by Tom Bower
The teaching unions identified Barber as the culprit. Too many primary schools, anxious to satisfy his demand for successful data, were coaching children to pass the tests, and the consequent good results inflated the eleven-year-olds’ abilities. Those children arrived in secondary schools lacking a proper understanding of maths and, once deprived of additional coaching, could not catch up. ‘Deliverology’ was corrupting education.
Blair was uninterested in that argument. In his view, Margaret Brown was an outsider. For the most part, he trusted Barber, who, despite his eccentric party piece of walking barefoot across two metres of broken glass without suffering any cuts, produced apparently verified results. But there were doubts. Six years after his election and more than halfway through his premiership, Blair’s declared priority of improving Britain’s education was faltering. He could not blame the chancellor. There were no conflicting orders about education. Success or failure depended entirely on him.
Not enough, he feared, had changed. Officials in the education department appeared to be detached as they lurched from success to calamity without achieving firm control. Blair’s telephone call to Charles Clarke in the midst of another disaster confirmed his worst fears. The education secretary was on holiday striding through an Estonian turnip field when his leader called.
‘You must come back immediately,’ implored Blair. ‘We have an £800 million schools’ funding crisis.’
‘I’m not returning,’ replied Clarke, suggesting that, viewed from Estonia, the shortfall was not an emergency.
‘You must understand, Charles,’ continued Blair, ‘I have a relationship with the people, and the people are angry. It’s urgent and it will explode if we don’t settle this.’
‘I’m not coming back.’
‘OK,’ said Blair meekly.
On his eventual return, Clarke met with Blair, Gordon Brown and John Prescott. For thirty minutes, a slanging match rich with expletives filled the Downing Street room as Brown refused to sign off any additional money.
‘Right, this is what we’re going to do,’ said Blair, readjusting his armour with an expressionless face. ‘If Gordon won’t approve it, then the permanent secretary will authorise it.’
‘Fuck off,’ screamed the chancellor, and he stormed out of the room. To Clarke’s satisfaction, Blair had for once smothered his chancellor’s ill will, and the crisis passed.
THIRTY-THREE
Lies and Damn’d Lies
* * *
The army’s plight in Iraq – both financial and political – could not be solved as easily.
Just days before becoming chief of the defence staff, General Mike Walker discovered that he could not get £10 million from the Treasury to hire engineers. Gordon Brown and his department had become, in his view, ‘a drag on our system’. Trying to find the money to provide water and electricity in Basra, Walker stumbled onto a stalemate between the military, Whitehall, the politicians and the aid workers, a situation that only Blair could resolve. He was determined that on this occasion the prime minister’s struggle with his chancellor should not be allowed to interfere with the fate of 42,000 servicemen and women.
The army had not been greeted as liberators by Basra’s 1.3 million inhabitants, yet the city was relatively peaceful. Since there was no mandate for nation-building, British soldiers were seen sunbathing and body-building while awaiting UN or NATO forces to take over from them. On the basis of the original plan – ‘first in, first out’ – General Mike Jackson ordered that the army should start to return on 19 April. By August, 32,500 soldiers would be back in Europe, leaving just 9,500 troops in southern Iraq until 2004. Walker doubted whether the plan would endure, but he was receiving no guidance from Downing Street.
Just before the war ended, Blair had finally agreed to Andrew Turnbull’s suggestion that a committee should direct Britain’s aid to Iraq. Jack Straw chaired the first meeting of the Ad Hoc Ministerial Committee on Iraq Reconstruction. From the outset, he found himself embroiled in a turf war between the army, the Treasury and DFID, Clare Short’s department, which was directly responsible for overseeing the reconstruction of southern Iraq. Straw blamed Short for its inactivity. ‘Short and DFID didn’t come to meetings,’ Admiral Mike Boyce discovered during his last days as chief of the defence staff. ‘She showed no will to support the army either with money or in human terms.’ Blair’s intense efforts to prevent her resignation had been counterproductive.
