Authors: Tom Bower
Any one of five men – Blair, Des Browne, Jock Stirrup, Nicholas Houghton or Bill Jeffrey – was empowered to initiate the discussion. Orthodox and loyal, both Stirrup and Houghton lacked the experience. On his own account, Stirrup assumed that every plan collapsed on the first day. He could not have started a major review on his own; he would have needed support from Jeffrey. Previous permanent secretaries in the ministry, like Frank Cooper and Michael Quinlan, had possessed the intellectual power and bruising personality single-handedly to question Britain’s defence policies. Jeffrey’s invisibility broke the mould. ‘Bill opted out,’ observed one minister. ‘He stayed in his office and led the rest of the ministry’s officials to opt out of decisions. All they did was type up orders.’
‘Why are you not participating?’ Matt Cavanagh, a political adviser in Downing Street, asked a senior civil servant in the MoD.
‘From Blair downwards’, replied the official, ‘you’ve all poured shit on us, so why should we?’
Browne later admitted, ‘I managed circumstances instead of thinking.
I was constantly reacting to an overwhelming daily routine. I had no reason to doubt Stirrup.’ On reflection, he identified his weakness: ‘I was getting no help from No. 10.’
Nigel Sheinwald, the ministry’s link to Downing Street, was regarded by his critics as inconsistent. To them, he blew hot and cold, and gave Whitehall no sense of direction. The responsibility for the policy vacuum led back to Blair, who could have challenged the military in the same manner as he questioned the ‘forces of conservatism’ across Whitehall. The idea never surfaced.
On his return from holiday at the end of August, the prime minister shrank back from the opportunity for a reassessment. ‘Blair held workshops on education and immigration’, recalled Browne, ‘but never held a single day’s conference on Iraq or Afghanistan.’
By September, the British army was facing a crisis. Soldiers in Afghanistan were dying, and those who were injured were receiving poor treatment from the NHS on returning to Britain. (One of Gordon Brown’s cuts had led to the closure of the military’s specialist hospitals.) The absence of American troops in Helmand and British reluctance to request help from other NATO armies aggravated the plight of the 1,500 British troops, who were fighting with insufficient helicopters and driving vehicles with inadequate armour. ‘Whatever package they want,’ Blair said about the army’s demands, ‘we will do.’ Since Brown refused to approve additional money, the promise remained unfulfilled. At that moment, Britain’s exit from Iraq – fixed for the end of 2006 – was being questioned by Washington. His country’s continued presence there, Blair agreed without a proper explanation, was essential to protect national security. General Walker’s assurance to Reid that engagement in two locations was ‘doable’ had proved to be mistaken.
And it got worse. Major-General Richard Shirreff had arrived in Basra for his six-month tour in July 2006. Faced by an uprising among the militia armies, Britain’s 7,200 soldiers, alongside 7,000 NATO troops, were cowering. Some 150 British soldiers were available to patrol the whole of Basra, a city of 1.3 million people. Belfast had been controlled by a
force of 10,000. ‘It’s like a self-licking lollipop,’ said Shirreff. ‘Everyone’s just guarding themselves.’ The army’s effort was devoted to supplying and protecting their three bases in a lawless city plagued by corruption and Shia death squads. Acting as neither the world’s policemen nor its social workers, British soldiers were risking their lives just to survive, without any chance of changing Iraq’s fate. Stirrup, who prided himself on understanding that wars should be fought only to fulfil a strategy, as set out by Carl von Clausewitz, the famous Prussian militarist of the nineteenth century, looked to Blair to define the purpose of continuing their mission. He received no meaningful reply.
Before he left Britain, Shirreff had presented Operation Salamanca, aimed at removing Basra’s criminal elements, to Generals Jackson and Dannatt over dinner at Bulford Manor in Wiltshire, the army chiefs’ headquarters. Shirreff suggested a ‘surge’ to counter-attack the militias, retake control and build a ‘better Basra’.
‘Absolutely right, we’ll go for that,’ agreed Jackson.
The ambitious plan was presented to the two other chiefs and to Houghton in Northwood. Success would require money and more British troops in Basra, and also the support of Nouri al-Maliki, the Iraqi prime minister.
‘We need a winning strategy to exit,’ Shirreff told Houghton. The plan, noted Shirreff, went down with his superior ‘like a lead balloon’.
