by Tom Bower
Sullenness and a sense of crisis pervaded Downing Street. The chance of a second UN resolution was dead, and there was no likelihood of neutralising the opposition within the party. War was unavoidable.
‘You don’t have to do it,’ Manning told Blair.
‘No, David, I really do have to do this,’ came the reply.
‘I was wrong on every count,’ Manning would later admit, referring to his anticipation that the conflict could be delayed.
Either complicit or cowardly, Manning did not separate himself from the decision. Additional relief came for Blair after he persuaded Short not to resign. Her unique skills in managing humanitarian aid in Iraq after the war, he urged, demanded that she remain. The time and passion he devoted to an awkward woman suggested that the cause was no longer freedom but Blair himself. On the edge, he was focused on his survival.
Before Goldsmith returned from America, the lawyer let it be known that he would change his advice. He now said that Blair’s global dash to produce the second resolution was unnecessary. The British people, Blair would write, had ‘assumed wrongly’ that the government needed a second resolution. He forgot to mention that he was the author of that assumption, until Goldsmith changed his mind.
This new advice was given to Blair on 14 March. Goldsmith’s legal duty was to give his revised opinion to the whole Cabinet. Instead, in what was interpreted as a clear breach of the ministerial code, he sent his new document directly to Blair, whom, he would later say, he regarded as his exclusive ‘client’. Blair showed the full thirteen-page version only to Hoon and Straw, while the Cabinet and Boyce were given a nine-paragraph précis that omitted the conflicting legal arguments. Based on previous UN resolutions, wrote Goldsmith, ‘Authority to use force against Iraq exists’ if Blair possessed ‘strong factual grounds’ that Iraq was in ‘material breach’ of the previous resolution. Fortuitously, Dearlove, citing Curveball’s latest offering, had produced those ‘factual grounds’. Goldsmith’s somersault persuaded Elizabeth Wilmshurst, a Foreign Office lawyer, to resign in protest.
To ensure that no minister complained about being misled, Blair held four unscheduled meetings to keep ministers onside. His Cabinet was shackled. The record would show that it had discussed Iraq twenty-four times over the previous year (including a gap of six months during which it was not debated), but without any of the authoritative papers prepared by Whitehall’s experts there was no ammunition to raise objections. To Blair’s satisfaction, at the formal Cabinet meeting on the eve of war on 17 March no minister ‘rose to the level of events’, as Roy Jenkins observed, and asked Goldsmith to explain why his advice had fundamentally changed since 31 January. Six years after Blair dismissed Robin Butler’s assumption that the system of collective government would continue, his docile ministers approved war without asking for the truth. The only person with the power to stop Britain’s involvement was Gordon Brown, but like Blair he was convinced about the importance of the special relationship with America.
Despite his dislike of the Commons, Blair could be an unrivalled performer at the Dispatch Box. In defence of war, his passion flowed. To neutralise his Labour opponents, he recited Saddam’s repeated deception of the UN inspectors. And then came the call to arms. With trembling hands but a steady voice, he asked, ‘Who will celebrate and who will weep if we take our troops back from the Gulf now? I believe passionately that we must hold firm.’
Persuasive and courteous, his battle cry was Churchillian: ‘This is the time … to show that we will stand up for what we know to be right, to show that we will confront the tyrannies and dictatorships that put our lives at risk, to show at the moment of decision that we have the courage to do the right thing.’ He was assured of the Tories’ support but was opposed by 139 Labour MPs, one of the biggest revolts by a governing party in parliamentary history. In the rebels’ opinion, the sincerity of Blair’s opinions did not make them less dangerous. Several dissidents were reminded of a play review in the Fettes magazine, in which the school was described as being ‘very fortunate in having so experienced an actor as Blair for the central figure’.
The majority for war was 263 votes. Blair looked relieved, the Tories cheered and Margaret Beckett was seen to cry. The prime minister’s brilliant oratory had won a majority in the House but had deeply divided the country. Among the outraged was Fiona Millar, who chose the start of the bombing campaign to announce to Blair that she intended to resign.
