by Blair, Tony
Cherie was away with her mum and Leo, taking a short break in Portugal.
Where the hell was Euan? I only knew he had been out with James. I phoned James’s mum, and got James’s number. I phoned him. He was not making a massive amount of sense, but the gist was he had last seen Euan wandering off in the general direction of Leicester Square.
I panicked. This is where being prime minister poses a few unusual challenges. I wanted to go and look for him. You do. You want to rush out and get busy. But I could hardly saunter up to Leicester Square and do a walkabout at midnight. I spoke to the policeman by the door at Downing Street, explained what had happened and threw myself on his mercy. Like a complete trooper, he announced he would go and search for Euan.
The next couple of hours were desperate. In my worry, I temporarily forgot the fact I had a huge programme on the next day. I was due to be down in Brighton, first to visit the Black Churches of Britain Conference, and then to do a special edition of Question Time, featuring just me, and centring on – yes, you guessed it – law and order and antisocial behaviour.
The wonderful Downing Street copper somehow tracked him down, and at around 1.30 a.m. he turned up with a very sorry-assed-looking Euan, plainly still the worse for wear, having been arrested near Leicester Square Tube station for underage drinking and being drunk in a public place. The circumstances and timing were not, shall we say, absolutely desirable.
I got no sleep that night. Around 2.30 a.m. Euan insisted on coming into my bed. Alternately, he would go into a mournful tirade of apology and then throw up. I loved him and felt sorry for him, but had a police cell been available I would have been all for moving him there.
Somehow, eventually, it was morning. The news had come out at roughly the time when Euan was being ushered back in the door of Downing Street. Police stations serve many admirable and necessary purposes, but they aren’t places to keep secrets. Alastair, who I had to speak to about press handling, thought the whole thing hilariously funny, going into what he thought was a very amusing riff about how Question Time would be, linking it without any sense of self-awareness to the debacle of cashpoint fines. I’m afraid I was completely beyond it all. I can make do with only a little sleep, but not no sleep. By some means – I suppose it must have been the train – I got down to Brighton and, clutching a prepared speech, went to where the Black Churches were having their conference.
I didn’t quite know what to expect. I didn’t know much about them then, though I came to know much more later in my time. In particular, I hadn’t realised how similar they were to American Black Churches – lively, inspirational, participational, all-singing and all-dancing.
When I walked in, there was a great roar of welcome. Of course, they all knew about Euan. It was big news. And it was meat and drink, if you’ll pardon the expression, to them. There was the prime minister’s son, falling from grace, yielding to the devil alcohol, straying from the righteous path; and here was the prime minister coming among them. Well, you can imagine.
It was like a revivalist convention. People were blessing and praying and calling out the Lord’s name. The main man, a total inspiration and lovely human being, got them all to hold hands and pray for me, for my family, for Euan. I did, at one moment, want to point out that, OK, he was drunk and shouldn’t have been, but all this seemed a little excessive – it’s not as if he was a proper criminal or anything.
But I didn’t and it wouldn’t have mattered a jot if I had. To them, the boy was lost and now was found, and that was all that mattered.
It certainly did revive me. I threw away my speech, got thoroughly into the spirit of it all and have to admit gave them as good as I was getting, cavorting shamelessly around the stage like some TV evangelist, doing a bit of whooping and hollering myself and having a ball.
By the time I got to the Question Time studio, I was fighting drunk on the Lord’s spirit. When the first questioner asked me a nasty question about whether my son’s antics didn’t make a mockery of my claim to be concerned about law and order or some such, I practically bopped him – verbally at any rate – and continued in that vein. ‘What did they slip into your tea at that religious thing?’ Alastair asked afterwards. ‘We should send you down there every week. On second thoughts, maybe not,’ he added.
We stopped off at a pub on the way back, much to the amusement of the locals. They were all thoroughly supportive of Euan and I heard in turn each customer’s tale of a similarly misspent youth. At moments like that, the British are very decent folk.
Once those various alarums and excursions were out of the way, Alan and I settled back down to the detail of the NHS Plan. We were having scores of meetings on it, several a week – examining, re-examining, re-re-examining over and again.
I realised that to sell it to a doubting and nervous party we would have to sweeten the pill of reform at points. Progressive parties can take their medicine and, once taken, feel and act better – but a spoonful of sugar helps it all go down. We had a number of positive factors to play with: the extra money; the extra staff: more NHS work to be secured from consultants in their starting years; more help for cancer and cardiac patients; an end to most mixed-sex wards; an increase in some types of hospital bed.
In return, we were opening up all the contracts of the professionals for renegotiation; breaching new ground with the private sector; changing the way the service worked to make it far more user-friendly; and, in essence, prefiguring an NHS that started to import twenty-first-century business concepts into the heart of the service.
