, and the spin-doctors’ culture of opinion-forming, in this case to win more of the public over to back a coming war. But the cultures did not blend, they curdled. At seven minutes after six one morning at the end of May 2003, Radio Four’s Today programme broadcast an interview between its presenter John Humphrys and its defence correspondent, a dishevelled digger of a journalist called Andrew Gilligan. He alleged that Downing Street had ‘sexed up’ the dossier beyond what intelligence sources thought was reasonable, particularly in saying that weapons of mass destruction could be ready for use within forty-five minutes. Campbell quickly and unequivocally denied the truth of Gilligan’s assertion and demanded an apology. Gilligan went further, in an article for a newspaper in which he named Campbell. As Iraq burned, Number Ten and the BBC began a war of their own.
In general battles between journalists and politicians do not spill real blood. There is bitterness. There may be resignations. But when the smoke clears, everyone gets up again and goes back to work. When Campbell widened his criticism of the BBC to attack it for having an anti-war agenda, he had no idea quite what he was setting off. Yet there was a certain recklessness in his mood. He confided to his diary that he wanted to ‘fuck Gilligan’ and wanted ‘a clear win’ against the corporation. On the BBC side, it would turn out that Gilligan had been loose with his words, claiming rather more than he knew for sure, so opening a flank to Campbell; nor was Gilligan frank with his colleagues. The BBC’s Director General, Greg Dyke, who had been hounded in the press as a Blair crony, was ferociously robust in defending the corporation against Campbell and was strongly supported by his Chairman, Gavyn Davies, whose wife was Gordon Brown’s senior aide. He too was determined to demonstrate his independence.
Neither side gave way until eventually it was revealed that a government scientist with a high reputation as an arms inspector, Dr David Kelly, was probably the source of Gilligan’s information. Downing Street did not name him but allowed journalists to keep throwing names at them until they confirmed who he was; a bizarre game. Because he was not involved directly in the joint intelligence committee or its work, ‘outing’ Kelly as the secret mole would, in the government’s eyes, discredit the BBC story. Suddenly thrown into the cauldron of a media row, Kelly himself was evasive when aggressively questioned by a committee of MPs. Visibly nervous, he denied that he could have been Gilligan’s informant. Yet he was. A fastidious, serious-minded man who had supported the toppling of Saddam and had served his country honourably as a weapons inspector, Kelly seems to have cracked under the strain. On a quiet July morning in 2003 he walked five miles to the edge of a wood near his Oxfordshire home where he took painkillers, opened up a pen-knife, and killed himself. This media battle had drawn blood in the most awful way. Blair, arriving in Tokyo after triumphantly addressing both houses of Congress about the fall of Saddam, was asked: ‘Prime Minister, do you have blood on your hands?’ He looked as if he was about to be sick.
Back home, he ordered an inquiry under a judge, Lord Hutton, which engaged the minute attention of the world of politics through the autumn of 2003. Much was revealed about Blair’s informal, sloppily recorded and cliquish style of governing, and the involvement of his political staff in discussion which led to the final dossier. But with the head of the JIC and other officials insisting they had not been leant on, or obliged to say anything they did not believe, and a very strong public performance by Blair, Lord Hutton concluded Gilligan’s assertion that the government knew its forty-five-minute claim was wrong, was unfounded. The intelligence committee might have ‘subconsciously’ been persuaded to strengthen its language because they knew what the Prime Minister wished the effect of the dossier to be; but it was consistent with the intelligence at the time. Hutton decided that Kelly had probably killed himself because of a loss of self-esteem and the threat to his reputation, but that nobody else was to blame. (There was a strongly held private belief among some doctors and journalists that Kelly had been murdered but so far, not a shred of hard evidence has come to light.) Hutton attacked the BBC’s editorial controls. His findings had been leaked a day early to Rupert Murdoch’s Sun newspaper, which robustly set the political mood: victory for Blair, humiliation for the BBC. With Blair defiant and claiming complete vindication in the Commons both Dyke and Davies resigned almost immediately. Distraught employees walked out from their offices to cheer them as they left. The corporation had suffered its worst day ever. Yet the stakes were high on both sides. Had Hutton found against the Prime Minister, it would have been Blair being applauded by his tearful staff as he walked into retirement.
Feeling vindicated and as aggressive as ever about the quality of journalism, Campbell then left Downing Street. Blair had concluded that the age of spin had done them all far more harm than good. It was time, despite his personal debt to Campbell, for a new broom. A widely trusted and traditionalist press officer who had worked for Roy Hattersley, called David Hill, was appointed. Slowly, painfully, both the BBC and Number Ten moved on – although there was plenty of trouble still ahead. By his last couple of years in office, Blair had come to realize that the frantic headline-chasing and rebuttal of the early years had merely helped stoke a mood of cynicism in the press. The habits of truth-shaving, subtle deception and syntactical evasion, which had once seemed magnificently clever, had done more harm than any brief newspaper victories they might have achieved. After Iraq, one of the most common jibes made about him was simply ‘Bliar’. For a Prime Minister who in his early days had been able to say that most people thought him ‘a pretty straight kind of guy’, it was a terrible come-down.
Always with us?
Through the New Labour years, with low inflation and steady growth, most of the country grew richer. Growth since 1997, at 2.8% a year, was above the post-war average, Britain’s gross domestic product per head was above that of France and Germany, and she had the second-lowest jobless figures in the EU. The number of people in work increased by 2.4 million. Incomes grew, in real terms, by about a fifth. Pensions were in trouble but house price inflation soared, so that home-owners found their properties more than doubling in value and came to think themselves prosperous indeed. One study showed that Britain had a higher proportion of dollar millionaires than any other country. Family budgets are by definition tricky things to generalize about but by 2006 analysts were assessing the disposable wealth of the British, defined by the consultants KDP as ‘the money people can really put their hands on if necessary’ at £40,000 per household. The wealth was not evenly spread geographically, averaging £68,000 in the south-east of England and a little over £30,000 in Wales and north-east England. But even in historically poorer parts of the UK house prices had risen fast, so much so that government plans to bulldoze worthless northern terraces had to be abandoned when they started to become worth quite a lot. Cheap mortgages, easy borrowing and high property prices meant that millions of people felt far better off, despite the overall rise in the tax burden. Cheap air travel, which had first arrived in the seventies with Freddie Laker, gave the British opportunities for easy travel both to their traditional sun-kissed resorts and to every part of the European continent. A British expatriate house-price boom rippled slowly across the French countryside and roared through southern Spain. People began to commute weekly to their jobs in London or Manchester from villas by the Mediterranean. Small regional airports grew, then boomed.
