Authors: Tom Bower
‘I’ve never been able to work Mike out,’ he told the general’s wife at a dinner in Downing Street.
‘We’ve been married thirty-three years,’ Lady Walker replied, ‘and he’s the most straightforward person you can want to meet.’
Blair smiled the Blair smile.
Over the lunch at Chequers, Walker showed the prime minister the government’s list of proposed cuts. ‘I’ve drawn a line halfway down the page,’ he explained. ‘We’ll accept the cuts on top. If you go further, you’ll have to look for a new set of chiefs.’
‘We can’t have that,’ said Blair. ‘You’re going to have to see Gordon.’
‘But he’s your man.’
‘Well, there’s nothing I can do.’
‘I wouldn’t put up with my officers behaving like that.’
‘I can’t do any more,’ replied Blair, without noticeable embarrassment.
The following night, over a glass of whisky, Tebbit answered Walker’s question, ‘What should my resignation figure be?’ Armed with the critical amount that the MoD needed, Walker met Brown in the Treasury. A small, spartan room had been allocated, with one table and two uncomfortable chairs.
‘Chancellor, I must tell you that the armed forces don’t like you,’ were the general’s opening remarks. ‘You’ve never once visited a military base, and they don’t like it.’
Brown did not reply. In the recent Budget, he had announced a spending and borrowing spree to win the election and pave the way for his premiership. To prevent Walker’s resignation, he had no choice but to surrender; he also promised to visit the military. Over the following two years, Walker regularly sent Brown invitations; none was ever accepted.
Walker did not trust Brown’s concessions. To underline that his ultimatum was still in place, McLean called Jonathan Powell. General Walker, he said, would not stand on a rostrum with Hoon at the parade the following Wednesday unless the government agreed to provide
an additional £1.9 billion over the following three years. On a Sunday afternoon, Hoon sat in his office holding one telephone receiver connected to Blair to one ear, while listening to Brown shouting his refusal to reduce the cuts into the other. ‘Blair’, said Hoon afterwards, ‘had lost control over the government’s spending.’
So it fell to Hoon to repeat to Brown the political consequences of Walker leaving. Early that evening, McLean was told that Brown had ordered, ‘Get that fucking bearded admiral here now.’ McLean aborted a visit to the theatre and drove to the Treasury. By the end of the evening, Brown had agreed to hand over some real money and, by ‘some financial tricks’, had conjured up other funds. Late the following night, with the chancellor threatened by the chiefs’ resignations, a settlement was finalised in a conference call between Brown, Hoon and Tebbit, who was driving back from a weekend in Buckinghamshire. Just minutes before the printer’s deadline for producing the Budget statement, Brown bad-temperedly agreed to extra money, although it fell woefully short of what was needed.
The Budget speech on 17 March was hailed as a triumph for the chancellor. That evening, Brown again demanded Blair’s resignation, threatening that otherwise he would, as Powell noted, ‘bring down the government immediately after the next election’. Campbell advised Blair to go, while Peter Mandelson said he should stay, although he would write, ‘I wasn’t sure that Tony had the spirit to fight on.’ To scotch a coup, Blair told Brown he would announce his departure immediately: he would go in the autumn. Brown feared that would allow sufficient time for a rival for the leadership to emerge and urged Blair to delay his announcement.
Brown’s worries momentarily became a sideshow. On 28 April, photographs appeared in the press of American soldiers humiliating Iraqis in Abu Ghraib prison. Simultaneously, the first accounts emerged of the CIA transporting suspected Islamic terrorists through Britain to Poland and other countries, where information was being extracted under torture. Despite the conclusive evidence of the flights landing
in Britain, Blair and Straw denied any knowledge of such ‘secret renditions’. Official documents would challenge their denials.
Torture, terrorism and violent massacres in Iraq, and no WMDs: Blair badly needed to reassert his authority. His solution was his meeting in the Libyan desert with Colonel Gaddafi in March 2004. Not everyone was convinced about the distinction between Gaddafi, Saddam and Osama bin Laden, but Blair felt triumphant. Nevertheless, still insecure and preparing for his resignation, he agreed that a friend of Cherie should look for a house for them in London. Angry with himself even now for having sold his Islington home for a mere £615,000 in 1997, he would buy a house near Marble Arch for £3.65 million, financed almost entirely by a mortgage. For the prime minister to be indebted to a bank was a conflict of interest, but the impropriety was never raised by Turnbull. It was at this point that Blair again told Brown he would ‘probably’ not fight a third election.