Because of her disapproval of the war, Short encouraged her officials to be semi-detached from the government and reluctant to use soldiers for civil work. Suma Chakrabarti, DFID’s permanent secretary, rejected Kevin Tebbit’s request for money to train the Iraqi police and dispense aid. ‘It doesn’t fit our poverty criteria,’ he told him. Without either the finance or the organisation, British experts were not dispatched to Iraq. ‘It was a breakdown,’ Boyce realised within the first week of occupation. ‘I don’t know why they didn’t come.’
Short revealed her anger on 15 April, six days after Saddam’s statue was pulled down. In a BBC interview, she listed the humanitarian plight, the disorder in Baghdad, America’s ‘illegality’ and finally condemned Blair’s conduct once again as ‘reckless’. ‘Treachery,’ was Blair’s verdict on both her and Brown.
Blair was fretting. Still no WMDs had been found, and reports from Paris, Berlin and Moscow were discouraging. Those governments emphasised their belief that Saddam did not possess the weapons. Facing the Commons in the past, Blair’s confident delivery would have brushed aside his critics but, in the debate on 18 April, he played for safety and, rather than mentioning the WMDs, boasted of Saddam’s fall as being comparable to Hitler’s.
During the third week of peace, ministers heard that Curveball’s so-called ‘mobile laboratory for the manufacture of biological agents’ had been found. American soldiers then reported that the machine in fact manufactured meteorological balloons. ‘Bollocks. Where does this leave us?’ asked Geoff Hoon. Others in Whitehall shuddered nervously. No minister, transport minister Alistair Darling noticed, dared to raise the subject of WMDs in that week’s Cabinet.
Just as some newspapers were accusing Blair of having blood on his hands, Richard Dearlove rushed into No. 10. ‘Bits and pieces’, he reported, had been found, meaning old Russian Scud rockets. ‘A scientist has just come over with his laptop,’ he told Blair, referring to an Iraqi fugitive, ‘so we should get the hard intelligence soon.’ No more credible promises were heard from Dearlove and, with those words, the curtain was finally lowered on his reputation.
During that last week of April, the failure to find WMDs was ‘like a bucket of cold water’ for Lieutenant General Rob Fry, the chief of staff in Northwood. Although Kevin Tebbit could not recall ‘a moment of collective embarrassment or confession’ within the MoD, Desmond Bowen, the senior policy adviser, admitted to Tebbit that ‘We’re dumbfounded, amazed and horrified.’ In public, Blair maintained his customary cool performance. ‘Before people crow about the absence of weapons of mass destruction, I suggest they wait a little bit,’ he said. At that moment, Air Marshal Brian Burridge, the commander of the British invading forces based in Qatar, sensed that Blair’s grip over the machinery of government was faltering. To prevent the public sensing any wobble, Alastair Campbell encouraged The Times’ Tom Baldwin, one of his trusted journalists, to write the opposite. Under the headline ‘Blair Has Emerged Bolder and Braver from War in Iraq’, Baldwin described ‘Blair the Bold’s’ intention to gamble against Brown’s obstruction on foundation hospitals and tuition fees.
In early May, Mike Jackson toured Basra, the first of over twenty British generals who visited the city without speaking any Arabic and without any special training in the unique circumstances of the region. Jackson was horrified. The British army lacked experts and money. Because of Short’s ‘complete lack of direction’, none of the non-governmental organisations expected to rebuild Iraq had arrived. Without the necessary equipment and expertise to resto
re essential services, the army was struggling. ‘It is startlingly apparent’, Jackson reported to London, ‘that we are not delivering that which was deemed to be promised and was expected.’ Nothing was to be said in public, Jackson ordered his staff: ‘This is a good-news story. Our political masters are happy. We’re not rocking the boat. Don’t start a bad-news story.’ He would subsequently be accused of being ‘General Hypocrite’ for failing to publicise the truth.
