Authors: Tom Bower
To exit in triumph, Blair used the long goodbye to fashion an image of his legacy. First, there was the Queen’s Speech, which anticipated thirty-nine new laws that would pass before his departure. Everything was thrown in: crime, immigration, more private services for the NHS, more academies, tougher A-levels, more social housing and nuclear
power. To the end, he believed that laws rather than good government would change the country, belying his own confession that it was only as the handover approached that ‘I knew what to do and how to do it.’
Next he delivered ‘Pathways to the Future’, a series of lectures about public services, energy, defence and Europe. ‘New Labour’, he said at the outset, ‘has set a new political course for our nation. Others now have to set variations on our basic theme.’ However, his hope of changing the nation’s mood was stymied by his inconsistent record. Over the decade, he had certainly helped the poorest and removed the intolerances suffered by minorities. The distress of the poor had been reduced by the minimum wage and higher welfare payments, especially for mothers. For those benefiting from the banking boom, especially in the south, Britain became a more comfortable, even happier place. Blair had caught the mood – enriched by the Lottery’s money for the arts and the false impression of an improving economy – to transform London into a genuinely international city bursting with entrepreneurs and cultural icons. He described his paradigm as ‘a new kind of politics in the new century. What you did in your personal life was your choice, what you did to others was not.’ But improved lifestyles did not amount to a defined ideology. The regressive downside to ‘modernisation’ and ‘progressive’ politics, highlighted by his critics, was the rise in drug addiction and alcoholism, the decline of marriage, the fractures in social cohesion caused by immigration, the stagnation of educational standards, an Orwellian jungle of regulations, sleaze and the public’s loss of trust in Britain’s institutions.
His journey on health, education and energy had gone full circle, and at huge expense. Waiting times for treatment had indeed been dramatically cut, and the new schools and hospitals improved the atmosphere surrounding public services, but he offered nothing fundamentally new. After all his changes, he remained unconvinced and unconverted to real choice, competition and markets. New buildings were not the same as new ideas. His reforms had added little to his inheritance.
His valedictory speeches were either ignored or, as he admitted, greeted with ‘cynicism’. The exception was the public’s reaction to his
passion for using Britain’s military to crush international terrorism. ‘Get real,’ he told his critics. ‘There is no alternative to fighting this menace [of a perverted form of Islam] wherever it rears its head. It has to be beaten. Period. Britain must be a player, not a spectator.’ Few disagreed about the dangers of political Islam, but most questioned a messenger who still energetically denied that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had made life worse for the local people.
In 1997, as the champion of multiculturalism, Blair had labelled those who warned about the danger of allowing political Islam into Britain’s mosques and opposed faith schools as racist. Ten years later, he was telling Muslims they had ‘a duty to integrate’ and should accept British values. ‘So conform to it or don’t come here,’ he said. Wearing a niqab, he added, was ‘a mark of separation’. Nevertheless, he did not believe that large numbers of Muslim immigrants rejected integration. In his opinion, immigration was not a harbinger of extreme Islam. On the contrary, he asserted, ‘To an extent immigration [was] to me utterly mainstream and a vital point of what the government was about.’
The evangelist’s sermon had become incomprehensible to the majority of Britons. He no longer presented his venture into Afghanistan as peaceful reconstruction. Helmand had become another front in the war on terror. Any defeat, he said, would be the fault of others for not sharing his self-belief.
Undeterred and led by General Charles Guthrie, the retired chiefs turned on Blair for dispatching a demoralised army to Afghanistan with insufficient money and equipment. From admiration to admonition within a decade, Guthrie’s disillusion reflected the public’s anger.
Blair’s other-worldliness was noticed by senior
Guardian
journalists during a lunch in Downing Street.
‘I was right to have gone to war in Iraq,’ said Blair defiantly.
‘But what if you’re proved wrong?’ a journalist asked.
‘I am right,’ Blair replied, and looking upwards continued, ‘but someone else will be my judge.’
Afghanistan would be decided using the same criteria. His denial
that British troops were ‘stirring the hornets’ nest’ in a medieval society matched his incomprehension over how a decade of wars had degraded Britain’s armed forces.
