Authors: Tom Bower
‘This is what we can do,’ General Charles Guthrie told Blair in the Downing Street flat just after Leo’s birth. Wearing a nightdress, Cherie sat silently near by. Bored by his paternity leave, Blair was nervous.
In March 2000, Sierra Leone, an impoverished former British colony, was in chaos. Rebels were usurping the civilian government, and an inept UN force was unable to protect the population. Blair had agreed that General David Richards should lead a small military group to secure the airport and organise the evacuation of about 400 British citizens.
In a war for blood diamonds, marauding rebels were cutting off limbs as punishment for voting, and murdering helpless civilians. ‘I am morally outraged by the amputations,’ Richards reported to London from Sierra Leone. In a direct conversation with Robin Cook about imposing an ethical foreign policy, he asked for permission to kill the rebels. The foreign secretary’s status, as the army knew, had been dented by his messy divorce and an embarrassing statement to the Commons about his officials’ misconduct in allowing Sandline, a private British company, to supply weapons to Sierra Leone; an inquiry would show that Cook had distorted the truth about his officials’ proper conduct regarding the arms sale. Cook embellished his ready agreement with Richards by mentioning Blair’s interest in a country where his father had worked.
‘It’s the right thing to do,’ declared Blair to a meeting of excited officials. Some 5,000 heavily armed soldiers were dispatched in a naval task
force – including a frigate, an aircraft carrier with Harrier jets and an amphibious assault ship with helicopters – that would assemble off the coast of Sierra Leone and confront an ill-disciplined gang of marauders. Within days, the troops had killed the rebels without losses. Richards returned to Britain, leaving behind a group of Royal Irish Rangers to train the Sierra Leone army. Shortly after, some soldiers carelessly allowed themselves to be caught by the West Side Boys, a murderous gang of drug-dealers, and were hauled off into the jungle.
‘We must do something,’ Guthrie told Blair.
‘Will there be casualties?’
‘If we do nothing, they’ll all be killed or skinned and tortured,’ said Guthrie, fearful that the prime minister might go ‘limp-wristed’. ‘If we try and rescue them, there might be a few casualties, and there could be forty if the helicopter is shot down.’
Blair flinched but, to his relief, the SAS rescue mission was a success. Most of the gang were killed, all the hostages were saved and just one SAS soldier died. Soon after, Blair was given a pop star’s welcome in Freetown, the country’s capital. Few in London disputed the proportionality of 5,000 troops and a naval task force combating a small group of drug addicts, or questioned Cook’s ethical imperialism. Rather, Blair was praised for another military success.
And there would be another. In the wake of Kosovo and Sierra Leone, 300 Gurkhas and a group of SAS troops under Richards’s command had policed a peace agreement following riots in East Timor. Blair had found a useful ally in the military. In particular, he liked how the army welcomed a challenge and appreciated leadership. Orders were given, the ranks obeyed and results were delivered. His respect for Guthrie and General Mike Jackson and his suspicion of civil servants gave the armed services an unusual advantage in Whitehall’s turf wars.
In the aftermath of these minor engagements, countless position papers criss-crossed Whitehall articulating Blair’s doctrine of military intervention to save humanity. No one voiced doubts about the British military’s capability or compared the triviality of those engagements
with any serious operation. The euphoria of success silenced scepticism. By the end of 2000, the Foreign Office had produced a strategy for a foreign policy that described the military’s enhanced capability to execute Blair’s blueprint for intervention. Beneath the title, the authors’ script failed to anticipate the nature of the conflicts Britain might be fighting. Since there was no precise plan, there was no description of an objective. There was only ‘strategy’, that frequently misused word in Labour’s lexicon.
The new review empowered the generals to become proactive, influencing Britain’s foreign policy rather than awaiting orders. Without anticipating the consequences, both the Foreign Office and Blair encouraged the military to accept their ascendant influence. In a government driven by overpromising, any voice of caution was made to feel unwelcome. The change was signalled by the reduced status of Kevin Tebbit, the new permanent secretary at the MoD. His predecessors, such as Frank Cooper, had been Whitehall giants, intellectually equipped to guide and challenge the military and politicians with their recognised expertise. During the Second World War, Cooper’s RAF plane had been shot down over Italy. Within twenty-four hours, he had escaped imprisonment and returned to his base. Such bravery counted in the MoD. Tebbit was not in the same position to question ambitious generals like David Richards, who evangelised about Blair’s ‘force for good’ turning Britain into a global troubleshooter. ‘Once the military became used more regularly,’ Richards believed, ‘the civilians could not second-guess the military.’ Others rejected that explanation – but silently.
