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CHAPTER FIFTEEN
A ROUTE BACK TO BRITISH POLITICS
‘The party people, exiled for years in the Siberia of Party drudgery far from the centre of government, suddenly re-emerge in the halls of the Kremlin with renewed self-importance.’
– TONY BLAIR ON THE LABOUR PARTY IN HIS AUTOBIOGRAPHY, A JOURNEY.
Tony Blair felt the party forced him out to make room for Gordon Brown. Nonetheless, Labour was the political vehicle that had taken him to the top, and, if he wished to continue to be involved in British politics, it was the only vehicle he could credibly use.
But it was awkward. His autobiography, A Journey, records that he once wrote to the then Liberal leader Paddy Ashdown of ‘our cavalier attitude towards our parties’. It also records that, in order ‘to circumvent’ his party, ‘what I had done was construct an alliance between myself and the public.’ He claimed a direct emotional attachment with the people, which declined towards the end of his premiership: ‘For me and for the people, this was sad. My relationship with them had always been more intense, more emotional, if that’s the right word, than the normal relationship between leader and nation.’ And he summed up his view of the party workers who had made his premiership possible in these words: ‘The party people, exiled for years in the Siberia of Party drudgery far from the centre of government, suddenly re-emerge in the halls of the Kremlin with renewed self-importance.’1
And he was by then a very divisive figure in Labour Party politics. There are those who almost idolise him, whom we will call the Blairites, and there are those who loathe him; and there are not many in between. In 2007 the supporters of the new Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, mostly came into the category of those who loathe Blair, for that year the Blair–Brown wars reached their crescendo.
However bad you think the Blair–Brown wars were, they were probably worse, and they are still going on. In 2013 Brown’s one-time spin doctor Damien McBride published his memoirs, and it was remarkable to see how quickly they could be reignited, with Blair and Brown supporters using the occasion to fight their old battles in public one more time.
Blair himself hasn’t forgotten or forgiven. There’s a brief sentence – blink and you could miss it – in his autobiography that speaks eloquently of his still-burning fury and resentment. Writing of the very early 1980s, before he became an MP, he says he wrote occasional articles for the New Statesman, ‘then a serious political magazine.’2 Why that intrusive, sneering little word ‘then’? Because when Blair was leader, the NS was bought by Geoffrey Robinson, and was said to have moved into the Brown camp (though it wasn’t obvious from its content). That one little word that he couldn’t resist tells you that his resentment at the magazine’s apostasy is still red and raw.
Blair privately hoped that a Blairite might stand successfully against Brown in 2007; his old ally Peter Mandelson, then European Trade Commissioner, made it publicly clear that he considered Brown unfit to be Prime Minister. Charles Clarke and John Reid were telling Blair not to hurry out. Both saw themselves as possible challengers to Brown.
But Blair’s premiership was doomed. His alienation from his party was complete. He told the chat-show host Michael Parkinson on television that God and history would judge him over Iraq, which infuriated Labour people who thought the electorate and his party ought to be the judges to whom a prime minister defers. He was no longer even an electoral asset; in fact the polls indicated that he had become an electoral liability.
He and Brown were constantly sniping at each other, retreating, withdrawing, publicly telling the world that all was peace and privately encouraging their lieutenants to say damaging things about each other. There was a stream of non-attributable venom directed at Brown the Chancellor from ‘ministers close to Tony Blair’ and ‘longstanding friends of the Prime Minister’ and ‘former cabinet ministers’ appearing under the bylines of journalists whom insiders knew to have particularly good contacts in Blairite circles, such as Patrick Wintour of the Guardian and Andrew Grice of the Independent.
Ministers started to resign, and more resignations were threatened. Labour MPs were panicking about the polling evidence, which showed that a Blair-led Labour Party was electorally doomed next time.
