The Joy of Trivia
Throughout the Blair years, Alastair Campbell would berate journalists for their tiny-minded obsession with trivia rather than substance. By trivia he meant a series of scandals involving ministers and money or, less often, ministers and sex. Resignations from government punctuated the Blair years. Perhaps the most single damaging thing Tony Blair ever said was this: ‘We are on the side of ordinary people against privilege. We must be purer than pure.’ There were few instances of personal corruption but in trying to raise money for politics without going cap in hand to the trade unions, the Blair circle became deeply enmeshed with business and privilege, a world where favours were exchanged without anything explicit necessarily being said. The Blairs themselves enjoyed luxurious surroundings and the company of wealthy people. And after the huge endorsement of the 1997 election, lacking any restraint from a threatening opposition party, a certain swagger was soon apparent among the inner circle. From the word go, New Labour’s high command, nose in the air, eyes aglitter with opportunity, was riding for a fall.
The Bernie Ecclestone affair of 1997, when the diminutive owner of Formula 1 racing around the world won an exemption from a tobacco advertising ban for his sport after giving a £1m donation to Labour, was the first rebuke to ‘purer than pure’. In Opposition, Blair had been driven round the Silverstone racing circuit as the crowd waved Union Jacks at him; the two men were acquaintances. The suggested link between a let-out clause in government policy for motor racing and Ecclestone’s personal influence on him was hotly denied by Blair in public. Behind the scenes, he and his advisers knew how it looked. There was panic. Though nobody could finally prove wrongdoing, lies were told as Number Ten tried to cover up the detail of the story. On Campbell’s advice Blair allowed himself to be interviewed by the BBC’s premier attack-dog interviewer John Humphrys, to whom he made a lame half-apology and appealed to viewers: ‘I hope that people know me well enough and realise the type of person I am to realise I would never do anything to harm the country or anything improper…I think that most people who have dealt with me think that I am a pretty straight sort of guy.’ Blair got away with it at the time, just about. But a dangerous impression had been left that the fresh-faced new administration which had so vigorously attacked Tory sleaze was not quite as clean-handed as it had seemed.
If Blair could still play his public reputation for niceness, the same could not in all fairness be said of Peter Mandelson. He had revelled in his reputation as ‘the sinister minister’, the all-seeing, omnipresent Machiavelli of New Britain. He could be stagey, camp, bullying, charming and for a man supposed to swirl around in the dark, was rather touchingly attracted by the spotlight. It was said that his arrival in a restaurant could turn soup to ice as he passed enemies, while he could raise an ally’s blood temperature with just the flicker of a smile. He was less efficient than overwrought enemies thought him. As a dark manipulator he had his Inspector Clouseau moments. Yet in the early days of New Labour, Mandelson and the people around him felt they were masters of the universe. One of his aides, Derek Draper, boasted darkly to someone working undercover for a newspaper about ‘the Circle’. There were, he said (no doubt tapping the side of his nose) only ‘seventeen people who count’. Perhaps the Mandelson circle was sending itself up just a little; but it was setting itself up too. Mandelson himself had a strongly developed taste for good living and had borrowed £373,000 to buy a house before the election from Geoffrey Robinson, a cheery MP and supporter of Gordon Brown’s. Robinson had a fortune secreted offshore in a Channel Island tax haven, money from a long business career and also from the bequest of a Belgian widow, happily called Madam Bourgeois. In government he became Paymaster General and in due course Mandelson became Secretary of State for Trade & Industry, the job which meant he was in overall charge of investigations into – among others – one Geoffrey Robinson, the man to whom he was indebted for his West End home.
