Authors: Tom Bower
There was also incredulity at his naivety. Alarmed by the rise of Islamic extremism, Blair had searched the Koran for passages
distinguishing moderate from extreme Islam. His argument exposed a misunderstanding. Modern Islam, unlike Christianity or Judaism, was morphing once again from a suppressed secular religion into an international political movement reminiscent of Soviet communism. Islam was not reinforced by history books and academic studies because until recently many Muslims had been illiterate; nor did it tolerate critical discussion. Believers believed, full stop. Blair’s audience did not grasp his misunderstanding. Instead, they rose to his emotional appeal for armies of morality to intervene against evil regimes across the globe. ‘This is the moment to seize,’ he cried. ‘The kaleidoscope has been shaken. The pieces are in flux. Soon they will settle again. Before they do, let us reorder the world around us.’
Labour’s leader attracted some unusual admirers. ‘The most eloquent leader in the Western world,’ gushed Senator Jesse Helms, a veteran of America’s unyielding conservatives.
The American media’s reports about Blair’s ‘Churchillian tone’ and his simplification of the Balkan crisis irked White House aides. Blair was mocked for ‘overdoing it’ and ‘sprinkling too much adrenalin on his cornflakes’. Guthrie provided the antidote. Other Americans, said the general on the eve of the next day’s NATO summit in Washington, were critical of Clinton. Emboldened by his popularity, Blair privately pressed the president to commit troops. Clinton declined frostily.
At least ten people had just died after a NATO missile hit Belgrade’s TV centre. Blair justified the attack as hitting Milošević’s ‘apparatus to do the ethnic cleansing in Kosovo’. Three days later, Jill Dando, a well-known BBC presenter, was shot dead in front of her house in London. Some speculated wildly that she was the target of a Serb. Blair returned home on the same day with a reputation as a hawk among NATO’s leaders, behaving as if Britain possessed the military capability to win single-handedly.
To maintain the momentum, on 3 May Blair flew to visit General Mike Jackson, a former paratroop commander, at his headquarters in Macedonia. Kosovan refugees were streaming into the nearby Stanković
camp. For ninety minutes, watched by a group of accompanying journalists, Blair sat under a camouflage net with Jackson and Guthrie, discussing the options. Both reassured Blair of their support because Kosovo was ‘a messy business’. An invasion by 150,000 troops, they explained, would require two months to prepare, and it would take at least another month for the troops to arrive in Belgrade. ‘Worst-case scenario’, said Jackson, who had never fought in a war, ‘would be several hundred British dead.’ Blair was given a deadline: the invasion would need to be completed before November. His fear, he confided, was TV pictures of corpses and defeat if Milošević were not persuaded to resign before the winter. Having mutually seduced each other, the discussion ended with more questions than answers, not least Blair’s refusal to consult the attorney general about the legality of an invasion. Instead, he relied on Charlie Falconer’s unscripted advice that a sovereign state could be invaded to avert a humanitarian catastrophe.
On the second anniversary of his election, he had every reason to fear the worst. Labour MPs resented the war, and even William Rees-Mogg, the right-wing columnist who up until then had supported the operation, turned against ‘NATO’s arrogant, ill-judged Balkan campaign [which] has produced a disaster’. Repeating the familiar criticism, the former
Times
editor damned the belief that bombing could produce peace.
That same morning, Blair, together with Cherie, visited the Brazde refugee camp ten miles from Kosovo for TV pictures aimed at Clinton. The bombing had aggravated the 29,000 inhabitants’ plight. ‘Tony, Tony,’ chanted the crowds of Kosovans. Cherie burst into tears and Blair’s voice cracked as he told the destitute hordes, ‘This is a battle for humanity. The butchers of Belgrade will be defeated.’ He promised that more refugees would be allowed to enter Britain.
At the next Cabinet meeting, Blair’s declaration about ‘the right thing to do’ recruited few allies. Cook was a snake murmuring that Blair wanted to ‘fix the world rather than running Britain’. Brown mentioned the combined cost of the bombing and help for the refugees as
a reason for the Treasury’s kitty being empty. Other ministers offered little support for Blair and, compounding the difficulty, eighty Labour MPs intended to defy the whips and vote against the government on a welfare reform bill.
