Authors: Tom Bower
In the midst of the bombing, Geoffrey Robinson’s loan to Mandelson was at last exposed and was followed by their resignations. On Christmas Eve, Mandelson was invited to Chequers. Blair was adept at separating business and friendship, and he encouraged Mandelson to feel undamaged, although the resignation had strained relations among Blair’s team. Cherie’s jealousy over Anji Hunter’s importance was unabated. Once again, she had burst into Blair’s office while the two were speaking and demanded, ‘When are you leaving?’ Hunter said nothing, and later Cherie attacked her husband for ignoring her feelings. Blair retorted that she was ridiculous and could damage the government; she would have to accept that Hunter was staying.
Soon after Christmas, Blair received verified reports that the Serbian army was murdering Kosovans. ‘I saw it essentially as a moral issue,’ he would write, one that had to be resolved by the military. ‘God, had we learned nothing from Europe’s history? It was shocking.’ More shocking still was the absence of similar outrage in Paris or Berlin. Both governments resisted involvement and were prepared, Blair believed, to ‘abandon the people’.
The fate of the Balkans was irrelevant to Britain’s national interest, but being a ‘force for good’ had been conceived by Blair for precisely these circumstances. ‘This is something Britain should be doing,’ he said. The bombing of Iraq had reinforced his self-confidence.
The traditional format for government meetings to consider major military interventions, honed over previous centuries, would have triggered a cast of ministers and officials to gather in the Cabinet room, each having read thick files outlining the background and options. The discussion of the Overseas Policy and Defence Committee would have been minuted and available for posterity. Blair disliked that formality, not least because he wanted to exclude Gordon Brown. Powell and not the Cabinet secretary was told to organise an informal conversation
in Blair’s new, larger office, or ‘the den’. In that ambience, any official record of the discussion was intentionally limited.
The scene for the arriving military and intelligence officials was unusual. ‘Jonathan Powell’, noticed Guthrie, ‘was sitting at a desk outside Blair’s office like a dog in a basket. He was no more a chief of staff than a monkey. We all knew by then that he couldn’t co-ordinate government affairs.’ If only, he thought, Blair had retained someone like General Hastings Ismay, Churchill’s invaluable wartime assistant. But mentioning Ismay would have confounded Blair.
Inside the room, seated on chairs or perched on a sofa were David Manning, a solid foreign-affairs expert who had been ambassador in Warsaw, New Delhi, Paris and Moscow before returning to London; defence minister George Robertson, who smiled a lot but would say little; John Kerr, the unremarkable head of the depleted British foreign service, who had given up arguing with Cook; John Sawers, the prime minister’s new gung-ho foreign-affairs adviser, who had recently returned from the British embassy in Washington; and Robin Cook, whose manner sapped Blair’s patience, not least because he often telephoned Robertson before meetings to alleviate his indecision. Finally, lurking at the back, stood Alastair Campbell, firing himself up for another self-declared war against the media to ‘show who was boss’.
The focus was on Guthrie. Sending the military on a moral mission to the Balkans made him cautious. ‘I’m dead against bombing,’ he said. ‘With bombing, you’re bound to make mistakes and risk alienating the local people. We must have a Plan B to move in on the ground.’ He was also wary of Kosovo’s mountainous terrain, the poor roads and the warring nationalities. ‘The army’, he explained, ‘is overstretched for a sustained commitment.’ The Americans, he added, opposed sending troops into an inhospitable environment.
By the end of an hour, some were unsure whether Blair had grasped all the problems, but he directed the army and intelligence agencies to check the environment around Kosovo, while the Foreign Office and Blair’s personal team negotiated with Paris, Berlin and Washington to
agree on a plan to compel Milošević to withdraw. Afterwards, he agreed that he was obliged to consult the Cabinet for an engagement that would cost hundreds of millions of pounds.
When the politicians assembled again in the Cabinet room, the scene was surreal. Gordon Brown, finally present, was noisily scrawling huge black letters across endless pages, interrupted only by his murmuring, ‘I don’t agree’; John Prescott, mispronouncing Milošević, ‘blathered rubbish’; Cook spoke portentously about morality; Robertson went on at length but pointlessly; while Clare Short repeated, ‘Tony, it’s more dangerous than you realise.’ Blair smiled, concealing his dislike of this perpetual irritant. Short was tolerated in the Cabinet so that he could preserve his relationship with Labour supporters around Birmingham. He allowed everyone to speak without interruption, limiting his own contribution to platitudes. As soon as the meeting was over, he expected Cook and Short to telephone their media friends, and he was keen to keep any reports about his ‘minority view’ from those he did not trust. But it was obvious to some that ‘Cook clearly wanted to nail the bogeyman’.
