Authors: Tom Bower
The Tory leader ducked the opportunity. Presenting an inconsistent
argument and throwing wild punches, he cast discord across the opposition benches. Hisses and boos interrupted his lament, while Blair’s grin destroyed any remaining self-confidence. But Blair’s respite was short-lived. Campbell had summoned a press conference to mark the victory and, in his naturally brutal manner, he demanded retribution from the BBC. His vitriol produced the immediate resignation of both the chairman of the BBC’s board of governors and the director general. ‘I really didn’t want that,’ wrote Blair.
Instead of the report and Blair’s parliamentary triumph concluding the matter, Hutton’s endorsement of the dossier’s credibility – wrongly asserting that it was based on the ‘available intelligence’ – aroused new suspicions of an Establishment fix. The media’s criticism of Hutton’s ‘whitewash’ spread the existing public distrust of Blair to the judiciary and across Whitehall. Bringing MI6 and the JIC to account for their manifest failure remained unfinished business. Days later, Blair agreed that Robin Butler should chair an inquiry into the accuracy of the intelligence. After all, if he survived Hutton, there was no reason to be concerned about a third report. On the contrary, its existence should release the pressure on himself and guarantee a soft landing.
Surviving two critical votes within days – first tuition fees, then Hutton – infused Blair with renewed self-confidence. All his enemies in Parliament had been repulsed – except Brown. The two had been arguing throughout that week. ‘You’ve got to work with me,’ Blair urged Brown.
‘Let’s talk about the handover,’ Brown screamed back. ‘Are you fucking going or not?’ Labelling Brown as psychologically flawed was an understatement.
His promise in November, Blair admitted, had been ‘unwise because it was never going to work … It was an act of cowardice.’ John Reid, Mandelson and Milburn urged him to stay. All three, along with Blair, feared a lurch to the left under Brown and, in the election war with the Tories over tax-and-spend versus lower taxes and controls on immigration, Labour would lose. ‘I knew we would be finished,’ wrote Blair.
‘The folly of retreat was unthinkable and precipitate withdrawal – a disaster.’
Politics was trumped by the human factor. ‘Why are you still sitting here?’ Ed Miliband brusquely demanded of Sally Morgan, Blair’s adviser. ‘Why haven’t you packed up to go? There’s a deal.’ Blair, outraged by that discourtesy, had another consideration. He loved political power, attracting the spotlight and being surrounded by celebrities. Downing Street provided an enviably privileged lifestyle. The absence of chores, the easy travel in limousines and private jets, and the large support operation would vanish overnight. And for what? To allow an unbalanced sociopath responsible for seven years of misery to occupy the spotlight. He told Brown unequivocally their deal was off – and there was an explosion.
Blair’s battle to survive produced another casualty. Blunkett’s revelation about unlimited immigration had angered IND officials in Sheffield. Repeatedly, they were reprimanded for failing to deport asylum-seekers, while Beverley Hughes was obeying Blair’s directive to open the door to those wanting to enter Britain. Anonymously, several IND officials contacted David Davis, the Conservatives’ shadow home secretary, expressing ‘disgust’ at their inability to prevent mass immigration. Their alleged incompetence, wrote the officials, was not to blame; thousands were entering Britain every week because of the government’s policy. Other officials told the
Sunday Times
how migrants were abusing the system to acquire welfare benefits.
Before the newspaper exposed the deception, Davis was told by a British embassy official in Bucharest that the government’s own rules were being disregarded by IND officials in Sheffield. A ‘one-legged Romanian who described himself as a roof tiler’ had been granted a work permit. Davis wondered whether Brown and Blair were ignoring the rules to secure the migrants’ votes. On reflection, he decided that the two politicians were not gerrymandering but pursuing a misguided economic strategy for growth. Neither of them seemed to realise that the low wages paid to migrants reduced the wealth of native Britons.
