The Waning
This book is written under the shadow of a new politics of global warming, when the British were being urged to be environmentally friendly. This author’s contribution, which may save a Nordic wood or small grove of some beauty, is to resist giving a detailed account of the decade-long feud between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. It would, apart from anything else, require at least another volume the same size as this one. But it cannot be ignored because it has affected the country itself. The feud went on from New Labour’s first days in power until the last months when the Prime Minister’s fingertips, white with effort, were slipping from office. Sometimes there were oases of tranquillity and good humour, for months at a time. Yet the stories of door-slamming tantrums, four-lettered exchanges, make-ups, go-betweens, public snubs and cherished policies for Britain’s future being tugged back and forth like disintegrating soft toys, were repeated in Whitehall private offices, pubs and newspaper columns almost weekly. Occasionally it seemed as if Blair was on the point of sacking his Chancellor. Brown was variously reported by Number Ten to have psychological flaws, to be a control-freak, a wrecker, a traditionalist ‘playing to the gallery’ and disloyal whenever the Prime Minister was in real trouble. Blair, retorted the Brownites, was a vain second-rater obsessed with money and glamour, who had betrayed the Chancellor over their original deal.
In the first term, Brown was defending his huge remit as Chancellor and Blair was trying to come to terms with how brutally he was being kept out of large policy areas; how little he knew of forthcoming Budgets; and how weak was his ability to push Britain towards the euro. Brown felt the second election victory in 2001 was mostly his own work, based on the strong economy. In the second term that followed it, he began pushing for a date when Blair would leave office. Blair, turning to the ‘war on terror’ and Iraq, failed to concentrate enough on domestic policy. Even so, he became ever more determined to hang on until he got the reforms he wanted. A gap seemed to open between Blair’s enthusiasm for market-mimicking ideas to reform health and schools, and Brown’s, for delivering better lives to the working poor. As we have seen, Brown was also keen on bringing private capital into public services, but there was a difference in emphasis which both men played up. ‘Best when we are at our boldest,’ said Blair. ‘Best when we are Labour,’ retorted Brown. Over Iraq, foundation hospitals and student top-up fees, Blair thought Brown came close to leaving him at the mercy of lethal backbench revolts, disappearing off into the rhododendron bushes just when he was most needed. Brown did give his support, and rally ‘his people’ to help Blair out of various self-excavated holes, but the Scotsman with the ladder tended to arrive as darkness was falling.
After six years in office he felt Blair was squandering the party’s reputation on gimmicks and a too enthusiastic backing for Bush. He thought Blair had lied to him about when he would step down. John Prescott intervened first during November 2003, so worried that their feud would bring down the government that he knocked their heads together – metaphorically, despite his reputation – over a dinner of shepherd’s pie, telling them they would destroy the Labour Party. This produced a truce but during 2004 things worsened rapidly again. Labour was badly hurt in local elections. With Iraq still smouldering, Labour MPs began to panic about what would happen at the next election. A mix of personal and political frustration brought Blair to another low ebb. For years he and Brown had dealt with each other through a range of intermediaries meeting on neutral ground and carrying white flags. Punctuating these regular arm’s-length contacts, at roughly the chilly level one might expect between a Prime Minister and Leader of the Opposition, Blair and Brown had hotter private meetings. But by now they were barely speaking and Blair was deeply depressed about his legacy, as well as private troubles.
In July 2004 four cabinet ministers were so worried he was about to resign that they jointly pleaded with him to stay on. In the autumn Prescott was involved in further talks about whether there could be a ‘peaceful transition’. On one occasion he met Brown at an oyster bar by Loch Fyne in Scotland. All the tables were taken. So for an hour and a half the two men talked in a black government limousine in the carpark, surrounded by armed guards, as if they were two businessmen of Sicilian extraction planning the carve-up of criminal territories. Prescott later talked of the (tectonic) plates moving and admitted that ministers were positioning themselves for the end of the Blair years. Brown was preparing himself for his looming premiership, briefing himself on foreign affairs, reaching out to groups well outside the Treasury’s normal remit. Transition teams were prepared. Surely, finally, even this soap-opera was ending?
It was not. Blair gathered together his formidable internal resources and quietly determined that he would not go after all. Immediately after Labour’s conference at Brighton he returned to Downing Street to make a triple announcement. He confirmed he was buying a house (an expensive, ugly, hard-to-let house) in Connaught Square which he and Cherie would eventually use for their retirement. After a heart scare the previous year, he was going into hospital for treatment using a thin wire to correct irregular heartbeat problems. This condition, which Blair was at pains to downplay, was known only to a few close friends. Like the house purchase, it tended to focus attention on his political mortality. Hence the third announcement, a bolt from the blue. He intended to fight the forthcoming election and if elected serve a full term. But as he told the author: ‘I do not want to serve a fourth term – I do not think the British people would want a Prime Minister to serve so long – but I think it’s sensible to make plain my intention now.’ It was an unprecedented thing to say, and caught Brown on the hop – he was on his way to a meeting in Washington. In the short term it effectively killed off speculation that Blair was about to resign. To that extent it was clever. It may also have helped Labour in the 2005 election since Blair was promising his critics he would not, like Margaret Thatcher, try to ‘go on and on’.
