A ROUTE BACK TO BRITISH POLITICS

‘The party people, exiled for years in the Siberia of Party drudgery far from the centre of government, suddenly re-emerge in the halls of the Kremlin with renewed self-importance.’

– TONY BLAIR ON THE LABOUR PARTY IN HIS AUTOBIOGRAPHY, A JOURNEY.

Tony Blair felt the party forced him out to make room for Gordon Brown. Nonetheless, Labour was the political vehicle that had taken him to the top, and, if he wished to continue to be involved in British politics, it was the only vehicle he could credibly use.

But it was awkward. His autobiography, A Journey, records that he once wrote to the then Liberal leader Paddy Ashdown of ‘our cavalier attitude towards our parties’. It also records that, in order ‘to circumvent’ his party, ‘what I had done was construct an alliance between myself and the public.’ He claimed a direct emotional attachment with the people, which declined towards the end of his premiership: ‘For me and for the people, this was sad. My relationship with them had always been more intense, more emotional, if that’s the right word, than the normal relationship between leader and nation.’ And he summed up his view of the party workers who had made his premiership possible in these words: ‘The party people, exiled for years in the Siberia of Party drudgery far from the centre of government, suddenly re-emerge in the halls of the Kremlin with renewed self-importance.’1

And he was by then a very divisive figure in Labour Party politics. There are those who almost idolise him, whom we will call the Blairites, and there are those who loathe him; and there are not many in between. In 2007 the supporters of the new Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, mostly came into the category of those who loathe Blair, for that year the Blair–Brown wars reached their crescendo.

However bad you think the Blair–Brown wars were, they were probably worse, and they are still going on. In 2013 Brown’s one-time spin doctor Damien McBride published his memoirs, and it was remarkable to see how quickly they could be reignited, with Blair and Brown supporters using the occasion to fight their old battles in public one more time.

Blair himself hasn’t forgotten or forgiven. There’s a brief sentence – blink and you could miss it – in his autobiography that speaks eloquently of his still-burning fury and resentment. Writing of the very early 1980s, before he became an MP, he says he wrote occasional articles for the New Statesman, ‘then a serious political magazine.’2 Why that intrusive, sneering little word ‘then’? Because when Blair was leader, the NS was bought by Geoffrey Robinson, and was said to have moved into the Brown camp (though it wasn’t obvious from its content). That one little word that he couldn’t resist tells you that his resentment at the magazine’s apostasy is still red and raw.

Blair privately hoped that a Blairite might stand successfully against Brown in 2007; his old ally Peter Mandelson, then European Trade Commissioner, made it publicly clear that he considered Brown unfit to be Prime Minister. Charles Clarke and John Reid were telling Blair not to hurry out. Both saw themselves as possible challengers to Brown.

But Blair’s premiership was doomed. His alienation from his party was complete. He told the chat-show host Michael Parkinson on television that God and history would judge him over Iraq, which infuriated Labour people who thought the electorate and his party ought to be the judges to whom a prime minister defers. He was no longer even an electoral asset; in fact the polls indicated that he had become an electoral liability.

He and Brown were constantly sniping at each other, retreating, withdrawing, publicly telling the world that all was peace and privately encouraging their lieutenants to say damaging things about each other. There was a stream of non-attributable venom directed at Brown the Chancellor from ‘ministers close to Tony Blair’ and ‘longstanding friends of the Prime Minister’ and ‘former cabinet ministers’ appearing under the bylines of journalists whom insiders knew to have particularly good contacts in Blairite circles, such as Patrick Wintour of the Guardian and Andrew Grice of the Independent.

Ministers started to resign, and more resignations were threatened. Labour MPs were panicking about the polling evidence, which showed that a Blair-led Labour Party was electorally doomed next time.

The Blairites mounted a restless search for a candidate called Notgordon Brown. (Ask ‘a cabinet minister close to the Prime Minister’ whom he wanted to see as leader and he’d reply, ‘Notgordon Brown.’) As we mentioned earlier, at one point Blair was grooming Charles Clarke for the role – he told Clarke this, according to Clarke’s interview with the Daily Telegraph’s Charles Moore – but the plan fell apart when Clarke was forced to resign as Home Secretary. In 2007 the mantle seemed to have fallen on David Miliband, but he, after a few days’ indecision, decided not to run against Brown.

So, as long as Brown led his party, Blair’s only option was to stay right out of domestic politics – and he did. But Brown resigned after losing the 2010 election. Blairite hopes then rested on David Miliband getting the job, but Miliband lost, narrowly and surprisingly, to his brother Ed – partly because David was seen as too close to Blair. Ed had been close to Brown, and was thought to hold views that were more traditionally Labour than Blair could stomach; even worse, he was thought to be close to the unions.

Blair’s hoped-for smooth passage back under a David Miliband leadership was no longer possible. He had a number of options, none of them very attractive. He could stay right out of domestic politics, as he had done under Brown, which was probably what Ed Miliband would have liked best. He could throw in his lot wholeheartedly with the new leadership, supporting it to the hilt and biting his tongue when it did something of which he disapproved, which is what former party leaders are supposed to do, and what Neil Kinnock had done for Blair himself. He has not been able to bring himself to do this, presumably because he feels sure that the Blairite flame is not safe in Ed Miliband’s hands.

He could fight openly, hoping to force Miliband out before the 2015 general election, or force him out after electoral defeat, giving the Blairites another chance to install a leader in whose hands the legacy would be safe. Or, if Miliband seemed likely to survive and perhaps lead Labour to victory in 2015, he could work to ensure that the new Prime Minister would be tethered by a Parliamentary Labour Party consisting overwhelmingly of Blair loyalists.