Blair was not sleeping and was suffering from an irregular heartbeat that required a minor operation. Stripped of his make-up, he looked haggard, with greying hair and falling weight. His children were also suffering, and a crisis involving his daughter was concealed by the media. Those who believed Iain Duncan Smith had been unwise to criticise Blair’s exposure of his children to the spotlight in 2002 – ‘I think Tony Blair uses his children ruthlessly,’ he had said, ‘I think it is wrong’ – reconsidered their opinion.
In the tumult, Cherie reinforced her husband’s survival gene. At the end of April, Blair told some Cabinet ministers that he intended to serve a full third term. Then he said the opposite. ‘I am not seeing Tony give way to that man,’ Cherie countered. ‘I will stop him moving in here with everything I’ve got.’ At her behest, on 11 May, over dinner at Wiltons, the fish restaurant in St James’s, Michael Levy urged Blair not to resign. Four days later, his pleas appeared to have been rejected when John Prescott, in his clumsy manner, volunteered that ‘the plates are shifting’ – meaning that Blair was resigning.
With so many trusted loyalists gone, Blair’s remaining supporters
were beset by fatigue, disillusion and distrust. ‘He’s in a fight for his political life,’ commented David Blunkett. But, at the end of May, Blair bowed to Cherie’s exhortations and decided to fight on. Curiously, in September, Cherie would tell
Richard & Judy
, while promoting her book on television, ‘There never was a moment when he was going to resign. I can assure you if he had done, I would have known.’ Many witnesses, including Levy, were surprised by her assertion but understood the reasons for it.
The omens seemed good. The local and European elections in early June were bad for Labour but not good enough for Michael Howard to be confident of victory. In the election year, Brown would bribe the electors. The Tories, Blair knew, could not overturn the 2001 landslide unless the middle class preferred Howard to himself. For many reasons, including Howard’s recent support for the Iraq invasion and his own declaration of war against Islamic terror, that was unlikely. Despite all the horrors, there was hope for a third term. And then another Iraqi time bomb ignited.
On 24 June, six British military policemen were murdered by a mob in Basra. Their deaths ended the army’s ‘light touch’ policing. This was the moment for Blair to reconsider the 1998 strategic defence review. The shortage of money had denied the army a range of essentials, including cooks, communications equipment, hospitals and bombproof vehicles. If informed advisers had been allowed access to Blair, he would have been persuaded to commission a new review and abandon the construction of two aircraft carriers. But his military leaders were squabbling.
The mutual dislike between the chiefs was professional and personal. Air Marshal Jock Stirrup’s RAF had been criticised for missing most of its targets during the Iraq war; Admiral Alan West was being pilloried for letting no one get between himself and his mirror; while General Walker, himself characterised by another chief as ‘a plodding infantryman’, disliked General Jackson, the chief of the army. And Tebbit was disliked by Blair for his continual demands for more money.
Aggravating their distrust was Powell, proudly preventing them access to his master.
Among the excluded was Admiral West. After three and a half years as head of the navy and marines, he had never been invited to Downing Street. ‘If I’d been a member of a pop group, I would have been invited to Downing Street,’ he said, stung by Blair’s refusal to engage with him as an individual. However, he eventually found himself invited there by Cherie. His misgivings were resolved when she explained that she wanted to launch a ship. Twelve Type 45 destroyers had been commissioned in 1998. West knew that the government wanted to cut the number to eight, so he wrote to Downing Street that Cherie had been nominated to launch the twelfth ship. The destroyer was not built.
Blair’s detachment screened him from the confused chain of command that was debilitating the military. ‘There’s a fifth wheel on the car,’ complained an admiral to Walker. Effectively, the three chiefs, their headquarters staff and senior officials at the MoD were excluded from directly influencing any operation, including Iraq. The responsibility for wars was assigned to the head of Northwood (the headquarters for military operations), reporting to Walker. As the chief of the defence staff, Walker had no obligation to consult the heads of the three services. Blair was uninterested in both that institutional muddle and another deficiency among Britain’s military: compared to the American army, the intellect of British officers was unimpressive. One crippling consequence of that was the army’s blind trust that operations in Iraq would be identical to their policing of Ulster. That error could have been identified had Blair met officers other than Walker and had he also realised the necessity of a robust government machine to direct the military. Accordingly, he seemed to be unconcerned that General Jackson, the army’s chief, had no direct control over the commanding officers posted to Iraq on six-month tours. Before leaving, none of those men was adequately briefed about the growing insurgency, and none was exposed to Arabists outside Northwood. None of the senior officers in Northwood had studied Iraq’s history, nor did they
speak the local languages. That casual approach was mocked by the American commanders in Iraq. Without exception, they were higher ranked and better educated than their British counterparts, and each decision made in Baghdad was subject to approval from headquarters in America. By comparison, communications between Northwood and Basra were slipshod.
