Authors: Tom Bower
The issue was still not resolved when he left for a holiday at the Mexican seaside, where he and Cherie underwent a ârebirthing experience', which involved covering themselves with watermelon, papaya and mud and screaming loudly to signal the pain of birth. They travelled on to Egypt, where the proposition of bowing to Brown's new
demand for his resignation before the next election disappeared. âI'm not going to be pushed out,' he told Mandelson on his return. He also decided that Anji Hunter should finally leave. Her continued presence was aggravating his relationship with Cherie, and he could no longer resist Hunter's own insistence that she resign in order to take a senior post at oil giant BP. Relations between the two old friends appeared to have deteriorated to such an extent that Blair would fail to attend her farewell party.
Enjoying the September sunshine at Chequers, he redrafted his conference speech about â yet again â modernising Britain. He also handwrote a note advocating more cash for schools and hospitals. His target was Brown. Before Blair's summer holiday, the chancellor had reasserted his refusal to advance additional money for either ministry. Instead, he sidelined Blair's priorities to highlight his own flagship scheme: means-tested tax credits that would capture most of Britain's population as recipients of state benefits.
The idea of such credits had been introduced to Brown by Ed Balls. The scheme, designed by Larry Summers, a Harvard professor, was aimed at helping the poor and accelerating social engineering. Blair had discovered that the introductory cost was over £2 billion, four times higher than Brown's original estimate. âThey basically lied to me about it,' he complained. In reality, Brown's tax credits were costing £4 billion a year and, financed by loans, were rising remorselessly (by 2015, they would cost £30 billion a year). And because the programme was unsupervised, the payments had become chaotic.
Dithering and meddling as usual, Brown had become the unsuspecting victim of incompetent computer programmers. He had also not understood that many poor people were incapable of completing the application forms for credits, leaving thousands of genuine claimants penniless. Nor did he grasp that the Inland Revenue was not set up to administer a welfare scheme. To Blair's misfortune, none of his own advisers realised that the scheme, organised by the Treasury without consultation, was turning into a debacle.
On that Sunday night in Chequers, he ordered that a copy of his memorandum about the NHS be sent to his chancellor. âWe thought he was crazy to think that Brown would be converted by his note,' recalled a Downing Street adviser. Regardless, Blair summoned a meeting on 6 September. At the outset, the discussion was about the gap between rhetoric and policy, and the huge cost of more change in the NHS. Blair waved the objections aside. His message was âdeliverology', a new word heralding a new vocabulary for the structural reforms to health, schools and universities. The agent for change would be targets administered by Michael Barber.
Flattered by the spotlight and Blair's trust, Barber did not offer complete reassurance. The civil service, he explained, required clarity, leadership and a sense of urgency, and without being told any plans, officials lacked confidence in the government. He did not complete his indictment. In his unsuccessful search for âcoherence at the centre of government', he blamed Blair for creating the problem by establishing competing quangos and targets.
Nearly two years after his commitment on David Frost's TV show to increase spending and change the NHS, Blair was still floundering.
For many, the appointment of Estelle Morris as education minister was a surprise. Morris had failed her A-levels and, although she was a popular teacher, her nail-biting and shyness suggested a lack of self-confidence. During a brief conversation in Downing Street after her appointment, Blair did not discuss his expectations, while Morris did not mention her concern over his shift towards choice and diversity for schools. ‘Market mechanisms to accommodate choice don’t work with education,’ she believed. She also disputed Andrew Adonis’s bold assertion that he had contributed to the expansion of good schools. Blair was unconcerned. As ever, he gave little weight to what Cabinet ministers said.
Morris’s department was suffering ideological turmoil when she arrived. Under Blair’s new agenda, nearly a third of all comprehensives had been converted into specialist schools and, since he was persuaded that faith schools ‘add to the inclusiveness and diversity of the system’, more of that kind were expected. Labour MPs opposed to this mentioned the recent riots by Asian youths in northern England. In his report about the disturbances, Sir Herman Ouseley would identify Muslim-populated schools in the inner cities, which effectively had a single culture, as potential breeding grounds for intolerance and racism. Under the Tories, faith schools had been integrated into the state system but were empowered with state funds to develop a distinctive ethos, morality and curriculum.
Blair was unimpressed, and approved a £12 million grant to build a secondary school for Muslim girls in Birmingham. Forty-five Labour MPs revolted against the legislation backing faith schools, forcing the
government to accept that such schools would have to admit 25 per cent of non-faith children. Blair blamed left-wing ideologues and not fears about Islamic extremists for the opposition. The same critics rejected his decision to privatise more state schools. Opinion polls showed that two-thirds of the public wanted only the state to provide education. Blair’s ideas encouraged trade-union leaders to conjure up images of greedy capitalists charging parents and the sick for schools and medical care. ‘I feel my persuasiveness is slipping,’ Blair told Peter Mandelson ‘For the first time, I felt they were not buying into what I’m saying. They are listening and rejecting.’