Clever, constantly evolving consumer electronics and then cheap clothing from the Far East kept the shops thronged. The internet, advancing from colleges and geeks to the show-off upper middle classes, then to children’s bedrooms everywhere, introduced new forms of shopping. It first began to attract popular interest in the mid-nineties: Britain’s first internet café and internet magazine, reviewing a few hundred early websites, were both launched in 1994. The following year saw the beginning of internet shopping as a major pastime, with both eBay and Amazon arriving, though for tiny numbers of people at first. It was a time of immense optimism, despite warnings that the whole digital world would collapse because of the ‘millennium bug’ – the alleged inability of computers to deal with the last two digits in ‘2000’, which was taken very seriously at the time.
In fact, the bubble was burst by its own excessive expansion, like any bubble, and after a pause and a lot of ruined dreams, the ‘new economy’ roared on again. By 2000, according to the Office of National Statistics, around 40 per cent of Britons had accessed the internet at some time. Cyber frenzy swept the country, and business; three years later, nearly half of British homes were connected. By 2004 the spread of broadband had brought a new mass market in downloading music and video online. By 2006, three-quarters of British children had internet access at home. Simultaneously, new money arrived. The rich of America, Europe and Russia began buying up parts of London, and then other attractive parts of the country, including Edinburgh, the Scottish Highlands, Yorkshire and Cornwall. For all the problems and disappointments, and the longer-term problems with their financing, new schools and public buildings sprang up – new museums, galleries, vast shopping complexes, corporate headquarters, now biomorphic, not straight, full of lightness, airy atriums, thin skins of glass and steel. This was show-off architecture for a show-off material culture and not always dignified, but these buildings were better-looking and more imaginative than their predecessors had been in the dreary age of concrete.
At a more humdrum level, ‘executive housing’, with pebbled driveways, brick facing and dormer windows, was growing across farmland and by rivers with no thought of flood-plain constraints. Parts of the country far from London, such as the English south-west and Yorkshire, enjoyed a ripple of wealth that pushed their house prices to unheard-of levels. From Leith to Gateshead, Belfast to Cardiff Bay, once-derelict shorefront areas were transformed. Supermarkets, exercising huge market power, brought cheap meat and factory-made meals into almost everyone’s budgets. The new global air freight market, and refrigerated lorries moving freely across a Europe shorn of internal barriers, carried out-of-season fruit and vegetables, fish from the Pacific, exotic foods of all kinds, to superstores everywhere. Hardly anyone was out of reach of a Tesco, a Morrison’s, Sainsbury’s or Asda. By the mid-2000s, the four supermarket giants owned more than 1,500 superstores. This provoked a new political row about their commercial influence but it also spread consumption of goods that had once been luxuries. Under Thatcher, millions had begun drinking wine. Under Blair they began drinking drinkable wine. Their children had to borrow to study but were more likely to go to college or university and to travel the world on a ‘gap year’, a holiday from ordinariness which had once meant working, occasionally abroad, but which by now might mean air-hopping across South America or to the beaches of Thailand. Materially, for the majority of people, this was a golden age, which perhaps explains why the real anger about earlier pensions decisions and stealth taxes failed to translate into anti-Labour voting in successive general elections.
Not everyone, of course, was invited to the party. New Labour’s general pitch was to the well-doing middle but Gordon Brown, from the first, made much of its anti-poverty agenda. Labour in particular emphasized child poverty because, since the launch of the Child Poverty Action Group, it had become a particularly emotive problem. Labour policies took a million children out of relative poverty between 1997 and 2004, though the numbers rose again later. Brown’s emphasis was also on the working poor, and the virtue of work. So his major innovations were the national minimum wage, the ‘New Deal’ for the young unemployed, and the working families’ tax credit, as well as tax credits aimed at children. There was also a minimum income guarantee, and later a pension credit, for worse-off pensioners.
The minimum wage was first set at £3.60 an hour and rising year by year. (It stood at £5.35 an hour in 2006.) Because the figures were low the minimum wage did not destroy the 2 million jobs, or produce the higher inflation, which Conservatives and others claimed it would. Employment grew and inflation stayed low. It even appeared to have cut red tape, since the old Wages Councils had to inspect businesses more frequently than the new Inland Revenue minimum wage inspections. By the middle 2000s, the minimum wage covered 2 million people, the majority of them women. And because it was uprated slightly faster than inflation, the wages of the poor rose faster. The situation may change, particularly if unemployment worsens, but it appeared to have been an almost unqualified success, enough for the Conservative Party, which had so strongly opposed it, to embrace it under Michael Howard before the 2005 election.
The New Deal was funded by a windfall tax on privatized utility companies. By 2000, Blair said it had helped a quarter of a million young people back to work and it was being claimed as a major factor in lower unemployment as late as 2005. It was clearly less of a factor than the huge increase in the size of the state: in the Blair years, state employment grew by 700,000, funded by record amounts taken in tax. And the cost of goading, coaxing and educating people into jobs was very high. The National Audit Office, looking back at its effect in the first Parliament, reckoned the number of under 25-year-olds helped into real jobs could be as low as 25,000, at a cost per person of £8,000. All those new jobs which had to be created to help people into jobs came at a price. A second initiative was targeted at the youngest of all, the babies and young children of the most deprived families. Sure Start was meant to bring mothers together in family centres across Britain – 3,500 were planned for 2010, ten years after the scheme was launched – and help them to be more effective parents. A scheme in the United States had shown great success and Sure Start was another initiative backed in its essence by the Conservatives, though Blair himself appeared to be having second thoughts, as the most deprived families declined to turn up. He believed in sticks as well as carrots.
Abroad, the government’s anti-poverty agenda concentrated on Africa. In 2004 Blair initiated the Commission for Africa which worked to persuade the world’s richest countries to back a wide plan for economic, political and social reform, supported by debt relief. By then it was estimated more than 50,000 people were dying every day from famine or bad water in Africa and the continent’s AIDS epidemic was wiping out much of a generation. In 2005 Brown, struggling to persuade the United States to back his plans for an international finance facility – a global piggy bank – agreed to raise Britain’s aid contribution to 0.7 per cent of GDP. Washington declined to follow suit. Enormous strength was added to the campaign by Make Poverty History, one of the two biggest examples of street politics in the Blair age. Here was extra-parliamentary action which showed people’s readiness to engage with politics-as-unusual, a residual idealism. There is a tradition in Britain of moral protest and practical action for famine abroad. Oxfam had started as the Oxford Committee for Famine Relief in 1942, campaigning to persuade the wartime government to lift its blockade on German-occupied Greece, where the Nazis were allowing people to starve as they diverted food to their army in North Africa. (Churchill took the view that the starvation was the fault of the occupying power and the blockade should stay – the argument was strikingly similar to those made about sanctions imposed on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in the Major and Blair years.) What made the later movement different was the fusion of celebrity, music and television to raise unheard-of sums.
