by Tom Bower
Over the previous two years, NATO’s involvement there had become diffuse. After the defeat of the Taliban in November 2001, American special forces had continued their search for Osama bin Laden in the Tora Bora mountains. Shrewdly, Washington had followed the advice of the hawkish Paul Wolfowitz. ‘One of the lessons of history’, he said, ‘is if you go in, don’t stay too long because they don’t tend to like foreigners.’ Separately, in the remainder of Afghanistan, some NATO countries, including Britain, had deployed Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) to suppress the narcotics trade. Playing on Blair’s antagonism towards Afghanistan’s heroin traffic, George Robertson, the NATO secretary general, had urged him in front of Jackson to ‘do better in Afghanistan and put a footprint across the whole country’. Otherwise, said Robertson, NATO’s reputation was in danger because so little was being achieved. His enthusiasm for NATO to run the war in Afghanistan involved the dispatch of more PRTs to build a prosperous modern state. Europe’s division from America, Robertson told Blair, could be bridged if Britain played the honest broker and increased its participation.
Robertson’s proposal was not perfunctory. Some 2,400 soldiers, mostly British, were attached to NATO’s rapid reaction force. The symbolic group had been unemployed and marooned in Germany since 1999. Moving the Allied Rapid Reaction Corps (ARRC), the British army’s jewel, as well as NATO’s mobile headquarters to Afghanistan with the aim of strengthening the International Security Assistance Force satisfied Robertson’s ambition and would please President Bush. The British army was also keen.
To reinforce the army’s status in Downing Street, the generals promoted the deployment of the ARRC as an invaluable opportunity to place a British three-star general alongside the Americans, and to restore relations damaged in post-war Iraq. The proposal had not been properly debated within the MoD and Foreign Office by the time that Blair arrived in Istanbul in June 2004 for a summit of NATO leaders. Nor had those around the sofa in Downing Street bothered to consult Whitehall’s traditional channels regarding Blair’s decision to shift the focus of Britain’s army away from Iraq’s rich oil fields and the commercial opportunities around Basra and into the hostile Afghan mountains. Blair’s explanation mentioned only providing the headquarters staff to stabilise Afghanistan and ‘finish the job’. He seemed driven by instinct rather than informed argument to satisfy Robertson.
Tebbit was ‘angry that Blair made the commitment’. His complaint about the deployment to a two-star female officer was rebutted. ‘It’s our turn,’ she replied. Tebbit urged Hoon to challenge Blair, but the politician was reluctant. Walker joined in. ‘If you’re not happy,’ he told Hoon, ‘we must say no.’
Shortly after Blair returned to London, he summoned Hoon, Walker and General Rob Fry, the deputy chief based in Northwood. ‘I want to go to Afghanistan,’ he announced.
‘It seemed to just come off his head,’ observed Fry.
‘The chiefs say it’s overstretch,’ Hoon told Blair.
‘We’re doing it,’ insisted Blair, without asking for more information.
‘Yes, Prime Minister,’ said Walker, loyally.
THIRTY-SIX
Managing the Mess
* * *
A third election victory depended more than ever on restoring the trust of the aspiring working and middle classes. Blair could rely on John Reid to soothe concerns about the NHS, but Charles Clarke at education was truculent – he was even, to Blair’s dismay, sympathetic towards Mike Tomlinson’s recommendation that A-levels should be replaced.
Tomlinson, the former chief of Ofsted, had been appointed to investigate the fiasco of inflated A-level grades and examinations for fourteen-to nineteen-year-olds. His radical proposal was encouraged by David Miliband, a junior education minister. Like Clarke, Miliband believed that Blair could be persuaded to replace A-levels, education’s so-called gold standard. Both were wrong. In Blair’s opinion, their abolition would inflame the middle class’s growing distrust over education standards and lose votes. To avoid a high-noon confrontation, Blair listened patiently to Clarke’s argument in favour of Tomlinson’s recommendations while he considered a bloodless solution.
