by Tom Bower
Margaret Brown’s criticism was particularly directed at Barber and his political masters. With Blair’s agreement, Barber had ordered teachers to follow ‘lesson plans’ drafted in a rush and, in part, by a non-mathematician, just as schools faced an unexpected shortage of maths teachers. Labour had ended teacher training in universities, and the new intake was not specially trained in maths. The chance to improve teaching, Brown wrote, was being wasted by the politicians’ distortions. ‘In some cases, research evidence was disregarded for political reasons,’ she said. ‘Barber even suggested that computers should replace bad teachers,’ she recalled.
Barber was particularly dismayed by the literacy results. His target had been for 80 per cent of eleven-year-olds to reach level 4 by 2002. He failed. In 2000, 75 per cent of children reached that level, but standards would rise no further. Indeed, many children could not sustain their progress and their reading skills deteriorated. Barber struggled to find an explanation. He had underestimated, he pleaded, the power of the educational establishment and had forgotten to champion parents. He also blamed the slowdown on ‘a failure to understand sufficiently the nature of the challenge’. ‘Too often’, he wrote, ‘it felt like a revolution without enough revolutionaries.’ Bemused by his verbosity, others blamed the guru himself. They were suspicious of the tests and realised that a credulous prime minister had misunderstood how Barber’s graphs failed to measure the human factor.
During those monthly stock-takes, Blair asked probing questions, but disappointing answers did not lead to any recriminations. In his world, post-mortems were rare. Neither Blair nor Barber would admit the reason for the plateauing – namely, that the snap improvement was a reflection of the Tories’ achievements, which Labour’s policies had stymied.
‘Should we do more phonics?’ Blair asked once again.
‘No,’ replied Barber.
‘What’s next?’ asked Blair, referring to the day’s agenda. Dabbling with statistics and passing over phonics in a brief sentence suggested little appreciation of pedagogy.
In public, he never challenged teachers’ skills or questioned the slide in standards. Some assumed he was avoiding political pitfalls, while others sensed his obliviousness to the educational establishment’s passion for ‘child-centred’ classrooms that followed the National Literacy Strategy (NLS). In his newspaper commentaries, Woodhead blamed the NLS for perpetuating illiteracy.
Blair also preferred to ignore those who scorned Barber for using data produced by educational institutions that was likely to confirm his own success. The critics suspected that he disregarded data collected from eleven sources by Professor Peter Tymms of Durham University that contradicted Barber’s statistics showing ‘success’. Tymms questioned whether Barber understood the discipline of statistics, as his own research showed schools were failing to improve literacy and numeracy. ‘Barber’s world is in the shadow between the idea and reality,’ commented Michael Little, another academic critic. ‘We can never be sure what happened.’ Such criticism made no impression. Barber had won respect across Whitehall. His energy and organisational skills were admired, and that counted in a zone where, in Blair’s assessment, talented officials were rare.
Blair’s approval lulled Estelle Morris into not questioning Barber’s target for secondary schools to improve their GCSE grades from D to C, especially in maths and English. No official warned Morris that setting such targets was complicated. When the teachers complained that the new demands would cause chaos in school tests, they were ignored. Morris was focused on enacting the 2002 Education Bill, an important landmark for Blair.
Under the bill, schools would be given more freedom, more faith schools would be approved and private sponsors would be welcomed for the new academies. The change reflected Blair’s abandonment of ‘standards not structures’. Structures – whether the school was a comprehensive, a city technology college or a specialist school – were important, he now acknowledged. After the first three academies were opened, Morris urged Blair, ‘You must take the teachers with you. We need their support.’ He ignored her advice but approved Andrew Adonis’s search for more sponsors for the academies, a 50 per cent increase in teaching assistants, the recruitment of 25,000 more teachers, and Teach First, an innovative scheme to encourage graduates to teach in disadvantaged schools. With over 600,000 teachers and assistants employed in English schools – now better paid in a profession that had become more popular – the odds were stacked in favour of outstanding results. The doubters included senior officials in the Department of Education, who were not convinced that money would buy success. And Morris herself had become depressed.