The reports of Serb savagery preoccupied Blair, but finding allies was difficult. Despite the St Malo agreement, Chirac was still unwilling to commit to a war (Blair did not understand Chirac’s warning that Milošević’s fate would be decided in Moscow), while attempts to secure German chancellor Gerhard Schröder’s agreement would climax in an argument, with Blair sighing, ‘I thought he was going to hit me.’ Getting Clinton’s approval in the middle of his impeachment hearings was fraught, not least because the president recalled John Major’s vehement resistance to bombing. But without Washington signing on, Blair had discovered, Britain’s army could do little.
Then Clinton relented, and on 24 March the first American bombs fell on Serbia. Five hundred bombers had been committed to the battle, plus a naval war group armed with missiles. The transformation of Michael Foot’s pacifist Labour movement into a Labour government launching an aggressive campaign shocked many. In
The Times
, under the headline ‘The Real Catastrophe’, Simon Jenkins warned: ‘No
amount of NATO bombing will make Milošević see sense in Kosovo.’ Sending in the bombers, he wrote, was ‘madness posing as morality … what is inconceivable is that the Serb leader will suddenly withdraw’. The criticism attracted support across the country.
At the end of that first day’s operations, Blair descended three floors below Whitehall for a briefing in the MoD’s Crisis Management Centre. In the sterile atmosphere, he learned that the RAF’s Harriers had all missed their targets, while a missile fired by a British submarine had nearly sunk a French frigate. His questions were ‘bright and sharp’, thought Guthrie, but the replies were discouraging. Bad weather was hampering the bombing and more refugees were flooding into neighbouring Macedonia.
The negative report hit Blair’s self-confidence. He was due to appear on television to broadcast a success story that would win public support. Since the final bombing reports were not ready, he was given estimates.
‘Is that OK?’ he asked an official about his script.
‘No,’ he was told, ‘you’ve exaggerated everything I’ve said.’ A few words were altered.
His return to Downing Street from the depths of Whitehall sparked a sense of unreality. The contrast of switching from bombing missions in Serbia to half-heartedly seeking to resolve Donald Dewar’s mismanagement of Scottish devolution, the EU’s shrill demand to reduce Britain’s rebate and the quicksands of negotiating peace in Ulster, combined with Brown’s refusal to discuss the Budget, was an awkward precursor to more bad news.
Two weeks after the bombing started, the RAF was still missing its targets, NATO headquarters was mired in bureaucratic mayhem, the refugees’ plight was dire and, instead of surrendering, Milošević was more resolute than ever. To compound these setbacks, Blair was uncertain about the proper response to the British public’s ‘pathetic’ disengagement from the ‘monstrous and unpardonable outrage’ of human misery.
He was equally upset about the continuing media criticism. Favourable publicity was his lifeblood. He needed instant results and,
unused to the fluctuations of war, despaired about success after reading reports of Belgrade in flames and high civilian casualties. ‘This is not moral,’ wrote a newspaper columnist, ‘it is megalomaniac.’
‘This could be the end of me,’ Blair sighed.
‘If we ran our election campaigns the same way NATO do their press,’ he told Clinton, ‘we would not have been elected.’ Alastair Campbell was sent to Brussels to deploy his wiles. In his instructions to NATO’s spokesman, Jamie Shea, he described how to manipulate the media. ‘Your job’, he told Shea, ‘is not to help the reporters. We decide what the news is. If you don’t like the news, put something else in the news. If there’s a hole, fill it. It’s an open goal to fill, otherwise you’re at the media’s mercy. It’s your fault if the media reports are bad.’
Blair’s distress about bad publicity was compounded by the continuing deaths of refugees. Milošević, he believed, would surrender only if he feared an invasion by allied troops, but NATO’s nineteen governments were divided, disorganised and resistant. Even Clinton, a man struggling for his own survival, opposed the threat to send troops. Controlling foreign adventures, Blair discovered, was as difficult as modernising Britain’s public services.