The problems were accumulating. Just at that point, David Normington, the education department’s permanent secretary, told Blair that the government would miss its target of 85 per cent of eleven-year-olds reaching the required standards for English and maths by 2007. About 30 per cent of children would still enter secondary school either innumerate or illiterate. Even the Labour-dominated Commons Education Committee chaired by Barry Sheerman, an independently minded Labour MP, reported that there was ‘no measurable improvement in standards’, despite all the extra billions of pounds spent since 1997. ‘Links between expenditure and outcome’, added the report, ‘remain difficult to establish.’
An Ofsted document made even more discomfiting reading. Blaming bad teachers, David Bell, the chief inspector of schools, declared that almost half of all boys and a third of girls were leaving primary school unable to write properly. After eight years of Labour government, illiteracy was increasing.
Looking for explanations, many criticised the emphasis on targets and the accompanying exams for tarnishing standards. Ever since the spike in 2001, Michael Barber’s graphs had plateaued. His Delivery Unit had exaggerated expectations. Although 21,700 more teachers had been employed since 2001, only 8,700 were qualified. The rest were trainees or unqualified assistants.
Blair did not recognise these flaws. Ignoring the statistics, he would write in 2010 that England’s ‘ten-year-old pupils were ranked third best in the world in literacy and the fastest improving in numeracy, with three-quarters of eleven-year-olds reaching high standards in reading, writing and maths’. Similar distortions kept the public’s faith in Labour’s education policies, until Tomlinson’s report, which up till that point had remained private, was published. For several weeks, Blair hoped forlornly that Clarke would swing against Tomlinson’s recommendation. Then a crisis offered a respite.
On 15 December 2004, David Blunkett resigned after compelling proof was produced that the award of a visa for the nanny of his one-year-old son had been accelerated by his staff. Surprisingly, the investigation found no proof that Blunkett had personally ordered the favoured treatment, while the minister himself denied knowing that the application for the visa was in his briefcase. Blair’s prediction that Blunkett would be exonerated following what he had hoped would be a feather-light investigation had been proved wrong.
In the midst of another bout of ‘Labour sleaze’ and theatrical media exaggerations about Gordon Brown’s latest bid to snatch the premiership, Clarke was summoned to Downing Street and told that he would move to the Home Office.
‘Who is going to replace me?’ he asked.
‘Ruth,’ replied Blair.
‘That’s a shocking appointment,’ said Clarke. ‘I can’t believe it.’ He doubted whether Ruth Kelly could lead any department, especially education.
Blair remained silent. The appointment, he knew, would dismay educationalists. Plucked from obscurity in the Treasury, where she had been ignored by Brown, the fourth secretary of state for education in four years had no administrative experience and enjoyed no political support. Like most new ministers under Blair, Kelly, a former journalist and employee at the Bank of England, was redundant even before her appointment and arrived at the department without an education philosophy or an agenda. However, there were, Blair believed, some advantages to promoting her that would help dispel the newspaper headlines deriding his government’s ‘soap operas’, ‘clowns’, ‘piggly-wigglies’ and ‘fairies’: placing a thirty-six-year-old mother of four young children in the Cabinet before an election was helpful; and she would also obey Blair’s orders to reject Tomlinson’s report.
The new home secretary received a single instruction from Blair: ‘Don’t mention immigration, but sort it out before the election.’ Clarke understood the reason: ‘We feared it would dominate the
election.’ Michael Howard was scoring points by accusing Blair of ‘pussyfooting’ and ‘sweeping immigration under the carpet’. Immigrants, maintained Blair, should continue to enter Britain according to a managed scheme, but bogus asylum-seekers were ‘a real problem’ that provided ‘the Tories one good issue to beat us with’. He offered no new solutions.
Clarke was unimpressed by his inheritance. ‘Blunkett left an enormous mess,’ he said.
‘It was a mess,’ Blunkett agreed, acknowledging the complaint.
Clarke also blamed Jack Straw, noting that ‘We had created a completely incoherent system.’ He considered Bill Jeffrey to be complacent and ‘no good’, and after a few weeks demanded the departure of John Gieve, the permanent secretary, whom he blamed for taking too long to find a replacement for Jeffrey.
‘Don’t rock the boat,’ cautioned Blair after hearing Clarke’s proposals.