There was an obvious conflict of interest. Mandelson tried to deflect enquiries about where he had got the money. But the Brown camp both loathed him and knew the truth. So it was bound to come out. When it did so Blair was furious, not least because his close friend Peter had said nothing to warn him; nor had any of his staff. After a tearful scene with two Downing Street press officers, and Blair off-stage looking cross, Mandelson agreed that he would have to resign. The Prime Minister, though determined to see him go, then had him and his partner to stay at Chequers and gave him advice about rebuilding his life and the art of making friends. Characteristically, Mandelson’s sad but noble letter of resignation and Blair’s memorably moving reply were both written by Alastair Campbell. Then Robinson went too. So in due course did Charlie Whelan, Brown’s press officer and the man blamed by Mandelson for revealing the story of his loan.
Had that been all it would have been bad enough. The mantra was established that nothing wrong had been done, but because of the appearance of wrongdoing, resignation was called for. But there followed a roll-call of scandals, all different in their detail, together devastating in their effect. Blair was accused of lying when he denied knowledge of any connection between a Labour donation made by Lakshmi Mittal, an Indian businessman, and his help for Mittal in trying to buy a Romanian steel company. Mandelson returned to government just ten months after his resignation and threw himself into the new job of Northern Ireland Secretary. Then came questions about whether two Indian businessmen who had helped fund the Dome had tried to obtain British citizenship via Mandelson. He was later cleared of wrongdoing but had to resign again. After Blair again showed himself entirely steely about this, Mandelson, who eventually turned up again as Britain’s Commissioner in Brussels, felt badly betrayed. (Connections between ministers and business people who ‘know the form’ and protect one another by never explicitly asking or offering, depend on a shared culture. It is interesting that so many of the rows that broke surface concerned Asian business people. They did not know the form. They could speak English, but not Unspoken English.)
For the same cabinet minister to have to resign twice within a year was unheard-of. But in the Blair years, twice happened twice. David Blunkett, the blind, tough-talking former leader of Sheffield council who had been Blair’s enforcer in education, had to resign as Home Secretary in 2004 after a row over whether he had asked his private office to fast-track a visa application for his lover Kimberley Quinn’s nanny. He had not exactly rallied colleagues to his side by confiding in a journalist his derisive views on much of the rest of the cabinet, duly published in a biography to his embarrassment and their fury. Press interest in the ‘nannygate’ story was whipped to fever pitch by Quinn’s role as well-known publisher of the Tory-supporting Spectator magazine and the revelation that she had had a child by him. Even Blunkett described it as the tale of the socialite and the socialist. There followed a bitter custody battle between Quinn, supported by her long-suffering husband, and the increasingly agitated Blunkett. It was a story from the wilder years of the eighteenth century and was used as the subject of a musical, which hurt Blunkett very much, as well as a television drama. He was brought back into government after the 2005 election as Work & Pensions Secretary but had to resign again after a row over shares in a DNA testing company he had purchased while out of the government. His taped diaries which were published in 2006 then revealed divisions at the heart of government before the Iraq War, his coruscating views on senior civil servants, and implied that Blair had considered sacking Brown if he failed to properly support him over it.
The Blunkett and Mandelson ‘doubles’ were the most celebrated resignations of the Blair years but were only part of the story. Ron Davies, the Welsh Secretary, went after ‘a moment of madness’ involving another man on Clapham Common. Estelle Morris, Education Secretary, went after a ‘moment of sanity’ – thoroughly honorably, she decided she was not up to the job. There were the Iraq resignations, first of Robin Cook, then Clare Short, the loss of a badly bruised Lord Irvine of Lairg as Lord Chancellor after Blair overruled him on constitutional reform, and the departure of Alan Milburn, Health Secretary, to spend more time with his family. Stephen Byers, a former hard leftist from the north-east of England, had been one of Blair’s most trusted and loyal ministers. He was badly damaged when his special adviser Jo Moore callously emailed colleagues telling them 9/11 was a good day ‘to bury bad news’, not the most sensitive response to the murder of thousands. Then as Transport Secretary Byers ignited a huge row when he forced Railtrack into liquidation and took control of it back, without paying the compensation to its shareholders that straightforward nationalization would have entitled them to. They felt robbed and cheated, though Labour MPs were delighted. Byers was attacked for lying to Parliament about this, and about what he said to a meeting of survivors of the horrific Paddington train disaster about the railway’s future. He resigned in May 2002.
