Tony's Ten Years

Memories of the Blair Administration

Adam Boulton

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781847392725
• eBook ISBN: 9781471128295
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Taking the events of Blair's last hundred days as his launching pad for captivating snapshots of key moments in his premiership, Adam Boulton follows Tony Blair intimately through his final day in office. The veteran political journalist witnesses the so-called 'Blairwell Tour' as the caravan travels from Westminster to Washington, Iraq, South Africa, the EU, the G8, Northern Ireland, the Sedgefield constituency, Chequers to the final farewell and beyond. Boulton traces from these celebrations back to the key incidents, achievements and mistakes of the Prime Minister's ten years in power. And he draws on his first hand experience of them to measure Tony Blair against his immediate predecessors, Margaret Thatcher and John Major, and the rival who succeeded him, Gordon Brown. Boulton has followed the Blair story intimately from 1983 to the present. He provides fresh and fascinating insights into the Blair-Brown conflict, the decision making that led to Britain joining the US invasion of Iraq, the pressures on the Blair family, and the often fraught and febrile relationship between Number 10 and the media. MEMORIES OF THE BLAIR ADMINISTRATION isauthoritative, highly readable and revealing.

1

POWER

1 MAY

Within the next few weeks I won’t be prime minister of this country.

Tony Blair, Edinburgh, 1 May 2007

Marking the decade

The ten years were up. But still nobody knew exactly when they would be over for Tony Blair.

Precisely a decade ago there had been no doubt. Even before the results were declared in 1997, there had been no false modesty, no need to prevaricate – everyone knew Tony Blair was about to become prime minister. But on May Day 2007 the only known fact was that Blair had promised the previous September to be gone within a year. The general assumption was that he would give some indication of his plans around his tenth anniversary in office because in practice he would have to step down before the approaching long summer parliamentary recess. The Labour Party would then have time to elect a new leader before the annual party conference in September 2007.

A decade earlier 71 per cent of eligible British voters had gone to the polls. Tony Blair had spent 1 May 1997 in his Sedgefield constituency, briefly crossing the playing fields in Trimdon with his family to vote before returning home to plan for the future and prepare for government – two activities beloved of rising politicians. This amounted to planning and appointing his cabinet team over the phone from Myrobella, his constituency base, aided by Anji Hunter and Alastair Campbell, and bickering privately with his wife, Cherie, about who would have, or not have, which role in his equally important ‘kitchen cabinet’.

By definition a general election is a public event, with the outcome declared within hours. Usually departures from Downing Street are sudden and brutal, the voters’ or party’s sentence of execution duly carried out without appeal on the doorstep of Number 10. Not this time. Uniquely, Tony Blair managed to take control of his own exit timetable and to divorce it from any electoral process. He also chose to keep the precise date a secret.

Even on this milestone day Blair decided to keep the nation, and more particularly the media, guessing. The advance spin from his advisers was that this would be a working day like any other with no news conference or public celebrations to mark what had been achieved during Blair’s decade in power. So Britain’s veteran prime minister pretended that 1 May 2007 was indeed a working day like any other. He began in London before moving on to Scotland for a campaigning visit. The prime minister had long fallen out with the ‘24/7 media’, as he would make explicit in his Reuters speech a month later. He had no desire to be seen feeding ‘the feral beast’, even though ‘Blair Decade Special’ supplements were pouring from the presses and airwaves alike.

The prime minister made the announcement of his departure bathetically in the least combative and most inconsequential forum he could find – the breakfast television studio of GMTV, just across the river from Downing Street on London’s South Bank. Fiona ‘Fifi’ Phillips (a sometime Chequers dinner-party guest along with her husband, Martin Frizzell, editor-in-chief of the show) and her firm-jawed co-presenter, Andrew Castle, were informed, ‘I’ll make an announcement next week.’ This all but non-announcement was significant for two reasons: it made it clear that Blair did not plan to announce his departure when the local election results came in that Friday; it also relaxed Gordon Brown.

Blair’s statement that he would begin the countdown to his departure in the middle of May made it certain that power would indeed be handed over by the time Parliament rose in July. Some Blairites hankered for delay, postulating that he could linger over the summer and yet still honour his commitment to be gone by the start of the Labour Party conference at the end of September. But even the dilatory Labour leadership timetable would not stretch from May to September. Brown now knew that he would be prime minister before July was out: the public statement of intention long demanded by him had finally been made on the GMTV sofa.