At a dinner for his ‘delivery ministers’, Blair was noticeably depressed by his party’s criticism. Coming so soon after he had delivered a second landslide victory, he was barely consoled by the jolly mood and the loyal people he had placed in key departments. Gordon Brown, he realised, was telling his supporters that the prime minister was stumbling, losing his touch and planning Thatcher-style privatisation. The dissenters were encouraged to sabotage his ambition for public-service reforms. Brown was personally insisting that every department abide by public-service agreements imposed by the Treasury. Blair despaired. ‘It’s intimidation in order to dislodge me,’ he complained. ‘I asked him all the right questions about the 1998 Comprehensive Spending Review,’ he told a confidant, ‘but I was lied to. I’m ready this time.’
His new armoury consisted of three divisions based in Downing Street: Michael Barber’s Delivery Unit; a Strategic Unit under Geoff Mulgan to advise on future policies; and the Office of Public Sector Reform under Wendy Thompson to transform Whitehall into a centre for entrepreneurs. Thompson was delegated with pioneering ‘choice and diversity’ and overcoming the civil servants’ uncertainty about Blair’s intentions. In the exuberant language favoured within No. 10, Mulgan was asked to produce ‘strategic policy challenges’ that would make society work better by ‘enhancing the individual, the market and the society with security and a stable sense of being’. The elaborate wording was adopted to disguise the reality of government.
A major fissure appeared during the summer. Morris was hesitant about the contents of her new White Paper and asked for a delay. ‘Flaky,’ Alastair Campbell noted. Sensitive about Morris’s hesitancy, Blair realised how many in the party disliked New Labour. Even the Blairites were split. Morris’s White Paper, ‘Schools: Building on Success’, did not resolve the disagreements.
Brown continued to create problems. First, he had seized control of Sure Start and, without waiting for proof of success, announced that the number of centres would double to 500, with the annual budget increased from £184 million in 2000/1 to £499 million in 2003/4. Although Naomi Eisenstadt, the director, protested that confusion, acrimony and disputes between constantly changing ministers and officials made it too early to evaluate the programme, Brown demanded the creation of a sticker declaring ‘success’.
Such haste troubled Eisenstadt. In an unexpected turf war, Sure Start found itself contending with a glut of other big-budget government programmes, announced with great fanfare, to cure poverty, including Health Action Zones and the ‘New Deal for Communities’. All those armies of social workers would produce limited benefits. Then Eisenstadt discovered that the teenage single mothers targeted by Sure Start were uninterested in the programme, which as a result could not find sufficient children to rescue from poverty. Instead, middle-class mothers were taking millions of pounds to finance their own niche groups.
Brown’s more serious problem was the Independent Learning Accounts (ILAs), which provided government grants for free adult education. In May 2001, the government handed out £273 million to a million of these accounts. By September, 2.5 million of them had received over £500 million and 8,910 companies were registered to provide the education. Morris’s senior officials rejoiced, unaware that those responsible for the programme had become suspicious that the ILAs were a honeypot for fraudsters, with 6,000 applications being received from just one address. By then, at least £100 million had been lost to fraud.
The programme was suspended. Some ministers blamed their officials for naivety; others said that the fraud showed that Labour could not trust the civil servants, who lacked any incentive to tell the truth. Blair despaired that here was yet another example of Whitehall’s failure to deliver. At the same time, in his familiar language, he wanted to cast aside cautious government and, with ‘radical thinking’, drive ‘modernisation’ from the centre. His tangled message for the annual meeting of the trade unions would be that they should end their ‘outdated thinking’, especially those trade unionists who said that ‘education is for children, not for profit’.
On 11 September 2001, Blair arrived in Brighton to address the TUC Congress. His sour relationship with the unions, he knew, was unlikely to have been altered by the election victory. John Edmonds, the union leader for local authority workers, had predicted in that morning’s newspapers ‘a bumpy ride. This is Tony Blair’s last chance to step back from the brink.’ Blair’s speech advocating public-service reform was certain to reinforce their mutual dislike. His loyal supporter Patricia Hewitt, he knew, had been received in sullen silence the previous day. Blair did not enjoy the twists and turns of his relationship with the unions. ‘They could not understand why I was doing what I was doing, and I could not understand why they could not see it was the way of the future,’ he would write.
He had built his career on attacking the unions, challenging the closed shop in 1989, then winning the vote to abolish Clause Four. Rewriting that clause in modern terms, replacing the pledge for mass nationalisation of industry with a meaningless promise to welcome ‘power, wealth and opportunity in the hands of the many, not the few’, was Blair’s coup against the party. His polished revision rebuked the committed socialists but preserved a fig leaf to distinguish Labour from the Tories. To the Congress’s additional dismay, he had refused to repeal Thatcher’s anti-union laws and defied those left-wingers pledged to save the party’s soul. To continue fighting the class war, Blair retorted, was pointless. He had won the leadership with 57 per cent of the total vote,
without needing the unions’ support. Ever since that victory, he was convinced that with unwavering willpower he would always triumph.
Just after his first general-election victory, he had spelled out in the same hall in Brighton his belief that the unions were partly to blame for preventing the modernisation of Britain. In 2001, his prepared speech again defined himself against those stubborn forces of conservatism within the Labour Party.