The great untold story of the Ed Miliband years is that Blair chose to fight. The battle is mostly discreetly hidden from view, but there is war on the ground, carefully shielded from public gaze. Just occasionally – as in Falkirk in 2013 – it explodes into the media; and just occasionally the two men have a public row, no less spectacular because of the careful, emollient-sounding words in which it is clothed.

September 2013 was a month of coded warfare between Blair and Miliband. At the start of September 2013 Ed Miliband did something few opposition leaders ever get to do: he changed the course of events. If Miliband had not decided unexpectedly to oppose David Cameron’s proposed military action over the use of chemical weapons in Syria, Britain and the USA would have begun a bombing campaign against Assad, and there is a good chance that this would have escalated into boots on the ground. By the time it became apparent that ISIS was a far greater threat than Assad, we would have been committed to destroying Assad.

Blair’s criticism, though expressed in weary, more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger tones, was clear, unambiguous and intended to be damaging. When, a couple of days later, negotiations that had the potential to prevent the use of chemical weapons in Syria started to look as though they might succeed, Blair’s voice was not heard.

When, towards the end of September 2013, Miliband called for the government to stand up to the energy companies, who were imposing huge price rises at the start of the winter, the former Conservative Prime Minister John Major supported him, telling a parliamentary press gallery lunch, ‘Governments should exist to protect people, not institutions. We’ll probably have a very cold winter, and it is not acceptable to me, and ought not to be acceptable to anyone, that many people are going to have to choose between keeping warm and eating.’3

For Miliband, it must to some extent have made up for the fact that his own former party leader and Prime Minister, Tony Blair, was a great deal less helpful to him than Major. Blair could easily have declined to comment. Instead, he went out of his way to make it clear he thought that Miliband was being irresponsible, silkily implying to journalists that it would be unhelpful to Miliband if he spoke his mind.

Blair told Sky News, ‘I’m not going to comment on the policy. He’s got the job of being leader of the Opposition. I did that job for three years. I know how tough it is. I’m not going to get in his way.’ He could very easily not have spoken, had he wanted not to damage Miliband.4

And, as so often happened when they were in government together, Peter Mandelson came out and said the things that Blair wished it to be understood that he thought. He said, ‘I believe that perceptions of Labour policy are in danger of being taken backwards.’

Blair may not have said these words, but the same week as Mandelson said them, Blair wrote in the New Statesman as a more general comment on Miliband:

Parts of the political landscape that had been cast in shadow for some years, at least under New Labour and the first years of coalition government, are illuminated in sharp relief. The Conservative Party is back clothing itself in the mantle of fiscal responsibility, buttressed by moves against ‘benefit scroungers’, immigrants squeezing out British workers and – of course – Labour profligacy. The Labour Party is back as the party opposing ‘Tory cuts’, highlighting the cruel consequences of the Conservative policies on welfare and representing the disadvantaged and vulnerable … The ease with which it can settle back into its old territory of defending the status quo, allying itself, even anchoring itself, to the interests that will passionately and often justly oppose what the government is doing, is so apparently rewarding, that the exercise of political will lies not in going there, but in resisting the temptation to go there.5

For once, Miliband was goaded into a reply:

As he was the first to recognise, politics always has to move on to cope with new challenges and different circumstances. For example, on immigration, Labour is learning lessons about the mistakes in office and crafting an immigration policy that will make Britain’s diversity work for all not just a few. It is by challenging old ways of doing things, showing we have understood what we did right and wrong during our time in office that One Nation Labour will win back people’s trust.

As September closed, Blair got in a last dig, before an invited audience of movers and shakers at the influential Mile End Group at Queen Mary College, London, in the presence of a number of spies, including the old Libyan hand Sir Mark Allen. In the chair was John Rentoul of the Independent. Rentoul once wrote a fairly good biography of Blair, but in recent years his approach to the former Prime Minister has become almost fawning.

Here Blair mused that it was a mistake for people to rise to the top having spent their lives in politics, with no experience of the ‘wider world’. He did not mention Ed Miliband by name, but no one was in any doubt whom this was aimed at.

These examples, Blair might argue, are all occasions when he felt very strongly that Labour’s leader had got it wrong, and felt he must say so. What happens, therefore, when he has the chance to give Ed Miliband a little support in a tight spot on a matter where he actually does support the Labour leader? Just such a chance turned up towards the end of 2013, when the Daily Mail launched its bitter attack on Miliband’s father Ralph, calling him – untruthfully – ‘The man who hated Britain’.6

Miliband took the unusual, and brave, decision to counterattack, rather than do what most politicians do in the face of unfair media onslaughts, which is lie low and hope not too much of the dirt sticks to them. He was widely supported across the political spectrum, including by Prime Minister David Cameron.

This was an area where Blair could have given Miliband much-needed support with a good conscience. But nothing was heard from Tony Blair. Was this simply an oversight? One journalist, Ian Hernon of Tribune, thought he would find out; he asked Blair’s press office if Tribune could get a statement from him about the Mail’s slur on Miliband’s dad. He was told that the former Prime Minister had no comment to make.

As often happens, the Blairites said the things Blair only implied. Charles Clarke says that ‘some people find Ed Miliband weird and geeky’ and that he has failed to express clear policies. It’s code for ‘He’s not a proper Blairite’.

When Blair was giving his support and encouragement to former News of the World editor Rebekah Brooks in her hour of need during the phone hacking trial, Ed Miliband was calling for her resignation.

