Blair Inc--The Man Behind the Mask

by Francis Beckett

  In May 2012, when Sarkozy lost the presidency, he seems to have gone down the path already trodden by Blair, charging £100,000 for speeches and being frequently seen in Qatar. He now faces accusations that his 2007 campaign was aided by funds from Blair’s old contact, the late Libyan dictator Colonel Muammar Gaddafi.2

  In fact, Blair had looked like an obvious candidate from the moment the job was first mooted, and he had been a key player in devising the job description. In December 2001, two years after the euro was introduced to world financial markets, he had been one of the leaders of the European Council at Laken, which established the Convention on the Future of Europe, with former French President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing as its president. The Convention was to draft the treaty establishing a constitution for Europe.

  It was this convention that, in July the next year, produced what was intended to become the European Constitution. But, in April 2004, Blair unexpectedly promised the UK a referendum on the EU Constitution, having previously rejected the idea. The next year the French and the Dutch rejected the Constitution in referenda, and the thing was effectively dead.

  Blair was a key player in the process of picking up the pieces, and salvaging what there was to be salvaged. An informal group was set up to draft a replacement which was to fall short of being a constitution. This was chaired by the former Italian PM Giuliano Amato and included the former British EU commissioner Chris Patten. In June 2007 they produced a draft treaty, and Blair, already on the way out as PM, said this would not require a British referendum since it was not a constitution. This treaty, later known as the Lisbon Treaty, was agreed.

  One of the provisions of this treaty was for an EU president to chair EU summits, represent the EU on common foreign and security policy and take on some of the functions of the presidency of the Council of the European Union, which is held on a rotating six-month basis by EU heads of government. It was not as big a job as had been envisaged in the constitution, but it was still quite substantial. It had the potential for its holder to be a major player on the world stage, if held by someone with the status and political skill to make it so.

  Blair was a strongly fancied candidate. ‘He is the most European of Britons … it would be intelligent to think of him,’ said Sarkozy on 23 June 2007, just four days before Blair left Downing Street.

  The only doubt in most people’s minds was: did Blair want the job? As his post-premiership career took shape and it became clear that he was going to make himself seriously rich, former Foreign Secretary David Miliband was heard to say, perhaps in jest, that the EU ‘might not be able to afford him.’ However, Sir Malcolm Rifkind is in no doubt of what his intentions were, telling us that ‘His main aspiration was to hold onto some public office in the hope that he would be asked to take on some more fundamental responsibility on the international stage. He had hoped to be President of the European Council. If somebody had asked him to do something of that kind, he would jump at it.’

  In January 2008, Sarkozy invited him to the national council of his party, the UMP, to mark his support for Blair’s candidature and to ‘sell’ Blair to his party colleagues. Shortly afterwards, Sarkozy invited Blair to be one of the two keynote speakers at a conference on the global financial crisis, held at the École Militaire – the other was Sarkozy himself.

  John Monks, general secretary of the European Trade Union Confederation and the former British TUC chief, was there to take part in a panel discussion, and remembers watching Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, side by side, as Blair spoke. Sarkozy nudged Merkel and whispered something – it looked like appreciation of Blair’s performance. Merkel looked sceptical.

  There was a difference between Sarkozy’s speech and Blair’s, Monks told us. Sarkozy saw the crash as a major heart attack for modern capitalism and argued for big changes. Blair was much more cautious and was not critical of the banks and other financial institutions whose recklessness and greed had caused the crisis.

  During the coffee break, Monks asked Blair whether he had regrets about the light-touch regulation – verging (said Monks) on adulation for the City – that had often characterised New Labour in government.

  Blair replied, ‘You have seen what the prime-ministerial in-tray looks like – heavy files on foreign policy, Iraq, the NHS, Northern Ireland and a host of others. With all these subjects demanding urgent attention, why would you transfer the City from the asset pile to the problems one? The City was contributing huge tax revenues that paid for much social expenditure, and no one saw the impending problems.’ Before Monks could question him further, Sarkozy, working tirelessly to promote Blair for President of the European Council, interrupted the conversation.

  Not everyone, even in Sarkozy’s own Party, was as enthusiastic about Blair as Sarkozy would have wished. ‘Blair cannot symbolise the Europe we want’ said former Prime Minister Edouard Balladur, while Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, former President and architect of the now-dead constitution, thought the president should come from a country that respected all the European rules.

  At the time, these were minority voices. It still looked good for Blair. But, in May 2008, it started to unravel, with Sarkozy wondering aloud if Blair was the right person after all. Blair, he recalled, was, after all, the architect of the Iraq War, and he had kept Britain out of the euro and the so-called Schengen zone of passport-free travel (named after the Luxembourg town where the agreement was signed).

  But what had changed? All these things had been just as true eleven months earlier, when Sarkozy endorsed him, and four months earlier, when Sarkozy sold him to the UMP. What had changed was that Sarkozy no longer felt confident he could deliver. For the previous month, April 2009, Prime Minister Gordon Brown, President Sarkozy and Chancellor Angela Merkel agreed that they would all have a veto on the appointment. It became clear that Merkel might well veto Blair.