Blair was dismissive. Most of his Cabinet ministers were disagreeable, and at the end of the day all of them would obey him. His anger was directed at his supposed foreign allies who resisted his exhortations. The bad news didn’t let up: allied bombs were killing innocent civilians and also hit the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, while their foe appeared unbeatable. Clinton was plainly antagonistic and, on 13 May, finally exploded in ‘real, red-hot anger’ during a one-hour telephone call. He rejected Blair’s protestations of ignorance that Campbell was ‘deliberately briefing’ the
Wall Street Journal
to build up Blair at his expense. Campbell, Blair later admitted, was ‘exposed … and we had to fly by the seat of our pants’ to avoid irreparable damage to the relationship. Yet finally, on 26 May, Clinton announced that 90,000 American troops would be sent to Kosovo. Blair claimed the credit for the switch.
Over the following five days, there were intense conversations between Washington and Moscow. At the top, Clinton persuaded President Yeltsin that the threat of invasion was real but that Russia’s involvement in peace negotiations would avert the danger. At the ambassadorial level, American and Russian diplomats agreed that Russian troops could participate in a multinational peacekeeping force to protect Milošević. At the end of the dialogue, under Russian pressure and with bombs thought to have been dropped by the Americans obliterating a Serb battalion, Milošević hinted that he might withdraw from Kosovo. Blair was excluded from the negotiations.
On 3 June, after seventy-two days of bombing, Blair heard about the Serb surrender from Campbell, who had learned the facts from a Reuters newsflash. Milošević had agreed to pull back. British and allied soldiers were readied to move into Kosovo without the risk of Serb opposition. Taking the media by surprise, Campbell commandeered the headlines. Blair’s ‘resolve and determination’ were credited
for the victory. Elsewhere, his critics were unwilling to be as generous. The bombing, wrote Simon Jenkins, ‘did not bring about yesterday’s deal’; he doubted that Milošević would be prosecuted as a war criminal, and he anticipated a third Kosovan war. Others were more self-critical. ‘It was a gamble,’ wrote Matthew Parris. ‘We peaceniks should grit our teeth and admit: it paid off.’ But he feared future jingoistic wars in pursuit of the ‘Blair doctrine’. ‘So much is still hazy,’ he wrote, listing many countries that could be the target of Pax Americana. Iraq was not on the list.
Blair adopted Campbell’s propaganda as the truth. Presidents, he told audiences, needed his advice, and needed him as the bridge between America and Europe. Non-intervention, he went on, would have led to ‘unforeseeable’ consequences.
After the eulogies faded, Blair told Robertson and Guthrie, ‘I want a small team to review the lessons to be learned.’ A post-mortem, he implied, would prevent mistakes in the future. Out of Blair’s and the military’s self-interest, no report was produced, although estimates of the war’s cost ranged from £1 billion to £10 billion.
Unlike the rejoicing in Downing Street, the end of the bombing was a reality check for the MoD. Kosovo, agreed the military chiefs, was not a military victory but, as General Jackson would concede, ‘a procedural drive-in’ by the armed forces that was unopposed by the Serbs. No VCs were won because, as Guthrie said, ‘Milošević caved’. No one on that side of Whitehall disputed Blair’s doctrine of liberal intervention or mentioned that Kosovo was an American, not a British, victory.
One week after the Serb surrender, the British did at last have the chance to shine. Unexpectedly, General Jackson found himself competing with a Russian brigade for the occupation of Priština airport. On the insistence of General Shelton in Washington, Jackson ignored orders from NATO headquarters to deploy British troops and directly confront the Russians to prevent their presence in the airport. Instead, he held back while the Russians advanced. Downing Street propaganda portrayed the general as a hero for preventing a third world war.
Less dramatic but more serious was the British occupation of Priština itself. Eight hundred and fifty British troops commanded by Colonel Paul Gibson had entered the town as peacekeepers. The Serb army had withdrawn before the deadline. As the standard-bearer of the ‘force for good’, Gibson was ordered to unify everyone in the city within a multinational authority. With ‘God on our side’, Gibson exhorted his soldiers, ‘your duty is to protect the Albanian good guys from the murdering Serbs’. By July, the town was peaceful for Blair’s visit. He was lionised by the huge crowds as a hero. Streets had been renamed after him. Basking in the cheers, Blair had good reason to believe that by keeping his nerve he had saved the population from genocide. He had taken a gamble and won.
