A Journey (106 page)

While they had a clear view of the importance of the fight to their ideology, public opinion in the West was becoming more and more fuzzy as to the reasons for our presence, asking whether it could possibly be worth it. Once again, people drew analogies with conventional warfare of the symmetrical kind, when what was self-evident was that this was unconventional warfare of the asymmetrical kind. We were engaged in long-term nation-building the purpose of which was as much our security as their nation. That’s the way the world is in the early twenty-first century. The wars, the ideologies, the power structures of the twentieth century seem less part of another century than part of another epoch. Unsurprisingly, people’s minds are slow to adapt.

So a constant and recurrent theme of 2006 was the increase of endeavour in Afghanistan. I was alarmed about it, uncertain we had the right civilian leadership there and concerned that though our military had a good plan for our contribution, it was unclear our enthusiasm was shared, at least outside of the US.

My mind was full of this as well as of the domestic challenge. At the end of August, just before I was due to go to Balmoral, and with carefully orchestrated debate rife as to when I would finally set a date for departure, I decided to give an interview. You would think I would have learned by then. One rule about giving interviews: never do it without knowing the answer to the obvious question. Sounds simple, but it’s amazing how many times even the seasoned pro can walk in full of thoughts, full of great things to say, concentrating hard on what they want the story to be, without ever focusing on the answer to the one question they are bound to be asked.

The inevitable question was: Are you prepared to set a date for leaving? Now, in truth, I had decided that in all probability the 2006 conference would be my last. As I have already intimated, if I could have got more time I would have taken it, but I could see it all closing in and Gordon’s folk were becoming bolder by the day. If I announced my departure at party conference at the end of September, it would be a surprise and have the necessary elan such things should have. I was reluctant to do it beforehand, so I shouldn’t have given the interview, at least not without carefully working out how I could walk round the question.

However, my mind was full of thoughts about how we had to keep to the New Labour way, how I would flush out opponents on the issues, how I would face the party up to the straightforward task of asking ‘change to what?’ before deciding on change. Maybe, at the back of my mind, I thought if I could squeeze out more freedom of manoeuvre, then who knows what might happen. Politics is a fast-changing business. But actually I think my mind was really made up. I just wanted to control the announcement.

I did the interview with
The Times
at Chequers in late August. Phil Webster, someone I had always liked and thought was straight, did the questioning and was perfectly fair. Naturally, he asked the obvious question.

Now there had been this rather ludicrous formula worked out after the 2005 election of there being ‘a stable and orderly transition’, which was of course code for ‘handing over to Gordon’. It was, in fact, as a formula, flawed. There should have been no assumption. There should have been a debate and an election. But few wanted a debate, and even fewer an election, so it sort of stuck as an agreed formula.

Part of the so-called ‘orderly transition’ was that I would set a date. Now clearly at some point I would have to. Gordon, naturally suspicious of my motives and actions – and by this time in a sense rightly, from his own perspective – was pushing hard for a date and was assuming it would be at party conference.

When I came to answer the question Phil put, rather than walking round it which I should have, I more or less said: No, I’m not setting a date.

I had also been hugely influenced by a typically brilliant note from Andrew Adonis that he had written over the summer break. It is so good it’s worth quoting in full.

Personal note for Prime Minister from AA – Monday 21 August

I thought I ought to contribute to your thinking on the Big Issue, though only really to say two unsurprising things – viz. a) that once you ‘name the date’, your authority will drain away rapidly and will soon be followed by growing calls for you to bring the date forward to ‘end the lame duckery’; and b) that in my view it is strongly in the public interest that you continue in office until conference 2007, and possibly beyond into 2008 depending on the position next summer.

Your political authority appears to me more than sufficient for this, provided you set out an energetic forward agenda on your return and at conference. By contrast, GB’s succession will now inevitably involve (whatever his efforts to claw things back when he succeeds) a shift to the ‘compromise everything Left’, given his associates and the forces he has nurtured. He looks set to be a weak – if extended – interlude between you and Cameron.

Two more extensive thoughts – on the chimera of the ‘dignified exit’ and ‘orderly transition’; and how to recapture the initiative.

I spent a solitary holiday walk reflecting on changes of prime ministers over the past century, and for what it’s worth these are my three conclusions:

1. There are no ‘dignified exits’ and ‘orderly transitions’ – just exits and transitions, all more or less ragged and unsatisfactory. That’s life, I suppose.

2. The more successful prime ministers all left No. 10 with the least ‘dignified’ and most ‘disorderly’ transitions. Gladstone, Lloyd George, Churchill, Macmillan and Thatcher all possessed a will to power for a purpose until the very end. If they had been planning their ‘dignified exits’ they would have been lesser leaders and lesser achievers. By contrast, the three long-serving prime ministers to execute ‘dignified’ and ‘orderly’ transitions are Wilson, Baldwin and Salisbury – all drained of energy and purpose, their reputations and uniformly disastrous legacies not enhanced by the warm retirement tributes. (Attlee as ever the enigma.)

