Authors: Tom Bower
On 27 December 2008, the Israeli army invaded Gaza in retaliation for rocket attacks launched by Hamas, the Palestinian group who had seized power the previous year. Over three weeks, nearly
1,400 Palestinians died and thousands of buildings were damaged or destroyed. At the beginning of the fighting, Blair was on holiday. Later, he stood on the sidelines, embarrassed by his isolation from Gaza but refusing to criticise Israel for any excess. His silence fed the Palestinians’ conviction that he was prejudiced, but at least he had instant entrée to Israel’s prime minister, unlike other Europeans. That access did not change after Olmert resigned in disgrace and, in February 2009, Benjamin Netanyahu was elected.
Blair and Netanyahu forged a bond of trust just as Obama, addressing a rally in Cairo in June, proposed new negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. Blair urged Netanyahu to reciprocate. Although in September the Israeli flew to New York to meet Abbas, Hillary Clinton and George Mitchell, who had been appointed to lead a new round of peace talks, Blair was again excluded from the process. Washington was decidedly uninterested in the Quartet. Robert Danin, dubbed ‘the Tranquilliser’, was replaced as Blair’s chief of staff by Firas Raad, a softly spoken member of the Jordanian royal family. With Washington’s declining support and Raad’s appointment, the Quartet had become more ineffective and even invisible. Blair was rarely seen in Jerusalem, other than to receive a $1 million award from an Israeli charity for his ‘unique, profound contribution to humanity, on a global scale’. The Palestinians were unimpressed, but Blair showed no concern about their disdain.
His priority was to complete his memoirs in anticipation of Labour’s defeat in the 2010 election. Finally, there was an opportunity to settle some scores against Brown and the media. He had survived their harassment, he wrote, thanks to him ‘trying to wear what was effectively a kind of psychological armour which the arrows simply bounced off, and to achieve a kind of weightlessness that allowed me, somehow, to float above the demonic rabble tearing at my limbs. There was courage in it and I look back at it now with pride. I was cornered, so it was either go down or fight.’
The combination of his lifestyle, the mounting number of fatalities among British soldiers in Afghanistan and his country’s wrecked
economy had unleashed unexpected vitriol among both Conservative and Labour Party members, and Blair’s defiance was no protection from his vulnerability over Iraq. The public were angry and, after the withdrawal of the last British troops, Brown could no longer resist the demand for a comprehensive inquiry. On the advice of Gus O’Donnell, the Cabinet secretary, its chairman could not be a judge: the general perception of Brian Hutton’s bias had discredited his profession. Accordingly, Brown, acting on O’Donnell’s advice, appointed John Chilcot. As a member of Robin Butler’s inquiry, Chilcot was well acquainted with the intelligence background and, O’Donnell reasoned, could master the remaining issues. To help him, O’Donnell selected Margaret Aldred as the committee’s secretary. With her Cabinet Office experience of the Iraq and Afghan wars, she was expected to guide the committee’s panel to the relevant files, manage the testimony of officials and supervise the writing of the report. The criterion for selecting the four remaining members of the committee was safety. The two respected historians, Martin Gilbert and Lawrence Freedman, had never upset the Establishment; Roderic Lyne, a retired diplomat, was never one to rock the boat; while Baroness Usha Prashar, an untalented quangoist, fulfilled the requirement of diversity. The five appointees were tasked with disentangling events since 1998.
Understanding the web of exchanges between Britain’s politicians, civil servants and the military required forensic investigation and astute analysis. The committee would also need to unravel the relationships between the British, American, Iraqi and European governments. Finally, the committee’s remit was to probe the secrecy spawned by sofa government. The nature of Blair’s exchanges with Bush, Boyce, Dearlove, Powell, Campbell and many others might be indicated in documents (although Blair had deliberately limited the number of written records), but only subtle questioning could discover whether he was culpable of deliberate deception.