Days after his visit, Albanian thugs began murdering Serbs. The lawlessness, Gibson would write at the end of his tour, was the British military’s fault. Their intelligence was wrong, the rules of engagement never arrived and the right questions about the political plan for Kosovo’s future were not asked. Like all military post-mortems, Gibson’s indictment was sanitised as it moved up the chain, and his review became meaningless. Blair’s halo remained undimmed.
Blair believed he had discovered new qualities within himself. He had been right about so much. ‘The Kosovo conflict’, he wrote, ‘taught me many things, about government, about leadership, about myself … It also completely changed my own attitude to foreign policy.’ He had, he believed, understood diplomacy and the importance of Britain’s alliance with America, and was confident that in the future his skills would carry him to even greater success. Andrew Turnbull, the Treasury’s permanent secretary, would date that moment as the birth of Blair’s Messiah complex: ‘He is into saving the world from evil.’ Others would say that he had become addicted to a life-or-death gamble to get away with more and to change history. One lesson he rejected was that military power alone rarely solved political problems. He drew the opposite conclusion.
The black-and-white outcome of warfare fed Blair’s exasperation about modernising Britain. Compared to Charles Guthrie, the civilians were not delivering results. The civil service, he decided, would not count among his allies. ‘TB seemed lost at the moment,’ noted Campbell on Blair’s return from his summer holiday. Blair admitted a lack of self-confidence. The desultory Monday-morning meetings mirrored his forlorn search for a silver bullet. Beyond Westminster, resentment festered about ‘spin’, Brown’s double and triple counting, the ‘scars’ speech and a prime minister surrounded by on-message ultra-loyalists who lacked authenticity.
Blair’s conversations aggravated the despondency. ‘I don’t want to take on the civil service,’ he told Charles Clarke, who had been promoted to the Home Office. ‘I don’t think it’s worth the effort. I’m not going through the battle of getting rid of that kind.’
‘That’s a terrible mistake,’ replied Clarke.
Rather than reform Whitehall, Blair’s substitute ploy was to express his anger at the annual Labour Party conference. He wanted to rebut the Tory complaint that he lacked beliefs. His speech’s theme would repeat New Labour’s promise of ‘giving everyone the chance to fulfil their true potential’. To prove his commitment to that promise he would identify those to blame for the obstruction.
Chequers was his ideal place to formalise his thoughts. Sitting in the September sun and served by Wrens, he struggled to find different words for the same theme: building a fairer, modernised Britain
based on New Labour’s values. His problem was the absence of an ideology. New Labour’s ‘triangulation’ – taking the best and denigrating the worst of competing philosophies – had disarmed the Tories and the hard Left but provided no answer to his perpetual quandary: how should he change Britain? Labour had adopted the Tories’ ideas to give more freedom to banks and businessmen. Further, thanks to John Major’s Lottery, the party could finance the growth of British culture and sport, while Labour activists were enacting laws to enhance minority rights. But reform of the public services – health, education and welfare – remained stymied. Although he had no road map to help him reach his destination, Blair knew he needed a big catchphrase for the media headlines – what Mandelson called a ‘washing line’ on which to hang memorable slogans.
In anticipation of meeting Blair at Chequers, Philip Gould, Peter Mandelson, Alastair Campbell and David Miliband discussed his forthcoming speech in a conference call.
‘People don’t have a clear sense of Tony’s direction,’ said Gould. ‘We have a huge majority yet we appear to be struggling to make change happen quickly. We’re drifting.’
Campbell agreed: ‘The media are not as excited about Tony any more. They think Tony is losing his bearings.’
Another voice added, ‘Tony has lost his radical cutting edge.’
‘How can we make Tony sound radical?’ asked Campbell.
Having promised to rebuild the world, they were failing, and they needed a scapegoat. The agonising ended when the discussion finally produced the answer: Blair should attack ‘the forces of conservatism’. No one, Mandelson admitted later, could identify the ‘forces’, and Campbell would agree that ‘“forces of conservatism” was the right concept but the wrong language’. The best justification for New Labour as the answer to Britain’s problems would come by creating a demon to slaughter.
By the time Blair’s team met at Chequers, the ‘forces of conservatism’ had been identified as cynics, elites, the Establishment and unscrupulous
vested interests. Like any tabloid journalist, his speechwriter Peter Hyman had overbilled a shallow headline. Adapting well-worn socialist clichés, he offered a draft full of colourful phrases. Plucking at those, Blair wrote in longhand, ‘Power, wealth and opportunity should go to the many and not just the few.’ He promised to lead those ‘who have the courage to change’ against ‘the forces of conservatism [who] have to be taken on and defeated’.