The Blairites mounted a restless search for a candidate called Notgordon Brown. (Ask ‘a cabinet minister close to the Prime Minister’ whom he wanted to see as leader and he’d reply, ‘Notgordon Brown.’) As we mentioned earlier, at one point Blair was grooming Charles Clarke for the role – he told Clarke this, according to Clarke’s interview with the Daily Telegraph’s Charles Moore – but the plan fell apart when Clarke was forced to resign as Home Secretary. In 2007 the mantle seemed to have fallen on David Miliband, but he, after a few days’ indecision, decided not to run against Brown.
So, as long as Brown led his party, Blair’s only option was to stay right out of domestic politics – and he did. But Brown resigned after losing the 2010 election. Blairite hopes then rested on David Miliband getting the job, but Miliband lost, narrowly and surprisingly, to his brother Ed – partly because David was seen as too close to Blair. Ed had been close to Brown, and was thought to hold views that were more traditionally Labour than Blair could stomach; even worse, he was thought to be close to the unions.
Blair’s hoped-for smooth passage back under a David Miliband leadership was no longer possible. He had a number of options, none of them very attractive. He could stay right out of domestic politics, as he had done under Brown, which was probably what Ed Miliband would have liked best. He could throw in his lot wholeheartedly with the new leadership, supporting it to the hilt and biting his tongue when it did something of which he disapproved, which is what former party leaders are supposed to do, and what Neil Kinnock had done for Blair himself. He has not been able to bring himself to do this, presumably because he feels sure that the Blairite flame is not safe in Ed Miliband’s hands.
He could fight openly, hoping to force Miliband out before the 2015 general election, or force him out after electoral defeat, giving the Blairites another chance to install a leader in whose hands the legacy would be safe. Or, if Miliband seemed likely to survive and perhaps lead Labour to victory in 2015, he could work to ensure that the new Prime Minister would be tethered by a Parliamentary Labour Party consisting overwhelmingly of Blair loyalists.
The great untold story of the Ed Miliband years is that Blair chose to fight. The battle is mostly discreetly hidden from view, but there is war on the ground, carefully shielded from public gaze. Just occasionally – as in Falkirk in 2013 – it explodes into the media; and just occasionally the two men have a public row, no less spectacular because of the careful, emollient-sounding words in which it is clothed.
September 2013 was a month of coded warfare between Blair and Miliband. At the start of September 2013 Ed Miliband did something few opposition leaders ever get to do: he changed the course of events. If Miliband had not decided unexpectedly to oppose David Cameron’s proposed military action over the use of chemical weapons in Syria, Britain and the USA would have begun a bombing campaign against Assad, and there is a good chance that this would have escalated into boots on the ground. By the time it became apparent that ISIS was a far greater threat than Assad, we would have been committed to destroying Assad.
Blair’s criticism, though expressed in weary, more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger tones, was clear, unambiguous and intended to be damaging. When, a couple of days later, negotiations that had the potential to prevent the use of chemical weapons in Syria started to look as though they might succeed, Blair’s voice was not heard.
When, towards the end of September 2013, Miliband called for the government to stand up to the energy companies, who were imposing huge price rises at the start of the winter, the former Conservative Prime Minister John Major supported him, telling a parliamentary pr
ess gallery lunch, ‘Governments should exist to protect people, not institutions. We’ll probably have a very cold winter, and it is not acceptable to me, and ought not to be acceptable to anyone, that many people are going to have to choose between keeping warm and eating.’3
For Miliband, it must to some extent have made up for the fact that his own former party leader and Prime Minister, Tony Blair, was a great deal less helpful to him than Major. Blair could easily have declined to comment. Instead, he went out of his way to make it clear he thought that Miliband was being irresponsible, silkily implying to journalists that it would be unhelpful to Miliband if he spoke his mind.