Adonis was another problem. ‘Andrew’s as bright as a button’, Morris told her confidants, ‘but a nightmare to work with.’ Many in the party, she knew, disliked him as a right-wing, self-aggrandising nerd.
Adonis was criticising Morris for being ‘nervous’ about taking on the left-wing educational establishment. ‘That is untrue and makes me furious,’ she retorted. He also questioned her understanding of education after she allowed, with Blair’s agreement, fourteen-year-olds to abandon learning foreign languages.
The two officials were moving in opposite directions. Behind Morris’s back, Blair told Adonis to ignore her and just secure the support of the department’s officials. Without her agreement, Adonis regularly visited the department to give orders that contradicted her own. ‘You can’t do that,’ he was told by the senior civil servants. With Blair’s blessing, Adonis ignored their instruction, blatantly challenging Morris’s authority.
‘Adonis is running his own education policy,’ a senior official told Morris.
‘What shall I do?’ she asked Barber.
‘Just listen to him,’ he replied enigmatically. Morris was powerless to challenge Blair.
Overseeing the bureaucracy was proving too much for a fragile woman with low self-esteem. Blair rarely engaged with her personally. He was unaware, she complained, of her anguish over failing schoolchildren and his refusal to meet teachers or understand their complaints. Isolated from Blair and irritated by Adonis, she was also critical of her ‘inadequate’ civil servants. Vulnerable, she winced about the imminent parliamentary battle to introduce tuition fees for university students, which had been explicitly excluded from the party’s election manifesto. Finally, she wilted, overcome by the failure to meet the government’s literacy and numeracy targets.
In 1997, Blunkett had promised to resign if his numeracy and literacy targets were not met by 2002. In March 1999, Morris had subscribed to the same pledge. On 24 October 2001, she unconvincingly denied that commitment. Months later, as a stream of negative headlines erupted about the A-level results, her undertaking was thrown back at her. She had become the target of blame for Blunkett’s failed ambitions.
In 2000, Blunkett had been accused of downgrading standards by rushing in changes to A-levels. The following year, the A-level pass rate jumped by 4.5 per cent. The disparity between examinations, course work and modules reignited complaints about fixing exams and falling standards. Researchers showed that, since 1988, high grades in the gold-standard exam had become progressively easier to obtain thanks to less demanding questions, grade inflation and the opportunity granted by Labour to take AS modules repeatedly. In anticipation of even more students passing in 2002, the fearful examination boards unexpectedly employed stricter marking to fail an unusually high number of A-level candidates. Newspaper headlines described a pass rate that had been fixed to prevent embarrassment, and an official report would later confirm limited ‘grade manipulation’. Academics appointed by Morris to resolve the problem engaged in a public dispute, then turned against her. Battered, the minister who had failed her own A-levels was accused of giving a ‘misleading’ assurance to the Commons and of undermining the authority of Mike Tomlinson, Ofsted’s chief inspector.
Blair was unaware that his minister was crumbling until about 11 p.m. on 18 October 2002, when he was told that the foll
owing day’s newspaper headlines would report a ‘fiasco’. Just after midnight, he telephoned Morris while she was being driven to her home in Pimlico.
‘Are we in trouble over A-levels?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘We are.’
There was a long silence, and then Blair tersely ended the call.
‘I knew at that moment that I had lost the confidence of Downing Street,’ Morris would later say. In truth, Blair still trusted her and had no reason to be suspicious when he was told three days later that she was returning to London from Birmingham for an immediate meeting. After brief pleasantries, Morris delivered her bombshell.
‘I want to resign,’ she said.
‘What?’ Blair exclaimed. ‘Why?’
As she listed her failures – not least the imminent publication of the official report that fraudsters had stolen over £100 million from the Independent Learning Accounts – Blair became adamant that she shouldn’t resign. ‘You’re doing a good job,’ he repeated. The reforms she had started would work and her problems were a legacy from the first term. ‘I want you to go away and think about it,’ he said. ‘Tell me tomorrow morning that you will not resign.’ Alastair Campbell’s calls over the next hours encouraging her to stay intensified her anguish. Blair, she felt, was blind to her plight.
She returned to Downing Street two days later. ‘I’m going, Tony,’ she said.
