A History of Modern Britain

by Andrew Marr

  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.

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  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.