Mostly, however, the battleground is the selection conferences up and down the country where the men and women who will be Labour MPs after 2015 are chosen. On one side are the Blairites, working mainly through the New Labour pressure group Progress. On the other side are Miliband’s friends as well as the trade unions and the Left.

Every stage of these selections is a battle. First you have to get the data – the names and addresses of the local party activists who will make the choice. Those with good connections get the data first, and give themselves a head start. Then you have to use it effectively. And all the time you have to be watchful lest your enemies are getting or using the data in a way that might be illegal, against party rules or capable of being made to look grubby.

Progress has proved itself a tactical master in these battles. ‘We’re doing it too, but Progress is well ahead of us,’ we were told by one of the left’s most prominent fixers. ‘In this Parliament so far [to December 2013] Progress has won 35 to 40 per cent of the winnable seats that have selected a candidate. The trade unions and the left have been less successful. We are not organised in the same way. Progress have staff and contacts and money and a very effective network.’

THE POWER OF PROGRESS

One of Progress’s great assets is that it controls Labour Students – a Labour-affiliated body. But its biggest asset by far is money. ‘If you are well-funded and have some young supporters with time and energy, you can make the most of the three leaflets you are allowed, for example targeting them carefully and producing different ones for each ward,’ we were told. ‘Progress leaflets are beautifully produced by PR consultancies.’

Getting a local party membership list in advance often provides a crucial advantage, and being connected to Progress delivers this advantage in many constituencies.

Progress is easily the most effective of the organisations seeking to influence Labour, and the main reason for this is that it is, by a very long way, the richest. David Sainsbury is funding it at the rate of about £260,000 a year. The next-biggest donors – a long way down – are the British Private Equity and Venture Capital Association (BVCA), the Advertising Association, the Childcare Voucher Providers Association, Facebook, PricewaterhouseCoopers and Sovereign Strategy. Smaller sums – less than £5,000 a year – come from Labour Friends of Israel and the European Azerbaijan Society. Azerbaijan is a major Tony Blair Associates client, and the money from the society was spent on a rally praising Azerbaijan and its oil business at Labour’s 2012 conference.

Other donors include Bell Pottinger, a lobbying firm that has worked on behalf of the government of Bahrain. After seven people died following a police clampdown early in 2011, protesters gathered outside Bell Pottinger’s London office with placards reading, ‘You can’t spin the unspinnable’. Bahrain isn’t the only authoritarian regime Bell Pottinger has represented in recent years. Its clients include Yemen, Sri Lanka and Belarus.

According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, ‘Bell Pottinger boasted to undercover Bureau journalists that it helped engineer the lifting of an EU travel ban on the man dubbed “Europe’s last dictator”’ – the dictator of Belarus. In recent years, Labour Ministers and MPs, including Douglas Alexander, have condemned the dictatorship in Minsk.

The European Azerbaijan Society is London-based and is one of the slickest and best-funded lobbying operations anywhere in Europe. It works for a brutal dictatorship that has little concern for freedom of expression or human rights, according to the freedom-of-speech organisation Index on Censorship and Human Rights Watch.

For example, Azerbaijan investigative reporter Khadija Ismayilova received a collection of photographs through the post that appeared to show her having sex with a man. Attached was a note warning her to ‘behave’ or she would be ‘defamed’.

Her crime was to use the Right to Obtain Information law to get documents about corruption in Azerbaijan, and expose the business interests of President Aliyev’s daughter.

They assumed – Ismayilova told journalists in London at the Frontline Club – that, like some other journalists who have suffered similar blackmail campaigns, she would temper her reports. But Ismayilova went public with her story. Days later, on 14 March 2012, an intimate video of Ismayilova filmed by a hidden camera was posted to the Internet. Honour killings still take place in Azerbaijan and the authorities knew that Ismayilova’s life could be in serious danger.

‘The current state of freedom of expression in Azerbaijan is alarming, as the cycle of violence against journalists and impunity for their attackers continues,’ says a report from the London-based human-rights organisation Article 19. ‘Journalists, bloggers, human rights defenders and political and civic activists face increasing pressure, harassment and interference from the authorities; and many who express opinions critical of the authorities – whether through traditional media, online, or by taking to the streets in protest – find themselves imprisoned or otherwise targeted in retaliation.’

Azerbaijan works hard to present itself as a modern, democratic country with excellent business opportunities for multinational corporations, and Tony Blair can undoubtedly help with this. But recent attacks against journalists and activists reveal a government unwilling to hear the voices of its people, and there are about sixty political prisoners, according to the former head of advocacy at Index on Censorship, Mike Harris.7

Another major former donor was a trust created by the late Lord (Michael) Montague, in his lifetime a Progress supporter; this has given a total of £875,500. Pharmacia and Pfizer also gave £52,287.

Progress’s total income in the fifteen months from 1 October 2011 to 1 January 2013 was £489,654. In the previous twelve months it was £368,598, and that is approximately its annual income.8

By the start of 2012, Progress had raised more money than the Green Party, Scottish Labour or Plaid Cymru. It had raised significantly more than any members’ association in the Tory Party or Liberal Democrats and 122 times more than the next highest in the Labour Party. It had the organisation and funding of a minor political party.

The money would have made a huge difference to the cash-strapped Labour Party, if it could have had it. But it can’t. Lord Sainsbury doesn’t think Ed Miliband is sound; Sainsbury supported David Miliband’s campaign to the tune of £200,000 and has been alienated by Ed Miliband’s clear wish to draw a line under New Labour. Progress is a safe home for Sainsbury’s money, because there it cannot be used to help Ed into Downing Street.