It began with the Irish rock star Bob Geldof, and Midge Ure of the band Ultravox, who were shocked by news coverage of the 1984 Ethiopian famine by the BBC’s Michael Buerk. They formed a thirty-strong ‘supergroup’ to make a fundraising Christmas single, ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’ It raised £65 m and Geldof managed to persuade Margaret Thatcher to waive VAT for the famine victims. This success was followed by Live Aid, a linked global concert held in London and Philadephia in 1985. It was watched by an estimated 1.5 billion people in 160 countries, making it by far the biggest world television event to that point. Geldof continued to campaign on Africa, joining the Commission for Africa. Having sworn he would never try to repeat Live Aid, Geldof did so in 2005 with a host of rock stars, including U2 and the (briefly) reformed Pink Floyd, breaking more records for global audience numbers. This time, though, the focus was on lobbying the richest countries, meeting as the G8 under British chairmanship at Gleneagles in Scotland.
On 2 July 2005, some 225,000 people marched in Edinburgh calling for debt cancellation to help Africa’s poorest countries. A week later a £28.8 bn aid deal and a debt cancellation programme for eighteen countries, plus new guarantees to fund anti-HIV drugs, were indeed agreed at Gleneagles. Because parts of the rich world remained hostile to opening up trade to Africa, essential to helping the continent recover, some campaigners were disappointed. And the announcement was greeted with cynicism by the anti-globalization movement which was also a feature of these years. Geldof said, however, that ‘never before have so many people forced a change of policy onto a global agenda’ and his fellow campaigner, Bono of U2, claimed the deal would save the lives of 600,000 Africans, mostly children. The legacy of Live8 and the Commission for Africa will continue to be debated for years but it was a unique alliance between civil organizations, churches, rock musicians, actors, writers – and politicians. Both Blair and Gordon Brown were consciously trying to use the hundreds of thousands of marchers and the glamour of the rock stars to nudge other world leaders towards agreement, and they were at least partially successful. It showed what their partnership could do.
Poverty is hard to define, easy to smell. In a country like Britain, it is mostly relative. Though there are a few thousand people living rough or who genuinely do not have enough to keep them decently alive, and many more pensioners frightened of how they will pay for heating, the greater number of poor are those left behind the general material improvement in life. This is measured by income compared to the average and by this yardstick in 1997 there were three to four million children living in households of relative poverty, triple the number in 1979. This does not mean they were physically worse off than the children of the late seventies, since the country generally became much richer. But human happiness relates to how we see ourselves relative to those around us, so it was certainly real. Under their new leader David Cameron, the Conservatives declared that they too believed in the concept of relative poverty, as described by a left-of-centre commentator, Polly Toynbee. And a world of work remained below the minimum wage, in private homes, where migrant servants were exploited, and in other crannies. Some 336,000 jobs remained on ‘poverty pay’ rates.16
Nevertheless the City firm UBS believes redistribution of wealth – a phrase New Labour did not like to use in case it frightened middle-class voters – had been stronger in Britain than other major industrialized countries. Despite the growth of the super-rich, overall equality slightly increased in the Blair years. One factor was the return to means-testing of benefits, particularly for pensioners and through the working families’ tax credit (which in 2003 was divided into a child tax credit and a working tax credit). This was a personal U-turn by Brown who in Opposition had opposed means-testing. As Chancellor he concluded that if he was to direct scarce money at the people in real poverty he had little choice. More and more pensioners were means-tested, eventually some 66 per cent of them, provoking a nationwide revolt and persuading the government to back down and promise an eventual return to a link between state pension rates and average earnings. The other drawback of means-testing was that a huge bureaucracy then had to track people’s earnings and try to establish just what they should get. Billions were overpaid. As people getting tax credits rather than old-style benefits, did better, and earned a little more, they found themselves facing demands to hand back money they had already spent. Many thousands of civil servants were hurriedly sent to try to deal with a tidal wave of complaint, and the system became extremely expensive to administer. It was also hugely vulnerable to fraud, with gangs taking over people’s identities (13,000 civil servants alone) and exploiting ‘a culture of overpayment’.
In the New Labour years, as under John Major, a sickly tide of euphemism rose ever higher, depositing its oily linguistic scurf on every available surface. Passengers became cubecame refuse operatives,stomers; indeed everybody became customers. Bin-men people with mental disabilities became differently-abled. And the poor became the socially excluded. There were controversial drives to oblige more disabled (and sometimes shirking) people back into work. The ‘socially excluded’ were confronted by a wide range of initiatives designed to make them, in essence, more middle class. In theory, Labour was non-judgemental or liberal about behaviour. In practice, responding to the darkest areas of deprivation, an almost Victorian moralism began to reassert itself. Advice on diet, weight-loss and alcohol consumption followed earlier government campaigns on AIDS and drugs. Parenting classes were much trumpeted. And for the minority who made life hellish for their neighbours on housing estates or in the streets, Labour introduced a word which became one of its particular gifts to the language of the age, as essential as dotcom or texting, the Asbo.
The Anti-Social Behaviour Order, first introduced in 1998, was an updated system of injunctions for what earlier generations called hooligans. These had to be applied for by the police or local council and granted by magistrates. To break the curfew or restriction, which could be highly specific, became a criminal offence. Asbos could be given for swearing at people, harassing passers-by, vandalism, making too much noise, graffiti, organizing raves, flyposting, taking drugs or sniffing glue, joyriding, either offering yourself as a prostitute or kerb-crawling in your car to find a prostitute, hitting people, drinking in designated public places . . . almost anything in fact that was annoying or frightening. More bizarre-sounding ones included giving an Asbo to an entire part of Skegness to allow police arrests of troublemakers there; a 13-year-old girl being banned from using the word ‘grass’ and an 87-year-old man being ordered not to make ‘sarcastic remarks’ to neighbours and their visitors. In one case a woman who kept trying to commit suicide was given an Asbo to prevent her jumping into rivers or canals.
Though almost every story about an unlikely-sounding Asbo as reported in newspapers turned out to have a reason behind it, Asbo-spotting became a minor national sport and there were fears that for the tougher children, they became a badge of honour. In their early years they were much mocked by Liberal Democrat and Conservative MPs for being ineffective and rarely used by local authorities, as well as being criticized strongly by civil libertarians. Since breaking an Asbo could result in a prison sentence, it meant extending the threat of prison to crimes that before had not warranted it. Yet the public when polled strongly supported Asbos and as they were refined and strengthened they were gradually used more frequently, becoming almost routine. Like the minimum wage, Bank independence and some of the anti-poverty initiatives they seemed to be a part of New Labour Britain that would stick. At the time of writing, 7,500 or so had been given out in England and Wales (Scotland followed in 2004 with its version). Was this part of a wider authoritarian and surveillance agenda changing life in the country?
