Broken Vows (5 page)

Dobson was not a member of the inner clique but he stood in the vanguard. Embraced by Blair as a signal of reassurance to the trade unions and to the NHS staff that they had Labour’s support, Dobson could silence fractious nurses. ‘I’m the heart and soul of the NHS,’ he told one of their conferences, ‘so trust me. The NHS is the envy of the world.’ He never reflected that no other country had adopted the British model, not least because it made no sense to manage the health of nearly 60 million people from Whitehall. ‘The NHS is a secret garden,’ Dobson told his officials. ‘It moves like a giant ocean tanker. It only becomes political when it goes wrong.’

The first tremors of trouble, from either garden or tanker, were felt one week after the election. ‘The NHS is running on empty,’ Hart told Dobson. Treasury officials had not replied to any of Hart’s previous warnings. In the months before the election, Gordon Brown had expressly forbidden any additional spending on the NHS because the economy he was inheriting, he said, was in crisis. He spoke about ‘sticking to Tory spending plans’ but intended to spend 0.6 per cent less on the NHS than the Tories, while increasing taxes. In truth, as Hart knew, the economy was growing, with a low debt of 37.6 per cent of GDP.

‘There will be a winter crisis,’ Langlands told Dobson. Waiting times would grow unless more staff were hired.

‘No, there won’t,’ replied Dobson. ‘We’re in charge now and it won’t happen.’

‘It will unless we get more money.’

Dobson was obdurate, so Langlands passed his warning on to Blair,
who in turn protested to Brown. ‘It’s all very difficult,’ replied his chancellor in what would become a familiar routine. ‘We’re not going to solve this today.’

Blair persisted. More money and improving morale thanks to Labour, he said, would solve all the problems.

In early July, Dobson was telephoned by a Treasury official. ‘The chancellor would like to see you, but come alone,’ he was told. One hour later, Dobson returned and summoned Hart. ‘Gordon wants to give us a lot of money,’ he announced.

‘How much?’

‘One billion quid.’

‘How did he arrive at that?’

‘It wasn’t explained.’

‘It can’t be a final settlement,’ said Hart. ‘We need discussions and a plan. When can we talk about it?’

‘He said there could be no discussion. Take it or leave it by 10 p.m.’

Dobson was clearly in awe of Brown and the insiders around Blair. Hart said nothing. Brown was reverting to the old ways of throwing money at a problem rather than attempting to understand it. In particular, he had not understood that the publication of waiting lists had been invented by the Tories to shame bad NHS managers, but then the hospitals with the longest lists received government money. Paying hospitals to reduce such lists had been condemned for rewarding the worst. Brown ignored that discovery. Dobson said nothing further, took the money and distributed it to hospitals around the country.

Two months later, newspapers reported an increase in premature deaths, cancelled operations and what they called ‘Third World hospital wards’. The NHS was still short of money. Blair was angry. Brown agreed to a further infusion of cash but insisted that he should broadcast the announcement to demonstrate his control over the economy. If Blair refused, he said, no more money would be released. Blair protested again, saying the NHS was being sabotaged, but he didn’t dare overrule his chancellor. Their argument raged for two months, while
the size of the waiting lists rose until they were 14 per cent higher than in 1996. It was impossible for Brown to sit on his hands any longer.

‘Go and see Gordon,’ Dobson told Langlands in early December. ‘I’ve been told that I’m not required.’ Brown’s attitude towards his colleagues, many were discovering, was peculiar.

Langlands made his way to the chancellor’s office. After reminiscing that Brown’s father, the minister of Kirkcaldy’s largest church, had married Langlands’s parents, the two engaged in a bitter argument. ‘Give me the answers to these nine questions tomorrow,’ snapped Brown, ending their dispute by handing over a list drawn up by his department.

The following day, Langlands returned with the required sheet of responses. ‘I can’t give these to the chancellor,’ a Treasury civil servant told him. ‘It’s too hard-hitting. You cannot talk to the chancellor like this.’ The stand-off was resolved by Brown agreeing to pledge more money, but without a public announcement.

