Authors: Tom Bower
Blair now directed his speeches at his left-wing critics. ‘To those who say where is Labour’s passion for social justice,’ he proclaimed, ‘I say education is social justice. Education is liberty. Education is opportunity.’ As so often, he also urged ‘modernisation’. On one theme he remained consistent: the changes in schools would be imposed from Whitehall. Control over education was to be centralised. London would micro-manage all the LEAs. To effect that change, he empowered Blunkett, Bichard and Barber to execute a radical plan across the Department for Education. Presentation was Blair’s driver of change. To convince the electorate of action, he expected regular announcements of Green Papers, White Papers, legislation and the creation of new schools.
Blunkett was his ideal ally, spreading New Labour’s message immediately after election day. In a frenzy of diktats, he announced a succession of White Papers, including ‘Excellence in Schools’, ‘Excellence in the Cities’, ‘Pupil Learning Credits’ and ‘Education Action Zones’ (EAZs). He also proclaimed the creation of more specialist schools (1,000 to be opened by 2002), more faith schools, a Leadership Incentive Grant and a programme of Leading Edge Partnerships. With every publication, the most important task was to guarantee coverage by the media. Then, forgetting what Blair had said before the election, he promised to devolve power to local people and give schools more freedom from the LEAs and the national curriculum, as well as the right to receive extra money from business.
Ever since the original criticism of teachers and comprehensive schools, Blair and Blunkett had hardened their dislike of the Left’s ideology that all children are born with the same ability, while excellence
is merely destructive elitism. To neutralise the Left, Blair engaged in a battle of slogans about equality. He spoke about children benefiting from ‘equality of outcome’ and ‘equality of opportunity’. His weapons were targets and tests.
On 13 May 1997, English teachers were told by Blunkett to achieve ‘a dramatic improvement’ by raising standards for eleven-year-olds. By 2002, they were ordered, 80 per cent of this age group should be able to reach level four or the average mark of the Standard Assessment Test (SAT) examinations. Under the Tories in 1996, only 57 per cent of children had reached that level. Secondary schools were told that children at sixteen would be expected to achieve five ‘good’ A*–C passes at GCSE, well above what was achieved during the Tory era. To enforce the changes, Barber established a standards and effectiveness unit to name and shame failing schools. Blunkett said he would resign if the targets were not met. Tory pragmatism had been replaced by Stalinist five-year plans.
Blair approved the ruthlessness. Schools that failed the Ofsted test were given two years to improve or would be closed. Eighteen were ‘named and shamed’ during the first flood of announcements, initiatives and laws. They were to be reopened under the ‘Fresh Start’ programme, another initiative to transform run-down schools with new staff, refurbished buildings and a revised curriculum to match the children’s needs. In parallel, Blunkett announced the construction of new schools and the recruitment of 35,000 teachers. Pertinently, there was no mention of retraining or dismissing any of the existing 400,000 teachers, or of reforming the curriculum. For both Blair and Blunkett, confronting the teachers amounted to no more than boycotting their annual conference and giving head teachers the power to reward performance with special payments. Nearly every teacher in England, it later emerged, was rewarded with a payment.
Blair still worried about his pet concern. ‘Why are the schools in my constituency so awful?’ he asked Chris Woodhead during their first meeting soon after the election, with Blunkett in attendance. The
director of Ofsted was the media star whom Blair could neither ignore nor dismiss.
‘Give me 2,000 inspectors and I can solve a lot,’ Woodhead replied. ‘Schools need to be held to account.’ Inspection, he continued, would reveal faults in a school, but his task force was not permitted to tell teachers how to improve. Something more prescriptive was required. ‘Ofsted should be used in a constructive way, but the improvements must be forced upon schools by the department.’
‘Yes,’ said Blair, appearing to agree.
‘Teacher training’, explained Woodhead, ‘is the heart of the problem. We must change it.’
‘Yes, yes, yes,’ said Blair. ‘Let’s do that.’
‘Bad teachers and inadequate head teachers unable to control anarchy in classrooms are to blame. Bad discipline leads to academic decline.’