The War on Privacy
At an educated guess, the British are currently being observed and recorded by 4.2 million closed circuit television (CCTV) cameras. Professor Clive Norris of Sheffield University, who did the educated guessing, has pointed out, ‘That’s more than anywhere else in the world, with the possible exception of China. It’s one for every 14 citizens.’ When they first appeared in the early nineties, gazing beadily down from a few high-security buildings, these remotely staring cameras were pointed out as novelties. They are now in almost every sizeable store, looking down at key points in most big streets, in railway and underground stations, buses, housing estates and even from the fronts of private homes. Londoners are said to be picked up on CCTV cameras on average 300 times a day; their cars are filmed and tracked by the cameras set up for the capital’s congestion charge. The Home Office has spent three-quarters of its crime prevention budget on CCTV cameras and the face-recognition and ‘smart’ technology that goes with them. The number of mobile phones is now equivalent to the number of people in Britain; with global satellite positioning chips, they can show where their users are, and the same of course goes for GPS systems in cars (by 2007 Britons were losing the art of map-reading). There are also more than 6,000 speed cameras on British roads.
Britain’s information commissioner Richard Thomas warned that the country had becoming a ‘surveillance society’. He thought future developments could include microchip implants to identify and track people; facial recognition cameras fitted into lampposts; and even unmanned surveillance aircraft over Britain’s towns. Thomas suggested this could lead to discrimination and harassment: ‘As ever more information is collected, shared and used, it intrudes into our private space and leads to decisions which directly influence people’s lives.’ Certainly, if being watched makes us good and safe, the British are now the goodest, safest people in the history of the world.
Who watches all the CCTV coverage? Court cases often demonstrated that either there was no film kept, or that to spot a face took many police officers many weeks. Though this can increasingly be done electronically, other kinds of surveillance were being done in person. A new force of council tax inspectors were given powers to enter any home in England and take photographs of any room, including bedrooms and bathrooms, on pain of a £1,000 fine for refusal or obstruction. This was to assess improvements including patios, conservatories and double glazing for revaluation purposes as soon as the government gave the go-ahead for such a revaluation, which was planned to include extra charges for people living in agreeable areas, or who could park their cars outside their homes. It was reported in early 2006 that discussions had taken place with the civil servant in charge of the surveillance programme about selling on the information his men had gleaned to insurance and mortgage companies. Paul Sanderson, director of modernization for the tax inspectors, said he thought privacy was ‘an old-fashioned concept’ and called for all the details, including photographs, to be shown online.
If anything could be more intimate than the insides of everyone’s homes, it is their DNA, with its clues about heredity, vulnerability to disease and much else. In 2003 the law was changed to allow the police to take and store the DNA of anyone arrested for any imprisonable offence, whether or not they were later convicted. Previously the police had had to destroy the samples of anyone found innocent, or whose case was dropped. Three years later, by which time 3.6 million samples were being held, Tony Blair said the database should be extended to everybody: ‘The number on the database should be the maximum number you can get’ and there was ‘no problem’ with the general public providing their DNA as part of the wider fight against crime.
By then the public also knew they would be expected to give biometric data – iris recognition and perhaps eventually DNA – for new compulsory identity cards, due to be introduced from 2008 when people applied for new passports. David Blunkett had promoted the idea of compulsory ID cards despite a hostile reaction from his predecessor Jack Straw, the Chancellor Gordon Brown, and initial caution from the Prime Minister. But he won his fight in government essentially because he convinced Blair the technology was becoming safe, and that ID cards would be popular with the majority of voters. These cards would carry a range of personal information, forming yet another new database, the National Identity Register. The issue provoked rebellions in Parliament before and after the 2005 election, but seemed to have been finally resolved by a thirty-one-vote majority in the Commons in February 2006. The new cards would cost citizens at least £93 each though ministers did not initially make it an offence to fail to carry one at all times. What were they for? To combat fraud and crime, to make life easier for government, and for individuals to make it harder to lose money through ‘identity fraud’. Yet compulsory ID cards would probably not have passed through Parliament had it not been for the terrorist threat.
Seven Seven
On 7 July 2005, at rush-hour, four young Muslim men from West Yorkshire and Buckinghamshire, Hasib Hussein, Mohammed Sidique Khan, Germaine Lindsay and Shezhad Tanweer, murdered fifty-two people and injured 770 more by blowing themselves up on London Underground trains and one London bus. The report into the worst such attack in Britain later concluded that they were not part of an al Qaeda cell, though two had visited Pakistan camps, and that the rucksack bombs had been constructed for a few hundred pounds. Despite government insistence that the war in Iraq – discussed below – had not made Britain more of a terrorist target, the Home Office investigation asserted that part of the four terrorists’ motivation was British foreign policy.
They had picked up the information they needed for the attack from the internet. It was a particularly ghastly one, because of the terrifying and bloody conditions below the streets of London in tube tunnels and it vividly reminded the country that it was as much a target as the United States or Spain. Indeed the intimate relationship between Britain and Pakistan, with constant and heavy traffic between them, provoked fears that the British would prove uniquely vulnerable. Blair heard of the attack at the most poignant time, just following London’s great success in winning the bid to host the 2012 Olympic Games. He rushed back from Gleneagles in Scotland, where the G8 summit was discussing the ambitious new aid plan for Africa, and differences between the United States and the rest over global warming.
The London bombings are unlikely to have been stopped by more CCTV coverage, for there was plenty of that, nor by ID cards, for the killers were British citizens, nor by ‘follow the money’ anti-terror legislation, for little money was involved. Only even better intelligence might have helped. The Security Service as well as the Secret Intelligence Service (MI5 and MI6 as they are still more familiarly known) were already in receipt of huge increases in their budgets as they struggled to track down other murderous cells. Richard Reid, the ‘shoe bomber’ from Bromley who tried to destroy a flight from Paris to Miami in 2001, was another example of the threat from home-grown extremists, visiting ‘radical’ mosques from Brixton to Yorkshire, and there were many more examples of plots uncovered in these years, though by no means every suspect finally made it to court. In August 2005 police arrested suspects in Birmingham, High Wycombe and Walthamstow, east London, believing there was a plan to blow up as many as ten passenger aircraft over the Atlantic. The threat was all too real, widespread and hard to grip.