Blair did not ask Dobson how waiting lists would be reduced, he just willed him to do so. By then, Dobson had discovered that the number of available hospital beds had, as part of a deliberate policy, declined since 1948 from 480,000 to 190,000. He rejected the advice that modern medicine did not require them. To prove that the NHS was once again safe under Labour, he ordered an immediate increase to 246,000. Blair did not ask how such an increase matched New Labour’s agenda. Millions were spent on extra beds, money that could have gone towards patient care. Jonathan Powell would be candid about the folly of unrealisable ambitions: ‘We had prepared a hundred-day plan on coming into government but not an overall strategy for what we were trying to achieve.’

This early episode involving the NHS suggested that Blair was ambivalent about the requirements for governing. A telltale sign was the fate of the red box left outside Blair’s flat in Downing Street every night. The case contained important memoranda from across Whitehall that Blair needed to read and annotate to guide civil servants and ministers. Officials recalled that by 7 a.m. Margaret Thatcher had
written comments on every paper in her box. Blair rarely completed even half the work.

Those problems had been anticipated by Robin Butler, who had persuaded Blair to use Alex Allan as his private secretary for three months. To his surprise, Blair discovered Allan’s value, telling Butler at the end of the period, ‘He’s very good. I want to keep him.’

‘Too late,’ replied Butler. ‘He’s going to Australia.’ To his surprise, Blair appeared to have no recollection of their earlier discussion. The official resisted offering a solution. ‘He’s left with Jonathan Powell and the problem,’ he decided.

On the eve of Butler’s retirement, one final task for the loyal civil servant was to guide Blair in the selection of his successor. At Blair’s request, he hosted a dinner at his home for the prime minister, Peter Mandelson and the Lord Chancellor Derry Irvine, who had admitted the young Blair to his chambers to practise at the bar and ever since had been a trusted adviser. Aware of his own inexperience, Blair relied on Mandelson’s and Irvine’s judgements to make the critical appointment. Butler was asked by Blair to debate with Irvine whether the combined post of Cabinet secretary and head of the civil service should be split. In the end, Blair was convinced by Butler’s argument that they should remain together.

A few days later, Blair asked his closest confidants to select what Mandelson would call ‘a reforming Cabinet secretary’. Their choice was Richard Wilson, the permanent secretary at the Home Office. With little thought, Blair directed that the Old Radleian be presented to the press as a moderniser. Powell scoffed. Wilson, he said, was a classic Establishment appointment. ‘Very odd-looking,’ agreed Campbell disparagingly. ‘With huge great ears and a face that didn’t quite map together. He didn’t seem naturally on our wavelength.’

The selection of Wilson revealed Blair’s indifference to the machinery of government. Whoever had been appointed would be excluded from his den, especially by Powell. In Butler’s words, the Cabinet had been quickly reduced to ‘a weekly meeting of political friends’.

Musing later with an official, Blair offered his understanding about the future: ‘Our job is to have the vision. Your job is to carry it out.’

‘It’s not as simple as that,’ replied the official. ‘There’s the money too.’

‘That’s Gordon’s job. I don’t get on with him. We’re like an unhappy marriage. But he’s the details man, and I’m the front man.’

The conversation trailed off.

Blair’s candour revealed both his strengths and his weaknesses. ‘You could take Jonathan away from me,’ he added, ‘but not Alastair.’

Blair acknowledged that he relied on his scriptwriter more than on anyone else. Politicians, it is said, should be judged by their choice of their closest associates.

Unlike Frank Dobson, David Blunkett arrived at his department with a detailed plan. Over the previous two years, the new secretary of state for education had spent many hours with Blair discussing the fate of working-class children. Just after the first Cabinet meeting, Blair invited Blunkett to Downing Street. He arrived with Michael Bichard, the permanent secretary of what Blunkett dismissed as a dysfunctional department focused on administration rather than education.

