Broken Vows (46 page)

Tebbit was ‘angry that Blair made the commitment’. His complaint about the deployment to a two-star female officer was rebutted. ‘It’s our turn,’ she replied. Tebbit urged Hoon to challenge Blair, but the politician was reluctant. Walker joined in. ‘If you’re not happy,’ he told Hoon, ‘we must say no.’

Shortly after Blair returned to London, he summoned Hoon, Walker and General Rob Fry, the deputy chief based in Northwood. ‘I want to go to Afghanistan,’ he announced.

‘It seemed to just come off his head,’ observed Fry.

‘The chiefs say it’s overstretch,’ Hoon told Blair.

‘We’re doing it,’ insisted Blair, without asking for more information.

‘Yes, Prime Minister,’ said Walker, loyally.

A third election victory depended more than ever on restoring the trust of the aspiring working and middle classes. Blair could rely on John Reid to soothe concerns about the NHS, but Charles Clarke at education was truculent – he was even, to Blair’s dismay, sympathetic towards Mike Tomlinson’s recommendation that A-levels should be replaced.

Tomlinson, the former chief of Ofsted, had been appointed to investigate the fiasco of inflated A-level grades and examinations for fourteen-to nineteen-year-olds. His radical proposal was encouraged by David Miliband, a junior education minister. Like Clarke, Miliband believed that Blair could be persuaded to replace A-levels, education’s so-called gold standard. Both were wrong. In Blair’s opinion, their abolition would inflame the middle class’s growing distrust over education standards and lose votes. To avoid a high-noon confrontation, Blair listened patiently to Clarke’s argument in favour of Tomlinson’s recommendations while he considered a bloodless solution.

The problems were accumulating. Just at that point, David Normington, the education department’s permanent secretary, told Blair that the government would miss its target of 85 per cent of eleven-year-olds reaching the required standards for English and maths by 2007. About 30 per cent of children would still enter secondary school either innumerate or illiterate. Even the Labour-dominated Commons Education Committee chaired by Barry Sheerman, an independently minded Labour MP, reported that there was ‘no measurable improvement in
standards’, despite all the extra billions of pounds spent since 1997. ‘Links between expenditure and outcome’, added the report, ‘remain difficult to establish.’

An Ofsted document made even more discomfiting reading. Blaming bad teachers, David Bell, the chief inspector of schools, declared that almost half of all boys and a third of girls were leaving primary school unable to write properly. After eight years of Labour government, illiteracy was increasing.

Looking for explanations, many criticised the emphasis on targets and the accompanying exams for tarnishing standards. Ever since the spike in 2001, Michael Barber’s graphs had plateaued. His Delivery Unit had exaggerated expectations. Although 21,700 more teachers had been employed since 2001, only 8,700 were qualified. The rest were trainees or unqualified assistants.

Blair did not recognise these flaws. Ignoring the statistics, he would write in 2010 that England’s ‘ten-year-old pupils were ranked third best in the world in literacy and the fastest improving in numeracy, with three-quarters of eleven-year-olds reaching high standards in reading, writing and maths’. Similar distortions kept the public’s faith in Labour’s education policies, until Tomlinson’s report, which up till that point had remained private, was published. For several weeks, Blair hoped forlornly that Clarke would swing against Tomlinson’s recommendation. Then a crisis offered a respite.

On 15 December 2004, David Blunkett resigned after compelling proof was produced that the award of a visa for the nanny of his one-year-old son had been accelerated by his staff. Surprisingly, the investigation found no proof that Blunkett had personally ordered the favoured treatment, while the minister himself denied knowing that the application for the visa was in his briefcase. Blair’s prediction that Blunkett would be exonerated following what he had hoped would be a feather-light investigation had been proved wrong.

In the midst of another bout of ‘Labour sleaze’ and theatrical media exaggerations about Gordon Brown’s latest bid to snatch the
premiership, Clarke was summoned to Downing Street and told that he would move to the Home Office.

‘Who is going to replace me?’ he asked.

‘Ruth,’ replied Blair.

‘That’s a shocking appointment,’ said Clarke. ‘I can’t believe it.’ He doubted whether Ruth Kelly could lead any department, especially education.

Blair remained silent. The appointment, he knew, would dismay educationalists. Plucked from obscurity in the Treasury, where she had been ignored by Brown, the fourth secretary of state for education in four years had no administrative experience and enjoyed no political support. Like most new ministers under Blair, Kelly, a former journalist and employee at the Bank of England, was redundant even before her appointment and arrived at the department without an education philosophy or an agenda. However, there were, Blair believed, some advantages to promoting her that would help dispel the newspaper headlines deriding his government’s ‘soap operas’, ‘clowns’, ‘piggly-wigglies’ and ‘fairies’: placing a thirty-six-year-old mother of four young children in the Cabinet before an election was helpful; and she would also obey Blair’s orders to reject Tomlinson’s report.

