‘They begged Tony to stay’
The three of them sat disconsolate in the empty room. It had been a long night. A chilly night, after a cool day – not like the blazing sunshine of 1997. Or that election in between that everyone almost forgot – 2001; foot and mouth, wasn’t it, or fuel protests? Or something.
This was going to be a terrible election, they all said. Especially party members. The Labour Party was happier in opposition. The three of them knew it, most MPs and all party members outside the madder elements in the General Committees knew it. Opposition was where they were cheerfully headed. Tony had won it for them twice, but – Iraq! The Guardian diary! ‘Blair stares into the abyss!’ Tony had been pictured looking greyer, and older, and more sunken. Every Guardian headline pushed Tony’s personal poll rating down with the middle classes – which meant the party members: teachers, local authority outreach workers, social workers. Even in the industrial towns of the North – Leeds, Halifax, Bradford – well, those places had universities too, and they certainly had councils, and that was where the party members worked. And they hated Tony. Hated him as much as they had ever hated Thatcher. Hated him more than Yasmin Alibhai-Brown did, which was going some. Was Yasmin a Labour Party member? They thought not.
Tonight, election night 2005, as the dawn broke, the result was clear. Labour had won again. The polls had always said the party would form another government, but their own intelligence said they would not, could not. Not after Iraq, not after George W and his ‘Yo, Blair!’ (didn’t matter whether he had really said it or not, The Guardian had said he had, so it must be true. Was as good as true for party members and for most other people too.) As the media got newer, and there was more than email – there were starting to be blogs, and MPs had websites, even some constituency parties had them these days – people had got more trusting, not less. The General Secretary could remember his grandfather, a railwayman who had been an NUR steward and who had voted Labour when you still had to keep quiet about it in front of the vicar, and he had never believed anything he read in his paper (the Mirror and before that the Daily Sketch) as a matter of principle. But people now, they believed it all. People came up to you in the street and said things like: ‘Tony’s in trouble again!’, because they had read it in The Guardian, or in the ‘Londoner’s Diary’ in the Standard, or even, some of them, in the words of somebody like Kevin Maguire in the Mirror, having a cheap go at some defenceless back-bencher who’d got drunk on the Terrace or been rude to someone who wasn’t a constituent and was wasting their time. The people never questioned anything these days. So that was it. Tony was going. Except – where was everybody?
The three of them, the General Secretary, his devoted hench-creature with the big calves and flat shoes, and Loyal John, were on their own. People were waiting for Tony to come down to London, for the helicopters to fill the sky above Downing Street again. But they were hearing some worrying stories: media shutdown; nothing to see here; move along now. And yet they had won. True, some seats had gone, though not many, even in the soft south; Reading East, after they deselected that woman with the red hair, but the Reading party were a bunch of thugs, everyone knew that. But in Harlow, in Crawley, in the working towns of the South, Labour had held on to its MPs, and so to the government.
But Tony had to go. The party and the people would never stand for him staying any longer, not after Iraq. The General Secretary remembered that when he went to see his aunties in Southsea just before the invasion of Iraq, they had had their dining table littered with newspapers. ‘We like to get the full picture, dear’, Auntie Jean had said. Screaming headlines, millions marching waving Saddam Hussein’s colours (what was all that about? Made no sense. Marching, yes, Labour’s internationalism had pretty much gone out with Michael Foot – but Saddam Hussein? There was no accounting, really there wasn’t …) ‘I think Tony will be all right, don’t you dear?’, said Auntie Sandra. And perhaps it was his aunties he should have believed, not The Guardian readers. Because his aunties read the papers, they even believed a lot of what they read, but they still knew what people said and what they thought, and they thought Tony would be all right. And so he was.
But Tony had told the General Secretary privately that he had had enough. There was more he wanted to do, he had said, a lot more. So much of the first term had been wasted, with the wrong ministers, the wrong people talking in his ear, and now there was so much to do with the economy. We had given people money; tax allowances; real money for working people. And were they grateful? They were not. And we had thrown money at the NHS. But that was what people expected Labour governments to do, so they weren’t grateful for that either. And anyway, the hospitals were dirty.
It was dealing with the legacy of Thatcher’s destruction of the mining and most of the old industrial communities, which had left millions on benefits, sometimes for three generations, with all that that did to communities – teenage pregnancies, drugs – that was the big task for a new term in government, Tony had said, but he shook his head, too, and said he couldn’t stand any more of the constant undermining and briefing. Was it just Gordon, the General Secretary wondered privately after this conversation? Gordon had his people around him, they all did, but they melted away when the going got tough. Where were all Alan Milburn’s chums now? Loyal John had asked the General Secretary after that meeting if Tony really knew what the PLP thought of him and his leadership. Neither man knew the answer. Tony wasn’t that much of a parliamentarian, but he did talk to people. Sometimes he even talked to some of the babes, usually the mousier ones who never made the headlines; he avoided the brassier Patsy and Edina types, who did.