To meet those demands, the five panellists would require the skills of jurisprudential examination. None had those gifts. Chilcot and Aldred
were uninspired officials; and while Gilbert, Freedman and Lyne were intelligent, none had ever distilled a similarly complex controversy into a pungent conclusion – and Freedman had drafted Blair’s Chicago speech. Their limitations would have been concealed if O’Donnell’s edict that the hearings be conducted in secret had survived. O’Donnell anticipated that Chilcot would adopt Butler’s efficient process and complete a satisfactory report by the end of 2010. That tidy plan was challenged by outraged MPs. Unable to resist their demand that the hearings should be held in public, Chilcot succumbed, and the ‘cover-up’ began to unravel on 24 November, when the first of 190 witnesses gave evidence.
By the time Blair appeared, on 29 January 2010, the treatment of the preceding eighty-three witnesses had exposed the panel as neither savvy nor well briefed. Chilcot had failed to appoint an experienced lawyer either to interrogate the witnesses or to present the official documents as evidence during their testimony. Without the cut and thrust of cross-examination to elicit explanations for the contradictions between the witnesses, no sensational revelations had emerged. Polite questions had produced bland replies. The tone of the hearings was familiar to those discussing history at a friendly dinner party in Notting Hill Gate.
Tanned and still youthful, Blair arrived to deliver a well-crafted narrative. He denied deceiving the nation for seventeen months after November 2001 over his intention for war, or making any private deal with Bush during 2002. ‘Mine was not a covert position but an open position,’ he said. During the meeting with Bush in April 2002 and thereafter, Blair told the inquiry, ‘It was always clear that there would be regime change.’ He insisted that his denial in July 2002 to the Commons Liaison Committee of any plan for war was not a lie. ‘We had not decided,’ he said, because he ‘could not be sure that the UN route would not work’.
Chilcot failed to refer to the discussion in Blair’s office on 23 July 2002, after Dearlove returned from Washington, when war was deemed certain. Two years later, Blair had told the Butler inquiry that during ‘July and August … I was increasingly getting messages saying … “are
you going to war?” and I was thinking “this is ridiculous”… we’ve not decided on military action, we’ve not decided on what we’re going to do’. Since giving that testimony, new evidence had emerged to contradict his assertion. Private letters between himself and Bush, recordings of the video conversations between the prime minister and president, and the internal messages between Bush’s senior advisers, based on their conversations with Blair’s confidants, all showed that Blair was committed to supporting an invasion the following year. Instead of confronting Blair, the panel’s questions did not undermine his own interpretation of Dearlove’s report, the errors in the dossier or his certainty about WMDs. He was not asked about the contradictions between John Scarlett’s private assessment that the intelligence on WMDs was ‘sporadic and patchy’, his own foreword to the dossier declaring that the JIC had established ‘beyond doubt’ that Saddam possessed WMDs, and his statement to the Commons that the intelligence was ‘extensive, detailed and authoritative’.
Helped by a meek panel, Blair escaped unchallenged after mistakenly asserting that he had ‘always’ favoured the ‘large-scale package’ for the military commitment. No one questioned his assertion that ‘we didn’t [commit troops] for influence’. No one asked about his failure to inform the Cabinet of his plans, or his endangering the military and the region by failing to make robust plans for the post-war occupation of Iraq. Instead, the quintet allowed Blair to set out a scenario based on selective hindsight rather than what he said at the time.
In Blair’s revised version, the world was changed by 9/11. Dictators like Saddam, armed with WMDs and advocating the ‘dangerous ideology’ of Islam, meant that in ‘my judgement you don’t take any risk on this issue’. The mistaken intelligence, he emphasised, was irrelevant. Cutting short Hans Blix’s hunt for WMDs was similarly immaterial. ‘Even if Blix had [had] another six months,’ said Blair, ‘it would have made no difference.’ Although Saddam did not possess WMDs in 2003, he had the ‘intent’ to possess them, possibly by 2010. That ‘long-term threat’ had to be prevented. The panel did not press Blair to produce
evidence for his conjecture and, in a familiar occurrence of not listening to his replies, failed to seize upon his unexpected revelation about deciding to go to war in January 2003 even without UN backing. That contradicted his original agreement with Peter Goldsmith – namely, that Britain could go to war only if the UN passed a second resolution.