To satisfy the prime minister’s ambitions, Guthrie stuck a map above a fireplace in Downing Street. With his leader’s rapt attention, the general described a plan to expel the Serbs from Kosovo that would require 150,000 troops – 50,000 Britons and 100,000 Americans. The army’s size surprised Blair. Fighting in the mountains, said the general, was a risk. There was also a procedural obstacle: ‘If there’s no legal justification for war,’ Guthrie had told Robertson, ‘the British military will not get involved.’
Blair was told by Edgar Buckley, a senior policy adviser in the MoD, that intervention without a UN resolution would be illegal. ‘I’m not interested in your analysis unless I can change the premise,’ replied Blair. ‘There are many views on international law and we’ll ask when it is necessary.’ The following day, an American pilot mistakenly bombed a convoy of fleeing refugees, killing at least seventy-two people.
Guthrie was told to prepare for the invasion, while Blair took it upon himself to persuade Clinton. First, he planned to shuttle around Europe to galvanise NATO’s leaders. ‘We are going for broke,’ he told Campbell. He would risk his government’s survival by intensifying the war, but he would not risk discussing his options with his ministers. Without Robertson’s knowledge, MoD officials were summoned to Downing Street. During one meeting, he used Cook’s unexpected dash for the lavatory to take a decision he knew the foreign secretary would oppose.
Both Robertson and Cook were left in London when Blair flew with Campbell, Powell and Guthrie to Washington on 21 April. ‘If we don’t win this,’ Blair said, ‘it’s curtains for the government.’ His melodramatic prediction reflected his fear of losing face among his confidants, humiliation by Milošević and, worst of all, souring his relationship with Clinton.
While driving to the White House with Guthrie and Sawers, Blair rehearsed his arguments about tipping the odds to guarantee success. ‘We cannot afford to lose,’ he repeated. ‘We must do whatever we have to do to win.’ After greeting Clinton, he sensed an unexpectedly embittered mood. None of the three had appreciated how America’s fatal involvement in Somalia in the early 1990s had created a reluctance to fight for liberal ideals rather than exclusively in the nation’s defence. Campbell’s earlier depiction to American journalists of Blair’s flight across the Atlantic to ‘stiffen Clinton’s resolve’ in the midst of the impeachment battle had angered the president.
In those circumstances, Blair’s performance was unimpressive. The moment Clinton challenged that bombing would be enough, Blair backed off. ‘Blair at his worst,’ thought Guthrie. ‘He’s mesmerised by the Americans. He’s caved in.’
During the drive back, Blair was downcast. ‘I’m deeply disappointed by how you folded over with Clinton,’ said Guthrie.
‘Oh well, it’s politics,’ replied Blair. Later, he admitted to Campbell, ‘I think I failed in my mission tonight. I am starting to panic.’
Hours later, Blair’s mood changed. Clinton’s negativity was derided by Republican politicians, who praised Blair’s championing of
humanity. In the capital’s piranha bowl, Clinton’s critics snatched any opportunity to embarrass their prey.
Even Blair forgot his loyalty to the president during his flight from Washington to Chicago. He arrived at a packed hotel ballroom to address a Republican group with a speech drafted by Professor Lawrence Freedman, a London academic who specialised in war studies. Freedman had provided the arguments to justify removing Milošević by force. In finalising his doctrine of liberal intervention, Blair did not consult the civil servants in Whitehall. They would read the revised meaning of ‘force for good’ in their newspapers. Idealist or Superman, Blair would invoke the authority of a power greater than a mere politician, one who knew the ideal outcome for the world better than mortals.
Speaking to big audiences energised him. In preparation, he found Gladstone to be his ideal model, a principled politician who irrevocably defined an era. In particular, Blair was attracted to Gladstone’s campaigning speeches in 1876, which damned the Turks for committing widespread atrocities in Bulgaria. Gladstone’s outrage, so similar to his own about the slaughter in Kosovo, had won over Britain’s electorate. Blair hoped Chicago would similarly mark the beginning of a new age.
His conservative audience echoed his strengths. An articulate, handsome Englishman passionately describing the ‘unspeakable things happening in Europe – ethnic cleansing, systematic rape, mass murder’ – touched many in the fevered auditorium whose forefathers had fled to America to avoid similar suffering. Appeasement, exhorted Blair, did not work – not only with Milošević, but also with Saddam Hussein. Thunderous applause interrupted his plea for global co-operation against ‘an evil dictator’ who could not be allowed to ‘range unchallenged’. For the British diplomats accompanying Blair, the contrast between the star lapping up the audience’s chant of ‘Blair for president’ and his timid performance the previous day in the White House was ‘astonishing’.