by Tom Bower
Brown’s more serious problem was the Independent Learning Accounts (ILAs), which provided government grants for free adult education. In May 2001, the government handed out £273 million to a million of these accounts. By September, 2.5 million of them had received over £500 million and 8,910 companies were registered to provide the education. Morris’s senior officials rejoiced, unaware that those responsible for the programme had become suspicious that the ILAs were a honeypot for fraudsters, with 6,000 applications being received from just one address. By then, at least £100 million had been lost to fraud. The programme was suspended. Some ministers blamed their officials for naivety; others said that the fraud showed that Labour could not trust the civil servants, who lacked any incentive to tell the truth. Blair despaired that here was yet another example of Whitehall’s failure to deliver. At the same time, in his familiar language, he wanted to cast aside cautious government and, with ‘radical thinking’, drive ‘modernisation’ from the centre. His tangled message for the annual meeting of the trade unions would be that they should end their ‘outdated thinking’, especially those trade unionists who said that ‘education is for children, not for profit’.
On 11 September 2001, Blair arrived in Brighton to address the TUC Congress. His sour relationship with the unions, he knew, was unlikely to have been altered by the election victory. John Edmonds, the union leader for local authority workers, had predicted in that morning’s newspapers ‘a bumpy ride. This is Tony Blair’s last chance to step back from the brink.’ Blair’s speech advocating public-service reform was certain to reinforce their mutual dislike. His loyal supporter Patricia Hewitt, he knew, had been received in sullen silence the previous day. Blair did not enjoy the twists and turns of his relationship with the unions. ‘They could not understand why I was doing what I was doing, and I could not understand why they could not see it was the way of the future,’ he would write.
He had built his career on attacking the unions, challenging the closed shop in 1989, then winning the vote to abolish Clause Four. Rewriting that clause in modern terms, replacing the pledge for mass nationalisation of industry with a meaningless promise to welcome ‘power, wealth and opportunity in the hands of the many, not the few’, was Blair’s coup against the party. His polished revision rebuked the committed socialists but preserved a fig leaf to distinguish Labour from the Tories. To the Congress’s additional dismay, he had refused to repeal Thatcher’s anti-union laws and defied those left-wingers pledged to save the party’s soul. To continue fighting the class war, Blair retorted, was pointless. He had won the leadership with 57 per cent of the total vote, without needing the unions’ support. Ever since that victory, he was convinced that with unwavering willpower he would always triumph.
Just after his first general-election victory, he had spelled out in the same hall in Brighton his belief that the unions were partly to blame for preventing the modernisation of Britain. In 2001, his prepared speech again defined himself against those stubborn forces of conservatism within the Labour Party.
Just before he was due to step on stage, two hijacked passenger planes crashed into the Twin Towers in south Manhattan. A Pearl Harbor moment for America would change Blair’s destiny for ever. Abandoning his speech, he headed back to London on a commuter train. During the hour-long journey, he appeared transformed, even traumatised. The warnings by the intelligence services after the recent fatal Islamic terrorist attacks in Kenya and Aden had proven to be understated. The world, he convinced himself, had fundamentally changed on his watch. Islam was no longer a benign religion but one that was being usurped by extremists to destroy Western values. In the battle between good and evil, his responsibility now was to save civilisation. Rather than contemplate how normality might be restored, he was planning to embark on a worldwide crusade.
London felt eerie as Blair was rushed to Downing Street to prepare a speech committing him to stand alongside President Bush. ‘It was not America alone who was the target,’ he later wrote, ‘but all of us who shared the same values. It was war. It had to be fought and won. It was a battle for and about the ideas and values that would shape the twenty-first century.’ Unmentioned was his new conviction about the threat from Islamic fundamentalists.
In years to come, he would admit his misunderstanding of Islam but would deny that his ignorance was to blame for his response. ‘The only course’, he wrote, ‘is to follow instinct and belief.’ Even after reflecting for nine years, Blair ignored the importance of acting on the basis of expert knowledge gained through reading and listening. During the summer of 2001, he had read the Koran rather than a series of new books describing recent conflicts in the Middle East. The nuances of the schism between Sunnis and Shiites and the tribal antagonisms embittering relations across the Muslim world were not reflected in the Koran. Blair never questioned the inherent dangers of relying on ‘instinct and belief’.
