Authors: Tom Bower
During the drive back to the airport, Lai Yahaya, the local AGI organiser, asked Blair whether he was mixing charity and business. ‘We don’t do business in Africa,’ the statesman replied. ‘Don’t worry. Only AGI and charitable work. We only do business in the Middle East and Asia.’ Yahaya was unconvinced. He had heard about Blair working the system in other African countries where AGI operated.
Two weeks later, Yahaya called Buhari’s office to ask whether the president would accept AGI’s experts. ‘Don’t push the AGI stuff,’ he was told. ‘The president was not happy with Blair pushing the Israeli business.’ (Buhari subsequently ignored Blair’s calls on behalf of the Saudi crown prince.)
Six weeks later, in London, Blair met Bukola Saraki, the president of the Nigerian senate, ranked by the constitution as the third most powerful person in the country. Just before the meeting, Blair was briefed by Yahaya that Buhari was vigorously campaigning to rid Nigeria of its endemic corruption and did not welcome Blair seeking a business deal. ‘They’re concerned that you’re pretending to be something else, using AGI to get access.’
‘That’s the problem with being the most successful prime minister,’ came the reply. ‘Britain is a country which doesn’t like success.’
Blair ignored Yahaya’s warning. During his conversation with Saraki, he discussed opportunities to introduce investors from the Middle East to Nigeria. ‘We’d like that,’ said Saraki, aware that Blair represented a wealth fund based in Abu Dhabi.
Yahaya was unaware of more glaring conflicts of interest. Two months earlier, Blair had posed with Ehud Barak, the former Israeli prime minister, at a college fund-raiser near Tel Aviv. Like Blair, since leaving office Barak had become a wealthy businessman. In Israel, he and Blair had become known as ‘the twins’. Blair presented a perplexing conflict of interests: he was simultaneously the envoy of the international Quartet, the contact group established in 2002 by the US, Russia, the UN and the EU to negotiate peace between Israel and the Palestinians; he was
also conducting business in Israel and the Arab countries; and, finally, he relied on the expertise and money of the British government to execute both undertakings. Was it a coincidence that, just two weeks later, Blair resigned as the Quartet’s envoy?
For Yahaya, his surprise at the conversation with Blair was tempered by the Delivery Unit’s global fame. A new book,
How to Run a Government
by Michael Barber, the founder of Blair’s unit in Downing Street, had become a ‘must read’ across the developing world. However, unknown to those African politicians lectured by Blair about his government’s unqualified success in improving Britain’s health, education, housing and society, the unit was dismantled in 2005, four years after its creation. Since then, most independent observers have come to regard the unit as unsatisfactory. That fact has not deterred Blair’s salesmanship. His genius since becoming prime minister in 1997 has been to pursue his causes regardless of any discomfiting misfortunes. With charisma and guile, he won three successive elections and, in the Blairite gospel, those unprecedented victories meant that he was successful. But, for others, there is a difference between success at the polls against weak opponents and success in government.
Fully understanding Blair’s record has not been possible until recently, partly because the politicians, officials and military officers involved are only now giving candid explanations about their role in the New Labour era, and also because Blair’s career after 2007 has cast a new light on his legacy.
Since his resignation, some Britons have remained admirers, while for others disappointment has grown. For the former, the extensive construction of new hospitals and schools and the dismantling of social barriers during his decade as prime minister remain a glorious achievement. Others, recalling the high expectations of May 1997, list the lost opportunities as a tragic waste. The principal complaint by the disenchanted is that the man who proclaimed his intention to be ‘purer than pure, whiter than white’ above all things broke that vow and revealed himself to be untruthful.
The invasion of Iraq, the critics say, was approved by Parliament because of his deception. Their anger has intensified during the years since his premiership, not least because while selling his services on the strength of the connections he made while in power, he continues to use the trappings of state to earn tens of millions of pounds. Even his close friends are puzzled about his quest for wealth, and their bewilderment is compounded by ignorance. None of them knows about his activities in Rwanda and Nigeria, or about the source of his lucrative business across the Middle East, Asia and America. So, has he undergone a metamorphosis since 2007, or is the man now consorting with a mass murderer and several vile dictators showing his true character?
At the outset of my research, in 2013, answering such a question was not my primary aim. Indeed, I knew little about Blair’s commercial career. Rather, my original focus was on what had happened during his days in government. The genesis of the book was a friendly but impassioned argument I had over dinner with a close friend of Blair. She insisted that, thanks to his time in government, only 20 per cent of eleven-year-olds entered secondary school illiterate, whereas in 1997 it was 30 per cent. I believed that there had been no genuine improvement in literacy and numeracy during the Blair years. The argument continued over the following days, and by the end I realised that no one really knew what had happened during that hectic decade – not only in education but in energy, immigration, health, social welfare, defence and, of course, the events that led Britain and America into two disastrous wars.
