by Tom Bower
To keep Beckett’s support and maintain the government’s unity in the weeks before the invasion of Iraq, Blair sacrificed Britain’s energy security. Wilson’s draft White Paper, ‘Our Energy Future – Creating a Low Carbon Economy’, was changed and nuclear energy was condemned outright. ‘Its current economics’, stated the paper, ‘make it an unattractive option for a new carbon-free generation capacity.’
‘Blair tried to balance Beckett,’ raged Wilson, ‘whom he should have ignored. We ended up with a stupid White Paper filled with wrong assumptions about gas to dodge the nuclear issue.’ The media were briefed that Blair was against nuclear power ‘because of the terrorist threat’ and because nuclear would have ‘undermined the drive for renewables’. Instead, gushed the White Paper, thanks to Labour the UK was committed to ‘cleaner, smarter energy’ and would reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 60 per cent in 2050. At the age of ninety-seven, Blair would know whether the target had been hit. In the short term, he asked John Birt to draw up a secret nuclear plan that could be implemented in 2005, when Beckett had less influence and Hewitt was no longer the minister at the DTI.
Until then, improving the nation’s infrastructure was delayed by the party’s division over Iraq. ‘I was as isolated as it is possible to be in politics,’ Blair would write about those weeks, referring to the countdown to the war. ‘My isolation within the Cabinet let alone the PLP and large parts of the media and public opinion was colossal.’
David Blunkett talked to him about this, touching on Iraq and also the tenor of his leadership. He blamed Blair’s impatience to forge alliances. ‘I can’t do organisational matters,’ Blair admitted, meaning that he had no patience to manage Whitehall or even to successfully direct the whips to win over the doubters.
The home secretary then made a second visit, this time accompanied by Alan Milburn. ‘This is not anti-Gordon,’ said Blunkett, ‘but you’ve got to sort out the government. This is the moment to lay down the terms for him to move on from being chancellor.’
‘Things are very difficult,’ replied Blair. ‘I don’t want to divert my attention from Iraq. If I fire Gordon, the consequences on the government would be too great.’
The management of the country was being ignored not only because of Iraq and Blair’s dilemma over Brown, but because of the prime minister’s domestic life. At the beginning of December 2002, a volcano erupted in Downing Street. The Daily Mail published a story claiming that Cherie had bought two flats in Bristol worth £270,000 with the help of Peter Foster, the boyfriend of Carole Caplin, her lifestyle adviser. Foster had been convicted in Australia of fraud. Further, he had negotiated a £40,000 discount on the flats by dropping the Blairs’ name to the developer. Cherie was known to seek discounts and free services from businesses – and even a piano shop – by using her name, but this unprecedented allegation fuelled a media frenzy.
Blair asked his wife whether she had had any contact with Foster, ‘No,’ she replied. That was the answer Campbell repeated to the Mail and the rest of the media. It was untrue. The Mail had copies of emails between the two, including Cherie’s thanks to Foster for his help. ‘You are a star,’ she wrote.
The unfavourable publicity was exacerbated by Blair’s peculiar relationship with Caplin. Staff at Chequers reported her staying for extended periods to massage the prime minister, and occasionally Blair went to her London home for anti-toxin rubbing treatments. Inevitably, there was gossip. Ever since 1994, when she was first included in the Blairs’ lives, Campbell and Fiona Millar had disliked Caplin and had warned Blair that her presence would end badly. But, mindful of Cherie’s needs, Blair rejected their warnings.
Part of the problem was his unworldliness. After a jar of honey fell and broke on the kitchen floor, he grabbed a brush and pan to clear up the mess. On another occasion, when water came pouring through a living-room ceiling from a bathroom above, Blair was found standing by the bathtub, without having turned off the taps or pulled the plug, using Virgin Radio mugs to shift water from the bath into the nearby basin.