Blair told Sky News, ‘I’m not going to comment on the policy. He’s got the job of being leader of the Opposition. I did that job for three years. I know how tough it is. I’m not going to get in his way.’ He could very easily not have spoken, had he wanted not to damage Miliband.4
And, as so often happened when they were in government together, Peter Mandelson came out and said the things that Blair wished it to be understood that he thought. He said, ‘I believe that perceptions of Labour policy are in danger of being taken backwards.’
Blair may not have said these words, but the same week as Mandelson said them, Blair wrote in the New Statesman as a more general comment on Miliband:
Parts of the political landscape that had been cast in shadow for some years, at least under New Labour and the first years of coalition government, are illuminated in sharp relief. The Conservative Party is back clothing itself in the mantle of fiscal responsibility, buttressed by moves against ‘benefit scroungers’, immigrants squeezing out British workers and – of course – Labour profligacy. The Labour Party is back as the party opposing ‘Tory cuts’, highlighting the cruel consequences of the Conservative policies on welfare and representing the disadvantaged and vulnerable … The ease with which it can settle back into its old territory of defending the status quo, allying itself, even anchoring itself, to the interests that will passionately and often justly oppose what the government is doing, is so apparently rewarding, that the exercise of political will lies not in going there, but in resisting the temptation to go there.5
For once, Miliband was goaded into a reply:
As he was the first to recognise, politics always has to move on to cope with new challenges and different circumstances. For example, on immigration, Labour is learning lessons about the mistakes in office and crafting an immigration policy that will make Britain’s diversity work for all not just a few. It is by challenging old ways of doing things, showing we have understood what we did right and wrong during our time in office that One Nation Labour will win back people’s trust.
As September closed, Blair got in a last dig, before an invited audience of movers and shakers at the influential Mile End Group at Queen Mary College, London, in the presence of a number of spies, including the old Libyan hand Sir Mark Allen. In the chair was John Rentoul of the Independent. Rentoul once wrote a fairly good biography of Blair, but in recent years his approach to the former Prime Minister has become almost fawning.
Here Blair mused that it was a mistake for people to rise to the top having spent their lives in politics, with no experience of the ‘wider world’. He did not mention Ed Miliband by name, but no one was in any doubt whom this was aimed at.
These examples, Blair might argue, are all occasions when he felt very strongly that Labour’s leader had got it wrong, and felt he must say so. What happens, therefore, when he has the chance to give Ed Miliband a little support in a tight spot on a matter where he actually does support the Labour leader? Just such a chance turned up towards the end of 2013, when the Daily Mail launched its bitter attack on Miliband’s father Ralph, calling him – untruthfully – ‘The man who hated Britain’.6
Miliband took the unusual, and brave, decision to counterattack, rather than do what most politicians do in the face of unfair media onslaughts, which is lie low and hope not too much of the dirt sticks to them. He was widely supported across the political spectrum, including by Prime Minister David Cameron.
This was an area where Blair could have given Miliband much-needed support with a good conscience. But nothing was heard from Tony Blair. Was this simply an oversight? One journalist, Ian Hernon of Tribune, thought he would find out; he asked Blair’s press office if Tribune could get a statement from him about the Mail’s slur on Miliband’s dad. He was told that the former Prime Minister had no comment to make.
As often happens, the Blairites said the things Blair only implied. Charles Clarke says that ‘some people find Ed Miliband weird and geeky’ and that he has failed to express clear policies. It’s code for ‘He’s not a proper Blairite’.
When Blair was giving his support and encouragement to former News of the World editor Rebekah Brooks in her hour of need during the phone hacking trial, Ed Miliband was calling for her resignation.
Mostly, however, the battleground is the selection conferences up and down the country where the men and women who will be Labour MPs after 2015 are chosen. On one side are the Blairites, working mainly through the New Labour pressure group Progress. On the other side are Miliband’s friends as well as the trade unions and the Left.
Every stage of these selections is a battle. First you have to get the data – the names and addresses of the local party activists who will make the choice. Those with good connections get the data first, and give themselves a head start. Then you have to use it effectively. And all the time you have to be watchful lest your enemies are getting or using the data in a way that might be illegal, against party rules or capable of being made to look grubby.