There are many books describing aspects of those subjects. Most are partial memoirs or gossipy accounts of life among Blair’s inner circle (the best being Andrew Rawnsley’s two volumes). In addition, Alastair Campbell’s diaries provide a useful timetable and a remarkable testament to the prejudices of Blair’s supreme adviser, while Jonathan Powell’s slim record provides a crude study in self-deception. No book adequately delves beyond the spin masters’ smoke and mirrors to reveal what the government actually achieved. The thirty-six books I read all
perpetuate myths and, occasionally, falsehoods about the central events of the period from 1997 to 2007. All ignore the eyewitness accounts by anonymous civil servants who saw so much but have generally kept their counsel. Even those books, articles or TV documentaries that reveal unknown facts about, for example, education or the build-up to the Iraq war present a mosaic rather than a full narrative.
Like, I suspect, the majority of my readers, I lived through the Blair era. I wrote two books covering that period: one exposing the dishonesty of Geoffrey Robinson in 2001, and a critical biography of Gordon Brown in 2004. In both, my focus was on a flawed politician; Blair was a subsidiary figure, albeit an important one. I later came across him while writing biographies of Bernie Ecclestone and Richard Branson; in neither case was his reputation enhanced. With all four mavericks, Blair’s conduct often seemed inexplicable to me. Yet, in hindsight, with the exception of Brown, there was a link between him and the other three: money, and the power of money. That did not appear to be relevant until I researched this book.
In 2013, despite the familiarity from the previous books, and despite absorbing huge amounts of information about the period, I realised that my understanding of Blair’s government was limited. Beyond the headlines, sensational resignations or accusations of deception was a mystery. That contentious dinner party bequeathed a riddle: what actually happened during those years? Like most people, I viewed the charismatic, charming communicator as something of an enigma, but suspected that the full story would never be known. His band of loyalists, I knew, would not reveal his flaws. The best way to discover the truth about an unknown, Karl Marx famously proposed, is to write a book. I have taken his advice.
My study focuses on five areas: health, education, immigration, energy and the wars. Health and education represented, according to Blair, huge successes for Labour, while the inside story of immigration has never been told. Regarding energy, I failed to understand why not a single power station was built throughout Blair’s decade in power,
exposing Britain to potential blackouts. The wars speak for themselves. Regarding Iraq, all the key military officers and many of the civil servants and politicians have broken their silence; I also had the benefit of the televised testimony of about 190 witnesses to the Chilcot inquiry. The road to war in Afghanistan has not been previously explored. It is a shocking story, but understandable in the context of Blair’s approach in other areas of his premiership. In other words, the same characteristics that persuaded Blair to dispatch troops to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan decided the fate of Britain’s education, our health service and the nature of our society. Iraq was not an aberration; it was consistent with his administration of government throughout his decade in office. The story of his tenure reveals the nature of the man today.
To discover what happened after 1997, I sought out all the retired senior civil servants who had worked in those five areas during Blair’s decade. I interviewed dozens of junior and senior officials, permanent secretaries and all the Cabinet secretaries. Next, I spoke with successive junior ministers and Cabinet ministers. For the wars, I interviewed most of the principal senior military officers, chiefs of staff and all four chiefs of the defence staff. In total, over two hundred people were interviewed, some of them several times. A handful refused to speak to me but, in the light of what others told me, I know that their contribution would have been mostly irrelevant. Those who agreed to speak were credible eyewitnesses. The result is the fullest narrative yet available about the workings of the Blair government.
To those readers who suspect my motives, let me declare the following. I voted for Blair in 1997 and excitedly watched his drive from Islington to Downing Street. Like the majority of Britons, I did believe that this was a new dawn. Before the election, I had met socially many of those close to Blair, including Peter Mandelson and Alastair Campbell, and had no reason to distrust them. I have met Blair once – at a Hampstead dinner party in 1996 to celebrate Mandelson’s birthday – and was bemused to discover that Labour’s leader knew nothing about Harold Wilson (with whom I had spent two memorable weeks
as a BBC TV producer during the October 1974 election) or any of his predecessors. Besides that, I did not doubt that he was sincere.