Charles Clarke was appointed education secretary in her place. The experienced political operator, characterised as corpulent, clever and occasionally boorish, was expected by Blair to trample on Morris’s critics, not least by reassuring teachers that the education budget would increase annually by 9.2 per cent, raising expenditure to £70.9 billion in 2003/4. In their brief conversation, Clarke and Blair did not discuss standards. In Clarke’s opinion, doctrines about education attracted obsessives. Phonics was unimportant. He would even decry studying classics at university and tell a parliamentary committee that blaming a child’s poor performance on the parents ‘makes me weep’. His response to bad teaching would be to refuse the invitation to attend the teaching unions’ annual conferences. The differences between him, his predecessors and Adonis undermined those attempting to explain Blair’s education policy. Like health and welfare, the only consistency was constant change.
The undisputed result of the turmoil in education policy was the growing dissatisfaction of the aspiring middle classes. Although Labour had built new schools, appointed a record number of teachers and reduced class sizes, more children than ever were going to private schools or receiving private tuition to improve their chances of entering Oxbridge, including the children of the prime minister’s friends, advisers and ministers in his government. Blair’s two sons would also apply for Oxbridge from a specially endowed school. Many inner cities had become immigrant ghettos, and a large number of young parents who could not afford school fees were fleeing from the cities to state schools in the shires. In response, Morris had launched London Challenge, a successful programme to reverse that trend through extra money and better teachers, but other cities had not followed suit. Neither Blair nor Clarke identified that as a priority.
Both, however, were horrified by the slowdown of Britain’s economy. Gordon Brown admitted his forecasts were worthless. The country would need to borrow an additional £20 billion over two years to pay for increased welfare benefits and the pay hikes for public-sector workers, including increases of 21 to 40 per cent over three years for some NHS employees. Others would have to pay for that largesse. Later generations would have to repay the PFI debt, already fixed at £15 billion and heading higher.
‘Will you push through university top-up fees?’ was Blair’s only question to Clarke during their first meeting. Neither mentioned the breach of the manifesto pledge that Blair cursed as short-sighted. Soon after the election, the leaders of the Russell Group, Britain’s best universities, had asked him to introduce the fees to prevent Britain’s leading colleges fading in the world’s league tables. Blair agreed that ‘co-payments’ – the government’s euphemism for tuition fees – would, in his words, ‘modernise’ Britain’s education system. He hoped to rely on Clarke to persuade Labour MPs to support the government.
‘I’ll go through it and let you know,’ replied his education minister. Blair, he found, was always willing to discuss problems. The glitch was whether anything happened thereafter. Two days later, as a warning to Clarke, and sensing Blair’s weakness after Morris’s resignation, Brown sent a forty-four-page letter to Cabinet ministers attacking foundation hospitals and opposing university tuition fees. With little effort, he made John Prescott ‘furious’. Blair tried to reason with Brown, but the chancellor adamantly opposed anything provided by the private sector. On reflection, Clarke agreed that compelling wealthy graduates to pay for their education retrospectively seemed sensible. He also agreed with Blair that the alternative – Brown’s proposed graduate tax – was unworkable because universities would need to wait fifteen years for their money. As anticipated, his conclusion provoked a battle with Brown. Clarke won the first round, but Brown kept on coming. Ignoring the chancellor’s behind-the-scenes manoeuvring, on 22 January 2003 Clarke published a White Paper advocating tuition fees. In retaliation, on Brown’s initiative 160 Labour MPs pledged to vote against the bill. ‘People have been licensed by Gordon to rebel,’ Blair told Peter Mandelson.
‘Don’t worry,’ Clarke reassured Blair. ‘Gordon’s a paper tiger. I don’t think he’s got the support on the back benches.’ Blair looked at the signatures on the opposition list and disagreed. His tolerance for political pain was inconsistent. Mindful of Alan Milburn’s fate, Clarke told Blair, ‘I won’t give in to Gordon.’