David Sainsbury’s £260,000 a year and four- and five-figure sums from finance companies and the like account for nearly the whole income. The exact figures are impossible to work out because Progress does not reveal smaller sums, or the income from early capital sums received from, for example, Lord Montague’s trust. But put all we do know together, and you are already getting close to the total income of about £370,000 a year.

So there is not much for the ordinary Labour Party member to make up. Progress’s claim that it is ‘funded by Labour Party members who support our aims and values’ is presumably based mainly on the fact that Lord Sainsbury is a Labour Party member. We know that individual membership costs £25 a year but we do not know how many members there are. It can’t be very many, even though membership is boosted by opponents such as Jon Lansman – veteran Bennite and political adviser to Michael Meacher MP – who likes to keep in touch with what the other side is doing.

Most political organisations, including Progress’s Labour Party rivals, make it as easy as possible for people to get in touch with them, because they are always on the scrounge. They need money. They are run on a shoestring.

Progress is just the opposite. It has a sophisticated website on which it is easy to find things that the organisation wishes you to find, such as a picture of Ed Miliband speaking against a backdrop of the Progress logo or a message from Tony Blair. But it is like all the Blair organisations – it makes it hard for the reader to get in touch. There are no contact telephone numbers or email addresses on the website. You can choose to follow director Robert Philpot or deputy director Richard Angell on Twitter, or on LinkedIn, but you cannot write to them.

Actually, the first time we looked, at the end of November 2013, we discovered eventually that it was possible to navigate one’s way, by a very circuitous and time-consuming route, through to a page that had on it an email address for Mr Angell, so we sent him an email. When no reply had been received by 11 December, we went back to the website. Angell’s email address had disappeared.

Simply, other political pressure groups make it very easy to get in touch because they need your money. Progress doesn’t need your money.

For a political organisation, Progress’s structure and process of decision-making is remarkably opaque. It does not seem to spend a lot of time asking its members what they want. In January 2012, Lord Adonis, a close Blair adviser, was made its chairman, but there is no record of an election being held for the post, and no one seems to know exactly who made the decision.

Its rivals for the soul of the Labour Party are both less well-organised and far less well off, and they all rely to a greater or lesser extent on trade-union funding.

The old right, the trade-union right wing, which had for decades been the right wing of the Labour Party until Blair arrived in 1994 and moved the frontier, is represented by Labour First, run by the vastly experienced Labour and trade-union fixer John Spellar MP. The left is represented by Labour Futures, and the key figure is Jon Lansman. Neither of these organisations employs any staff of its own. Only Progress does that.

The four directors of Progress Ltd include Jennifer Gerber, the director of Labour Friends of Israel, and lobbyist Jon Mendelsohn, former chairman of Labour Friends of Israel, who in 2013 was created a life peer as Baron Mendelsohn. In 1998 Mendelsohn was caught on tape along with Derek Draper boasting to Greg Palast, an undercover reporter posing as a businessman, that Progress could sell access to government ministers and create tax breaks for Palast’s supposed clients. He also advised an undercover journalist posing as a representative of American energy companies to rephrase their plans into language that sounded ‘Earth-friendly’ since ‘Tony [Blair] is very anxious to be seen as green. Everything has to be couched in environmental language – even if it’s slightly Orwellian.’

The other two directors are Robert Philpot, the full-time executive director, and Stephen Twigg MP.

Progress was founded in 1996, two years after Blair became Labour leader, and describes itself as ‘the New Labour pressure group which aims to promote a radical and progressive politics for the 21st century.’ The twenty-first century is mentioned in this message presumably so as to underline Progress’s commitment to being ‘modern’, since it is hard to see what other century it might be promoting anything for.

Its first director was Jon Mendelsohn’s friend and colleague Derek Draper, then research assistant to Peter Mandelson. For the first thirteen years of its existence, Progress mainly provided support and cheerleaders for everything Tony Blair did. Then, in 2007, Blair resigned as PM and the game changed. It provided a platform for those who were critical of Gordon Brown. It was a convenient way for Blair to attack Brown without having to put his own name to anything. He could appear to be above the fray.

In addition, and crucially, it supported reliably Blairite candidates in selections for parliamentary seats. During that parliament it held six parliamentary candidate workshops, to train its people in how to win selection battles. Candidates it boasts having helped get selected in that period include Stephen Twigg in Liverpool and Emma Reynolds in Wolverhampton.

After Brown resigned as Prime Minister it supported David Miliband for the leadership. His brother Ed’s election was a nasty shock, and the organisation stepped up its work of training parliamentary candidates, to equip them for selection battles, and to protest about trade-union influence in these selections.

These two activities went together. No doubt Progress supporters believe as a matter of principle that unions should have less say in the selections; but it is also the case that the unions were often the only obstacle to Progress’s ability to dictate them. The only serious opposition to a Progress-supported candidate was often a union-supported candidate, and the only machine capable of matching Progress was that of the unions.

One of the trainers for these selection battles was Matthew Doyle, former Blair spin doctor in Downing Street and by then the director of communications for the Office of Tony Blair – whose services were presumably provided free as a donation in kind from Tony Blair. Training in speechwriting was supplied by Paul Richards, former chair of Labour Students and the Fabian Society, adviser to Blairites Patricia Hewitt and then Hazel Blears.

Weekend seminars at splendid country houses were provided at the expense of generous commercial sponsors, including Bell Pottinger, which was founded by Margaret Thatcher’s favourite advertising man.