The litmus test was his reaction to the capture on 23 March 2007 of fifteen Royal Navy ratings and marines by Iranian guards in the Gulf. The men and women had behaved appallingly. Over the following days of their incarceration, the men whimpered and humiliated themselves on Iranian television, while British diplomats negotiated their release.
On 4 April, Blair stood in his study with David Hill, his media supremo, watching the live television coverage of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president, announcing the ratings’ departure from Iran. Constantly glancing at the mirror to check his tie, Blair was observed by an aide to be psyching himself as usual into the right mood for his choreographed exit onto Downing Street to address the waiting cameras.
The following day, the ratings emerged from a plane at Heathrow to be hailed by the navy as heroes. Instead of swiftly escorting the miscreants into oblivion, the navy chiefs encouraged a rating to sell her story to a national newspaper. Many were outraged, not least the heads of the army. To allow a rating to profit from humiliation symbolised the Blairist priority of placing the media before morality. Blair rejected the complaints as ‘synthetic fury’. His principles had shifted sharply since 1997; alternatively, his true values had been concealed for ten years and only over the last weeks were they finally surfacing.
The public test of Blair’s status would be the local elections on 5 May, his thirteenth election campaign as leader since 1994. He was ending his extended swansong with a calculated gamble against those who ridiculed New Labour as an ideology. He hoped his critics would at least acknowledge that electoral success was the glue that had held the party together. A good showing would confound the Brownites and make them admit, however grudgingly, that Labour was electable thanks to his championing of the centre ground.
His gamble failed. Labour lost over 500 seats in England, while the
Scottish Nationalists became the largest party in Scotland. Labour’s Scottish leaders feared eventual meltdown. The Tories won 40 per cent of the vote against Labour’s 27 per cent. Blair once again blamed the defeat on those who refused to share his own belief in himself. To his disappointment, his long farewell had not provoked the crowds to ask for more but to cry for relief. He could no longer resist. The
Evening Standard
’s headline was percipient: ‘Blair Quits to Make Millions’.
Five days later, he flew to Sedgefield, his constituency. In the Trimdon Labour Club, packed with local admirers, he made an emotional resignation speech, asking to be remembered as a visionary aiming for the stars – and getting there. Holding back tears, he apologised ‘for the times I have fallen short … To be frank, I would not have wanted it any other way … I ask you to accept one thing hand on heart: I did what I thought was right.’ Even before he returned to London, the New Labour logo had been removed from the party’s website. That night’s
Evening Standard
headline reflected the mood: ‘I Am Sorry’.
Among the obituaries from his supporters, Peter Riddell wrote, ‘Mr Blair may be widely reviled at present, but his influence will long outlast his departure.’ Philip Gould concluded, ‘New Labour rather than the Tories is the Establishment … The future remains New Labour, the only party of genuine change in Britain today.’ One enduring success in those twilight days was a full peace agreement between the IRA and the unionists in Ulster.
Over the last six weeks, as Brown awaited his coronation, Blair embarked on a world tour using a Boeing 777, the world’s largest twin-engined jet, which normally seats about 400 people and had been chartered by the government from British Airways. His first stop was Paris, after which, on 17 May, he flew to Washington to stand with President Bush in the White House rose garden for a public farewell. ‘What I know’, said Bush, ‘is that the world needs courage, and what I know is that this good man is a courageous man.’ World leaders, added Bush, listened to Blair. ‘Even if they may not agree with him 100 per cent, they admire him.’ Asked whether he had caused Blair’s downfall,
the president replied, ‘I don’t know.’ The day ended with a party at the British embassy arranged by David Manning.
Next, Blair visited the Pope and formally revealed he would convert to Catholicism, before flitting across Africa, from Sierra Leone to South Africa. In 2001, he had described the continent as a ‘scar on the conscience of the world’. Since then, the successful organisation of debt relief had benefited some countries, while others had corruptly abused Britain’s generosity.