In 2001, Guthrie, fed up with his minister, refused to extend his service as chief of the defence staff, despite Blair’s efforts. ‘Hoon’s a lightweight,’ the general declared, and retired. His disenchantment with Geoff Hoon, Robertson’s successor as defence minister, was duplicated by his replacement, Admiral Mike Boyce, a taciturn submariner. Despite playing squash with Hoon, Boyce scorned him as ‘a bearer of little brain’; he also disliked Tebbit for protecting Hoon rather than
championing the military’s interests. Neither man, in Boyce’s judgement, appreciated the absolute nature of war: risk was endemic, men would die, and nothing should be allowed to obstruct total victory.
With hindsight, Hoon understood that Boyce was ‘too straightforward and didn’t like the confederation of politicians’. The unusually intelligent admiral agreed: ‘I don’t do chummy.’ Unlike Guthrie, he made little effort to disguise his rational, unemotional approach. The solitariness of submarines was not the best preparation for charming the prime minister, and in turn Blair was displeased at how Boyce chilled rather than warmed the room. The whirlpool of fraught relationships was further complicated by Jonathan Powell’s antagonism towards Tebbit ever since the two men had served together at the embassy in Washington. Powell’s sentiments influenced Blair, a misfortune for the permanent secretary at the MoD.
Boyce took over in the midst of a Whitehall storm. Gordon Brown’s underfunding of the defence budget, the chiefs had discovered, was worse than the £200 million shortfall they had concealed in 1998. ‘We are £900 million short every year,’ they were told by a vice air marshal reporting to the chiefs. The result was shortages of manpower, equipment and training. ‘Blair’s championship of “prevention diplomacy” as described in “Defence Planning Assumptions”’, the vice air marshal continued, ‘doesn’t stand the reality test. The question is whether there is a political will to fix it.’
Admiral Nigel Essenhigh, the financial architect of the defence review, suspected the worst. The annual budget, he estimated, was in reality ‘£2 billion light’. At Blair’s request, the chiefs were making plans based on assumptions that Britain could not afford. The army was funded to prepare for war but not to fight one.
In 2001, Brown directed that the MoD should make further cuts. Officials began compiling a ‘cut list’ of equipment, frigates and planes. Disturbed that the 1998 defence plan would be fundamentally undermined, Essenhigh urged Tebbit to consider ‘less damaging savings’ by ‘smart procurement’ and identifying waste. ‘Cutting the front line is a
flawed approach,’ Essenhigh told him. ‘We should aim for the flabby costing.’
Tebbit did not agree. He had already made substantial efficiency savings, but Essenhigh was unconvinced and turned to Hoon. ‘You’re being poorly advised,’ he told the minister. ‘You’re being misled by your officials that we can make savings only by cutting the front line – frigates, RAF squadrons and the army. There are huge savings in the soft underbelly – the bureaucracy, management and procurement.’ In Essenhigh’s opinion, he was regarded by Hoon as an embarrassment for having the facts at his fingertips.
The minister didn’t want to listen and wished Essenhigh would go away. As a last bid, the admiral urged Hoon to tell the prime minister. Hoon refused. Blair, he knew, ‘had little control over the Treasury’.
It was Boyce who agreed to confront Blair. Their conversation was predictable. ‘You can have all the money you want,’ replied Blair courteously, ‘but you’ll have to ask Gordon.’
The outcome of Boyce’s meeting with the chancellor was similarly preordained. ‘The military needs at least an extra £500 million every year,’ he told Brown, but he had hit a brick wall. ‘He offered £150 million,’ he recalled later.
Blair asked no questions about what would happen now. Detaching himself from the consequences of underfunding the military, he was preoccupied by the forthcoming election, having received a reprimand from Philip Gould, his trusted adviser: ‘You are not focusing on the domestic agenda. Your language is wrong.’
Unmentioned in that message were the fractured relations among the New Labour family.
The mood inside Blair’s own home had been poisoned by a ninety-minute argument between himself, Cherie, Alastair Campbell and Campbell’s combative partner, Fiona Millar, who had told Blair that his government was too right-wing and that he should no longer employ Jonathan Powell or Anji Hunter. Blair replied that he would decide on his staff rather than be subject to Millar’s diktat. Her rant spurred Campbell to snap that he would resign after the election, due in spring 2001.