After many years of allowing dissident clerics and activists from the Middle East asylum in London, Britain had more than its share of inflammatory and dangerous extremists, who admired al Qaeda and preached violent jihad. Once September 11 had changed the climate, new laws were introduced to allow the detention without trial of foreigners suspected of being involved in supporting or fomenting terrorism. They could not be deported because human rights legislation forbade sending back anyone to countries where they might face torture. Seventeen were picked up and kept at Belmarsh high security prison. But in December 2004 the House of Lords ruled that these detentions were discriminatory and disproportionate and therefore illegal. Five weeks later the Home Secretary, Charles Clarke, hit back with ‘control orders’ to limit the movement of men he could not prosecute or deport. They would also be used against home-grown terror suspects. A month later, in February 2005, sixty Labour MPs revolted against these powers too, and the government only narrowly survived the vote. Ten Belmarsh men were put under these new restraints but the battle was far from over. In April 2006 a judge ruled that such control orders were ‘an affront to justice’ because they gave the Home Secretary, a politician, too much power and two months later said curfews of eighteen hours a day on six Iraqis were ‘a deprivation of liberty’ and also illegal. The new Home Secretary, John Reid, lost his appeal and reluctantly had to loosen the orders. In other cases, meanwhile, two men under control orders vanished.
New Labour Britain found itself in a struggle between its old laws and liberties and a new borderless, dangerous world. As we have seen the Britain of the forties was a prying and regulation-heavy country, emerging from the extraordinary conditions of a fight for national survival. From the fifties to the end of the eighties, the Cold War had grown a shadowy security state, with the vetting of BBC employees, MI5 surveillance of political radicals, a secret network of bunkers and tunnels, and the suspension of British jurisdiction over those small parts of the country taken by the United States forces. Yet none of this seriously challenged hallowed principles such as habeas corpus, free speech, a presumption of innocence, asylum, the right of British citizens to travel freely in their country without identifying papers, and the sanctity of homes in which the law-abiding lived. In the ‘war on terror’ much of this was suddenly in jeopardy.
New forms of eavesdropping, new compulsions, new political powers seemed to the government the least they needed to deal with a new, sinuous threat which ministers said could last for another thirty years. They were sure that most British people agreed, and that the judiciary, media, campaigners and elected politicians who protested were a hand-wringingly liberal, too-fastidious minority. Tony Blair, John Reid and Jack Straw were particularly emphatic about this and on the numbers were probably right. As Gordon Brown eyed the premiership, his rhetoric was similarly tough. Against recent historical tradition it was left to the Conservatives, as well as the Liberal Democrats, to mount the barriers in defence of civil liberties.
The Waning
This book is written under the shadow of a new politics of global warming, when the British were being urged to be environmentally friendly. This author’s contribution, which may save a Nordic wood or small grove of some beauty, is to resist giving a detailed account of the decade-long feud between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. It would, apart from anything else, require at least another volume the same size as this one. But it cannot be ignored because it has affected the country itself. The feud went on from New Labour’s first days in power until the last months when the Prime Minister’s fingertips, white with effort, were slipping from office. Sometimes there were oases of tranquillity and good humour, for months at a time. Yet the stories of door-slamming tantrums, four-lettered exchanges, make-ups, go-betweens, public snubs and cherished policies for Britain’s future being tugged back and forth like disintegrating soft toys, were repeated in Whitehall private offices, pubs and newspaper columns almost weekly. Occasionally it seemed as if Blair was on the point of sacking his Chancellor. Brown was variously reported by Number Ten to have psychological flaws, to be a control-freak, a wrecker, a traditionalist ‘playing to the gallery’ and disloyal whenever the Prime Minister was in real trouble. Blair, retorted the Brownites, was a vain second-rater obsessed with money and glamour, who had betrayed the Chancellor over their original deal.
In the first term, Brown was defending his huge remit as Chancellor and Blair was trying to come to terms with how brutally he was being kept out of large policy areas; how little he knew of forthcoming Budgets; and how weak was his ability to push Britain towards the euro. Brown felt the second election victory in 2001 was mostly his own work, based on the strong economy. In the second term that followed it, he began pushing for a date when Blair would leave office. Blair, turning to the ‘war on terror’ and Iraq, failed to concentrate enough on domestic policy. Even so, he became ever more determined to hang on until he got the reforms he wanted. A gap seemed to open between Blair’s enthusiasm for market-mimicking ideas to reform health and schools, and Brown’s, for delivering better lives to the working poor. As we have seen, Brown was also keen on bringing private capital into public services, but there was a difference in emphasis which both men played up. ‘Best when we are at our boldest,’ said Blair. ‘Best when we are Labour,’ retorted Brown. Over Iraq, foundation hospitals and student top-up fees, Blair thought Brown came close to leaving him at the mercy of lethal backbench revolts, disappearing off into the rhododendron bushes just when he was most needed. Brown did give his support, and rally ‘his people’ to help Blair out of various self-excavated holes, but the Scotsman with the ladder tended to arrive as darkness was falling.
After six years in office he felt Blair was squandering the party’s reputation on gimmicks and a too enthusiastic backing for Bush. He thought Blair had lied to him about when he would step down. John Prescott intervened first during November 2003, so worried that their feud would bring down the government that he knocked their heads together – metaphorically, despite his reputation – over a dinner of shepherd’s pie, telling them they would destroy the Labour Party. This produced a truce but during 2004 things worsened rapidly again. Labour was badly hurt in local elections. With Iraq still smouldering, Labour MPs began to panic about what would happen at the next election. A mix of personal and political frustration brought Blair to another low ebb. For years he and Brown had dealt with each other through a range of intermediaries meeting on neutral ground and carrying white flags. Punctuating these regular arm’s-length contacts, at roughly the chilly level one might expect between a Prime Minister and Leader of the Opposition, Blair and Brown had hotter private meetings. But by now they were barely speaking and Blair was deeply depressed about his legacy, as well as private troubles.
In July 2004 four cabinet ministers were so worried he was about to resign that they jointly pleaded with him to stay on. In the autumn Prescott was involved in further talks about whether there could be a ‘peaceful transition’. On one occasion he met Brown at an oyster bar by Loch Fyne in Scotland. All the tables were taken. So for an hour and a half the two men talked in a black government limousine in the carpark, surrounded by armed guards, as if they were two businessmen of Sicilian extraction planning the carve-up of criminal territories. Prescott later talked of the (tectonic) plates moving and admitted that ministers were positioning themselves for the end of the Blair years. Brown was preparing himself for his looming premiership, briefing himself on foreign affairs, reaching out to groups well outside the Treasury’s normal remit. Transition teams were prepared. Surely, finally, even this soap-opera was ending?
It was not. Blair gathered together his formidable internal resources and quietly determined that he would not go after all. Immediately after Labour’s conference at Brighton he returned to Downing Street to make a triple announcement. He confirmed he was buying a house (an expensive, ugly, hard-to-let house) in Connaught Square which he and Cherie would eventually use for their retirement. After a heart scare the previous year, he was going into hospital for treatment using a thin wire to correct irregular heartbeat problems. This condition, which Blair was at pains to downplay, was known only to a few close friends. Like the house purchase, it tended to focus attention on his political mortality. Hence the third announcement, a bolt from the blue. He intended to fight the forthcoming election and if elected serve a full term. But as he told the author: ‘I do not want to serve a fourth term – I do not think the British people would want a Prime Minister to serve so long – but I think it’s sensible to make plain my intention now.’ It was an unprecedented thing to say, and caught Brown on the hop – he was on his way to a meeting in Washington. In the short term it effectively killed off speculation that Blair was about to resign. To that extent it was clever. It may also have helped Labour in the 2005 election since Blair was promising his critics he would not, like Margaret Thatcher, try to ‘go on and on’.