3. The closest analogy to your current position is that of Harold Macmillan in the summer of 1963. In fact the larger parallel between you and Macmillan is uncanny. Macmillan too was a long-term largely successful prime minister; a Middle England moderniser with a fine sense of the ‘wind of change’ sweeping his party, country and international affairs, whose domestic success soon came to be taken for granted. By summer 1963, an election looming, he was engulfed in Profumo, the animosity of the sacked and disgruntled, and a media clamour for the ‘new man’ to defeat Wilson. After months of uncharacteristic dithering, brought about by Profumo and other forgotten minor events, and poor advice from friends, he finally decided to stay and fight the coming election. Indeed, at precisely this point he pulled off the brilliant Test Ban Treaty with JFK after years of foreign policy frustration (apartheid in South Africa and Rhodesia; de Gaulle’s first ‘non’, etc.). The Cabinet rallied to him with relief once he declared – but then, on the eve of the Tory Conference, he was laid low with what he briefly feared might be a fatal prostate condition. The rest is history: hasty resignation under pressure; the ‘new man’ – Sir Alec Douglas-Home (!); Wilson winning a year later by only a whisker . . . and Macmillan in regret for the next twenty-three years.

How to take the initiative decisively?

On the domestic front, you need I think to herald a next-phase reform process which you will lead. The best way I can see of doing this is to put yourself at the head of a semi-public ‘next steps’ reform process to run alongside the CSR – and announce next month that you are doing so, to culminate in renewed Five-Year Plans to be published alongside the CSR next year. This doesn’t involve the impossible at your phase of leadership – a ‘new agenda’ – but rather the relentless renewal and intensification of an agenda (choice and quality in the public services; rights and responsibilities in welfare and public order) which in fact has been largely successful, and which is regarded by middle opinion and the sensible commentariat as authentically yours and the continuing national imperative – on a par with privatisation and trade union and labour market reform in the 1980s, and the ‘one nation’ economic liberalism of Macmillan. It is precisely this continuing vital reform agenda which will stall if you stand down in the next year, as middle opinion senses strongly whatever the gripes about other matters.

I could quickly sketch out such a ‘plan of reform’ in more detail, on the basis of what is already in the pipeline or ought to be so. But to produce something worthwhile I would suggest bringing together a small group of trusted people who have done the business for you across education, health, welfare and the Home Office over recent years, and get a plan worked up asap for internal strategising.

Hope all this helps a bit.

Andrew

So perhaps subconsciously I was more definitive in my reply to Phil Webster than I meant to be. But the headline was ‘
BLAIR DEFIES HIS PARTY OVER DEPARTURE DATE
’, i.e. it appeared defiant, as if I had changed my mind and decided to stay after all. Period. The moment the story came out, I immediately called Gordon to reassure him I did not mean to carry on to the end of the term. However, I could tell he, and possibly more particularly his team, had decided they were going to be ‘robbed’ again and had better start the battle.

So began the ‘coup’. Essentially, they decided to organise waves of resignation letters and round robins calling for me to go. Somewhat bizarrely, the first we heard of such a letter was when we were on a visit to a care home for problem kids and teenagers in York on 4 September. I always reflected, going on such visits, how lucky I was as a child and then as a parent. Some of the stories are truly horrendous. The father leaves, for example; the mother takes up with someone else; the new man doesn’t get on with the teenager and eventually they throw him or her out on the street. Unbelievable, really. Of course, some of the youngsters have deep behavioural problems and can be virtually impossible to parent; but it is all shocking, nonetheless.

This was a new type of care home, helping them, giving them training and education and teaching them personal skills and manners. It was challenging work, and as always on such visits, I felt an enormous respect for the patient and committed service of those running the place. I wouldn’t like to do it, that’s for sure. It requires a very special and dedicated sort of person. We took some of the kids back with us to the headquarters of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, where we held a seminar and had a meeting with some of the foundation’s staff in preparation for a lecture on social exclusion that I was to give at the New Earswick Folk Hall in York the next day.

You’ve always got to see the amusing side of such things. I’m doing this visit, talking to the youngsters about finding a job, getting a purpose in life, etc. Suddenly I am pulled aside by Hilary Coffman, accompanying me as the press officer for what was supposed to be a routine low-level regional trip, and I’m told that there is some letter circulating from thirty or forty MPs calling for me to resign. From then on the visit is interspersed with updates from my staff about the precariousness of my own job. There’s me popping out to be told the latest about this quite serious news, then popping back in to talk with Charlene or Robert about job-seeking possibilities.

Eventually, rather to the bemusement of the people in the meeting, I had to take some real time out to assess the situation. The letter had been leaked to the media. What’s more, a minister, Tom Watson, was a signatory. I didn’t feel angry at the letter, by the way. I understood it was a reaction to the
Times
interview and an indication that the GB team had had enough.

In a curious way, I felt sorry for the party and I more or less remained like that up to the point of departure. By then, I had come to the clear and settled view that unless Gordon spelt out whether he was New Labour or something different – and defined the ‘something different’ – it was going to be a disaster. I knew it. But to be fair, I had taken a long time to come to know it. Even really smart people who knew us both well, like Philip and Alastair, thought it could be OK, so ordinary members of the PLP were bound to be unsure. Of course there were some, like John Reid and Alan Milburn in the party and Jonathan and Sally in my office, who were absolutely clear from the outset that unless Gordon was unambiguously New Labour – which they doubted – we were going to be at the mercy of the Tories. If the Tories didn’t square up to the challenge, we might survive. If they did, we wouldn’t.

And yet I could see Gordon’s enormous ability, extraordinary grasp and unyielding energy, and realised those were all big qualities in a leader. Unfortunately, what I had also come to realise was that those qualities needed to be combined with a sure political instinct in order to be fully effective. And that instinct comes from knowing what you truly believe, not vaguely or at a high level of generality or ‘values’, but practical, on the ground, everyday-life conviction. And at this utterly crucial epicentre of political destiny, I discovered there was a lacuna – not the wrong instinct, but no instinct at the human, gut level. Political calculation, yes. Political feelings, no. Analytical intelligence, absolutely. Emotional intelligence, zero.