Blair nodded. ‘What’s the cure?’ he asked.
‘It’s bottom up,’ explained Woodhead. ‘Dismiss every bad teacher and head teacher. We’ve got to tackle the problem in each school, root out the enemy in every classroom. And then we’ll get rid of the malign influence of the LEAs. The LEAs are failing schools.’
‘You can’t inspect your way to success,’ interrupted Blunkett.
The exchange revealed an irreconcilable disagreement between Woodhead and Barber, Blunkett and Bichard. Woodhead, like the Tories, focused on the quality of every teacher and advocated that schools should be set free from the dead-hand control of local authority officials. Blair’s team disagreed.
Woodhead was puzzled. Did Blair not understand that his proposed improvements required a drastic change to the organisation and management of the educational system? ‘They want change and think they know how to do it,’ he thought, ‘but they have no real understanding how change happens.’ He did not conceal his irritation. Blair, he considered, was ‘being taken in by Blunkett’s and Barber’s whacky initiatives’.
At the meeting, Blair simply applauded Blunkett’s fanfare. In his desire for faster change, the details evoked little interest. In the days
that followed, he never summoned experts to consider the quality of Labour’s literacy and numeracy strategy. Many applauded his ‘quick grasp of detail’; they did not realise that his gift for headlines ignored the problem.
That autumn, Blunkett ordered primary schools to devote one hour every day to English and another to maths. The hours were hailed as New Labour triumphs. In reality, they had been first announced in 1995. However, the Tory programme was different from Michael Barber’s. The Tories had told teachers what to teach; Blair ordered schools
how
. The detailed maths curriculum instructed teachers on how to use every minute in an ‘interactive style’ for ‘whole class teaching’. The best and the worst pupils would be taught together.
Blair personally endorsed that directive despite two evident flaws: ‘whole class teaching’ forced the best pupils to progress at the rate of the worst; and, as Professor Margaret Brown of King’s College, London, one of Britain’s foremost experts on maths education, noted, ‘interactive teaching’ disregarded how children understood maths. Student teachers, warned Brown, were not learning how to teach maths.
In the rush of those early months, all these contradictions were easily overlooked. However, because education was so important, Blair appointed a special education adviser in Downing Street. His choice was Andrew Adonis, an Oxford graduate whose political activism first as a Liberal Democrat and then as a Labour councillor convinced him of the credibility of the Conservatives’ education policies. ‘If you want to reform education,’ Adonis told Blair, ‘you should make me the minister, not keep me in No. 10.’
A civil servant who overheard this conversation cautioned Blair, ‘Like so many bright things in No. 10, Adonis is full of ideas but without experience.’ Blair nodded. Whether he understood the criticism about a frenetic realist was hard to discern.
New Labour values continued to be wrapped in impenetrable jargon. Typically, Anthony Giddens, the architect of the Third Way, said, ‘The crisis of democracy comes from it not being democratic enough.’
Giddens’s way with language would be dissected by a group of permanent secretaries gathered at a seminar held by him at the British Academy on Pall Mall, during a fierce debate about the validity of the Third Way. At the end, the civil servants were divided about Giddens but still uniformly loyal to the government’s ambitions, symbolised by Blair’s vow to be ‘whiter than white’. After witnessing Tory sleaze, Blair’s pledge counted among Whitehall’s senior mandarins. The smokescreen of slogans served New Labour well, until unexpected revelations eclipsed his triumphalism.
Long before the election, Tony Blair had come to rely on Geoffrey Robinson. The former Jaguar executive, who lived in a suite at Grosvenor House on Park Lane, was an unashamed millionaire who since his election as an MP in 1976 had attached himself to Gordon Brown as an adviser on finance and industry. Both Brown and Blair had accepted hospitality in Robinson’s five homes around Europe and were grateful for his financial help in maintaining their parliamentary offices while in opposition. Neither suspected the murky source of his fortune nor knew that he had deposited millions of pounds in a secret offshore account.