The new home secretary received a single instruction from Blair: ‘Don’t mention immigration, but sort it out before the election.’ Clarke understood the reason: ‘We feared it would dominate the election.’ Michael Howard was scoring points by accusing Blair of ‘pussyfooting’ and ‘sweeping immigration under the carpet’. Immigrants, maintained Blair, should continue to enter Britain according to a managed scheme, but bogus asylum-seekers were ‘a real problem’ that provided ‘the Tories one good issue to beat us with’. He offered no new solutions.

Clarke was unimpressed by his inheritance. ‘Blunkett left an enormous mess,’ he said.

‘It was a mess,’ Blunkett agreed, acknowledging the complaint.

Clarke also blamed Jack Straw, noting that ‘We had created a completely incoherent system.’ He considered Bill Jeffrey to be complacent
and ‘no good’, and after a few weeks demanded the departure of John Gieve, the permanent secretary, whom he blamed for taking too long to find a replacement for Jeffrey.

‘Don’t rock the boat,’ cautioned Blair after hearing Clarke’s proposals.

‘There’s no alternative,’ replied his new minister. ‘It will take five years to sort it out. So you must show your confidence in me and let me do it.’

Blair agreed unenthusiastically.

His leader’s delinquency, thought Clarke, was his lack of interest in finding the right people for the job, be they civil servants or politicians. His strength was to resist agonising about the past. Self-criticism was rare. Although Labour had caused the migrant problem, Blair asserted his customary self-righteousness. ‘Let’s move on,’ he told Clarke. ‘Don’t dwell on the causes. Forget it. Just look at how we can solve the problem.’

The familiar solution was a White Paper followed by new legislation. After five weeks’ intensive consultation, Clarke proposed that Britain should introduce a points system that would guarantee ‘better control than before’. Blair agreed but had no intention of closing Britain’s doors. His mistake, he realised, had been to categorise his critics as prejudiced. He had even challenged Trevor Kavanagh, the
Sun
’s political editor, for questioning his record on immigration. ‘Are you serious, Trevor?’ asked Blair, forcing the journalist to deny that he was racist.

To regain credibility, Blair spoke about a new five-year plan. The deportation of bogus migrants, he pledged, would soon outnumber the approval of new applications. Making promises was easy but depended on civil servants. Clarke’s dismal report about his Home Office officials reflected similar complaints by ministers about the departments of education and health. Eight years after he confronted Robin Butler, Blair still cursed the government machine. ‘Changing a country was a whole lot harder than changing a party,’ he wrote.

Switching from central control of schools and hospitals to devolving Whitehall’s power was taking longer than he anticipated. Part of the problem was his lukewarm commitment to choice and competition; as the American hustler Mel Weinberg memorably said, ‘Before you sell a
deal you have to live the deal. You have to believe in it, because, if you don’t believe in it, you can’t sell it.’ Another difficulty was his judgement about markets. Typical was his continuing faith in the energy market.

‘Do you want to move to nuclear?’ Mike O’Brien asked him during a chance encounter in the Commons lobby in 2004.

‘What do you think?’ Blair asked his fourth energy minister.

‘I’m worried about an energy gap coming up,’ explained O’Brien, ‘which we will need nuclear to bridge. The problem is the very high cost of development.’

Blair moved on, leaving O’Brien puzzled. Blair had not revealed to him the reason for his indecision – an argument with Brown over whether to trust the market or impose new regulations. The confusion was compounded by the diverse characters contributing to the debate. Joan MacNaughton, the DTI’s director of energy, had prepared a briefing paper in favour of nuclear energy. That was Britain’s safest option, she wrote. After twenty years of self-sufficiency, the country had become a net importer of energy. Patricia Hewitt, relying on the assurances of Vicky Pryce, a newly recruited DTI economist opposed to nuclear energy, recited to Blair that the market was working. Low prices, both women chanted, would continue. ‘Mysteriously, Pryce has become a force in the land,’ commented Geoff Norris, Blair’s energy adviser.

‘The markets are not working in the consumers’ interest,’ O’Brien told Pryce.

‘Yes, they are, because prices are coming down,’ replied Pryce, pointing out that the cost of electricity had fallen to a new low.

‘They’ll go up soon,’ replied O’Brien. In 2005, they would indeed begin to rise, and would nearly double by 2010.

