17

Millennium

‘Let’s all meet up in the year 2000’

What is the Dome for?

Jacques Chirac (1999)

 

When I look back and reread the papers, reminding myself of the sheer horror, depth and scale of the crisis, it is a total miracle we came through it.

Tony Blair (2010)

 

To all the people who supported Ken Livingstone, all the people who backed Labour in opposition but would rather snipe from the sidelines than be tainted by support; all the people who vote Liberal, Green or Socialist Labour, the time for such luxuries is now over.

John O’Farrell (2000)

‘I knew a lot about history before becoming prime minister,’ wrote Tony Blair in his memoirs. Some commentators were less than convinced, not sure that he quite comprehended the word itself, suspecting that he too readily confused the idea with the concept of destiny. Blair, claimed the writers of Rory Bremner’s show, saw history as being ‘not something in the past, but something in the future which will judge him favourably’. Perhaps that was why he seemed so tremendously excited about the fact that he would become the first prime minister of the twenty-first century, and the first holder of the office ever to welcome in a millennium.

In his speech to the 1995 Labour Party conference, Blair had talked of the challenge that would face an incoming government, using terms that were hyperbolic even by his own standards. There would be, he said, ‘a thousand days to prepare for a thousand years’. That was a slight miscalculation – there were actually 964 days between the election and 1 January 2000, which didn’t have quite the same ring – but it did allow his detractors to suggest there was something of a ‘thousand year Reich’ about his aspiration. It also prompted John Major to warn that ‘A thousand days of Labour government could ditch a thousand years of British history.’

There was, from an early stage, a conflict about the significance of the forthcoming millennium, a dispute about quite what it meant to Britain, a continuation of the argument about heritage and modernity that had dominated so much of the decade. Why it should mean anything at all was not a question that appeared to trouble too many leading politicians; instead there was a determination to mark the occasion on a scale unmatched in most other countries of the world. The Millennium Commission was created to distribute monies from the National Lottery for events up and down Britain, but that was too diffuse to satisfy the political appetite for spectacle, and Michael Heseltine came up with the idea of a national focus, a major exhibition to be staged in Greenwich. ‘As a nation,’ he later wrote, ‘I believed that we should stake our claim to the future with a statement of great confidence and pride in ourselves.’ This was to be a showpiece for the country in the same way as the Great Exhibition of 1851 and the Festival of Britain a hundred years later had been.

There was a symbolism to the choice of location, just a couple of miles from the Royal Observatory, home of the prime meridian and of Greenwich Mean Time, but the site chosen was far from straightforward. Formerly occupied by British Gas, its soil was so poisonous that for the first few months of the reclamation work, visitors were warned not even to open their car windows. The costs of decontamination alone were vast. By the time Labour came to power in 1997, upwards of £100 million had already been spent, with nothing yet to show for the investment. ‘I should really cancel it, but my gut instinct tells me otherwise,’ reflected Blair. He let it be known that he was minded to continue with the exhibition, though he insisted it should pass the ‘Euan test’, that it should be sufficiently exciting that his thirteen-year-old son would wish to attend. This was the height of Cool Britannia, and the fantasy of placing Britain at the centre of the global celebrations of the millennium was simply irresistible.

Although Blair had to leave early from the cabinet meeting where the future of the project was to be determined, his wishes were amply represented by John Prescott: ‘I knew and they knew that Tony was for it, even though most were critical.’ There was little desire to thwart the leader’s wishes. ‘If the PM were here and said we should go ahead,’ shrugged Robin Cook, ‘we would all accept it.’ And so they did, and though they also resolved that no further public money would be allocated to the project, David Blunkett at least was honest enough to admit that ‘nobody believed for a moment that this would be the case’. The Millennium Dome, as it became known, was to go ahead. One last chance to change course came with the death of Diana later in the year, but it too was spurned. ‘In retrospect,’ reflected Jonathan Powell, ‘one idea that I wish we had accepted came from the organisers of the Millennium Dome who suggested we scrap the Dome and replace it with a children’s hospital dedicated to her.’

Despite the complexities of the construction project, the Dome itself – designed by the recently ennobled architect Richard Rogers – was the more straightforward part of the equation, and proceeded more smoothly than had the Festival of Britain, the construction of which had been beset by strikes. A greater challenge was what to put inside the building and, as time slipped by, it became ever more apparent that there was no consensus on what that might be, even in the broadest of terms. Various consultants were employed, some more successfully than others. Amongst those who fell by the wayside early on was Malcolm McLaren, formerly the manager of the Sex Pistols and Bow Wow Wow, who suggested that, instead of an exhibition, everyone under the age of twenty-six should be give a free air ticket to any destination of their choosing, ‘so they can get the hell out of this country for the millennium celebrations’.

More influential, though still controversial, was Terence Conran, who had worked on the Festival of Britain but was best known for founding the furniture shop Habitat. He insisted that it would be ‘entirely inappropriate’ for the Dome to have a Christian theme because, rather puzzlingly, the millennium ‘is not an event that has very much to do with Christianity. It’s to do with time.’ Ann Widdecombe called for him to be sacked. As it finally materialised, an area of the Dome designated the Faith Zone featured a celebration of all the major religions practised in Britain, in an attempt to appear inclusive; significantly, however, faith was thus hived off to its own corner, rather than permeating the entire event as it had the Festival of Britain. It was an indication of the way that religion had become a cultural sideshow in the last half-century.

Also on the planning team of what Blair called ‘ideas merchants and creative forces’ were the theatre impresario Cameron Mackintosh and the usual suspects from cinema and television: David Puttnam, Alan Yentob, Michael Grade. The latter was keen to stress that this wouldn’t be like Britain’s previous forays into such territory: ‘In 1851 and 1951 the great and the good created wonderful tableaux, then lifted the curtain and allowed the great unwashed to have a peep. This show is different. The people are in charge.’ Gerald Barry, director general of the Festival of Britain, had made a similar claim – that it was to be ‘the People’s Show, not organised arbitrarily for them to enjoy, but put on by them’. In the case of the Millennium Dome, as with its predecessor, the rhetoric was misleading.

Because, despite such democratic talk, the person actually in charge this time was Peter Mandelson. His grandfather, Herbert Morrison, had overseen the Festival of Britain – amongst the legacies of which was the Royal Festival Hall where New Labour celebrated its election victory on 2 May 1997 – and Mandelson was determined to live up to the family tradition. Unburdened by a government department, he threw himself into what was still being talked about as an exhibition, and his commitment to the project at the time was all-encompassing (even if, in his memoirs, he spared just two of 566 pages to covering the eighteen months he spent working on it). He took to speaking of ‘my Dome’, while Tony Banks nicknamed him the Dome Secretary. Unfortunately his enthusiasm wasn’t matched by others outside his immediate coterie. The Sport newspaper denounced the entire thing as ‘bollocks’, and a poll in the Daily Telegraph found that 98 per cent of the public thought the Lottery money should be spent elsewhere.

Even some of those at the heart of the enterprise doubted the wisdom of the decisions being made. David Puttnam regarded the ‘Euan test’ as ‘a slight and demeaning basis for the Dome’, while Richard Rogers was unimpressed by the vagueness of what was to be put inside his big tent: ‘It was like an orchestra without a conductor,’ he concluded. The consultant creative director, Stephen Bayley, who had earlier created the Boilerhouse Project at the Victoria & Albert Museum and – with Terence Conran – the Design Museum, lasted for just six months before resigning in protest at what he saw as Mandelson’s limited artistic vision, as demonstrated by a much-publicised trip to Disney World in Florida to pick up some new ideas. The whole thing, now rebranded as the New Millennium Experience, was, said Bayley, ‘a project that could have been one of the great international world exhibitions, but is instead going to be a crabby and demoralising theme park’.

A man who, in his words, saw ‘typography as far, far more important in the general run of things than politics itself’, Bayley was perhaps not best suited to steering what was rapidly becoming a very political project. For both Mandelson and Blair seemed determined to stake their reputations on the Dome. It would be, announced Blair, ‘the most exciting day out in the world’. He was also reported to have referred to the Dome as ‘the first paragraph of my next election manifesto’, though Alastair Campbell furiously denied the authenticity of the quote, calling it ‘journalistic fantasy’. Less disputed, though no more accurate as a prediction, was Blair’s claim that the Dome would ‘see off cynics who despise anything new’.

That denunciation of cynicism was a familiar one, of course, but there was a little more impatience and irritation in Blair’s voice now, a sense that he was deliberately stepping up his attacks on those who failed to share his vision of the future. Midway through the parliament, he seemed painfully aware that the reality hadn’t thus far matched the rhetoric and that he hadn’t yet lived up to his self-image. ‘Pushing to get out of me was the desire to be a leader who led and challenged all the way,’ he later wrote.

At the 1999 Labour conference, he launched into an attack on all those who he felt were holding back the birth of the New Britain he wished to create. The next century, he declared, would see a battle ‘between the forces of progress and the forces of conservatism. They are what hold our nation back. Not just in the Conservative Party, but within us, within our nation.’ In terms that could only recall Margaret Thatcher, he railed against ‘the cynics, the elites, the establishment’ and ‘those who will live in decline’. And he ended with a peroration somewhere between the Book of Ecclesiastes and Martin Luther King: ‘To every nation a purpose. To every party a cause. And now, at last, party and nation joined in the same cause for the same purpose: to set our people free.’