Those candidates it chooses to help through the selection process can expect a lot of support on the ground: a team to canvass local party members, introductions to influential people, even lists of the contact details for local party members.

Its many successes include placing its former deputy director, Jessica Asato, as the prospective parliamentary candidate for Norwich North, a seat Labour should win back from the Conservatives in 2015 – it is essentially a Labour seat, thrown away by the Labour high command’s ham-fisted handling of expenses issues surrounding its then-Labour MP Ian Gibson in 2009.

It is no wonder that, by 2011, the left was describing Progress as a ‘party within a party’ in a deliberate echo of the charge mainstream Labour Party people used to level at Militant in the eighties. It is not an entirely accurate parallel. Militant, after all, had a policy of ‘entryism’ – of getting into the Labour Party in order to turn it into a different sort of party – whereas Progress seeks to continue the policies and legacy of a former Labour Prime Minister.

Nonetheless, there was a shred of truth in Jon Lansman’s March 2011 attack: ‘Progress operates at several levels, of course, like the Militant Tendency in the 1980s: the politics (and the surroundings) may be very different, but the methods are surprisingly similar. They even have “readers’ meetings” … It is only someone who is regarded as politically reliable, truly “one of us”, who is introduced to the covert layers of operation, and only as necessary, though many more are aware of the kind of activities that Progress is engaged in than are themselves involved – the way any secret organisation sustains and protects itself.’9

But, Lansman told us in 2014, that was then, and this is now. It had by then become less of a party within a party, and less committed to the overthrow of Ed Miliband. The change, he says, was detected by Labour political fixers in January 2012, and the reason, he believes, is that it proved impossible to get a consensus around an alternative to Ed Miliband. David Miliband had ruled himself out, and the Blairites cannot stand Ed Balls, the shadow Chancellor.

That did not prevent a trade-union move at the 2012 Labour Party conference to expel the organisation for being a party within a party. Progress hastily promised reform, and has become more open about its finances and the names of those who control it.

The heart of its activities remained the continuation of New Labour policies and protecting the legacy of Tony Blair. An email to its members in July 2012 was headed ‘New Labour’s unfinished business’.10

But the methods were, for the time being at least, becoming less aggressive. Tony Blair himself started, early in 2012, to have meetings with small groups of Labour MPs. A ‘source close to Mr Blair’ told Public Affairs News magazine, ‘He wants to re-engage in the UK. He has things to say and he thinks it’s the right time. The question is how he re-enters the UK scene without re-entering domestic politics and interfering with the Labour Party.’ The pious wish not to interfere with the Labour Party evoked a hollow laugh from those who knew what Progress had been up to.

The news was too much for Richard Heller, once adviser to Denis Healey and a stalwart of the old right in the Labour Party, who relieved his feelings with a furious, passionate blog post:

In 1956 Britain’s prime minister took this country into an unlawful and unprofitable war in the Middle East, and misled its parliament and people about its origins and purpose … Once an international icon, Anthony Eden disappeared into political oblivion … He did not hawk himself round the world for money. Although a vastly more experienced diplomat than Tony Blair he was never offered any international appointment. He did not set up any foundations in his name. He did not have a spin doctor or a retinue of any kind. Above all, he abandoned any hope of a political comeback.

Eden’s afterlife was a sign of a Britain with high standards in political life. Politicians were penalised for error, failure and dishonesty. If Tony Blair returns to a frontline role in British politics, it will show that those standards have finally collapsed.

Blair seriously believes that he is entitled to such a role and that the British people should be grateful for his wisdom. Once again, he has demonstrated one of his terrifying strengths as a politician – he is never embarrassed by himself …

Blair now thinks that the time is right for him to ‘re-engage with the British people’ … Clearly Blair is seeking some special and personal avenue for this re-engagement, because he has always had the option of standing as an MP, as ex-premiers used to do routinely. Sir Alec Douglas-Home fought two general elections after being defeated as prime minister, and loyally served his successor, Ted Heath, in opposition and government. Standing again at a by-election would ‘re-engage’ Blair automatically with a selection committee and local voters and guarantee the maximum exposure for his current views. Blair could also ask for a life peerage and contribute in the House of Lords without the risks of facing a voter.

There is one major problem with either of these comeback routes: he would undergo scrutiny about his murky finances.

Tony Blair has let it be known that he has ‘things to say’ to the British people. He may have to say some of them to the Leveson inquiry, on his relationship with Rupert Murdoch. Eventually the endless Chilcot Inquiry will have ‘things to say’ about him and Iraq. It would have been seemly for Blair to await the judgment of Chilcot and Leveson before seeking a comeback, but perhaps he knows already that he will get an easy ride.

For millions of British people the one thing that they want to hear from Tony Blair is ‘I’m sorry’ and it’s the one thing he never can bring himself to say. Of course, he is not alone in this attitude. No one with authority or status in modern Britain ever apologises for their conduct – whether bankers or bosses or footballers. No matter how badly they mess up or offend people or even wreck lives they still expect admiration and money. Even in this depressing context, Blair’s return to a frontline role would represent a very special nadir.11

You can agree or disagree with Heller, but he’s right to point up the key importance of the Chilcot Inquiry in all this. If Chilcot goes half as far in its criticism of Blair as Blair’s enemies hope, it will be very damaging to Blair’s attempts to re-enter British politics.

A journalist who is close to Blair, Matthew d’Ancona, reports that Blair himself understands this, and is very apprehensive about Chilcot. D’Ancona quotes a ‘close ally’ of Blair as saying, ‘He is deeply concerned about it. It could define his legacy.’12

The report of this investigation, launched by Gordon Brown in 2009, has been delayed over and over again. The last witness gave evidence in 2011, and the report will not now appear until sometime after the general election on 7 May 2015 – and maybe a long time after that.