Then there was his own relationship with Cherie. She soaked up the exaggerated media descriptions of herself as a ‘brilliant lawyer’. She was undoubtedly intelligent, but she was far from brilliant. Beset by thin-skinned fragility, she could be gregarious and warm towards those she trusted, but as Anji Hunter discovered, she could also deploy bitchiness that crushed like a Centurion tank. Her legal onslaught against Ros Mark, her children’s nanny for four years, after a misunderstanding about a sympathetic book Mark had written for a children’s charity, was regarded by lawyers aware of the circumstances as vindictive. Her aggressive protection of her privacy when no violation had occurred sat oddly with her own detailed description of the contraceptive methods she had failed to use during a visit to Balmoral.
Her attraction to Blair was often debated, and the host of explanations was as unsatisfactory as the business of unravelling Blair himself. Among the worst that could be said was that their marriage rested on mutual irritation. Some praised Cherie for transforming a geeky youth into a calm socialite able to pacify her hysteria. She could claim credit for contributing to his political success and calming his outbursts of insecurity. Together, in the midst of any crisis, they lacked any sense of how long they would remain in the building or their own future after Downing Street. Both feared rejection by the rest of the cast and the audience.
Among Cherie’s many misfortunes was the presence around her husband of people she disliked, not least Gordon Brown, who was forbidden to enter her private flat. Of the other miscreants, she most suspected Campbell, and the sentiment was reciprocated. The ex-alcoholic became venomous towards those he disliked, and after the Mail showed Cherie had lied about Foster – the lies of a Labour lawyer using a convicted fraudster to buy flats as an investment was a gift to the Tory media – there was no sanctuary from Campbell’s venom for anyone in Downing Street.
Without hiding his anger, Campbell now briefed journalists against Cherie, openly scorned Caplin and failed to defend Blair. In the meltdown that followed, Blair raged at everyone, not least the media. The crisis was ended with the help of Blair loyalists, especially Peter Mandelson. Cherie made a tearful apology on TV, Fiona Millar stayed in Downing Street and Carole Caplin left.
In those moments of stress, Blair read either the Bible or theological books. He knew that his Christianity was an unpopular subject. However, his belief had guided him since Oxford. He appeared regularly for Mass on Sundays at Westminster Cathedral, occasionally wearing a T-shirt and jeans. The discretion surrounding his beliefs, preferring the rigour of Roman Catholicism over Anglicanism, baffled those who could not reconcile his religion with his support for ungodly activities like marriage for homosexuals, freer gambling and the liberalisation of the alcohol licensing laws. His religion and poor judgement of people coalesced in the choice of Rowan Williams, an eccentric leftish cleric, over Richard Chartres, the charismatic and purist Bishop of London, as Archbishop of Canterbury. Blair’s pick, based on a recommendation by a commission, was odd. As usual, he would eventually regret another delinquent appointment and the waste of the power of his patronage.
The time had come to grasp the nettle. ‘I’m going to sack him,’ he told Jonathan Powell in January 2003 about Brown. Jack Straw, he said, would be the new chancellor. Then he dithered, before finally retreating. The nettle remained untouched.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Countdown
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‘The military’, Jonathan Powell had emailed Blair in early October 2002, ‘are making another effort to bounce you into a decision on Option 2.’
Blair was prevaricating. In his opinion, the longer he waited, the better. The army chiefs, he knew, wanted Britain’s unconditional pledge of support for the invasion in order to win the confidence of General Tommy Franks in Florida. So far, Blair was committed to package one, the smallest commitment. The outcome of any battle against Iraq’s impoverished army was not in doubt. Alongside Americ
a’s technological advantages, the British forces could be trusted to deliver, but dispatching half his military to the desert was an irreversible gamble. To clear his mind, he began a round of rhetorical conversations. On the one hand there was his relationship with President Bush and his own dazzling success as an interventionist; on the other were his critics in the Labour Party and his European antagonists, Gerhard Schröder and Jacques Chirac.
‘Where does Britain stand in the world?’ he asked a civil servant in the MoD. ‘If I agree to join the invasion, then I’ll be in a position of command, influence and regular conversations with the president. We have all these military people,’ he continued, ‘why not use them?’
‘Why not?’ replied the official, observing Blair work his way towards a Faustian pact.