Progress has proved itself a tactical master in these battles. ‘We’re doing it too, but Progress is well ahead of us,’ we were told by one of the left’s most prominent fixers. ‘In this Parliament so far [to December 2013] Progress has won 35 to 40 per cent of the winnable seats that have selected a candidate. The trade unions and the left have been less successful. We are not organised in the same way. Progress have staff and contacts and money and a very effective network.’
THE POWER OF PROGRESS
One of Progress’s great assets is that it controls Labour Students – a Labour-affiliated body. But its biggest asset by far is money. ‘If you are well-funded and have some young supporters with time and energy, you can make the most of the three leaflets you are allowed, for example targeting them carefully and producing different ones for each ward,’ we were told. ‘Progress leaflets are beautifully produced by PR consultancies.’
Getting a local party membership list in advance often provides a crucial advantage, and being connected to Progress delivers this advantage in many constituencies.
Progress is easily the most effective of the organisations seeking to influence Labour, and the main reason for this is that it is, by a very long way, the richest. David Sainsbury is funding it at the rate of about £260,000 a year. The next-biggest donors – a long way down – are the British Private Equity and Venture Capital Association (BVCA), the Advertising Association, the Childcare Voucher Providers Association, Facebook, PricewaterhouseCoopers and Sovereign Strategy. Smaller sums – less than £5,000 a year – come from Labour Friends of Israel and the European Azerbaijan Society. Azerbaijan is a major Tony Blair Associates client, and the money from the society was spent on a rally praising Azerbaijan and its oil business at Labour’s 2012 conference.
Other donors include Bell Pottinger, a lobbying firm that has worked on behalf of the government of Bahrain. After seven people died following a police clampdown early in 2011, protesters gathered outside Bell Pottinger’s London office with placards reading, ‘You can’t spin the unspinnable’. Bahrain isn’t the only authoritarian regime Bell Pottinger has represented in recent years. Its clients include Yemen, Sri Lanka and Belarus.
According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, ‘Bell Pottinger boasted to undercover Bureau journalists that it helped engineer the lifting of an EU trave
l ban on the man dubbed “Europe’s last dictator”’ – the dictator of Belarus. In recent years, Labour Ministers and MPs, including Douglas Alexander, have condemned the dictatorship in Minsk.
The European Azerbaijan Society is London-based and is one of the slickest and best-funded lobbying operations anywhere in Europe. It works for a brutal dictatorship that has little concern for freedom of expression or human rights, according to the freedom-of-speech organisation Index on Censorship and Human Rights Watch.
For example, Azerbaijan investigative reporter Khadija Ismayilova received a collection of photographs through the post that appeared to show her having sex with a man. Attached was a note warning her to ‘behave’ or she would be ‘defamed’.
Her crime was to use the Right to Obtain Information law to get documents about corruption in Azerbaijan, and expose the business interests of President Aliyev’s daughter.
They assumed – Ismayilova told journalists in London at the Frontline Club – that, like some other journalists who have suffered similar blackmail campaigns, she would temper her reports. But Ismayilova went public with her story. Days later, on 14 March 2012, an intimate video of Ismayilova filmed by a hidden camera was posted to the Internet. Honour killings still take place in Azerbaijan and the authorities knew that Ismayilova’s life could be in serious danger.
‘The current state of freedom of expression in Azerbaijan is alarming, as the cycle of violence against journalists and impunity for their attackers continues,’ says a report from the London-based human-rights organisation Article 19. ‘Journalists, bloggers, human rights defenders and political and civic activists face increasing pressure, harassment and interference from the authorities; and many who express opinions critical of the authorities – whether through traditional media, online, or by taking to the streets in protest – find themselves imprisoned or otherwise targeted in retaliation.’
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