A Fortunate Life (55 page)

Back in London I wrote a report for Blair proposing, among other things, that the court in The Hague should be encouraged to initiate immediate proceedings by indicting the Serb commanders of the operation I had witnessed. I still believe that, if this had happened,
Operation Horseshoe
might just have been stopped in its tracks, and the whole tragic course of the Kosovo war might just have been avoided.

Events were now moving steadily towards two concurrent climaxes. The first was the wider international crisis over Kosovo, the second, the narrower personal climax in the relationship I had established with Blair more than six years previously.

At a long meeting on 27 October, two days before the publication of Roy Jenkins’ crucial recommendations on electoral reform, Blair told me that he would have to draw back from our Chequers agreement, because he did not feel he could overcome increasing opposition from within the Cabinet, and could not risk splitting the Government.

I replied that I would try to think of a way through but could not easily see one. If this failed, I would have to stand aside in due course. All would depend on his reaction to the Jenkins recommendations. If he could be warm about these, there might still be something to play for. If not, it was all over.

When the Jenkins Report was published two days later, Blair’s response was entirely neutral. Later that day Robin Cook (a long-time supporter of electoral reform) rang me and, in a conversation which he said I should treat as ‘never having taken place’, told me that there had been a discussion about Jenkins at Cabinet that day.

Blair had been uncharacteristically silent, Cook complained, adding that he was really worried about Blair’s lack of leadership and inability to make decisions sometimes.
*

The
coup de grâce
came on BBC
Newsnight
that night, when Jack Straw, then Home Secretary and so responsible for the whole constitutional agenda, was anything but neutral, rubbishing the whole Jenkins Report in the most contemptuous terms. Blair rang me in apologetic mood next day. I told him that I was fed up with finding ways round his retreats from what we had already agreed and how angry I was about Jack Straw’s comments the previous night. If he did not now make some statement that would counteract the negative spin Straw had put on Jenkins, then everyone would know that Jenkins was dead, and, if that was the case, then so was our project.

No such statement ever came. Britain’s best chance of getting much-needed electoral reform for Westminster was dead, and my time as Leader of the Lib Dems was coming to a close. Two days later I told my closest adviser, Richard Holme, that, though we had achieved much, the ultimate aim of my strategy was now unachievable, and I had concluded that my usefulness to the Lib Dems as their Leader was over. I had therefore decided to resign at the earliest opportunity, which would enable me to do so on my terms and hand over to my successor as smoothly as possible.

In November there was one more attempt to revive things, this time initiated by Blair, but it came to nothing. The long dance was over. We had failed to recover the chance we lost on the night of 2 May 1997. Perhaps it would have been different if Labour’s majority in 1997 had been smaller. Perhaps not.

Looking back, I have concluded that there were several reasons for the failure of our plans. Way back in 1997 I asked Richard Holme, ‘Do you think Blair really means it?’ His reply was, ‘Yes. But then the best seducers
always do!’ So, did Blair mean it? In the end, I must leave others to decide. But I do not believe that, as a new Prime Minster facing huge challenges at home and abroad, he could have afforded to spend as much time as he did on something he had no intention of carrying out. And his most senior colleagues in the Cabinet, such as Brown, Straw and Prescott, who were surely in the best position to know, certainly believed he meant it – which is why they opposed it so strongly.

I think the fault lies elsewhere.

Tony Blair has many extraordinary qualities: an outstanding ability, second only perhaps to Mrs Thatcher, to locate and stimulate the erogenous zones of the British public; and very considerable personal courage. He also has an exceptional ability to recover when on the back foot. It used to be said of Gladstone that he was terrible on the rebound – Blair is, too. He has, too, an unfussy, unpompous and straightforward approach to problems and people, an ability to take criticism without rancour (in 2001, when the Government was going through a bad patch, I warned that many people in Britain saw him as a ‘smarmy git’, and he never turned a hair) and a mind interested solely in the practicalities of politics and unencumbered by its creeds.

I remember being particularly struck by the contrast with Mrs Thatcher here. If you took a proposition to her you could see that the first question she asked herself was whether this was something consistent with her personal creed. Then the second was, ‘Will it work?’. Most politicians are like that. But with Blair the only question was, ‘Will it work?’. This was a weakness as well as a strength, for in politics beliefs, creeds and principles are the sheet-anchors that hold the ship’s head to the sea when the storm blows. The fact that Blair had abandoned socialism but never really found something else to replace it meant that he was far too often blown around by the prevailing winds – especially, in his latter years, those blowing from the direction of Fleet Street.