‘There’s no alternative,’ replied his new minister. ‘It will take five years to sort it out. So you must show your confidence in me and let me do it.’
Blair agreed unenthusiastically.
His leader’s delinquency, thought Clarke, was his lack of interest in finding the right people for the job, be they civil servants or politicians. His strength was to resist agonising about the past. Self-criticism was rare. Although Labour had caused the migrant problem, Blair asserted his customary self-righteousness. ‘Let’s move on,’ he told Clarke. ‘Don’t dwell on the causes. Forget it. Just look at how we can solve the problem.’
The familiar solution was a White Paper followed by new legislation. After five weeks’ intensive consultation, Clarke proposed that Britain should introduce a points system that would guarantee ‘better control than before’. Blair agreed but had no intention of closing Britain’s doors. His mistake, he realised, had been to categorise his critics as prejudiced. He had even challenged Trevor Kavanagh, the Sun’s political editor, for questioning his record on immigration. ‘Are you serious, Trevor?’ asked Blair, forcing the journalist to deny that he was racist.
To regain credibility, Blair spoke about a new five-year plan. The deportation of bogus migrants, he pledged, would soon outnumber the approval of new applications. Making promises was easy but depended on civil servants. Clarke’s dismal report about his Home Office officials reflected similar complaints by ministers about the departments of education and health. Eight years after he confronted Robin Butler, Blair still cursed the government machine. ‘Changing a country was a whole lot harder than changing a party,’ he wrote.
Switching from central control of schools and hospitals to devolving Whitehall’s power was taking longer than he anticipated. Part of the problem was his lukewarm commitment to choice and competition; as the American hustler Mel Weinberg memorably said, ‘Before you sell a deal you have to live the deal. You have to believe in it, because, if you don’t believe in it, you can’t sell it.’ Another difficulty was his judgement about markets. Typical was his continuing faith in the energy market.
‘Do you want to move to nuclear?’ Mike O’Brien asked him during a chance encounter in the Commons lobby in 2004.
‘What do you think?’ Blair asked his fourth energy minister.
‘I’m worried about an energy gap coming up,’ explained O’Brien, ‘which we will need nuclear to bridge. The problem is the very high cost of development.’
Blair moved on, leaving O’Brien puzzled. Blair had not revealed to him the reason for his indecision – an argument with Brown over whether to trust the market or impose new regulations. The confusion was compounded by the diverse characters contributing to the debate. Joan MacNaughton, the DTI’s director of energy, had prepared a briefing paper in favour of nuclear energy. That was Britain’s safest option, she wrote. After twenty years of self-sufficiency, the country had become a net importer of energy. Patricia Hewitt, relying on the assurances of Vicky Pryce, a newly recruited DTI economist opposed to nuclear energy, recited to Blair that the market was working. Low prices, both women chanted, would continue. ‘Mysteriously, Pryce has become a force in the land,’ commented Geoff Norris, Blair’s energy adviser.
‘The markets are not working in the consumers’ interest,’ O’Brien told Pryce.
‘Yes, they are, because prices are coming down,’ replied Pryce, pointing out that the cost of electricity had fallen to a new low.
‘They’ll go up soon,’ replied O’Brien. In 2005, they would indeed begin to rise, and would nearly double by 2010.
Since there was no Cabinet energy committee to resolve the disagreement, Blair invited Hewitt and O’Brien ‘for a chat in his office’.
‘How are we planning to cope with the long-term problem of capacity?’ asked Norris. ‘The market has failed to encourage new investment. They’ve built no new generators.’
Hewitt repeated that the market would prevent an energy blackout. Blair made no contribution. He voiced no concern over the fact that the regulator had allowed foreign state-owned corporations to merge Britain’s independent power companies into six Goliaths, nor did he reveal that Brown had rejected his plea that only nuclear energy could guarantee Britain’s supplies. The chancellor had cited the cost of disposing of the waste as his reason for opposing nuclear power.
Labour’s manifesto for the 2005 election concealed the problems. ‘We have reformed our energy markets’, it stated, ‘to make them open and competitive. We are a leading force in the campaign to make Europe’s energy markets the same.’
