by Tom Bower
As he worked through his questions, Reid did not ask whether British officers could operate in a tribal society where they neither spoke the language nor understood the culture; nor did he query whether the British would encounter resistance to nation-building, or whether the Taliban posed a danger. Despite the intelligence failure in Iraq, he did not question the reports stating that the army could perform well in Afghanistan. And since he favoured the deployment, Walker did not volunteer, as he admitted later, that ‘we did not have any clear intelligence picture on Helmand. It was an empty hole.’
Reid was a bruiser who basked in the prime minister’s trust, fortified by self-belief; he was not a counter-intuitive intellectual. One question did not dawn on him: had the army learned any lessons in Iraq? Accordingly, he never discovered that the army and the MoD had resisted a post-mortem to investigate their mistakes. In the military’s mindset, not only did the generals and the MoD convince themselves that there would be no similarities between the two wars, but, pointedly, both had decided not to deploy senior officers with Iraqi experience to Afghanistan.
Not surprisingly, to protect his own department from embarrassment Tebbit did not prompt Reid to query the wisdom of Britain punching above its weight. Although the financial cuts since 1998 had denuded the army of reserves, Walker had stopped asking for additional funds. Knowing that Blair was addicted to using ‘force for good’, he said nothing more. At the end of the session, Reid thanked his guest for giving all the assurances he required. ‘I acted on Walker’s advice,’ he would later say.
The two men visited Downing Street next. The passive mood in Blair’s den did not reflect a government pondering another distant engagement. Walker was not surprised that Blair failed to ask, ‘How badly wrong could it go?’ or even ask for a comparison with the last three years in Iraq. The prime minister was not interested in the past. Since 2004, he had been eager to support NATO in Afghanistan, and General David Richards, the hero of Sierra Leone and the new NATO commander in Kabul, had assured him that nation-building was doable. For his part, Walker was not equipped to contribute to a discussion on foreign policy, and the general remained silent as Reid explained the plan devised by Air Marshal Torpy to send 3,150 lightly equipped troops, without surveillance drones and with only a few helicopters. Neither visitor mentioned that Brigadier Ed Butler, the mission’s commander, had requested 10,000 men. That figure had been ridiculed by Walker. The number he had chosen reflected, in his words, ‘what the market would bear’ – not least to avoid an argument in Cabinet.
Relying on Torpy to decide the nature of the Afghan mission reflected the disorganisation of the British military. Torpy was a fighter pilot without any experience of land warfare. In his uneasy relationship with Butler, a seasoned forty-five-year-old former SAS commander and Old Etonian who first served in Afghanistan in 2001, Torpy never referred to the continuing flow of intelligence reports from the SAS groups that had been fighting the Taliban since 2001. ‘Torpy didn’t understand,’ complained Butler long after. ‘I was hugely frustrated and nearly resigned.’ In 2005, Butler suffered Northwood’s detachment in silence. Whitehall and Westminster relied on Margaret Aldred’s committee to deliver the reassurance that Britain could safely engage in nation-building. Neither the contradictory intelligence reports nor Butler’s request for at least 10,000 men were considered.
Reid was advised to suppress his own and Blair’s gung-ho enthusiasm when he sought Cabinet approval, and instead to emphasise that it was a peaceful mission, with only 600 troops equipped for combat. Gus O’Donnell watched Reid make a ‘this is all relatively straightforward and short-lived’ presentation. Next, Blair went around the table asking each minister for their opinion.
Ruth Kelly stood up and gushed, ‘Yes, we must go.’
Des Browne asked about the ‘exit’.
‘What are we getting into here?’ asked Alistair Darling.
‘This is essentially peacekeeping,’ replied Reid, ‘and we’ll be surprised if there are more than a handful of British casualties.’
After the Cabinet gave its unanimous approval, Gordon Brown stopped his noisy scribbling and got up, saying, ‘If that’s your view, I’d better go and get the money.’
Five years later, Blair’s recollection of the circumstances leading to that Cabinet decision did not match the memories of the others. ‘As John made very clear, it would be a tough and dangerous mission [and] our military had a good plan for our contribution,’ he wrote in 2010, contradicting Reid’s suggestion that the mission would be peaceful. Jonathan Powell also provided a revisionist version. The military chiefs, he wrote, argued for going into Helmand in strength, ‘although Tony and Reid were reluctant’.