  If he could not have the presidency, Blair was now reported to be interested in the other permanent position created under the Lisbon Treaty, the high representative for foreign affairs, effectively the EU’s foreign minister, which he felt – probably rightly, so long as he did not have a strong president – could be turned into the real powerhouse of EU affairs.

  But this put the British government in a bind. It already had a potential candidate for that job – the Foreign Secretary, David Miliband. Of course, if Blair was the president, Britain could not hope to have the foreign-affairs post as well. So Miliband’s potential candidacy was on ice while Blair was frontrunner for the presidency.

  If he were to hope to deliver the foreign-affairs brief to Miliband, Gordon Brown would have to give up backing Blair for president. But he did not feel he could safely do that. Brown led a parliamentary Labour Party that contained a large number of vengeful Blairites who thought Brown had pushed their man out of No. 10, and who stood ready to tear the new Prime Minister to pieces if he appeared not to be giving Blair his full support.

  Sarkozy had not given up. He soon decided to give it another go, partly because he felt that the strongest alternative candidate to Blair, Luxembourg Prime Minister and Finance Minister and Eurogroup President Jean-Claude Juncker, had failed to act decisively during the economic crisis. Sarkozy was determined to block Juncker, as David Cameron was in 2014.

  Blair’s old friend Silvio Berlusconi backed him. Ireland and Czechoslovakia backed the Lisbon Treaty, the last two nations to do so. Gordon Brown and David Miliband endorsed him. Sarkozy seemed to have grounds for optimism. But he badly underestimated the growing opposition to Blair. Juncker told a meeting of European finance ministers, ‘I will do anything to prevent a certain person becoming president of the European Council.’ The Brussels press pack knew exactly whom he meant: Tony Blair.3

  This started a bandwagon. Smaller EU countries – Poland, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Sweden, Austria – began ranging themselves against Blair, and suggesting that the first president should come from one of the smaller countries. Some key German
politicians agreed with them, though Angela Merkel kept her options open.

  Brown’s government became nervous about the outcome, with Brown himself ramping up the rhetoric in support of Blair’s candidature and assigning civil servants to lobby for Blair, and former EU commissioner and Blair’s old friend Lord Mandelson reassuring everyone that Blair really did want the job.

  But the campaign they were trying to revive was failing. On 24 October, Newsweek published an article by Blair’s former Europe Minister, the ultra-loyal Denis MacShane, which constituted a desperate last-minute attempt to shore up the Blair candidature. Blair personally encouraged MacShane to write the article, and suggested lines to him. MacShane wrote that Blair did the EU a favour by not holding a referendum on the euro in the UK, because he would have lost it and thereby set back the cause of European integration. He poured scorn on Blair’s opponents: ‘old European grandees like former French president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, who craves the post for himself.’ And, as for that old canard that Blair was too fond of money, ‘Blair has spent his whole life in public service, turning down more lucrative options as a young man to spend years in opposition before finally winning power.’ This sanitised Blair’s early career and ignored his post-prime-ministerial one.

  The story has a strange postscript. MacShane was a longstanding ally and emissary. In the last years of Blair’s premiership he had been engaged in a frenetic round of European travel, seeing key people on Blair’s behalf, but unable to present his expenses to his master; and he remained active on Blair’s behalf after Blair left Downing Street, travelling European capitals and shoring up Blair’s crumbling support.

  But he had no one to whom he could present the substantial expenses he incurred in air travel, as well as buying books and journals in foreign capitals. He was travelling on Blair’s behalf, but at no time did Downing Street offer to pick up the tab. So he claimed them from Parliament. If they had been UK travel, or if they had been limited to three trips in a year, this would have been OK. But it wasn’t, and he invented a shadow research company to pick up the bills.

  This was catastrophic for MacShane, who has served time in a high-security prison for wrongly claiming them from Parliament. While he was in prison (from December 2013 to mid-2014), Blair sent him a handwritten letter:

  Dear Denis

  I have been trying to track down how to contact you.

  I just wanted to say how sorry I am about the situation you find yourself in. You were always a good supporter of mine and a thoroughly sympathetic colleague who contributed a huge amount to the government.

  I can only imagine how ghastly this is. But please come and see me after you emerge and I will do whatever I can to help.

  You still have a lot to give and you should know you have a friend in me.

  Yours ever

  Tony

  Blair had fired MacShane from the government job he loved and was good at, as Europe Minister, and had then continued to allow MacShane to use his unofficial services as an emissary around Europe, without bothering his head about how Denis might pay for all this globetrotting. But MacShane’s loyalty to his old master is absolute. He was deeply touched by the letter, and if (as we hope he has) Blair has made good the implied promise in the last couple of paragraphs, MacShane is far too loyal to tell us.

  However, even MacShane’s eloquence could not save the doomed Blair candidature. Just three days after MacShane’s article, on 29 October 2009, Sarkozy and Merkel indicated they were not backing Blair. ‘The on dit [rumour] was that Merkel gently told Sarko that Blair wouldn’t fly,’ MacShane tells us. They had done a political deal – the presidency for the Christian Democrats, the foreign-affairs job for the social democrats. This ruled out Blair, who came from a social democratic party, even though most of Europe recognised that ideologically he was a Christian Democrat.