The
Sunday Times
’ eventual report detailing the chaos in the Home Office caused uproar. Blunkett blamed Straw and the Foreign Office: ‘At the beginning, Jack said everybody was welcome to come from the A8 countries and draw benefits. Now he tells Tony that we shouldn’t have anyone here at all.’ As a smokescreen, Blair publicly demanded new restrictions.
In the Commons, Davis probed for ‘inconsistencies and lies’ in the Home Office’s response to his questions about fraudulent applications by Bulgarians and Romanians. Hughes replied that she was unaware of any misconduct. To her embarrassment, she was reminded that Bob Ainsworth, a Labour MP, had sent her written warnings that IND staff had been told to fast-track visa applications from specifically those countries. Similar advice had been sent by the IND to the British consul in Bucharest. Hughes denied receiving any notification that work permits were being granted contrary to the guidelines, but her statement was undermined by an internal investigation in Sheffield. Caseworkers at the IND’s office, it was revealed, were assuming that applications should not be refused. ‘They’re over-interpreting the Bulgarians’ and Romanians’ entitlement to come,’ Hughes was told by Bill Jeffrey. ‘They’re passing them on the nod. It’s a surprise to me that it is being handled this way.’ In the Commons, Hughes blamed her senior IND officials for being overcome by ‘an excess of zeal’. ‘This came out of the blue,’ she said. Her misfortune was the paper trail in her office showing that she had indeed been warned.
‘It’s sod’s law,’ Blunkett told Blair. ‘She’s the victim of inept management and confusion.’ Jeffrey, he said, was the culprit. Blair disagreed. He appreciated Jeffrey’s work in Ulster. Instead, he blamed Hughes. She resigned on 1 April 2004 and was replaced by Des Browne, a Scottish supporter of Gordon Brown with limited experience of politics who now became Blair’s fifth immigration minister.
In the run-up to the election, Blair knew that Labour’s biggest weakness was the public support for the Tories on immigration. In that year, 589,000 migrants would be registered, the third year running that over
half a million foreigners had settled in the country. Those numbers would continue until reaching a peak of 591,000 in 2010. Net immigration was five times higher than in 1997. Blair’s pre-election claims in 2001 to have imposed controls were proven untrue. Tory research showed that 85 per cent of the electorate condemned the government’s policy. Unusually, the Tories were supported by Trevor Phillips, the chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, who condemned Labour’s policy of multiculturalism. With the polls showing that 75 per cent of the public wanted stronger controls, the Tories were eating into Labour’s lead.
To restore himself alongside the majority, Blair convened a ‘work party’ to produce an initiative. Des Browne anticipated his role as Blair’s punchbag. ‘Christians fed to the lions’, was his observation as the former barrister interrogated the new minister at another immigration summit. It was a blood sport for the other participants, but there was nothing Browne could say. All the policies were in place: Sangatte had been closed; some trucks had to pass through port-side X-ray machines; and new laws had supposedly made asylum less attractive. The problem now was the judges, many of whom were lenient to those who had destroyed their identification papers or claimed to be Chinese or Iranian, making deportation impossible.
At the end of his asylum summit, Blair admitted there were ‘real abuses of the immigration system’ and that Britain was at a ‘crunch point’. Blunkett promised a crackdown on sham marriages and bogus students – the same script he had used seven months earlier. And, to ingratiate himself with European leaders, Blair secretly decided to surrender Britain’s veto over the EU’s asylum policy.
On 18 March 2004, John Scarlett sent an email to Rod Barton, an Australian weapons inspector employed by the American Iraq Survey Group based outside Baghdad. The message reflected Blair’s burden: the failure to find WMDs.
Later that month, Charles Duelfer, the leader of the Survey Group, was due to deliver a report to the US Congress. Duelfer intended to record the truth: the Iraqi weapons programme had ended in 1991 and nothing new had been produced for the next twelve years. To reduce the embarrassment, the CIA had placed Duelfer under pressure to report that Saddam’s WMD programme
could
have been active in 2003, and the group would continue to search for the evidence. Scarlett joined that chase.