Stories would be out, before the sun was up. They didn’t have Sky in here, this was an old building and HQ still operated in an old-fashioned way, but there was breaking news. ‘Gordon Brown Fails to Appear at Own Election Count. Were Medics Called to Brown’s Constituency Home?’ The General Secretary didn’t know what had happened. The media-grid people would know, though, and they would be getting ready to brief their chosen journos. What did Tony know? What had he been told? What would he do? Tony was expected to make an announcement about his own future on Monday morning, this had been briefed in advance, and the media were quite frankly more interested in that than in who was going to be Minister of Defence Procurement in the new government.
Gordon was, variously, reported as under sedation at home suffering from severe stress, not appearing in public because of a bad cold, and in hospital suffering from exhaustion – if you got hospitalised for exhaustion the hospitals would be full of us after every election, thought political activists up and down the land that weekend – and it later emerged that an ambulance had been called by Gordon’s wife Sarah, who was worried about the stress Gordon was under and about his behaviour.
On Friday night Tony called his trusted people together. Peter, of course, was there already when the little group arrived, but said nothing, standing aloof by the mantelpiece and occasionally jotting something down in a little notebook. Tony told them nothing new. He had had enough, he said. He had plans; he was moving on; the Middle East; a faith foundation (a harrumph at this from Alastair). At last, Tony said with a broad smile, we do do God. He would cheerfully announce an approximate departure date at the PLP meeting on Monday.
But – where was Gordon? Denis MacShane, recovering in Rotherham from a tough campaign despite his safe seat – those Lib Dems could be nasty customers – had an idea. Yes, he found out from an old comrade who knew people that Gordon was a patient in a remote, very private establishment. He had, possibly, been sectioned. Not at all shocked by this, Denis knew straight away what he must do. He called Tony. A bemused Prime Minister, who had already been to see the Queen, came on the line. ‘Come late to the PLP, Tony’, said Denis. Some of us need to talk without you first.
‘You always do that anyway, don’t you?’, said Tony with a characteristic smile.
‘They’re saying Gordon has had a health crisis – but whatever he has had he’s not here’, said Denis. ‘He won’t be in London. You will. Come late, though. Please, Tony.’
At the PLP that Monday evening, with the massed ranks of the lobby’s finest peopling the committee corridor outside the room, Denis MacShane made what was probably the speech of his life. And in English, too! (Most of his speeches in recent years seemed to have been made in one of the several European languages he spoke, and to impress nobody.) ‘We were wrong’, he says. ‘Our General Committees were wrong.’
‘They always are’, came several voices from around the room.
‘Tony is a winner’, said Denis. ‘He won it for us. Thirty or forty of us here in this room thought we wouldn’t be here tonight, but we are, because of Tony. You know it, I know it, some of us didn’t want to admit it even to ourselves, but it’s Tony they want. Iraq, neither here nor there on the doorstep. Poodle of the Americans, did you hear that on the doorstep? Nor me.’
Up spoke the Blairites in support – but then up spoke Jeremy Corbyn, and up spoke John McDonnell. We on the left, they said, must listen to the people. The people have spoken. If the people had thought what party members said they thought, most of us wouldn’t be here today. We are, and we live to campaign another day. Comrades, we have spent too much of our history in opposition – to campaign for what we know we must do, we have to be in government. Tony has said he wants to leave us. No. He must not be allowed to leave us.
Then a pause. All eyes turn to the grizzled Beast of Bolsover, Dennis Skinner, in his usual position near the door, leaning on the wooden barrier. Dennis growls, ‘Get him to stay.’
And they do. They beg. They cajole. They plead. They do all but threaten to kidnap Tony or his children. Tony is reluctant – he even blushes. But the certain knowledge that he will not have Gordon breathing down his neck – not now, not soon, probably not ever – puts a quiet gleam in his eye. Caroline Flint in the Treasury team, he catches himself thinking, let’s get a good-looking team in every sense of the word, and what are we supposed to do? Gordon has been telling me for ages about the economic cycle, and that booms don’t go on for ever, and there could even be a financial crisis coming, and he might be right, what would I know – but he wouldn’t let me pull in spending, and when I tried to he briefed against me. And now he’s gone. We hope. I can put the Middle East on hold for now, Israel-Palestine is not exactly going to go away in the next few years, is it? It’s not like there are going to be uprisings in Syria or anywhere of that sort any time soon, is it? And God – well, forgive me, Lord, of course I can’t put You on hold, it doesn’t work like that, and I can’t go into Your proper church, the one in Rome, if I’m going to be Prime Minister for a while longer, but I can go along with Cherie sometimes, and the children are being brought up in it, and – oh well, Lord, I knew You’d understand that I am doing Your work all the time anyway; You do understand that, don’t You? Knew You would. OK, glad that’s sorted out.