It was a speech that went down extremely well in the hall, even with those he would happily include in the ‘forces of conservatism’. Elsewhere, though, it marked the end of Blair’s long honeymoon with the right-wing press. The Daily Mail took the speech to be an attack on the values it held dear – as indeed it was – while the Sun retaliated by accentuating the positive, ‘such as the conservation of good things like the countryside and our heritage’. It provoked the Tories sufficiently that William Hague sounded genuinely fired up in his own conference speech the following week, giving renewed hope to those who distrusted Blair. ‘He spoke for Britain,’ exulted Richard Littlejohn, a convert to Hague’s cause. ‘Not the Guardian-reading, polenta-munching, euro-loving, history-hating, public-spending, outreach-coordinating, New Labour elite, but ordinary, hardworking, tax-paying, car-owning, home-loving, small-saving, patriotic, family men and women.’

From the perspective of Downing Street, it even seemed as though Blair’s speech had similarly riled the heir to the throne. That autumn Prince Charles was particularly visible in the media, making a speech that criticised genetically modified crops, taking his son, William, out hunting, and declining an invitation to attend the Buckingham Palace reception given in honour of Jiang Zemin. Alastair Campbell was convinced that it was all ‘a strategy to put himself at the head of the forces of conservatism. The speech had clearly really struck a nerve.’

The impression was of a government picking fights for the sake of it, happiest when it was in conflict, as though it could only define itself in opposition to others. And yet there seemed little need for such confrontation. The country, as it approached the end of the century, was relatively content. Blair might not have delivered on his implied promises, and many would have been happy to see an increase in public spending, some sign of improvement in the ‘schools and hospitals’ so often invoked by Labour, but he was more secure than any mid-term prime minister in living memory. There was no hankering for a return to a Conservative government, no real crisis. The economy was still growing, the stock market was booming, unemployment was falling, and the majority were enjoying good times.

A handful of doubters pointed out that this was largely being fuelled by easy credit, which would one day have to be repaid, but they were definitely in a minority, and the rapid accumulation of household debt was generally laughed away. Everyone, it seemed, from toddlers to pensioners, was in receipt of a constant stream of letters that, as parodied by Louise Wener, read along the lines of: ‘Dear sir, we hear you are very badly in debt and a loser. We would like to offer you one of our platinum cards so that you can plunge yourself still deeper into destitution and penury.’ The mockery didn’t stop the acquisition of such cards, nor did it hinder the willingness to use them, creating a continuing sense of well-being.

Contentment, though, was not enough for a government that still thought in terms of tomorrow’s headlines and required a daily flow of announcements and initiatives. Targets were still being set, new laws still being introduced at a ferocious rate, but the media appetite for such initiatives was diminishing, and now it became increasingly likely that the Millennium Dome would fail to deliver. The tabloids were mostly brought onside – Rupert Murdoch had even been persuaded to become a sponsor of the project, adding his money to that of McDonald’s, the Ford Motor Company and arms manufacturer British Aerospace amongst others – but there were plenty still to be heard predicting a disaster.

Indeed disaster was very much in the air. The last time the western world had confronted the dawning of a new millennium, there had been a widespread belief that the world was about to end, with the serving pope, Sylvester II, amongst those who believed that the coming of the Kingdom of Heaven was nigh. This time round, such concerns seemed laughable even in Christian circles, where the accuracy of the calendar had long been accepted as flawed. Instead there was a new terror, more in keeping with science fiction than eschatology. As the century drew to a close, a worldwide panic arose about what became known as the Millennium Bug, a potential problem arising from the way that dates had been stored in computer code. To minimise memory use, the year had been represented by just two digits and there was a concern therefore that if 99 was followed by 00, programs would interpret this as 1900 rather than as 2000.

The consequences were uncertain, but the media were keen to paint a doomsday scenario. ‘Your home is suddenly plunged into darkness as power fails and the lights go out,’ opened the Sun’s account of what might happen on 1 January 2000. ‘When power is restored, the washing machine breaks down and the phone is dead. Your credit cards stop working. You lose your job.’ From household appliances to life-support machines to the stock markets, nothing was safe. ‘Forty thousand companies could go bankrupt.’ Nor was the alarmism confined to the tabloids. ‘Bank vaults and prison gates have swung open,’ was the Observer’s version of what might happen, ‘so have valves on sewer pipes.’ The Financial Times talked of ‘the worst case scenario, where aircraft fall out of the sky as air-traffic control fails, power stations shut down and hospital equipment does not operate’.

None of this, of course, materialised, possibly because somewhere in excess of $300 billion was spent in remedial work to fix the problem. Or possibly it was because the problem had been overstated in the first instance. For there were those who saw this international scare as little more than a resurgence of the superstitions of the Dark Ages, proof that society might change but human beings remained stubbornly superstitious.

The Dome was scheduled to open on New Year’s Eve, with a party for the great and the good. It was not a triumph. Having apparently forgotten the lessons of the Sheffield rally in 1992, the organisers failed to ensure the proper working of the transport laid on for guests. A train broke down, stranding several thousand guests at Stratford, amongst them the senior members of the media, including the director general of the BBC and seven newspaper editors, who were supposed to be covering the launch. As John Prescott put it, ‘That pissed them off.’ Any lingering chance of positive coverage died on the cold, concrete platforms of an East End station.

The most memorable images of the event itself were of the Queen and Prince Philip looking as though they would prefer to be at home, or indeed anywhere else at all, rather than spending the evening in a South London tent, linking arms with the Blairs for a rendition of ‘Auld Lang Syne’. The arrogance of New Labour was revealed in a diary entry by Oona King, who was present, remarking that ‘the Queen had both her hands the wrong way round’, untroubled by the likelihood that Her Majesty had a better grasp of protocol on such occasions than did a recently elected MP in her early thirties. King added the magnificently patronising comment: ‘considering how old she is, she did pretty well.’ Meanwhile, outside, tens of thousands had gathered on the banks of the Thames to welcome the millennium and to witness a display of pyrotechnics that, it was promised, would create a breathtaking ‘river of fire’. It was no such thing, and not even the television pictures were convincing.

Humiliatingly, it all looked so much more fun in Sydney and Rio, while the world’s media chose as their image of the night the superb firework display at the Eiffel Tower. Despite all the emphasis that Labour had placed on looking forward, on the excitement of the new, it was a structure from the nineteenth century that won the front pages.

The Eiffel Tower had been built to accompany the Paris Exposition in 1889, which attracted over thirty million visitors. The Millennium Dome never stood a chance of matching that, but it was confidently predicted that between twelve and fifteen million would attend during 2000. In the event, it managed just 6.5 million, two million fewer even than the main exhibition at the Festival of Britain, which had run for just five months (those attending at least one event in 1951 were estimated at upwards of twenty-five million). Nor was it a great unifying force in the nation; the Daily Record was pleased to announce that in the first two months of 2000, just 400 tickets had been bought in Scotland. Although the Dome was Britain’s most popular tourist attraction that year, the numbers were disappointing. So too was the fact that repeated injections of cash were required from Lottery funds just to keep it running. It wasn’t even as though it were a cheap day out. Adult tickets cost £20 – twice the cost of entry to the London Dungeon or the Blackpool Tower and Circus – but nonetheless each visitor to the Dome was subsidised out of public funds to the tune of £90 a head.

The other big projects of 2000 met with mixed results. The Millennium Wheel, a massive Ferris wheel on the South Bank of the Thames, was scheduled to open on New Year’s Eve but, although the ceremony went ahead, it wasn’t yet ready to start turning. ‘I don’t think that really matters for tonight,’ said Bob Ayling, chief executive of British Airways, who had paid for the attraction. ‘It does if it’s called the Millennium Wheel,’ rejoined Blair tartly, as he pressed the button to start a firework display that failed to happen. Later known as the London Eye, the wheel came in at three times its original budget – one of the reasons why Ayling subsequently lost his job – but it was a genuine success and, although intended as a temporary structure, it stayed to become a fixture of the London skyline.

Also a hit was the new gallery further down the Thames, Tate Modern. Converted from a disused power station with £50 million of Lottery money, it exceeded expectations, albeit at a cost to other institutions; its parent gallery, now rebranded Tate Britain, saw visitor numbers fall. Tate Modern was connected to the City of London on the north bank by the Millennium Footbridge, a steel suspension bridge for pedestrians that, like the London Eye, suffered a troubled start. The day it opened, some reported experiencing a swaying motion, and the bridge was promptly taken out of service – for two years – so that engineering work to counter the wobble could be carried out. ‘We opened the first new bridge over the river Thames in a hundred years,’ boasted culture secretary Chris Smith, at the Labour conference that year, adding: ‘Then we closed the first new bridge over the river Thames in a hundred years.’

