Authors: Tom Bower
Through his own short-sightedness, Blair had lost his key supporters in the Cabinet. And his reliance on Stephen Byers and Alan Milburn to write newspaper articles criticising Brown, or David Miliband coyly suggesting that Blair would resign on his tenth anniversary as prime minister in May 2007, only fired the chancellor’s anger. He wanted Blair to make a public statement, immediately.
At 7.45 a.m. on 6 September, Blair walked through the connecting door into 11 Downing Street and entered Brown’s study. He implored Brown to be patient. They argued for an hour. Blair accused Brown of orchestrating an attempted coup, while Brown accused Blair of lying about his departure. Blair eventually left, unaware that Watson, a thuggish Brownite, had delivered a blistering letter urging him to depart ‘for the sake of the legacy … I have to say that I no longer believe that your remaining in office is in the interest of either the party or the country.’
Blair was furious about the ‘student’s coup’. Watson, he spluttered, was ‘disloyal, discourteous and wrong’. A meeting was arranged with Brown at 2 p.m. that same day in No. 10. Just minutes after their discussions began, the media were informed that four more MPs had resigned from junior positions in the government. They would describe their co-ordinated initiative as a ‘spontaneous insurrection’ aimed at obtaining a timetable for their leader’s going. More resignations would follow, Blair was told, unless he announced his departure. ‘He’s got hours left,’ said one rebel. ‘He has been very foolish and arrogant. Tony is going to be told it is moving time.’
Michael Levy listened to his friend’s woe: ‘Tony got angrier and angrier. More furious than I had seen him. He kept saying that he had never realised how duplicitous Gordon was – and what a “liar”.’
On David Hill’s instructions, Downing Street told journalists that a coup orchestrated by Brown’s cabal was under way. Derek Simpson, the trade union leader, was blamed for ‘a disgraceful attempt to blackmail the PM from office’. Blair’s nightmare scenario was departing Downing Street like Margaret Thatcher. To leave with dignity, he needed to regain control of events. In the City jargon, his choice was to bow to his attackers or ‘catch a falling knife’.
That afternoon, he sat with Brown in the garden at No. 10. The common sentiment, he said with shrewd foresight, was that Labour risked being out of office for the next three elections if the succession were forced, in the manner of the Tories in 1990. Brown replied that removing Blair was the party’s only hope; he was toxic.
By the end of their ninety-minute meeting, Blair had capitulated – but only partly. Rather than leaving quickly in order to allow his chancellor to establish himself at the autumn party conference and restore Labour’s fortunes in the perilous Scottish and Welsh elections, he insisted on staying until he notched up a decade, which meant May 2007, at the earliest.
Brown agreed to Blair’s compromise, which they settled should be announced the following day. He left No. 10 by the back entrance. A photographer caught him sitting in his car smiling.
Blair chose to make the announcement at Quintin Kynaston, a school in north-west London whose head teacher had been praised for exemplifying the best of Labour’s education policies. (Eight years later, she was banned from teaching for life because of financial discrepancies.) Wearing heavy make-up, Blair was surrounded by fifty hand-picked children. With the media corralled as far away as possible, he apologised to a single camera for the party’s behaviour: ‘It has not been our finest hour, to be frank.’ Then he confirmed that his speech to the party conference at the end of the month would be his last. And yet still he refused to give a precise date for his resignation.
While the Blairites, especially Charles Clarke, denounced the chancellor’s behaviour as ‘reckless’, ‘stupid’ and ‘madness’, Brown himself denied there was a coup and pleaded, ‘The situation is sad, regrettable and has caused us a great deal of grief.’ Fearing a backlash, he whitewashed his participation: ‘I said to him it is for him to make the decision.’
Blair’s anger mounted. He felt that his loyalty to Brown had been rewarded by treachery. Stubbornly, Brown had ignored the polls that showed only 30 per cent believed Labour could win an election under his leadership, with 80 per cent of under-twenty-fives hostile towards the prospect of a Brown government. Ben Wegg-Prosser, the head of his Strategic Communications Unit, sent an email to the staff to say, ‘There is no deal.’
That afternoon, Stephen Boys-Smith, working with the Independent Monitoring Commission responsible for disarming the paramilitaries in Ulster, visited Blair with the members of his team. Blair made no attempt to disguise his lack of interest. ‘He could not even switch on his actor’s performance,’ noticed Boys-Smith. ‘He didn’t even try to look like being on the ball.’ Two days later, Blair ordered his supporters to stop sniping at Brown. Without a ceasefire he feared the split would permanently damage the party.