Tony came to himself suddenly. People were still speaking. Backbenchers he didn’t recognise. That woman with the frizzy hair at the back, had she just been elected? No, he thought he remembered some rather tedious intervention from her at some point, and having to say something nice about her constituency in PMQs a few weeks before the election was called. Better pay attention, he told himself. This meeting is going to be so briefed, so I had better know what really got said before the newspapers start deciding what they said and what I said.
Oh well, thought Tony, still musing despite himself, I was going to tell them at party conference I was leaving, but I don’t think I can do that now – too much work to be getting on with, it’ll take a bit longer. But I won’t stay until the next election, I’m not getting any younger, and I’m missing Leo’s growing up. But the things I’ve got in mind, that Gordon would never let me do, I can get most of them done in a year, two at the most. Yes. Oh yes.
Cherie was aghast. ‘All our plans!’, she wailed. ‘Now we have to carry on living in that poxy hole in Downing Street!’ She wouldn’t miss Gordon, though, she less than anyone. She loathed him with a passion that Tony sometimes found a little terrifying, She had never understood their partnership and how they had worked over the years, those Tory years, for a Labour government. Something about Gordon didn’t smell right, she had said. And yet, Tony thought, women liked Gordon. He had had some top girlfriends before Sarah came along, better lookers than he, Tony, could … Stop it. Stop it now. And women said, even Anji had once said, Tony remembered, that what they found attractive about Gordon was his smell. He didn’t use a special cologne or anything, he just smelled good. Well, apparently he was somewhere pumped full of sedatives now and probably didn’t smell so good any more; nothing attractive about smelling of hospitals. Tony had thought at times that Cherie would actually have killed Gordon if she had thought she could get away with it. She had said once that all Gordon’s crap over the years had made her understand how people could do murder – just to make that person not be there any more. For ever. Tony was, just a little bit, frightened of Cherie himself.
So, the PLP wanted Tony to stay. In fact they had begged him to. He had never exactly even said he was going, and certainly not when, in any public way, but people had expected it. And it seemed that begging Tony to stay was all Denis MacShane’s idea. Finger on the pulse for the first and probably the only time in his political life, Tony thought, spitefully.
Tony’s departure somehow went off the boil as a story. The media just stopped asking about it. He had never really said he was actually going, or that he had changed his mind. No, Gordon’s health was the story. Cue endless think-pieces about what politics did to the brain and the emotions and the mental health. But neither Tony’s people nor Gordon’s had much of an interest in briefing about Gordon either. It wouldn’t help any of their agendas; and certainly wouldn’t help the government. Gordon’s people in Parliament had their own careers to think about – and there weren’t that many of them anyway. And there was all the business of government to be thinking about. Of course the ‘Stop the War’ crowd still hated Tony; but they always had and always would, and, Tony thought, they weren’t interested in stopping any wars at all. In fact they were totally in favour of wars, especially in Iraq, they just wanted the other side to win. They were the warmongers, against Bush’n’Blair.
Better stop wool-gathering, thought Tony, and get out there and face them. Well, there was nothing to face, really.
That night Tony and Cherie talked, side by side in the dark bedroom that was never really dark, because Downing Street never went dark, about the future. Not the immediate future – a third term won, and Tony didn’t even have to decide now whether he would serve the whole of it or go earlier – but Tony’s own future. Bestriding the world; England was too small for him now. By morning Tony was renewed. He understood it all now. Since the late 1970s he had been trying to impose himself on the world. When he decided he wanted to become an MP there was no clear path for him – no Labour tradition in the family, no relatives who were MPs, no one really properly in politics at all. No, he had had to push, and wheedle, and persuade, and talk to people he didn’t like at all, and eventually he had got in, but none of it had been easy. Nothing had ever been easy for Tony, because, it had always seemed to him, he was trying to follow a path which was not the one his background, and his parents, and his early life, had set him on. But he had done it. He had pushed in, and he had got to be Prime Minister.