Blunkett had already clashed with Robin Butler about his senior aides. ‘If you rock the boat too much,’ Blair warned Blunkett, ‘they’ll get you.’

Until Bichard’s appointment in 1995, only one of Blunkett’s officials had taught in a school. ‘Education was the Tories’ biggest failure,’ Blair told Bichard, ‘and education is Labour’s number-one priority.’ To emphasise his commitment, days after the election he stood on the ground floor of the department’s eighth-floor atrium, looking up at hundreds of officials crammed onto balconies. ‘Building a modern society depends on education,’ he exhorted his audience with passion. ‘My job depends on what you’re doing.’ The wild applause was encouraging.

Blunkett was never quite sure what Blair’s ‘modernisation’ meant. He assumed that it involved ridding Britain of the old politics, empowering people to embrace ‘citizenship’ and join the knowledge economy. The fuzziness was intentional. Blairites had banned the word ‘ideology’. In its place, Blunkett acknowledged, ‘Tony didn’t have one set of values to drive across the board.’ Unlike the old socialists, Blair offered a
concoction of intentions rather than a set of principles. Within the first weeks, the absence of a firm ideological base was causing confusion for John Prescott at transport and Harriet Harman at welfare. Both politicians, limited by their intellect and lack of new policies to inspire their departments to produce realistic improvements, were struggling. Jack Cunningham at agriculture was also adrift. He disliked his civil servants, and the sentiment was returned towards a wayward minister ostentatiously enjoying the perks of his office. Education was the exception. Blunkett arrived with a clear route map agreed with Blair and based on a fundamental change from old Labour.

The transformation had begun in the early 1990s, during dinner parties among Blair’s friends in Hackney and Islington. As with so many young parents across Britain, their conversation would return to a familiar topic: the disappointing standard of local state schools. The Blairs knew that using private education could be a fatal handicap for an ambitious Labour politician. Nevertheless, they refused to entrust their children to failing schools. They heaped the blame for their dilemma on Thatcher’s indifference to state resources. John Major had been little better. Since 1995, the education budget had been cut to its lowest level since the mid-1950s and the department was relegated to middle-ranking ministers. The Conservatives, Blair believed, were deliberately undermining state schools in order to champion private education. While only 7 per cent of Britain’s children were privately educated, 20 per cent of university entrants came from private schools, and half of all Oxbridge students were from public schools.

Blair was a beneficiary of that privilege. Fettes, his Scottish private school, and St John’s College in Oxford had provided enviable advantages. By improving state schools, he wanted to remove the social inequalities suffered by children from poor backgrounds. Such children, he argued, deserved the same opportunities as those born to the wealthiest. Realising his ambition, he believed, depended on confronting an educational establishment filled not with Tories but with left-wing academics – Marxist schoolteachers and ideological trade unionists.

The Left’s anger had been particularly roused in 1994 by Chris Woodhead, the head of Ofsted, the regulator established by the Tories to inspect schools and report on their performance. On the basis of his staff’s reports, Woodhead, a leading evangelist for the depoliticisation of education, had denounced 30 per cent of teachers as unsatisfactory. In a headline-capturing declaration, he demanded that no fewer than ‘15,000 incompetent teachers’ should be instantly dismissed, especially the champions of ‘progressive education’. Blair sympathised with the sentiment, although he did not appreciate the history behind the headlines.

After the publication of a report in 1967 by Bridget Plowden, an amateur educationalist, describing primary schooling, Britain’s education system had become an ideological battleground. Masked by a scattering of platitudes about improving schools, Plowden recommended the destruction of traditional education. Children, she wrote, should no longer sit in rows of desks but instead gather in groups around tables to encourage self-learning. She also recommended that the eleven-plus examination, a three-part test (English, maths and intelligence) taken in one day that irrevocably determined a child’s educational fate – either to blossom in a grammar school or be consigned to failure in a secondary modern school – should be abandoned. Grammar schools should be replaced by non-selective comprehensives that mixed children of all standards. With cross-party support, successive Labour and Conservative governments implemented her recommendations.