It certainly felt like a slap in the face for Brown. Just a day earlier in Brighton the two of them had had a long, tense talk about the future in which Blair warned him that his supporters were destabilizing the government and urged him to work with him. In response to a newspaper report that he was intending to serve a full third term, Blair told Brown this was wrong. He said nothing about his heart problem. When he discovered that Blair was planning a complete third term Brown was reported to be livid. Demoted from his old role running the forthcoming election campaign, he rejected an offer to chair Labour’s press conferences during it. ‘There is nothing that you could ever say to me now that I could ever believe,’ he was said to have told the Prime Minister. But life is full of surprises. Blair discovered that pre-announcing his political mortality, however protracted, was a draining and sapping mistake, the worst purely tactical decision of his premiership. It provoked a stream of further questions – yes, but when exactly? How many years is a full term? How long does your successor get in office before a further election? If you are going, what validity do your long-term plans for the country really have? And most pertinently, do you still want Gordon Brown to take over? These questions pursued him, loud, irritating, distracting heckles. His authority was first subtly, then dramatically, weakened.
Always, there were moments of hope. After Bush declared the war over on 1 May 2003, a search began for pro-Western Iraqis to whom some authority could be given. Eventually Saddam Hussein was found hiding in a hole and taken prisoner. Some eighty other countries pledged £18 bn for reconstruction, while US and British companies worked hard on repairing infrastructure. In the south where British forces were in control, they were quick to take off their helmets, patrolling in berets and trying to build good relations with local people. To start with, this worked well. Across Iraq huge amounts of money, dollars in shrink-wrapped blocks, were sent to be disbursed locally by hastily recruited Western viceroys. The following year saw the naming of Ayad Allawi, an affable Shiite, as interim Prime Minister of Iraq. That June, the United States formally handed over sovereignty to his government and a few days later, an Iraqi court began the trial of Saddam Hussein and eventually sentenced him to death. A national assembly was chosen and a date for elections was set. In January 2005, Iraqis had their first multi-party election for fifty years, choosing a transitional government. Later a Kurd, Jalal Talabani, was sworn in as Iraq’s interim President. In October Iraqis voted for a new constitution, establishing an Islamic republic. At the end of the year millions took part in the full election which by January 2006 resulted in victory going to a Shia-dominated party, though without an overall majority. These were the drumbeats of democracy and renewal, much what Blair and Bush had hoped would happen.
What had not been predicted by them was the appalling dark side of Iraq after the conflict, which completely overshadowed the reconstruction and the creation of democratic structures. A long, numbing tale of insurrection followed by religious feud, slaughters, car and suicide bombings, the killing of civilians in heavy-handed military responses, the beheading of Western hostages, the revelation of brutality by US guards at the notorious Abu Graib prison, a full-scale assault on the rebel town of Falluja, a thousand dead in a panicked stampede…every day brought more murders, more fighting, less hope. By 2004, child mortality had doubled compared to 1990. There was a shortage of doctors and teachers. According to the World Bank, about a quarter of Iraqi children no longer attended school. Universities reported that they were being infiltrated by Muslim militias; professors fled and female students were persecuted for failing to wear the hijab. According to the United Nations, some 750,000 people had fled their homes since the war, adding to the 800,000 refugees of the Saddam era, while an estimated 1.6 million Iraqis had moved across the borders. By 2006, electricity supply was running at below the pre-war level and only half of Iraqi homes had safe supplies of water. Baghdad was on the edge of full-scale war, her hospitals filthy and dangerous, while militias roamed the streets. The possible breakup of the country was being openly talked about. In spring 2007, the international Red Cross described the suffering of Iraqi civilians as ‘unbearable and unacceptable.’ According to polls most British voters wanted the troops home, whatever further mayhem was caused.
It was the same story in the United States where most voters, who had been sold the idea that the Iraq War followed on naturally from 9/11, now believed it was a mistake. Bush stopped talking about ‘staying the course’. A report for a Ministry of Defence think tank described Iraq as a recruiting sergeant for Islamic extremism around the world. This reflected the view of the Washington organization which brings together America’s nineteen intelligence agencies, who firmly concluded that Iraq had increased the global risk of terrorism. In December 2006 the US Iraq Study Group presented Bush with a bleak assessment of the mayhem and a series of unpalatable options, designed to slowly bring America’s soldiers home while negotiating with her traditional enemies in an attempt to bring some kind of stability to the country.
So by almost any standard that can be applied, three years after the Iraq war, it looked like a catastrophe. The country was experiencing civil war. The lives of Iraqis were now even more at risk, and mostly more unpleasant, than under Saddam’s dreadful regime. Terrorism had been encouraged, not defeated. Countries regarded by London and Washington as regional menaces, Syria and Iran, were stronger and more confident, not less. With 120 British military dead in Iraq, most people saw the war as the worst single mistake by a British government in recent times. Some believe that had Blair refused to give British support for the war, it would not have happened. The mood inside the White House after September 11 makes this unlikely. Even so, having committed Britain, Blair could not stand aside from the consequences. The kaleidoscope was shaken all right. The pieces were in flux.