The popularity of the London Eye and Tate Modern made the Dome look even more forlorn, and the failure to meet its targets became a reliable source of fodder for journalists, the butt of endless jokes and attacks. John O’Farrell was one of the few trying to buck the trend. He hadn’t been to the Millennium Experience himself, he wrote, but ‘everyone I know who’s been along there seemed to enjoy themselves and come away impressed’. Yet this happy news was being quashed because ‘Everyone who dislikes this government was determined to hate the Dome with or without going there.’ On the other hand, the members of the House of Commons culture committee did go, and came back to report: ‘There is no single element to make the visitor gasp in astonishment, to provide the “wow” factor that was originally sought.’

That was a fair assessment of the attractions on offer, a random collection of exhibits that were all slightly inferior to the versions available elsewhere – the interactive technology was bettered by At-Bristol, the main show was less impressive than the Cirque du Soleil – but O’Farrell had a point. Most visitors were relatively satisfied with the show, if not overwhelmed, their attitude summed up in the slightly surprised comments of Tony Benn, who went along with his family: ‘It was actually a thoroughly enjoyable day.’

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Benn’s approval wasn’t enough, and by February 2000 Alastair Campbell had come to the belated realisation that ‘Governments shouldn’t run tourist attractions.’ Blair picked up the theme. ‘Hindsight is a wonderful thing,’ he mused in September; ‘if I had my time again, I would have listened to those who said governments shouldn’t try to run big visitor attractions.’ Meanwhile William Hague was happily ignoring the Conservative origins of the project and describing it as ‘a symbol of New Labour, an empty pointless tent in the middle of nowhere’.

Hague’s mockery of the Dome was barely more convincing than had been Blair’s espousal of it. For he too went into the new century looking unsure of his ground and losing support. The enthusiasm for his 1999 conference speech didn’t last amongst commentators; one of his key allies in the Conservative Party, Alan Duncan (a ‘ghastly little cunt’, according to Nicholas Soames), was privately voicing his concern that his leader had ‘lost the plot’; and Margaret Thatcher – now nearly a decade out of office but still wielding an authority in Tory circles – couldn’t even pretend that the next election offered any hope. ‘We must all work hard to cut down the [Labour] majority as much as possible next time,’ she said in December 1999, ‘and eliminate it altogether as soon as we can.’ Hague’s continuing irrelevance to national debate, however, was less significant than Blair’s waning authority.

It was by now generally accepted that Thatcher’s downfall – however much it might have been triggered by the specific issues of Europe and the poll tax – was largely attributable to the way that she had become distanced from her natural constituency. Her great strength as a politician had always been her instinctive feel for the public (or at least for the section that was likely to vote for her), but it was hard for that instinct to survive the remoteness of office, after what Alan Clark once described as ‘a decade of motorcades’. Now it seemed that, just a couple of years into his premiership, Blair was heading in the same direction. ‘There’s a bit of a feeling about the place that TB is losing touch with ordinary people and what matters to them,’ noted Lance Price in January 1999. ‘He seems almost bored with all the ordinary stuff and interested only in all the foreign leaders, Clinton, wars, etc.’

Blair himself, of course, acknowledged no such doubts. ‘I know I am right,’ he insisted in May 2000. ‘I am where the country is.’ The need to reassure himself on the point was occasioned by Philip Gould’s latest set of focus-group findings, which showed the government was perceived as being weak on crime, Europe, asylum, defence and the family. In response Blair had written a personal memo that was duly leaked to the press. ‘It is bizarre that any government I lead should be seen as anti-family,’ he noted. ‘All these things add up to a sense that the government – and this even applies to me – is somehow out of touch with gut British instincts.’ He demanded yet more policy initiatives to grab the headlines: ‘the government needs something tough with immediate bite which sends a message through the system. Maybe the driving licence penalty for young offenders. But this should be done soon and I personally should be associated with it.’

Chris Mullin observed of that memo: ‘It is remarkably shallow and short term. There is an air of panic running through it.’ More than that, it displayed no insight into how to remedy the problem. If there was a failing, it was the fact that the government appeared more interested in sending signals than in real action, but Blair’s only response was to seek out yet more signals that might be sent.

In the absence of ideology or philosophy, New Labour had promised competence, but there was little of that currently on show. In pursuit of modernity, the government was entranced by technology, commissioning large computer systems such as the one intended to deal with passport applications; introduced in 1999, it promptly built up a backlog of over half a million applications, a failure already experienced in the immigration service and one that was to be repeated elsewhere. Computers were widely believed to be the tool of the future, but getting them to work proved harder than governments of either stripe had imagined. Perhaps that was partly due to a certain technological illiteracy at the top for, despite Blair’s boast of being ‘a modern man’ and ‘part of the rock and roll generation’, he wasn’t entirely sure of himself when it came to a straightforward computing concept like the Millennium Bug: ‘David Miliband tried to explain it once, and I honestly didn’t have a clue what he was talking about.’

The real difficulties, though, came with much more old-fashioned issues. In January 2000 the NHS was put under huge strain by a particularly bad flu epidemic, and struggled to cope. Amongst the host of horror stories to emerge was the appallingly casual treatment of an elderly woman whose son happened to be Professor Robert Winston, a Labour peer and one of the best-known doctors in the country, thanks to his broadcasting career. In an interview with the New Statesman, Winston described the NHS as the worst health service in Europe and said the government had failed to improve it: ‘we have made medical care deeply unsatisfactory for many people.’

This hit hard at the heart of Labour, whether old or new, and Tony Blair responded to the criticism by announcing in a television interview that health spending in Britain would be raised to the average level of other EU countries. The declaration hadn’t been agreed with Gordon Brown, who made clear that he saw it as ‘not a commitment, but an aspiration’, but both had revealed themselves to be out of step with the public. So focused had they been on establishing an image of financial rectitude, that they had failed to take into account the people’s appetite, after years of rising prosperity, for the increased spending on health and education that they thought they had voted for in 1997 (even if no such pledges had been made). The budget in 2000 promised yet again, this time more credibly, the release of more tax revenue.

The clumsiness remained, however, and the days when a sure-footed New Labour opposition was the master of all the media it surveyed seemed ever more distant. The misreading of the popular mood reached a new low in June 2000 with Blair’s very public humiliation at the hands of the Women’s Institute.

The occasion was an appearance at the organisation’s national conference, over which Blair had agonised for days, turning to some unlikely figures for help in articulating his message, including the right-wing journalist Paul Johnson. The result was a call for a reassertion of traditional values: ‘Respect for the old, for what it has still to teach; respect for others, honour, self-discipline, duty obligation, the essential decency of the British character.’ Viewed in a low light, it could almost have been mistaken for John Major’s exhortation to return to basics, but in the event it was received with even less enthusiasm. There were heckles, boos and slow handclapping, while several members of the audience walked out, leaving Blair on stage looking as though he were returned to his days as Bambi, this time caught in the headlights of an oncoming truck.

‘What on earth was all that about?’ he asked as he left the stage, thoroughly rattled by the hostile reception. The answer was spelt out to the press by Helen Carey, the WI’s national chairman: ‘We made the point very clearly that this was not a political platform. We told them that if Mr Blair was political it would backfire because members would not like it. I think they felt their meeting had been hijacked.’ As the media revelled in the prime minister’s discomfort, even Campbell acknowledged that he couldn’t spin his way out of this one: ‘there was no way we would win a war of words with the Women’s Institute.’

So much of the marketing of New Labour had focused exclusively on Blair himself that the incident reflected disproportionately badly on the whole enterprise. The only answer, he concluded, was that ‘we simply had to hold our nerve and have balls of steel’. Seldom had his favourite formulation been more inappropriate, or more revealing of the laddishness of his premiership, than when responding to the Women’s Institute.

David Blunkett reflected that the public relations disaster of the speech might prove beneficial, since ‘It shook people in the party out of complacency at a time when we had dropped to just a three per cent lead in one opinion poll.’ That was overly optimistic, for more unwinnable fights were yet to be picked.

The flu outbreak that had hospitalised Robert Winston’s mother contributed to the highest winter death rate amongst the elderly for a decade. But politically the bone of contention for pensioners was the announcement the previous autumn that the basic state pension would rise in 2000 by just 75 pence a week. Pensioners’ campaigning groups, led by veteran figures from the Labour movement including the former trade union leader Jack Jones and the former cabinet minister Barbara Castle, had long called for pension increases to be linked to pay rises, but a succession of chancellors – including Gordon Brown – had resisted such expenditure and opted instead for a link with prices. Now, a fall in the rate of inflation had produced what was widely seen as a derisory increase.

Through the years of Conservative government, support for pensioners had been a sacred part of Labour rhetoric. The heartless Tories’ treatment of the elderly was regularly cited as an example of how little they cared for the weakest in society, particularly in 1993 when the pension had increased by just 70 pence a week. Now, it seemed, such concerns were no longer a priority. In April 2000 Clive Soley, the chair of the Parliamentary Labour Party, was reported to have spoken of the elderly in disparaging terms to a meeting of party researchers: ‘I would not say they are all racist but some have been expressing racist views.’ He also implied that politically they were not worth worrying about: ‘They are the only age group in Britain where there has been a consistent Tory majority. We are talking about people more than half of whom are bound not to be our supporters.’ There were further reports that Peter Mandelson shared that latter position, concluding that there was ‘no mileage’ to be gained from chasing the pensioner vote.