On 16 October, the conversations became more difficult. In a televised speech after Congress had authorised him to invade Iraq, the president explained that war would, he hoped, ‘not become necessary’ once Saddam surrendered his WMDs, but was inevitable if he refused. Hours later, Saddam’s spokesman replied that all of Iraq’s WMDs had been destroyed years earlier. The neocons around Bush were unimpressed. Although the American intelligence agencies could not prove that Saddam was lying, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld remained intent on his removal. In London, Blair repeated his demand that Saddam allow the UN inspectors to visit nineteen sites where WMDs were allegedly being developed. If he agreed, the invasion could be avoided.
The next day, Admiral Mike Boyce addressed the prime minister. General Franks, he told Blair, wanted to know by the following week whether Britain was choosing package two or three. The army, Boyce added, wanted package three. Blair’s patrician inscrutability deterred serious questions. He was inclined to choose package two but was tempted to go for broke after the latest JIC assessment, based on Curveball, ‘confirmed’ that Saddam possessed a mobile biological-agent production facility. Neither Richard Dearlove nor John Scarlett mentioned the refusal of the BND, Germany’s intelligence service, to allow MI6 officers access to Curveball. In hindsight, the BND’s intransigence was judged a ruse to leverage influence over the CIA and MI6. In any circumstances, taking such ‘war or peace’ information on trust was a gamble.
Fickle confidants surrounded Blair while he considered the most momentous decision of his life. Powell and Alastair Campbell spoke decisively but lacked experience in foreign affairs; the Foreign Office’s leaders hesitated to cross the road to warn of the dangers; Dearlove and Scarlett peddled misinformation like Warren Street spivs selling second-hand cars; and finally there was David Manning, the loyal diplocrat who, though lacking accurate insight into the Arab world, criss-crossed the Atlantic beneath the radar to represent Blair’s interests. Manning’s only escape from the conspiracy would have been an appeal to Andrew Turnbull, but it was a call he never made.
Towards the end of October, Blair arrived in the MoD’s bunker with Campbell and Powell for a briefing by Lieutenant General Rob Fry, a Royal Marine. During his presentation, Fry took considerable effort to explain the timetable for transporting 42,000 personnel and equipment to the Middle East, the preliminary plans for the invasion and the outline for occupation after Saddam’s defeat. Blair’s lack of interest was spotted by Fry and Geoff Hoon. Clearly, Hoon realised, Blair did not appreciate the importance of his visit to the military and the officials. At the end, the prime minister asked no questions. He did not intend to debate the virtues of the presentation and, after an embarrassed silence, he departed.
On 31 October, Blair summoned Jack Straw and Hoon to Downing Street, where they agreed on package three without protest. Later, he would credit Boyce for persuading him to make that choice. That was unlikely: Generals Mike Walker and Mike Jackson were the lobbyists for all-out involvement. Blair was not unhappy, though, as package three confirmed his relationship with Bush. Boyce did, however, protest once again about the lack of money. ‘Yes, we must fix that,’ replied Blair, without any intention of arguing with Gordon Brown. Once again, Boyce was left on his own. Walker resisted issuing an ultimatum that there could be no war without proper funds, and instead made his plans on the presumption that the British forces would be first in and first out and that the Treasury would pay all the costs. Brown allocated £1 billion for the war. Such a small provision did not trouble Blair, but he instructed that knowledge of his decision was to remain within the ring of secrecy. ‘Keep it all tight,’ Hoon told Boyce. ‘Only twelve people should know what we’re doing.’ Even the chief of defence logistics was to be excluded from the planning staff, and no additional equipment for the war could be ordered.
‘That’s crazy,’ said Boyce.
‘We cannot let the world know we are working for war’, explained Hoon, ‘and at the same time say at the UN we want peace.’
Dissatisfied, Boyce went straight back to Downing Street.
‘Well, that’s how it is,’ Blair replied, accepting responsibility for delaying the military’s mobilisation.
Hoon, too, appealed to Blair. ‘We need to order machine guns, body armour and other equipment.’
‘No,’ replied Blair. ‘I’ve got to keep the UN negotiations going and I can’t act as honest broker if it’s clear we’re planning to go to war.’ The death of soldiers because they lacked sufficient body armour would become a sensitive issue.