The missed opportunities came to a climax with Blair’s own omission. At the end of the session, he was asked by Chilcot, ‘Is there any final comment, beyond those you’ve already made, that you wish to add before we close?’
‘No,’ replied Blair.
Behind him, the packed audience included the families of soldiers killed in Iraq. They had expected him to express regrets for the dead. His silence evoked angry protests. He was unconcerned. ‘You get to a position’, he told an interviewer, ‘where the criticism you get, you just have to live with. It’s the way it is. When you are someone like me, you create a lot of controversy one way or another. You just decide to do what you are going to do and let that speak for itself.’ He blamed his woes on the British media’s malice. Their preoccupation, he complained, was ‘how to belittle what I am doing, knock it down, write something bad about it. It’s not right. It’s not journalism. They don’t get me and they’ve got a score to settle with me. But they’re not going to settle it.’
His sense of victimhood was matched by that of Gordon Brown. The prime minister was also lashing out at those who refused to appreciate his talent. He had survived attempted Blairite coups, first by Patricia Hewitt and Geoff Hoon, then later by James Purnell, a junior minister who resigned from the Cabinet and appealed to Brown also to quit ‘to give our party a fighting chance of winning [the election]’. At the last moment, Purnell was abandoned by David Miliband, who remained foreign secretary. Blair watched his legacy disintegrate. His refusal to nurture successors had left the party slipping towards the abyss. His one achievement was to help Gloria de Piero, a dark-haired TV presenter and a close friend, become the favoured candidate to succeed Hoon as an MP.
Labour’s defeat in the 2010 election left Blair depressed. His judgement about Brown had been confirmed. More painful was his own exclusion from the political debate. He had much to say, but few wanted to hear. His alienation from Britain was confirmed when he was not invited to the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton, and by the Queen’s unprecedented refusal to award the Order of the Garter to a former prime minister. Her unease over Blair’s conduct after Princess Diana’s death had turned to general suspicion towards him. But then Blair had made his choice between obeying the Establishment’s rules and pursuing his own personal enrichment, and that choice had consequences.
Frustrated in Britain and Israel, Blair found his strength was his permanent optimism about the future. His opportunities to become rich appeared to be limitless. The downside was that, as the number of people employed by his charities and businesses increased to over 150, he was under pressure to generate yet more income. Among his new clients was Vinod Khosla, an American billionaire associated with Bill Clinton’s controversial green-energy investments. As a ‘face for hire’, Blair made appearances at receptions to promote the ‘green’ ventures, until the businesses crashed and Khosla lost hundreds of millions of dollars. Next, he accepted a contract from PetroSaudi, a newly formed group led by a colourful group of directors who paid him £41,000 a month and 2 per cent commission on any deals he brokered with Chinese officials. That arrangement was also short-lived, with PetroSaudi being accused of bribing Malaysian politicians. Almost inevitably, Blair accepted Richard Branson’s invitations to visit Necker, part of the British Virgin Islands, but eventually discovered that the tycoon refused to reimburse him for advice.
For those prepared to pay, Blair seemed unconcerned by controversy. Spurred on by J. P. Morgan and others interested in Libya’s oil money, Blair had visited Colonel Gaddafi six times during the two years since he had left Downing Street. Saif Gaddafi, the dictator’s son, facilitated Blair’s relationship with his father and was rewarded, after paying £1.5 million to the university, with a place and eventually a PhD at the London School of Economics. That quid pro quo would be
condemned by an official inquiry and the LSE’s director would resign.