In 2003, I supported the invasion of Iraq. I believed the prime minister’s warning that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and even, to the bemusement of friends, followed the government’s advice to stock up on tinned goods and spare batteries. Thirteen years later, I am neither disenchanted nor angry about Blair or his party. I am not a Labour supporter, but I remain mightily influenced by the student radicalism I absorbed during the 1960s at the then uniquely blessed London School of Economics. So please accept that what follows – my twenty-first book – while fuelled by curiosity is not motivated by prejudice. Rather, I was compelled to research this book because, like most Britons, I could not understand how the ‘whiter than white’ prime minister of 1997 evolved into a derided carpetbagger. Were we all fooled at the outset by a brilliant actor, or did an honest man fall victim to the temptations of power? Did he embark on government in bad faith or, infected by vanity and unmoored values, did he slowly lose his way amid situations he did not understand? Will his still loyal friends, after reading this book, retreat from their high ground? Or are Blair’s critics, as he asserts, guilty of mean-spirited ingratitude? Will history, as he believes, hail his greatness?
Shimon Peres, the veteran Israeli statesman, told Blair during one of their early meetings that every successful political leader needs to be a narcissist and paranoiac to survive. ‘Not one or the other,’ said Peres, ‘but both at the same time.’ Blair acknowledged that wisdom. His unshakeable self-belief is an essential prop that keeps him afloat during his involuntary exile from Britain.
Many believe redemption is impossible for a man so tarnished. For the moment, the best way to judge the man is to uncover the previously unknown story of his government. Discovering the truth was a surprise to me, and perhaps will be for you too.
One week before the 1997 general election, Tony Blair was facing Robin Butler, the fifty-nine-year-old Cabinet secretary. On the eve of his landslide victory, Blair had invited Britain’s most important civil servant to his home in Islington for a meeting. Uppermost in Butler’s mind as he drove from Downing Street to north London was the fate of Jonathan Powell, Blair’s chief of staff.
Ever since Blair had first met Powell in Washington in 1993, the Foreign Office diplomat had fed Blair’s suspicion that most civil servants were unimaginative conservatives opposed to modernising Britain. Two years after that meeting, Powell had resigned from his job and joined Blair’s private office, and over the following years Blair came to accept Powell’s belief that Whitehall’s inertia would sabotage New Labour’s mission. Anticipating his party’s victory, Blair expected Powell to move into Downing Street and issue orders to his former colleagues.
‘When I arrive next week,’ Blair told Butler as the two men faced each other, ‘I want Jonathan to be my principal private secretary.’
‘I advise very strongly against that,’ replied Butler. ‘You’ll need someone experienced to operate the levers of power. You’ll have Alex Allan for the first three months. After that, see how it goes.’ Allan was an experienced civil servant trusted by Butler.
‘I see,’ replied Blair.
‘There are some things that a PPS has to do that should not be done by a political adviser,’ explained Butler. ‘Like relations with the Palace, civil-service appointments and intelligence matters.’ He mentioned
another factor. Powell’s elder brother Charles, also a former Foreign Office official, had been a close adviser to Margaret Thatcher, and Butler believed that Thatcher had been brought down in 1990 partly because her reliance on Powell had isolated her from others.
Not mentioned was Jonathan Powell’s reputation. Many in Whitehall considered him to be politically naive and even trivial. His belief in himself extinguished any self-doubt. Butler, a former head boy at Harrow school and now an accomplished patrician on the eve of retirement, was seeking to protect the young future prime minister from an early mistake.
‘Right,’ said Blair reluctantly, ‘let’s keep Allan for the first three months and see how it goes.’
Butler was relieved. Sharp words, he thought, had been exchanged in the stand-off. ‘I’ll make the legal arrangements using an order-in-council to give him and Alastair Campbell the necessary powers,’ he told Blair. Powell would remain Blair’s chief of staff and would be given executive authority to issue orders to civil servants.
Blair smiled. In their confrontation he had acted with the self-confidence of an insider, although he had been bored after an hour. ‘Amiable but out of date,’ he told himself as he bid his visitor farewell. His natural politeness had concealed his judgement that Butler’s protests were the death rattle of the old mandarin class. Under his regime, Whitehall would be occupied by a network of friends ruled by himself as self-styled chief executive. By giving both Powell and Campbell, his spokesman, executive powers, he had cleared his first obstacle. Henceforth the civil servant’s tainted advice would be ignored. Blair had modernised the Labour Party. Now he would modernise Britain.
*
‘He’s scared of me,’ Butler concluded during the drive back to Whitehall. ‘He didn’t even ask me how to make the government machine work.’ He was puzzled by Blair. Since they had first met in 1993, his attempts to explain Whitehall had been ignored. First, he had sent the young MP the transcript of a lecture describing the problems of governing Britain.