Just to make sure that there would be no further misunderstanding with Brown, Blair gave his clearest pronouncement so far on his succession later that day in Scotland. His campaigning for Labour candidates to the Holyrood Parliament was overshadowed when he told his audience of party activists in Edinburgh, ‘Within the next few weeks I won’t be the prime minister of this country. In all probability, a Scot will become prime minister of the United Kingdom . . . That’s someone who has built one of the strongest economies in the world and who, as I’ve always said, will make a great prime minister.’

Since announcing his intention to be gone within a year at the Labour conference in Manchester in the autumn of 2006, Blair had refused to repeat his endorsement of Brown – ‘he would make an excellent prime minister’ – that had punctuated their tortured relationship for more than ten years. In Manchester it would have been difficult to back Brown, thanks to the tale of Cherie Blair’s overheard stage whisper against the chancellor, even if Tony Blair had felt inclined to do so after that September’s attempted coup against him orchestrated by Brown allies. But now, on the day he took the decisive step towards the exit, he was finally giving his clear endorsement, while sticking to his pledge not actually to name his successor.

There was, however, one other Scotsman still notionally in the frame as a potential challenger to Brown. The home secretary, John Reid, had not yet officially withdrawn from possible contention. Reid was working class, Catholic, populist and self-confident compared to the withdrawn, cautious, Presbyterian, middle-class Brown, and the two men had a long-standing political enmity. It seemed implausible that Reid could ever have mustered the support to beat Brown, but he was a ‘big beast’ who would have made the leadership a real contest. Reid, however, had just signalled that he was unlikely to be a candidate. In a coded utterance on the BBC’s Sunday AM just two days before, he had pleaded for party unity: ‘there will not be a fracturing beyond this election, there will be a coming together of the Labour leadership’. The next day Tessa Jowell, the culture secretary, gave an uncharacteristically pointed speech calling for an end to tribalism. The mobile phone lines had been busy and now Jowell and Reid, the two most prominent standard bearers of Blairism still active, were admitting that they would carry his torch but not challenge the transition from Blair. A week or so later, the offer of the chairmanship of his beloved Celtic Football Club convinced John Reid that he would spend much of the Brown era away from Westminster, and certainly out of the cabinet frontline.

In the end – because nobody ever really trusted what anyone else said in private – the manner of Tony Blair’s departure was decided in the way New Labour had always done business – a double bind in which private negotiations and understandings were backed up by public declarations from which inferences could be drawn.

The problem for Blair and his advisers was that the ‘ten years’ anniversary, which they wanted to celebrate, had become unavoidably linked to his departure, which they naturally wanted to play down. After Iraq, and with tricky regional elections underway, they were also aware that there was a limited public appetite for ten years’ jubilation. The compromise was the business-as-usual, taking-it-all-in-my-stride demeanour forced on the prime minister.

Framing the legacy

In truth, both Blair and the Blairites did not really want the moment to pass unnoticed or unspun. Much thought had in fact been given to the exit strategy.

As far back as the spring of 2006, Ben Wegg-Prosser, the head of the Strategic Communications Unit and former aide to Peter Mandelson, had produced a memo, ‘Reconnecting with the Public – a New Relationship with the Media’, with detailed proposals for Blair’s activities during the ‘final phase’. This document was subsequently leaked to the Daily Mirror at the beginning of that September, coinciding with the attempted coup against Blair by some MPs.

The document from BWP, also known as ‘Benjie’, was much mocked for its hubris and concentration on presentation: ‘We know what works well: strong policy focused events which have substance, striking pictures, words from TB and real people involved.’ Wegg-Prosser was ambitiously proposing that ‘TB . . . needs to go with the crowds wanting more. He should be the star who won’t even play that last encore,’ after a series of nationwide visits during which ‘he needs to embrace open spaces, the arts and businesses, he needs to be seen to be travelling on different forms of transport. He needs to be seen with people who will raise eyebrows . . . carefully positioned as someone who while not above politics, is certainly distancing himself from the political village.’