A more accurate reflection of Blair’s and Reid’s intentions was the latter’s statement in the Commons on 26 January 2006 announcing the commitment. ‘This potent force’, Reid said, was being sent ‘to protect and deter … Afghanistan again becoming a sanctuary for terrorists’, to guard the PRTs and to destroy the source of 90 per cent of Britain’s heroin imports. The government’s purpose was not to wage war. ‘We would be perfectly happy’, he fatally volunteered, ‘if they returned without firing a shot.’
In April, as a final check before dispatching British troops to Lashkar Gah, Blair asked Bill Jeffrey, who had taken over as permanent secretary from Tebbit the previous November, for reassurance that the army’s simultaneous engagement in Iraq and Afghanistan was ‘manageable’.
Seeking Jeffrey’s advice was bizarre. He had left the Home Office after being embarrassed by another immigration scandal. For the Cabinet secretary to appoint a man with no knowledge of defence as the senior official in the ministry highlighted the changing standards in the civil service. Previously, the new permanent secretary would have been an outstanding insider, and the disappointed candidates would have been dispatched to run other departments across Whitehall. The selection of Jeffrey, a taciturn man without any military expertise, just as Britain was about to enter another war reflected Blair’s unusual management style. Having purposely excluded Tebbit from the inner councils, he by default deprived Whitehall of any senior civil servant able to scrutinise the logistics of the Afghan war – the manpower, equipment and plans. To no one’s surprise, Jeffrey rarely emerged from his office, but he advised Blair that stretching the army between Iraq and Afghanistan was indeed manageable. The trick was for the troops to ‘dribble’ into Helmand over several months rather than all arriving together.
In his excitement, Reid ordered that a war room be set up in his suite of offices to follow the movements of the ‘PRTs, plus a battle group in support and attack helicopters’. He was persuaded to desist.
On 23 April, Reid arrived in Kabul for his first visit to Afghanistan. Over breakfast, he was briefed by Ed Butler that, since the army’s arrival in Lashkar Gah, the mission had gone pear-shaped. The intelligence reports had not identified the chaos and danger in Helmand, the Foreign Office and DFID officials were hopeless, and the 600 paratroopers were outgunned by the Taliban.
‘What Taliban?’ asked Reid. ‘No one told me that there are any Taliban left. It’s the first I’ve heard about this.’
Butler looked at the minister with surprise.
‘What about nation-building?’ asked Reid.
‘It’s always been a very complex security situation here,’ Butler replied, unable then or thereafter to decide whether Reid was genuinely ignorant or just posturing.
Over the following four days, Reid saw the reality facing Britain’s ill-equipped small army. ‘We’ve got a serious problem,’ he told Butler. ‘I don’t know how we got into this. Trust me, I’ll sort it out. I’ll knock a few heads together on this.’
The minister who had committed Britain to its fourth Afghan war spent the next five days hearing warnings about the possible consequences for Britain’s inadequate force. He returned to London, but neither he nor Blair changed anything. And then he was gone, dispatched to the Home Office. His removal wa
s followed by the departure of all the architects of the mission. Military officers, civil servants and politicians – all were replaced by men inexperienced in warfare or even defence.
FORTY-TWO
The Cost of Confusion
* * *
‘Education is our best economic policy,’ said Blair in 2005, but the truth about Britain’s schools after his eight years in office was mixed. He had endorsed sixteen White Papers and eleven Acts of Parliament and had increased spending by 78 per cent, but the additional money, as David Normington was forced to admit to a parliamentary committee, had barely improved children’s education. On the contrary, England’s school examination results were poor, and had never been more controversial. In private, Blair accepted that failure.
In public statements, Normington occasionally asserted that ‘school performance, both primary and secondary, is dramatically up, with a 17 per cent improvement in literacy since 1997’, but he too acknowledged a different picture in private, with academic studies showing that there had been a decline in certain standards since 2000.