Within ten years, educationalists had become divided over the consequences of Plowden’s changes. For left-wing academics, schools were ideal locations for engineering the removal of class distinctions. In the Left’s ideology, all children start as equals, regardless of genetics or social background. If parental choice, testing and selection were prevented, middle-class children would beneficially influence those in the classroom whose home life was blighted by crime, drug addiction and deprivation. The Left had also welcomed Harold Wilson’s decision to centralise teacher training in universities. Like-minded academics
could persuade their student teachers to use education for social engineering. Self-learning became the mantra; teachers would no longer be required to guide the learning process. ‘Phonics’ was abolished as a way to teach reading, and traditional basic textbooks were discarded. Instead, children discovered how to read by themselves using books sanitised of unwelcome stereotypes.

By the 1990s, Blair understood the consequences. Amid a notable decline in educational standards, the closure of grammar schools and indiscipline in classrooms, over 30 per cent of children were leaving school illiterate or innumerate. Yet, while aspiring parents became disillusioned with comprehensives, Labour’s support for non-selective schools remained solid.

The dilemma for Blair was whether poor education was the fault of schools and their teachers or whether those on the left of his party were correct to blame poverty and a child’s social background. The ideological battle between the left-wing educational establishment and the Tories centred on whether poverty could be overcome by a school’s culture. Did elitism, excellence and discipline – based on choice and selection in state schools – give deprived children the chance of a good education? Or, as argued by the Left, did choice and selection prevent the majority of disadvantaged children receiving a good education so that a few could benefit at grammar schools?

In 1994, Blair had hesitated about engaging in that battle. Labour’s educational establishment, he knew, denied outright that any schools were failing. ‘There’s no such thing as a bad teacher,’ they proclaimed in unison. They opposed selection at any stage in the educational process and wanted to limit parent power because in both cases the middle class would be favoured. They wanted the middle class to use the ailing schools that the Blairs were resisting for their own children in Islington. Such prejudice excused the Left from questioning why literacy and numeracy were successfully taught in private schools. Blair spoke publicly about the importance of discipline in the classroom but rarely mentioned the curriculum. Amid Tory ridicule that Labour lacked any
education policy, he needed to resolve his dilemma between what he wanted and what he believed, and in particular whether he would challenge Labour’s opposition to Thatcher’s 1988 Education Reform Act.

The Tories had become alarmed by the capture of education since the 1960s by the ‘progressives’, especially in the Institute for Education in London and in the Department for Education in Westminster. The Left’s pursuit of equality, in their opinion, was harming children. The abandonment of traditional teaching methods had effectively consigned the 30 per cent of teenagers who were innumerate or illiterate to lifelong failure. In Thatcher’s opinion, as the demand for manual labour declined, those children would become permanently unemployed.

The 1988 Act imposed on schools a national curriculum with a ‘basic syllabus’ of the ‘Three Rs’ plus testing. The important innovation was the publication of schools’ results in league tables. Their performance would be monitored by Ofsted, a new regulator. With that information, parents were empowered to choose the best schools. Those with poor academic results that failed to attract children would be forced to improve or close.

Six years later, improvement was patchy, with the Tories blaming the educational establishment for sabotaging their policies. To overcome that obstruction, in 1996 they introduced compulsory literacy and numeracy hours for all primary schools. Blair’s predicament was that Labour’s educationalists condemned the innovation, and much more besides. Rather than join the Tories in pulling aside the lack of disclosure that protected inadequate teachers and struggling schools, Labour was committed to denying parents any information about a school’s performance, abolishing Ofsted and ending all choice. ‘Ghettoisation’, as the Left described parental selection, would be replaced by an entirely comprehensive system.

