“Tony Wants”: the First Blair Premiership in Historical Perspective Transcript
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“Tony Wants”: The First Blair Premiership in Historical Perspective Transcript Date: Wednesday, 7 November 2001 - 12:00AM Location: Staple Inn Hall Blair’s First Term Professor Peter Hennessy May I begin this evening with a few words about Professor Colin Matthew. I did not know Colin well ~ but I knew him well enough to appreciate how important he was to my profession. He had a capacity to inspire and to organise both on the page, within his university and through such learned bodies as the Royal Historical Society which was very special indeed. His judgement allied to his energy and generosity of spirit meant that Colin could ~ and did ~ make good things happen like few others. It is a great honour to be speaking in his memory this evening. Ladies and gentlemen, this is a lecture in two parts. Part one is written as if today was the10th September 2001. It will be the sort of presentation I would have given if Black Tuesday had not happened and the political press was still reflecting the running argument between sections of the Labour movement and the government about the precise mix of the still churning New Labour version of a mixed economy. No doubt the papers, too, would have been full of the latest twists and turns of the Tony/Gordon story ~ a political rivalry unmatched perhaps since the Gladstone/Disraeli era, (the period which Colin Matthew covered so wonderfully), the difference being that TB and GB are members of the same Cabinet. We would be intrigued, too, by the new configuration of the ever more tightly fused No.10 and Cabinet Office ~ the latest geographical expression of the Blair Centre. We would be boring each other rigid as well by pondering the latest odds on a successful outcome of the drive for better public services by the time of the general election of 2005 or 2006 ~ the theme of the second term being that of delivery. All of this I shall undertake in a moment as section one. Part two of my paper this evening will reprise the Prime Minister’s style during Gulf War II, the four days of concentrated military action against Iraq in December 1998, and the considerably larger, 2 ½ month Balkan War in the spring of 1999 before making an early stab at describing the handling of the post-11 September emergency, the so-called ‘War on International Terrorism.’ The weeks before and after the general election of June 2001 were quite revealing of the way Tony Blair himself saw his first term and its ~ or to be more precise, other people’s ~ shortcomings. At the last Cabinet meeting before the contest, he warned his ministers not to expect an easy time when they returned [1] Despite the 167- seat margin of victory over all other parties and the prospect of a full-length, unprecedented second term for a Government carrying a ‘Labour’ label, Mr Blair did not return to No.10 with any overt signs that, in Disraeli’s phrase in Tancred, ‘[a] majority is always the best repartee.’ [2] Quite the reverse. Jim Naughtie caught this very well in his new study of Blair and Brown, The Rivals, which he subtitles ~ a trifle fruitily ~ as ‘The Intimate Story of A Political Marriage.’ ‘Euphoria,’ he writes, ‘had been banned at the moment of victory. Any repeat of the 1997 frolics at the Royal Festival Hall risked looking arrogant, they had decided, so there was meant to be no public rave. Behind the controlled façade, however, the feeling that was struggling to find a way out was not one of wild celebration. It was a deep frustration. Blair was impatient with his Cabinet and with Whitehall, and Brown was impatient with Blair. ‘In Number 10, all the anxiety about “delivery” in the public services and about the need to confront the public cynicism revealed in the General Election turnout (the first to dip under 60 per cent since the arrival of universal suffrage) was focused once again on the central partnership.’ [3] In fact, it had been rather a scratchy year for the Prime Minister. One of Tony Blair’s more endearing characteristics is his willingness to talk publicly about the human side of his job ~ a capacity to acknowledge anxiety which is quite rare amongst top politicians who often fail to distinguish it from being an admission of weakness. For example, in the spring of 2000, the Prime Minister told Robert Harris he agreed that most political lives ended in failure. Why? ‘It’s because the public is always encouraged to be cynical about people. And…in the end…whatever the expectations are, you can’t meet all of them.’ [4] Whatever else might be said of him, Tony Blair is a command and control premier with a sense of political mortality. Within four months of his conversation with Harris reaching the bookstands, that sense, I suspect, became his most dominant emotion for a few, fraught days in September 2001 when a curious, unanticipated coalition of the semi-organised effectively closed down much of the UK’s oil and petrol distribution system. [5] From the moment the Prime Minister was warned by the contingency planners in the Cabinet Office early on the morning of 12 September that ‘the situation is near breaking point’ and that ‘MOD [is] looking at options for military assistance,’ [6] an autumn of fretfulness began to afflict the Government and, for a few days, none of those around the Prime Minister ‘knew what the petrol scare meant. Is it the end? Have we lost? This went on for three or four days,’ as one of them recalled. [7] The normally phlegmatic Home Secretary, Jack Straw, declared at a meeting of the Civil Contingencies Committee in the Cabinet Office at the height of the crisis: ‘This is our poll tax.’ [8] Over the coming days the opinion surveys suggested Straw may have not entirely succumbed to anxious overreaction giving the Conservatives a lead over Labour for the first time since the ‘Black Wednesday’ crisis eight years earlier. [9] ‘The focus groups failed’ was the blunt conclusion of a highly intelligent Labour movement veteran. [10] In fact, this was not quite the case. Philip Gould had been briefing Blair on rising anger about the price of fuel since the beginning of the year. [11] The problem flowed partly because Whitehall’s capacity for contingency planning had been dispersed beyond the Cabinet Office and into several departments and allowed to lose its sharpness. Sir Richard Wilson and Sir David Omand swiftly set about reviewing this in the wake of ‘petrol September,’ [12] only for its shortcomings to be shown up in a still more acute and protracted fashion when the foot and mouth crisis began to bite in late February 2001. [13] Briefly, it looked as if the events of September 2000 had fuelled a mini-revival of collective government. ‘There is more challenge to the PM,’ an insider explained. ‘They realise that they are not going to win an election just on his face.’ [14] This impression of mildly waxing collegiality was reinforced by two other factors. As the preoccupation with winning a second term grew (not that it had been absent for one moment since 2 May 1997 hence the relentlessness of the permanent election campaign over the subsequent four years which had, I believe, much to do with the 59 per cent turnout when the real election campaign ended on 7 June 2001), there appeared to be a little more space at the centre in which the career civil servants could operate. This included the Prime Minister’s Department-that-will-not-speak-its-name as the regulars in the Private Office began to take over more of the day-to-day running of business from the special advisers. [15] In addition, close observers of the Cabinet Office noticed a burst of Cabinet committee activity. The Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott, had always liked operating through them and the autumn of 2001 found him particularly active in the chair of MISC 10, the Ministerial Committee on the Millennium Dome. [16] Sir Richard Wilson, too, was at his collegiate subtlest in encouraging that mini-revival of Cabinet committeedom and bringing together clusters of informal groups into a proper Cabinet committee shape. MISC 9 on children’s and young persons’ services was an example. [17] He was also skilled at offering the Cabinet Secretariat as minute-takers even if a particular ministerial group did not feature formally in his Cabinet Committee Book. [18] This phenomenon of the late first term should not be exaggerated, however. In October 2000, a Cabinet minister said greater collegiality was not apparent on Thursday mornings ~ the full Cabinet could neither tackle difficult issues on which there might be disagreement nor go on much beyond an hour for fear of the press reporting splits. [19] Such a self-defeating preoccupation with the media’s obsession for personality and clash stories, in the view of another Cabinet minister, is what, in the longer-term perspective of the first time as a whole, had stymied what might have been a natural growth in collegiality as ministers became more experienced: ‘Well all went in [in May 1997] nervous. There was a high degree of ignorance. There was a degree of silence round that table. Then we got a bit more verbal and things began to improve. Then we got into trouble with the press and Tony took more control.’ [20] In the last months of the first term, just before the outbreak of foot and mouth, a very senior Whitehall figure thought that over the past 3 ¾ years a more profound factor had been at work virtually trumping all else: ‘It’s not the fear of the press going on about splits that stops the Cabinet from discussing things, it’s because the PM doesn’t like argument.