Research by the Curriculum, Evaluation and Management Centre (CEM) on 5,000 children across 120 schools had found no evidence of a rise in literacy levels since 1997. The improvements in the test results, particularly in literacy, owed everything to test preparation rather than an improvement in actual learning.
Blair had been misled by Michael Barber’s graphs. Testing, the researchers reported, had been appropriated by the government to demonstrate an artificial rise in standards. To satisfy Barber, local authorities and schools were implementing anti-learning measures to boost results. Over 25 per cent of children were still leaving primary school without the required levels of reading and numeracy. Some studies would report that 33 per cent of school-leavers were deficient in the three Rs. ‘National tests’, admitted Andrew Adonis, newly appointed as junior education minister, ‘show that progress is not being sustained across the board.’ Blair knew that his original conviction that poverty was the principal cause of poor education was mistaken. Bad teachers were the main culprits. But, hooked by his slogan ‘standards not structures’, he had ignored the human factor and, like Adonis, he wanted to tell a good story.
Eight years after he had terminated the advantages enjoyed by pupils at 1,198 grant-maintained schools and introduced ‘child-centred’ classrooms, he reconsidered Chris Woodhead’s homily that the only cure for England’s inferior education was to remove bad teachers. Although his advisers had not shown him statistics indicating how well-trained American teachers had reduced the ‘stubborn 20 per cent’ of problem children in US schools to a mere 1.5 per cent, Ofsted reports sent to Downing Street did finally blame teachers for failing to improve education.
Records submitted to Downing Street showed that many of Labour’s special programmes had been worthless. Some £885 million had been spent since 1998 to reduce truancy, but rates had increased, not least because of high illiteracy among secondary-school children. Schemes for eleven-year-olds had also failed. Those children targeted in one major project to improve literacy and numeracy costing £386 million still lacked the necessary skills. Most of England’s disadvantaged children were not benefiting from the £1.1 billion spent annually on Sure Start, and even sympathetic politicians were disillusioned.
Blair’s flagship policies giving schools greater freedom had failed. Just nine out of 21,000 had received the small grants that were part of a programme giving them the ‘power to innovate’, and none had won the status of ‘earned autonomy’ awarded under the scheme. Nine out of the eleven academies were ranked at the bottom of the 2005 national curriculum tests. The government was committed to spending £5 billion on 200 academies by 2010, without any certainty that standards would improve.
Blair lost faith in Whitehall’s ability to improve education. ‘I know what I want to do,’ he told his special adviser. ‘I just need to persuade my party to do it. I’ll take charge because it has a political dimension.’ His argument about education, he acknowledged, had been with the Labour Party and not the Tories.
In the race for his legacy, he once again changed direction. The state, he persuaded himself, should commission and regulate schools but not actually provide education. Competition was the answer and parental choice the best stimulus to improvement. ‘The system’, he said in a speech on 12 September decrying his failure to pursue well-grounded reforms, ‘will finally be opened up to real parent power.’ To complete the somersault, he advocated ‘genuinely independent non-fee-paying state schools’.
The next day, the OECD reported that Britain had slipped down the league of educated nations. Stagnation over the decade meant that the country had fallen from thirteenth to twenty-second in the OECD’s league. The government’s own statistics confirmed a ‘crisis’ in state schools. Not only had truancy increased, but a hard-to-believe 25 per cent of students dropped out of university in their first year. Those 71,000 non-graduates wasted £500 million. Blair ordered initiatives to prove that the 37 per cent increase in the education budget since 1997 would not be wasted.
In an outpouring of headlines, new structures emerged: ‘Trust Schools’, ‘Families of Schools’, ‘Primary Strategy Learning Networks’ and ‘School Improvement Partners’. In yet another White Paper, ‘More Choice for Pupils and Parents’, Blair further encouraged the fragmentation of the state system.
Blair’s aspirations inevitably courted controversy. David Bell, the chief inspector of schools, had warned about the danger of segregating white and immigrant communities. Roman Catholic institutions had become ‘white citadels’, while Muslim schools were hindering integration. Traditional Islamic education, Bell told Blair, espoused intolerance and illiberalism, while it encouraged misogyny by subordinating women. Ghettoisation in faith schools, he explained, would fail to equip Muslim children for life in Britain.