The dirty tide washed through Number Ten too. Blair and his wife Cherie had been the butt of many attacks for the gusto with which they enjoyed free holidays at the expense of rich friends – Geoffrey Robinson, an Italian prince, Cliff Richard, a Bee Gee, and (briefly) Silvio Berlusconi, the scandal-mired Prime Minister of Italy. Cherie had been criticized frequently for free-loading more generally; though a high-paid lawyer she was unreasonably frightened of not having enough money, which presumably dated from her insecure childhood. The Blairs were less wealthy than the Thatchers (though not, in office, the Majors or the Wilsons or the Callaghans) and had failed to capitalize on the house-price boom when they sold their private north London home. Yet they and their children were looked after in two homes paid for by the State and he was well paid by the standards of ordinary Britain. Not rich only by the standards of millennial London high society, the family was comfortable. And as soon as Blair resigned he knew that through book deals, speaking fees and corporate work he could become rich beyond the dreams of avarice. None of this seemed to cut much ice.
Carole Caplin, a health and beauty trainer, had known Cherie Blair from the nineties but became more influential with her after Labour won power. Disliked by Number Ten officials who regarded her as manipulative, and her New Age views as barmy, Caplin nevertheless helped Mrs Blair develop a style and self-confidence she felt she had not had before. Particularly after her pregnancy with Leo, and then a later miscarriage, a close feminine bond was established. With Blair constantly distracted by the ‘war on terror’ and domestic politics, Cherie took it more upon herself to organize family plans, including financial plans. Through Caplin, she arranged to buy two flats in Bristol where her son Euan was at university, one for him and one as an investment. The deal was negotiated by Caplin’s lover, a pantomime Australian rogue and fraudster called Peter Foster. When the story broke, Cherie Blair failed to tell Campbell the full truth. Nor did she tell Fiona Miller, Campbell’s partner, who had been Cherie’s spokeswoman and who loathed Caplin. Nor, it seems, did her husband know the complete story either. As a result, Number Ten misled the press when stories in the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday were put to them and were later forced to apologize. Stormy scenes erupted inside Downing Street when the link from Blair to a conman, via Cherie and Caplin, was finally established. It was a very bleak moment for the couple and media anger was only partially assuaged when at Campbell’s insistence Cherie made a live televised apology, blaming her busy life and maternal pressure for what had happened. Some applauded her for a courageous performance and a life of difficult juggling. Others were unconvinced.
Britain had not become a corrupt country. But a sense of let-down, betrayal or perhaps just weary disappointment was felt by millions who had hoped for better. Why had Blair and his associates failed to show themselves purer than pure? First, by deciding to live with a system of business donations to help fund politics, they opened themselves to influence-peddling. Blair always replied that he had set up rules for the disclosure of party donations and the tightest ever code for ministerial behaviour. This was true. Yet there always seemed to be another loophole and another set of questions. By the end of his time in office his fundraiser Lord Levy had been arrested in a loans-for-peerages investigation and he was facing police questioning himself.
Second, the growth of a super-rich class of business people in London in the two decades after the Big Bang gave some politicians a wholly unrealistic measurement of how ‘people like us’ live. Many did not fall for it. Brown did not. Most ministers went home to their constituencies and found themselves walking again on solid ground. But the temptation to think, ‘I run the country, or part of the country, don’t I deserve better?’ was always present. Britain seemed to have become a society which measured success merely by money, rather than by public esteem. Finally, the way politicians were really monitored had changed. It was not the smooth expressions of warning from civil servants they had to worry about, or even tough questions from fellow MPs. A self-appointed, lively, impertinent and at times savage opposition did the job instead, a class of people courted by ministers and then despised by them: the media. After brilliantly using journalism to help discredit the Conservatives, Blair and his colleagues were themselves about to feel the rough edge of a rough trade.