by Tom Bower
The echo of Blairism’s assumed permanence was Peter Riddell’s judgement during the September ‘coup’ that ‘Mr Blair has made Labour a party of government again. There is no going back to the 1980s.’ That was precisely Blair’s intention. His legacy was the continuous modernisation of Britain.
The obstacle, he complained, was Brown. At the end of their conversations about the transition, Blair had emerged to complain, ‘Gordon has nothing. Nothing.’ After a decade, Brown saw New Labour as a tactic to win elections, not an ideology. The chancellor, Blair knew, misunderstood why the middle class, especially in the south of England, had switched from the Conservatives to New Labour. ‘Values to improve society’, he emphasised, was the persuasive appeal. ‘Once the values are fixed,’ explained Blair, ‘the policies would flow naturally.’ To his despair, Brown resisted the lesson. His chancellor, Blair complained to his inner circle, had no ideas other than the reheated Bennism of the 1980s. Eager to reconnect the party with the trade unions and the working class, Brown still opposed Blair on foundation hospitals, academies and reforms to the welfare state. But beyond that antagonism lurked something deeper. Unlike Blair, Brown did not believe the New Labour brand could be regenerated. The problem was not marketing but the product. A section of the country harboured a deeply felt outrage towards Blair. Combined with their anger at Cherie, Alastair Campbell and Iraq, the poison could not be drained away by rebranding. Brown classified Blair not as a victor but as the victim of his own convictions.
Saving face had become a political necessity. Reluctantly, Brown agreed to accompany Blair to the Mossbourne Academy in Hackney to praise the success of the academy movement. Together, they pottered around smiling at the cameras and pupils, and for fifteen minutes served meals. Ofsted rated Mossbourne as the one outstanding academy out of forty-six. By the end of the year, Blair expected there would be about ninety-five in existence, and his ambition was for 400 by 2010, accounting for 10 per cent of all secondary schools. Brown refused to endorse that ambition, not least because David Bell, the permanent secretary at education, criticised academies for failing to improve basic skills. Too many were based in expensive, complicated new buildings. In one east London academy, no one knew how to open the windows after the maintenance man unexpectedly died.
A more searing indictment of the Labour decade was the enrolment of 40,000 more children in private schools than in 1997. Parents gave up their savings to avoid the bad discipline and poor teaching in state schools. Ignoring that ‘vote’ by dissatisfied parents, Blair would nevertheless praise his achievement, writing, ‘In schools, standards up across the board.’ Not for the first time, international statistics contradicted his self-congratulation. Writing for the Sutton Trust, a Blairite educational group, Alan Smithers reported that his research had unearthed ‘a long trail of under-achievement’ across all levels in primary schools, especially in maths. In 2009, PISA, the international monitor, placed English secondary schools twenty-seventh out of sixty countries in maths, and eighteenth in the three Rs and science. In 2009, PISA, the international monitor, placed English secondary schools twenty-seventh out of sixty countries in maths and eighteenth in the three Rs and science, while in 2016 an OECD report ranked English sixteen-to-nineteen-year-olds and undergraduates as the worst of twenty-three developed countries in literacy and second worst in numeracy.
To Brown, all that was irrelevant. Despite Blair’s pleas, he refused to look beyond the Treasury. Blair acknowledged his impotence. As usual, on Budget day he sat on the front bench to cheer his chancellor, and found himself surprised by Brown’s 2p cut in income tax and the abolition of the 10p band for the lowest earners. Blair’s genuine praise placed him in good company. ‘His stewardship of the nation’s finances’, gushed the Daily Mail, ‘has been remarkable.’ The newspaper’s political columnist Peter Oborne hailed Brown as ‘a great chancellor’ and predicted that ‘historians will look back at the Brown years and marvel’. As usual, the man himself had ignored warnings that the abolition of the 10p threshold would increase taxes for the poorest. Blair also discounted the alarm. Like the majority of the country, he assumed that Brown had stuck to his pledge of ‘no more boom and bust’ and did truly believe he had produced ‘the longest period of economic growth for over 200 years’. The self-styled Iron Chancellor disregarded the rise of the public debt from 30.4 per cent of GDP in 2001/2 to 36.8 per cent, which was accurately predicted to soar the following year to 44.6 per cent, then 65.9 per cent in 2010/11, tipping Britain into recession. Those who forecast disaster were ignored.