Blair did not respond. Then, several weeks before the 1997 election, they had met in Westminster. Butler had been beguiled by Blair’s charm but only in hindsight did he realise that the future prime minister had not asked how Whitehall intended to implement Labour’s election manifesto. Only later did he understand his mistake. Blair had not asked how prime ministers operated because he was focused on winning power. Despite his lifelong experience, Butler had missed the signs of a politician’s fearless conceit. ‘He didn’t really get what was going on inside Blair’s head,’ noted Campbell in his diaries.
Over the following days, the headlines were dominated by predictions of a Labour landslide. Blair’s cautionary words – ‘I take nothing for granted’ – were greeted amid unusual bitterness by Prime Minister John Major’s accusations that Blair was telling ‘bare-faced lies’ by predicting that a new Tory government would abolish the state pension and levy VAT on food. Beyond the cynical abuse,
The Times
columnist Matthew Parris speculated whether Labour’s appeal to Britain’s middle class spelt the end of the Conservative Party and the abandonment of the working class. Simon Jenkins, another shrewd commentator, was awed by New Labour’s ‘discipline of vacuity’ so that ‘an entire political generation has been chloroformed to utter waffle by a leader who is not politically bold’. Nevertheless, everyone agreed that on Friday 2 May the removal van would arrive in Downing Street and eighteen years of British history would be derided.
A week after their confrontation in Islington, Butler and Blair met again in the Cabinet room in Downing Street. Millions of television viewers were watching reruns showing the smiling victor greeting Labour supporters at an all-night party in the Royal Festival Hall and, later, as the century’s youngest prime minister, walking in the sunshine along Downing Street to witness the beginning of his eulogy that ‘a new dawn has broken’. ‘This is a dream come true,’ the playwright Colin Welland was saying on TV. ‘I’m going to be able to pick up my four-year-old grandson and tell him he has got a future.’
Exhausted by the campaign, Blair had been re-energised by the
excitement he had witnessed on the pavements as he had been driven from Islington towards Westminster. The clapping crowds, he would accurately say, were ‘liberated, yearning for change in their country’. His message was addressed to those in the middle ground, voicing their hopes and fears and giving reassurance about taxes and the economy. Yet none of the jubilant supporters spraying the media with guffaws about ‘a new era’ and ‘history is changing’ could have imagined the strained atmosphere inside 10 Downing Street.
After welcoming Blair, Butler told him, ‘We have studied your manifesto and are ready to help you implement it.’ Blair smiled, concealing his disbelief. Thirteen years later, he would write that he found those words strangely disturbing. In his punctilious manner, Butler went through the routine housekeeping list: the senior appointments that Blair would make that day; the seniority of ministers and the seating plan in Cabinet meetings; and the allocation of government houses for ministers. The final item covered the process by which Britain’s nuclear weapons were activated.
Blair was then presented with a bundle of files. In the traditional manner, the civil service had prepared a detailed schedule for implementing Labour’s manifesto. Butler was proud of the achievement, but the reaction unsettled him. Glowering at Butler from the side, Powell interpreted the files as an attempt to overawe Blair. Butler, he thought, was ‘an old-school Cabinet Secretary who was anxious to assert control over a new and inexperienced prime minister’.
‘Butleshanks’, as the Blairites demeaningly called the Cabinet secretary, was puzzled by Powell’s hostility. ‘I never saw it as putting the frighteners on him at all,’ Butler would say, mystified. The first sign of his reduced status was his exclusion from Blair’s Monday-morning discussion with his confidants about the upcoming week’s agenda. Powell’s attitude, Butler lamented privately, was ‘quite ridiculous and ludicrous’.
Butler’s humiliation was repeated over the following hours across Whitehall. Freshly appointed ministers arrived in their departments
expecting their civil servants to be untrustworthy Tories. During their brief moments with Blair to receive their appointments, any suspicions they may have built up over eighteen years of opposition had not been discouraged. For many, the only surprise was their new responsibility. With some exceptions, Blair had jettisoned his pre-election plans.
George Robertson, a jocular fifty-one-year-old career politician, arrived in Downing Street believing that he would emerge with the Scottish portfolio. The man who Blair feared talked too much was unprepared for his appointment as defence secretary, a brief he had never considered. Chris Smith, a former charity worker, had spent two years developing Labour’s health policy but at the last moment Gordon Brown had taken offence at Smith’s ideas, so, bowing to his chancellor’s objections, Blair made Smith culture secretary. Health he entrusted to Frank Dobson, a mainstay of old Labour. The NHS had never aroused Blair’s interest. ‘24 hours to save the NHS’ had been one of several key election pledges made up on the spur of the moment by a Labour speechwriter. ‘Tony didn’t discuss health when we met in Downing Street,’ recalled Dobson. ‘He only mentioned my daughter Sally, who was part of his election team.’