Building on her husband’s new relationship with Gaddafi, in April 2010, at a dinner in her Buckinghamshire home, Cherie received a substantial contribution to her Foundation for Women from Oxand, a French consultancy that was pursuing business in Libya. Neither Cherie nor her husband appeared to be troubled by possible conflicts of interest.
In November 2010, Blair arrived at Nnamdi Azikiwe airport in central Nigeria on a private jet with Kate Gross and Catherine Rimmer, his most trusted staff, and his protection officers. He was met by Wiebe Boer, the representative of Tony Elumelu, a local multimillionaire banker who had set up a foundation to promote entrepreneurship. At Blair’s suggestion, Elumelu had agreed to co-fund with Bill Gates the employment of two AGI advisers for the Nigerian government and one for Liberia. Elumelu’s interest was not entirely philanthropic. He hoped that a close relationship with Blair would open doors for his business interests in Europe and America. Similarly, Blair relied on the banker to ease his ambitions in Nigeria.
Elumelu had arranged for Blair to meet President Goodluck Jonathan. Blair was to offer the services of AGI and the Faith Foundation to reconcile Muslims and Christians, especially in the war-stricken north of the country. After an intelligence briefing at the British embassy, Blair had requested what the president’s staff called a ‘one-on-one audience’. Jonathan’s staff regarded the private meeting as ‘Blair satisfying his ego, to feel a sense of importance in the intimacy’. After the meeting, Blair was joined by Jamie Dimon. The American banker was asked by Jonathan to invest in a national power grid. He declined, but he did offer to manage Nigeria’s sovereign wealth fund. No other bank was asked to tender for the profitable chore and J. P. Morgan’s bid was accepted.
Dimon was not present when Wiebe took Blair for an informal Sunday lunch at the presidential palace. In the garden, surrounded by the president’s entourage, Blair explained the potential benefits of their relationship. ‘When you become president,’ said Blair, ‘your experience
is the lowest and your approval is the highest. When you finally leave, your approval ratings will be the lowest but your experience will be the highest.’ Laughing, Jonathan praised Blair’s wisdom, especially his advice about ‘time management’ – the simple task of scheduling an effective day’s work. As the banter continued, Blair said, ‘You know, one of the conditions of aid will be that you must give gays their rights in Nigeria.’ The foreign minister jabbed his finger at Blair: ‘OK, but we will only sell you our oil if you in Britain and America agree to allow polygamy. If you don’t allow polygamy, we will black you.’ Amid the laughter, Blair stopped arguing his case.
From Nigeria, he flew with Dimon to Sierra Leone and then Monrovia, Liberia. The presidents of both West African countries had small AGI teams advising them. J. P. Morgan invested in a project in Liberia, while Ian Hamman, one of the bank’s mineral experts, was mining diamonds in Sierra Leone. The intertwining of Blair’s charity and commercial work was irrefutable.
Dotted throughout his travel were further well-paid speeches, including an address in Orlando to the International Sanitary Supply Association, manufacturers of lavatory cleaners. During his speech, Blair confessed that ‘What is rather shocking is that I have a so much better understanding of the Israeli/Palestinian issue than I did when I was prime minister. That’s just the way it is, I guess.’ He did not mention that his visits to Jerusalem had fallen off just as freedom protests erupted in the Arab world. Starting in Tunisia, the demand for democracy had spread to Egypt, Libya, Syria and down the Gulf. Blair shared Hillary Clinton’s pleasure when President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt resigned, and believed that, eight years after the toppling of Saddam, the Arabs had finally seized the opportunities provided by his ideology of liberal intervention. His ‘better understanding’ failed to predict the obvious: that Mubarak would be replaced by an extremist Muslim Brotherhood government that would destabilise Egypt, Libya and the Middle East.
