by Tom Bower
Scarlett’s lifebelt was his original description of the reports as ‘sporadic and patchy’. He blamed his abandonment of caution on the new intelligence report disclosed to Blair by Dearlove in Downing Street on 11 September 2002. He switched the ultimate responsibility for the misinformation onto Blair, who, after all, had asserted in Parliament that the intelligence on WMDs was ‘extensive, detailed and authoritative’. In his own testimony to the committee, the prime minister explained with charm and apparent candour that the contradictions were mere detail. He was justified in omitting the caveats because Scarlett sincerely believed that Saddam did possess WMDs. The dossier, said Blair, was an instrument of persuasion that merely provided information, and was not intended to make the case for war.
Butler did not pursue his witness forensically. He did not ask why, immediately after the dossier’s publication, Blair had told Admiral Mike Boyce to plan for war. Rather, in response to Taylor’s influence, he gave Blair the benefit of the doubt when he claimed that the dossier was not remotely connected with making the case for war. Recalling from his own experience how little the prime minister read, Butler also did not ask whether he had actually studied Scarlett’s report. ‘That would have been too insulting,’ he would say. Instead of openly criticising Blair’s distortions, he blamed him only for ‘over-salesmanship’ and ‘sofa’ government.
Dearlove could not make the same excuses as Blair and Scarlett. MI6’s credibility was shredded. Yet even with him Butler’s rebukes were mild. Dearlove was taken to task for allowing budget cuts to undermine the scrutiny of intelligence, but neither he nor Blair was criticised for forging unusually close relations. Those tepid words satisfied Taylor. Finally, at the insistence of other members of the panel, Butler agreed to express his ‘high regard’ for Scarlett’s abilities and emphasised that he should remain MI6 chief, since he should ‘not bear personal responsibility’ for the flawed dossier.
Later, Butler looked at the transcript of Blair’s interviews again. The prime minister’s charm, he realised, had concealed how insubstantial his replies had been. ‘Perhaps we were too polite,’ Butler would later say. ‘I’m a trusting fellow.’ As a final concession to Downing Street, he also inserted into the report, ‘We conclude that it would be a rash person who asserted at this stage’ that WMDs and missiles ‘will never be found’. This was seventeen months after the war. The civil servant’s timidity, which Blair so disliked, was in this instance his protection.
President Bush did not enjoy that advantage. On 9 July, the US Senate Intelligence Committee published a similar report on the failure of the CIA. The agency was accused of overstating the threat of WMDs, relying on dubious sources and ignoring dissenting opinions. ‘The biggest intelligence failure in our nation’s history,’ judged Senator Jay Rockefeller. To avoid the congressional missile, George Tenet, the CIA’s director, had quickly resigned.
Five days later, Butler’s report was published. Like Hutton’s and Taylor’s reports, his conclusions reinforced Blair’s defiance of his critics. ‘We found no evidence to question the prime minister’s good faith,’ wrote Butler. To assuage his own misgivings, he hoped that the media would draw damning verdicts by carefully reading the facts rather than the particular judgements. The report’s annex compared the cautionary language in key passages of the JIC’s original briefings with the modified version published in the dossier. In those pages, the reader would see the evidence of Scarlett acting under pressure to ‘sex up’ the dossier. Only by ploughing through the report to paragraph 458 and, more importantly, what followed would the diligent reader finally grasp the full chicanery that Butler was bursting to publicise. Butler anticipated that he would be asked at the press conference whether Blair should resign. He expected his intended reply to be explosive: ‘That question is not for us, but for Parliament and the people.’ The question was not asked and, to his regret, he was unable to cast doubt on Blair in public. The media’s listless reaction to the report disappointed him.
In the subsequent Commons debate, Blair used the report as both sword and shield. ‘No one lied,’ he said. ‘No one made up the intelligence. No one inserted things into the dossier against the advice of the intelligence services.’ He admitted that Iraq did not have WMDs but, having ‘searched my conscience’, he said, ‘I cannot honestly say getting rid of Saddam was a mistake’.
