Alastair Campbell executed the spin doctor’s dream coup in October 1998 when he entered a Lobby meeting at 4 p.m. and told us that Ron Davies, the Welsh secretary, had resigned after a forty-five-minute conversation with the Prime Minister over an incident the previous night when he had been robbed at knifepoint after meeting a complete stranger on Clapham Common. Got that?!
None of the astonishing news had leaked out until this point and, although the questions were manifold, Campbell was able to give us a resignation, an exchange of correspondence between PM and former minister, and a new minister. I mention the smoothness of that operation because it compares starkly with the way prime ministers generally handled resignations during my time.
Tony Blair was a reluctant sacker, as was John Major. Both held on to ministers long after it was obvious to colleagues and particularly the press – which always loved a scalp – that they had to go. There were understandable reasons for this. Sacking a minister, like reshuffling generally, never guarantees a good outcome. Spurned ministers, or those who feel they have been treated badly, become enemies. Margaret Thatcher got the most dramatic come-uppance for demoting Sir Geoffrey Howe. Major had been backed for the Tory leadership by Norman Lamont but when he dismissed him as chancellor in 1993, after the fiasco of Britain’s exit from the European exchange rate mechanism, he was a friend no more. Lamont accused Major in the Commons of running a government that looked to be ‘in office but not in power’.
Most sackings are borderline cases. Ministers guilty of any financial impropriety or other improper conduct have no choice. They go, and go quickly. But ministers dismissed because of policy disagreements with the prime minister of the day become dangerous foes. I observed and reported on scores of sackings, and each reshuffle that condemned former ministers to the back-benches widened the internal opposition to the incumbent prime minister.
Thatcher and David Cameron were more ruthless sackers than Blair, Gordon Brown and Major. Tory MPs are certainly less sentimental about their leaders than Labour. Perhaps the same goes for the leaders. No one has ever quite matched Supermac, or Harold Macmillan. In 1962 he sacked a third of his Cabinet in what became known as the Night of the Long Knives, named after Hitler’s considerably bloodier purge of the Sturmabteilung (SA; the Nazi storm-troopers) in 1934. Macmillan wanted to give his ageing administration new life and desired a shift away from the austere economic policy of Chancellor Selwyn Lloyd. But his plans were leaked, he rushed the changes and upset everyone involved, producing Jeremy Thorpe’s memorable quote: ‘Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his friends for his life.’
Thatcher discarded a trio of ‘wets’ in 1981 and continued to weed them out in later reshuffles to make way for her own supporters. But every time she did it, she left another enemy – be it Sir Ian Gilmour, Christopher Soames, Francis Pym or one of many others – brooding on the sidelines, waiting to take revenge whenever the opportunity presented itself. When one of her own faltered – Nicholas Ridley with his disparaging remarks about the Germans – they got the bullet as well.
Cameron professed a hatred of reshuffles when he took over in 2010 but he has been more Thatcherite than Blairite when it comes to the crunch. Three ministers were reported authoritatively to have blubbed when he sacked them in 2012. He showed no compunction in dismissing an angry Andrew Lansley, the former health secretary, who had been his boss in his days in the Conservative Research Department.
He showed similar hardness in 2014 when demoting Michael Gove, a friend and close political ally, from education secretary to chief whip after his relations with the teaching profession and other ministers, such as Theresa May, became difficult. He gave Gove the job of justice secretary but Gove became a key ‘Outer’ in the European debate after earlier promising to keep a low profile. Their relationship has not been repaired. May’s reshuffle on assuming the prime ministership was brutal, as I have reported elsewhere.
In dropping Kenneth Clarke, Owen Paterson and Dominic Grieve, Cameron also knew that he was placing three potentially dangerous heavyweights on the back-benches. They were joined by Iain Duncan Smith after he resigned in a row over cuts to disability benefits after the 2016 Budget, probably anticipating his likely removal in any post-referendum shuffle.
The press gets very excited about reshuffles. They are a weapon for the prime minister of the day but so often they go wrong and leave them wondering why they bothered. The theory is that you use them to reward the up-and-coming and discard the poor performers. There is plenty of excitement during the day as beaming faces emerge from Number 10. But for every smiling visage there is a sullen one – the sacked and the never-asked.
Blair never really mastered the reshuffle art, getting his timing wrong with forced departures and sometimes missing people out because of late rows with Brown over which of their respective supporters should be included. Take Stephen Byers. The transport secretary was another whose career looked dicey from the moment his press adviser, the likeable and utterly harmless Jo Moore, was caught out sending an e-mail on 9/11 saying that today would be a ‘good day to bury bad news’. It was a gruesome mistake but it reflected the climate in which Labour’s army of zealous ‘spin’ operators worked in those days.
True, Byers had also become involved in a furious row over his decision to force the Railtrack operator into administration. Without the ‘spin’ problem he might have survived but after initially standing by him, Blair eventually agreed he should go. We were called to Number 10 and Byers was given the stage of the Pillared Room to announce his own resignation, another first for Campbell.
The comeback king was Peter Mandelson. He had spent his working life trying to get Labour elected – promoting in public esteem Blair and Brown, and giving his party credibility and electability after four terms in exile. Now, just eighteen months after Labour’s landslide triumph, he was out as trade secretary having failed to declare a home loan of £373,000 from fellow Labour MP Geoffrey Robinson, at a time when the latter’s business affairs were being investigated by Mandelson’s department. This was a pretty open-and-shut case.
Despair turned to triumph when Blair brought him back just ten months later to become Northern Ireland secretary, to build on the success of the Good Friday Agreement. It was a job he loved, and in which he excelled, but before long he was out again after a row concerning a passport application from an Indian billionaire.
