by Tom Bower
Some suspected that his somersault reflected an understanding with his paymaster in the Gulf. The United Arab Emirates opposed the Muslim Brotherhood government in Egypt. With their support, a violent uprising in June 2013 deposed the elected administration and restored the army to power under General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. Among those dispatched to Cairo at the UAE’s expense as an ‘economic adviser’ was Blair. Despite the bloody military revolt, he hailed Sisi’s coup as the ‘absolutely necessary rescue of a nation’. The hundreds of deaths during the uprising, he said, were justified because ‘all the choices facing Egypt are ugly … but simply condemning the military will not get us any nearer to a return to democracy’.
Three years after welcoming Mubarak’s downfall, Blair’s tolerance of dictators reflected his complaint about the impotence of European and American politicians over radical Islam. The West, he said, should assert the supremacy of its values in the Middle East. Such stridency cast Blair as prejudiced.
In July 2014, at the very moment that war erupted again in Gaza and Israeli shells were killing Palestinians, he returned to Britain to host a surprise sixtieth birthday party for Cherie and 150 guests at his Buckinghamshire home. The contrast between photographs of celebrities dancing, his new commercial interests in Israel and pictures of Palestinians suffering underlined his conflicts of interest. Isolated from the Palestinians and scorned by EU officials, he was also adrift from Washington. Blair knew he was on borrowed time.
To save his job, he flew to Cairo to persuade General Sisi to broker a peace deal between Hamas and Israel. His initiative cut across Kerry’s efforts. For the secretary of state, that was the final straw. Kerry wanted Blair’s resignation but did not want to be held responsible for the deed. He waited until November 2014, when Federica Mogherini, an Italian politician, became responsible for the EU’s foreign affairs. Ignoring Blair’s charm offensive, Mogherini told him that she wanted control over Europe’s policy in the region and that he should resign. Blair agreed, so long as the announcement was delayed until May 2015.
To repair his self-esteem, he welcomed the decision by Justin Forsyth, a former special adviser in Downing Street and an ex-employee of AGI, to use his position as chief executive of the Save the Children charity to present Blair with a prize in recognition of his ‘leadership in international development’ at a gala in New York. Forsyth’s endorsement was supported by Jonathan Powell, a member of the charity’s board. Forsyth had forgotten that, six years earlier, his organisation had supported a complaint by twenty-one aid agencies who condemned Blair’s mission in Palestine for having ‘fundamentally failed’. That contradiction was noted by more than 87,000 people, including members of the charity’s staff, who signed a petition of protest. Blair looked embarrassed at the award ceremony because the protest had snowballed after GQ magazine, not coincidentally, named him ‘philanthropist of the year’ at the same time. Both awards appeared to have been prompted by Blair’s requests.
With his employment with the Quartet about to end, he established a discreet office in Israel and sought a closer relationship with the UAE. One cloud was the state of Mubadala’s faltering finances. As oil prices fell, the Emirates’ finances were squeezed. At the insistence of the crown prince, the value of the fund’s contracts was questioned. As with other funds in Abu Dhabi, Mubadala’s managers had been swindled by fixers and over $1 billion had disappeared. Suspicions of fraud were directed at senior advisers who had sought to cultivate Blair. Ignoring that hiccup, in a lengthy proposal he suggested a new five-year partnership. ‘There is virtually nowhere in the world right now’, he wrote, ‘where we could not work or provide the necessary contacts either politically or commercially should we want to.’ He continued: ‘As with any country, there are from time to time issues or problems that arise and require fixing. These could be diplomatic or commercial or even relational challenges. We stand ready to offer our help in solving these issues.’ Mubadala’s managers anticipated that he would ask for £25 million, plus commission.