Once again, Michael Howard resisted exposing his rival’s inaccuracies. He did not highlight the proof of Scarlett acting under pressure to ‘sex up’ the dossier. When he was asked by Patrick Cormack, a Tory MP, whether those who voted in favour of war had been deceived, instead of replying ‘Yes’ he fudged. Blair was safe.
Eleven weeks later, Howard regretted his uncharacteristic timidity. Tony Blair, he told the New Statesman, had ‘lied’ over Iraq. He would later accuse Blair on television of lying to Parliament about Lord Goldsmith’s changing opinions.
Butler also abandoned his reticence. On 22 February 2007, the retired official told the House of Lords that Blair had been ‘disingenuous’ about WMDs in the first dossier by omitting the JIC’s doubts. But it was too little, too late. Blair would gloss over the contradictions and accusations. To have failed to join America in Iraq, he would write, would have ‘done major long-term damage to that relationship’. WMDs, he explained, were not the overriding issue: ‘In the final analysis, I would be with the US because in my view it was right, morally and strategically.’ Unburdened by curiosity, he displayed no spiritual struggle with Christian ideas of guilt, atonement or deception. Although he had solemnly apologised in Parliament for British heartlessness during the Irish potato famine that started in 1845 and expressed ‘personal deep sorrow’ for the slave trade, he would never apologise for the Iraq war.
The day after the publication of Butler’s report, Labour lost a by-election in Leicester to the Lib Dems but retained a seat against the Tories in Birmingham. The polls again suggested that Howard would be unable to win the following year’s general election. Blair was re-energised. Determined finally to forge his legacy, he snubbed Brown and encouraged Trevor Kavanagh to report in the Sun, in an article headlined ‘Blair’s Shock Blow for Brown’, that he intended to fight the next election and serve a full and final five years as prime minister. After that he departed for his summer holidays, once again enjoying the hospitality of the rich, first at Cliff Richard’s villa in Barbados, then at the Strozzis’ estate in Tuscany and finally at Silvio Berlusconi’s estate in Sardinia, which would become infamous for the owner’s ‘bunga bunga’ parties with underaged prostitutes.
Soon after Blair’s return from Italy, Rob Fry submitted his twenty-page report to General Walker and the chiefs, presenting the reasons why the military should strengthen its commitment in Afghanistan. The deployment, Fry foreshadowed, would be a bigger commitment than Blair’s decision in Istanbul to dispatch the ARRC, the NATO headquarters staffed by British soldiers, to the country. Any reservations among the chiefs was silenced by the knowledge that Blair was already committed to Afghanistan, so Fry was told to develop the plan, even though he had never commanded a mission of the size he was writing about, nor did he have any familiarity with the country.
In January 2005, Mike Jackson decided that he should see at first hand how the NATO operation in Afghanistan could be revived. On his return, he told Fry, General Richard Dannatt, his successor as chief of the army, and others at Northwood that he was confident that the deployment could be executed without much danger. Moreover, he added, the engagement would be worthwhile because the Taliban were enjoying ‘a free run’.
Smarting from their experience in Iraq, the generals discussed what the army could do, and those discussions continued informally between Jackson and the two other chiefs, West and Stirrup, and then with Walker. The two generals agreed that any involvement would be low risk, while Stirrup and West opposed the commitment. Nevertheless, the chiefs agreed that a British force would be dispatched to Kandahar in south Afghanistan the following autumn to s
atisfy Blair’s orders for ‘reconstruction and development’, with the secondary aim of combating terrorism and destroying the local narcotics trade. Altogether that matched Britain’s destiny as a ‘force for good’. ‘I didn’t realise it was a hornets’ nest,’ Jackson would later say.
As Fry developed the plan in early 2005, he missed one contradiction: how could British soldiers committed to nation-building win the hearts and minds of the Afghan tribesmen if the opium crops – by far and away the main source of their income – were to be destroyed? Fry did, however, understand that Washington’s attention was focused on Iraq and not Afghanistan, though he was unsure whether Blair was aware of that fault line.
Iraq, Blair knew, was becoming a war without a foreseeable end. He summoned Geoff Hoon and Walker. ‘Tell me how to fix this,’ he said to the general. ‘What does the military need?’