The tour ended in Libya, where hints about the real Blair finally emerged. Over the previous year, MI5 officers, in co-operation with Libyan intelligence agents, had been targeting Libyans living in London who were opposed to Colonel Gaddafi’s regime. In a letter Blair had written to Gaddafi one month earlier, on 27 April, he had thanked the dictator for the ‘excellent co-operation’ between their intelligence services, adding, ‘As you know, I am determined to see that partnership develop still further.’ He had also expressed his regret that an English judge had refused to deport two dissidents back to Tripoli. ‘I am very disappointed at the court’s decision,’ he had written. To pacify Gaddafi, he had added ‘a personal word of thanks for your assistance in the matter of deportation’. The ‘assistance’ was information possibly extracted from other dissidents by torture in Libya.
The presence of Blair’s extravagant jet at the small dusty airfield in Sirte, set halfway between Tripoli and Benghazi, was exaggerated by the unrecognisable version of the British anthem played by the Libyan military band. In a scene reminiscent of Ruritania, Blair shook the hands of those summoned to accompany him on his visit to Gaddafi, including Peter Sutherland, the chairman of BP, and Mark Allen, the head of MI6’s counter-intelligence. BP, the camouflage for the visit, had announced a £454 million plan to resume oil exploration after years of absence, but the company’s gesture was quickly forgotten. The prime minister was secretly negotiating an agreement for an exchange of prisoners. Among Gaddafi’s demands was that Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, convicted for his involvement in the Lockerbie bombing, be released from a Scottish jail.
Why Blair, in the last days of his premiership, was keen to conclude such a controversial pact became apparent only after his resignation.
The contrast between Blair’s public support for a murderous dictator and his private humanity was visible to only a few. During those final weeks, Peter Watt, the Labour Party’s general secretary, asked for a favour. One of his father’s dying wishes was to visit Downing Street. Blair readily agreed, and the fifty-three-year-old was welcomed into the Cabinet room. Few could beat Blair’s expressions of sympathy. During the half-hour visit, their friendly conversation was recorded in a succession of photographs. In the aftermath of the millisecond flashes, Watt observed that his ‘brilliant’ leader ‘did not allow a curtain to fall’, reassuring his father that his visit was not a chore for the prime minister. The public, Watt feared, condemned Blair as a bogeyman rather than appreciating his genuine concern for those who suffered. The mismatch was Blair’s tragedy.
On 6 June, a removal van arrived in Downing Street to start taking the Blairs’ possessions. During a farewell dinner for financial supporters that week, the prime minister recounted that a Birmingham party official had called to explain how his local constituency had just completed a protracted discussion to decide whether to thank Blair for his thirteen years as leader. ‘We’ve decided’, the constituency chairman went on, ‘not to give you a vote of thanks.’
The last Cabinet meeting was more generous. Brown congratulated his nemesis effusively and presented him with a painting of Chequers, paid for out of the £1,600 raised by the members of the Cabinet. ‘It’s the right time to go,’ said Blair. And not just for him. ‘I’m walking out of office with my head held high,’ said John Prescott, who had also decided to retire.
In the dying days of his premiership, Blair crammed in two summits: a climate-change discussion with the G8 leaders, and an EU summit on the union’s constitution. Everything was fashioned for a glorious farewell and a smooth transition into his new career. In Downing Street, his goodbyes to his staff were genuinely emotional. Buckingham Palace refused
to agree to a dinner for the Queen in Downing Street on his last night, reflecting the monarch’s dislike of the Blairs. Instead, the final piece of razzmatazz saw Blair welcoming Arnold Schwarzenegger for breakfast on his last morning. The governor of California was expected to help his friend earn an income as a global envoy combating climate change.
Just after 11 o’clock, Blair put on the same pair of Church’s brogues he had worn for every Commons question time and headed for the chamber. In his pocket he carried a blank P45 form to wave as evidence of his imminent unemployment.
In an emotional, funny and solemn finale, the astute player paid tribute to the fears and the excitement of the past decade. ‘I can pay the house the greatest compliment I can by saying that, from first to last, I never stopped fearing it. The tingling apprehension that I felt at three minutes to twelve today, I felt as much ten years ago, and every bit as acute.’ With laughter and bathos, one of the great political performers at the Dispatch Box repeatedly bowed to a sceptical but charitable audience. To them, members of the world’s greatest political arena, he offered the final credit amid a trace of tears: ‘If it is on occasions the place of low skulduggery, it is more often the place for the pursuit of noble causes. I wish everyone, friend or foe, well – and that is that. The end.’