Britain’s war was being directed from Northwood, an hour’s drive from Downing Street. To the military’s surprise, Blair never visited the headquarters. ‘He’s not collegiate,’ General Walker noted. ‘Maggie even had the chiefs down to Chequers. This prime minister doesn’t want to meet them.’
Just as he rarely visited Whitehall departments or Parliament, Blair was uninterested in the machinery of war. Until WMDs were found and Saddam overthrown, he preferred to summon Boyce and Walker into the intimacy of his office. Daily, Powell gathered the ad hoc group for morning meetings, excluding the gossip-prone Cabinet critics. Daily, assessment papers and reports were prepared by the Cabinet Office and MoD, but few appeared to be read. To his military visitors, Blair displayed emotion over soldiers’ deaths and frustration at his powerlessness to make things happen. ‘Have they found the WMDs?’ he would ask Boyce every day. Daily, he was disappointed by the reply.
Walker would leave Blair’s office perplexed. ‘I couldn’t work out why the UK was not on a war footing,’ he recalled. ‘No decisions were taken during the meetings. Ad hoc meetings were ad hoc in name and ad hoc in nature. We never seemed able to grasp this slippery bar of soap which was Iraq properly.’
Boyce was similarly puzzled: ‘We had no war cabinet, and if I’d asked half the Cabinet, they would not have known we were at war.’
After ten days, the British advance in the south was halted to allow the Iraqi army to retreat and avoid unnecessary death and destruction.
‘Can’t we get on?’ Campbell asked Boyce during the halt.
His impatience irritated Boyce, who would again complain that ‘We lacked any sense that we were at war.’ Across the country, however, the public supported the troops. An ICM opinion poll found that 84 per cent of those questioned believed that the war should be fought to a successful conclusion, although two-thirds replied it would be justified only if WMDs were found.
On 2 April, twelve days after the invasion began, the American army reached the perimeter of Baghdad. Among the news items was the shooting of seven Iraqi women and children by American soldiers at a checkpoint. In his office, Blair looked at Peter Stothard, the former editor of The Times, who had been shadowing him during the invasion. ‘It does really get to you,’ he said. He added he was ready ‘to meet my Maker’ and answer for ‘those who have died or have been horribly maimed as a result of my decisions’.
Five days later, American soldiers entered the capital. The city quickly slipped into chaos but, under orders from Rumsfeld, the army did not intervene. ‘Stuff happens,’ he said. ‘Freedom is untidy.’
Blair’s daily routine was similarly a succession of struggles for power. Overnight, he had been fighting against the neocons to keep Bush’s support for the UN taking a major role in Iraq and to ensure he did not abandon his announcement of a new initiative for a Middle East peace plan. At the same time, he was recovering from another blistering argument with Brown, ostensibly about the euro. In between, Campbell was moaning that Fiona Millar had called him ‘a bastard’ that morning and thrown a cup at him; he had decided to resign. Blair could cope with warfare but not with Campbell’s departure: his spokesman was the one person he trusted and needed. At the end of the day, he flew to Belfast to meet Bush. By any reckoning, the president’s agreement to endorse Blair’s Ulster peace plan was an extraordinary climax before another storm.
Blair returned to London certain of victory in Iraq. The British army controlled Basra and southern Iraq and had lost only thirty men. In the north, the Americans were crus
hing the last bursts of opposition and searching for Saddam. At about 8 a.m. on 9 April, Boyce arrived for his daily briefing. Blair was slumped in a sofa. The walls of his office were covered with maps.
‘We can say officially the war has ended,’ Boyce announced. Blair registered no joy. There was no sign of emotion. The admiral could just as well have announced that a number 24 bus had broken down in Whitehall.
‘Any news about WMDs?’ asked Blair.
‘No, Prime Minister,’ replied Boyce. ‘They’ll probably be found in a bunker.’ The civility was ice cold. After his retirement, Boyce would criticise the Labour government’s ‘trade’ on the armed forces’ loyalty and indomitable can-do spirit without providing adequate money as ‘wrong and immoral’.