  Gordon Brown fought on for his old rival, continuing to demand the presidency for Blair, and in doing so badly undermined his own credibility among European leaders. Brown gave way only on condition that Britain obtain the foreign-policy job, which he intended for Miliband.

  On 19 November the Belgian Prime Minister Herman van Rompuy was chosen as President unanimously. Then the rest of Brown’s strategy unravelled. David Miliband ruled himself out as foreign-affairs representative. He was saving himself for the top job in British politics – he thought he would succeed Brown as Labour leader and become Prime Minister. Blair was no longer interested in the second job – and perhaps no longer acceptable for it.

  So Brown got an important job for Britain, but the frantic last-minute wheeling and dealing meant that he had to scratch around for a last-minute candidate to take it on. The little-known (though reputedly able) Baroness (Catherine) Ashton got the job. Ashton’s political career had begun only a decade earlier, when she was created a life peer and then Parliamentary Undersecretary of State in the Department for Education and Skills in 2001, and subsequently in the Department for Constitutional Affairs and Ministry of Justice in 2004. She became Leader of the House of Lords in Gordon Brown’s first cabinet in June 2007, and in 2008 she succeeded Peter Mandelson as Commissioner for Trade in the European Commission. She has never held elected office, and was hardly a political big hitter.

  Ashton’s appointment was the peace offering Europe made to Britain. Announcing it, Commission President José Manuel Barroso said, ‘We believe it’s so important that Britain remains at the heart of our project.’

  Brown felt he had to keep on fighting for Blair to the last ditch, for he was still terrified that the vengeful Blairites would turn on him and drive him out. But it did him real damage in Europe. In the long term, Ashton herself, by proving to be able and diligent, helped reverse some of that damage.

  But Brown was not forgiven in Europe. In Germany, Martin Winter of the daily Süddeutsche Zeitung reflected much official thinking:

  The fact that Brown backed Blair for so long has not done Europe any good. For too long, petty arguments dominated the debate. Too many byzantine-seeming intrigues were hatched to either get Blair into office or to keep him out of it. That prevented the Europeans from looking for the most competent and politically best-suited candidates for the two tasks.4

  Why did it all go wrong for Blair? If you asked his opponents at the time, they would have said, smoothly and emolliently, that they thought it better to have someone from a small country, but no one can doubt that if a candidate they really liked had emerged from Britain, France or Germany, they would not have blocked them. They blocked him because the candidate was Blair.

  If you had pressed them on why they opposed Blair personally, they might have mentioned events in his premiership: mainly the Iraq War, but also European matters such as the euro and the Schengen agreement. John Monks thinks the biggest single reason for Blair’s failure to get the presidency was Iraq. Much of the EU leadership, while often admiring Blair, was strongly critical of British intervention in Iraq alongside US President George W. Bush, made worse by the fact that the intelligence about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction was unravelling just at the time that the manoeuvrings for the European Council presidency were taking place.

  Another factor damaged Blair: the fact that he did not cultivate ‘a strong left constituency’ in Europe, according to Monks. Most of his support came from the centre right, with whom he was more comfortable than with the social democrats. It looked bad that he had no support and few friends on what was nominally his side. ‘That’s the choice he made,’ says Monks.

  All these things played their part. But these were all known right from the start of the presidency debate, when Blair was clear favourite and almost no one seemed to want to stand in his way. What tipped the scales was that Blair was getting a reputation as a man who was more interested in money than in anything else. His Middle East contracts in particular alienated key political support in Europe, as well as reminding European politicians of the Iraq War; and there was a growing feeling that h
e was not performing well in his one big international job, as Middle East envoy.

  As Jean Quatremer put it in 2009, ‘He is blamed also for his inactivity as Quartet Representative in the Middle East, where he makes only rare appearances, despite the sumptuous fitting-out he has demanded for his place there.’ People were asking themselves, reports Quatremer, whether he was really interested in the European job, which ‘will bring him much less than he gets as a consultant’.5

  European politicians were still asking the half-humorous David Miliband question: can Europe afford Blair? Neither did Blair’s countrymen’s hostility help. Conservative foreign-affairs spokesman William Hague, who was to become Foreign Secretary the next year, told Europe’s decision makers that a Blair presidency was ‘the best way of turning Britain against the EU’, and it turns out to have been wise advice.

  Blair has not given up on a European future for himself. When we approached his office in 2013, the one thing it did give us, without our even needing to ask for them, was his two major speeches on the future of Europe, and they make very interesting reading. They are thoughtful, aimed at a European audience and studded with graceful compliments to Angela Merkel, whose opposition originally sank his hopes of the presidency.

  The first, delivered to the Council for the Future of Europe in Berlin on 29 October 2012, calls for a ‘grand bargain’ to rescue Europe, and a part of this would be a directly elected president:

  A Europe-wide election for the Presidency of the Commission or Council is the most direct way to involve the public. An election for a big post held by one person – this people can understand. The problem with the European Parliament is that though clearly democratically elected, my experience is people don’t feel close to their MEPs. This could change but only if the European Parliament and National parliaments interact far more closely.