The Labour Party didn’t like him much. They liked John Prescott, and they liked Gordon too, and they loved Dennis Skinner. Dennis, and the dwindling band of northern ex-miners in Parliament, and the overweight, drinking, brawling Scots who had a ‘wee lassie that works the computer’ in their constituency offices, were an exotic breed to the average party member. Most Labour members were more at home with people just like themselves – just like people were everywhere, really – and that meant people a lot more like Tony, with his nice background and his nice soft voice, and yet it was those same party members up and down the land who hissed the word Blair (oh yes, Tony knew they did, whatever the people around him tried to hide from him) with the most profound loathing. When Tony had been to constituency parties in the 1990s after he had become leader, the look on their faces, especially the women’s faces, reminded him of his mother’s look when he was a child and had watched her emptying the vacuum cleaner bag.
But now Tony understood it, or so it seemed to him on that rather clammy grey day early in the summer of 2005. Something had happened when Gordon went crazy: the scales had fallen from the eyes of the PLP. And now it seemed, because he had been begged, pleaded with, to stay, by Labour MP after Labour MP – he almost expected one of the more sycophantic ones to say: ‘Only you can save us, Tony, lead us out of this wilderness and into the promised land’ – there was nothing to push for any more. He had come home. He belonged. All his life so far he had had to make powerful friends (Derry) and influential ones (Peter) because none of the places he wanted to be had really wanted to let him in. He knew, like David Owen before him, that he would have been better accepted, and better liked, if he had been a Tory. But somehow he was not a Tory, although his family and background had set him on that path. He had followed a different path, and now they wanted him, the country accepted him. The back-benchers’ pleadings, orchestrated at first by Denis MacShane – who then didn’t need to any more as they were enthusiastically doing it for themselves – had made him something he had never thought himself to be before: powerful.
‘How ridiculous’, Cherie had said to him in bed that night. ‘Of course you’re powerful. You are one of the most powerful men in the world. Politics is about power. However people dress it up, that is what it is about. So you of all people should understand where power is. And it is in you.’ But Tony had never understood that, never really felt it before. Even though he had got a safe seat in Parliament, when better connected men than he had tried to get a seat for twenty years and given up disgruntled; even though he had not been long on the back benches; even though he had not toiled in a succession of junior front-bench and ministerial jobs that no one was interested in, surrounded by civil servants who despised him, until the inevitable dismissal by the Prime Minister or Leader of the Opposition of the day, as he had seen others do, ending their careers in bitterness and drink. No, he, Tony Blair, had held only one office, that of Prime Minister. He had had the ear of the President of the United States – and at any given time, how many could say that? Because he had been asked to stay on – after ten years of Gordon, especially, but not only Gordon, trying to push him into the outer darkness – suddenly he could see his way clear, and his life entire. He had a mission, a road to travel, a world to save. In the mean time he had a country to run, and a Europe to influence, and a US President to hobnob with in the interest of democracy, human rights and the rule of law. Oh, and a constituency to represent. But he had been doing that for years already.
Not many people remembered Tony’s speech in Chicago in 1999 on humanitarian interventionism; in the UK hardly anyone had noticed it. But that speech, in which he had set out the case for intervention wherever in the world populations were being oppressed, tormented and killed by leaders who denied them the basic freedoms taken for granted in North America and much of Europe, though not in many other places, had been hugely influential, producing a generation of what were called in America liberal hawks (some called them neocons, but that wasn’t quite the same thing) – or at least the speech had contributed to that generation’s gestation. Cherie had been furious with him for making it – but then she didn’t agree with any of it, anyway. Old-fashioned, Cherie was, probably still a unilateralist who didn’t understand that Ronald Reagan had been a great reforming, anti-nuclear president who had kept most of the world at peace for a decade or more. Cherie was more worried about what The Guardian would say. Well, what price The Guardian, now, thought Tony in fierce triumph. Anyway, he never asked Cherie what she thought about any of those things. He was afraid of what she might say.
So, out into the world. The economic cycle; yes, Gordon had warned him about that. But Gordon is no more, and the Tories cannot convince and cannot form a government – they will probably need two more elections to get anywhere near it, and only then if they reform, he thought. But in the mean time, Tony might nationalise a bank or two, not to keep the lefties happy but to keep the British people’s mortgages safe, and as an example to the others. Then he had a brilliant idea: the French socialist Dominique Strauss-Kahn must go to the IMF. That would suit everyone. Chirac couldn’t stand the bloke, but he and Tony got on terrifically well, in French of course (Tony was proud of his fluency in that language, which very few British politicians, and still fewer Prime Ministers, had ever had). Brilliant. Someone at the heart of the world’s money who was One of Us and who might be President of France one day. Yes, Dom was the man. What next?