In his Mansion House speech that year, Brown praised the City’s ‘ingenuity and creativity’ in inventing new forms of finance. The banks’ success, he boasted, was thanks in part to a decade of Treasury support for light-touch regulation. Brown’s City audience applauded themselves. Blair appeared beyond caring that Britain’s productivity remained poor and personal debts were increasing. He failed to catch that the cost of working tax credits was heading towards £20 billion, forty times more than Brown’s original estimate. New Labour’s achievement was not only the considerable redistribution of wealth so that poverty among children and pensioners had been reduced, but also that many people still appeared not to resent paying higher taxes to improve society. Yet Blair did appreciate that the limit would soon be reached. The cost of increased debt and ever-increasing stealth taxes contradicted New Labour’s ideals. Brown’s ‘prudent’ image was beginning to fade.
For the first time, Blair read the Treasury’s official records recounting the abolition of the annual £5 billion tax credits on dividends for pension funds. In 1998, he had called Brown’s edict ‘brilliant’ for making Britain ‘fair, modern and strong’. The official records from that year revealed a different judgement. Released in 2007 after a long freedom of information battle, the papers recorded Treasury officials accurately warning Brown that Britain’s unique private pension system would be wrecked by the loss of tens of billions of pounds. Nine years later, Blair publicly supported Brown’s ‘right decision to make for investment and the future of our pension system’. In private, his fears were reconfirmed.
Brown, he knew, was incapable of defeating David Cameron, but Blair had failed to nurture a network of party loyalists to support any alternative. In Powell’s judgement, Blair was acutely sensitive that any ‘mishandling’ of the succession would attract ‘bigger criticism of Tony than the Iraq war’. Out of either self-interest or a sense of obligation, he had tolerated Brown’s destruction of any potential leadership rival. Alan Milburn, Charles Clarke and John Reid had been effectively undermined by Damian McBride’s poisonous briefings to journalists. With Brown’s tacit approval, McBride, who described himself as ‘a cruel, vindictive and thoughtless bastard’, had peddled stories about sexual affairs, alcoholism and personal peccadilloes. ‘Tony never showed loyalty,’ recalled Geoff Hoon. ‘He spent no time to make sure there was a successor to entrench his brand of politics. He just looked after his enemies and damaged his friends.’
That left David Miliband as the sole Blairite flag-carrier. In some ways, back in 1992 the thirty-two-year-old had been similar to Blair – articulate, charming and intelligent. Hampered by Blair’s refusal to make him education secretary in 2005 or foreign secretary in 2006, Miliband had limited experience of government, which made him a casualty of Blair’s desire to control everything. Some believed that Blair feared the young man’s opposition on schools and foreign policy. In truth, his misgivings went much deeper. After recognising Miliband’s manifold weaknesses while he worked as the head of the policy unit in Downing Street after 1997, Blair had orchestrated his snap adoption as the Labour candidate for the South Shields constituency on the eve of the 2001 general election in order to propel him from his office. In those circumstances, he refused to encourage Miliband’s challenge to Brown.
Miliband’s own indecision exposed another serious defect: his lack of courage or, as Peter Mandelson would later put it, of ‘lead in his pencil’.
Accordingly, on 22 April, Miliband surrendered and pledged his vote to Brown. ‘Then Tony handed over the government to the one man who hated him,’ said Hoon. In the short term, by conceding the crown to Brown, Blair knew that the party would not split. But, beyond the smooth transition, he feared for its fate. The absence of influential Blairites at the head of the party threatened to bring about the demise of New Labour.