In his email to Barton, he urged that nine ‘nuggets’ be included in Duelfer’s report to reinforce the belief that Saddam had been pursuing a WMD programme in 2003. ‘He’s trying to sex up our report,’ thought Barton, a former intelligence officer. ‘We cannot accept any of these.’ He said later on Australian TV, ‘I thought it was dishonest.’ Barton resigned and watched on 30 March as Duelfer delivered an inaccurate report to Congress.
The deception failed. President Bush was compelled by Congress to initiate an investigation into the errors committed by America’s intelligence agencies. This ended any hope Blair had of putting an end to the controversy. Unable to quash the continuing complaints about Brian Hutton’s distortions, he had announced on 3 February that
Robin Butler, the former Cabinet secretary, would review the whole affair.
Blair’s lack of respect for Butler, particularly for his willingness to accommodate his critics, was the mandarin’s qualification. During John Major’s premiership, Butler had probed allegedly dishonest statements by Neil Hamilton and Jonathan Aitken, two Tory MPs. As a trusting man, he acquitted both of any wrongdoing. Subsequently, both were exposed as liars. Butler had many qualities, but he was neither a sceptical nor a forensic investigator. The star schoolboy who led Harrow’s Bible society would not, Blair suspected, overtly embarrass Scarlett, Richard Dearlove or himself. His safeguard was to appoint Ann Taylor, a Labour MP and chairman of the parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee, as a member of the inquiry.
Taylor’s committee had published its own report on the WMDs in September 2003. Few were surprised that she had exonerated the government, the intelligence services and Alastair Campbell. MI6 and the JIC, Taylor declared, had provided ‘convincing intelligence’ that Iraq was pursuing an active WMD programme, and she refused to rule out the possibility that WMDs might still be found. Blair, her report concluded, had not misled Parliament.
Blair knew the truth but remained suspicious. ‘Why did he [Saddam] allow his country to be devastated to protect a myth?’ he wrote in 2010. Seven years after the war, he still could not understand Saddam’s self-delusion. As he later acknowledged, Saddam had destroyed his WMD capability in 1991 and intended to restart his programme once sanctions were removed. The Anglo-American bombing in December 1998 had hit worthless facilities. Possibly, Saddam was misled by his intelligence chiefs, but certainly in 2003 he was in denial about the American invasion.
The following year, Blair similarly refused to admit the truth. Instead, he repeated that the JIC’s reports over many years ‘assumed an active chemical and biological programme … [and] no one seriously disputed it existed’. That inaccuracy was trivial compared to his misinterpretation of why he went to war. ‘At stake’, he wrote in 2010, ‘was the whole future
of Islam.’ Iraq, he suggested, was invaded to crush ‘the forces opposed to modernisation’. He failed to say that, both in 2003 and seven years later, he had continued to misunderstand that the ‘liberation’ of the Iraqis meant something different to him than to the Iraqis themselves. Iraqis – Sunnis, Shias, Kurds and Christians – did not yearn to replicate Westminster’s liberalism. And the Sunnis feared Shiite Iran.
To protect his vulnerability in the aftermath of the war, Blair took care of his core group. In particular, he approved Scarlett’s appointment as Dearlove’s successor. The selection of a retiring JIC chairman to head MI6 was unprecedented. More surprisingly, Scarlett was appointed before Butler had completed his inquiry. To some, the choice appeared to be an inducement to secure Scarlett’s loyalty during Butler’s inquiry, while Whitehall insiders said that Scarlett had the field to himself once Nigel Inkster, the alternative candidate, performed badly during the interview.
Regardless of his managerial qualities to reform MI6, Scarlett had shown manifestly poor judgement before the war. Among Butler’s tasks was to establish why Scarlett had excluded his conclusion that the evidence for WMDs was ‘sporadic and patchy’ from the published dossier. To bury the inconsistencies, Blair directed Butler to limit his inquiry into the mundane techniques of intelligence gathering. This restriction was successfully challenged by Michael Howard, and the inquiry’s remit was extended to include the ‘use of intelligence’. These three extra words empowered Butler to look carefully into Blair’s relations with Scarlett and Dearlove. Whether Butler was minded to embarrass the three protagonists was unknown – as was whether Blair understood the growing crisis enveloping Iraq.
