A Journey (5 page)

But, in truth, it no longer mattered what I said. The mood was the mood, and I might as well try to thwart it as try to stop an oncoming truck. The pent-up expectations of a generation were vested in me. They wanted things to be different, to look, feel, have the attributes of a new era, and I was the leader of this sentiment. We were like a movement, connected by a single converging interest: to chuck out the old and usher in the new. They weren’t troubled by the dilemmas of policymaking or the savage nature of decision-making. They were raised up on stilts far above the ugly street on which the real, live business of politics is conducted, and from that height could only see the possibility, the opportunity, the distant but surely attainable horizon of future dreams.

When Barack Obama fought and won his extraordinary campaign for the presidency in 2008, I could tell exactly what he would have been thinking. At one level, the excitement and energy created by such hope vested in the candidate has the effect of buoying you up, driving you on, giving all that you touch something akin to magic. The country is on a high and you are up there with them.

At another deeper level, however, you quickly realise that though you are the repository of that hope and have in part been the author of it, it now has a life of its own, a spirit of its own and that spirit is soaring far beyond your control. You want to capture it, tame it and harness it, because its very independence is, you know, leading the public to an impossible sense of expectation.

Expectations of this nature cannot be met. That’s what you want to tell people. Often you do tell them. But the spirit can’t be too constrained. And when finally it departs, leaving your followers with reality – a reality you have never denied and which you have even sought to bring to their attention – the danger is of disillusion, more painful because of what preceded it.

Anyway, so I felt.

It seemed unreal because it
was
unreal. It was understandable the people should feel like that; understandable that I should want to lead it; understandable that together we became an unstoppable force. But it was, in a profound way, a deception on both our parts – not a deception knowingly organised or originating from bad faith or bad motives, but one born of the hope that achievement and hard choices could somehow be decoupled. A delusion perhaps describes it better; but as the policeman stood aside and the door of 10 Downing Street opened, my election as prime minister felt like a release, the birth of something better than what had been before.

For the poor old staff of Number 10, it was something of a shock, however. As per convention, John Major had walked out only moments before I had come in. There is a tradition that when the new prime minister enters, the staff line up in the corridor that leads to the Cabinet Room and applaud. A couple of the staff vaguely remembered the last Labour government, but they had been young things back then. The vast majority had now just said goodbye to eighteen years of one-party rule.

As I walked down the row of faces, all unfamiliar to me – people who would be companions in the events to come, and many of them friends – some were a little upset at the departure of the old guard, and a few of the women were sniffling or weeping. By the time I reached the end of the line, I was beginning to feel a right heel about the whole thing, coming in and creating all this distress. Needless to say, I got over it.

Then I entered the Cabinet Room. I had never seen it before. It is immediately impressive, both in itself and because of the history made within it. I stopped for a moment and looked around, suddenly struck by the sanctity of it, a thousand images fluttering through my mind, like one of those moving picture-card displays, of Gladstone, Disraeli, Asquith, Lloyd George, Churchill, Attlee, of historic occasions of war and peace, of the Irish and Michael Collins, of representatives of numerous colonies coming through its doors and negotiating independence. This room had seen one of the greatest empires of all time developed, sustained and let go. I thought of the crises and catastrophes, decisions and deliberations, the meetings to discuss the mundane and the fundamental business of governing a nation. All of it had run through this smallish room looking out over the Downing Street garden, with two false pillars marking the end of the table. The table itself is the product of a decision by Macmillan to have it shaped oval so that the prime minister sitting in the centre could see the faces and body language of all the Cabinet, and in particular any little signal of loyalty or dissent. There was the prime minister’s chair, the only one with arms to it, either because it should be more grand, or perhaps because the prime minister, above all others, needs more support.

Sitting in the chair next to it, in the otherwise empty room, was the Cabinet Secretary Sir Robin Butler, famous in his own right and immensely experienced, who had worked closely with both Margaret Thatcher and John Major. He indicated to me the prime minister’s chair, which I sat down in, relieved to get the weight off my feet after the tumult of the last twenty-four hours.

‘So,’ he said, ‘now what?’ It was a good question. ‘We have studied the manifesto,’ he went on, something which rather irrationally disturbed me, ‘and we are ready to get to work on it for you.’

In the light of what later became quite a vigorous disagreement about the nature of decision-making in my government and the so-called ‘sofa’ style of it, I should say that right at the outset I found Robin thoroughly professional, courteous and supportive. He didn’t like some of the innovations, but he did his level best to make them work. He was impartial in the best traditions of the British Civil Service, intelligent and deeply committed to the country.

But he was a traditionalist with all the strengths and weaknesses that reverence for tradition implies; and in this, he was thoroughly representative of a large part of the senior Civil Service. Very early on, I could tell that he didn’t really approve of the positions of Jonathan Powell as chief of staff, Alastair and, though less so, my old friend and general factotum Anji Hunter. Even though Jonathan had been in the Civil Service, they were all ‘special advisers’, political appointments brought in by the new government. The British system is essentially run by the career Civil Service right up to the most senior levels. Special advisers are few and far between, unlike in the American system, for example, which has thousands. When after a few years in government I accumulated seventy of them, it was considered by some to be a bit of a constitutional outrage.

They are, however, a vital part of modern government. They bring political commitment, which is not necessarily a bad thing (I always used to think such commitment was more frowned upon when originating from the left, but maybe that’s paranoia!); they can bring expertise; and properly deployed they interact with and are strengthened by the professional career civil servants, who likewise are improved by interaction with them. In the light of what I am going to say, I should emphasise that many of the civil servants not merely worked well with the special advisers, but enjoyed doing so and genuine friendships were often made.