Bell was supported by protesting Labour MPs who demanded that Ofsted should force faith schools to promote tolerance. Others cautioned Blair that his priority of removing class inequalities would in turn create religious divisions. He ignored all that advice, as he did the threat of rebellion by about a hundred Labour MPs. A steely determination underlay his new philosophy.
The explosion of opposition reflected one anxiety. Unlike previous education secretaries, Ruth Kelly lacked the experience to dominate her officials. Her department also knew that Blair had unsuccessfully manoeuvred to demote her after the election in favour of Andrew Adonis. At least Barber’s resignation had removed one hurdle to improving literacy, with Kelly encouraging primary schools to use ‘synthetic phonics’ to teach reading. The counter-revolution against the Left’s passion for chaotic ‘child-centred’ classrooms using the National Literacy Strategy had begun, but the reading gap between children from advantaged and disadvantaged families was as wide as it had been in 1997. As Kelly admitted, ‘It appears that we have not managed to narrow the gap between attainment of children from lower and higher income families.’
Her weakness suited Adonis. The junior minister was tasked by Blair with masterminding the fightback against Blair’s own earlier policies. In the countdown to the prime minister’s departure, he drafted ‘Higher Standards, Better Schools for All’, a White Paper calculated to upset Labour’s vested interests in that it mirrored the Tories’ 1997 proposals. The government revealed itself on 25 October 2005 as an unashamed supporter of parental power, selection, independent state schools, more private sponsorship, breaking the comprehensive model and reducing local authorities’ powers. The focus, said Blair, was on excellent schools that were independent of ‘politically correct interference from state or municipality’.
Approving the menu was, as usual, easier than delivering the product. Within days, his Labour opponents exposed flaws in the new scheme. Even their own Westminster staff, complained MPs, found Adonis’s system too complicated to understand. Blair’s pontificating about delegation and independence, they concluded, was unrealistic. The paper was condemn
ed as ‘extraordinarily poorly written’. Beneath the headlines, the substance had been tailored by Adonis to match Labour’s demand for centralised control. So, despite Normington’s assurance that money would follow the pupil to finance the expansion of the best schools, Adonis’s introduction of a minimum-funding guarantee prevented the closure of bad ones. Proper parental choice, a parliamentary committee confirmed, would be thwarted. The confusion was inevitable. Blair once again lacked the courage to disempower the local education authorities. School funds and teachers’ salaries would still be controlled by the LEAs. Three weeks after his speech lamenting his past failures to reform, Blair was again fighting Labour MPs demanding his retreat.
John Prescott led the charge. ‘Choice’ was abhorrent to the uneducated, he said. Giving poor children the opportunity to choose a good school, he warned, was a risk: ‘The trouble is, if you create good schools people will want to go to them.’ Instead of allowing bad schools to wither, Blair’s critics wanted to compel middle-class children to attend poorly performing schools. In the orthodoxy of social engineering, they imagined that the presence of such children would automatically improve failing academies. Prescott led the same charge against trust schools. The academies, he said, would be a revival of selective grammar schools. He could not take in the truth that the hurdle to good education was bad teachers.
One month later, at the end of January, Blair faced a revolt by ninety Labour MPs against his latest education bill’s provisions for self-governing trust schools. He fought back hard. Eight years of New Labour, he said, had improved Britain’s education system. The number of schools deemed to be inadequate by Ofsted, he said, had halved to 1,557, educating nearly a million children, while over 1,500 secondary schools had improved and the number deemed to be ‘outstanding’ had doubled.
In support of Blair, Normington had produced the government’s statistics in front of a parliamentary committee, showing that, since 1997, with an additional 40,000 teachers and 260,000 more assistants and support staff – a 150 per cent increase – the quality of teaching and educational standards had soared. A-level pass rates had risen from 87 to 97 per cent. Over the same period, the number of candidates getting five GCSEs had zoomed from 45 to 76 per cent. ‘There was a significant improvement in performance,’ Normington said, contradicting the evidence of falling standards due to grade inflation.