On 10 October, the prime minister attended a service of Thanksgiving at St Paul’s Cathedral for Iraq’s war dead. Years before, there had been a parade through the City of London to commemorate the Falklands war, but Blair knew that similar triumphalism would be inappropriate. At the reception after the service, he encountered Air Marshal Brian Burridge.
‘Is this all doable in Iraq?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ replied Burridge, ‘but this is a three-brigade war and we’re down to one.’
Blair looked blank. With hindsight, Burridge realised that his advice was wrong. Even three brigades of soldiers – about 15,000 men – could not have resolved the festering violence around Basra. Burridge had witnessed the irreconcilable divisions of Iraqi society. No one in London, he realised, had understood the loyalty of the local Shias to the Iranian government or their enmity towards the Sunni government in Baghdad. Blair still believed that those religious differences could be smoothed over by the British military. Burridge, like other senior officers, recognised the impotence of soldiers when it came to reconciling political enemies.
Such insight was not unique. Four years earlier, Colonel Paul Gibson had warned about the army’s mistakes in the Balkans. His sanitised post-operation report had been ignored but, in the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq, he noticed the army make similar mistakes. ‘Soldiers only see as far as the horizon because that’s how far they can walk,’ reflected an admiral anticipating the consequences of serial miscalculations.
The visit to Downing Street by General John Abizaid, the American commander responsible for Iraq, highlighted that unfortunate truth.
‘The overall situation is getting bad,’ he told Blair and General Walker.
‘I’m sorry about that,’ Blair replied. ‘What will you do?’
He listened to Abizaid’s fears about violence spiralling out of control, and his concerns over the torturous restoration of water and electricity and the struggle to impose a representative government. To his visitors, Blair appeared to be either embarrassed by the failure to find WMDs or nonplussed by the slide towards lawlessness. Abizaid’s departure was followed by an awkward conversation between Blair and Walker. Both men were groping for an explanation.
On 11 March, in a sign of what was now in store for Europe, 191 commuters were killed after Islamic terrorists set off explosions on the
Madrid rail network. In the general election three days later, Spain’s governing People’s Party unexpectedly fell. Blair had reason to fear similar retribution. To reassure the British public that there was a reason for the war, he flew from the funerals in Madrid to Libya to meet Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. The dictator responsible for financing terrorism in Ulster and planting a bomb on the Pan Am flight to New York that blew up over Lockerbie had been persuaded by MI6 to accept Western aid in exchange for surrendering his WMDs. The TV pictures for what was called ‘the deal in the desert’ gave Blair much-needed credibility.
As a show of goodwill, just before Blair arrived in Libya MI6 and the CIA organised the kidnap of a Libyan jihadi and his wife, who were living in Thailand, and arranged their transportation to Libya for interrogation. The couple’s evidence was to be used in British courts to obtain the deportation to Tripoli of other Libyan dissidents. Simultaneously, MI6 and Libyan intelligence began joint operations against Libyans living in Britain who were members of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group. Letters sent by Mark Allen, the head of MI6’s counter-terrorism section, to Moussa Koussa, the head of Gaddafi’s intelligence, included the warning that their agreement needed to be kept secret and not be ‘discovered by lawyers or human rights organisations and the media’. Despite Jack Straw’s later denials, the operations would have required his approval and, by implication, Blair’s too, although he would deny ‘any recollection at all’. The aftermath of the war was proving to be as murky as the fifteen months before the invasion.
Blair was now challenged by Labour’s left wing over his loyalty towards Israel. Tony Benn and his followers argued that 9/11 was the direct result of the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Their scenario, developed since the Iraq war, described Blair’s support of Israel as justifying the Islamic grievance against the West. In reply, Blair argued that al-Qaeda was using Palestine as an excuse to destroy Western liberalism. His reasoning was echoed by Israeli politicians. Like Blair, they argued that civilisation could be protected only by defeating Islamic terror – which simply evoked more anger towards Blair among Labour’s left
wing. So many countries, tribes, sects, armed groups and politicians were fighting for power within Iraq that Blair’s regular refrain of the war being a battle of ‘good against evil’ baffled his military advisers.