At Mubadala’s request, he flew to Vietnam to offer his advice on restructuring state enterprises and making the country more attractive to foreign investment. Shortly after, David Cameron visited with a large trade delegation. Blair offered the same service to Aleksandar Vučić, the Serbian prime minister who had served in Milošević’s government. Blair’s fees were paid from Abu Dhabi. On each visit to a foreign country, he would call at the British embassy for briefings, occasionally staying overnight, undeterred by the fact that he was advising a sovereign government in ways that could conflict with British interests. The sentiment among some in London was suppressed irritation, but no one in Whitehall dared challenge the former prime minister. On the contrary, he was encouraged to join Peter Sutherland, the former chairman of BP, on the advisory panel that supervised the construction of a $45 billion oil pipeline from Azerbaijan to the Mediterranean. He was also paid to advise Ilham Aliyev, Azerbaijan’s president and an ally of Britain, whenever required. The threads of Blair’s relationships led in many directions. BP – once dubbed ‘Blair Petroleum’ because of the close relations between the then prime minister and the corporation – secured Blair’s services not only in Azerbaijan, but also in seeking new concessions for the company in Abu Dhabi. Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, Blair’s employer at Mubadala, was also the head of Abu Dhabi’s Supreme Petroleum Council. Entwined in that commercial association was Blair’s enthusiasm for recycling his role with the Quartet. Soon after a discreet conversation with Zayed al-Nahyan in Jones the Grocer, a coffee house adjacent to Mubadala’s headquarters, Blair flew to Qatar to meet Khaled Meshaal, a Hamas leader. Ostensibly, Blair was offering Hamas a prize. In exchange for a permanent ceasefire, he explained, Gaza’s border would be opened and billions of dollars invested to help the Palestinians. Although Netanyahu had not approved the plan, Blair sought to prove his credibility by offering Meshaal a meeting with David Cameron in Downing Street in June 2015. Hamas rejected the invitation, but the offer raised a litany of questions about Blair’s profitable proximity to government leaders and his many commercial retainers, especially with J. P. Morgan, whose client needed Hamas’s acquiescence to develop the gas fields off the coast of Gaza.
By February 2016, Blair’s resumé as a broker of influence presented him as being at the heart of a network of commercial contacts in twenty-five nations that operated in parallel with AGI and the Faith Foundation in another twenty countries. His latest accounts disclosed that his annual turnover had increased to £19.4 million, with increased profits of £2.6 million. ‘In a series of deep business and government connections around the world’, he explained, ‘we do business and philanthropy.’
His self-description had surprised the organisers of ‘Eat’, a conference held in Stockholm on 1 June 2015 to discuss feeding the hungry. Blair was invited to make a twenty-minute speech. He sought a fee of £250,000, plus £80,000 in expenses. He was offered £125,000, which he rejected.
The snap rejection of what by any standards was a large fee reflected a politician guided by an unusual code of integrity. That weakness existed during his premiership but went unseen by not only the public, but also civil servants and Labour MPs. By obscuring his attitude towards spending and making money and his disregard for the traditional culture of government during his decade in Downing Street, Blair persuaded millions of people in Britain and abroad to believe in his and New Labour’s exceptional virtues. Subsequently, his conduct in committing the country to war in Iraq and Afghanistan challenged their trust. His broken vows could no longer be concealed by the disseminators of government information. We now realise that the path to the two wars was not an aberration but all of a piece with the way his government behaved across its entire domestic agenda, especially in the areas of health, education, energy and immigration. In a tragic sense, Blair had been consistent. His legacy was shorn of any nostalgia.
During his time in power, the three most important public servants in his administratio
n – Robin Butler, Richard Wilson and Andrew Turnbull – had served him competently and loyally. During those years, each had judged that Britain’s leader was, at worst, an enigma. They later changed their opinions and, in their different ways, concluded that, as prime minister, Blair had not been a laudable guardian of the public’s trust. No other prime minister in recent history has been similarly castigated after leaving office. Richard Wilson’s heartfelt verdict echoed their judgement: ‘There are events during my period as Cabinet secretary that make me shudder at what I remember because we had high hopes and we were so disappointed. He promised so much, but in the end so little was achieved.’
Acknowledgements
* * *
I owe a huge debt to many people who were generous with their time and help. By the end of the two-year project, I had interviewed over 180 people, some several times. I will not name them individually. Most are apparent from their quoted comments in the text; a minority preferred to remain anonymous. I am immensely grateful to them all.
At the outset, I was indebted to Sarah Fletcher for her research at Westminster. I am also grateful to Sarah Mole for her research, while Alistair Morton provided a succinct guide to government statistics.