Blair disagreed with that ideology, and after his election as party leader he signalled his sympathy towards the aspiring middle classes by removing Ann Taylor as shadow education minister for being too favourable to teachers. Taylor’s replacement by Blunkett would be hailed as a milestone.

Blair next declared war on the educational establishment. ‘We should build on what’s good from the Tories,’ he declared. Britain’s children, he said in a dramatic speech in 1995, were being betrayed by the system. Labour, he added, would keep the Tories’ tests, league tables and streaming, and even enhance Ofsted’s powers. Oxbridge’s prejudice in favour of excellence would not be challenged.

Blunkett was encouraged by Blair to intensify the assault at the annual conference of the National Union of Teachers in 1995. ‘There is a culture of complacency and lack of ambition in some schools,’ the new shadow minister told the outraged delegates. Comprehensive schools were failing the majority of children. Many teachers, he believed, were lazy, poorly trained and had low expectations. ‘We have a crap teaching profession,’ he would later say, referring to the anarchy in some schools.

There were, however, important aspects of the 1988 Act that Blair opposed. To escape the control of the local education authorities (LEAs), the Tories had given some of the money from their budgets directly to schools. This could then be used by the 1,198 grant-maintained schools to fund extra classes – for example, in music – or to amend their curriculum.

Five years later, Tony and Cherie Blair enrolled their eldest children at the Oratory, a grant-maintained Catholic school in Fulham. There was uproar. Both Left and Right accused Blair of hypocrisy, with the former infuriated by their leader’s endorsement of the divisions created by the Conservatives. To persuade the Left that Labour was ideologically different to the Conservatives, Blair promised to end the privileges of the grant-maintained schools and to terminate the assisted-places scheme that paid for 38,000 poor children to attend private schools. That decision revealed his confusion. He refused to close the last 164 grammar schools and protected the new city technology colleges (CTCs), despite their dependence on selection and private finance. He also adopted the Tories’ plan for 200 specialist schools that selected 10 per cent of their intake.

Compounding the confusion, Blunkett solemnly promised his party conference: ‘Read my lips. No selection by examination or interview.’ To further pacify the Left, he agreed that disruptive pupils would not be expelled. Inclusivity would rule and ‘special needs’ schools would be closed.

By cherry-picking and promising the Left half of a golden age, Blair hoped to create a coalition to reform education. ‘Some things the Conservatives got right,’ he inserted into Labour’s 1997 manifesto. ‘We will not change them.’ The manifesto partly focused on class sizes and laptops, and to assuage the Left’s passion for uniformity it omitted mentioning the standard of teaching in classrooms. Blair himself said nothing about Harriet Harman, the shadow minister for welfare, sending her children to private schools.

Blair’s ideological confusion was disguised by adopting ideas suggested by Michael Barber, a key ally of Blunkett. Barber, a former official in the National Union of Teachers, somersaulted in 1995 and attacked what he called ‘the dark side of the moon’ among his former allies. Teachers, he said, echoing Blair, should cease tolerating failure in poor communities. They should abandon their conviction that only money could change education, and they should be accountable. But there was an awkward outcome to his conversion.

Unlike the Tories, Barber believed that all children share the same abilities and, regardless of their social background, can, with the right education, be successful. In the policies that he and Blunkett presented to Blair, they stressed that every child would benefit from an ‘accessible and personalised’ education. By default, they denigrated special technical colleges that trained plumbers, carpenters and electricians.

Barber tempted Blair with an additional hymn. Education, he said, should be driven by measurement. Targets would change the culture of schools. As an instinctive dogmatist, Blair was persuaded that improvement could be achieved by setting what they variously called strategies, standards, benchmarks, performance indicators and measurements by examinations. He also echoed another of Barber’s gospels: ‘It’s
standards, not structures.’ By that, Blair and Barber meant that Labour would focus on what happened in the classroom. To their critics, that was tokenism. To avoid a conflict within the party, they both refused to challenge the local education authorities. The LEAs’ officials controlled the teachers in the classroom. Nothing could change without removing their doctrinaire influence.