Blair followed Jackson to Basra. There were no Iraqis shouting ‘Tony’ to welcome the celebrity liberator. He was cheered by British soldiers, but in private he heard about their frustration and the sabotaging of their efforts by the locals. On his return to London, Blair told Turnbull to put Whitehall on ‘a war footing’ to dispatch experts. Turnbull mentioned the army’s complaints about Straw’s committee. ‘We were cross’, said Walker, ‘that departments would not get focused and refused to take Iraq seriously. At the meetings, people arrived, gave their fiver and then disappeared.’ To relieve the tension among ministers and create harmony in Basra, Walker asked Blair to appoint a Cabinet minister uniquely responsible for Iraq. Without a special government department that would ‘make sure that everyone is steaming in the same direction’, he warned, the British position would deteriorate. Blair refused and asked Straw to energise his committee.
Soon after, civil servants noticed Blair’s reluctance to attend the committee’s meetings. His absence, some speculated, coincided with the failure to find the WMDs; others marked the moment his eyes glazed over when Patricia Hewitt, according to one general’s swipe, ‘banged on about women’s rights in Basra’. Even Hewitt noticed the general’s disdain over her contribution. The army, she thought, was foolish not to recognise that only with Iraqi women’s engagement could the country be transformed. But the army wanted £10 million to provide water, not to engineer a social revolution.
Without Blair demanding action from his ministers to promote ‘vital British interests’, Straw’s own enthusiasm waned and Hoon became angry. The army’s budget, he told Blair, was falling, while DFID’s was increasing. Yet Short’s department still refused to dispatch teachers, currency experts, engineers or policemen to Basra. ‘Blair was in charge of the system but, with the lack of focus, the system was failing,’ observed Bowen from the MoD. Once Blair stopped attending the committee, Straw would make his own excuses after thirty minutes, and soon Hoon became reluctant to attend at all. ‘The Ministry of Defence could not do anything,’ said Tebbit. ‘I found it embarrassing.’ Short’s fiery resignation on 12 May made no difference other than to cause Blair to curse his timidity for not dismissing her earlier. She was replaced by Valerie Amos, a professional quangoist born in British Guyana who was ennobled in 1997.
The stagnation in London continued, reflecting the faltering conditions in Baghdad. Blair sent John Sawers, a Foreign Office adviser, to the Iraqi capital to discover the reasons. His report, ‘Iraq: What’s Gone Wrong?’, delivered in early May, described a breakdown of law and order. He blamed Jay Garner, an ineffectual general who was a personal friend of George Bush. His appointment as America’s director of reconstruction had confirmed Washington’s lack of any post-war plans for Iraq other than to dispense suitcases of cash.
Sawers recommended that the American command’s request for British troops to be sent to help in Baghdad should be approved. In particular, he wanted the 16 Air Assault Brigade to be dispatched from Basra. The 5,000 battle-ready commandos, he wrote, were ideal for patrolling Sadr City, a volatile area in Baghdad. Blair approved the plan, but Walker objected.
‘There’s only so much we can do,’ he told Blair. ‘We have limited resources. It would be a logistical nightmare.’
‘Can’t we increase troop numbers in Iraq?’ asked Blair.
‘No, we cannot, Prime Minister,’ replied Walker. The government’s plan, he explained, was to withdraw the army out of Iraq as quickly as possible. To support a brigade in Sadr City would require another 10,000 back-up troops and rotation for men who had spent too long on the front line. Blair, Walker realised, did not understand that military plans could not be changed on a whim.
Walker also found a new gripe. Sawers was earning a reputation for excessive interference by continuing to contradict the general. ‘We don’t want to get involved in another Fallujah,’ said Walker, referring to an American assault that had devastated an Iraqi town. At least 5,000 British soldiers, summarised Walker, would be lost in the mayhem of supporting the Americans in Sadr City. ‘I didn’t think they were going to change the price of fish,’ he would say. The military, Walker said, adapting Rab Butler’s famous phrase, ‘is the art of the possible’. Blair was disappointed, but concealed his exasperation over the fact that the British refusal to dispatch the troops would irritate the Americans. He did not overrule the military’s advice.
Towards the end of May, Walker returned to Downing Street to brief Blair about his first visit to Iraq, which coincided with the arrival from Washington of Paul Bremer as America’s governor, replacing Jay Garner. Without understanding the complexities of Iraq’s divided society, Bremer used his vice-regal powers to demobilise the Iraqi army, allowing ex-soldiers to disappear unpaid with their guns. He also abolished the Ba’ath Party. Since most civil servants were Ba’athists, Iraq was effectively deprived of a civilian government.