There was a discussion between Robin and Jonathan about whether Alastair or Jonathan could give instructions to civil servants, which eventually we compromised over. (And incidentally, neither ever had a single complaint made against them from civil servants all the time they were in Downing Street.) I could not believe, and still don’t, that my predecessors did not have a de facto chief of staff, but Jonathan was the first openly acknowledged and nominated one. Robin didn’t much like all this, and in his mind it became conflated with another issue: how decisions were taken. Here, he had a more solid point. Truthfully, for the first year or so, as we found our feet and grappled with the challenges of governing, we did tend to operate as a pretty tight unit, from which some of the senior civil servants felt excluded.

From our perspective, we were working flat out to deliver an enormous series of commitments to change. We were very quickly appreciating the daunting revelation of the gap between saying and doing. In Opposition, the gap is nothing because ‘saying’ is all you can do; in government, where ‘doing’ is what it’s all about, the gap is suddenly revealed as a chasm of bureaucracy, frustration and disappointment. So we tended to work in the first months of government rather as we had when campaigning for office and changing the Labour Party.

However, Robin was only with us for eight months. In time, we broadened out, we learned, we adjusted. Ministers, sympathetic to the changes we were making, came to the fore. The modus operandi shifted. Cabinet and Cabinet committees flourished, and there was a better balance between special advisers and civil servant input.

The allegations of ‘sofa government’ were always, therefore, ludicrously overblown. For a start, leaders have always had inner circles of advisers. What’s more, although Robin used to make much of the fact that my predecessors had been sticklers for Cabinet government, I found this a trifle inconsistent with my recollection, admittedly from the outside, of Mrs Thatcher and her Cabinet relations.

There was a more serious point, at the root of which was a disagreement which touches on the way modern government functions. As I shall come to later, the skill set required for making the modern state work effectively is different from that needed in the mid-twentieth century: it is far less to do with conventional policy advice, and far more to do with delivery and project management. The skills are actually quite analogous to those of the private sector. This is true of civil servants. It is also true of politicians. The skills that bring you to the top of the greasy pole in Parliament are not necessarily those that equip you to run a department with a workforce numbered in thousands and a budget numbered in billions.

Moreover, the pace of modern politics and the intrusion of media scrutiny – rightly or wrongly of an entirely different order today than even fifteen or twenty years ago – mean that decisions have to be made, positions taken, strategies worked out and communicated with a speed that is the speed of light compared to the speed of sound.

Of course, none of the above means that decisions should be taken without proper analysis, but it does mean that the old infrastructure of policy papers submitted by civil servants to Cabinet, who then debate and decide with the prime minister as benevolent chairman, is not suitable in responding to the demands of a fast-changing world or an even faster-changing political landscape. Into this infrastructure, the import of special advisers is not a breach in the walls of propriety; it is a perfectly sensible way of enlarging the scope of advice and making government move. As I discovered early on, the problem with the traditional Civil Service was not obstruction, but inertia.

However, all of that was in the future as I sat and contemplated giving this famed British system its instructions. The first command was in conjunction with the Treasury to work on Bank of England independence. The day passed in a bit of a daze, principally occupied with appointing Cabinet members and ministers. This was a moment of joy for some and anguish for others. The key positions were already allocated, but the Shadow Cabinet was larger than the Cabinet could be. I had to tell three members that though they could be ministers, I could not put them in the Cabinet. Two agreed to take the ministerial positions, one preferred to go on the back benches. Hmm, welcome to the hot seat, I thought, knowing that in the years to come, the members of the ejected, dejected and rejected would only grow.

But in those first hours, days and weeks, the government led a charmed life, as you might expect. The first evening as prime minister I went back to Richmond Crescent to spend my last night there. A couple of days later we ate a Chinese takeaway in Downing Street and my dad came down to be with me, which was lovely for him and made me feel very proud.

I got my first red box, my first recommendations, my first letters to sign. The team were all finding their feet, making the transition from Opposition assault unit, scaling the walls of the citadel, to sitting in the ruler’s palace in charge of all we surveyed. My core staff were an extraordinary group of people, very different in character and outlook, but knitted together like a regiment, imbued with a common purpose and with a camaraderie that had a spirit of steel running through it. I have a few rules about people I work with really closely. Work comes first. No blame culture. Fun, in its proper place, is good. Disloyalty has no place. Look out for each other. Stick together. Respect each other. It helps if you also like each other.

By and large, they did. Jonathan had had initial difficulty settling in to the role of chief of staff in the Leader of the Opposition’s office, finding the change from career diplomat to politico tricky. Once settled in, though, he was brilliant. I describe his contribution to the Northern Ireland peace process later, but his main contributions to the office were a knowledge of the Civil Service system, an extraordinary work rate (he has a lightning ability to absorb information), and a politics that was completely and naturally New Labour. He and Anji were the non-party-political side of New Labour. They empathised with business, were indelibly middle class in outlook and could have worked in any apolitical outfit with ease; strong supporters of Labour, but not Labour people.

Sally Morgan, the political secretary and later director of political and government relations, was very much a Labour person and could reach the parts of the political firmament others couldn’t; but for all that was totally in favour of aspiration and high standards, and, though a formidable organiser, had no truck with Old Labour organisational politics. But she and Alastair, along with Bruce Grocott, my parliamentary private secretary since 1994, could always understand the party point of view. They didn’t necessarily agree with it, but they always got it, and therefore were invaluable in advising how to change it.