Blessed with a theme, he repeatedly revised the speech, crafting the image of a leader articulating the people’s courageous insistence that a ‘progressive’ movement – ‘the patriotic party’ – would sweep away discredited conservatism and give the people liberty. The result, he promised, would be ‘a new Britain of true equality … free from the closed doors of snobbery and prejudice’. The casualties would be the ‘old elites [who] held people back. They kept people down. They stunted people’s potential. Year after year, decade after decade … [they] chain us to an outdated view of our people’s potential.’ He pledged to end the class war, make the Tories redundant and lead a government of national unity. The result would be a community working together in a fair society. Individuals would have a ‘responsibility’ to work but could depend on the state to provide welfare.
Unexpectedly, when he arrived at the conference in Bournemouth his theme was illustrated by a group in favour of fox-hunting who were protesting outside the building against the government’s proposed ban. They were excluded from New Labour’s tolerant culture. While Blair, in his hotel suite, continued to refine phrases about ‘enabling’ a citizen’s self-fulfilment and rejecting Whitehall’s bureaucracy, his ministers were promising delegates endless directives from a centralising government. Throughout the four days of the conference, Blair was darting in and out of lunches, £350-a-plate dinners, and receptions organised by Lord Levy and the party’s fund-raisers to tap rich bankers, hedge-fund managers and property developers. Using what he called ‘my Rolodex memory’, Blair could summon the perfect questions and comments for conversations with miners or multimillionaires.
Thanks to Brown, the managers of the investment companies at the conference would be paying less tax than their cleaners. Those trim, well-dressed chief executives, each personally worth tens of millions of pounds, intrigued Blair. The wealthy and their ostentatious lifestyles would evoke his refrain about whether his mistake was to have headed for Westminster rather than the City. ‘I love aspiration,’ he would say. ‘I adore the notion of coming from nothing and making something of yourself.’ At a rich men’s jamboree in Davos some years later, he would sit next to Bill Gates and confess, ‘Coming here reminds me of what a bad career choice I made earlier in my life.’ During private dinners, many fat cats – including George Soros, the speculator, and Matthew Harding, the mercurial businessman – had answered his questions as he sought to understand the source of their fortunes. He invariably came away bewildered at how men who apparently lacked exceptional intelligence could create such huge personal wealth. At the end of his premiership, he promised himself, he would not return to a house in Islington burdened with a high mortgage.
To the party faithful, the money-makers counted among those damned by Blair for hiding behind the ‘closed doors of snobbery and prejudice’. But he was comfortable circulating among the rich and took an interest in his patronage. Labour loyalists, he ensured, emerged with titles befitting their friendship and finances. In Blair’s vision, those were proper rewards for contributing to ‘modernisation’.
Three months before the coronation of ‘Cool Britannia’ at the Millennium Dome, Blair seemed determined to label anything that had existed before the victory in 1997 as redundant. He snatched at the phrase ‘We live in a new age but in an old country’ to win applause.
Spouting slogans to the party faithful was easy; explaining the message was not. Just twenty-four hours before delivering the speech, Blair became flummoxed. ‘What’s the argument?’ he asked his team. They were not surprised. Moments of panic always preceded his most effective speeches; his crisis of confidence would produce the performance. But on this occasion he was struggling more than usual. Conquering
the old elite was the easy bit, but what followed? New Labour was not promising to liberate the downtrodden masses, nor had it pledged to redistribute landowners’ wealth to the workers. Blair was modernising, not subverting.
Delegates had been passing the noisy pro-hunting demonstrators as they entered the packed auditorium in Bournemouth. Blair’s own opinion about hunting was uncertain. He gave the impression that he wanted to avoid both fighting the Labour Party and annoying Middle England. The masquerade was irrelevant to his audience.
Soon it was time for him to take to the podium. Those watching him pace in the gloom behind the stage, his face contorted and his hands clenched, feared disaster. But as the music signalled his entrance into the spotlight, they witnessed a transformation. Within seconds, the crumpled wreck metamorphosed into a colossus. The actor smoothed over the inevitable imperfections of his speech with a wondrously theatrical presentation. He loved the sound of his own voice. He had a deft line to soothe the activists: ‘Realism and idealism at last in harmony.’ Wild cheers greeted his attack on the ‘forces of conservatism’, a phrase repeated seventeen times. The delegates assumed his target was the hunting lobby and the Conservatives, but in reality he meant anyone who opposed his ideas, including old-fashioned supporters of Scottish independence and the defenders of the NHS’s dreaded internal market.