One of the factors holding it up is a row over whether up to 200 cabinet-level discussions on the Iraq war, notes sent between Blair and George W. Bush, and more than 130 records of conversations between either Blair or Brown and the White House may be published. The Cabinet Office has blocked publication of most of them, almost certainly at Blair’s insistence. Blair, who, as we have discovered many times, never lets any information into the public domain that he can keep secret, told the inquiry that it was important ‘that the British Prime Minister and the American President are able to communicate in confidence.’ He said he would give the inquiry the gist of what was said. Not everyone will be satisfied that Tony Blair’s summary will give them the full picture.

In November 2014, after several deadlines for publication had passed, Blair was reported to have seen the draft report. In January 2015 Sir John Chilcot told the Prime Minister that publication must be held up by ‘the process of giving individuals an opportunity to respond to provisional criticism in the Inquiry’s draft report.’13 We may safely assume that one of these individuals, perhaps the main one, is Tony Blair.

So what is he worried about? Not, presumably, that it might damage Labour’s chances if it appears before the election, since it emerged in December 2014, via leaks and interviews with people close to the former PM, that he had written off Labour’s chances anyway; he saw the most likely election outcome as a defeat for Ed Miliband, after which he had hopes that Progress candidate Chukka Umunna would oust Miliband and return Labour to pure Blairite principles. And on the penultimate day of 2014, Blair himself broke cover with an interview in the Economist where he claimed that the 2015 election would be a return to the old pre-Blair sort, ‘In which a traditional leftwing party competes with a traditional rightwing party, with the traditional result.’ Asked if he meant a Tory win, Blair said: ‘Yes, that is what happens.’ He said he saw no evidence of a shift to the left in public thinking after the financial crisis – a move that Miliband thinks has occurred – and added: ‘I am still very much New Labour and Ed would not describe himself in that way, so there is obviously a difference there. I am convinced the Labour party succeeds best when it is in the centre ground.’14

The next day he tweeted that these remarks had been misinterpreted: he wanted and expected Miliband to win.15

Seeing that all this needed clarification, he gave the BBC’s Nick Robinson an interview on 12 January 2015 during which he said that the public must decide whether Ed Miliband ‘has a problem’, he said, and they were crying out for ‘clear leadership and direction’. Asked to endorse Miliband, he said it ‘will be for the people to choose.’16 Just a week later, Peter Mandelson was on television calling Ed Miliband confused and unconvincing, denouncing the mansion tax, and talking up the Liberal Democrat alternative.17 On 7 February the Observer had Blair saying blandly that he would do whatever the Labour Party wanted him to do to help win the election.18 Miliband might have been tempted to reply with what Clement Attlee once wrote to Harold Laski: ‘A period of silence from you would be welcome.’ But a period of silence is one thing he is unlikely to get.

The war is well under way, no less vicious because everyone concerned politely denies that it has ever been declared.

THE BATTLE OF FALKIRK

At the 2013 Progress conference there was much complaint that Progress candidates had not been selected in certain constituencies, and accusations that the trade unions had been too successful. The closing session of the conference saw the battle between Progress and the unions suddenly burst into the open.

The session featured a panel discussion with Peter Mandelson, Times columnist and Blair loyalist David Aaronovitch and Blairite former MP Oona King, and they were asked what could unite Progress and the trade union Unite. It appeared that nothing at all could achieve this.

Aaronovitch spoke first, laying into the new Unite general secretary Len McCluskey with a vehemence and ferocity that seemed to startle his audience. He attacked the validity of McCluskey’s election, which McCluskey won by 2–1, because there was a poor turnout, though this is probably at least partly explained by the fact that most people saw the election as a foregone conclusion. The attack echoed, in its arguments and its ferocity, the bitter attacks made on unions by Conservative ministers such as Lord (Norman) Tebbit over the years.

Then Mandelson took up the story, as though on cue, and said that McCluskey had been responsible for manipulating the selection battle for a new Labour candidate for Falkirk. That was the first most of the audience had heard of the battle, which was quickly to become headline news. Aaronovitch came back at once and said, ‘I think all the media here have their headline for tomorrow.’ Indeed they did. They probably arrived expecting it.

It was a carefully staged media event, and successfully laid the groundwork for the Progress narrative about the selection of a Labour parliamentary candidate for Falkirk: that the unions manipulated the selection and tried to steal the candidature. The real story is rather different, and shines at least as much light on the Progress modus operandi as those of the trade unions.

The Falkirk selection issue was one of the most divisive affecting Labour in 2013. The sitting MP Eric Joyce was deselected by Labour after being involved in a drunken brawl in a House of Commons bar. This was followed by another incident at Edinburgh Airport, where he was accused of abusive and threatening behaviour over a mobile phone and racist comments after being arrested by police. He admitted a breach-of-the-peace charge at Edinburgh Sheriff Court in March 2014, was fined £1,500 and ordered to pay compensation. He pleaded not guilty to two charges relating to obstruction and making offensive remarks, and his plea was accepted without trial.

For the media, what followed after his deselection was a gift, but it was seriously misrepresented. The media and Progress saw it as an opportunity to attack trade-union power in general, and Unite in particular, over the manipulation of a Labour candidate selection in a Scottish town.

In fact it was a battle for the heart and soul of Labour between the unions on the one hand and Progress and the Blairite modernising wing of the party on the other. What was little more than the normal rivalry of various groups fighting to get their candidate selected as an MP was turned into a national battle for the future of the party.