In February 2011, after failing to persuade Gaddafi to cease his brutal suppression of an uprising, Blair asked David Cameron to grant the
dictator safe haven. The prime minister refused. Blair then urged Gaddafi to end the violence by leaving the capital. ‘If you have a safe place to go, then you should go there because this will not end peacefully unless that happens.’ He warned the colonel that he was approaching ‘the point of no return’. Having lured Gaddafi to abandon extremism and come in from the outside, he could not deliver any protection, and the Libyan leader was killed by a mob in October 2011. Blair was powerless despite Hillary Clinton’s email about his efforts for the Quartet: ‘You are truly doing “the Lord’s work” but not sure even He could get it done.’
The Israelis had not shared his jubilation about the Arab Spring. On the contrary, American negotiations for a settlement, based on the Palestinians recognising a ‘Jewish state’ in return for Israel agreeing to the creation of a Palestinian state and a freeze on building more settlements on the West Bank, had foundered amid bitter recriminations between Benjamin Netanyahu and Mahmoud Abbas.
In July 2011, with Hillary Clinton’s blessing, Blair began shuttling between Jerusalem and Ramallah to persuade Abbas to recognise a ‘Jewish state’ in order to form the basis for a peace agreement. In reply, Abbas threatened to appeal to the UN to recognise Palestine as a state. A successful vote at the UN would wreck any chance of an agreement with Israel. Abbas rejected Blair’s entreaties, which only increased Netanyahu’s belligerence. Abbas urged Blair to protest publicly. Blair refused. Even one of Olmert’s advisers advised him to reconsider: ‘You’ve got to call a press conference and complain about Bibi. You’re being played by him. He’s wrapping you up in his promises and lies, and you don’t say a word.’ The adviser had one more go – ‘You’re like the Pope. You have no [military] divisions except media attention’ – yet still Blair refused to confront Netanyahu. In Ramallah, his stock fell. ‘What’s Blair’s value?’ Abbas asked, and refused to meet him again before flying to the UN in New York. ‘Useless, useless, useless,’ was his spokesman’s verdict on the envoy.
In September, Blair gathered with Hillary Clinton and other players at the Carlyle Hotel in New York. His haunted look reflected his
acknowledgement of failure. ‘We’d gone from bad to worse,’ recalls one of the participants, ‘and then the criticism of Blair really started.’ His trips away from Jerusalem increased, sometimes lasting for nearly two months.
In his absence, his staff moved from the Colony Hotel to a seven-storey building in an expensive area of east Jerusalem. Since both Washington and Brussels refused to finance the increasing cost of Blair’s operation, he had arranged for the Kuwaiti government to secretly provide money. The transfer of the cash, Blair admitted to the State Department, required ‘bending some budget rules’, which had in turn caused ‘internal chaos’ in Kuwait. The Kuwaitis were not financing a success: Blair was making no progress in improving the Palestinian economy. A plan to create an industrial zone had been abandoned, while British Gas’s intention to explore off the Gaza coast was stymied by the Palestinian refusal to prevent the profits being spent by Hamas.
During his brief visits, Blair socialised with his new friends and regularly met Ehud Barak and Netanyahu. He never revealed to his staff what was discussed. His frequent access to the Israeli prime minister suggested that he wielded remarkable influence, but in reality he underestimated the complexities and concealed his impotence by radiating self-confidence.
To his good fortune, the paralysis in Jerusalem passed unnoticed among his new clients, including Nursultan Nazarbayev, the president of Kazakhstan. Ever since the break-up of the Soviet Union, this one-time satellite state had become a credible target for British investors seeking contracts from a country whose fortunes depended upon a consortium of Western corporations extracting oil from beneath the Caspian Sea. In 2000, Blair had welcomed Nazarbayev to Downing Street, allowing Kazakhstan’s first president, elected in 1991 as the only candidate with 91.5 per cent of the votes, to hold baby Leo. Over the following years, Whitehall had supported the dictator’s bid to transform his peasant economy, although the new wealth had spawned corruption and violence. To cement relations, Prince Andrew was dispatched
to promote British industry. The prince forged financial relationships with controversial Kazakhs, which damaged his credibility, and, in the same vein, Blair encouraged Dick Evans, the former chairman of BAE, to become chairman of Samruk, the Kazakh state holding company for most of the country’s industries.