He repeated his view that this was ‘an attack on America but also an attack on our values’ to the group awaiting him in the Cobra room. ‘We shall support America in anything they do,’ he told them. The senior military officer present was surprised by Blair’s ‘excited rant’ and welcomed Blunkett’s intervention – ‘Provided we check the intelligence first.’ Blair ignored his home secretary, and no one else spoke. That night, he publicly committed Britain to ‘stand shoulder to shoulder with our American friends in this hour of tragedy, and we, like them, will not rest until this evil is driven from our world’. The label of ‘evil’ was not fixed on any one person in particular. ‘Are we bombing Baghdad?’ an official in Downing Street asked the liaison officer in the Ministry of Defence.
Elsewhere in Westminster that day, Jo Moore, the special adviser trusted by Stephen Byers at the DTI, sent out an email: ‘It’s now a very good day to get out anything we want to bury. Councillors’ expenses?’ Her email was later leaked to the media. Also that day, Byers quietly made a series of telephone calls to begin the appointment of administrators for Railtrack, the privately owned and solvent company whose unknowing shareholders were about to lose their money.
On the same day, Blair called Brown to discuss the crisis. ‘When are you resigning?’ was Brown’s response. Speechless, Blair slammed down the phone.
Within twenty-four hours, there was no doubt that the attack had been plotted by Osama bin Laden, the leader of al-Qaeda, from his base in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. In Blair’s conversation with Bush on 14 September about those responsible, the American president mentioned Iraq’s possible relationship with al-Qaeda, which had never previously been associated with the country. At the time, Downing Street’s spokesman relayed Blair’s reply that they would need to find the evidence for that link, and the immediate focus should be on the Taliban. In 2010, Blair admitted that ‘at the forefront of my mind’ immediately after 9/11 was his fear that terrorist groups would gain possession of weapons of mass destruction.
One of the sources of his conflation of Osama bin Laden, international Islamic terrorism, WMDs and Iraq was Richard Dearlove. Accompanied by the MI6 chief during his flights around Europe as the self-appointed broker gathering support for American retaliation in the newly named ‘war against terror’, Blair took in Dearlove’s conviction that Iraq possessed WMDs. He also heard that a suicide bomber could possibly trigger a nuclear explosion in London. Dearlove’s warnings were not dismissed. On the contrary, he was telling the prime minister what he expected to hear and, in the can-do manner beloved by Blair, highlighting his new priority of killing bin Laden.
On the morning of 20 September, just before flying to New York for a memorial ceremony for the 3,000 victims of the attack, Blair attended the regular education stock-take in Downing Street. ‘I might be preoccupied for a while,’ he told the small group, ‘but I don’t want you to forget how important education is for me.’ In an emotional farewell, everyone shook his hand in what the education department’s permanent secretary David Normington would call ‘a heart-stopping moment’.
/> During the flight, accompanying journalists were informed that Blair was reading the Koran. Taut and sombre, he later told them that he bore a ‘huge and heavy responsibility’. At the same time, Foreign Office officials were working hard to persuade Bush to emphasise that Afghanistan was the danger, not Iraq. They took comfort from the fact that the president’s speech to Congress on 21 September avoided linking Iraq with the New York massacre. Cool heads cut through the emotion.
Twelve hours later, raw passion convulsed the congregation in New York as they listened to the address, which included a message from the Queen to the bereaved: ‘Grief is the price we pay for love.’
TWENTY-TWO
Hither and Dither
* * *
Towards the end of November 2001, Blair was discussing with his foreign-affairs advisers the bombing campaign against the Taliban in Afghanistan. A small contingent of British SAS soldiers was supporting the American special forces, who were guiding the US air force’s bombing raids and cruise missiles. Out of the blue, he asked, ‘Is there any danger that America will bomb Iraq?’
‘No,’ was the unanimous reply.