Blair was struggling to understand why, since the start of his second term, he had been stuttering, failing to recover from the disappointment of the first. He had publicised his conversion to abandoning state monopolies in the NHS and education, and had declared his support for ‘the consumer’ and ‘diversity of supply and choice’, but little was happening. He wrote about building ‘New Labour around the ideas of traditional values – solidarity, social justice, opportunity for all – applied entirely afresh to the modern world’, but Labour stalwarts were scathing. He even advocated a debate about his support for ‘greater interdependence plus greater individuality’, a baffling proposition that was greeted with silence. What more did he have to do?
TWENTY-SIX
Broken Vows, Part 2
* * *
In July 2002, Blair hosted a generous farewell dinner in Downing Street for Richard Wilson, the retiring Cabinet secretary. Over the course of the evening, both men ignored the consequences of their fraught relationship. Wilson did not mention his regret that the traditional machinery of good government had been abandoned, while Blair showed no guilt for regularly humiliating Wilson by excluding him from meetings. On the contrary, he intended to also exclude David Omand, the newly appointed security and intelligence co-ordinator, from any involvement in Britain’s defence and intelligence operations.
Within weeks of his appointment, Omand realised that he was not invited to Blair’s meetings with Richard Dearlove or the other intelligence chiefs, or those with Admiral Mike Boyce. Instead, Jonathan Powell would sit with Blair. ‘Powell regarded us with contempt,’ noted Andrew Turnbull.
‘The system of government was obviously corrupted,’ recalled Omand. ‘Turnbull and I tried to get it changed, but we were blocked by Manning.’ David Manning would deny the accusation: ‘I had no say over who had access to the prime minister.’ The other possible culprit was Powell. In either case, the exclusion of representatives of honest government from critical meetings resulted in what Omand later called ‘a failure of statecraft’.
The newcomer’s fate was not surprising. During his last days in Downing Street, Wilson’s suspicions had grown. At one point, he noticed Blair was writing a conversation note for a forthcoming telephone exchange with President Bush about Iraq. �
��We will be with you come what may,’ was the summary. Wilson’s surprise was shared by Manning, who advised Blair, ‘You can’t say that because you’re committing the British army to an invasion which no one else knows about.’ Blair appeared unmoved.
Those who assumed that the prime minister had been seduced by Bush in Crawford misunderstood his attitude. Blair was not the president’s poodle but his partner. However, unlike Bush, he could not legally reveal their joint plan to pursue regime change. Iraq’s possession of WMDs could be the only justification for Britain’s participation. Manning, a reporter rather than an innovator, resisted raising the alarm by appealing to Turnbull for advice. Instead, he moved closer to Blair’s inner circle alongside Powell and Dearlove, excluding any potential critics. ‘I got “keep out” vibes from Manning,’ recalled Turnbull. ‘He had the Stockholm syndrome – complete loyalty.’
Boyce was struck by the prime minister’s unyielding conviction. ‘I don’t want to look at myself in the mirror in ten years’, said Blair, ‘when he has used WMDs again and know I could have stopped that.’ He did not welcome the admiral’s scepticism, especially his questions about what would follow Saddam’s defeat.
In his report in July, Dearlove had highlighted the absence of any American plan for post-war occupation, a warning that was repeated by Jack Straw. The foreign secretary now introduced Michael Williams, a Middle East specialist, to Blair. Williams explained that Iraq’s stability owed everything to Saddam forcibly keeping the Shias and Sunnis apart. Once this control disappeared, peace was unlikely. ‘That’s all history, Mike,’ said Blair. ‘This is about the future.’
Another warning was delivered by Peter Ricketts, the director of the Foreign Office’s Middle East department. He predicted Saddam’s overthrow would lead to turmoil. He also cautioned that the scramble ‘to establish a link between Iraq and al-Qaeda is so far frankly unconvincing’. Since Ricketts’s advice did not appear to be endorsed by either Michael Jay, the Foreign Office’s chief, or Straw, Blair avoided any response. He also sidestepped the legal advice offered by Peter Goldsmith, the attorney general, that regime change without the approval of the UN would be illegal. ‘Well …’ Blair replied, his voice trailing off. He had decided to accept his lawyers’ advice that in public statements ‘we focus on WMDs and we do not mention regime change’. Any suggestion that this amounted to deception would be fiercely denied by him.