Since there was no Cabinet energy committee to resolve the disagreement, Blair invited Hewitt and O’Brien ‘for a chat in his office’.

‘How are we planning to cope with the long-term problem of capacity?’ asked Norris. ‘The market has failed to encourage new investment. They’ve built no new generators.’

Hewitt repeated that the market would prevent an energy blackout.
Blair made no contribution. He voiced no concern over the fact that the regulator had allowed foreign state-owned corporations to merge Britain’s independent power companies into six Goliaths, nor did he reveal that Brown had rejected his plea that only nuclear energy could guarantee Britain’s supplies. The chancellor had cited the cost of disposing of the waste as his reason for opposing nuclear power.

Labour’s manifesto for the 2005 election concealed the problems. ‘We have reformed our energy markets’, it stated, ‘to make them open and competitive. We are a leading force in the campaign to make Europe’s energy markets the same.’

Procrastination was making matters worse in other industries too. Just as he had postponed resolving Britain’s energy needs, Blair had dawdled over the growing crisis at the Rover factory in Longbridge. The unprofitable company had been sold by BMW in 2000 to four businessmen, the self-styled ‘Phoenix Four’, for just £10. To rid themselves of all legal obligations, BMW had also given the Phoenix Four a longterm loan of £427 million. During 2004, Hewitt knew that Rover was running out of money. Six thousand five hundred jobs would be at risk in an election year. The only beneficiaries were the Phoenix Four, who had personally pocketed £42 million.

Once again, Blair first heard about the seriousness of the problem while passing Mike O’Brien in the Commons lobby.

‘Give me more information,’ said Blair, and walked on.

Obeying Blair's order, General Rob Fry was drafting the plan to reinforce the army in Afghanistan, but the 3,000 new troops would be dispatched with a fuzzy objective. Blair was committed to nation-building, while America was still bombing terrorists in the mountains. Once again, no Cabinet committee (embracing the key departments and the intelligence agencies) was convened to propound the purpose of the mission. Blair preferred to have Fry define his objective and describe the pathway to success.

Instead of questioning his brief, Fry snatched the blank cheque. Unlike most of his peers, he was educated in history and military strategy. He believed there was a convincing case that the allies should have either left Afghanistan for good in 2003 or stayed to destroy the Taliban. He now relished the opportunity to plan the return. His error, shared by Blair, was to ignore the growing chaos around Basra. One consequence of Whitehall's dysfunction was the prime minister's miscalculation that the same handful of ill-equipped soldiers could be relocated from Iraq to ‘build the peace' in the Afghan mountains.

In normal circumstances, Blair would have had good reason to be nervous. Robin Butler was completing his report into the intelligence surrounding WMDs and he had naturally focused on the first dossier. Blair's fears were assuaged by Ann Taylor's regular discussions with David Omand in Downing Street. On Blair's behalf, she demanded amendments and exclusions. In particular, she opposed any direct criticism of the prime minister. John Chilcot, an undistinguished
former civil servant and the member of the committee described as ‘the prisoner's friend' for appearing to help Blair, negotiated the compromises with Omand. ‘Omand dug Blair out of a hole,' noted Andrew Turnbull.

Omand judged that his task was to prevent any named person being blamed for the intelligence failure. The most obvious culprits were Richard Dearlove and John Scarlett. ‘The intelligence community', he recalled, ‘had suffered a severe blow by being proved to be wrong. We didn't want scapegoating of an individual. The collapse of the system was the real cause. The blame was the underlying failure of statecraft.' In his opinion, Blair was responsible.

The final negotiations between Taylor and Chilcot required a mandarin's compromise: either Dearlove and Scarlett would be damned outright for their errors or their culpability would be minimised as a sin of exaggeration.

The previous year, Dearlove had told Taylor's Intelligence and Security Committee that the intelligence reports stating that weapons carrying WMDs could be ready for firing within forty-five minutes were ‘reliable'. MI6, he had said, had based its prized intelligence on three human sources. By the time Butler considered MI6's reports, the agency was admitting that all three were worthless. Some MI6 officers blamed the mistake of believing the bogus reports on a corrupted processing system within MI6, but Dearlove denied this.

After sifting through all the intelligence files, Butler could have judged that Dearlove's and Scarlett's mismanagement amounted to misconduct. Instead, his committee mildly reprimanded the two chiefs for issuing ‘less assured' judgements and ‘estimates' that became the ‘prevailing wisdom', despite the absence of evidence. ‘The dossier,' Butler wrote, by ‘inferring the existence of banned weapons … went to (although not beyond) the outer limits of the intelligence available.' His most damning judgement was that ‘More weight was placed on the intelligence than it could bear.' To seal the compromise, he criticised Scarlett for co-operating with Alastair Campbell, but accepted
his excuse that he was simply obeying Blair's orders. He also endorsed Scarlett's self-congratulation for resisting Campbell's pressure to embellish his report.