Rereading it now, I can see all its limitations. Today it would be considered less than bold. And there were errors in implementation, to be sure. We paid more for the consultants’ and GPs’ contracts than strictly necessary (this later became a strong bone of contention with the Treasury), but in the long run, I considered it worth it. We set in place tracks of reform that in time would carry the system to transformational change. So: GP contracts were generous, but when we put the new contract into legislation, we inserted the right to open up local GP monopolies to competition. Nurses were given far more power; old demarcations between junior and senior doctors were collapsed.
The door was edged open for the private sector. The concept which, in time, was to result in foundation hospitals was introduced. And the whole terminology – booked appointments, minimum guarantees of service, freedoms to innovate – spoke of a coming culture of change, oriented to treating the NHS like a business with customers, as well as a service with patients.
For me, the process was itself extraordinarily revealing and educative. I started to find my proper points of reference when thinking of reform; began to articulate the concepts more clearly; assumed a more substantial confidence in the direction of change. I stopped thinking of it as a gamble with questionable empirical evidence, and started realising it was a clear mission whose challenge lay not in whether it was right, but in how it was carried through.
I date from that time, too, my clear break with the thinking that had dominated even New Labour policy up to then: that the public and private sectors operated in different spheres according to different principles. New Labour had indeed weaned the party off its hostility to the private sector, but now we moved on from the 1990s version of New Labour to something more consistent with a twenty-first-century mindset.
The truth was that the whole distinction between public and private sector was bogus at all points other than one: a service you paid for; and one you got free. That point is obviously central – it defines public service. But it doesn’t define how it is run, managed and operated. In other words, that point is critical, but at all other points, the same rules apply for public and private sector alike, and those points matter enormously.
For a public service, even one like the NHS, in the negotiation of contracts for buildings, IT equipment, technology, it is like a business. When it cuts costs, as it should if it can, it is like a business. When it employs or fires people, it is li
ke a business. When it seeks to innovate, it is like a business.
So I began to look for ways, all ways, of getting business ideas into public service practice. Just as the private sector had moved from mass production and standard items to just-in-time, customised products, so should public services. Just as people could shift custom if one company’s service was better than others, so should customers of public services be able to do so. Just as private sector service was driven by risk-taking and innovation, so we should be freeing up the front line of public services to do the same.
I also came to have a sense, at times too obvious, of impatience with the view that all such talk was a betrayal of public service ethos. It seemed to me perfectly clear that if the status quo resulted in a poor service, then that was the true betrayal of that ethos; and so, if the poor service arose from the wrong structure, the structure had to change. In any event, I could see that so much of the language of defending ‘our public services’ was just obscurantist propaganda designed to dress up a vested interest in the garb of the public interest.
We took care in how we presented the plan, which was scheduled for launch at the end of July, just before the recess. I always liked to announce a few big things before the long summer recess.
It can be up to three months. Robin Cook – in his reforming zeal when Leader of the House of Commons – tried to shorten it, a proposal in which the media delighted and at which MPs groaned. Personally, I loved the long summer break. It gave everyone space to contemplate, holiday, work it all out and get in shape for the party conference season. Life is so frenetic when Parliament is sitting. And, of course, the media environment in which ministers work is so incredibly altered, with tons more media obligations. The pace of modern politics is breakneck, so a long recess really helps.
But the MPs need to be sent off for summer with a clear strategy. Hence, the end of July was always a busy time, as busy as I could make it.
Before we got to the NHS Plan we had a stack of other things to do. We presented our Annual Report as a government to Parliament. This was one of our wackier innovations. The idea was entirely sensible: go through what the government had said it would do, and what it had done during the year. A sort of State of the Union address.
I finally binned it after the 2000 Report which I presented in mid-July to Parliament. It was a bit rushed. We ticked off the items we had achieved. Except some we ticked, we hadn’t done. There was a memorable so-called achievement we listed and ticked off, which was the building of a new sports stadium in Sheffield. The only problem was it didn’t exist. William Hague gave me a real old drubbing. Peter Brooke, a wonderful old Tory grandee, got up and asked what was the purpose of the photograph on page so-and-so, which turned out to be a picture of a packet of contraceptive pills. Tricky one to answer, that. Anyway, some ideas work, some don’t. This didn’t.
I decided that by bending over and inviting people to come and kick the government’s backside we weren’t advancing the cause of human progress much, and certainly not the cause of Her Majesty’s Government. So although binning the idea generated a certain amount of additional embarrassment, I was more than happy to suffer it to save a perpetual hiding being handed out each year.
On 27 July 2000, I presented the NHS Plan. It went well. There was enough to satisfy the backbenchers that it was a Labour document. And we had put down the markers for New Labour.
Around the same time, Andrew Adonis and I first formulated the academy idea for schools. It was still in its early stages, but the idea had germinated. It was based, in part, on the old Tory policy of independent technical colleges, but they had only created ten of them and then sort of shelved the policy. However, it aligned neatly with our thinking elsewhere: to give schools independence, to set them free from the local authority system of hands-on control; and to let them innovate, including in how they employed staff.