It certainly felt like a slap in the face for Brown. Just a day earlier in Brighton the two of them had had a long, tense talk about the future in which Blair warned him that his supporters were destabilizing the government and urged him to work with him. In response to a newspaper report that he was intending to serve a full third term, Blair told Brown this was wrong. He said nothing about his heart problem. When he discovered that Blair was planning a complete third term Brown was reported to be livid. Demoted from his old role running the forthcoming election campaign, he rejected an offer to chair Labour’s press conferences during it. ‘There is nothing that you could ever say to me now that I could ever believe,’ he was said to have told the Prime Minister.17 But life is full of surprises. Blair discovered that pre-announcing his political mortality, however protracted, was a draining and sapping mistake, the worst purely tactical decision of his premiership. It provoked a stream of further questions – yes, but when exactly? How many years is a full term? How long does your successor get in office before a further election? If you are going, what validity do your long-term plans for the country really have? And most pertinently, do you still want Gordon Brown to take over? These questions pursued him, loud, irritating, distracting heckles. His authority was first subtly, then dramatically, weakened.
Always, there were moments of hope. After Bush declared the war over on 1 May 2003, a search began for pro-Western Iraqis to whom some authority could be given. Eventually Saddam Hussein was found hiding in a hole and taken prisoner. Some eighty other countries pledged £18 bn for reconstruction, while US and British companies worked hard on repairing infrastructure. In the south where British forces were in control, they were quick to take off their helmets, patrolling in berets and trying to build good relations with local people. To start with, this worked well. Across Iraq huge amounts of money, dollars in shrink-wrapped blocks, were sent to be disbursed locally by hastily recruited Western viceroys. The following year saw the naming of Ayad Allawi, an affable Shiite, as interim Prime Minister of Iraq. That June, the United States formally handed over sovereignty to his government and a few days later, an Iraqi court began the trial of Saddam Hussein and eventually sentenced him to death. A national assembly was chosen and a date for elections was set. In January 2005, Iraqis had their first multi-party election for fifty years, choosing a transitional government. Later a Kurd, Jalal Talabani, was sworn in as Iraq’s interim President. In October Iraqis voted for a new constitution, establishing an Islamic republic. At the end of the year millions took part in the full election which by January 2006 resulted in victory going to a Shia-dominated party, though without an overall majority. These were the drumbeats of democracy and renewal, much what Blair and Bush had hoped would happen.
What had not been predicted by them was the appalling dark side of Iraq after the conflict, which completely overshadowed the reconstruction and the creation of democratic structures. A long, numbing tale of insurrection followed by religious feud, slaughters, car and suicide bombings, the killing of civilians in heavy-handed military responses, the beheading of Western hostages, the revelation of brutality by US guards at the notorious Abu Graib prison, a full-scale assault on the rebel town of Falluja, a thousand dead in a panicked stampede . . . every day brought more murders, more fighting, less hope. By 2004, child mortality had doubled compared to 1990. There was a shortage of doctors and teachers. According to the World Bank, about a quarter of Iraqi children no longer attended school. Universities reported that they were being infiltrated by Muslim militias; professors fled and female students were persecuted for failing to wear the hijab. According to the United Nations, some 750,000 people had fled their homes since the war, adding to the 800,000 refugees of the Saddam era, while an estimated 1.6 million Iraqis had moved across the borders. By 2006, electricity supply was running at below the pre-war level and only half of Iraqi homes had safe supplies of water. Baghdad was on the edge of full-scale war, her hospitals filthy and dangerous, while militias roamed the streets. The possible breakup of the country was being openly talked about. In spring 2007, the international Red Cross described the suffering of Iraqi civilians as ‘unbearable and unacceptable.’ According to polls most British voters wanted the troops home, whatever further mayhem was caused.
It was the same story in the United States where most voters, who had been sold the idea that the Iraq War followed on naturally from 9/11, now believed it was a mistake. Bush stopped talking about ‘staying the course’. A report for a Ministry of Defence think tank described Iraq as a recruiting sergeant for Islamic extremism around the world. This reflected the view of the Washington organization which brings together America’s nineteen intelligence agencies, who firmly concluded that Iraq had increased the global risk of terrorism. In December 2006 the US Iraq Study Group presented Bush with a bleak assessment of the mayhem and a series of unpalatable options, designed to slowly bring America’s soldiers home while negotiating with her traditional enemies in an attempt to bring some kind of stability to the country.
So by almost any standard that can be applied, three years after the Iraq war, it looked like a catastrophe. The country was experiencing civil war. The lives of Iraqis were now even more at risk, and mostly more unpleasant, than under Saddam’s dreadful regime. Terrorism had been encouraged, not defeated. Countries regarded by London and Washington as regional menaces, Syria and Iran, were stronger and more confident, not less. With 120 British military dead in Iraq, most people saw the war as the worst single mistake by a British government in recent times. Some believe that had Blair refused to give British support for the war, it would not have happened. The mood inside the White House after September 11 makes this unlikely. Even so, having committed Britain, Blair could not stand aside from the consequences. The kaleidoscope was shaken all right. The pieces were in flux.
A Crowd of New People
One result of the long Iraqi agony was the arrival of many Iraqi asylum-seekers in Britain, Kurds, Shiites and Sunnis. This was little commented on because they were only a small part of a large migration into the country which changed it during the Blair years. It was a multi-lingual, many-religioned migration which included Poles, Zimbabweans, Somalis, Nigerians, Russians and Afghans, Australians, white South Africans and Americans, as well as sizeable French and German inflows. In 2005, according to the Office for National Statistics, immigrants were arriving to live in Britain at the rate of 1,500 a day; and since Tony Blair had arrived in power, more than 1.3 million people had come. By the mid-2000s English was no longer the first language of half the primary school children in London, and the capital boasted 350 different separate language groups.
The poorer new migrant groups were almost entirely unrepresented in politics but radically changed the sights, sounds and scents of urban Britain. The veiled women of the Muslim world, or its more traditionalist and Arab quarters, became common sights even on the streets of many market towns, from Scotland to Kent. Polish tradesmen and factory workers were followed by shops stocking up with Polish food and selling Polish magazines, and even by Polish road signs. Chinese villagers were involved in a tragedy when nineteen were caught by the tide while cockle-picking at Morecambe Bay and drowned; but many more were working in grim conditions for rural ‘gang-masters’ or as the then Home Secretary, David Blunkett, put it, ‘as slaves’. Russian voices began to be as common on the London Underground as Irish ones. Through most of its history Britain had been abnormally open to the world, mostly imposing herself elsewhere. Now she found herself a ‘world island’ in a new way.