The economic cycle dipped all right. They always do, like earthquakes and tsunamis, just a bit more predictable. But then it started to get uglier. There were rumours that sent the markets wobbling, talk of bankruptcy protection at the very top of America; it could be the start of a full-blown crisis. Some of the more swivel-eyed market commentators started to talk about runs on banks. The thing with crises is to get at them before they’ve picked up speed, before the tipping point is reached and firms start laying off workers and people start not being able to pay their mortgages – Tony had learned all that from Gordon. Gordon had wanted full employment. He had said that was the only guarantee against recession. Tony supposed he was right, so that was what his government wanted too – and everyone was in favour of full employment, even the bosses, who don’t usually like having to up wages when there are plenty of jobs. Even The Guardian. It didn’t work quite so much like that any more, now that the workforce was more mobile than it had been in the post-war years; so, a dip but not a crash. Everyone happy – well, nearly. In world terms most of the victims were American blue-collar workers, and nobody had ever cared much about them, not since FDR, anyway.
It couldn’t last. The clear direction, the sense of belonging, the sunny confidence about his place in the world, those Tony would keep. When they begged him to stay he had found all those at last, and he would not be letting go of them. But inevitably people, meaning the media, began to wonder What Tony Would Do Next. And of course there were those who had themselves in mind for a future leadership role. Alan Milburn, anyone? No, perhaps not. All leaders stay too long – well, nearly all, Tony said to Alastair one day. Harold Wilson didn’t; and Harold won us four elections, which I haven’t done yet. Alastair looked uncomfortable. The next day Peter asked for a conversation – about the Middle East. So Tony began to take an interest in it. He hadn’t, much, before. He had thought of himself at first as the Prime Minister for Africa. But that hadn’t really worked, despite the Sierra Leone success. No, the Middle East it must be. Tony began going there, more than he had ever done before. He read the Koran. He started learning Arabic.
A third-term Labour Prime Minister. The country hadn’t had one of those before, not continuously anyway. The manner of Harold Wilson’s passing gnawed at Tony. He knew better than to mention Harold’s name to any of his own advisers, but Harold had quit while he was ahead, even though it was possible that he had known his mind was going – it didn’t really matter, he hadn’t stayed around to let people see he was not the Prime Minister, or the man, he had been. And Tony was still young, still good-looking – the grey hairs Iraq had given him were not a disfigurement, no one thought so, after all – and not in the same place Harold had been in at all. So, a mission – but first, fend off the doubters. They were mostly in the media, but there were plenty in the constituency parties too, and some of the back-benchers in the more marginal seats were starting to listen to those voices at their General Committees. Deselection was always a risk – once parties started on that they got a kind of taste for it, like sharks scenting blood. The wiser heads could understand that when you start with that, you’ve got opposition as your future – though of course, opposition is where most of the Labour Party feels most comfortable. That was why the party had never been Tony’s spiritual home; he needed government, he needed power, he needed influence, he needed a place on the world stage. And if Tony needed those things, so did Britain, and so did the Labour Party. Obvious, really.
Tony would go. He didn’t think they would beg him to stay again, but they didn’t need to. They had done it once, and they had been doing the Lord’s work without knowing it. But before he made his announcement he had something to do. Something which would assure him of the place in history he already knew he had, but perhaps not all the world realised it. I’ll go, he told those closest to him, on my terms: not pushed out like Thatcher was, not booted out by the electorate – well, let’s not think about that one. No, I’ll go and I’ll tell them when. But first there is Something I Must Do. For the Good of Humanity. Tyranny must be opposed wherever it is to be found.
‘What are you going to do, Tony?’ asked Denis MacShane, awed.
‘Well, y’know, people’, said Tony quietly, ‘I am the man for the Middle East; and democracy, human rights and the rule of law for those suffering under tyranny will be my goal when I leave this place. But there are some things you have to be in government to do. And toppling tyranny can be one of them. The places I’m thinking aren’t even necessarily geographically in the Middle East, but you know what I mean. I’m talking to the chiefs of staff straight after this. Then a war cabinet at Chequers at the weekend. Then, when it’s done, I’ll be off.’
A hubbub of voices.
‘Oh, didn’t I say?’ said Tony over his shoulder as he strode towards the door. ‘9/11, 7/7, they’re all getting ideas, and their own people don’t like it. Libya – Gaddafi was only pretending; Iran, yes; Pakistan even if we need to. We’re going in.’
On a dry hillside a shepherd looks up as a sudden wind causes his skinny sheep to bunch together and sand to eddy over the parched grass.
Jets scream overhead.