‘Getting to Baghdad will be a doddle,’ Jackson told author Max Hastings when the two met in Washington around that time, ‘but the Americans haven’t a clue what to do once they get there.’ The British were relying on the Americans’ plan for the invasion but were puzzled about the aftermath. On the orders of Rumsfeld and Cheney, the US army was not expecting to police post-war Iraq. Nation-building did not feature in the Pentagon’s calculations. The MoD assumed the British army would stick to the policy spelled out in the 1998 strategic defence review – ‘Go first, go fast and go home.’
The countdown to war accelerated on 8 November, the same day the UN passed resolution 1441 authorising the weapons inspectors to return to Iraq because Saddam had breached resolution 687, passed in 1991. Despite the ambiguity of the wording, Blair’s hunger for a resolution had been satisfied by Jeremy Greenstock, Britain’s ambassador to the UN. Blair was further rewarded by Bush ad-libbing during his speech to the UN General Assembly his personal support for the organisation’s involvement.
The knife-edge drama in New York was followed by an unusual twist in London. Blair told Turnbull that he refused to appoint a war cabinet ‘because we are trying to avoid war’. Even the Cabinet’s committee on defence and overseas policy – the group that traditionally discussed foreign wars – was to remain moribund. And, ordered Blair, no special committee would be dedicated to Iraq. Instead, Powell would invite officials to ad hoc meetings. Brown was automatically excluded.
To his surprise, Kevin Tebbit discovered that he was apparently excluded too. He called Manning, asking, ‘How can you plan a war without the head of the Ministry of Defence?’ Manning agreed to ask Blair.
The reply, which appears to have been concocted by Manning and Powell with Blair’s blessing, was incomprehensible. ‘We can’t have you’, Manning told Tebbit, ‘because we would then have to include the permanent secretaries of the Foreign Office and DFID [the Department for International Development], and we don’t want Michael Jay and Clare Short involved.’
Powell’s vendetta against the Foreign Office and his contempt for Whitehall’s officials had created a unique situation. By excluding the MoD – and Tebbit’s background included seventeen years in the Foreign Office, then GCHQ – Blair denied himself direct advice about the movement of manpower and the supply of equipment before and after the invasion. Hoon could have challenged Blair, but everyone knew that the prime minister did not want to hear about problems and details from Tebbit, who, he complained, spoke too much – in other words, the MoD man would challenge him. ‘I was rebuffed,’ said Tebbit. ‘I was embarrassed, humiliated that they would not have people like me.’
Unlike education or the NHS, Blair cared little about defence and, as Hoon discovered, ‘never discussed detail’. After approving package three, he never questioned the preparations for moving 42,000 men, tanks, ships, planes and tons of equipment to Iraq’s borders. ‘This is what I want, go away and do it,’ Hoon was effectively told. Conversations with Blair, Hoon discovered, were invariably undermined by the prime minister’s attention shifting elsewhere. For some time, he assumed Blair was thinking about something more important. Later, Hoon confessed that ‘I’ve never had a conversation with Blair about the war.’ Others had the same experience. Blair’s detachment, combined with both his and Hoon’s indifference to Boyce and Tebbit, meant he resisted providing the services with sufficient money to fulfil their task, thus scuttling the military’s inviolability.
‘You cannot send the armed forces on adventures without paying for it,’ Admiral Nigel Essenhigh told Hoon. The military, he added, had insufficient money to maintain an army in Iraq after Saddam’s defeat. Labour was fighting a war to win prizes on the cheap; the corruption of ‘punching above our weight’ would be exposed.
Hoon ignored the criticism. ‘The MoD’s budget has actually gone up,’ he replied. The admiral was incredulous.
On the eve of his premature retirement, Essenhigh wrote to Blair warning that the estimated additional cost of raising the standard of the three armed services to Blair’s requirements would be £2.6 billion a year. He urged Blair not to choose the favourite ruse of inflicting cuts on the front line. Rather, he should save money after first rigorously investigating the issue of waste in the military. In the nature of Blair’s government, Essenhigh’s negative message was intercepted and never reached the prime minister. Instead, Hoon replied. Major cuts to the front line, he told the admiral, would be made after the war.
