A JOURNEY

by Blair, Tony

  But I’m afraid you get the general picture: I was pressing forward; Gordon was resisting. The whole thing was enervating and depressing. So not for the first or last time, I came back to the central dilemma: how to deal with it?

  By then, even more so than 2001, removing Gordon would have brought the entire building tumbling down around our ears. He had massive support in the party and had backing among powerful people in the media. As I fell out with Paul Dacre of the Daily Mail, he had fallen in with him. Rupert Murdoch liked Gordon. As Iraq divided me from the left papers, his own relationship with them blossomed. Serious people rated him, and for perfectly good reasons: he was an excellent Chancellor, he had a towering intellect, he had immense, even incredible energy and drive. He was a problem for me; but he wasn’t a significant problem to anyone else – well, some of the other Cabinet ministers maybe, but none were at that point powerful enough to take him on, even with me. He was also careful enough, as always, to put resistance on a Treasury and not an anti-reform footing.

  Besides, for all the resistance, the effect was to slow down and sometimes water down the process, but not to stop it. Each reform – painful though it was – got through. Manifestly it would have been easier and less painful if it had been done with his support; but he was a brake, not a brick wall.

  The alternative to removing him was the one I chose: to try to reach one last understanding with him; to try to reassure him that if he and I cooperated, if we truly shared the same agenda, I would go before the election and hand over to him.

  It was unwise because it was never going to work. It was almost certainly unwise also to use John Prescott as the go-between. I say this not because John was badly intentioned – on the contrary, he was only motivated by what he believed was good for the Labour Party – but the trouble was he thought the policy differences between us were immaterial. He thought it was essentially personal. Because John had his own deep reservations about New Labour, they blinded him to the fact that the differences went to the heart of what New Labour was about.

  To me, at least, though I was of course at points angry and dismayed at Gordon’s behaviour, it really wasn’t personal. The thing that mattered most was getting the New Labour programme through, proving that the Labour Party was indeed the party that could, because it had changed, change the public services and welfare state it had helped create; change them radically, make them secure because we had made them modern, right for the twenty-first century, right for a world that was an era away from 1945 in its thinking. I saw this as the supreme fulfilment of my mission: to show how progressive politics, itself modernised, could modernise the nation; to escape from Labour’s hide-bound and time-bound fixation with its past, and in doing so help the country escape from theirs. I thought I could see where Thatcherism was right and where it was severely and dangerously limited. I also believed – and this belief increased over time – that a new politics was opening up in which traditional distinctions between left and right were not so much blurred as often profoundly unhelpful in analysing either the past or the future.

  Was it reasonable for him to block measures simply because I would not yield to him the position of prime minister? Of course not. But then look at it from his point of view: constantly waiting; constantly fretting that I might sacrifice all political goodwill before the crown was his; constantly fearing the passage of time.

  Look at it from my point of view: by late 2004, I would have done more than seven years. The job had taken its toll. Iraq and September 11 had taken their toll. The fight with him had taken its toll. Peter gone, Alastair gone, Anji gone. The shadows had grown larger and darker.

  Suppose I am the block to his assumption not just of the position but also of his destiny? Suppose once he gets it, he changes, he relaxes, he breaks open the shell and takes wing? Surely what matters is the programme. Surely if he completes it after I have begun it, that is to the credit of us both. So if he will only agree to carry it through, why not put the burden down, get out, escape? Imagine the relief. Imagine the freedom. Contemplate a new life without that strain, stress and struggle. One that allows me to think; allows me to build; to study the religious philosophy that fascinates me, and then perhaps to build something even more important than what I was able to build in politics.

  It was a delusion, of course. Worse, it was an act of cowardice. I was worn down. Simple as that. Prosaic as that. Nothing grand about it. Nothing elevated. Not really to do with destiny, his or mine. Just born of the normal weakness of a normal person.

  In November 2003 we had agreed to meet at John’s flat in Admiralty House. A previous meeting down at Dorneywood had been pretty stormy and inconclusive. The vote on tuition fees was only weeks away and it remained very tight. My office were adamantly opposed to me having the dinner with John and Gordon. They guessed where it would lead. It wasn’t so much that they didn’t trust John or thought he was against me; they just thought that he thought we were interchangeable when we weren’t, and therefore they didn’t trust his instincts.

  I walked across Horse Guards Parade in Whitehall. It was a cold evening and the square was just about empty. I went in the side door and made my way up to the flat in the lift. It was a good-size apartment and well furnished, but as with all these grace-and-favour places, always to my mind a little anaemic. John and Pauline’s home in Hull – the old Salvation Army hostel – had much more character. But the flat was comfortable and convenient.

  I had a drink with John and we waited for Gordon, who came a little late. We sat down to dinner immediately. It was a rough conversation. After a time I asked John to leave to let us talk. I told Gordon bluntly of my concern: I was prepared to go – as I had often said, I had only wanted to do two terms – but the constant obstruction and wilful blocking of the reform programme had to stop. He denied, as ever, that he was obstructing, only really raising legitimate financial points. I said I needed to know that he would be one hundred per cent committed to the reform programme and would carry it through after I left. He said of course he would. John came back in. I said: I have made it clear I won’t serve a third term and will go before an election, but I need Gordon’s full and unconditional support. John said he thought that was sensible. We parted.