As the press hunted for further such insults, it was revealed that Charlie Falconer had told a retired dinner lady that he would have no problem living on a state pension. In response Jeff Rooker, the social security minister, back-pedalled as fast as he could, remarking that he certainly wouldn’t be able to live on such an income and ‘wouldn’t even dream of trying’. It was hard to know which was more damaging: the remote arrogance or the truth.

The depiction of older members of society as natural Tories was a self-fulfilling analysis. In July 2000 Labour held a four-point lead in the polls over the Conservatives amongst pensioners; as the controversy grew, and the reality of the 75p rise sank in, that position was more than reversed, with Labour falling ten points behind. In vain did Brown point to the substantial increase in money paid to pensioners; the system of means-tested benefits he had established was so complex it ensured that many simply didn’t feel the benefit, and the labyrinthine nature of his tax schemes was never going to compete for headline space with the brevity of 75p. The anger was very real. Tony Blair was horrified to see an old woman with a placard reading BLAIR, YOU ARE A CUNT. ‘I couldn’t believe it. I was really shocked,’ he recalled. ‘She looked like your typical sweet granny.’

In September the Labour conference voted against the measure and called for the restoration of the link between pensions and earnings. Such votes were not binding, but Blair looked suitably chastened, even as he sought to allocate blame to the person who he clearly felt was responsible for the fiasco: ‘I tell you now, as Gordon made crystal clear yesterday, we get the message.’ He delivered the speech in his shirtsleeves, presumably intending to convey the impression that he was getting down to business, but unfortunately he was wearing a blue shirt and the patches of sweat under his arms made him look both unattractive and flustered. As Michael Dobbs had once observed: ‘Prime ministers aren’t meant to sweat, to show pressure or exasperation.’

It was announced that the following year the pension rise would be £2 a week, and in November a further concession was made with an increase in the winter fuel allowance for pensioners from £150 to £200. Some cynics noted that the timing of this decision might have been made not with winter in mind, but with spring, when a general election was expected.

The panicked response also reflected a dawning awareness on the part of politicians that, with an ageing population, it was foolish to dismiss pensioners in such a cavalier manner. A change of national atmosphere was evident on television, where One Foot in the Grave, Waiting for God and In Sickness and in Health – as well as other sitcoms including The Upper Hand and As Time Goes By – depicted an older generation unwilling to accept being written off by society, determined to remain engaged and often angry. ‘It’ll change,’ points out a professor of geriatric medicine in Waiting for God.‘As soon as the baby boomers become the wrinkly boomers, then there’ll be a whole new set of attitudes appearing.’ There were even signs in youth culture of such a change; the first single from Robbie Williams’s debut album (following his departure from Take That) reversed the Who’s famous maxim to announce: ‘I hope I’m old before I die.’

The battles with the Women’s Institute and with pensioners helped to erode further the national spirit of optimism engendered by the cultural excitement of the mid-1990s and by Blair’s election. In June 2000 Philip Gould revealed that, according to his focus-group studies, people now felt ‘that the country has little hope, is going to the dogs, is not a great country any more’. It began to look as though New Labour had failed to study hard enough the example of Major’s government and its ability to court unpopularity even with a booming economy.

The conflicts were also clearly taking their toll on the prime minister. In July 2000 he addressed the conference of the African and Caribbean Evangelical Alliance and sounded unusually weary: ‘I know it’s only been three years, but sometimes it seems like thirty,’ Blair said, echoing – perhaps inadvertently – words from Jesus Christ Superstar, the rock opera that had been such a sensation at the time of his brief attempt to make it in the music business. ‘Tried for three years, felt like thirty; could you ask as much from any other man?’ despairs Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane.

If there were to be a Gethsemane for Blair in his first term, however, it had yet to come. For the government returned from its summer holidays to find itself embroiled in a far more damaging dispute, perhaps the worst of the parliament.

 

In 1993, the Conservative government had introduced what was known as the fuel duty escalator, a system designed to ensure that the tax on petrol would rise faster than inflation, with an increase in real terms of at least 3 per cent a year, later rising to 5 per cent. Like the introduction of VAT on domestic fuel, this was billed as a green tax though, as Tony Blair acknowledged, ‘no one took that reasoning very seriously’. It was, however, a very useful source of income and so the Labour government kept the policy in place, and increased it to 6 per cent, calculating that a steady year-on-year escalation of prices at the pumps was sustainable. That turned out not to be the case.

Demonstrations against fuel tax in 1999 helped convince Gordon Brown to end the escalator in his budget in November that year, but by then – critics argued – the damage had been done to the competitiveness of British industry. Over 80 per cent of the price of petrol was now accounted for by tax, through a combination of VAT and fuel duty, making Britain the most expensive country in Europe to fill up a car. Or, more pertinently, a lorry. For it was haulage drivers whose patience finally snapped as world oil prices rose sharply. In September 2000, acting in conjunction with farmers’ pressure groups, lorry drivers began a series of blockades of oil refineries and distribution depots, effectively shutting off the supply line to petrol stations.

Within a couple of days a genuine crisis emerged. In recent years supermarkets and petrol stations had adopted a ‘just in time’ supply system, whereby stocks were kept to a minimum at retail points, making them extremely vulnerable to any interruption in deliveries. A fuel shortage thus had an immediate and powerful impact, striking at a fragile food chain. ‘We weren’t far off a crisis in the basic infrastructure of the nation,’ reflected Alastair Campbell, while Jonathan Powell was later to write: ‘The public never realised quite how close we had come to shutting the country down on 13 and 14 September 2000. Ford had been about to close its European operations; hospitals were about to shut down for lack of fuel; and cashpoints were about to run out of money.’ The Queen was prevailed upon to sign an Emergency Order, allowing a state of emergency to be declared if it was considered necessary.

There was an echo here of the fabled winter of discontent when, in the early months of 1979, the last Labour government had found itself in conflict with various trade unions. The most disruptive element in that dispute had been a transport workers’ strike that prevented food and other supplies from being moved around the country. The ensuing chaos had provided the backdrop to Margaret Thatcher’s election victory, and the Conservatives had never been shy of reminding the country of those times in subsequent years. Talk of the country being ‘held to ransom’ by the unions had become an important part of the demonology of the right. It was the lingering effectiveness of that charge, more than anything else, that had persuaded Blair to distance the Labour Party from the union movement.

Now, however, it was not the unions that were at the root of the government’s troubles, but the self-employed, the small businessmen and women, the self-reliant, non-unionised, aspirational workers whose votes and support Blair had spent so much time trying to court. It was a point not lost on the unions, as a spokesperson for the GMB observed: ‘It is ironic that the country is being brought to a standstill by blockades and pickets conducted by small businessmen and traditional allies of the Conservatives.’ The irony didn’t end there. ‘The life of a nation is being strangled,’ thundered John Monks, general secretary of the TUC, using precisely the language associated with the Thatcher government. ‘This has gone well beyond democratic protests. It is bullying and intimidation – holding the country to ransom.’

The blockades (‘or picket lines as we used to call them’, noted David Blunkett) were, at least to start with, generally well supported. The protestors’ demand for an immediate and substantial reduction in fuel duty struck a chord with virtually every motorist in the country. The newspapers, although in some cases reluctant to back direct action, were broadly sympathetic, and were scathing towards the government. The most powerful front page came from the normally loyal Daily Mirror, which printed pictures of Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and John Prescott, superimposed on petrol pumps, with the headline: empty. The text read: ‘These three men run the country. Today the country will run dry. None of them knows quite how to get it going again, but they all agree it’s not their fault.’

The Tories benefited from the confusion and their standing rose in the opinion polls, briefly overtaking Labour for the first time in eight years and causing panic in government ranks. The prime minister’s anger was directed both at the newspapers for their supposed role in whipping up the crisis – ‘I felt that a Tory government would not be treated like this,’ he complained, conveniently forgetting the media treatment of John Major – and at the police for not dispersing the protestors: ‘if this was Thatcher and the miners, the police would waste no time wading in.’

The action provoked mixed responses on the left. ‘Although I don’t support this type of action, it is a popular movement – if the word “popular” is used in its proper sense – against a high level of tax,’ reflected Tony Benn, in grudging admiration, while for Chris Mullin it merely illustrated the futility of New Labour’s electoral strategy: ‘After years of creeping and crawling to Middle England, they’ve abandoned us at the first whiff of grapeshot.’

Perhaps most significantly, the speed with which the protests spread – helped in no small measure by the growing popularity of mobile phones – suggested that the prime minister had drifted out of touch with the public, the very danger he had been warned about the previous year. ‘I had messed up big time,’ admitted Blair in his memoirs. ‘My antennae should have been twitching.’ For a man who, according to his adviser David Miliband, was impatient with the details of opinion polls – ‘He is much more fingertip sensitive, trusts his instincts not the figures’ – there was a shocked realisation at how things had slipped. He hadn’t even paid attention to his own domestic focus group: ‘I should have realised that for your ordinary motorist, the rising cost of filling the car was a big, not an insignificant one (after all, the children’s nanny, Jackie, had been complaining about it for weeks).’