Throughout the twentieth century, Britain’s foreign policy had been concerned to control the impact of outside forces on these busy, crowded islands. In its first half she had tried this by attempting to keep her imperial possessions while subduing her greatest rival, Germany. In its second half she had worked with America against the Soviet Union to preserve a system of democracy and the free market, hoping to avoid nuclear annihilation, determined to avoid European federalism. She was not a successful manufacturing country but became a popular place to do financial business. Compared to similar countries, she was unusually warlike, spending more on defence and fighting more, too. Britain had always gone out into the world. Now, increasingly, the world came to her, poor and migrant, rich and corporate, the people of Eastern Europe and the manufactures of China. As in Victorian times, she was on the edge of newness, at the global bow-wave of change, but now it was change experienced near at hand.
Immigration had been a constant of British life. What was new was the scale and variety. Earlier modern migrations had, as we have seen, provoked a racialist backlash, riots, the rise of the National Front and a series of new laws. These later migrations were controversial in different ways. The early arrivals from the Caribbean or India were people who looked different but spoke the same language and in many cases had had a similar education to native British people. Many of the later migrants looked similar to the white British but shared no linguistic or imperial history. There were other differences. Young educated Polish or Czech people had come to Britain to earn money before going home again to acquire good homes, marry and have children in their rapidly growing countries. The economic growth of the early 2000s was fuelled by the influx of energetic and talented people, often denuding their own countries of skills, making their way in Britain as quickly as the East African Asians had before.
But there are always two sides to such changes. Criminal gangs of Albanians, Kosovars and Turks appeared as novel and threatening as Jamaican criminality had thirty years earlier. The social service bill for the new migrants was a serious burden to local authorities; towns such as Slough protested to national government about the extra cost in housing, education and other services. Above everything else, there was the sheer scale of the new migrations and the inability of the machinery of government to regulate what was happening. The Home Office’s immigration and nationality department (IND) seemed unable to prevent illegal migrants entering Britain, to spot those abusing the asylum system in order to settle here, or to apprehend and deport people. An illegal and sometimes lethal trade in ‘people smuggling’ made it particularly hard. Even after airlines were made responsible for the status of those they carried, large articulated lorries filled with human beings who had paid over their life savings to be taken to Britain, rumbled through the Channel Tunnel.
A Red Cross camp at Sangatte, near its French entrance, was blamed by Britain for exacerbating the problem. By the end of 2002, when Blunkett finally managed to get a deal with the French to close it, an estimated 67,000 had passed through Sangatte into Britain. Many African, Asian and Balkan migrants, believing the British immigration and benefits systems to be easier than those of other EU countries, simply moved across the continent and waited patiently for their journey into the UK. Thermal-imaging devices, increased border staff and unwelcoming asylum centres were all deployed. Unknown numbers of migrants died through thirst, asphyxiation or cold; some were murdered en route. Successive home secretaries – Jack Straw, David Blunkett, Charles Clarke and John Reid – tried to gapple with the trade, introducing legislation which was criticized by civil liberties campaigners and challenged in the courts. None was much applauded for their efforts and the last of them eventually confessed that he believed his department was ‘not fit for purpose’. He hived off the struggling IND as a separate agency and promised to clear a backlog of around 280,000 failed asylum-seekers still in the country within five years. Uniformed border security staff were promised, and the historic Home Office was to be split up.
Meanwhile, many straightforwardly illegal immigrants had bypassed the asylum system entirely. In July 2005 the Home Office produced its own estimate of what the illegal population of the UK had been four years earlier, reckoning it between 310,000 and 570,000 souls, or between 0.5 and 1 per cent of the total population. A year later unofficial estimates pushed the possible total higher, to 800,000. The truth was, with boxes of cardboard files still being uncovered and no national recording system, nobody had a clue. Even the Bank of England complained, asking how it could set interest rates without knowing roughly how many people were working in the country. Official figures showed the number applying for asylum falling, perhaps as former Yugoslavia returned to relative peace. Controversially, thousands were being sent back to Iraq. But there were always new desperate groups, in the Middle East or war-torn and hungry Africa: projections about the impact of global warming suggested there always would be.
The arrival of workers from the ten countries which joined the EU in 2004 was a different issue, though it involved an influx of roughly the same size. When the European Union expanded Britain decided that, unlike France or Germany, she would not try to delay opening the country to migrant workers. Ministers suggested that the likely number arriving would be around 26,000 over the first two years. This was wildly wrong. In 2006 a Home Office minister, Tony McNulty, announced that since 2004 when the European Union expanded 427,000 people from Poland and seven other new EU nations had applied to work in Britain. If the self-employed were included, he added, the real figure would be nearer 600,000. There were at least 36,000 spouses and children who had arrived too and 27,000 child benefit applications had been received. These were very large numbers indeed. The Ugandan Asian migration which caused such a storm in 1971 had, for instance, amounted to some 28,000 people. It was hardly surprising that Britain now faced an acute housing shortage and that government officials began scouring the South of England looking for new places where councils would be ordered to let the developers start building.
By the government’s own 2006 figures, annual net migration for the previous year was 185,000 and had averaged 166,000 over the previous seven years. This compares to the 50,000 net inflow which Enoch Powell had criticized in his notorious 1968 speech as ‘mad, literally mad’. Projections based on many different assumptions suggested the UK population would grow by more than seven million by 2031. Of that, 80 per cent would be due to immigration. The organization Migration Watch UK, set up by a former diplomat to campaign for less immigration, said this was equivalent to requiring the building of two new towns the size of Cambridge each year, or five new Birminghams over the quarter century. But was there a mood of unnecessary hysteria? As has been noted, many of the Eastern European migrants, like those from Australia, France or the United States, could be expected to return home eventually. Immigration was partially offset by the outward flow of around 60,000 British people moving abroad each year, mainly to Australia, the United States, France and Spain. By the winter of 2006–7 one policy institute, the IPPR, reckoned there were 5.5 million British people living permanently overseas – nearly one in ten of us, or more than the population of Scotland – and another half million living there for some of the year. Aside from the obvious destinations, the Middle East and Asia were seeing rising colonies of expatriate British. Who were they? A worrying proportion seemed to be graduates; Britain is believed to lose one in six graduates to emigration. Many were retired or better-off people looking for a life of sunlit ease, just as many immigrants to Britain were young, ambitious and keen to work. Government ministers tended to emphasize the benign economic effects of immigration. Their critics looked around and asked where all the extra people would go, and what spare road space, hospital beds or schools they would find to use.