Escaping from the village was also tied to the media opportunities that the outgoing prime minister was to embrace. Political journalists were to be avoided, replaced by disc jockeys and appearances on such shows as the BBC’s sanctimonious Songs of Praise, and Blue Peter, its flagship children’s programme. Blair’s appearance on Blue Peter had already been filmed by the time the contents of the memo became known, and the BBC’s younger viewers subsequently learned, amongst other trivia, that the prime minister’s nickname for Downing Street was ‘The Tardis’, given its surprising size. But the ‘Vicar’, as Private Eye dubbed him, never made it to Songs of Praise. The producers had insisted that it would have to be a joint appearance with Gordon Brown and that had proved impossible to arrange.

Wegg-Prosser also betrayed some important anxieties about Blair’s ‘place in history’. Iraq was ‘the elephant in the room, let’s face up to it . . . Most importantly, are we up for it? Is TB up for it?’ There seemed to be even some question as to how prominent concrete domestic achievements could or should be in ‘the triumph of Blairism’: ‘his genuine legacy is not the delivery, important though that is, but the dominance of New Labour ideas’.

Number 10 sought to play down the leak, claiming that ‘nobody senior’ had seen or acted upon the memo. Initially no one would admit authorship of it. The Daily Mirror carefully spread the blame: ‘among the Downing Street aides involved with the document are Ruth Turner, Dave Hill, Liz Lloyd, John McTernan’. Philip Gould (by now Lord Gould), Blair’s public opinion analyst, was also fingered. He had previous form, having authored another embarrassing leaked memo in early 2000 titled ‘Getting the Right Place in History and Not the Wrong One’.

However, Wegg-Prosser cheerfully acknowledged his work shortly after he left Number 10, a few weeks before Blair’s own departure, to pursue internet business opportunities in Moscow with his Russian wife, Yulia. In the meantime, his proposals bore some fruit. Blair cut down his contacts with the pack of political journalists. His last monthly news conference took place on 17 April 2007, more than two full months before he quit. Instead a team was set up, comprising Wegg-Prosser, Deputy Chief of Staff Liz Lloyd and political researcher Catherine Rimmer, to manage the so-called ‘Legacy Project’ to ensure that Blair’s exit from office was given coverage on sympathetic terms. They organised special access for selected well-known journalists and writers including Martin Amis for the Guardian; Robert Crampton for The Times; Roger Cohen, the London-born New York Times columnist, writing for Men’s Vogue (covering the American market); Will Hutton and Andrew Rawnsley for Channel 4; and David Aaronovitch for the BBC. But even these privileged few were kept at arm’s length. This satisfied the Blair team’s desire to control, but it did not get their message across for them.

Opposition leaders, however, were ready with their own tenth anniversary tributes on 1 May. While on the local election trail, David Cameron impudently raised the state of the National Health Service in a speech at a hospital in Crewe:

‘Tony Blair’s time as prime minister started with great hope but ended with disappointment. It is clear he has done some good things like make the Bank of England independent. But ten years ago he promised “twenty-four hours to save the NHS”. Today, community hospitals face closure, the NHS faces more job losses than ever, maternity units are under threat, it is difficult to find an NHS dentist and junior doctors are being treated appallingly. Tony Blair will be remembered as a successful party leader but not as a good prime minister.’

The former Liberal Democrat leader, Paddy Ashdown, who had been so disappointed after 1997 by Blair’s unconsummated flirtations with partnership, was scarcely more generous: ‘Tony Blair will go down as a good, but not great prime minister.’ As his diaries showed, Ashdown had been seduced by Blair’s talk of a ‘progressive century’ during which the parties of the centre-left – Labour and the Liberal Democrats – could combine to keep the Conservatives out of power. In 1997 Blair would have been prepared to do the deal, but Labour won too big. With a majority of 179 it was simply not possible, even for Blair, to tell his party that they needed to share power. In deference to Ashdown and Roy Jenkins (the Labour cabinet minister turned SDP founder turned Liberal Democrat whom Blair regarded as a mentor), the prime minister would eventually commission Jenkins to make recommendations on electoral reform – only to leave them not taken up. Even if it was not reciprocated in the end, Blair’s admiration for Ashdown remained warm. He backed him as UN high representative in the former Yugoslavia and praised his work there. But even after Blair’s resignation Ashdown shrunk from the Labour embrace, declining Gordon Brown’s offer to make him Northern Ireland secretary in his first cabinet.