The response, however, once the scale of the problem was grasped, was swift and effective. The police were told to take more decisive action against the blockades, with the threat that the army would be called in should they fail so to do, and a major public relations operation swung into action. The propaganda initiative was seized with briefings about the potential threat to the NHS, a line strengthened when nurses were sent to put their case to the pickets. Meanwhile, Gordon Brown simply refused to cede any ground on the demonstrators’ demands, arguing that if he yielded, it would merely encourage further such protests. It was an entirely reasonable attitude, though Peter Mandelson thought ‘politically it was tone-deaf’.

The combination of measures brought the immediate crisis to an end and within a couple of days normal service was restored in the country and in politics. The Conservatives’ lead in the polls proved short-lived, largely because, at the start of the protests, Michael Portillo had vetoed William Hague’s proposal to promise a major cut in petrol tax. By the time he agreed to pledge a more modest reduction, it was too late and the Tories were accused of bandwagon-jumping. Come November the Labour lead was back up to seven points, but the image of a government that was both out of touch and incompetent, the same dangerous combination seen in John Major’s administration, lingered on.

Blair’s personal rating at the height of the crisis fell to minus 34, the lowest for a Labour leader since Neil Kinnock in 1989. Comparisons with the latter days of Thatcher seemed ever more apposite. ‘I don’t know why they don’t like me,’ she had complained of the public in her last months in office. Now Blair was, according to Philip Gould, similarly ‘mystified as to why a government that is doing well economically should not be popular’.

Perhaps the most disappointing aspect of the entire affair, though, was that it seemed to prompt no serious thought on the part of the government, despite revealing a precariously poised society, its support system existing in a delicate state of balance which was no more than a few days away from serious breakdown. The perception in Whitehall was that the situation became so serious so quickly because of panic-buying by consumers. ‘The instinct to buy was perfectly logical individually but disastrous collectively,’ observed Jonathan Powell. To this there was apparently no answer, despite Blair’s longstanding promise to rebuild a spirit of community. And when it came to the roles played by the supermarkets and the oil companies, the necessary questions weren’t even raised. The underlying issue, however, was much the same: ‘just in time’ policies maximised profits, but were dangerously anti-social, leaving the country vulnerable to attack. But by now no one really expected this, or any other, government to demand responsibility or morality from major companies.

Whether there was much demand at this point for political action to curb the power of multinational companies was doubtful. A loose coalition of anti-capitalist groups had staged a major protest in November 1999 outside a meeting of the World Trade Organisation in Seattle, but a May Day demonstration in London in 2000 attracted only some 5,000 people. The event turned into a riot during which a McDonald’s restaurant was wrecked, several shops looted, the Cenotaph defaced and – in one of the wittier images to come out of a British demonstration for some time – the statue of Winston Churchill in Parliament Square adorned with a strip of turf, giving him a grass Mohican. Unsurprisingly the press weren’t amused. The patriotic Sun was outraged (RIOT YOBS DESECRATE CHURCHILL MONUMENT) but for once was outdone by the Daily Mirror: THIS WAS THEIR VILEST HOUR. The Sun was also keen to point out that the demonstration was ‘largely organised on the internet’. In response to these disturbances, the police developed the tactic of ‘kettling’ for the next May Day demonstration, surrounding and containing protestors for long periods of time until weariness replaced anger.

There seemed little prospect that such moments would turn into a coherent movement any time soon, and most of the substantial incidents of social disorder during this parliament (as in Oldham, Burnley and Bradford in 2001) were primarily racial, related to the rise of the British National Party. The virtual disappearance of socialism in Britain and beyond, combined with the absence of leadership – Ken Livingstone was quick to condemn the ‘mindless thugs’ and ‘violent hooligans’ seen in London just days before the mayoral elections – meant that anti-capitalism was likely to remain a minority slogan rather than a coherent philosophy for the foreseeable future. The one exception was an irritant left over from the Major government.

The Hatfield rail crash in October 2000 was, by the standards of such incidents, not one of the worst disasters the country had witnessed. Four people were killed, fewer than half the average daily total that year on Britain’s roads. But railway privatisation had always been controversial, even in New Labour circles, and the discovery that the cause was faulty maintenance of the track prompted a panic about the state of the rail infrastructure. In what many considered an extreme over-reaction, rail schedules were disrupted for over a year as hundreds of speed restrictions were imposed and track replacement works undertaken. The impact on Railtrack, the company responsible for the rails, was sufficient to send it into administration, at which point its duties were handed over to a new body called Network Rail. Still privately owned, it was at least a not-for-dividend company, which provided some comfort to those on the left who had always objected to privatisation.

There was no such reassurance to be found with the government’s response to the news in late 2000 that Richard Desmond, having made his fortune with downmarket pornographic magazines including Asian Babes, 40 Plus and Women on Top, and then branched out into celebrity gossip with OK! magazine, was now to become a newspaper proprietor, by buying the Daily Express, the Sunday Express and the Daily Star. Such a purchase could have been the subject of an inquiry, but in February 2001 the trade secretary, Stephen Byers, announced that he wouldn’t be asking the Competition Commission to stage an investigation. Barely a week later, Desmond made a donation to the Labour Party, much to the horror of some senior ministers, particularly Tessa Jowell and Harriet Harman, who disapproved of the source of his wealth. Desmond’s reported comment to Alastair Campbell – ‘I’m not happy about these bitches Jowell and Harman’ – did nothing to suggest that their estimation of him was far wrong.

Relations between the government and the press continued, however, to deteriorate. Indeed, the media was shortly to claim its greatest scalp. Peter Mandelson, having been obliged to resign once already from the cabinet, found himself again mired in controversy at the start of 2001, the year that was widely expected to see a general election. At issue was the case of two Indian businessmen, the brothers G.P. and S.P. Hinduja, and their effort to acquire British passports. Having applied for passports in 1990, the Hindujas had been turned down by the Conservative government on the grounds that they didn’t spend enough time in the country and were being investigated in relation to an alleged financial scandal in India. Charges brought against the two men in 2000 were later thrown out by the High Court in Delhi for lack of evidence, but during the investigation some speculated that part of the reason they wanted British nationality was that they could then establish a bolthole if things got too hot at home. Following the 1997 election, G.P. Hinduja’s passport application was approved, as, a little later, was S.P. Hinduja’s. Soon after they received this happy news, the brothers agreed to sponsor the Faith Zone in the Millennium Dome, then being overseen by Peter Mandelson.

The story, such as it was, fell dormant until January 2001, when the Observer ran an article suggesting that Mandelson had helped the brothers get their passports. He explained that he had indeed been asked by the Hindujas to assist with their application, but – he insisted – that he had very properly refused to do so: ‘At no time did I support or endorse this application for citizenship.’ That was the story passed to the press by Alastair Campbell and to Parliament. Unfortunately, a Home Office minister named Mike O’Brien had a different tale to tell. He remembered Mandelson himself phoning to discuss the Hindujas’ applications. Campbell apologised to the lobby journalists for having misled them, saying that, while Mandelson had no memory of such a phone call, it had clearly been made. Mandelson, on the other hand, continued to deny that he had made any such call and was furious with Campbell for his briefings.

It was a confused, messy and murky tale, in the midst of which the truth seemed likely to be lost. But in the context of a government that had always promoted its personalities, it offered the instant attraction of open conflict between Campbell and Mandelson, Blair’s two greatest courtiers and two men who had long had their differences. One was bound to lose. And unfortunately for Mandelson, he had few friends left; he was, said Blair, ‘pretty much alone and without support except for me’.

The danger for the government, observed Lance Price, was of ‘a perceived cover-up’ and, without even the courtesy of an inquiry, Mandelson was forced to resign from the cabinet for a second time in a single parliament. Blair’s diary secretary, Anji Hunter, was said to have been reduced to tears: ‘It’s the end of New Labour. It was all due to Peter, Gordon and me and now Peter is going, it’s all over.’ But grief was not the primary emotion in Westminster. ‘The truth is,’ wrote Chris Mullin in his diary, ‘that most people on our side are delighted to see the back of him and are doing their best, with varying degrees of success, not to gloat.’

In his briefings to the press, Campbell hinted heavily that this was the end of Mandelson’s political ambitions: ‘It is an absolute tragedy that his entire career is in tatters.’ There was also an implication, reported by the lobby journalists, that Mandelson’s behaviour was, like that of Ron Davies, a ‘moment of madness’. And this time round, there was no encouragement for Mandelson to be found in the press, which simply revelled in his fall: GOODBYE AND GOOD RIDDANCE (THIS TIME DON’T COME BACK) waved the Sun; YOU WERE THE WEAKEST LINK – GOODBYE jeered the Daily Mirror. (The latter referred to a newly popular television quiz show hosted by Anne Robinson, though it was some way wide of the mark; Mandelson was far from the weakest link in the New Labour chain.)