The festering disagreements among Labour’s top echelon were stoked by Geoffrey Robinson’s newly published memoirs, which offered a gloriously prejudiced description of his service in the Labour government, laced with a disparaging account of Blair’s lapses as compared to Gordon Brown’s genius. ‘I have a real sense of foreboding,’ Blair told Peter Mandelson. ‘I feel very insecure. It’s just not going to work.’
The test of leadership, Blair knew, was to stay in power. In the wake of the petrol crisis, the polls had put the Tories temporarily ahead. Newspapers reported the fading of ‘Teflon Tony’. The bad news was compounded by Hunter announcing that she would definitely leave No. 10 after the election. Blair pleaded with both her and Campbell to stay. Without them he felt even more vulnerable, especially because Brown was being ‘vile and rude’, according to Mandelson, about the election campaign. Blair’s charm and popularity enraged the chancellor, who shrugged aside Blair’s warning that, if his vitriol did not stop, his expectations for the succession would be stymied. If he were fired, he threatened, there would be war. Blair recoiled. He fulminated about
the risk of ‘Gordon on the back benches’ rousing his considerable army of supporters.
His fears had become profound. Without Brown, he could not fight the election. Only his chancellor had the intellect and political savvy to rout the Conservatives with beguiling slogans and the thunder of competence. Unlike most other ministers, including John Prescott, Stephen Byers, Harriet Harman and Jack Straw, Brown, despite his dubious counting, retained the appearance of running his ministry flawlessly. Somehow he concealed his dithering over decisions, his volcanic temper and his propensity to blame others for his own mistakes, like the award of a 75p pension increase. Brazenly, however, in his quest to become leader he also threatened to destroy the government. ‘The two clowns’, Alan Milburn told Blair unceremoniously, referring to Brown and Mandelson, ‘are harming the government.’ Blair’s best weapon against Brown, and his only defence against the
Daily Mail’
s latest attacks against Mandelson, was Campbell, who was soon to be deployed when the New Labour family’s troubles increased markedly on 21 January 2001.
Norman Baker, a Lib Dem MP, was alleging that Mandelson, by then employed as secretary for Northern Ireland, had interceded with the Home Office to help Srichand Hinduja, an Indian billionaire, obtain British citizenship. Baker knew that, two years earlier, Mandelson had persuaded Hinduja to finance the Millennium Dome’s Faith Zone. Mandelson denied Baker’s allegation, a denial that was repeated by Campbell to journalists.
Mandelson’s answer surprised Mike O’Brien, the immigration minister at the time. Referring to his notes, he recalled a telephone call from Mandelson asking about the application’s progress, and mentioned the contradiction to Jack Straw. At that stage, Straw could have remained silent to protect Mandelson and the government. Instead, he telephoned Blair and subsequently appeared on television to say that Mandelson had ‘told an untruth’. Not only had Mandelson telephoned O’Brien, said Straw, but he had also asked for his name to be omitted from any parliamentary answer.
Blair was trapped. Mandelson pleaded his innocence – ‘I never used my position to help anyone get a passport,’ he said – but the media were demanding the resignation of a man who aroused suspicion. While Mandelson fretted, Hinduja was bathing in the Ganges during a festival. To enquiring journalists he denied placing any pressure to obtain British nationality other than asking Mandelson to make ‘purely a casual query’. Blair approved an official inquiry into the allegations, but the media were unsatisfied. Mandelson’s honesty was widely disputed. The fate of a controversial politician could have awaited an independent report, but Blair was feeling even less secure than usual. At the best of times, holding together a government threatened by the passion of personal rivalries was difficult but, as he well understood, cynicism always triumphed over sycophancy. After four days of torrid headlines, the foundations of his government appeared to have become unusually fragile.
Campbell reckoned that Mandelson had been lying. He had indeed telephoned O’Brien, Campbell decided, and ‘had misled us’. Although Richard Wilson told Blair it was all ‘a minor mix-up’ that should be ignored, Campbell pronounced the opposite and pressured Blair to dismiss Mandelson. In choosing between his two closest aides, Blair surrendered to his overbearing spokesman. ‘Peter Mandelson is at this moment upstairs discussing his future with the prime minister,’ Campbell told journalists at a briefing on 24 January, implying the minister’s departure even before Blair had requested a formal resignation.