To reward his help, Blair had agreed to Brown’s demand that Robinson be appointed paymaster general, a sinecure to be used as the chancellor required. Presented by Brown as a key member of the Treasury team, Robinson assumed he had the authority to roam across Whitehall as a problem-solver. His methods were unconventional. In telephone conversations he demanded loyalty and reminded officials, ‘We’re here for a long time, so why don’t you get on with me and do it our way.’ One Treasury official muttered, ‘It’s a sad day. We’ve never previously allowed spivs to set foot inside this building.’
Like others in Brown’s entourage (known as the ‘Hotel Group’ for enjoying the hospitality at Grosvenor House), Blair seized on Robinson’s invitation to spend part of his 1997 summer holiday at the millionaire’s neoclassical villa in Tuscany. He and his wife Cherie would then move on to a French chateau owned by a High Court judge. They
did not conceal from their friends a fondness for life as guests of the super-rich. The only requirement for a prime minister was to be certain that his host was honest. If Blair had made any enquiries, he would have discovered that Robinson failed his own test set in 1994 about those people who ‘just by hiding money in the right places can avoid paying tax altogether’. There were other skeletons in Robinson’s career that were about to rattle Blair’s ‘pure’ image.
Blair returned to London at the end of August 1997 in some despair. His holiday at Robinson’s Italian estate had been interrupted by an ugly spat caused by him leaving Peter Mandelson in charge of the government. Mandelson’s lofty self-portrayal as acting prime minister attracted newspaper headlines such as ‘Who’s in Charge?’ and accusations that the minister was hysterically rude. John Prescott had aggravated the problem on camera by holding a jar containing a crab next to his smirking face and addressing it as ‘Peter’. ‘Peter has let his ego run out of control,’ noted Alastair Campbell somewhat gleefully about a ‘disastrous’ summer, and temporarily stopped talking to Mandelson.
Blair walked into 10 Downing Street fretting that after his first hundred days he was at a loss what to do. The mood has changed, he told Brian Bender. The quality of his ministers, he complained, was dire. The bad ones, his officials had already noticed, were ignored. The only ones Blair could unhesitatingly rely upon were Brown and Mandelson. They at least understood how to sell New Labour. ‘No. 10’s bright new young things have brought huge enthusiasm,’ thought Bender.
Three days later, Princess Diana’s midnight death in Paris provided Blair with an unexpected opportunity to cure his frustration. Those hearing the news as they awoke in Britain and across much of the world on 31 August were deeply shocked by the senseless death of a beautiful icon. Many were traumatised by the pictures of the crashed car, the vigil outside the Paris hospital where Diana’s death was confirmed and the anticipated reaction after her two young boys were told the news.
During the morning, the nation’s emotions intensified. Britons needed a leader who could express the country’s grief. Neither the
Queen nor Prince Charles was prepared to speak. Blair was the natural alternative. After consulting Campbell, he composed his eulogy on a piece of paper and stood in front of the church in Trimdon, in his Sedgefield constituency. ‘She was the people’s princess and that’s how she will stay, how she will remain in our hearts and in our memories for ever.’ An outstanding performer delivering the perfect words with the appropriate gestures, Blair proved his genius as a communicator to mourners across the globe.
The Queen, by contrast, was criticised for failing to respond to the country’s mood by remaining in Balmoral to console the two boys rather than returning to London to lead the nation’s mourning. The symbol of her alleged insensitivity was the refusal to break protocol and raise Buckingham Palace’s flag to half-mast. Amid open and growing criticism of the monarch, Blair would claim the credit for persuading the Queen to return to London five days later, inspect the vast floral tribute outside Kensington Palace and address the nation on TV. The public’s anger dissipated, but the reason for it was not forgotten.