  I have put it down baldly. He would say: I received an assurance Tony would go. I would say: I received an assurance Gordon would cooperate and carry through the agenda. You can then debate who kept his word and who didn’t.

  Unfortunately, I have come in time to a different view. It was an assurance that should never have been asked or given. It was not our right to apportion power like that. Not our right. Not wise. Not sensible politically, let alone democratically.

  But more than that, there was an obvious flaw at the heart of it. To demand I give up the office in order to agree the programme is, if you think about it, a disqualification for the office. Whatever leadership is, that is the opposite of it. Likewise, to yield to the demand is an act of deep expedience. Now, I didn’t know what else to do. But the feelings on his part of entitlement – which should never enter into a discussion of the office of prime minister because no one is ‘entitled’ – burgeoned still further from that moment on. Maybe he would have got there anyway. Maybe he should have. But never through entitlement bestowed on one holder of the office by another.

  I don’t mean to make any grandiose point about democracy. There are frequent occasions in which a prime minister has a chosen successor. The point I make is more a political one; it’s just a thoroughly bad method to make the choice.

  Of course the obvious question, and one repeatedly put by friends and occasionally even by foes, is why didn’t I sack Gordon. A perfectly legitimate question with no very obvious answer.

  Sometimes my close staff would say to me: You don’t owe him what you think you owe him; your past friendship shouldn’t stand in the way.

  But it was neither obligation nor friendship that stopped me. It was that I still disagreed with the premise that hi
s absence from government was better than his presence within it. Given the nature of some of his behaviour, especially towards the end, that might seem an extraordinary thing to say. The answer to the question, ‘Would life have been easier if he was removed?’ seems so clear; however, the answer assumes that had he been sacked, everything else would have remained the same: i.e. it would have been the same world, minus Gordon.

  That’s not how politics works.

  In the end, a political leader has both to manage complex situations and to judge them. Gordon might be said to have been such a complex situation, and he had to be managed. And there is a crucial difference between political management and running, say, a company or a football team. A conversation I used to have with Alex Ferguson pinpointed this. ‘What would you do if you had a really difficult but brilliant player causing you problems?’ I would ask. ‘Get rid of them,’ he would reply. ‘And supposing after you got rid of them they were still in the dressing room, and in the squad?’ I would say. ‘That would be a different matter,’ he would reply, laughing.

  Gordon had enormous support within the party and the media. He was regarded by many as a great Chancellor, and by nearly all as a strong one. When it’s said that I should have sacked him, or demoted him, this takes no account of the fact that had I done so, the party and the government would have been severely and immediately destabilised, and his ascent to the office of prime minister would probably have been even faster. By 2004, but possibly well before then, the media – left and right – would have insisted that I had acted spitefully and wrongly. It is easy to say now, in the light of his tenure as prime minister, that I should have stopped it; at the time that would have been well nigh impossible. I would have had barely any support in any influential quarter for doing so; and some of those most critical of Gordon now, were singing a quite different tune then.

  However, that is not the reason I didn’t do it. If I had decided he really was unfit to remain as Chancellor I would have dismissed him, even if it had hastened my own dismissal. My failure to do so was not a lack of courage. Nor was it simply about managing a complex situation. It was because I believed, despite it all, despite my own feelings at times, that he was the best Chancellor for the country.

  I formed this judgement for two reasons. First, just as during the time when Gordon sheltered beneath my umbrella as prime minister the benign view of him was misguided in his favour, so now it is misguided to underestimate his huge strengths. The truth is that every time I considered who might replace him, I concluded he was still the best for the job. He gave the government ballast, solidity and strength. Many of his interventions were excellent, especially at an international level. At his best, his intellect and energy were vast and beneficial to the country. When, sometime in 2001, I think, there was talk of him taking an international job of some description, I reflected and decided the government would be weaker and not stronger without him.

  Later, when I ran through possible replacements, I still bumped up against the same uncomfortable but – I thought – incontrovertible – reality. He was head and shoulders above the others. Only towards the very end did the thoroughgoing New Labour people start to emerge who had sufficient seniority and experience to have taken his place.

  The second reason was that, though Gordon resisted many of the reforms and slowed some of them down, he didn’t prevent them. We did them. By the time I left, choice and competition were embedded in the NHS; academies were powering ahead; the crime bills had passed; tuition fees were in place; and welfare and pension reforms were formulated, if not introduced. These weren’t small items. They were major changes. In the final analysis he supported them. He wouldn’t have initiated them; but when it came to the crunch, he went along. They got through. And herein lies a lesson. There is a reason, apart from the principal one of New Labour, why the government I led was the first Labour government to win even two successive full terms, let alone three; and why it governed for more than double the length of the previous longest-serving Labour government. This is the part that even my closest advisers never understood; but as I used to tease them, these judgements are why I’m the leader and you’re not!