At the end of Friday 8 September, Powell sent round another email: ‘Very well done over the past week or so. A remarkable performance on behalf of TB, who is not very good at saying thank you directly. Thank you very much indeed for keeping the ship afloat.’
The TUC conference on 12 September was the dress rehearsal for Blair’s farewell at the party conference. He enjoyed entering the bear pit to preach the truth. Labour’s continuing dependence on the unions, he feared, still made the party ‘the prisoner of the Left’ and could terminate any chance of re-election. His own success owed everything to minimising their power. In return, the unions had vented their anger at the man who put the interests of patients and schoolchildren ahead of the self-interest of NHS employees and teachers. He was greeted
with a hostile silence and placards of ‘Time to Go’. Undaunted, he provoked boos and heckles by telling his audience the ‘brutal truth’. If they refused to understand the problems of government and compromise, he warned, Labour would spend the future ‘wasting our time in opposition passing resolutions which nobody will do anything about’. His message was rejected. Perfunctory claps was the reward for three election victories.
The party conference was held in Manchester. Brown arrived keen to solicit support, upset the polls showing the Tories ahead, and restore relations with Blair. In the middle of a clunking speech, he told the packed auditorium, ‘It has been a privilege for me to work with and for the most successful ever Labour leader and Labour prime minister.’ Outside the hall, Cherie watched a monitor and was heard by a Bloomberg journalist to remark, ‘Well, that’s a lie.’ Her words dominated the media, suffocating Brown’s emollient message. Cherie’s denial seven hours later – ‘Honestly, guys, I hate to spoil your story, but I didn’t say it and I don’t believe it’ – was mocked.
That night, the Blairs hosted a party in their suite. One floor below, the Brownites sat in fury, ‘feeling utterly sick’, according to Damian McBride.
‘She’s killed us, she’s killed us,’ Brown wailed, slumping against a wall.
The next day came Blair’s speech. It was a supremely confident finale. He started by thanking Cherie for her support and gave a flash of his showbiz genius: ‘I mean, at least I don’t have to worry about her running off with the bloke next door.’ What followed was a captivating description of his successes and his hopes that the reforms would continue, and an admission that ‘You make your own luck.’ Having held his audience in thrall, he ended, ‘In the years to come, wherever I am, whatever I do, I’m with you. You’re the future now. Make the most of it.’
The standing ovation appeared endless. Biting his lip, Blair seemed set to shed a tear, but his emotions were torn. He craved an audience, but he did not love those who cheered. On the contrary, he hated their ingratitude. He had never loved the common man. For their part, many
in the audience wanted him to stay on but realised that he was too damaged to win the next election. Sleaze and Iraq had stained him permanently. A Mori poll put the public’s ‘satisfaction’ rating of Blair at 20 per cent, lower than Thatcher on the eve of her fall.
The following week, David Cameron asked Blair in a raucous Commons, ‘Do you back the chancellor as your successor? Yes or no?’ Blair did not reply.
During the whole of September, those engaged in the battle for Downing Street forgot the soldiers fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. The 130th soldier had just been killed in Iraq, and a Nimrod surveillance aircraft had crashed in Afghanistan, killing fourteen crew. Their deaths were blamed on the government’s refusal to provide enough money to service the plane. To the country, Blair was a lame duck repeating that the troops should remain in Iraq ‘until the job is done’. Whitehall gossip did not restore any confidence.
In early October, during a visit to Downing Street to discuss the perils in Afghanistan, General Richards noticed that Blair was not listening. The war had been delegated to Stirrup. After their talk, Blair agreed to pose for a photograph. ‘You sit down,’ he said to Richards, ‘and I’ll stand behind you to show a coup.’
Dannatt’s frustration boiled over. While Richards was standing on the Downing Street steps, he inhabited the shadows. Since Blair refused to listen about ‘the army running hot’, Dannatt turned to the
Daily Mail.
In the published interview, he said that Britain should leave Iraq ‘sometime soon, as their presence was exacerbating the Islamic security threat to Britain’.
Blair was visiting Ireland when the general’s words were reported. ‘I wasn’t best pleased,’ he would write, understating his outrage. Dannatt, he complained, was a dogmatist scoring points at a politician’s expense.