That it was really a battle of ideas was publicly confirmed by the Blairite former cabinet minister John Reid, who told the BBC, ‘It is at heart an ideological battle, a political battle between those who want to take Labour back to the seventies and eighties, as Len McCluskey does, where we represented the sectional voice, the weak echo of every industrial demand of the trade unions, and those like Ed Miliband, who want to see us move increasingly towards an open party which reaches across class, across geography, across gender in which ordinary trade unionists can play their part, along with many others.’19

Of course every commander draws battle lines where he would like them to be, not where they necessarily are. Reid’s description of the two sides is a partisan one, and his assumption that Ed Miliband is a fully paid-up Blairite moderniser is more what he hopes than what he believes. But the statement is useful as confirmation that Progress and the Blairites are at least as much engaged in the battle as the unions.

The scandal – such as it was – seems to have arisen out of two separate incidents. One involved the union Unite, and the other the local chairman of the Labour constituency party, Stevie Deans, who is also a Unite convener at Grangemouth Oil Refinery. Stevie Deans took two decisions. As chairman of the local party he decided to recruit some of his relations as members, particularly the Kane family. This is hardly a criminal offence, as the police would later realise. The problem arose because some of the family members hadn’t realised they had been signed up.

Also, Unite decided to copy a very successful campaign run by the shop workers’ union USDAW to recruit new Labour members free of charge for a year so long as they also signed a direct debit to start paying in a year’s time. The problem was that they didn’t get them to sign direct-debit mandates, and, when they realised their mistake after they submitted the new members to Labour HQ, they hurriedly went round and got people to sign the mandates. These arrived at Labour HQ in a big plastic bag; but some of the direct debits were signed by partners.

All this got Labour HQ worried – particularly as the leading candidate for the constituency was Kari Murphy, office manager for Tom Watson MP, Labour’s campaign director for the general election, a prominent member of Unite and a close friend of Len McCluskey, the union’s general secretary.

So a very experienced constitutional officer, Eric Wilson, based in the north of England, investigated the state of affairs and sent a memorandum to HQ.

At the same time – though this was not reported until well after the event by Rajeev Syal of the Guardian – Progress was doing the same thing, or rather worse. As Syal reported,20 Gregor Poynton, who wanted to challenge Unite from the right, paid the membership fees of eleven new members.

‘Gregor Poynton told the Guardian that he paid for the new recruits with a single cheque of £137 in July last year [2012] – a move which raised concerns with Labour officials. Two new members say their joining fees were paid for by Poynton or members of his family in the expectation they would vote for him at a future selection meeting.’

Poynton, like Kari Murphy, is a well-connected young Labour Party member. He is a former party election-strategy manager and Scottish Labour Party organiser who is married to the MP and shadow Defence Minister Gemma Doyle. He is from Falkirk and his parents still live in the town. Gemma Doyle is connected to Jim Murphy, who was later moved by Ed Miliband from the role of shadow Defence Secretary, and is also on the Blairite wing of the party.

The Guardian reported:

One of those recruited last July, who asked to remain anonymous, joined because of a long-standing friendship with the Poynton family. ‘I wanted to help them and ensure the town is represented by someone local,’ the source said.

The source said the joining fees were paid by Poynton or a member of his family from July 2012 until sometime in 2013.

Now all of this, we understand, was conveyed to Labour HQ with a recommendation that it should be sorted out locally by long-serving official Eric Wilson.

But Labour HQ rejected this and decided to set up a high-level investigation under Jane Shaw, an experienced compliance officer. This move appeared to be backed by Iain McNicol, the party’s general secretary. But more importantly, figures close to Ed Miliband wanted firm action. They are said to have included Torsten Bell and Bob Roberts, the former Mirror journalist who is now the Labour Party’s executive director of communications.

So a separate report was prepared but, before it could be published, some of its contents were leaked to the Mail on Sunday, concentrating entirely on the role of the Unite union. Ed Miliband put the local party under special measures.

The party, not knowing whether the paper had the report, acted by calling in the police after a Tory MP, Henry Smith, had also reported them. Unite retaliated by bringing in its own lawyers, who interviewed all the families involved and produced their own twelve-page report, saying that there had been no fraud, only some mistakes, and Miliband backed down over the charges against Unite. The police also found no evidence of fraud.

But it was not without cost. Campaign director Tom Watson, who had been implicated by the press in the scandal, resigned from the shadow cabinet. His office manager, Kari Murphy, withdrew as candidate and the party decided on an all-women shortlist and said none of the members recruited from the day Joyce was deselected could vote for a successor, reducing the constituency party to a rump of about 120 members.

General Secretary Iain McNicol was moved sideways. Never Miliband’s choice, this former GMB union official lost any major say in the general election campaign to Spencer Livermore, a former head of strategy to Gordon Brown, under the chairmanship of another Blairite, Douglas Alexander, as Labour Party chairman.

More significantly, and despite Miliband’s agreeing that Unite had not committed electoral fraud, the way was opened for a special conference to discuss whether to change the whole relationship between the unions and the party, reducing further the trade union link. And one leading official at a barbecue in Miliband’s private north London home in July called for Unite to be disaffiliated.

In context, the whole issue was blown up for other purposes. It was used as a catalyst to reform union-party relations and power and to allow reform of party funding. Miliband agreed to limit union contributions, which would inevitably lead to his committing himself to funding political parties from the taxpayer if he wins the 2015 general election.