Like Blair, Walker did not understand the complexities of the uprising in Iraq, and his presentation was reassuring. At the end of a series of platitudes, he declared, in the military’s can-do tone, ‘We’ll get through this.’ Blair thanked the general. Only with hindsight did Walker recognise the prime minister’s unwillingness to devote time to understanding the army’s predicament: a lack of men, equipment, intelligence and money. Even more corrosive was Blair’s objective in Afghanistan – ‘reconstruction and development’ – a mirror of the army’s woolly ‘goal’ in Iraq.
Sensitive to Blair’s disillusionment about events in Iraq, the informal conversations around the water coolers in Northwood focused on the honourable circumstances in which Britain could leave. ‘We’re on a hammering to nothing,’ the generals agreed. Those speaking to Jackson on his return from another tour in Iraq were struck by his pessimism: ‘We’re not doing any good. Our reputation is suffering. We have released forces we cannot control. I think there’s the possibility of strategic failure.’
In discussions with his senior officers, Jackson suggested that the government needed to define how the army could withdraw with integrity. That required an approach to Blair. Walker refused to comment on Jackson’s proposal, while Hoon resisted adopting any position, not least because there was no will or money to send reinforcements, nor to set a timetable for withdrawal. Paralysis hung over Northwood.
THIRTY-EIGHT
Towards a Third Term
* * *
‘Tony is very gloomy. He’s very miserable,’ noticed Charles Clarke some months before the general election of May 2005. He followed Alan Milburn, David Blunkett and others into No. 10 to boost Blair’s morale. ‘You’re tremendous,’ Clarke told his leader. ‘You’re very important. You must stay. I’ll support you all the way.’
‘I’m grateful,’ Blair replied unemotionally. Even at his lowest, he would conceal his true feelings from his Cabinet supporters. To serve his own interest, he toyed with their loyalty. ‘Tony played footsie with me for nine months to get me back,’ recalled Milburn, while Blunkett was assured of his return to the government after Blair pointedly presented his resignation as a charade by declaring that the former home secretary was ‘a man without a stain on his character’. He needed his dwindling band of loyalists.
In the days before the party conference in Brighton, Blair was confident of victory in the election, with the polls showing a Labour lead of between 3 and 10 per cent. Yet he showed no excitement about the prospect of a third term. Gordon Brown’s constant presentation of himself as the ‘consolidator’ offering ‘stability and prudence’ versus the Blairite ‘transformers’ was wearisome, but more troubling still for Blair was defining the reason for his re-election. Simply depriving Brown of the crown was hardly a rallying cry. Iraq hung over everything, especially during the conference, which coincided with the kidnapping in Iraq of Ken Bigley, a civil engineer, by Islamic terrorists. Following his capture, Bigley pleaded unsuccessfully in mournful videos for his life. To insiders, Blair spoke about ‘securing my legacy’; to the electorate he promised to ‘serve a full third term’, or at least bid a very long farewell, for the stock market was soaring.
After eight years, Blair listed his achievements: a more tolerant society, a minimum wage, multiple new schools and hospitals, a safer rail network, a Human Rights Act, a Civil Partnership Act to rid the country of institutionalised homophobia, laws to liberalise drinking, the encouragement of the arts and the embedment of the attitude that ‘what you did in your personal life was your choice but what you did to others was not’. The hole was the absence of the enduring substance of Thatcherism or the Gladstone era. The former was symbolised by the transformation of Canary Wharf from derelict dockland into a global financial centre for over 100,000 professionals. It was not just the cynics who pointed to the appropriate symbol of Blair’s legacy: the Dome.
Blair’s solution was to get John Birt to solicit five-year plans from each government department. Similarly, Andrew Turnbull was tasked to deliver twenty targets for the public services. These would be distilled into ‘A Fair Future for All’, a paper written by Matthew Taylor, recently hired from a left-wing think tank. Taylor concocted six snappy election pledges, which, while hardly a legacy, did at least offer ideas for those scrambling to draft the new manifesto. With a few tweaks, they could also rely on the manifestos of 1997 and 2001, including the familiar pledge to ‘unremittingly’ reform the public services. The result was refashioned New Labour. Inevitably, selling the brand for a third term was difficult. The party’s finances were also in dire shape: in early 2002, its debts were over £10 million.