Just before he was due to step on stage, two hijacked passenger planes crashed into the Twin Towers in south Manhattan. A Pearl Harbor moment for America would change Blair’s destiny for ever. Abandoning his speech, he headed back to London on a commuter train. During the hour-long journey, he appeared transformed, even traumatised. The warnings by the intelligence services after the recent fatal Islamic terrorist attacks in Kenya and Aden had proven to be understated. The world, he convinced himself, had fundamentally changed on his watch. Islam was no longer a benign religion but one that was being usurped by extremists to destroy Western values. In the battle between good and evil, his responsibility now was to save civilisation. Rather than contemplate how normality might be restored, he was planning to embark on a worldwide crusade.
London felt eerie as Blair was rushed to Downing Street to prepare a speech committing him to stand alongside President Bush. ‘It was not America alone who was the target,’ he later wrote, ‘but all of us who shared the same values. It was war. It had to be fought and won. It was a battle for and about the ideas and values that would shape the twenty-first century.’ Unmentioned was his new conviction about the threat from Islamic fundamentalists.
In years to come, he would admit his misunderstanding of Islam but would deny that his ignorance was to blame for his response. ‘The only course’, he wrote, ‘is to follow instinct and belief.’ Even after reflecting for nine years, Blair ignored the importance of acting on the basis of expert knowledge gained through reading and listening. During the summer of 2001, he had read the Koran rather than a series of new
books describing recent conflicts in the Middle East. The nuances of the schism between Sunnis and Shiites and the tribal antagonisms embittering relations across the Muslim world were not reflected in the Koran. Blair never questioned the inherent dangers of relying on ‘instinct and belief’.
He repeated his view that this was ‘an attack on America but also an attack on our values’ to the group awaiting him in the Cobra room. ‘We shall support America in anything they do,’ he told them. The senior military officer present was surprised by Blair’s ‘excited rant’ and welcomed Blunkett’s intervention – ‘Provided we check the intelligence first.’ Blair ignored his home secretary, and no one else spoke. That night, he publicly committed Britain to ‘stand shoulder to shoulder with our American friends in this hour of tragedy, and we, like them, will not rest until this evil is driven from our world’. The label of ‘evil’ was not fixed on any one person in particular. ‘Are we bombing Baghdad?’ an official in Downing Street asked the liaison officer in the Ministry of Defence.
Elsewhere in Westminster that day, Jo Moore, the special adviser trusted by Stephen Byers at the DTI, sent out an email: ‘It’s now a very good day to get out anything we want to bury. Councillors’ expenses?’ Her email was later leaked to the media. Also that day, Byers quietly made a series of telephone calls to begin the appointment of administrators for Railtrack, the privately owned and solvent company whose unknowing shareholders were about to lose their money.
On the same day, Blair called Brown to discuss the crisis. ‘When are you resigning?’ was Brown’s response. Speechless, Blair slammed down the phone.
Within twenty-four hours, there was no doubt that the attack had been plotted by Osama bin Laden, the leader of al-Qaeda, from his base in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. In Blair’s conversation with Bush on 14 September about those responsible, the American president mentioned Iraq’s possible relationship with al-Qaeda, which had never previously been associated with the country. At the time, Downing Street’s spokesman relayed Blair’s reply that they would need to find
the evidence for that link, and the immediate focus should be on the Taliban. In 2010, Blair admitted that ‘at the forefront of my mind’ immediately after 9/11 was his fear that terrorist groups would gain possession of weapons of mass destruction.
One of the sources of his conflation of Osama bin Laden, international Islamic terrorism, WMDs and Iraq was Richard Dearlove. Accompanied by the MI6 chief during his flights around Europe as the self-appointed broker gathering support for American retaliation in the newly named ‘war against terror’, Blair took in Dearlove’s conviction that Iraq possessed WMDs. He also heard that a suicide bomber could possibly trigger a nuclear explosion in London. Dearlove’s warnings were not dismissed. On the contrary, he was telling the prime minister what he expected to hear and, in the can-do manner beloved by Blair, highlighting his new priority of killing bin Laden.
On the morning of 20 September, just before flying to New York for a memorial ceremony for the 3,000 victims of the attack, Blair attended the regular education stock-take in Downing Street. ‘I might be preoccupied for a while,’ he told the small group, ‘but I don’t want you to forget how important education is for me.’ In an emotional farewell, everyone shook his hand in what the education department’s permanent secretary David Normington would call ‘a heart-stopping moment’.
During the flight, accompanying journalists were informed that Blair was reading the Koran. Taut and sombre, he later told them that he bore a ‘huge and heavy responsibility’. At the same time, Foreign Office officials were working hard to persuade Bush to emphasise that Afghanistan was the danger, not Iraq. They took comfort from the fact that the president’s speech to Congress on 21 September avoided linking Iraq with the New York massacre. Cool heads cut through the emotion.
Twelve hours later, raw passion convulsed the congregation in New York as they listened to the address, which included a message from the Queen to the bereaved: ‘Grief is the price we pay for love.’