Blair’s Final Years
From Labour’s arrival in power in 1997 right through to the 2005 election, Blair and his ministers had never been seriously worried about the Conservatives. After the heavy defeat in 2001, Hague had instantly resigned. The Conservatives then rejected the man who had seemed the obvious alternative, Michael Portillo. The son of a Spanish republican refugee and as a boy the advertising face of Ribena fruit juice, he had suffered the crippling fate of being regularly touted as a future leader from the mid-eighties, Mrs Thatcher’s chosen one. But Portillo had feuded with Hague. More importantly, he was on a personal journey to a more metropolitan view of the world, had admitted homosexual affairs in his youth, and would not condescend to pretend to his party that he was anything other than socially liberal. He launched his campaign in an achingly trendy London restaurant, so the party in its first full democratic leadership vote instead chose Iain Duncan Smith. In ‘IDS’, a former soldier, businessman and, in Parliament, a Euro-sceptic rebel, MP for Norman Tebbit’s old seat of Chingford, traditionalist Conservatives thought they had found someone who truly represented their core beliefs. Indeed they had. But they underestimated Duncan Smith’s deep interest in helping the disadvantaged and, sadly, had overestimated his political skill. A thoroughly decent man, he was outclassed so badly as a speaker and on television that the Tories took fright. A growing rebellion persuaded him to resign as leader in December 2003.
A demoralized party did something rare. It chose its next leader without the customary vicious fight, returning the former cabinet minister Michael Howard to the colours. Howard had been controversial as Home Secretary but was part of the Tories’ ‘Cambridge mafia’ and brought rivals from the liberal wing of the party back inside his leadership tent. He began brilliantly as leader, binding wounds and restoring morale. He was the first Tory leader to really worry Brown and Blair, a dangerous opponent. Like Hague, he performed well in the Commons, calling on the Prime Minister to resign over Iraq and making much of a series of Home Office scandals and failures. In 2005 his election focused on better public services and immigration. Conservative posters asked the question: ‘Are you thinking what we’re thinking?’ Though they gained substantial numbers of seats and votes – a majority in England – the country’s overall answer was ‘No, not really’. Michael Howard resigned and was replaced by the bright young Old Etonian David Cameron. Taking the Tories in a green and liberal direction, he won high poll ratings and looked set, by 2007, to be the Conservative leader best placed to oust a sitting Labour government since Margaret Thatcher had the job thirty years earlier.
The Liberal Democrats might have hoped that the hugely unpopular Iraq War and the Blair government’s growing reputation for illiberal and fiddly statism, would allow the third party to break through. Under Paddy Ashdown, there had been a long and fruitless courtship with Labour, ultimately made impossible to consummate by Blair’s large majorities. Then the experience of the Scottish parliamentary elections turned Blair against voting reform, a key Lib-Dem demand. His old mentor Roy Jenkins wryly gave him up as a constitutional reformer of any kind, and that relationship cooled. Ashdown’s successor Charles Kennedy had been the youngest MP when first elected for the Western Isles as an SDP member. He was popular with the party and the media. He took the Lib-Dems away from any proximity to New Labour and campaigned, after some encouragement, against the Iraq War. Under him the third party became a place where disaffected leftish Britons gathered, a pacific haven from Blair’s bellicose certainties and the Home Secretary David Blunkett’s enthusiasm for locking up asylum-seekers. In the 2001 election the Liberal Democrats won fifty-two seats and in 2005, sixty-two, a record performance. But after the heady optimism of the early eighties, they seemed to be back playing a long game. Charles Kennedy had a serious alcohol problem which could make him fuzzy and unconvincing and which, though his aides lied about it for years, eventually led to his resignation as party leader. He was replaced by Sir Menzies Campbell, a Scottish lawyer and former Olympic runner who was older but safer.
The 2005 election campaign ended with Labour’s majority cut from 167 in the previous contest to just sixty-seven. For most previous prime ministers a majority of that size would have been considered handsome. Heath, Wilson, Callaghan or Major would have killed for it, and it was twenty-four more than Margaret Thatcher had enjoyed in her first, strife-ridden and tumultuous administration. But by the standards of New Labour’s record the loss was a serious rebuke. The voters were noticing. But what? Blair thought they were noticing the habit of disloyalty among his MPs. Many of them thought they were noticing Blair. Certainly with so many disaffected former ministers and left-wing dissidents on the Labour benches it meant he would have an even harder time getting his own way. Then there was the further problem of his time-limited remaining tenure and the slow withdrawal of his personal authority. Brown had not been given his accustomed role in election planning but was far more involved than Blair had first intended in the 2005 fight. With their best false hearty smiles in place, and much criticized for making wild claims about the cuts planned by their Tory opponents, they had won their third mandate standing beside one another, if not hand in hand. As soon as the election was over Blair turned his mind to staying on rather longer than the Chancellor had hoped.
The latter stages of Blair’s time as Prime Minister were overshadowed by the bloody aftermath of the Iraq War, and by renewed fighting in Afghanistan. After more bad local elections in 2006 he sacked his Home Secretary, Charles Clarke, who publicly protested; he demoted his Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, and he stripped John Prescott, who had been hit by a scandal, of his departmental responsibilities. The embarrassing police inquiry into whether businessmen had been recommended for peerages as a result of offering loans to the Labour Party drew closer to Downing Street; shortly before Christmas 2006 Tony Blair became the first serving Prime Minister to be interviewed by the police as part of a criminal investigation. He was questioned in Downing Street for two hours by Detective Chief Inspector Graeme McNulty and a colleague. This occurred on the same day as the official police report into the death of Diana was finally published, and a controversial announcement was made about rural post offices. Downing Street denied there was any attempt to bury bad news but from the outside it looked like one New Labour tradition that should have been ditched.
But would it bring forward an earlier departure? After a rocky summer in 2006 there had been an organized round of junior ministerial resignations, and demands for Blair to quit, assumed by Number Ten and most of the media to have been organized by supporters of Gordon Brown. Despite calling an open letter on the subject ‘disloyal, discourteous and wrong’, on 7 September the prime minister promised that the coming party conference would be his last, breaking under duress his earlier promise to serve a full term. Labour’s conference, held unusually in Manchester, saw one of Blair’s most eloquent speeches ever, a defiant farewell to the party which no longer wanted him, and which responded to him with largely hypocritical adulation. It did not look as if the parting would be particularly sweet, on either side. His wife was heard referring to Brown’s earlier conference speech with the single word ‘liar’. Soon, Blairites were attempting to persuade the young cabinet minister David Miliband to challenge Brown in a leadership contest. He was being bashful, but it was evidence of how deeply in trouble Labour now was. The polls showed Brown trailing the new Conservative leader David Cameron. Whatever this was, it was not glad confident morning again.