The Dawning of a New Era?
Margaret Thatcher had been a celebrity strictly on her own terms, never big on forgiveness or peace-making but always understanding the importance of optimism. Blair was learning from her. He quickly invited her back to see him in Downing Street and during his first years in office showed that he had picked up some of her bad traits too. She was unreasonably suspicious of the civil service. So was he. She was unimpressed by her first cabinet. He felt the same about his. Like her, when it might have voted him down on a pet idea, he simply went round it. Like her, he toyed with and then discarded the ideologies of intellectuals as he saw fit. With Thatcher it was the radicals of the new right, urging her to sell off hospitals or motorways. With Blair, it was the more gentle spirits urging him to adopt ‘stakeholding’ or ‘communitarianism,’ novel ways of reordering or taming capitalism. For their authors these were new political philosophies, for New Labour, briefly useful fads. Blair was no more of an intellectual than she was. He shared middle-class instincts, just like her. She took to praising him, if in qualified terms. They were really quite similar. Yet when Thatcher became Prime Minister she had years of Whitehall experience. Blair had none. She may not have enjoyed the boozy male clubbiness of Parliament but she respected the institution. Blair gave every sign of disliking the place intensely.
But the biggest difference between the two was Blair’s obsession with journalism. Thatcher did her best to cope with the media, a little flattery here, a blunderbuss-blast from Bernard Ingham there. Blair during his first years in power was a fully engaged media politician. She sailed on the stuff, he swam in it. She knew who her press enemies were, and who were her friends, and more or less kept both throughout. Blair tried to make everyone his friend, and would lose almost all of them. Campbell was more powerful in the Blair court than Ingham had been in the Thatcher one. Again it was a generational thing: she had come into politics when newspapers were comparatively deferential and it was beneath a rising minister to court journalists. Blair learned the dangers of schmoozing media people, but slowly. More a problem of his early years, his relationship with the press and his misused press briefings hurt him and his reputation badly.
One example of how, came in the debate over British membership of the euro, the single currency finally taking shape at the beginning of 1999. Though never a fanatic on the subject, Blair’s pro-European instincts and his desire to be the lead figure inside the EU predisposed him to announce that Britain would join – not in the first wave, perhaps, but soon afterwards. He briefed that this would happen. British business seemed generally in favour. But, as the former Liberal Democrat leader Paddy Ashdown revealed in his diaries, Blair had a problem. According to Ashdown, Roy Jenkins told Blair in the autumn of 1997: ‘I will be very blunt about this. You have to choose between leading in Europe or having Murdoch on your side. You can have one but not both.’ Ouch. Pro-euro journalists went to see him and came away thinking he was on their side. Anti-euro journalists had the same experience. He had a pro-euro adviser, Roger Liddle. But he also had an anti-euro adviser, Derek Scott. The briefing and guesswork in the press was completely baffling. Lord Simon, the former BP boss now in government working on euro matters, held up a wodge of papers at one evening speech, announcing that they represented the speech about the euro that had been written for him, before putting it down and confessing that he would not bother to read it; it had been completed an hour before so the policy had probably changed. It was a joke, but meant to sting.
Gordon Brown, who had been generally in favour of the euro, munched his way through Treasury reports. For him, stability came first. He concluded that it was not likely Britain could safely enter in the first Parliament. He warned Blair. The two argued. Eventually they agreed a fudge. Britain would probably stay out during the 1997 Parliament but the door should be left slightly ajar. Pro-European business people and those Tories who had lent Blair and Brown conditional support, as well as Blair’s continental partners, should be kept on board. So should the anti-euro press. The terms of the delicate compromise were meant to be revealed in an interview given by Brown to The Times. Being more hostile to entry than Blair, and talking to an anti-euro paper, his team briefed more strongly than Blair would have liked. By the time the story was written, the pound had been saved from extinction for the lifetime of the Parliament. When Blair discovered this he was aghast and began to phone desperately around until he reached Brown’s press officer, the affable Charlie Whelan (a man Blair detested and had tried vainly to have sacked earlier in the year). Whelan was in the Red Lion public house in Whitehall and cheerfully confirmed to the Prime Minister on his mobile phone that his government’s policy was indeed that Britain would not enter during the lifetime of the Parliament. As Whelan put it later, ‘he was completely gobsmacked’. Blair told him to ‘row back’. Whelan replied it was too late.