Mandelson was outraged by Blair’s disloyalty: ‘I was simply not worth the trouble and was dispensable.’ He also felt ‘betrayed’ by Campbell, who in turn suggested that Mandelson was ‘mentally detached’. Blair absorbed Mandelson’s outburst about an unnecessarily ruined career. Although his minister was a gambler, Blair had allowed Campbell, declared by a High Court judge in a recent libel action to be an ‘unreliable witness’, to destroy an invaluable confidant. His only concession was to describe his doomed adviser’s fate as ‘tragic’.
On his last morning in office, Mandelson had been served breakfast by his butler at Hillsborough Castle, his official residence in Northern Ireland, and by lunchtime was opening the door of his London house in Notting Hill to take delivery of a ‘Mermaid Queen’ pizza. Over the following days, he would admit his mistake, then deny his confession and finally repudiate the investigation. ‘I came briefly to be persuaded that my recollection was entirely wrong,’ he would say, ‘that I had erred, and that I should resign. Downing Street sentenced me to political suicide without a fair trial.’ No one could have imagined that a consequence of creating a Faith Zone at the Dome would be the termination of a career on account of a ‘forgotten’ telephone call two years earlier. But, in Blair’s judgement, he could not afford to ignore Campbell and take gratuitous risks so close to the election.
In one breath, he had dumped Mandelson and, with Campbell’s encouragement, embraced Richard Desmond, a publisher with a background in pornography and other murky business ventures, including a contract in 1991 to supply pornographic magazines to the Gambinos, New York’s mafia family.
Blair’s interest in the abrasive millionaire was sparked by Desmond’s purchase on 22 November 2000 of the Express group of newspapers. Although no longer the dominant influence it was in the Beaverbrook era, the
Daily Express
was still read by over a million people. Its new owner’s expectation of respect from Britain’s power brokers was instantly rewarded. Within an hour of his arrival at the
Express
’s headquarters, he was telephoned by Blair, who offered his congratulations and an invitation to visit Downing Street the same afternoon.
Blair seemed unaware that in 1997 Desmond had donated £5,000 to the Conservatives and, on that year’s election night, had watched with Barbara Windsor – ‘wearing our blue badges’ – the news of Labour’s landslide victory. ‘We were crying,’ Desmond recalled. Nor did Blair know that, a few months before, Desmond had ordered the editor of his pornographic magazine
Readers’ Wives
to ‘put Cherie Blair on the front cover’.
On his arrival in Downing Street, Desmond snatched Blair’s outstretched hand and volunteered, ‘I’m a socialist.’ After some excited small talk about their shared interest in guitars, Desmond agreed that Margaret McDonagh, the Labour Party’s general secretary, should visit him to discuss a donation. A day later, he agreed secretly to donate £100,000 to the party.
To cement the new relationship, McDonagh invited Desmond to visit the party’s headquarters in Millbank. His appearance shocked Lance Price, a Downing Street spokesman. With Blair’s approval, said Price, ‘a sleazeball was allowed to run around’ the secret sanctum. Days later, Campbell addressed the Express group’s editors as members of Labour’s election machine rather than independent journalists.
‘Can you get Posh Spice to say, “Vote Labour”?’ he asked.
‘She’s Tory,’ he was told.
‘Beckham?’ chimed in Campbell, laughing. The footballer, he was informed, might be a more likely bet, but could not be relied upon to say the right thing.
‘I like Blair,’ Desmond recounted after his next meeting with the prime minister. He prided himself on having dictated his lunch menu to Downing Street – asparagus, steamed fish and berries – in order to satisfy his diet. ‘I can talk to Blair about anything – asylum-seekers, pensions and music. He and his wife are what modern Britain is all about. They are typical
Express
readers, self-made, liberally minded and down-to-earth.’ Shortly after, Blair met Anthony Bevins, who had just resigned as the
Express
’s political editor. ‘Why did you leave?’ Blair asked. Bevins placed in front of him
Horny Housewives, Mega
Boobs, Posh Wives, Skinny & Wriggly
and other magazines owned by Desmond. One year later, Blair was asked by Jeremy Paxman on television whether he knew Desmond published pornography. ‘No, I don’t,’ he replied with doe-eyed innocence.
The new partnership would be tested after the
Mail on Sunday
revealed Desmond’s £100,000 donation to the Labour Party and juxtaposed it with Byers’s formal approval of the takeover of the
Express
and Desmond’s recent employment of McDonagh as general manager of Express Newspapers.