Mandelson’s resignation statement expressed some of the frustration he had been bottling up for years: ‘There must be more to politics than the constant media pressure and exposure that had dogged me over the last five or so years. I want to remove myself from the countless stories of controversies, feuds and divisions.’ Those with long political memories could detect an echo here of Richard Nixon’s notorious press conference after losing the 1962 gubernatorial election in California: ‘you don’t have Nixon to kick around any more because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference.’ Six years later, of course, Nixon had been elected president, and just five weeks after Mandelson’s swansong an official inquiry into the Hinduja affair concluded that his actions had been neither dishonest nor improper. No one was entirely convinced that they could really write off his chances of another return to government.

The loss of Mandelson for a second time gave the lie to New Labour’s claims to competence in government. The highest profile resignation from John Major’s cabinet had been David Mellor, a confidant of the prime minister, but still no more than the minister for fun. Mandelson, however, had been obliged to step down first from trade and industry, and then from Northern Ireland, the latter at a stage when the future of the peace process still hung in the balance. Even his official positions, let alone his acknowledged role as the founder of New Labour, meant that his departure was of a different order altogether from anything Major had suffered. Although he was no longer a central figure – and hence was deemed expendable (‘the need for a Peter Mandelson has withered,’ as John O’Farrell put it) – the image of Blair sacrificing his mentor could hardly fail to resonate.

There was a perfectly coherent case to be made – Mandelson made it himself, repeatedly and forcefully – that he had done nothing wrong and had been pushed out with unnecessary haste, given no chance to defend himself. But somehow that only made the government’s fitness for office even more questionable, revealing the macho egos and power struggles in Downing Street. There was, however, one consolation for ministers to cling on to, no matter how bad the headlines. As David Blunkett put it in his diary: ‘Thank the Lord the Tories are so useless.’

To complete the picture of John Major’s government repeating itself, this time as farce, there came in February 2001 the first outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease for twenty years, creating a farming crisis to rival that of BSE. In terms of public health, there was no comparison. The terrifying fear that BSE could be transmitted to humans in the form of vCJD was simply not matched by foot-and-mouth; the last case of a human being infected in Britain by the latter had been in 1966, and such incidents were vanishingly rare – certainly it couldn’t be passed on through eating contaminated meat. Nonetheless, the new outbreak inevitably provoked memories that were still fresh in the mind. Indeed there was a suggestion that the two issues were linked, that since the closure of small, local abattoirs during the BSE crisis, animals were being moved far greater distances, thereby facilitating the rapid spread of foot-and-mouth.

The Labour Party had never been noted for its commitment to the rural economy, and the present government was no exception to that rule. Apart from the long and wearisome campaign to ban hunting, its principal contribution thus far had been its decision in 2000 to remove the restrictions introduced by the Attlee government upon the placement of advertising hoardings in fields, but even that had been reversed before its implementation. Now, facing a nationwide epidemic amongst cattle, and with its options restricted by EU regulations, it decided to follow the same path as the Major government and to slaughter any herd that had been infected. That programme expanded into the killing of animals in the vicinity of such a farm, and soon the funeral pyres were blazing again, one of them, Blair noted sardonically, ‘situated near the Heathrow flight path, to delight the passengers hoping to spend a few days in rural idyllic Britain’. By April Michael Meacher, the environment minister, was reporting: ‘We’ve slaughtered a million animals, 97 per cent of them healthy. It’s animal genocide. Just like the Somme. The prime minister won’t opt for vaccination because the farmers object and he won’t go against them.’

That judgement was a little unfair. In truth there was little else the government could do. For if the experience of BSE was still a recent memory for the British, so too was it for the rest of the world. As soon as the news broke, the EU banned the export of meat and related animal products from the UK, and the message went out again that British food was unsafe. An outbreak of swine fever in 2000 had already resulted in a temporary ban on pork exports and the slaughter of 12,000 pigs, and for once the tabloid headlines – PLAGUE ON THE LAND, read the Daily Mirror – didn’t seem exaggerated. There was still scope for panic, of course (NO MEAT LEFT BY END OF THE WEEK, shrieked the Express), but farming in Britain did seem to be blighted. If confidence in the industry was ever to be restored, extreme and high-profile measures were necessary.

Apart from anything else, foot-and-mouth is a highly contagious disease and the mass slaughter of animals was only one element of the government’s attempt to prevent its spread. The other was the effective isolation of the countryside. Much of the horse-racing calendar was suspended, rambling and recreational riding were discouraged, the National Trust and the RSPB closed many of their properties to the public. The movement of livestock was banned, and that of humans heavily restricted.

If the government’s public response, however heavy-handed, was inevitable, it came with all the usual turf wars that had become such a common feature of the New Labour hierarchy. The agriculture minister was Nick Brown, MP for the distinctly non-rural constituency of Newcastle East, and the response to foot-and-mouth should have been primarily his concern. But he was a close ally of his namesake Gordon, which meant that foot-and-mouth became another weapon in the war of Downing Street. Jonathan Powell overheard Gordon Brown on the phone telling Nick to resist Blair’s ‘presidential style’ and to keep hold of the issue: ‘We have to stop him taking foot-and-mouth away from you.’ From the other side, Nick Brown’s position in the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food meant that the department was seen as being suspect; Alastair Campbell talked about Downing Street having ‘pretty much lost confidence in MAFF’.

Again, there were potential lessons to be learnt about the fragility of society, had the right questions only been asked in the right places. ‘All this export of animals for slaughter, the global trade in food and so on, is bringing health hazards,’ observed Tony Benn; ‘it would be better to have local farmers growing local food and feeding local people from local markets.’

As the story ran on, unvarying in its horror, the media struggled to maintain its interest. In desperation, a story was found of a farm where all the cattle had been given lethal injections and left to die. Some days later, however, a calf was said to have been discovered still alive amidst the carnage, just one day old at the time the death sentence was enacted, and born – happily enough – on Good Friday. Swiftly named Phoenix, the suspiciously photogenic white calf became a tabloid star, with the Daily Mirror leading a campaign to have the animal reprieved. As though it made any difference, the order duly went out from Downing Street that Phoenix was to be spared. As Campbell put it, ‘we had to play along.’

More significantly, the fact that the countryside was now closed for business meant that the projected general election date was looking increasingly unlikely. A range of opinion-formers, from Dennis Skinner through to the Queen, told Blair that the election would have to be postponed. In truth, there was very little choice; an election long intended for May was put back to 7 June 2001.

The outcome of that election, the colour of the government that would emerge, was never in doubt. To have overcome Labour’s parliamentary majority, the Conservatives would have required a huge swing and, apart from that brief aberration during the fuel crisis, they hadn’t enjoyed a lead in the opinion polls for nearly nine years. In any event Tony Blair had always been clear that he was seeking two full terms in office and, after eighteen years of Tory government, the country was inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt.

Peter Mandelson had insisted in 1997 that the Labour government could only be properly judged after ‘ten years of success in office’, but some were prepared to issue an interim report. In 1999 David Miliband itemised what he saw as the legacies put in place thus far: ‘independence for the Bank of England, the national minimum wage, devolution, a settlement in Northern Ireland (hopefully) and the Dome.’ Blair himself offered a similar list in 2002, though obviously omitting the Dome: ‘If I die tomorrow, they would say he was the guy who modernised the Labour Party, made it electable, won two landslides, sorted the economy, improved public services, Bank of England, Kosovo, Northern Ireland.’ In December 2000, he had been asked what his greatest achievement had been. ‘There’s our part in the progress toward peace in Northern Ireland and also in giving Britain a strong voice again in Europe,’ he replied. ‘I’m also proud of the fact that the New Deal has helped to reduce youth unemployment by 70 per cent.’

That latter claim, in particular, was crucial, for employment was the one issue that most demonstrated continuity with the best traditions of the Labour movement. It had been a long time since leading members of the party had talked of full employment as a realisable aspiration, but progress in that direction was desperately wanted. In March 2001, just in time for the election, the official figures showed that unemployment had fallen to below a million, for the first time since the days of James Callaghan in 1975.

That month Robin Cook was at pains to stress how much Labour had achieved for its working-class base. ‘This government has done far, far better than any previous Labour government,’ he argued; ‘800,000 new jobs, the New Deal, long-term unemployment halved. Look also at the minimum wage, trade-union recognition.’ David Blunkett was likewise at pains to make a comparison with old Labour: ‘I suspect that what will be remembered from our government will be much more substantial than anything from 1964–70 or 1974–79.’ And Clare Short insisted that in the first term there were ‘many achievements of which Labour people could be proud, most importantly the return to full employment’.

Much depended on those official figures and on whether they could be trusted. In opposition, Labour had been scathing of attempts to manipulate the statistics; now it was understandably more content to accept the good news that came its way, though there were still doubters. Chris Mullin noted that 9,000 people were claiming Jobseekers’ Allowance in Sunderland, but that also ‘a staggering 38,000 are claiming for sickness, incapacity or disability. None of these are even in the market for work, although many of them must be capable of doing something.’ It was alleged by many that right through the 1990s, under governments of both parties, there had been a policy of encouraging the unemployed to register as disabled in order to make the figures look more respectable. There might be fewer than a million signing on, but – it was said – that didn’t fully reflect the reality of the job market. Certainly that figure was dwarfed by the number of people of working age who were, to use a phrase that was gaining currency, economically inactive, some four million who didn’t show up in the official figures for the unemployed.