Bremer’s decision initiated a civil war for which the American army was unprepared. Walker, similarly lacking experience of the Arab world, admitted that he had not grasped Bremer’s ‘complete misunderstanding about Iraq’s psychology’. However, he could not mistake Bremer’s disdain for the British. ‘We got cold-shouldered by Bremer,’ he reported. Blair did not react. The situation in Basra, Walker continued, was worse than he had anticipated. He had arrived with ‘no thoughts that it would go wrong’, and was pleased that British soldiers were patrolling there without flak jackets among supportive Iraqis. But, he told Blair, showing him what he called his ‘optimistic charts’, the army was stumped. Not only was the reconstruction package delayed, but the army’s training of Iraqis to be policemen – a priority for Blair – had been unsuccessful. He cautioned that, in a city riddled with corruption, British policemen found training the locals ‘most difficult’. The British intelligence agencies, he added, had been ‘clearly misinformed’. The JIC, in a prewar report, had predicted that the Iranians were ‘unlikely to be aggressive’. The reality, he reported, was that they ‘are exploiting the situation, but we cannot find anyone’. Army intelligence officers could not find the Iranians fomenting revolt and, even with the SAS’s help, the military could not seal the border with Iran.
This was the moment when rigorous questioning of Walker would have extracted hard truths about an underfunded army. But Blair did not welcome precision, and Walker, who had risen to the top by going with the flow, saw no point in imitating Boyce and irritating Blair. Even had Blair asked, Walker could not have offered any perspective regarding the consequences of the government’s decisions. He was a loyal servant rather than a sage, chosen by Hoon because, as a member of the Royal Anglian Regiment rather than the upper-class Guards Regiment, ‘he was not a social snob but a breath of fresh air; a man who, unlike Boyce, understood how to operate in the political context’. Hoon had not considered that the historic antagonism between Jackson and Walker undermined a considered discussion among the army chiefs.
Others recognised that Blair’s predicament was self-made. He had excluded Hoon, Tebbit and any Iraqi specialists from his meeting with Walker, choosing to rely on a plain soldier who was, like himself, unversed in history. A man of few words, the general believed that the military should not interfere in politics or discuss with the prime minister whether his judgement ‘made sense’. He left Downing Street satisfied with his honest report. Blair’s mask did not reveal whether he recognised that he had just moved closer to the precipice.
On 28 May 2003, the prime minister flew to Kuwait. From there he planned to hop across into Iraq to visit Bri
tish soldiers and hear briefings from Paul Bremer. The month had been turgid. The Tories had won impressively in the local elections, and Brown’s renewed warfare was dousing his self-confidence about a third term.
Subverting the mood throughout Downing Street was the continuing failure to find WMDs. The chance of their discovery some six weeks after the invasion began, Blair and his advisers knew, had become remote. Surrounded by those complicit in his blunder – David Manning, Alastair Campbell and Jonathan Powell – Blair underestimated the anger across the country about going to war on bogus intelligence. After sixteen months’ proximity to Richard Dearlove and John Scarlett, he realised they had committed an ‘error’ but believed they were innocent of ‘deception’. In any case, in his mind the weapons were irrelevant. The invasion was still ‘the right thing to do’, regardless of WMDs. Or at least that was the argument he adopted in public. Giving Hans Blix more time would have been pointless, explained Blair, since the inspector ‘would have yielded … the [wrong] conclusion that because Saddam had no active WMD programme, therefore he was not a threat’. Blair was uninterested in reconciliation with his critics. Digging in to defend his belief in ‘regime change’, the accusation he faced across the country was of ‘deception’.
Blair’s shield was punctured soon after he stepped into the desert heat of Basra on 29 May, alongside Campbell. After earlier telling journalists that he remained ‘absolutely confident that the weapons would be found’, he was informed that Donald Rumsfeld had publicly conceded that Saddam’s WMDs would probably never be discovered because he possibly never possessed them. Campbell noted about Bush’s hardman, ‘What a clot … really irritating.’