To exit in triumph, Blair used the long goodbye to fashion an image of his legacy. First, there was the Queen’s Speech, which anticipated thirty-nine new laws that would pass before his departure. Everything was thrown in: crime, immigration, more private services for the NHS, more academies, tougher A-levels, more social housing and nuclear power. To the end, he believed that laws rather than good government would change the country, belying his own confession that it was only as the handover approached that ‘I knew what to do and how to do it.’
Next he delivered ‘Pathways to the Future’, a series of lectures about public services, energy, defence and Europe. ‘New Labour’, he said at the outset, ‘has set a new political course for our nation. Others now have to set variations on our basic theme.’ However, his hope of changing the nation’s mood was stymied by his inconsistent record. Over the decade, he had certainly helped the poorest and removed the intolerances suffered by minorities. The distress of the poor had been reduced by the minimum wage and higher welfare payments, especially for mothers. For those benefiting from the banking boom, especially in the south, Britain became a more comfortable, even happier place. Blair had caught the mood – enriched by the Lottery’s money for the arts and the false impression of an improving economy – to transform London into a genuinely international city bursting with entrepreneurs and cultural icons. He described his paradigm as ‘a new kind of politics in the new century. What you did in your personal life was your choice, what you did to others was not.’ But improved lifestyles did not amount to a defined ideology. The regressive downside to ‘modernisation’ and ‘progressive’ politics, highlighted by his critics, was the rise in drug addiction and alcoholism, the decline of marriage, the fractures in social cohesion caused by immigration, the stagnation of educational standards, an Orwellian jungle of regulations, sleaze and the public’s loss of trust in Britain’s institutions.
His journey on health, education and energy had gone full circle, and at huge expense. Waiting times for treatment had indeed been dramatically cut, and the new schools and hospitals improved the atmosphere surrounding public services, but he offered nothing fundamentally new. After all his changes, he remained unconvinced and unconverted to real choice, competition and markets. New buildings were not the same as new ideas. His reforms had added little to his inheritance.
His valedictory speeches were either ignored or, as he admitted, greeted with ‘cynicism’. The exception was the public’s reaction to his passion for using Britain’s military to crush international terrorism. ‘Get real,’ he told his critics. ‘There is no alternative to fighting this menace [of a perverted form of Islam] wherever it rears its head. It has to be beaten. Period. Britain must be a player, not a spectator.’ Few disagreed about the dangers of political Islam, but most questioned a messenger who still energetically denied that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had made life worse for the local people.
In 1997, as the champion of multiculturalism, Blair had labelled those who warned about the danger of allowing political Islam into Britain’s mosques and opposed faith schools as racist. Ten years later, he was telling Muslims they had ‘a duty to integrate’ and should accept British values. ‘So conform to it or don’t come here,’ he said. Wearing a niqab, he added, was ‘a mark of separation’. Nevertheless, he did not believe that large numbers of Muslim immigrants rejected integration. In his opinion, immigration was not a harbinger of extreme Islam. On the contrary, he asserted, ‘To an extent immigration [was] to me utterly mainstream and a vital point of what the government was about.’
The evangelist’s sermon had become incomprehensible to the majority of Britons. He no longer presented his venture into Afghanistan as peaceful reconstruction. Helmand had become another front in the war on terror. Any defeat, he said, would be the fault of others for not sharing his self-belief.
Undeterred and led by General Charles Guthrie, the retired chiefs turned on Blair for dispatching a demoralised army to Afghanistan with insufficient money and equipment. From admiration to admonition within a decade, Guthrie’s disillusion reflected the public’s anger.
Blair’s other-worldliness was noticed by senior Guardian journalists during a lunch in Downing Street.
‘I was right to have gone to war in Iraq,’ said Blair defiantly.
‘But what if you’re proved wrong?’ a journalist asked.
‘I am right,’ Blair replied, and looking upwards continued, ‘but someone else will be my judge.’
Afghanistan would be decided using the same criteria. His denial that British troops were ‘stirring the hornets’ nest’ in a medieval society matched his incomprehension over how a decade of wars had degraded Britain’s armed forces.