While Blair decided on the remaining 191 appointments, Dobson made his way across Whitehall to the health department’s headquarters and stepped into a government departmental building for the first time. ‘He looked aghast to have been appointed,’ recalled the senior civil servant who welcomed him. On Dobson’s desk was a thick folder prepared over the previous months. In simple terms, Graham Hart, the permanent secretary, and his officials outlined the problems and alternative policies for the national health service. ‘I won’t need that,’ said Dobson, pushing the file to one side. ‘I’ll read the manifesto and we’ll do that.’ He gazed suspiciously at the perplexed officials. ‘Everything’s OK,’ he said as he leaned back in his upholstered chair. ‘Labour will save the NHS.’ His audience suppressed their unanimous opinion that their new boss knew nothing about the health service.
Two hundred yards away, Margaret Beckett, a former deputy leader
of the party and, in 1994, one of Blair’s rivals for the leadership alongside John Prescott, had just entered the Department of Trade and Industry. To her surprise, she was greeted by hundreds of clapping civil servants. Without a word, she walked unsmiling into the waiting lift. ‘I never expected such a welcome,’ she told Michael Scholar, her permanent secretary. Scholar, a principled public servant, had organised the reception to win Beckett’s trust. Her hostility suggested that he would fail.
As in other parts of the civil service, the department had compiled a five-hundred-page plan based on Labour’s manifesto, speeches and policy documents. ‘This is to achieve your objectives,’ said Scholar, offering Beckett a timetable for briefings. ‘Nice to be here,’ she replied, pushing the thick brief aside. Either hostile or lazy, she would never open the file and refused to meet civil servants for briefings.
Below her in the same building John Battle, a former councillor, would enter his office as the new energy minister. During a two-minute telephone conversation with Blair, Battle was told: ‘Stick to the party’s election manifesto and look after the coal mines.’ In fact, Labour had no energy plan other than to follow the Tories’ policies. On his first day, Battle denounced his officials to their faces. ‘He was’, noted a hurt Scholar, ‘strangely blinkered and distrustful.’
Officials in other buildings were not as downhearted. General Charles Guthrie, the chief of the defence staff, had been delighted by George Robertson’s appointment. Some weeks before the election, over breakfast with Blair in a private room at Claridge’s hotel, Guthrie had stacked the odds in Robertson’s favour. ‘David Clark’, said the general, referring to Labour’s shadow defence spokesman, ‘is not the right man for the department.’ Blair accepted the advice with a trace of gratitude. Compared to the lawyers, academics and dissolute parliamentarians vying to be ministers in the new government, the general’s openness was disarming. On 2 May, Robertson crossed Whitehall and received a rousing welcome in the ministry’s main building, not least from Guthrie.
Gordon Brown had been similarly cheered as he entered the Treasury. ‘Thank you,’ he said, before walking up a staircase lined with portraits
of his predecessors. His smile disappeared once he sat behind his desk in the large chancellor’s office. Speaking without warmth, he issued instructions regarding where to seat his closest advisers – Ed Balls, Geoffrey Robinson and Charlie Whelan – and gave orders that would revolutionise the Bank of England by enshrining its independence. Terry Burns, the permanent secretary, suggested slight modifications, in so doing confirming Brown’s suspicions that Burns was untrustworthy. He resolved to neutralise him at once.
By contrast, Jack Straw had appreciated the applause of hundreds of civil servants as he arrived at the Home Office in Queen Anne’s Gate. Like most government officials, they had become weary of John Major’s fractious administration, and were drained by the previous home secretary Michael Howard’s abrasive complaints about their obstruction of his demands. In his brief speech of thanks, Straw praised his audience, promised to listen to their advice and expressed his intention to work ‘within the system’. His list of priorities included human rights and crime, the territory that the new prime minister had memorably captured from the Tories during the election with the slogan ‘Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’.
Shortly afterwards, Straw was closeted in a conference room with Richard Wilson, his permanent secretary, and other senior officials. ‘Implement our manifesto,’ said Straw. ‘That will take us through the next two years, and then we’ll look to you for ideas.’
The officials smiled. ‘This is refreshing,’ thought one. ‘He’s got emotional intelligence. He’s more open than Michael Howard. We can work for him.’ Everyone suppressed their surprise as Straw then revealed that he had not discussed Labour’s policies for the Home Office with Blair. ‘I’m not interested in immigration,’ Straw told Tim Walker, head of the Immigration and Nationality Department (IND).
‘Howard had played up immigration,’ thought Walker, ‘Straw wants to play it down.’ Straw believed immigration had become toxic under Howard, a situation that he intended to defuse.