Scarlett's lifebelt was his original description of the reports as ‘sporadic and patchy'. He blamed his abandonment of caution on the new intelligence report disclosed to Blair by Dearlove in Downing Street on 11 September 2002. He switched the ultimate responsibility for the misinformation onto Blair, who, after all, had asserted in Parliament that the intelligence on WMDs was ‘extensive, detailed and authoritative'. In his own testimony to the committee, the prime minister explained with charm and apparent candour that the contradictions were mere detail. He was justified in omitting the caveats because Scarlett sincerely believed that Saddam did possess WMDs. The dossier, said Blair, was an instrument of persuasion that merely provided information, and was not intended to make the case for war.

Butler did not pursue his witness forensically. He did not ask why, immediately after the dossier's publication, Blair had told Admiral Mike Boyce to plan for war. Rather, in response to Taylor's influence, he gave Blair the benefit of the doubt when he claimed that the dossier was not remotely connected with making the case for war. Recalling from his own experience how little the prime minister read, Butler also did not ask whether he had actually studied Scarlett's report. ‘That would have been too insulting,' he would say. Instead of openly criticising Blair's distortions, he blamed him only for ‘over-salesmanship' and ‘sofa' government.

Dearlove could not make the same excuses as Blair and Scarlett. MI6's credibility was shredded. Yet even with him Butler's rebukes were mild. Dearlove was taken to task for allowing budget cuts to undermine the scrutiny of intelligence, but neither he nor Blair was criticised for forging unusually close relations. Those tepid words satisfied Taylor. Finally, at the insistence of other members of the panel, Butler agreed to express his ‘high regard' for Scarlett's abilities and emphasised that he should remain MI6 chief, since he should ‘not bear personal responsibility' for the flawed dossier.

Later, Butler looked at the transcript of Blair's interviews again. The prime minister's charm, he realised, had concealed how insubstantial his replies had been. ‘Perhaps we were too polite,' Butler would later say. ‘I'm a trusting fellow.' As a final concession to Downing Street, he also inserted into the report, ‘We conclude that it would be a rash person who asserted at this stage' that WMDs and missiles ‘will never be found'. This was seventeen months after the war. The civil servant's timidity, which Blair so disliked, was in this instance his protection.

President Bush did not enjoy that advantage. On 9 July, the US Senate Intelligence Committee published a similar report on the failure of the CIA. The agency was accused of overstating the threat of WMDs, relying on dubious sources and ignoring dissenting opinions. ‘The biggest intelligence failure in our nation's history,' judged Senator Jay Rockefeller. To avoid the congressional missile, George Tenet, the CIA's director, had quickly resigned.

Five days later, Butler's report was published. Like Hutton's and Taylor's reports, his conclusions reinforced Blair's defiance of his critics. ‘We found no evidence to question the prime minister's good faith,' wrote Butler. To assuage his own misgivings, he hoped that the media would draw damning verdicts by carefully reading the facts rather than the particular judgements. The report's annex compared the cautionary language in key passages of the JIC's original briefings with the modified version published in the dossier. In those pages, the reader would see the evidence of Scarlett acting under pressure to ‘sex up' the dossier. Only by ploughing through the report to paragraph 458 and, more importantly, what followed would the diligent reader finally grasp the full chicanery that Butler was bursting to publicise. Butler anticipated that he would be asked at the press conference whether Blair should resign. He expected his intended reply to be explosive: ‘That question is not for us, but for Parliament and the people.' The question was not asked and, to his regret, he was unable to cast doubt on Blair in public. The media's listless reaction to the report disappointed him.

In the subsequent Commons debate, Blair used the report as both
sword and shield. ‘No one lied,' he said. ‘No one made up the intelligence. No one inserted things into the dossier against the advice of the intelligence services.' He admitted that Iraq did not have WMDs but, having ‘searched my conscience', he said, ‘I cannot honestly say getting rid of Saddam was a mistake'.

Once again, Michael Howard resisted exposing his rival's inaccuracies. He did not highlight the proof of Scarlett acting under pressure to ‘sex up' the dossier. When he was asked by Patrick Cormack, a Tory MP, whether those who voted in favour of war had been deceived, instead of replying ‘Yes' he fudged. Blair was safe.

Eleven weeks later, Howard regretted his uncharacteristic timidity. Tony Blair, he told the
New Statesman
, had ‘lied' over Iraq. He would later accuse Blair on television of lying to Parliament about Lord Goldsmith's changing opinions.