The British suffered another weakness. Like Jackson, the commanding officers dispatched to Basra were fixated on drawing from their experiences in Ulster. None had fought in a foreign country or killed an enemy in battle. The army’s inexperience would have been less onerous had Blair not decided to increase Britain’s military obligations.
Blair arrived at the G8 summit at Sea Island on the American east coast on 6 June, dismissive of the criticism that he was blindly supporting Bush’s policies without having any influence on their outcome. Over the previous weeks, the MoD had briefed journalists that the army would stay in Iraq ‘for however long it takes’, but then briefed them about plans for a ‘speedy exit’ under the banner ‘Mission Accomplished’. The contradiction reflected the decisions being handed down from No. 10.
Blair’s response to American criticism was an agreement to send 3,000 more soldiers to Iraq. On his return, he consulted Walker, who told him that the army’s plight had worsened. He doubted that he could send the additional troops and he had been ‘shocked’ by the technology developed by the Iraqi militias to make bombs: ‘They had taken six months compared to the IRA needing thirty years.’ As the violence escalated, more British soldiers had been killed. Facing an unknown future in Iraq and the certainty of reductions in the defence budget, Walker reckoned that the British army had ‘reached a fork in the road’. The troops were unable to maintain security and were fighting to survive. They were on borrowed time, he told Blair, so the best policy was to cut and run. ‘That was the plan at the beginning,’ Walker said. ‘But now …?’
Blair was obdurate. Regardless of money and men, he intended to stay in Iraq at least until the end of 2005. The extra soldiers did not
materialise, yet three weeks later he announced another commitment. Despite the public’s disenchantment with war, out of the blue he pledged to increase Britain’s forces in Afghanistan.
Over the previous two years, NATO’s involvement there had become diffuse. After the defeat of the Taliban in November 2001, American special forces had continued their search for Osama bin Laden in the Tora Bora mountains. Shrewdly, Washington had followed the advice of the hawkish Paul Wolfowitz. ‘One of the lessons of history’, he said, ‘is if you go in, don’t stay too long because they don’t tend to like foreigners.’ Separately, in the remainder of Afghanistan, some NATO countries, including Britain, had deployed Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) to suppress the narcotics trade. Playing on Blair’s antagonism towards Afghanistan’s heroin traffic, George Robertson, the NATO secretary general, had urged him in front of Jackson to ‘do better in Afghanistan and put a footprint across the whole country’. Otherwise, said Robertson, NATO’s reputation was in danger because so little was being achieved. His enthusiasm for NATO to run the war in Afghanistan involved the dispatch of more PRTs to build a prosperous modern state. Europe’s division from America, Robertson told Blair, could be bridged if Britain played the honest broker and increased its participation.
Robertson’s proposal was not perfunctory. Some 2,400 soldiers, mostly British, were attached to NATO’s rapid reaction force. The symbolic group had been unemployed and marooned in Germany since 1999. Moving the Allied Rapid Reaction Corps (ARRC), the British army’s jewel, as well as NATO’s mobile headquarters to Afghanistan with the aim of strengthening the International Security Assistance Force satisfied Robertson’s ambition and would please President Bush. The British army was also keen.
To reinforce the army’s status in Downing Street, the generals promoted the deployment of the ARRC as an invaluable opportunity to place a British three-star general alongside the Americans, and to restore relations damaged in post-war Iraq. The proposal had not been
properly debated within the MoD and Foreign Office by the time that Blair arrived in Istanbul in June 2004 for a summit of NATO leaders. Nor had those around the sofa in Downing Street bothered to consult Whitehall’s traditional channels regarding Blair’s decision to shift the focus of Britain’s army away from Iraq’s rich oil fields and the commercial opportunities around Basra and into the hostile Afghan mountains. Blair’s explanation mentioned only providing the headquarters staff to stabilise Afghanistan and ‘finish the job’. He seemed driven by instinct rather than informed argument to satisfy Robertson.