Mullin added to his description of the state of Sunderland a warning note: ‘Benefit culture is our greatest inheritance from the Thatcher Decade. It hangs around our neck like a huge albatross.’ This was what Frank Field had been drafted into government to address, before it was realised that his prescription was simply too radical. And perhaps his departure from office was inevitable. The welfare state had been created fifty years earlier by the Attlee government, to a blueprint provided by William Beveridge, and had been based on the concept of full employment; without the political will to reinstate that objective, it was unlikely that a genuine return to the principles of Attlee and Beveridge could be achieved.

Perhaps too the statistics were unfair to Blair’s administration, if compared with the last Labour government in the 1970s, since they took no account of the rise in the numbers of women in the workforce. There were now three million more people employed in Britain than there had been in the mid-1970s, not all of whom were accounted for by the growth in the population.

In any event, it could safely be said that, since its peak in 1992, official unemployment had fallen by two million, half of that fall being achieved during Tony Blair’s first term in office; the downward trend had been maintained. Similarly the annual rise in GDP inherited from John Major had been maintained, interest rates had experienced no abrupt changes and the inflation rate had continued to fall. Taxes as a share of GDP had increased, although in buoyant times, this was comfortably sustainable. More worryingly, job insecurity had continued to grow, wealth inequality had resumed its rise, after the stabilising years under Major, and there were longer-term implications arising from the continuing failure to regulate properly the financial industry, and from the availability of easy credit. But senior politicians of both parties chose not to dwell on such matters. The important thing in the immediate moment was that, unlike most previous Labour governments, this one could go to the polls boasting of economic success. It was a point that Gordon Brown made forcefully to Blair as they laid their plans for the 2001 election. ‘The Tories screwed up the economy, and we’ve given people stability and growth,’ he argued. ‘It’s about time you fucking realised that’s all the election is about.’

Implicit in that analysis was a recognition that, even if New Labour had proved economically competent, it had failed to communicate any sense of philosophy or direction. As Alastair Campbell admitted: ‘people felt we were better at defining what we weren’t than what we were.’ After three years of preparation for and four years in office, Labour was able to trumpet few achievements that were specifically of its own making. Even the very modest proposals on the pledge cards issued in 1997 seemed unlikely to be met by the time of voting, a problem for which the spin doctor Lance Price had an answer: ‘We will just have to say that the pledges were for a five-year parliament.’ It was Price too who admitted the truth of the forthcoming campaign: ‘We mustn’t let the election slip back to being a referendum on the government’s record. Must stick to the Choice.’ The strongest card that Labour had to play was that the alternative to Tony Blair was a return to Conservative rule.

Indeed the only real question for the election was how badly the Conservatives would fare. The more optimistic saw William Hague’s task as being to reduce Labour’s parliamentary majority to double figures, thereby allowing a serious assault to be mounted next time. Not many were so hopeful, and plenty expected still further decline. ‘I may not hold this seat and will go down with 60–70 existing Conservative MPs,’ worried the Worcestershire MP, Michael Spicer. ‘We may even lose our position as the official opposition.’

Even tried and tested Tory policies were looking like vote-losers, as the journalist Boris Johnson – now the Conservative candidate for Michael Heseltine’s old, and very safe, seat of Henley – observed. ‘Slowly, and barely perceptibly, the phrase “tax cut” has become a little ambiguous, and certainly no longer guaranteed to raise a cheer,’ he wrote. ‘It is extraordinary. This is the same electorate that mutinied over the cost of petrol.’ He was also concerned that the campaign against the single currency, which William Hague had made the central plank of the Tory platform, smacked rather of desperation. ‘We are saying that there are seven days to save the pound,’ he noted. ‘It sounds too much like seven days to save the Tory party.’

The nervousness was evident in a poster that showed Blair at his most smug, captured in a bubble, being approached by a hand bearing a pin. GO ON, BURST HIS BUBBLE, ran the caption, in a damage-limitation exercise, pleading with the public not to give Labour another landslide.

It was, even by comparison with 1997, a dull campaign, almost all the moments of interest being crammed into a single day at the outset. On 16 May the launch of the Labour manifesto was followed by what should have been an unexceptional photo-opportunity for Blair as he visited the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham. It turned into a deeply awkward trip when the prime minister was cornered on camera by Sharron Storer, whose husband was being treated for cancer in the hospital, and who was unhappy with the treatment he was receiving. As so often in such cases (Margaret Thatcher being quizzed by Diana Gould in 1983 about the sinking of the Belgrano, Gordon Brown being accosted by Gillian Duffy in 2010), outrage was much more effective on television when voiced by a woman. Blair looked bewildered and lost as he attempted to reassure someone who had no apparent appetite for reassurance, just action.

Coverage of Blair’s discomfort at least ensured that the news bulletins didn’t lead on the sight of Jack Straw being slow-handclapped and heckled at the Police Federation conference. But even Blair himself was driven into second spot by John Prescott who, on a visit to Rhyl in North Wales, was struck on the back of the neck by an egg thrown by a local farmer, Craig Evans. Without pause for thought, Prescott turned and hit out with a straight left that connected perfectly; his years of training as an amateur boxer had clearly not been forgotten. He was later to explain that he hadn’t realised it was merely an egg: ‘It certainly didn’t feel like one, but then I would never have believed an egg crashing into you can feel so powerful.’

There was a moment of panic in the prime minister’s circle as they digested the news and tried to work out what the response should be. Clearly the physical assault of voters by members of the cabinet was not to be encouraged, but there was also the fact, as Blair commented, that the incident was ‘extraordinarily funny’. There was a split, according to David Blunkett, between ‘those who liked it and those who didn’t, men on the one hand and women, middle-class women in particular, on the other’. Confirming that division, Prescott received messages of support from the likes of Alex Ferguson and Sean Connery, neither of them men noted for their readiness to turn the other cheek. In the end, it was decided to laugh the whole thing off. Prescott’s nickname in the party had long been Thumper and Blair’s public comment was a simple shrug: ‘John is John.’ William Hague echoed the jovial tone, explaining: ‘It’s not my policy to hit voters during an election.’

The only other moment of excitement came with the issue of those promises of tax cuts by the Conservatives. Hague announced that these would amount to a total of £8 billion, but a report in the Financial Times then quoted an anonymous senior Conservative suggesting that somewhere around £20 billion might be achievable. Media enquiries soon uncovered the source of this figure as being Oliver Letwin, a treasury spokesperson, who promptly disappeared from public view in the hope that the story would disappear. The Labour Party, while strongly protesting that it deplored the triviality of the media (‘the best I could hope for was that underneath some whizz-bang piece of marketing creativity or twist to a story, we might squeeze some policy,’ reflected Blair, piously), produced ‘Wanted’ posters with Letwin’s face on them, while a press officer was dressed up as Sherlock Holmes, posing as though he were on the track of the missing MP. If that was embarrassingly childish on the part of a government, the response of the Conservative Party was simply a mess. Hague restated the £8 billion target, while the shadow chancellor, Michael Portillo, suggested that £20 billion might indeed be right.

Unlike 1997, this was not a time for the Cool Britannia message. The Labour Party’s anthem for the campaign was ‘Lifted’ by the Lighthouse Family, though few noticed, while the stars lining up in support were old faithfuls rather than young fashionistas: Alex Ferguson, Mick Hucknall, 93-year-old John Mills, as well as Michael Cashman and Michelle Collins, formerly of EastEnders. The party did, however, adorn its election broadcasts with a couple of actors from the television soap Hollyoaks and with former Spice Girl Geri Halliwell, who had apparently transferred her allegiance from Margaret Thatcher.

Labour went into the last week of campaigning with a lead of twenty-three points in the polls and the results of the election came as no surprise. Labour representation in the Commons was down by five seats, the Liberal Democrats under Charles Kennedy had improved by six, and the Conservatives had gained just one MP. This latter figure was seen as a disaster for the Tories, and William Hague immediately resigned as leader.

His tenure had hardly been a success. Clearly he was too young and inexperienced for the role he had accepted, but even beyond those considerations, he was probably the wrong person for the job anyway. In happier times, he would have made a fine second-in-command, but with the absence from Parliament of Michael Portillo, he was promoted too far and too fast. Even so, he had done as well as perhaps anyone could have done. Inheriting a tainted party that was determined to fight an internal, ideological war, he had held it just about together. He had behaved during the last couple of years with dignity and – in public, at any rate – with a degree of humour and resilience that must have been hard to maintain. If he had looked, at the time of his election as leader, as if he might be the Tory Michael Foot, he had ended up more like Neil Kinnock in 1987, ensuring the survival of a party that might have disappeared entirely into history.