Butler also abandoned his reticence. On 22 February 2007, the retired official told the House of Lords that Blair had been ‘disingenuous' about WMDs in the first dossier by omitting the JIC's doubts. But it was too little, too late. Blair would gloss over the contradictions and accusations. To have failed to join America in Iraq, he would write, would have ‘done major long-term damage to that relationship'. WMDs, he explained, were not the overriding issue: ‘In the final analysis, I would be with the US because in my view it was right, morally and strategically.' Unburdened by curiosity, he displayed no spiritual struggle with Christian ideas of guilt, atonement or deception. Although he had solemnly apologised in Parliament for British heartlessness during the Irish potato famine that started in 1845 and expressed ‘personal deep sorrow' for the slave trade, he would never apologise for the Iraq war.

The day after the publication of Butler's report, Labour lost a by-election in Leicester to the Lib Dems but retained a seat against the Tories in Birmingham. The polls again suggested that Howard would be unable to win the following year's general election. Blair was re-energised. Determined finally to forge his legacy, he snubbed Brown and encouraged Trevor Kavanagh to report in the
Sun
, in an article
headlined ‘Blair's Shock Blow for Brown', that he intended to fight the next election and serve a full and final five years as prime minister. After that he departed for his summer holidays, once again enjoying the hospitality of the rich, first at Cliff Richard's villa in Barbados, then at the Strozzis' estate in Tuscany and finally at Silvio Berlusconi's estate in Sardinia, which would become infamous for the owner's ‘bunga bunga' parties with underaged prostitutes.

Soon after Blair's return from Italy, Rob Fry submitted his twenty-page report to General Walker and the chiefs, presenting the reasons why the military should strengthen its commitment in Afghanistan. The deployment, Fry foreshadowed, would be a bigger commitment than Blair's decision in Istanbul to dispatch the ARRC, the NATO headquarters staffed by British soldiers, to the country. Any reservations among the chiefs was silenced by the knowledge that Blair was already committed to Afghanistan, so Fry was told to develop the plan, even though he had never commanded a mission of the size he was writing about, nor did he have any familiarity with the country.

In January 2005, Mike Jackson decided that he should see at first hand how the NATO operation in Afghanistan could be revived. On his return, he told Fry, General Richard Dannatt, his successor as chief of the army, and others at Northwood that he was confident that the deployment could be executed without much danger. Moreover, he added, the engagement would be worthwhile because the Taliban were enjoying ‘a free run'.

Smarting from their experience in Iraq, the generals discussed what the army could do, and those discussions continued informally between Jackson and the two other chiefs, West and Stirrup, and then with Walker. The two generals agreed that any involvement would be low risk, while Stirrup and West opposed the commitment. Nevertheless, the chiefs agreed that a British force would be dispatched to Kandahar in south Afghanistan the following autumn to satisfy Blair's orders for ‘reconstruction and development', with the secondary aim of combating terrorism and destroying the local narcotics trade. Altogether that
matched Britain's destiny as a ‘force for good'. ‘I didn't realise it was a hornets' nest,' Jackson would later say.

As Fry developed the plan in early 2005, he missed one contradiction: how could British soldiers committed to nation-building win the hearts and minds of the Afghan tribesmen if the opium crops – by far and away the main source of their income – were to be destroyed? Fry did, however, understand that Washington's attention was focused on Iraq and not Afghanistan, though he was unsure whether Blair was aware of that fault line.

Iraq, Blair knew, was becoming a war without a foreseeable end. He summoned Geoff Hoon and Walker. ‘Tell me how to fix this,' he said to the general. ‘What does the military need?'

Like Blair, Walker did not understand the complexities of the uprising in Iraq, and his presentation was reassuring. At the end of a series of platitudes, he declared, in the military's can-do tone, ‘We'll get through this.' Blair thanked the general. Only with hindsight did Walker recognise the prime minister's unwillingness to devote time to understanding the army's predicament: a lack of men, equipment, intelligence and money. Even more corrosive was Blair's objective in Afghanistan – ‘reconstruction and development' – a mirror of the army's woolly ‘goal' in Iraq.

Sensitive to Blair's disillusionment about events in Iraq, the informal conversations around the water coolers in Northwood focused on the honourable circumstances in which Britain could leave. ‘We're on a hammering to nothing,' the generals agreed. Those speaking to Jackson on his return from another tour in Iraq were struck by his pessimism: ‘We're not doing any good. Our reputation is suffering. We have released forces we cannot control. I think there's the possibility of strategic failure.'