Procrastination was making matters worse in other industries too. Just as he had postponed resolving Britain’s energy needs, Blair had dawdled over the growing crisis at the Rover factory in Longbridge. The unprofitable company had been sold by BMW in 2000 to four businessmen, the self-styled ‘Phoenix Four’, for just £10. To rid themselves of all legal obligations, BMW had also given the Phoenix Four a longterm loan of £427 million. During 2004, Hewitt knew that Rover was running out of money. Six thousand five hundred jobs would be at risk in an election year. The only beneficiaries were the Phoenix Four, who had personally pocketed £42 million.
Once again, Blair first heard about the seriousness of the problem while passing Mike O’Brien in the Commons lobby.
‘Give me more information,’ said Blair, and walked on.
THIRTY-SEVEN
The Devil’s Kiss
* * *
Obeying Blair’s order, General Rob Fry was drafting the plan to reinforce the army in Afghanistan, but the 3,000 new troops would be dispatched with a fuzzy objective. Blair was committed to nation-building, while America was still bombing terrorists in the mountains. Once again, no Cabinet committee (embracing the key departments and the intelligence agencies) was convened to propound the purpose of the mission. Blair preferred to have Fry define his objective and describe the pathway to success.
Instead of questioning his brief, Fry snatched the blank cheque. Unlike most of his peers, he was educated in history and military strategy. He believed there was a convincing case that the allies should have either left Afghanistan for good in 2003 or stayed to destroy the Taliban. He now relished the opportunity to plan the return. His error, shared by Blair, was to ignore the growing chaos around Basra. One consequence of Whitehall’s dysfunction was the prime minister’s miscalculation that the same handful of ill-equipped soldiers could be relocated from Iraq to ‘build the peace’ in the Afghan mountains.
In normal circumstances, Blair would have had good reason to be nervous. Robin Butler was completing his report into the intelligence surrounding WMDs and he had naturally focused on the first dossier. Blair’s fears were assuaged by Ann Taylor’s regular discussions with David Omand in Downing Street. On Blair’s behalf, she demanded amendments and exclusions. In particular, she opposed any direct criticism of the prime minister. John Chilcot, an undistinguished former civil servant and the member of the committee described as ‘the prisoner’s friend’ for appearing to help Blair, negotiated the compromises with Omand. ‘Omand dug Blair out
of a hole,’ noted Andrew Turnbull.
Omand judged that his task was to prevent any named person being blamed for the intelligence failure. The most obvious culprits were Richard Dearlove and John Scarlett. ‘The intelligence community’, he recalled, ‘had suffered a severe blow by being proved to be wrong. We didn’t want scapegoating of an individual. The collapse of the system was the real cause. The blame was the underlying failure of statecraft.’ In his opinion, Blair was responsible.
The final negotiations between Taylor and Chilcot required a mandarin’s compromise: either Dearlove and Scarlett would be damned outright for their errors or their culpability would be minimised as a sin of exaggeration.
The previous year, Dearlove had told Taylor’s Intelligence and Security Committee that the intelligence reports stating that weapons carrying WMDs could be ready for firing within forty-five minutes were ‘reliable’. MI6, he had said, had based its prized intelligence on three human sources. By the time Butler considered MI6’s reports, the agency was admitting that all three were worthless. Some MI6 officers blamed the mistake of believing the bogus reports on a corrupted processing system within MI6, but Dearlove denied this.
After sifting through all the intelligence files, Butler could have judged that Dearlove’s and Scarlett’s mismanagement amounted to misconduct. Instead, his committee mildly reprimanded the two chiefs for issuing ‘less assured’ judgements and ‘estimates’ that became the ‘prevailing wisdom’, despite the absence of evidence. ‘The dossier,’ Butler wrote, by ‘inferring the existence of banned weapons … went to (although not beyond) the outer limits of the intelligence available.’ His most damning judgement was that ‘More weight was placed on the intelligence than it could bear.’ To seal the compromise, he criticised Scarlett for co-operating with Alastair Campbell, but accepted his excuse that he was simply obeying Blair’s orders. He also endorsed Scarlett’s self-congratulation for resisting Campbell’s pressure to embellish his report.