For Blair, the public criticism of the Queen validated his agenda to modernise the country. As he claimed credit for rescuing the monarchy from embarrassment, the rousing phrases tripped off his tongue: Britain as ‘the beacon to the world’; ‘Britain as the best’: ‘The glory of the British people’; and ‘We must be able to build from this a more compassionate Britain.’ His words offered no answers to the problems his country faced, but they did sprinkle stardust on their speaker. The media was briefed about the ‘deep involvement’ of Blair and Campbell in the funeral arrangements. The prime minister himself would deliver the reading on faith, hope and love from 1 Corinthians in Westminster Abbey. Blair was in his element and, according to Campbell, was praised by the Spencer family. ‘Tony Blair has this week taken on the mantle of Disraeli and Baldwin’, wrote Peter Riddell glowingly in
The Times,
‘as a bridge between the people and the Palace.’
The royal family was less grateful. Its relations with Blair had been ‘frosty’ from the outset and did not improve after he emerged from the
prime minister’s traditional annual September weekend at Balmoral to explain that the monarchy intended to ‘change and modernise’. The Queen was entitled to expect sound advice from her prime minister, but Blair failed to accept that it should remain secret and not be read by the royal family in the media, as briefed by Campbell.
‘Modernisation’ was the theme of his speeches during that month, both in attacking the trade unions and in enthusing the party at its annual conference. ‘Our destiny’, he said, was to modernise Britain and Europe. The conference was ecstatic, while the polls showed he enjoyed a 93 per cent approval rating.
Three months after this unexpected success, the frisson of joy within Downing Street had evaporated. Rivalries, jealousies and personal insecurities were plaguing Blair’s household. At the centre of the bickering was Cherie. Insecure about her unphotogenic appearance, she was sensitive to media criticism about her clothes and later about a pendant she wore to ward off evil spirits. Contrary to newspaper profiles, she was not the outstanding lawyer they proclaimed and was not pursuing a glittering career at the Bar; on the other hand, she was instinctively political and keen to participate in her husband’s government. But, if her ambitions were realised, she knew the consequences would be fatal, so she festered with mounting resentment over her exclusion by Blair’s entourage from the discussions about the affairs of state constantly echoing around her own home.
There were other problems. Money was a serious concern. Having agreed with Gordon Brown that the Blairs would use the larger flat in 11 Downing Street while the chancellor occupied the flat at No. 10, she had complained to Robin Butler about the shabby state of the accommodation. The carpet was worn, the kitchen old, her daughter’s mattress needed replacing and the stale smell of Ken Clarke’s cigars stuck to every fabric. ‘I won’t sleep in Ken Clarke’s bed,’ her husband told everyone, and spent his first night as prime minister in the brass bed brought from his home in Islington, which was soon after replaced by a new bed costing £3,500 that had been bought by Cherie’s close friend
and lifestyle adviser Carole Caplin. ‘And his lavatory is cracked!’ Cherie complained to Robin Butler, adding that she needed a new dustbin. In any other country, a leader’s request for household replacements would have been granted automatically, but Cherie’s haughty tone insulted Butler. Tact towards Downing Street officials, he noted, was alien to her. Unlike most of her predecessors, her prickly attitude towards the staff began the moment she entered Downing Street and dumped her bags at the entrance door, expecting someone to carry them upstairs. Her imperious manner sparked wry reminiscences about her raid on the No. 10 flat in the hours just before Brown arrived in Downing Street, ordering a sofa and a TV set to be pushed across the corridor into No. 11.
The Blairs had already irritated officials over the time and money wasted even in advance of their arrival. Just before the election, Robin Butler had spent hours with them poring over the floor plans of the Downing Street accommodation. Dissatisfied, the Blairs decided to remain in Islington. The police and the security agencies built guard huts around the house and ordered bombproof glass for their home, only for Cherie, with little grace, to change her mind. The pattern would become familiar.
Unflattering stories appeared in newspapers about her accompanying Blair to a summit abroad with a hairdresser and beautician. Irritated by the betrayal, Cherie fumed when the civil service asked for repayment of the costs. She also discovered the disadvantage of publicity. Each newspaper account describing her fixation with money would also mention her drunken, adulterous father, Tony Booth, a well-known, prickly actor who had abandoned his family when she was a child. Instead of remaining in the shadows like her predecessors, Cherie offered herself as a target. To avoid further embarrassment, Blair vetoed the new kitchen and offered to pay for the whole refurbishment.