Later, Blair met his ad hoc group of ministers and officials. The UN inspectors and the American army, he said, were searching for the buried WMDs. ‘I wonder why the WMDs weren’t used during the war,’ piped up one voice. After a murmur of agreement, nothing more was said.
In the Commons that day, Blair enjoyed his moment of glory. The ‘Baghdad bounce’ was propelling his approval ratings upwards. To prove his righteousness, he had rejected an invitation to meet Vladimir Putin, Gerhard Schröder and Jacques Chirac at the weekend in St Petersburg. Blind to the consequences of Saddam’s fall, he classified the three as deflated rivals rather than potential allies. ‘I suppose I have toughened,’ he told Saga magazine in anticipation of his fiftieth birthday. Iraq was his Falklands. He had come of age. He could even spare a moment to record a cameo appearance for The Simpsons.
Back in Downing Street, the television screens were reshowing a small crowd in Baghdad toppling Saddam’s statue. With exquisite symmetry, Fiona Millar walked into Blair’s office to announce that since she neither liked nor respected him any more, both she and Campbell would definitely be resigning. At eleven o’clock that same morning, just hours before he delivered his Budget speech, Gordon Brown was needling Blair in a Cabinet meeting. Blair was stung by the absence of any praise from his colleagues or the media.
THIRTY-ONE
Knights and Knaves
* * *
The latest battle for control of Downing Street had been raging for about ten days. The victory in Iraq, Gordon Brown feared, might persuade Blair to reconsider his resignation. He needed to act. For his part, Blair felt isolated. The constant altercations with his chancellor were wearing.
On 1 April, Blair sat through Brown’s long presentation on Britain’s readiness to join the euro. To provoke Blair, who, Brown knew, had still failed to master the technicalities of what membership would mean for the British economy, he declared that his decision would be revealed in the Budget. In a heated exchange, Blair, who knew that the chancellor was still against Britain joining the euro, forbade him to terminate the option publicly.
Their argument continued the following day. Blair raged. Some would recall him telling Brown to resign, while others would say the chancellor was dismissed; a third group would describe Brown storming out of the room having agreed to resign. Overnight, both men stood at the precipice.
In the morning, Blair considered the folly of losing a chancellor while British soldiers were risking their lives. Trust in the government was precarious. With the party split, he had limited the damage within the Cabinet, but the divisions over the euro could not be similarly concealed. He had failed to forge the alliances recommended back in 1998 by Richard Wilson. But, as the Cabinet secretary also observed, Blair usually anticipated the troublemakers and manoeuvred appropriately. In this case, he encouraged Jeremy Heywood to negotiate a truce. Brown agreed to say nothing about the euro in his Budget and prepared instead a lengthy assessment for a future Cabinet meeting.
Just as one fire was extinguished, another burst into flames. In the tit-for-tat to prove his power, in the days before the Budget Brown refused to disclose how much money he would allocate to the NHS for the following three years. ‘I went mad,’ recalled Milburn, although as he wasn’t even allowed to enter the chancellor’s office, he was unable to vent his anger to Brown’s face. Awareness of Milburn’s anger and Blair’s impotence emboldened Brown. This was the moment to exact his revenge for being outwitted by Milburn seven months earlier over the press release describing the compromise over foundation hospitals.
Just before the Blackpool party conference, Brown had circulated to the Cabinet a forty-page paper that attacked choice, competition and foundation hospitals. ‘That was an apocalyptic moment,’ Milburn reflected. ‘Brown had distributed his paper without Blair’s knowledge. It was deliberate subterfuge.’ Brown had co-ordinated his revolt with Bill Morris. The trade union leader was due to raise the flag during the conference.
‘This is the end,’ Milburn told John Prescott in a telephone call from Durham.
‘I agree,’ said Prescott. ‘I’ll tell Gordon that if this leaks, that’ll be the end of it’ – meaning the final straw for his brokering of Brown’s bid to become prime minister.
Remarkably, Brown’s mutiny evaporated without a whisper. His paper was suppressed. ‘Tony should have sacked Gordon there and then,’ thought Milburn.