One idea being studied by Labour is to end taxpayer funding for free election addresses – which costs £63 million for Westminster and European elections – and transfer the cash directly to the political parties. That way, Miliband can claim that in an age of austerity no extra taxpayer funding is being given to political parties.

But the Progress agenda in the whole affair was clear: further reforms along Blairite lines with the aim of separating the unions from major decision-making inside the Labour Party, as well as more Labour MPs from Progress and fewer from the unions. It’s the agenda that was laid down clearly by Peter Mandelson, carefully prompted by David Aaronovitch, on the last day of the 2013 Progress conference.

Miliband badly wants to avoid another Unite-versus-Progress bloodletting, Falkirk style. He almost got one, in Bootle on Merseyside, but it was averted by the local Labour Party. This one centred on the man who once, as Blair’s head of communications, trained candidates for selection battles, Matthew Doyle – once head of communications and broadcasting for the Labour Party and for five years, until 2012, political director at the Office of Tony Blair.

In 2014 he tried to get selected for the safe Labour seat of Bootle when veteran Labour MP Joe Benton announced he was standing down at the 2015 general election. Doyle entered a field that included Peter Dowd, Labour leader of Sefton Council and also Bootle born-and-bred Alex Flynn, Unite’s director of communications.

The stage was set for another bruising battle between Unite and Progress, but Bootle Labour Party tried to take matters into their own hands. By September 2014 Dowd was way ahead, with Flynn as his most likely challenger. Doyle failed to get a single nomination from a Labour ward. He was hoping for support from USDAW, the shop workers’ union, which ultimately mainly supported Dowd.

In desperation, he tried to enlist support from Angela Eagle, Labour MP for Wallasey and shadow Leader of the Commons. But she told him that he didn’t stand a chance and it wasn’t worth her trying to get him support. She says, ‘If you are not from Bootle, the fiercely independent constituency Labour Party is not even interested. He should have known this before he stood.’

Bootle Labour Party compiled a shortlist that included neither Doyle nor Flynn. A complaint was made to the National Executive Committee, which instructed Bootle Labour Party to include both Flynn and Doyle on the shortlist. But in the end the formidable local party machine made sure that by hook or by crook Peter Dowd, the favoured son, got the nomination. Alex Flynn came second while Matthew Doyle, despite his work for Progress in advising how their candidates could win seats, came nowhere – as Angela Eagle had earlier predicted.

The Blairites normally operate within the Labour Party under the camouflage of Progress. But Blair’s occasional public interventions are carefully timed.

BLAIR’S SPEAKING INCOME

Normally, of course, Blair speaks in public for money, not for political ends. Public speaking has earned him £9 million,21 as he charges up to £200,000 per lecture, mostly through the Washington Speakers Bureau, of which George W. Bush is also a client. He signed with the bureau in October 2007, four months after ceasing to be PM, taking a $600,000 signing bonus. He has also signed up with the All American Speakers Bureau, whose website gives his fee as $200,000 upwards.

Yet, for a man once considered an orator, he has turned into a stiflingly boring speaker, frequently appearing to do little more than read out his host’s PR handout, but sometimes producing a breathtakingly banal observation of his own. ‘When things are in the balance, when you cannot be sure, when others are uncertain or hesitate, when the very point is that the outcome is in doubt – that is when a leader steps forward,’ was the insight he shared with a Beijing audience in 2008. At a conference on Africa in 2013 he said that there was ‘something wonderful, vibrant and exciting’ about the continent’s culture and traditions; and, speaking of economic development, helpfully pointed out, ‘With electricity, given the technology we now have at our fingertips, everything is possible. Without it, progress will be depressingly slow. Likewise with roads and often ports.’ At Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines he said that the main problems President Obama faces ‘are essentially global in nature’.22

The All American Speakers Bureau is one of several agencies that have also represented Blair, and they listed his minimum fee as $200,000 – twice the rate of Donald Trump.

However, the huge sums that he commands are something of a mystery, given the content of his private-sector lectures. ‘The reason I am in Dongguan now is because I was told that everything that was happening here was amazing,’ Blair said during a 2007 speech at a VIP banquet in China, for which his fee was in the region of $200,000. ‘Dongguan’s future is immeasurable.’ Actually, the future is always immeasurable, in Dongguan as everywhere else; the title of the speech was ‘From Greatness to Brilliance’. Such twaddle infuriated Chinese newspapers, which said Blair’s empty remarks showed he was interested only in ‘digging for gold’ and ‘money-sucking’. Deng Qingbo wrote in the China Youth Daily, ‘Why pay such a high price to hear the same thing? Is it worth the money? Do these thoughts multiply in value because they come from the mouth of a retired prime minister?’23

Dongguan is a city of 1.7 million permanent residents and 10 million migrant labourers, mostly living eight or more to a room in the workers’ dormitories that are attached to the city’s industrial estates. Typical wages range from £40 to £100 per month.

In 2010 Blair published his autobiography, A Journey. He took three years to write it and donated the £4.6 million advance and all royalties to a sports centre for injured soldiers. The donation was dubbed ‘blood money’ by some of Blair’s critics, who said he gave the sum to assuage his guilt for taking the UK to war against Iraq in 2003.

Even this autobiography appears to be aimed at the US market. ‘Tony Blair is an extremely popular figure in North America,’ said Sonny Mehta, his publisher. ‘His memoir is refreshing, both for its candour and vivid portrayal of political life.’²⁴

But, from time to time, Tony Blair speaks about British politics to a British audience, and is not paid for doing so. Almost always it is because an opportunity has arisen to undermine Ed Miliband.