‘Richard Desmond’, said Alice Mahon, a Labour MP, ‘is the last person I would want to support and finance the Labour Party.’
Baroness Kennedy, the Labour lawyer, added about the donation, ‘I do think this is tainted money.’
In response, John Reid, the secretary of state for Northern Ireland – his fourth job in the government – retorted, ‘If you’re asking if we are going to sit in moral judgement on those who wish to contribute to the Labour Party, the answer is no.’
Blair damned all his critics for being part of a ‘systematic attempt … by some parts of the media to undermine politicians and undermine the political process’.
Events interrupted the flow of Blair’s spleen towards his critics. On 19 February, Brian Bender, now the permanent secretary at the Ministry of Agriculture, told Blair that foot-and-mouth disease had been discovered among pigs at an abattoir in Essex. The ministry’s policy in such cases assumed that the neighbouring ten farms were at risk. Restrictions on animal movements were imposed and the ministry’s staff were deployed to resolve the outbreak. ‘You’ll have to sort out that mess,’ Blair told Bender. His priority was preparing for a meeting at Camp David with George W. Bush, the new US president.
After weeks of turbulence, Blair’s critics watched his arrival with Cherie in Washington on 22 February 2001 with particular scepticism. Taking his wife to meet Bush was a risk. Quite possibly she would not conceal her dislike of the Republicans, but rejecting Bush’s invitation was impossible. The right-wing president seemed uninformed but safe. ‘At Last a US President Who Won’t Meddle in Foreign Intervention’ was one British newspaper’s headline. By the end of their first day in Camp David, Bush’s charm had melted Cherie’s antagonism. Despite their different political allegiances, the two leaders also bonded over shared philosophies towards terrorism and religion.
Few beyond his inner circle had realised Blair had developed
a genuine interest in religion since his days in Oxford with Peter Thomson, the Australian chaplain of St John’s. Unlike his predecessors, Blair made no secret of his Christian worship, which Matthew Parris in 1998 perceptively predicted would end with his conversion to Catholicism. Thomson, a lifelong friend, encouraged Blair’s conviction that religion lay at the heart of human existence, but sensibly Blair rarely discussed his faith, unless it was with like-minded people, including Bush. Both had read the scriptures, especially with regard to the importance of providence. Among their shared values was a hatred of Saddam Hussein. Blair opposed the dictator in the name of social democracy, while Bush wanted revenge against Saddam following the Iraqi president’s failed attempt to assassinate his father, former president George H. W. Bush. During their conversations, Bush reassured his visitor of their union in a moral crusade.
In the press conference at the end of the visit, Bush blessed Blair as ‘our strongest friend and closest ally’. The two leaders were asked about sanctions against Iraq. The previous week, American and British planes had attacked targets around Baghdad, the first bombing in nearly two years, evoking protests from many Labour MPs but justified by Robin Cook and the Foreign Office as necessary to prevent the development of WMDs.
‘Don’t be under any doubt at all’, Blair replied, ‘of our absolute determination to make sure that the threat of Saddam Hussein is contained and that he is not able to develop these weapons of mass destruction.’ Blair’s emphasis was on Saddam ‘developing’ the weapons. After conversations with Bush and the CIA’s director, he did not state that Saddam actually ‘possessed’ them.
He flew back to London exhilarated, but any feelings of triumph soon evaporated. New outbreaks of foot-and-mouth disease had been discovered in Northumberland and Devon. Fifty-seven farms in sixteen counties had been infected even before the first discovery in Essex. The unexpectedly large number of animals being transported around the country was overwhelming the government’s outdated contingency
plan. Whitehall’s leaders had allowed the organisation created during the Second World War to manage civil emergencies to disintegrate. The replacement Cobra machinery, Brian Bender discovered, was ‘antiquated. We were making it up as we went along. Everyone was out of their depth.’ ‘You may be looking for leadership,’ Helene Hayman, a junior agriculture minister, told a group of officials in the Cobra room, ‘but I’m completely untrained for this role.’ In their slow, uncoordinated response, officials were closing down rural areas and culling thousands of healthy animals. Smoking pyres were beginning to cover Britain, as Blair searched forlornly among the civil servants for a solution. In this major battle to save the countryside, he shrank from assuming the mantle of commander-in-chief.