Senior army officers expected the general to be dismissed for breaching the constitutional code, and Shirreff spoke for many by criticising Dannatt’s ‘crass own goal’. Throughout history, rebellious American generals had been fired by their president, and an immediate decision
to remove a maverick serviceman would have silenced the hubbub between the chiefs and the civil servants, and even resolved the breakdown between the military in Afghanistan and the politicians in London. Blair could have received that instant recommendation from Stirrup, but the air marshal held back.
In Blair’s telephone conversation with Browne, Dannatt’s dismissal was not seriously considered. Instead, Blair coyly anticipated the media headlines should the draconian measure be taken. ‘If Dannatt’s fired,’ he reckoned, ‘the
Mail
and the rest of Fleet Street will turn against me. Their headline will be “A Very Honest General”.’ Signalling his dislike of confrontation, he told Browne, ‘I’m cornered.’ His only request was that Dannatt should accuse the
Mail
of distorting his words and demand a correction. Then he invited the general and all the chiefs to a lunch of sandwiches.
The scene in Downing Street was surreal. The conversations at all social meetings between Labour politicians and the military were strained, but on this occasion the atmosphere of cordiality was particularly contrived. Energetically circulating the room, Blair went to pains to show that his distrust of civil servants did not extend to people in uniform. The chiefs would not be given ammunition to whisper any criticism of himself to the Tories. During lunch, no one acknowledged that the army was engaged in its biggest battle since the Korean war some fifty-five years earlier. No one reviewed the contradiction of launching two wars in the name of nation-building. Both the chiefs and the politicians shied away from mentioning that the army was unable to protect Iraqi and Afghan civilians from slaughter or discussing Washington’s declining confidence in Britain’s fighting ability. Blair and the military were united in their strategy of just muddling through.
The theme of Blair’s short speech to his guests was, ‘We must all work together’ – or, as some quipped, ‘We all must hang together.’ He had admitted that Iraq was ‘so far pretty much a disaster’, but blamed Muslim extremists for preventing the majority of Iraqis from building a peaceful, democratic state.
That explanation was no comfort to Dannatt. With some justification he complained about his treatment, adding, ‘Blair didn’t look me in the eye,’ and that he had not been invited to say anything. Powell’s mistaken recollection was that the general did speak.
By the end of lunch, Blair had classified Dannatt as untrustworthy and unsuited for the job. But, assuming Powell is reliable, Blair’s interpretation of his own dilemma was similarly skewed. ‘We spent most of our time in government’, Powell would write disingenuously, ‘not fighting wars but trying to prevent them.’ He added that Dannatt’s use of the
Mail
would ‘make politicians think twice if military action is proposed in the future’.
The written apology Blair expected from his outspoken general did not arrive. ‘Dannatt’s no fucking good to you lot,’ Matt Cavanagh, Browne’s special adviser, told General Richards. ‘He’s toast in No. 10.’
Animosities flourished among the chiefs. ‘Everyone hated each other,’ complained an official. ‘Dannatt’s made everything difficult.’
The politicians and commentariat would blame successive chiefs of the defence staff for failing to inform Blair and the secretaries of state for defence about awkward truths in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now, Dannatt was castigated for telling Blair just those truths. Newcomers like Cavanagh, a recent arrival at the MoD who witnessed the fractured relationships, blamed the military for having ‘lost sight of strategy’. He also blamed civil servants for having ‘simply opted out of the difficult arguments’ between the military and the politicians. He was unaware of Whitehall’s path to war in Iraq. From the outset, Blair had excluded those who offered unwelcome advice.
Even after nine years in office, Blair had a limited understanding of government. During a conversation with Stirrup while on a flight from Iraq, he referred to the importance of Europe’s military defence agreements. ‘It’s a joke, Prime Minister,’ said Stirrup. ‘When the Europeans spend real money, I’ll believe in it, but in the meantime it’s a fig leaf for doing less.’
Blair looked discomfited. Despite the setbacks he had witnessed in
Iraq, he still believed passionately in intervention. He urged Stirrup to dispatch groups of special forces to solve humanitarian crises in Zimbabwe, Sudan, Darfur and other war zones in Africa. On each occasion, Stirrup replied, ‘What is your strategic purpose? You don’t know how this will turn out. No plan ever survives the first contact with the enemy. The unexpected will happen.’