Houghton was still seeking a policy from Downing Street, but instead of a reply there was only silence. Blair refused to decide on the fate of British troops. His only order to Stirrup was to bring peace to the British zone, but he offered no ideas on how achieve that Elysium.
Although Blair appeared to be fully engaged at their regular discussions, Stirrup sensed that Downing Street was languishing in a ‘
fin de
siècle
atmosphere’. At one meeting, Blair agreed with the air marshal that the army should leave Iraq, then refused to name the date, as if he had no power to influence events. Adding to the confusion, Stirrup admitted, ‘I didn’t know whether Houghton supported Operation Salamanca.’ Yet, before flying to Basra, Shirreff had the impression that
Blair had given his approval. The general arrived expecting 5,000 more British troops and additional funds. He had not anticipated a conversation in Downing Street between the chief of the defence staff and Blair.
‘Prime Minister,’ Stirrup said, ‘it is clear that Maliki will not support the army’s operation.’
Blair voiced surprise that Iraq’s leader did not want the gangs wreaking havoc across Basra to be neutralised. ‘Can’t we do something about it?’ he asked in the tone of a motorist looking at his flat tyre. Without Maliki’s support, Shirreff’s hopes would be dashed.
‘I had kittens,’ Stirrup admitted during his first visit to Basra following Shirreff’s arrival. Sending reinforcements, he told the major-general, had not been approved. ‘More British troops won’t alter the strategic outcome.’
Shirreff’s operation was duly watered down. Its replacement, Operation Sinbad, was a series of low-level hit-and-runs to protect the beleaguered British soldiers. The official policy was to protect the stalemate. Blair’s decision to withdraw by the end of 2006 and in the meantime reduce the number of soldiers from 7,200 to about 3,500 was, Stirrup knew, ‘not feasible’. He returned to London undecided on how to tell Blair that the position was hopeless.
‘We need political involvement and a political solution,’ he eventually reported. ‘The army cannot fix the problem alone.’
Blair looked without confidence at the two ministers at the meeting: Des Browne, whom he disliked, and Margaret Beckett, whom he had appointed mainly to make ignoring the Foreign Office easier. ‘Try and persuade Maliki to approve the removal of the Shia militias,’ he told Beckett. Nothing happened.
‘The levers of government and the Foreign Office don’t deliver,’ Stirrup discovered.
Shirreff’s final orders were to ‘give it a go’. He was to ‘surge to get the Iraqis into a position to take over’ and, at the same time, ‘to ramp it down’. The attacks began in October. Within days, British soldiers were under heavy fire. In London, General Dannatt, the new army
chief, was aggrieved. According to Whitehall rules, he was excluded from direct involvement in the Iraqi operations by Houghton and Stirrup.
Dannatt attracted mixed feelings. ‘He’s too Christian,’ was a common complaint among his fellow officers.
‘Dannatt never took advice except from God, and God isn’t very good on defence,’ observed General Charles Guthrie.
In theory, Blair should have found much in common with his new senior officer. ‘God’s on our side in Helmand,’ the general told an RAF officer. ‘We’re doing the right thing.’ But Dannatt had also told Desmond Bowen, the MoD’s policy director, that ‘We need to be shedding more blood to show that we’re in there with the Americans.’ That eccentricity caused Stirrup to dislike Dannatt, and the sentiment was mutual. ‘When you’re in a cockpit flying at the speed of sound,’ Dannatt observed, ‘you don’t have to decide who lives and who dies and pick up the body parts.’ At the chiefs’ weekly meetings, at 10 a.m. every Wednesday, he found himself isolated. ‘Stirrup’s not prone to consultation,’ the new chief complained, ‘even though the army is fighting two wars.’ He found that the two other chiefs ‘played games’. Stirrup, he felt, spoke in bursts of ‘grandstanding’ and refused to discuss the detail of the war or the army’s request for more money. ‘When I need you,’ Stirrup told Dannatt, ‘I’ll call for you.’
The mutual antipathy between the chiefs was aggravated by Dannatt’s search through the formal minutes of his predecessors’ discussions. He found no mention of their discussing the army’s commitment to Afghanistan. Dannatt had himself supported the Afghan expedition, but his influence had become minimal.
The solemnity of the hearses regularly carrying fallen soldiers past guards of honour magnified media reports about the casualties and depressed morale in the MoD. Instead of the government following tradition and burying the dead where they fell, every soldier’s death had become the focus of a coroner’s public inquiry to fix the blame. Gordon Brown in particular was held responsible for ignoring the army’s demand
for reinforcements, helicopters and bombproof vehicles. ‘War is not clean,’ an official told Bill Jeffrey at the climax of a public storm about the army’s lack of body armour. Neither Des Browne nor Jeffrey was suited to presenting to the public or the Cabinet the reality of modern warfare.