If the record was to be put straight and the Blair ten years commemorated properly, the Blairites always knew they would have to do the job themselves. Following the Wegg-Prosser leak disaster, Blair had begun to outline his own summary of achievements. As so often before, he worked on this document by hand during spare hours at Chequers and then had it typed up and circulated to his advisers – both those formally still on the payroll and those, like Campbell and Hunter, now off it. In the early days this would all have been done by faxes, reams of which were fired off most Sunday evenings, but now email certainly did its bit to save the environment or, at any rate, fax paper.

A draft circulated in April 2006 contained sixteen points. The introductory paragraph was a first-hand exposition of the paradoxes and reconciliations which drove Blair’s politics:

1. A basic philosophy – the new Labour essence – that sought to overcome the traditional right–left divide ie the right understands the economy, the left, social justice. In place of this, recognising that the development of human capital is key, New Labour put economic prosperity and social justice as partners not opposites. We supported aspiration and compassion. This changed the basic parameters of British politics with the Tories having to say the same.

The same philosophical juxtapositions recurred in the remaining points, even as he tried to reconcile seemingly opposing approaches. Tony Blair was convinced of his own righteousness and asserted it provocatively. The document showed that the verbless sentences which made up so much of his public rhetoric were indeed his natural style of self-expression.

2. A nation, open, at ease with globalisation, prepared to compete on its merits not its history.

3. Public Service Reform. We recognised the under-investment but combined the values of public service – equal access and equity – with the virtues of the market – breaking up the monolith, diversity of supply, consumer choice, flexibility.

4. We have redrawn the boundaries of the liberty debate: socially liberal, pro gay rights, anti-discrimination; but hard and intolerant of anti-social behaviour and lawlessness. People may question the success in implementing the policy but the essential liberty/security paradigm is widely accepted.

5. A society at ease with itself. Immigration an issue but still racially and ethnically tolerant. Minimum wage. Gay rights.

6. Economic Prosperity for all, through stability, high employment and bringing children and pensioners out of poverty. Good relationship with business as well as brining [sic] in work/life balance changes. New agenda on social exclusion.

7. Massive constitutional reform. Devolution. London. FOI [Freedom of Information]. ECHR [European Court of Human Rights]. Party funding. First House of Lords reform etc.

8. Northern Ireland – a changed part of the UK.

9. A new doctrine of interventionism in international policy: Kosovo; Sierra Leone; Iraq; Afghanistan, on the one hand; Africa, climate change, Palestine, on the other. An agenda in which hard and soft power has been combined. Again, it may not always have been to people’s liking, but it was and is a coherent and radically different approach to international relations.

10. We took Britain’s two key alliances – Europe and America – and kept them both strong. In Europe the UK went from the Beef War and isolation, to leading the debates on European defence, economic reform, energy, enlargement, and did the budget deal. The American alliance has been very controversial. But no doubt of its strength. And eg on G8 Gleneagles summit; WTO; or MEPP [Middle East Peace Process], has given UK a chance to influence policy.

11. A renaissance in British cities.

12. Science – stem cell, bioscience and the new creative industries. All new British success stories. Art and culture flourishing.

13. Africa and climate change. Real progress on two major issues, G8 Gleneagles set a new standard in international negotiation.

14. Party transformed from election losing (4 in a row) to winning (3 in a row). Cl IV changed governing philosophy, our Bad Godesberg. Became a modern social democratic party.

15. Britain became definably, in many different facets, a modern country, finally over the Empire hangover, able to combine modern attitudes with great traditions (monarchy etc) in a way that gave Britain a new image for new times eg.

16. The Olympics!

Blair’s catalogue of achievements was manifestly designed for eventual public consumption. He grasped for ‘eye-catching initiatives’ such as cities, science, culture and the Olympics without offering corroborative details and didn’t even bother to stake claims about education and health, which got barely a mention. Leaving Scotland and Wales out of ‘massive constitutional reform’, while including the never-loved Freedom of Information Act...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise for Adam Boulton and Tony’s Ten Years
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• Preface to the Paperback Edition
• Foreword
• 1 Power
• 2 Devolution
• 3 Home Front
• 4 War
• 5 World Stage
• 6 ‘Feral Media’
• 7 Europe
• 8 The Private Man
• 9 Brown
• 10 Exit Prime Minister
• Epilogue: Sacred and Profane
• Diary of the Last 100 Days and Beyond
• Acknowledgements
• Index