The prime minister was struggling to come to terms with a mini-lecture from General Mike Jackson. ‘Without a political objective’, Jackson had told him, ‘the army cannot define their enemy. And the army cannot offer a solution in Iraq because you’re resisting the chiefs’ request to define “victory”.’
To avoid that question, Blair danced around ‘conditions’ and ‘solutions’ and steered away from asking Walker for detailed plans on the army’s fate or his view on the consequences of Gordon Brown’s refusal to provide more money. Since British casualties were still low, Walker in turn resisted asking Blair to clarify the government’s long-term ambition. ‘What good would it do to whinge?’ he reflected. ‘Blair had his divided interests, between Britain and Iraq, and we had to deliver what we promised.’ The general’s perfunctory briefings always ended with Blair’s solicitous question, ‘And how are the men and women in the armed forces?’ Walker realised later that Blair never asked about the civilian disturbances and deaths. The mismatch partly stemmed from the unreliable predictions by MI6 and the JIC on whether the violence in Basra would escalate. The continuing poverty of intelligence reflected the agencies’ inability to penetrate the Iraqi groups causing the violence. Ill prepared for the mayhem, British soldiers were haphazardly shooting back at attackers, inaccurately describing the hostilities as the actions of criminals rather than correctly identifying them as the result of political attrition between religious militias.
That misinterpretation undermined the debate in London. During his discussions with both David Manning, Blair’s trusted envoy, newly posted as ambassador in Washington, and his replacement in Downing Street, Nigel Sheinwald, Blair rarely focused for long on the government’s inability to impose its will on Basra. He preferred to ramble across topics rather than host aggressive arguments about identifiable follies. Since Andrew Turnbull, David Omand, Kevin Tebbit and other
senior officials were excluded from Downing Street’s discussions about Iraq, the army’s fate languished and a new crisis unfolded.
Just as Admiral Nigel Essenhigh had predicted, the shortfall in the military’s budget in 2004 was £1.9 billion. George Robertson had created an unaffordable dream in 1998. Only Blair could end the daydreaming, but after Anji Hunter’s departure Walker and Geoff Hoon found access to Downing Street much harder. Both blamed Jonathan Powell for being ‘very difficult’, while in their opinion Sheinwald had already proved to be ‘unhelpful’. Then Gordon Brown demanded more cuts in what Walker called ‘all big-ticket items’, including 38 per cent from the helicopter budget. For some weeks in spring 2004, Walker tried to negotiate with Blair but found him ‘inattentive’.
He was not the only one to feel frustrated. Vice Admiral Rory McLean, responsible for resources in the MoD, finally got Powell’s agreement to demonstrate to Blair the Network Enabled Capability programme, a sophisticated communications system that would enable marksmen to identify enemy positions. The Treasury had cancelled funding for its development. At the end of a twenty-minute presentation, Blair asked, ‘What’s the effect if you don’t have the money?’
McLean realised that the prime minister had not read the single-page brief. ‘Our military cannot operate without this equipment,’ he replied.
Soon after, Walker was told that Blair had approved more funds, but then nothing happened. ‘The mattress mice would get at it,’ quipped Walker, politely blaming civil servants rather than Blair for the lack of action.
One Friday afternoon, after Whitehall’s mechanisms to settle the financial dispute had been exhausted, Blair was told that Walker had issued a draconian ultimatum: matters would have to improve or he would resign. Blair invited the general to Chequers for Sunday lunch. Other than General Charles Guthrie, he found all military personnel a strange breed. He could not grasp that, once committed to an operation, a soldier willingly faced death in pursuit of success. Nor could
Blair appreciate that the military found politicians incomprehensible.