Above all, I could not have written this book without Claudia Wadsworth’s remarkable research. Over many months, Claudia produced original information across the whole range of topics covered herein, which made the writing both a pleasure and a challenge.
Regarding the military aspect, I spoke to all the senior generals, admirals and air marshals who served Blair. That good fortune owed much to the advice offered by General Christopher Elliott, whose recent book, High Command: British Military Leadership in the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, provided an invaluable analysis of the problems faced by Britain’s military during the Blair government.
Jonathan Cummings and Matthew Kalman were helpful researchers in Israel.
Others to whom I am grateful are Neil Barnett, Jan and David Blackburn, Adam Boulton, James Brabazon, Phil Clark at SOAS, Phil Collins, David Cornwell, Dominic Cummings, David Easton, Robert Fox, Penny Furniss, Brian Griffith, Mark Hollingsworth, Solomon Hughes, Trevor Kavanagh, Tim Knox at the Centre of Policy Studies, Brian and Anne Lapping, Richard Norton-Taylor, Alex Perry, Dominic Prince, Patrick Smith, Andrew Weir and Myles Wickstead of Africa Confidential, Hew Strachan, Paul Vallely, James de Waal, the late Henry Worsley and the authors of Blair Inc., Francis Beckett, David Hencke and Nick Kochan.
Many other contributors, especially Blairites, prefer to remain anonymous.
I am hugely grateful to Richard Cohen, an accomplished publisher and author, for editing the manuscript. Richard was generous, inspired, meticulous and made an invaluable contribution to the book.
Ian Bahrami was, as always, an outstanding copy-editor. Thanks to Sarah Barlow for her remarkable proofreading. At Faber, I was helped by Angus Cargill, my editor, and Rachel Alexander. For many years, none of my books has been completed without an enormous debt being owed to two stalwart friends: David Hooper, my libel lawyer, and Jonathan Lloyd, my agent at Curtis Brown.
Above all, I owe so much to Veronica. Her loyalty and support are invaluable and irreplaceable.
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* * *
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Notes and Sources
* * *
Providing sources in books that rely on any off-the-record conversations is always unsatisfactory. Unusually, however, a considerable number of interviewees in this book agreed to go ‘on the record’. Their names appear in the text alongside their comments. However, some constraints remain. For various reasons, most did not want their names to reappear regularly in this list of sources. Some are mentioned once, some occasionally, while others go unmentioned. Assiduous readers seeking the source of a quotation may be irritated by those omissions, but using an alternative identification – such as ‘private information’ – would, I believe, be worse, so I hope the compromise is acceptable.
Unless sourced to a book, newspaper or television programme, most of the quotations in the book are from named civil servants, politicians or military personnel whom I interviewed. Regarding the references from the inquiry chaired by John Chilcot, I have only included dates wh
en a witness gave oral evidence twice, or when his or her evidence also included a written submission. In some instances, the reference only mentions a page in the transcript.
INTRODUCTION
Soldiers and corporate chief executives … New York Times, 4 December 2014
CHAPTER 1
Butler’s protests were the death … Campbell, Power and the People, pp. 47, 50
‘He didn’t even ask me …’ Butler, interview with author
‘He didn’t really get …’ Campbell, Power and the People, p. 104
Simon Jenkins, another shrewd … The Times, 2 May 1997
‘an old-school …’ Powell, The New Machiavelli, p. 18
The first sign of … Mandelson, interview with author
‘I’ve decided to make …’ Butler, interview with author; Seldon, Blair, p. 280
‘It was my idea …’ Blair, A Journey, p. 114
‘My core staff …’ ibid., p. 19
That, he mistakenly … Chilcot, Wilson, 25 January 2011
‘You can keep it, Clare’ Campbell, Power and the People, p. 21
‘communication is fifty per cent …’ Blair, p. 27
The most important ally … Seldon, Blair, p. 196
CHAPTER 2
Beyond that, he was oblivious … McTernan, interview with author
‘We had come to power with …’ Blair, pp. 204–5
He was supported by … House of Commons, 20 November 1995 and 11 December 1995
Tim Walker and other … Walker and Flesher, interviews with author
Many of his constituents … McTernan, interview with author
Blair agreed with Straw … Clarke, interview with author