The litmus test was his reaction to the capture on 23 March 2007 of fifteen Royal Navy ratings and marines by Iranian guards in the Gulf. The men and women had behaved appallingly. Over the following days of their incarceration, the men whimpered and humiliated themselves on Iranian television, while British diplomats negotiated their release.
On 4 April, Blair stood in his study with David Hill, his media supremo, watching the live television coverage of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president, announcing the ratings’ departure from Iran. Constantly glancing at the mirror to check his tie, Blair was observed by an aide to be psyching himself as usual into the right mood for his choreographed exit onto Downing Street to address the waiting cameras.
The following day, the ratings emerged from a plane at Heathrow to be hailed by the navy as heroes. Instead of swiftly escorting the miscreants into oblivion, the navy chiefs encouraged a rating to sell her story to a national newspaper. Many were outraged, not least the heads of the army. To allow a rating to profit from humiliation symbolised the Blairist priority of placing the media before morality. Blair rejected the complaints as ‘synthetic fury’. His principles had shifted sharply since 1997; alternatively, his true values had been concealed for ten years and only over the last weeks were they finally surfacing.
The public test of Blair’s status would be the local elections on 5 May, his thirteenth election campaign as leader since 1994. He was ending his extended swansong with a calculated gamble against those who ridiculed New Labour as an ideology. He hoped his critics would at least acknowledge that electoral success was the glue that had held the party together. A good showing would confound the Brownites and make them admit, however grudgingly, that Labour was electable thanks to his championing of the centre ground.
His gamble failed. Labour lost over 500 seats in England, while the Scottish Nationalists became the largest party in Scotland. Labour’s Scottish leaders feared eventual meltdown. The Tories won 40 per cent of the vote against Labour’s 27 per cent. Blair once again blamed the defeat on those who refused to share his own belief in himself. To his disappointment, his long farewell had not provoked the crowds to ask for more but to cry for relief. He could no longer resist. The Evening Standard’s headline was percipient: ‘Blair Quits to Make Millions’.
Five days later, he flew to Sedgefield, his constituency. In the Trimdon Labour Club, packed with local admirers, he made an emotional resignation speech, asking to be remembered as a visionary aiming for the stars – and getting there. Holding back tears, he apologised ‘for the times I have fallen short … To be frank, I would not have wanted it any other way … I ask you to accept one thing hand on heart: I did what I thought was right.’ Even before he returned to London, the New Labour logo had been removed from the party’s website. That night’s Evening Standard headline reflected the mood: ‘I Am Sorry’.
Among the obit
uaries from his supporters, Peter Riddell wrote, ‘Mr Blair may be widely reviled at present, but his influence will long outlast his departure.’ Philip Gould concluded, ‘New Labour rather than the Tories is the Establishment … The future remains New Labour, the only party of genuine change in Britain today.’ One enduring success in those twilight days was a full peace agreement between the IRA and the unionists in Ulster.
Over the last six weeks, as Brown awaited his coronation, Blair embarked on a world tour using a Boeing 777, the world’s largest twin-engined jet, which normally seats about 400 people and had been chartered by the government from British Airways. His first stop was Paris, after which, on 17 May, he flew to Washington to stand with President Bush in the White House rose garden for a public farewell. ‘What I know’, said Bush, ‘is that the world needs courage, and what I know is that this good man is a courageous man.’ World leaders, added Bush, listened to Blair. ‘Even if they may not agree with him 100 per cent, they admire him.’ Asked whether he had caused Blair’s downfall, the president replied, ‘I don’t know.’ The day ended with a party at the British embassy arranged by David Manning.
Next, Blair visited the Pope and formally revealed he would convert to Catholicism, before flitting across Africa, from Sierra Leone to South Africa. In 2001, he had described the continent as a ‘scar on the conscience of the world’. Since then, the successful organisation of debt relief had benefited some countries, while others had corruptly abused Britain’s generosity.