But, whatever his formidable and many strengths, Blair had weaknesses, too. First, although I think he spoke the truth when he said the partnership with the Lib Dems was the big thing he wanted to do to reshape British politics, it never was the
next
thing he wanted to do. Hence the delays, which in the end killed us. In politics waiting for ‘the ripe time’ is important – but you have to be able to spot the ripe time when it arrives. A leader’s powers are always greater on Day One than on Day Two, in the first month than in the second, and so on. The early days are the golden period of leadership, when almost anything is possible. After
that, the capacity to do is eaten away by events and an inevitable decline in support which comes from the necessity to make decisions. I fear that, in Tony Blair’s case, these early ‘golden hours’ of leadership were wasted, as his Government appeared to decide that the most important achievement of his first term would be to get elected for a second one.

The second problem lay in Blair’s overestimation of the power of his most formidable weapon: his charm. This was indeed a most prodigious instrument in his hands: I remember, like St Augustine, who pressed a rusty nail into his palm to resist the temptations of the devil, preparing myself for our meetings with the armour plate of a clear set of objectives in order not to succumb to his persuasiveness. But the problem was that Blair believed that he could overcome all obstacles through personal charm and did not see that, with hoary old warhorses like Prescott and Brown, this was simply not enough.

Thirdly, Blair and I shared a major deficiency. We were both, to some extent, strangers in our parties. Unlike Brown and Prescott (and there were many equivalents in the Lib Dems), we were outsiders not steeped in the cultures of the organisations we led. This caused both of us, I think, to conclude that, because something was logical, it was therefore achievable. In consequence, we perhaps underestimated the task of persuading organisations held together by a necessary tribalism to abandon this for the risks of partnership with others.

Do I feel deceived by Blair?

No. We always knew that whatever deals we made, both of us were governed by
force majeure
and the law of the possible. As it happens, it was Blair who had, in the end, to tell me that he could not carry his Cabinet on PR. If he had been able to do so, then it might very well have been me who would have had to tell him that I could not now carry my Party for a coalition. The fault here was not one of sincerity, but of underestimating the scale of the obstacles that we faced and an overestimation of our ability to overcome them.

Do I regret making the attempt? No, not that either. I do blame myself for focusing so much on what was possible that I did not spot how much more improbable it had all become after the end of 1997. But I do not regret trying.

Someone once said that, in big things, it is enough to have tried. I do not agree. It is precisely because a thing is big that trying is not enough; it is all the more necessary to succeed. And, though much was delivered along the way, we did not succeed in our stated aim of reuniting the
Centre Left. Politics has returned to its same old shape and its same old ways. The best I can do is take some comfort from the fact that not to have tried in these unique circumstances would have been a dereliction of duty by both of us, but especially by me as the Leader of a third party whose
raison d’être
has always been to be the centre of a broad movement to bring liberal values into the Government of Britain.

At the end of November I started actively to plan for my resignation. I had decided to announce this on 20 January the following year and to remain in post for five months as a caretaker Leader, while the Party fought the local elections in May, after which it would get down to the business of electing my successor.

In December I paid another trip to Kosovo, this time with Shirley Williams. The international community had finally persuaded both sides into a ceasefire and installed a ‘Kosovo Verification Mission’ (KVM), which was unarmed and had little or no power. I never believed this would work and had said so, but I wanted to see things for myself on the ground. Shirley and I came away convinced that the ceasefire could never hold, and the KVM was too weak to enforce it. Before long, we said in our report to the Government, Kosovo would slide back to war.

On 13 January, a week before my planned resignation date, Ming Campbell invited me to dine with him at the Reform Club. I knew he was thinking of standing as Leader when the time came and would probe me about my intentions. Sure enough, during dinner he asked me directly about my intentions. I fear I deceived him. I know that this upset him greatly later and led him to believe that I had somehow betrayed the bond of friendship between us. Ming was, and remains, a very close friend and was one of the key pillars upon whom I relied during my leadership years. But the duties of friendship, though great, do not in my view override the duties of leadership. The plain fact is that, if I had told Ming the truth that night, I would in effect have given him an advantage over others who might have wanted to stand for Leader in the coming contest, and this, I fear, I was just not prepared to do, even for a close and much admired friend.