  Ultimately, though the relentless personal pressure from Gordon was wearing, it actually troubled me far less than they (or perhaps he) ever realised. And it was in many ways a far less toxic and deadly opposition than might have been the case.

  Because Gordon was the standard-bearer for dissent, his banner the one to which the internal critics naturally gathered, the natural opposition that progressive politics always contains was kept within bounds. Put him out and one of two things would have happened: either he would have been in a position, and long before ten years, to mount a successful challenge (or at least a challenge that would have been terminal in its consequences); or another banner, probably more to the left, possibly more destructive to the party’s long-term health, would have arisen. I came to the conclusion that having him inside and constrained was better than outside and let loose or, worse, becoming the figurehead of a far more damaging force well to the left.

  So was he difficult, at times maddening? Yes. But he was also strong, capable and brilliant, and those were qualities for which I never lost respect.

  There was another interesting factor that occurred to me. I had always taken the view that Margaret Thatcher, great prime minister though she was, should never have stood in the way of Michael Heseltine becoming leader. It was her determination to stop him that made her withdraw from the leadership contest following the challenge to her, and allow John Major to win. Heseltine had many flaws, but he was a big figure and would have been a far more potent force to deal with. He may also have stopped the Eurosceptic virus from taking over the Tories. So I always took the view that she allowed personal preference to stand in the way of her party’s true interests.

  I was set upon not repeating that mistake. I would be big enough to put aside personal bitterness and not stand in Gordon’s way. In so doing, I just made the same mistake differently. I too tried to choose my successor, and by the time I realised the choice was mistaken, it was too late.

  However, it did buy me peace. After the dinner, Gordon and I began talking again properly. Though it came about rather tortuously, by degrees he got George Mudie of the Treasury Select Committee and Nick Brown to stand down their opposition. We won the tuition-fee vote. The Hutton Report concluded favourably.

  In my own mind, I became more settled. I told no one in the office that I had agreed to stand down if Gordon cooperated, but naturally they guessed. Rather sensibly, instead of pushing back they just let matters take their course. Jonathan and Sally in particular were confident it wouldn’t happen. They understood my desire to leave, but thought it inconceivable that I would conclude that Gordon shared the same agenda. They were completely sure he didn’t.

  Meanwhile, events crowded in on us as thick and fast as ever. In March 2004, there were the terror attacks in Madrid, timed for the Spanish general election. Almost two hundred people died and over 2,000 were injured. It was a stark reminder that the terrorist movement remained alive and kicking. The memories of September 11 had dimmed, despite events such as the 2002 Bali bombings. The anti-terror laws passed in the first flush of fear after the attack in New York were now subject to a steady drumbeat of opposition from those who felt them inconsistent with Britain’s liberties. I was continually conscious of the fact that the terrorists would love to strike at Britain. We had more or less regular updates and briefings and were watching numerous cells of activity.

  In May, ten countries entered the EU. We had been staunch advocates of enlargement. It was a big moment. The Constitution for the EU had been agreed. With deep misgivings, I accepted we had to promise a referendum on it. We wouldn’t get the Constitution through the House of Lords without it, and even the Commons vote would have been in doubt. My statement met with predictably and justifiably raucous cheering from Tories, who knew my heart wasn’t in it.

&nb
sp; Jacques Chirac was also aggrieved as he felt it presented him with a real problem. In this, he was right. If Britain promised a referendum, it put enormous pressure on France to do the same. But truthfully, I couldn’t avoid it, and as Jack Straw insistently advocated, better to do it apparently willingly than be forced to do it by a vote. However, it reminded me how far I had to go to persuade British opinion of the merits of being in the mainstream of Europe. As ever, the difficulty was that the Eurosceptics were organised and had savage media backing; those in favour of a constructive attitude were disorganised and had the usual progressive media ‘backing’, i.e. spending more time criticising their own side than rebutting the propaganda of the other.

  For all that, though, we remained reasonably strong in Europe. We chose our battles carefully. I went out of my way to construct alliances that protected us against any potential French/German stitch-up, and, despite a profound disagreement over Iraq, kept lines open to Chirac and Schroeder.

  Gerhard Schroeder was a really tough cookie. Despite falling out over foreign policy, I generally admired his radicalism in domestic policy reform, sympathised with his problems with Oskar Lafontaine, his former Finance Minister who was now parked strongly on his left and soon to start a new party, and I thought Gerhard had real leadership qualities.

  As I say elsewhere, my motivation for bringing Britain into the centre of Europe is nothing to do with starry-eyed idealism, though I happen to share the European ideal; it is about naked national self-interest. In time, and a time fast approaching, no European nation, not even Germany, will be large enough to withstand pressure from the really big nations unless we bond together. United, we are strong. Divided, we are not only weak, but we also unbalance the geopolitical power game. Europe can play a role positioned not between but alongside the US and China, India, Russia, Brazil and the other emerging powers. In that role it can do a lot, not only for itself but also for the equilibrium of international politics. But if Europe’s countries are played off against each other – and major powers are swift to spot that opportunity – the downside is felt not just by us but by the international community as a whole.