But he didn’t. In the battle between principle and a phoney prophet, Blair had incited Milburn to lead the charge against Brown, but when it came to sacking his chancellor, he ducked for cover. Hopeless or helpless, this was the wrong time to fight, he decided. Compared to securing Brown’s continued support for Iraq, Milburn’s muscular loyalty could be taken for granted.
At midday on Wednesday 9 April, Blair was sitting on the front bench beside Brown for the Budget speech. No outsider could have imagined the tumult he had endured during the day. His cheers for his chancellor masked his anger – and also his nonchalance towards the economy. In a quick-fire speech, Brown was admitting that his optimistic predictions of 2002 were wrong. The public-sector net debt, which had been falling steadily from 42 per cent of GDP in 1997 to about 31 per cent in 2000, was rising remorselessly, as he borrowed to pay for public services and tax credits. Public spending had increased by 5 per cent in 2003/4. Brown had assumed that the debts would be repaid by increased taxes, but the combination of the dot-com bubble bursting and increased oil prices had suffocated economic growth. He shrugged off forecasts that Britain’s deficit would soar, while Blair sneered at the Tory taunts. Preoccupied by conflicts in Iraq and Downing Street, he did not flinch as Brown increased taxes and raised borrowing in one year from £11 billion to £20 billion, breaching the 40 per cent of GDP mark. He seemed oblivious that Brown’s ‘golden rule’ limiting borrowing exclusively to investment was being broken. He even cheered Brown’s announcement that tax credits, or ‘progressive universalism’, were expanding – immune to the fact that the welfare programme was veering out of control.
Brown originally intended to give the poor means-tested cash credits, financed by loans, to augment their incomes. By 2003, he was giving credits to nearly every citizen, including those in employment, regardless of their wealth. The cost was about £10 billion a year, twenty times more than originally estimated. The Inland Revenue was struggling to cope. A hundred million telephone calls swamped the Revenue’s centres in 2003 as hundreds of thousands of poor people could not get their cash. Nearly 2 million would eventually be penalised for receiving too much money, losing the Exchequer over £2 billion in a single year. The tax-credits system, Nicholas Montagu, the chairman of the Inland Revenue, admitted, has ‘gone spectacularly wrong’. Despite the rising bedlam, he was barred from the chancellor’s office.
Brown’s personality generated dysfunction. Civil servants in the Treasury had become afraid of him, and because in order to control the process he rarely made a decision until the last moment, they were wary of correcting obvious errors without his approval. Even Blair apologised for the ‘hardship and distress’. But Brown, knowing that Blair did not dare challenge him about the chaos or the cost, admitted nothing. ‘He told me there was no more money,’ Blair whispered to a Labour minister in the
Commons chamber about the extra billions of pounds being spent. ‘They basically lied to me to get it through me,’ he said later.
Worse, with the exception of the very poorest poverty levels in general had not fallen, and some people were getting poorer. Brown’s claim in 2001 to have taken a million children out of poverty was discredited by the government’s own statistics. Only half that number had benefited, and his programme’s fate was dire. Blair was flummoxed.
Two weeks later, Blair and Brown met to discuss a route towards joining the euro. For months, Downing Street had been briefing journalists on how Blair was determined to join and would hold a referendum to win public endorsement. The scenario, conjured up by his media fixers, of a meeting between Labour’s two leaders was overshadowed by newspaper reports that Cherie had exploited an offer by a Melbourne shop-owner to ‘take something’ as a gift. She had grabbed sixty-eight items. ‘I wish she didn’t have this thing about a bargain,’ Blair told Peter Mandelson. On her return home, he pleaded, ‘When we leave we’ll have lots of money. We’ll have enough. You’ve got to stop this.’
His wife was chastened but could not help herself. Her lack of self-control had seen her asking the Queen whether Queen Victoria had had an affair with John Brown, and matily telling Princess Anne, ‘Call me Cherie.’
‘I’d rather not, Mrs Blair,’ Anne had replied.
Thinking only of his own position, Brown arrived at the euro meeting expecting another showdown. ‘I know what you’re up to,’ he told Blair. ‘I know your plans.’ He expected to be fired, but Blair ducked for cover as usual. He was too distracted by Iraq to seize the opportunity.