Blair’s question was surprising. No one had found a link between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. ‘I’d like a strategy paper on Iraq,’ he concluded.
Unknown to those advisers, Blair had heard from President Bush that in January he would name Iraq as one of the ‘axis of evil’ countries whose reigning government should be toppled. He was not entirely surprised. The Iraq Liberation Act passed by Congress in 1998 empowered the president to remove Saddam, and ever since their meeting in February the two men had been discussing the continued risk of Iraq developing WMDs, despite the Anglo-American bombing raids. Blair knew that the mood in Washington had changed fundamentally. Before 9/11, American policy had been to contain dangerous dictators, but Bush now supported confronting them.
Blair’s thoughts since September had moved in the same direction. An ideological war, he concluded, had broken out, a ‘fundamental struggle for the mind, heart and soul of Islam’. More accurately, he reduced the conflict to ‘our values versus theirs’. As he had told his party conference later that month, ‘There is no compromise possible with such people – just a choice: defeat it or be defeated by it.’ He persuaded himself that the battle of values ‘required interventions deep into the affairs of other nations’, as well as ‘nation-building’ to promote democracy and freedom. ‘I thought we had to provide a comprehensive strategy for changing the world,’ he would write. ‘Not fighting until victory would have been cowardice.’ The ‘force for good’ would wipe terrorism and all the other evils off the face of the earth. Purposefully, he offered to ‘lead the world’ in restoring order and building a ‘coalition against terror’. ‘Mission creep and we haven’t even started,’ Simon Jenkins had noticed just two weeks after the attack. The same government that could not prevent a few handfuls of asylum-seekers creeping through Dover was ready to wage a global war against terror.
Even the White House noted that Blair was more hawkish than its president. Only later did Blair acknowledge, ‘I misunderstood the depth of the challenge.’ At that moment he was fired up to take on all his foes, and his speech to the party conference included among the villains both those who denied global warming and trade unionists who obstructed reform of the public services.
Of those who did formally warn Blair about the perils of his planned crusade one of the best informed was Admiral Mike Boyce. Boyce knew that the British military’s contribution to America’s war on terror would be minuscule. Even the government’s offer to send 6,000 troops to Afghanistan had been rejected by the Pentagon. Blair’s commitment was driven entirely by an untested philosophy, and he could not provide a definition of ‘victory’ that would end the war. In October, Boyce had described the fight against the Taliban as no different to the global war against communism after the 1917 revolution. Just as that war had been waged for seventy years, the one in Afghanistan would end up going ‘nowhere’ and could last fifty.
The first bombs and missiles had hit Kabul on 7 October. Within hours, bin Laden, dressed in a combat jacket and with a Kalashnikov rifle propped up against a wall behind him, had appeared on television to boast of his responsibility for the attack on New York, which had ‘split the whole world into the camp of the believers and the camp of the unbelievers’. On the second day of the bombing, John Negroponte, the American ambassador to the United Nations, wrote that, in self-defence, America could decide to extend its attacks to other organisations and states. Blair acknowledged Negroponte’s code for Iraq and agreed that after victory in Afghanistan ‘the job is not over’.
In Baghdad, America was accused of using the bin Laden attacks as a pretext for settling old scores. In Britain, the public understood the effect of 9/11 on their lives, with 81 per cent telling a Mori poll that the world had ‘changed for ever’. On 13 November, six weeks after the bombing had begun, Kabul was taken over by American-sponsored warlords. Contrary to the scepticism of critics, the campaign had worked. Exhausted after his fifth foreign tour, Blair briefly expressed his satisfaction at a Cabinet meeting and anticipated Boyce’s frown. The admiral was indeed a pessimist, not eager to accelerate the hunt to find bin Laden or to combat militant Islam. He cautioned against hysteria. Pursuing the Taliban in the caves, he said, was a forlorn effort. The bombing, Boyce went on, had triggered fury in Muslim countries against America, yet Donald Rumsfeld, the American defence secretary, was talking about a war ‘sustained for a period of years’.