Despite Mandelson’s insistence that he had not acted improperly, and his subsequent clearing by an independent inquiry, Blair deemed there were sufficient inconsistencies in his account of circumstances surrounding an application for a passport from Indian-born business magnate Srichand Hinduja. The story centred on whether Mandelson had or had not had contact with Mike O’Brien, the former immigration minister, over the case.
24 January 2001 was another extraordinary day. Alastair Campbell had arrived late for the morning Lobby briefing because he had been sitting in on an inconclusive meeting between Blair and Mandelson. Blair wanted to lead Mandelson to the conclusion that he should go, but was not finding it easy. As I was to reveal later, Campbell at one point drummed his fingers on the table to indicate his impatience.
He came to the Lobby and told us that the two principals were meeting, and added that it would be wise if he could get back to us later to give us the conclusion. That was it. He was effectively telling us what would happen. Mandelson was doomed – again – and broadcasters raced from the room to tell that to the world.
The Times felt there was enough doubt about the circumstances to warrant an investigation and I wrote a big two-page spread in the Times 2 supplement asking the question: was Blair panicked into sacking Mandelson? After hearing all sides, I concluded that Mandelson was probably at fault in failing to give a clear account of what had happened, leading the Government into making conflicting statements. But there appeared to be no hard proof at all that he had done anything wrong and I questioned how an affair that had done Blair much damage and deprived him of his key ally should have been allowed to get out of hand. The rest is history. Mandelson resigned his seat, went to Brussels, and his third coming was in 2008, when Gordon Brown asked him to return.
David Blunkett, too, had a second bite at a Cabinet career after resigning over the claim that he had used his position as home secretary to push through a visa application for his former lover’s nanny. His troubles started when it was revealed that he had had an affair with Kimberly Quinn, the American publisher of The Spectator. But Blair was swift to give him a second chance, bringing him back as work and pensions secretary in the reshuffle after his third election victory in 2005.
However, support in the Labour back-benches for Blunkett collapsed just five months later when it was revealed that he took a two-week directorship at a company while he was out of the Cabinet. He broke ministerial rules by doing so without consulting an independent committee that advises former ministers on whether they should take up jobs. It was a tragedy for Blunkett, one of the most remarkable men to adorn British politics in recent times. And it was another blow for Blair, whose majority had been cut in half at the election and who seemed to be paying the price yet again for his kindness to a friend and ally. Our headline, ‘Decline and Fall’ was not only about Blunkett.
The local election results in May 2006 were dreadful for Labour. Blair was moving into the final straight of his premiership, as Gordon Brown’s allies again pressed him to move on. The Prime Minister used his reshuffle that month to suggest that that was not his intention. ‘Blair turns butcher after polls carnage’ was the excellent headline on my splash.
While he sacked an ally, Charles Clarke, as home secretary because of the row over foreign prisoner deportations, he threw down the gauntlet to Brown by promoting supporters such as John Reid and Alan Johnson – who could have been seen as leadership alternatives to the chancellor – while demoting ministers who had appeared sympathetic to Brown.
Blair angered the chancellor and his backers by appointing, without any consultation with Brown, two avowed Blairites, Hazel Blears and Jacqui Smith, to the posts of Labour Party chairman and chief whip. Brown’s supporters said that Blair had shown he had lost interest in the transfer of power and one said the reshuffle was an ‘act of war’.
Clarke went despite Blair offering him two alternative jobs, including defence secretary and trade and industry secretary. The PM wanted a new face at the home office to restore public confidence but, in a bitter exit, Clarke stood his ground and insisted he was the man to put things right. Blair was to miss Clarke when the pressure on him from the Brownites became intolerable just three months later.
In retrospect he regretted sacking Clarke and in the eyes of many, Blair’s biggest mistake was in NOT sacking Brown. Had he done so, he might have gone on to win a fourth term without Brown snapping at his heels and he might have got further with his reform agenda without the brake of his chancellor. We can only surmise.
As for poor old Ron Davies, his ‘moment of madness’ on Clapham Common, as he was to call it himself, destroyed his career. I knew Ron and played a few games of squash with him. Once he flew into a blind fury when I walked into a squash court where he was playing another Labour MP without knocking on the door, a dangerous thing to do. And two days after he entered the Cabinet, I met him as he walked into the Commons and said: ‘Congratulations, Ron.’ ‘Secretary of State to you, Phil,’ he retorted. He was joking.
But Davies’s resignation and its announcement, carried out with the ruthless efficiency for which Campbell and his team were renowned, was a graphic example of how fragile Cabinet ministers’ careers can be. In that case, both Campbell and Blair knew that Davies could not survive the ‘lapse of judgment’ that led to him going to a stranger’s flat and being robbed. It was better to end it there and then.
In his diary for 27 October 1998, Campbell tells of how Jack Straw (then home secretary), having being told by the police about the incident, called Downing Street to warn the PM and then how an ‘absolutely shattered’ Davies had come in to tell his story. Campbell writes:
I could tell looking at TB’s face that he had pretty much decided this was a no-hope situation for Ron, and that the only way for him to salvage anything from this was to get ahead of the curve, resign before anyone knew the first thing about it, and maybe get some sympathy and understanding.
I and the rest of us at the briefing were dumbstruck when Campbell told us some of the news. He admits in the diary:
It was not easy. As I knew they would they got straight to the point – what had he done wrong? – and I didn’t want particularly to dump all over him, so I was avoiding a lot of questions.
Blair got that one right. But he and other leaders got so many wrong.