The chaos surrounding such an important matter was ended and patched up by Brown as he and his adviser Ed Balls quickly produced five economic tests which would be applied before Britain entered the euro. They required more detailed work by the Treasury; the underlying point was that the British and continental economies must be properly aligned first. Brown then told the Commons that though it was likely for economic reasons Britain would wait until after the next election, there was no constitutional or political reason not to join. Preparations for British entry would begin. It all gave the impression, not least to Blair, that once the tests were met there would be a postelection referendum, followed by the demise of sterling. In 1999, with tantantaras and a full-scale public launch at a London cinema, Blair was joined by the Liberal Democrat leader Charles Kennedy and the two former Tory cabinet ministers Ken Clarke and Michael Heseltine to launch ‘Britain in Europe’. This was to be a counterblast to the anti-euro campaign, ‘Business for Sterling’. Blair promised that together they would demolish the arguments against the euro, and there was alarmist coverage about the loss of 8 million jobs if Britain pulled out of the EU.
But this expensive, brightly coloured and crowded bandwagon was going nowhere at all. The real significance of the Red Lion kerfuffle was that the power to decide over membership of the euro passed decisively and for ever from Blair in Downing Street to Brown, whose Treasury fortress became the guardian of the economic tests. Brown would keep Britain out, something which won him great personal credit among Conservative press barons. There would be no referendum in the Blair years, however much the Prime Minister fretted. During his second administration, according to the former cabinet minister Clare Short, Blair offered Brown an astonishing deal: he would leave Number Ten soon if Brown would ‘deliver’ the euro. Brown brusquely rejected the offer, telling Short that he didn’t make policy that way and in any case, could not trust Blair to keep his side of a bargain.
But other historic changes went ahead. Both devolution and the Irish peace process reshaped the country and produced clear results. So did other constitutional initiatives, such as the expulsion of most hereditary peers from the Lords, ending its huge inbuilt Conservative majority, and the incorporation of the European human rights convention into British law, allowing cases to come to court here. Neither produced the outcomes ministers expected. The Lords became more assertive and more of a problem for Blair, not less of one. British judges’ interpretation of the human rights of asylum seekers and suspected terrorists caused much anguish to successive home secretaries; and the ‘human rights culture’ was widely criticized by newspapers. But at least, in each case, serious shifts in the balance of power were made, changes intended to make Britain fairer and more open.
Other early initiatives would crumble to dust and ashes. One of the most interesting examples is the Dome, centrepiece of millennium celebrations inherited from the Conservatives. Blair was initially unsure about whether to forge ahead with the £1 bn gamble. He was argued into the Dome project by Peter Mandelson who wanted to be its impresario, and by John Prescott, who liked the new money it would bring to a blighted part of east London. Prescott suggested New Labour wouldn’t be much of a government if it could not make a success of this. Blair agreed, though had the Dome ever come to a cabinet vote he would have lost. Architecturally the Dome was striking and elegant, a landmark for London which can be seen by almost every air passenger arriving in the capital. Public money was spent on cleaning up a poisoned semicircle of derelict land and bringing new Tube and road links. The millennium was certainly worth celebrating. But the problem ministers and their advisers could not solve was what their pleasure Dome should contain. Should it be for a great national party? Should it be educational? Beautiful? Thought-provoking? A fun park? Nobody could decide. The instinct of the British towards satire was irresistible as the project continued surrounded by cranes and political hullabaloo. The Dome would be magnificent, unique, a tribute to daring and can-do. Blair himself said it would provide the first paragraph of his next election manifesto.
A well-funded, self-confident management was put in place but the bright child’s question – yes, but what’s it for? – would not go away. When the Dome finally opened, at New Year, the Queen, Prime Minister and hundreds of donors, business people and celebrities were treated to a mishmash of a show which embarrassed many of them. Bad organization meant most of the guests had a long, freezing and damp wait to get in for the celebrations. Xanadu this was not. The fiasco meant the Dome was roasted in most newspapers and when it opened to the public, the range of mildly interesting exhibits was greeted as a huge disappointment. Far fewer people came and bought tickets than was hoped. It turned out to be a theme park without a theme, morphing in the public imagination into the earliest and most damaging symbol of what was wrong with New Labour: an impressively constructed big tent containing not very much at all. It was produced by some of the people closest to the Prime Minister and therefore boomeranged particularly badly on him and the group already known as ‘Tony’s cronies’. Optimism and daring, it seemed, were not enough.