The prime minister did not welcome a passive chief of the defence staff. Such an attitude risked opening up a debate he disavowed, and Boyce was not offering any ideas on how to prevent the Taliban remaining in Afghanistan. Blair wanted a plan to rebuild that country led by Britain’s military, even if Washington was against nation-building.
‘I think we need a strategy on Iraq,’ he told Richard Wilson on 1 December. Three days later, he sent David Manning, his foreign-affairs adviser, and Richard Dearlove to Washington to hand over a personally drafted letter setting out his ideas about regime change. Wilson and other senior officials did not see the message. Inside his den, Blair’s trusted advisers did not judge the prime minister to be Bush’s poodle. On the contrary, he appeared as an equal, advocating the interventionist doctrine he had spelled out in Chicago two years earlier, albeit subject to UN approval. Notionally, Britain could escalate from bombing to an actual invasion only if there were legitimate reasons under international law.
These weeks formed a seminal moment in Blair’s life. Before 9/11, he had shown no deep interest in the intelligence community and had rarely met Dearlove. In the aftermath of the attacks, he allowed the ‘seductive spook’ to come very close. Within Whitehall’s and Washington’s tight circle of security chiefs, Dearlove had already won respect for organising blood-and-guts operations using mercenaries in Afghanistan. That success appealed to Blair, who now took Dearlove with him as he flew around the world to build a coalition to support a war against the plotters. ‘Dearlove seriously swam into Blair’s life,’ noticed Wilson. Not surprisingly, the spymaster was puffed up by his unprecedented access and sought to satisfy his master’s requirements. ‘Dearlove was a buccaneer who had lived in the shadows, and it was flattering for him [to be] exposed to a politician,’ observed former Cabinet secretary Robin Butler, who would scrutinise these events three years later.
During those flights, Dearlove emphasised his conviction that Saddam still possessed WMDs and rockets. When he and Manning arrived in Washington, he would discuss with the CIA the orchestration of a coup to remove Saddam, knowing he spoke with special authority; after all, he enjoyed an unusually ‘close relationship with the prime minister’.
Previous prime ministers, especially Harold Macmillan, Harold Wilson and Margaret Thatcher, had allowed Whitehall’s institutional filters to cast automatic scepticism over MI6’s reports. By its very nature, the secret service obtained information from th
ieves, liars and traitors. That danger had been understood sixty-six years earlier, when the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) was created to rigorously assess the information collected by Britain’s intelligence agencies. John Scarlett, the current chairman of the JIC, was qualified to lead that task in the Cabinet Office. As a former MI6 officer, he had participated in a successful operation in Soviet Russia and masterminded its bloodless conclusion. However, his operational experience in the Middle East was limited. Given their relationship, Blair would not have perceived that vulnerability. By the nature of his previous job, Scarlett had not become closely involved with politicians and would not have considered warning the prime minister to engage with caution in direct discussions with MI6’s chief. Remarkably, in his punctilious manner, Scarlett’s rigid interpretation of the JIC’s formal task to ‘assess’ the intelligence supplied by MI6 and the other agencies excluded natural scepticism. ‘We didn’t see it as our job’, he would say, ‘to second-guess the agencies on the reliability of their sources.’ Unaware of that unusual self-denial, Scarlett’s reassurance gave Blair confidence in the JIC’s judgements and Dearlove’s reports.
Unlike previous Cabinets, which had included wartime military officers whose personal misfortunes during action in Europe or Britain’s colonies had occasionally been caused by incorrect intelligence, Blair lacked the experience to penetrate the polished bluff of the intelligence community. Accordingly, Blair never probed the reasons for the failure by the British and American intelligence agencies to predict the 9/11 attacks; nor did he invite a vigorous debate about the nature of the Islamic threat. Pertinently, he never encouraged Whitehall to challenge the interventionist doctrine described in Chicago. One dominant memory of that speech was the resounding applause, the same approval received by the Good Friday agreement in Ireland. That success had owed much to his patient diplomacy with stubborn enemies and his understanding of their contradictory interpretations of history. He assumed that his expertise could be carried over to the Middle East.
