A History of Modern Britain

by Andrew Marr

  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.

  120

  From New York to Kabul

  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 sim
ply 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.

  121

  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. 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 s
ide 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.