The public service and welfare reform agenda for the second term was gradually becoming defined. As we departed for the recess, I was in a reasonably jolly mood. I was no longer feeling my way, but finding it.
However, one cloud was gathering, and starting to spread with a rather deep shade of darkness. Gordon was managing the economy with all his power and skill, and that was no small thing – it gave the whole government ballast and weight – but there was a worrying pattern emerging that was more than conventional Treasury caution. It was clear that the direction of reform was not shared; not agreed; and not much liked. I noticed that the term ‘marketisation’ of public services started to be used in discussions between us, especially when his adviser Ed Balls was involved, and the term was not meant as a compliment.
The cloud did not obscure the sun or sky at that point, but it made me uneasy. I wanted a radical manifesto, and so did he – but did the term ‘radical’ mean the same thing to each of us? And how would he feel about the second term and the succession? An election was less than a year away if we were to go four years, the right time for a government which believes it can win again.
But, as I set off down to Tuscany and then to the Ariège in France, I felt we were in good shape to win a second term and win it well. Little Leo was proving a complete, unalloyed blessing: gorgeous, happy, a joy to others and to himself. It was weird having a small baby again; and weirder still in Downing Street. But right from the off, he was carried from room to room, from the switchboard to the foreign policy unit, a pocket-size piece of benign innocence existing in the maelstrom of the world-weary activities of government.
In the beautiful and venerable garden of the Strozzis’ palazzo in Tuscany, I wondered what the intervening months would hold in store. My conjecture ranged widely. But not for one moment did it stray into the realms of floods, fuel protests and foot-and-mouth disease. Just as well, really.
TEN
MANAGING CRISES
I left for holiday at the end of July with the focus on public service reform. I came back at the end of August and found naturally that the focus had shifted to the thought that an election could be anticipated in May 2001; this was the run-up. The moment you begin a pre-election period, everything starts to be shaped around the election. The focus alters. The mind starts to think politically; the perpetual analysis and reanalysis about public sector reform gets displaced by polls, focus groups, anecdotal evidence of public opinion; 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; and the wheels of the election machine start to turn.
For most of the party, the upcoming campaign would be centred on one simple ambition: to be the first ever Labour government to win two successive terms in office. For me, it was going to be about winning a mandate for more fundamental change. For me, the arguments about direction were long settled. The first term had proved we could govern. The second term had to be about what we were governing for: getting beyond the old established British ways, based in my eyes on a vision of the country no longer possible or desirable, and making us fit for the future. My boundless, at times rather manic lust for modernisation could occasionally be misdirected, but I was sure the basic thrust was correct: we needed to modernise the whole idea of the 1945 welfare state and public services, out-of-date systems of law and order and immigration, and our view of our role in the world. We had to use the twenty-first century as an occasion to renew ourselves as a nation. Thatcher had done the right thing in liberating enterprise and industry, but in becoming so obsessed with Euroscepticism, I felt she had still indulged the country in a view of itself that was simply no longer compatible with where we needed to be now, in this the year of the millennium.
I hadn’t by any means worked out all the right policy answers, but I had worked out the crucial failing of the first term: the mistaken view that raising standards and performance could be separated from structural reform. This was true virtually across the board; and especially so in the public services. Above all, we had to div
est power away from the dominant interest groups, unions and associations, and put it into the hands of people, the consumer, the parent, the patient, the user.
So I came back after a long and good holiday rested, but also fidgety and anxious. I had to frame the political argument right to win. I had to frame our manifesto right to give ourselves a proper mandate for proper change. We had hoarded our political capital in the first term. We had to keep it high to win again and win big. But I knew the moment was fast coming when I would have to spend it. And by now, if I had ever been in any doubt at the beginning, I knew that this would mean a second term that was an awful lot tougher, more challenging and less popular than the first.
As if to bring this home to me, from the moment I was back until nine months later when we won the election, I was embroiled in the most bizarre mixture of divine and man-made crises.
Within hours of my return, I was posed one of those extraordinarily sensitive and difficult decisions that can occur at any time and frequently come in batches. The British troops in Sierra Leone had been brilliant, and were successfully reasserting the control of the democratic government, but sadly a group of soldiers from the Royal Irish Regiment caught up in the fighting had been kidnapped by the RUF. We received intelligence as to where they were. Charles Guthrie asked to see me urgently in my den in Downing Street. He told me that they could mount an SAS rescue operation.
As ever with Charles, he had the courage to recommend a course of action rather than simply leave the decision to me, but he warned me that casualties were likely. The RUF are crazy and well-armed people, he explained, and there is a risk both to the hostages and to the rescue force. The alternative was to continue trying to negotiate and hope somehow we could prise them out through that route. We could probably buy them out, but we both quickly agreed that would be a disastrous signal which would only provoke a rash of copycat kidnappings.