In previous times, Blair would have automatically turned to Michael Levy, but his principal fund-raiser had upset many in the Foreign Office and the Middle East while acting as an intermediary between the Israeli and Arab leaders. Blair had been mistaken to entrust a former music agent with the task. The fault once more was his own naivety about the region, not least in thinking that the Arabs were likely to trust an Orthodox Jew as the prime minister’s representative. Even Ariel Sharon, when prime minister, had shouted, ‘No Levy!’ and ordered the envoy to be thrown out of his office.
General Charles Guthrie was one of many who had found it ‘odd that Blair trusted him as his envoy, because the Arab rulers hated his touchy-feely embraces and his kissing, and he had no merit because he didn’t know anything’. Guthrie recalled some early advice from George Robertson: ‘Get close to Michael Levy because he’s very influential.’ Accordingly, the general had invited Levy to visit Bosnia. ‘He asked questions showing he didn’t know the difference between Serbs and Bosnians,’ he would report. During that trip, an army chef offered Levy a bacon sandwich.
Without telling Levy, Blair decided to rely on Ronnie Cohen, a private-equity investor based offshore, as the party’s new principal fundraiser. Cohen, a former parliamentary candidate for the Liberals, had switched to support Gordon Brown in the mid-1990s. Over the next decade, he had shown no particular flair for politics, nor did he prove able to entice previous donors to pledge £1 million each for the election campaign. Cohen’s legacy, Levy complained, was a deficit of £12 million.
Blair needed an experienced hand to rescue the party’s finances, but his old friend, he discovered, was incandescent. ‘Tony had gone behind my back,’ raged Levy. ‘What I found so difficult to accept or forgive was that he hadn’t been straight with me.’ Nevertheless, against his better judgement that ‘TB really was sometimes just in it for himself’, Levy agreed to swallow his anger and resume raising millions.
The atmosphere among the donors, he discovered, had changed. Established friends of Labour were unwilling to be publicly associated with the party. Complicating the fund-raising was Labour’s new law requiring the declaration of all donations over £5,000. However, an unintended omission did allow the legal concealment of loans. Knowing that the Tories were raising millions of pounds in this way, Blair urged Levy to follow suit.
Levy approached a series of businessmen and, deploying his talent, persuaded them to lend the party a total of £14 million, without recevi
ng any publicity. Among those who agreed to lend over £1 million were Sir David Garrard, a property developer, Barry Townsley, a stockbroker, and Chai Patel, the founder of the Priory clinic. Sir Gulam Noon, known as the ‘curry king’, lent £250,000. Levy told Blair and the party’s treasurer about those arrangements. In October 2004, showing little sensitivity, Blair nominated seven of the twelve who had given loans for peerages. They included Garrard, Noon, Townsley and Patel. The nominations were submitted to the scrutiny committee, which was under the chairmanship of Dennis Stevenson, a well-known corporate chairman. To vet whether the individuals would be suitable legislators, the committee’s staff sought out any damaging information by circulating the names to the Inland Revenue, the police, the intelligence services and other state agencies. Blair and members of his staff who had compiled the nominations – principally Jonathan Powell and Ruth Turner, his trusted political adviser and close friend – did not expect any blowback despite the unusual desperation to raise money.
At the same time, Blair had also nominated Paul Drayson, the chief executive of PowderJect Pharmaceuticals. Within six months, Lord Drayson had contributed £1 million to the Labour Party and become a junior minister. Soon after, news emerged that, following his first donation of £100,000 in 2002, Drayson’s company had been awarded a £32 million contract by the government for a smallpox vaccine. The relationship was denounced by a Tory MP as ‘pretty corrupt. To describe Paul Drayson as a captain of industry is far from accurate. He is a young man in a hurry.’ Drayson was forty-four. Unknown to his critics, the new minister had previously saved £3 million in tax by setting up offshore trusts before floating his company. After that saving was discovered, Drayson asserted that at all times he and his company had acted within the law, and there was no evidence to the contrary. Later, surveying Blair’s record, a parliamentary scrutiny committee realised that twenty-five of the 292 peers Blair had created were donors to the party. They had given about £25 million.