Arguments about money were compounded by the simultaneous dispute between Cherie and Blair about Anji Hunter, Blair’s girlfriend during his teenage years, who had been an intimate assistant since 1994.
Cherie strenuously opposed Blair bringing Hunter into Downing Street. She had discovered an old collection of affectionate notes between him and his former flame in a cardboard box, and this sparked an irrational jealousy against the good-looking, well-turned-out blonde who, unlike herself, possessed ‘more than one dress’.
In a succession of attacks, including one ferocious outburst in front of Hunter, at the end of which the prime minister’s wife stormed out of Blair’s office, Cherie demanded that the assistant be fired. Blair pleaded that a prime minister was entitled to employ people he trusted. His misery was aggravated by Fiona Millar, Campbell’s partner, who worked as Cherie’s personal assistant. Millar had promised to ‘keep Cherie biography-free’ by rejecting media requests to interview the prime minister’s wife. In the current dispute, she was angry that Campbell supported Blair.
After a succession of exhausting arguments, Blair persuaded Cherie that Hunter be allowed to stay. Michael Levy, the party’s fund-raiser, was asked to broker a suitable job description for her with the civil service. (The irony lost on Blair was that Levy was worried about his own position: he hoped he would receive a peerage, but Mandelson was agitating against it.) Levy duly delivered the title ‘special assistant for presentation and planning’.
To assuage her humiliation, Cherie sent Hunter a note outlining the restrictive terms of her employment: ‘In so far as your job brings you into contact with me, that will be kept to a minimum … I trust this is clear.’ In the aftermath of Blair’s premiership, Cherie admitted to Levy that she had let her husband down.
Other personalities were causing aggravation. The failing marriage of Robin Cook had become spectacularly public when a newspaper exposed his adulterous relationship with his assistant; at welfare, Harriet Harman was proving to be a persistent irritant who ‘fussed and fretted’, in Blair’s words, while failing to deliver a scheme for welfare reform; and Charlie Whelan, Brown’s aggressive publicist, was ceaselessly machinating against Blair on his master’s behalf. Mandelson had attracted endless criticism, not least for his manipulation of the media
after leaking that Chris Patten was the subject of a security investigation thanks to his book of reminiscences describing his governorship of Hong Kong, a ruse aimed at diverting attention away from Cook’s problems. The spin rebounded. ‘Peter Mandelson seems to be suffering from midsummer madness verging on megalomania,’ sniped Francis Maude, the Tory frontbencher. The Camelot-like atmosphere of the first few weeks in power had truly evaporated.
In the aftermath of Princess Diana’s funeral, Gordon Brown, jealous about his colleague’s easy return to the spotlight, told Blair that he rejected the suggestion that the government should announce its intention to be admitted to the European Monetary Union (EMU). Brown knew how to poke a sensitive spot. Those who had discussed membership of the euro with Blair were surprised by his poor grasp of the technical consequences. In his desire to lead Europe, he had pledged to join the currency union, subject to a referendum. Briefed by Campbell, the
Financial Times
had for weeks reported that Britain was ‘moving towards’ becoming part of the EU’s inner group. Then, in mid-October, Blair gave Philip Webster of
The Times
an interview expressing his intention to join the euro in the near future. He expected Brown to continue his pre-election support, although both were uncertain whether the government could win the referendum. In the interview, Blair accepted that Britain would not join in the first phase in 1999, but thereafter the options were open. Webster, a reliable journalist, then spoke to Charlie Whelan. On Brown’s behalf, and without consulting the Cabinet, Whelan gave a contradictory briefing, with the result that
The Times
led with the headline ‘Brown Rules Out Single Currency for the Lifetime of This Parliament’.
‘I cannot believe what Gordon has done,’ exclaimed Blair in disbelief. ‘He has damaged our credibility in a way that could take ages to restore. And all over something where there is in fact no division.’ For the first time, he sensed the depth of Brown’s fury that he was not prime minister. But the chancellor was impregnable: there was no question of getting rid of him.