That, however, was clutching at Westminster straws. And the real story of the election had nothing to do with Parliament. Spike Milligan had once joked: ‘One day the don’t knows will get in, and then where will we be?’ Now it had happened. For the first time in British electoral history, fewer had voted for the victorious party than had chosen not to vote at all, and the gap between the two figures was enormous. Blair’s first electoral success had set a new post-war record for low turnout, with just 71.3 per cent of the electorate casting a vote; this time round, the Labour Party attracted the support of less than a quarter of the electorate, while over 40 per cent stayed at home. More than half of those aged between eighteen and twenty-five absented themselves.

It was the worst turnout since 1918, when the election had been staged barely a month after the end of the First World War. For the Conservative Party, the news was more dire still. With even less support than it had achieved in 1997, it had now lost well over five and a half million voters since 1992, and secured the backing of fewer people than Michael Foot’s Labour Party had managed in the disaster of 1983.

Some of this could be attributed to the fact that the result was so obvious from the start. Turnout declines in the face of certainty, so that Thatcher’s weakest showing in her three election victories was in 1983, when victory was inevitable. Even so, the fact that an incumbent government could sink so low that it inspired fewer than one in four of the population to cast a supportive vote – and still get re-elected – was unprecedented. And, following the pattern of the last few years, the turnout was noticeably poor in Labour’s safest seats, where even the party’s share of the vote fell. Chris Mullin’s Sunderland South constituency was typical of the Labour heartlands; he had lost nearly 10,000 voters since 1992.

Other individual results proved of minor interest. Peter Mandelson held his safe seat in Hartlepool and celebrated with a wonderfully emotional acceptance speech, proclaiming that ‘I’m a fighter not a quitter’, while Peter Lilley held on to Hitchin and Harpenden, despite a challenge from Labour’s Alan Amos, last seen as a Tory MP on Hampstead Heath. Martin Bell didn’t seek re-election in Tatton, leaving it to return to its natural state as a safe Tory seat, thereby providing an easy route into Parliament for one of Hague’s closest advisers, George Osborne, while a further new star appeared in the form of David Cameron. He stepped into another true blue constituency, Witney, which had been abandoned by his old boss, the defector Shaun Woodward.

But perhaps the most significant result was the one that seemed to buck the trend and revealed a discontent with Labour’s policies. Local politics in the Wyre Forest constituency had been dominated for some time by the closure of the accident and emergency department at Kidderminster Hospital, as part of a restructuring that included the building of a PFI hospital in Worcester. Amongst those campaigning against the plans was Robert Plant, formerly the singer with the group Led Zeppelin, who wrote to Blair and received a reply that seemed desperate to parade the prime minister’s rock and roll roots. ‘I am certainly a Led Zeppelin fan,’ the prime minister gushed. ‘I can’t tell you how many memories I have of you.’ It turned out that no one was much interested in his memories, and the sitting Labour MP in Wyre Forest shed 16,000 votes, to be overtaken by a Kidderminster physician, Richard Taylor, standing on a Health Concern platform, who won 58 per cent of the vote. At a time when political parties were losing support at an unprecedented rate, they could not afford to ignore the spectacular success of a genuine independent.

Nonetheless, the results were largely ignored. ‘In a way it is even better than 1997,’ wrote John O’Farrell, of the 2001 election, ‘because we weren’t just voting to get rid of a government; the country made a positive choice of public services over tax cuts.’ His self-delusion was far from unique. Two years earlier, Peter Hain had warned about New Labour’s tendency to be ‘gratuitously offensive to its own natural supporters’, but nothing had changed. Membership of the party was falling fast as though, like a malignant parasite, New Labour was gradually killing its host organism, in the same way that Thatcherism looked as though it might have destroyed the Conservative Party.

Neither party really meant a great deal in terms of the everyday social life of the country any more, and the decline was considered an inevitable fact of modern life. There was no reason why this should be so. The rise in Labour Party membership in Blair’s early days had demonstrated that there was another way forward, as had – the previous decade – the enormous wave of support that had greeted the creation of the SDP. What was missing now was any sense that hope for change could be realised, any sign of genuine leadership that sought mass participation rather than media representation.

In his first speech to the Conservative conference as leader, Hague had predicted that Blair’s government would provoke ‘fascination, admiration, disillusion and finally contempt’. That had sounded like whistling in the wind in 1997. By 2001 it seemed more like a diagnosis of the state of modern politics.

William Hague’s resignation as leader of the Conservative Party triggered the first election under the new system that he had introduced. Five candidates presented themselves to the MPs, with David Davis and Michael Ancram knocked out in the first two rounds of voting. That meant there was one final round in order to produce the two candidates who would be presented to the party membership for their consideration.

Leading the field were the two heavyweights who were expected to make the run-off – the old bruiser Kenneth Clarke and the young(ish) pretender Michael Portillo – as well as the little-known Iain Duncan Smith. The verdict should have been a foregone conclusion, but Portillo’s behaviour since the 1997 defeat, his abandonment of Thatcherite social policies, his perceived arrogance and the factionalism of his followers, had alienated too many of his colleagues, and he failed by one vote to reach the final contest. That missing vote belonged to William Hague, who had cast it instead for Iain Duncan Smith.

Portillo was said not to be overly distressed as he stepped out of the firing line. Whoever became leader faced an unhappy future, with years of struggle over the party’s identity almost certain to be followed by a third defeat at the polls. Portillo’s argument for a more inclusive vision of Conservatism would subsequently emerge victorious, but he lacked the forces necessary to push it through, for he was out of step with too many others in the party (‘I am liberal, and I am a member of the elite,’ as he told the shadow cabinet). In his reborn incarnation, he also found that he attracted the fire of those right-wing commentators who had been so opposed to John Major. ‘It was not that Tories oppose in principle the toleration of black people and homosexuals,’ reflected journalist Simon Heffer, musing on the reception accorded to Portillo by the party conference; ‘they just don’t expect to be evangelised on the subject by a shadow chancellor.’

As in 1997, the outcome when the membership of the party were invited to cast their votes in the final leadership ballot should have been a foregone conclusion. On the one side there was the popular and successful Clarke, an MP for over thirty years, with a track record as chancellor of the exchequer and as secretary of state successively for health, education and home affairs; on the other, there was Duncan Smith, elected only in 1992, whose principal contribution had been to rebel against his own government on the issue of Europe. But even if the general public knew nothing of him, and even if he had initially attracted just one member of the shadow cabinet to his team, Duncan Smith was an attractive candidate for the faithful.

He was seen as Norman Tebbit’s anointed successor as the MP for Chingford; he had the backing of Margaret Thatcher; as a Roman Catholic, he was socially conservative on questions such as homosexuality and abortion; and he had made the most of his recent post as shadow defence spokesperson to remind people that he had served as a Scots Guards officer in Northern Ireland and Rhodesia. He was also more determined and ambitious than many recognised. In 1997 he had run John Redwood’s campaign for the leadership, but even then he had his eyes on a higher prize: ‘Next time, I’ll be running my own campaign.’

More important still, he was a Eurosceptic, and his contest with Clarke became, in the words of Nicholas Soames, ‘the physical incarnation of the split that has poisoned our party’. At a hustings in London, pictures were circulated of Clarke sharing a pro-European platform with Tony Blair, accompanied by the ominous slogan: ‘Lest We Forget’. At the same meeting Duncan Smith mentioned that he’d voted against the party whip eleven times over the Maastricht Treaty, and received a standing ovation for his confession. The 1997 leadership election had shown that there was no more important issue for Tory MPs than Europe; 2001 confirmed that this was also the case with the dwindling army of activists in the country. Duncan Smith won over 60 per cent of membership votes, more than 155,000 people, and became leader of the Conservative Party.

It was a choice that baffled those members of the wider electorate who bothered to pay attention. The reaction was encapsulated in the announcement by the waxworks museum Madame Tussaud’s that Duncan Smith would be the first Tory leader in 130 years of whom they would not make an effigy. ‘He is not in the papers very much and you never hear his name,’ explained a spokesperson, some months after Duncan Smith’s accession. ‘We are not sure if our visitors will recognise him, especially as many are from abroad.’

Nor was the selection likely to cause many sleepless nights in Downing Street, save perhaps in relation to the one issue that Duncan Smith had made his own. ‘They thought Ken would win the leadership, and then they would have gone gangbusters on the euro,’ reflected Duncan Smith, in later years. ‘And they believed that the Tory Party would have been wrecked, because it would have had its leader on the same platform as Blair and most of the rest of the party opposed. That would have been the end for us as a party, we would probably have disintegrated.’ Instead, with Duncan Smith at the helm, it was at least certain that the entire party would be united in defence of sterling, had Gordon Brown decided that his five tests had been met and permitted Tony Blair to call a referendum. The prospect of Britain joining the single currency receded still further.

That was the one legacy of a leadership seemingly doomed by bad luck from the outset. The schedule for the election called for ballot papers to be returned by 11 September, with the results to be announced at a press conference the following day. Unfortunately that press conference had to be delayed for twenty-four hours when it was realised that no one much was likely to attend. For on 11 September 2001 the terrorist group al-Qaeda launched a coordinated wave of suicide attacks on the USA, killing nearly 3,000 people, most of them in the destruction of the World Trade Center in New York. In the immediate aftermath of that devastation, the choice of who was going to lose the next election for the Tories seemed to be of little significance.