The politicians did not bear all the blame. The army had spent months inconclusively bickering among themselves about the ideal bombproof vehicle. On the other hand, Blair had agreed to allot billions of pounds to two unaffordable aircraft carriers, which automatically reduced how much the army had to spend. ‘We have a huge hole in our budget,’ Paul Drayson, the minister of procurement, had been informed by his officials. ‘There’s no money,’ Browne had also been told. Britain could not afford the ‘expeditionary’ war set out in the 1998 defence review.
The officials in the MoD’s logistics department presented their financial predicament to Jeffrey. ‘You’ve got to ask for a formal direction,’ he was told. That imperative would ultimately have forced Blair to justify the lack of money. ‘Jeffrey stayed silent,’ recalled one official. ‘He should have asked for a formal direction from the minister, but he didn’t want a public row. We were cheerleaders, and we were strongly discouraged from giving ministers unwelcome advice.’
Dannatt decided to rattle the cage. ‘The army is running hot,’ he told Browne. The 7,200 soldiers in Iraq, he explained, were part of the problem and not the solution. With limited resources, the British army would be defeated. ‘We are fighting for our lives.’ The army could retrieve its reputation only if everything were thrown into Afghanistan. Dannatt wanted a political decision. Until the army withdrew from Iraq, reinforcements could not be sent to Afghanistan. ‘Browne could not understand,’ he concluded. ‘I got no positive outcome from him.’
In turn, Browne was irritated by his senior officer: ‘It was always about Dannatt.’ In the general’s opinion, it was about soldiers risking their lives. ‘I had to struggle in Whitehall to get the army’s voice heard,’ he said. ‘It was very frustrating.’
Repeated attempts to arrange a meeting with Blair were ignored by Downing Street. The general was furious. The army, he believed, needed
protection from a prime minister who was deaf to complaints and who was the begetter of dysfunctional chiefs.
Unwilling to listen to conflicting opinions, and weary of the generals’ familiar antagonism, Blair would talk only to Stirrup. In his opinion, the more important battle at that moment was his own fight for survival against Gordon Brown and his supporters.
On his return from his summer holidays, Blair was told by Alastair Campbell, Jonathan Powell and Sally Morgan that support for him in the party was ‘haemorrhaging’. With the party conference approaching, his support for Israel in Lebanon, he heard, was jeopardising his survival as prime minister. To reassert his authority, he invited Philip Webster, the political editor of
The Times,
to interview him at Chequers.
Eight times during their conversation Webster asked Blair when he intended to leave, and each time Blair refused to answer. He pledged only to give his successor ‘ample time’ before the next election and urged his party to ‘stop obsessing’ about the leadership. He arranged for himself to be photographed with a mug listing the traits of anyone with the name Anthony. Among them was, ‘You’re a man who’s in charge, others follow your lead.’
To gauge the reaction of Labour MPs, Webster asked Blairite loyalists for their comments about their leader’s silence. He heard that even they were ‘demanding a timescale for his departure’. The newspaper’s headline on 31 August was ‘Blair Defies Party Over Departure Date’. There was uproar. Blair was accused of destroying the party by clinging on to power. Even Blairites were switching to Brown.
Brown was incandescent but, as always, dithered, resisting Ed Balls’s demands for blood. He would not be seen publicly to wield the knife. Instead, he asked his closest supporters to organise the coup.
On 4 September, a group of MPs, with the chancellor’s support, delivered an ultimatum to Downing Street: ‘Sadly it is clear to us – as it is to the entire party and entire country – that without an urgent change in the leadership of the party it becomes less likely that we will win the next election. This is the brutal truth. It gives us no pleasure
to say it. But it has to be said and understood. We therefore ask you to stand aside.’ Over a hundred Labour MPs echoed the demand, led by Tom Watson, a junior minister, that he leave by summer 2007.
Instinctively, Blair wanted to fight back against what some insiders called a coup. While he sat in his office being consoled by political lightweights like Tessa Jowell and Charlie Falconer, his staff contacted Blairite MPs to sign a loyalist statement. ‘We need to get people to start using the expression “blackmail”,’ urged Powell. The sympathisers’ voices were smothered.