Afterwards, Matthew Taylor, the director of a left-wing think tank, wrote that the speech was a ‘turning point’ that ‘goes to the heart of New Labour’s diagnosis of the country’s ills’. Noting Blair’s enjoyment of manipulating his audience, Richard Wilson observed ‘the cold eyes behind the chummy exterior’, while his ministers seated beneath him in the hall were bemused by the meaninglessness of ‘setting our people free’ and his commitment to lead Britain towards ‘national salvation’. Some thought his target was the trade unions.
‘I don’t understand “forces of conservatism”,’ Brown told him later.
‘It defines us against the Tories,’ Blair replied. ‘Reformers against extremists.’
‘Not great,’ said Mandelson.
Blair shrugged off the criticism and told another critic, ‘I have redefined The Project.’
‘It’s government by assertion,’ concluded Tom McNulty, the Labour MP, ‘and hope that the facts will catch up. Then hope it works.’
In the aftermath, Gould admitted, the ‘cynicism was dreadful beyond belief’. Newspaper headlines included ‘Mad King Tony’, ‘The Cult of Blair’ and ‘This Man Is Dangerous’, but the public loved it and Labour’s lead in the polls rose to 27 per cent.
To relieve the Tories’ dismay, their new leader William Hague ferociously attacked Blair’s sanctimony at his own party conference the following week. The Labour leader was ridiculed as the public-school barrister from Islington who, despite a Commons majority of nearly 200, was admitting to being powerless to usurp the so-called Establishment that was holding the country back. ‘Tony Blair’, mocked Hague, ‘thinks he’s a Napoleon Bonaparte figure who’s taken near total control of the levers of political power.’ Listing all the contradictions uttered by ‘the man [who] is a fraud’ and the author of ‘the Great Labour Lie’, Hague attacked him as the leader of ‘vindictive, mean-spirited, class-obsessed’ activists who were ‘a bunch of hypocrites’. To laughter, he contrasted the Labour Party magazine’s description of ‘Tony’s favourite food’ as fish and chips, which he bought as ‘a takeaway from his local chippie’, with what Blair had told
The Islington Cook Book
, a constituency publication, was his preferred meal: ‘fresh fettuccini garnished with an exotic sauce of olive oil, sun-dried tomatoes and capers’.
Blair ignored Hague’s brickbats. His nervous dislike of his own party was reflected by his agent’s advice on his first visit to a working-men’s club: ‘Don’t ask for Perrier.’ But the party’s rapturous response had restored his self-confidence and, since the Tory corpse was heading further to the right, as reported by Gould, he could tell his colleagues that the Conservatives were no longer an electoral threat.
Privately, however, Blair knew that Hague’s speech had exposed his limitations, and he feared that his ministers were insufficiently
courageous to overcome Whitehall’s neoliths. Beyond the core of his team, he lamented, few genuinely understood how New Labour’s success depended upon slaughtering those ‘sinecure cynics who despise anything modern and are made uneasy by success’. New Labour making good on its promises depended on his own relentless willpower.
The Dome in Greenwich, where the arrival of the new millennium would be celebrated, reflected those weaknesses. There was no reason why Blair’s ambition for the Dome to project Britain as young, confident, relaxed, dynamic and diverse should not have been realisable after the Cabinet had agreed, in June 1997, to continue with the project inherited from the Tories. With two and a half years before its opening, there was sufficient time to hire Disney’s expertise and prepare an entertaining show that, predicted Mandelson, the then minister for the Dome, will ‘make a powerful statement to the world about Britain’s new-found pride and self-confidence’. The only necessity was appointing a creative manager. Selecting the right person for any task ranked high among Blair’s weaknesses, and instead of luring a Disney executive, he chose Jennie Page, a callow bureaucrat. The result would be a financial and cultural disaster. The estimated cost was heading towards £828 million, double the original budget. If New Labour’s ‘modernisers’ could not even produce Disney-by-the-Thames, how could they transform Britain’s public services, which were already consuming nearly 35 per cent of the nation’s revenues?