Morality did not appear to be a consideration. The issue of whether to deal with corrupt dictators, all intolerant of minorities and opponents, across Asia, the Arab world and Africa was a familiar one for Western governments. Their justification was that self-denial was expensive and ‘opening up’ these societies offered an eventual prospect of democracy. Some considered that Blair’s special status denied him that defence. His speech in Chicago in 1999 had advocated intervention against dictators, but his acceptance in 2011 of Nazarbayev’s lucrative offer of employment indicated that those principles had been forgotten. The embarrassment followed soon after. Kazakh security forces in a regional town shot dead fourteen unarmed protesters and wounded over sixty others. There were also reports of opponents being tortured. ‘I don’t dismiss the human rights stuff,’ Blair said. ‘These are points we make. There’s a whole new generation of administrators there who are reformers, and we’re working with them.’ In return for his fee, he also appeared in ‘In the Stirrups of Time’, an hour-long video extolling Nazarbayev in which Blair, sitting beside the president, repeatedly eulogised his new client. Alastair Campbell and Tim Allen, a former Downing Street spokesman who had set up Portland PR, were also contracted to promote Nazarbayev. In each case, the incentive appeared to be money.
Similar considerations led Blair to Conakry, the capital of Guinea, another impoverished West African dictatorship infected by corruption. He arrived in 2011 to offer advice to Alpha Condé, the president who had wrested power from the military but was intolerant of the opposition parties. Guinea had become the target of rival tycoons eager to develop the country’s rich mineral resources. Among those interested were Mubadala of Abu Dhabi and J. P. Morgan’s mining specialists in
West Africa. As before, Blair denied any link between his presence and his paymasters. Rather, he explained, he had arrived to outline the benefits of AGI. He was following in the footsteps of billionaire investor George Soros, whose better-funded international advisory team was offering a similar service. To avoid using his own money, Blair obtained funds from the US aid programme.
By then, the value of his advice was being challenged, not least in Kuwait. His expensive report, ‘Kuwait Vision 2035’, had been greeted with derision by those who read a lengthy repetition of Kuwait’s well-known problems and the presentation of impractical solutions. And then Ismail Khudr al-Shatti, the project’s prime supporter, abruptly departed from the government, terminating the venture. Blair’s personal investment in the project had been so limited that the sixty-five staff involved did not notice him showing much concern about the scorn the report received. To save face, the Kuwaitis buried the bad news.
Blair’s frenetic journeys – often in a black Bombardier Global Express business jet dubbed Blair Force One – between West Africa, the Gulf, Kazakhstan, Israel, China, America and occasionally Britain sustained his divorce from reality. Accompanied by his protection officers, he worked from his old Downing Street red box, trusting his team to prevent any information about his activities getting out. Altogether, his constant deal-fixing, which saw him flitting across the globe between various five-star hotels owned by the Four Seasons group, and lucrative speech-making created an unusual backdrop to his bid to become president of the European Council in 2012.
To establish his credentials, Blair set himself apart from his commercial life. ‘I’m basically a public-service person,’ he explained on BBC television. Two-thirds of his time, he said, was spent doing pro bono work, and the rest was devoted to earning enough to deal with his expanding payroll. To succeed, Blair needed to douse the European federalists’ criticism of him being ‘Euro-lite’ and being burdened by the unforgiving baggage of Iraq. With his familiar self-confidence, he assumed that he could ignore the antipathy towards Britain’s refusal to
join the euro or the Schengen agreement on common frontiers. Instead of initiating an open campaign for the presidency and spelling out his vision, he denied that he was seeking the job, while quietly expecting that it would simply be offered to him.