A Journey (52 page)

You can just about get over a lack of such normality provided you don’t pretend to be other than you are. Some politicians, and I’m one of them, enjoy chatting about things and meeting people. I am infinitely curious about them. (Clinton’s great political strength was an endless capacity to be fascinated even by the most unfascinating people because he was always willing to learn from them.) But other politicians aren’t. If you aren’t, don’t obsess about it. Serious-minded, severe even, can still win, provided it’s authentic.

Though I always complained about doing these regional tours because of the questionable PR premise, and the time away from Number 10 and from pushing forward on policy, and despite the unreality and occasional surreality of it all, I would always learn something from being out and about, in particular from talking to front-line staff or businesses. They were useful not so much as a barometer of opinion, but as a means of finding out whether what I was being told in Downing Street bore any resemblance to the facts on the ground. Very often it didn’t.

At the beginning of September, just before we left to do this tour in the North, there were reports of fuel protests in France. The price of oil had been steadily rising to over $30 a barrel, the highest for more than ten years. Prices at the fuel pump began to rise sharply.

Fuel duty had been a bone of contention for years. In order to sort out the public finances, the previous government had established a ‘fuel duty escalator’, which meant that the duty would rise by a certain percentage above inflation. It was also given an environmental justification – the first green tax – but no one took that reasoning very seriously. It helped bring the borrowing requirement back under control, and while the price of crude oil remained low, the rise in duty could be effectively masked by the low price of the raw product. So it suited government fine. Of course, when the oil price began to spiral upwards and carried the price of petrol at the pump with it, it was a different matter.

The French tend to protest at anything and don’t need much excuse to get out on the street, but in Britain it was not traditionally the done thing. Suddenly the anger at the rising price of petrol concentrated attention on the fact that UK fuel duty was the highest in Europe. On 8 September, the fuel protests from France, which we had been watching with a rather uninterested complacency, spread to the UK.

The fuel protesters were a motley bunch. There were farmers, hauliers, the self-employed and the anti-government. They were not from the usual protesting stock with which the left is familiar; these were what your Marxist would call the petty bourgeoisie, not that there was anything petty or petit about them. They had a genuine grievance. But they were strongly anti-Labour, I suspect.

They were also smart enough to target the Achilles heel of the fuel industry, and thus the economy, and thus the government. Oil comes into the country and is refined at vast refining plants, of which there are not many, before being transported by lorry to petrol stations. Without the refining plants, no blood flows to the arteries. Petrol stations don’t have a lot of capacity, so they fill up every forty-eight hours or so. Day in, day out, this system gets the fuel out to the forecourt and hence to the customer, be they a farmer, a business or a member of the public.

The trouble is at the time when I had to know this, I didn’t. And neither, it seems, did anyone else in a position of authority, so when we heard of some protests at two refineries – Buncefield and Stanlow – the enormity didn’t sink in.

We went on our tour, the normal round of schools and hospitals and ‘connections with ordinary people’. We stopped for lunch at a small country hotel just outside Hull, where we were due to talk at a party event and then go for a dinner to celebrate John Prescott’s thirty years as a Hull MP. We ate a leisurely meal, as we had a bit of time to kill. There was a travelling media pack and I passed some time with them discussing the upcoming presidential election in the US. I recall having an intriguing discussion about terrorism and its potential to grow into a worldwide threat.

The fuel protesters were using the good old trade union picket tactic which Mrs Thatcher had outlawed, and stopped the lorries leaving the refineries. Anji Hunter told me the protests were spreading. Shell, who had reported that some of the protests were violent, wanted police escorts for their drivers. I was beginning to get the first real stirrings of unease – about forty-eight hours too late.

By the time we got to Hull, the thing had turned really ugly and protesters were ringing the place. Like a storm breaking out of nowhere, the media and the protesters suddenly came together in a great clap of thunder. You might think that employing Arthur Scargill-like tactics of picketing and intimidation in order to bring the nation to a halt would have called the media forth into a barrage of condemnation. Had it been Scargill, probably it would have, but since this was about the price of petrol – something dear to their readers’ hearts – and the protests were aimed at a Labour government, the opposite happened and the protesters quickly became street heroes, fighting for the rights of ordinary people against an insensitive administration.

One of the hardest things at a time like this is to carry on and do all the things in the schedule, when you are desperate to stop it all, go into a quiet corner and think. Sitting in an anteroom to the main chamber in the magnificent Hull City Hall, I was really agitated. I knew I had messed up big time. My antennae should have been twitching. I should have realised that for your ordinary motorist, the rising cost of filling the car was a big, not an insignificant one (after all, the children’s nanny, Jackie, had been complaining about it for weeks). I should have understood the total vulnerability of the system to the protest; and the attraction of the protest to the media. Sitting there with a twenty-point lead in the polls, I had just opened up a massive breach in our defences.

The Chinese restaurant where the dinner for John Prescott was to be held was already thronging with protesters. The police advised me to call it off. I accepted gratefully. I had to think.

We got out of a side door of the City Hall, and after being pursued down the street by a mob, we got into the hotel. I was trying to get some sense of the seriousness of it all from Number 10. Alastair was in full crisis mode, but the rest of the machine seemed curiously paralysed, reacting to the scene as it was unfolding with a mixture of endless process and hand-wringing that was not pretty to behold.

You always have to know when to delegate and when to take the thing very purposefully and very clearly into your own two hands. Leadership without delegation is usually a mess – nothing gets done as people fret about whether they are doing what the leader wants them to do, and the leader has too many things on the go to concentrate long enough to give adequate instruction. But when it is crisis time, forget delegation. That’s the moment you’re there for: grip it, shape it, decide it and solve it.

After a restless night – I wished I had gone back to London the previous evening – we got to the station very early. As I stepped on to the train, much to the surprise of the travelling public, a lady said to me: ‘Don’t give in to them, they’re Tories, you know. You stand up to them.’ That was one view, certainly. There would definitely be others.

On the train I formed a strategy. We had to defeat the protest and reopen the refineries, that was for sure; but we also had to make sure the Pre-Budget Report addressed the fuel question, i.e. stand up for proper government, but don’t be daft and refuse to listen. Unreasonable people sometimes make reasonable demands.

First things first. The crisis was now fully blown. The media were revelling in it. Panic buying of fuel was the order of the day, and the images of queues of cars, petrol forecourts crowded or closed, and general chaos were irresistible, and the media weren’t in a mood to resist them. They were lashing the chariots of fury on, the protesters were cheered and the government got lambasted for ‘doing nothing’ to solve the crisis which the media were actively encouraging.

I was really angry about it. I felt that a Tory government would not be treated like this. But, having vented a bit to Jonathan, Anji and Alastair, I realised that anger – or even worse, self-pity – was just pathetic. We were where we were; we just had to get out of it.

I called in the ministers. Jack Straw was, as ever, practical and focused. Gordon said it was important that this was not seen as a tax issue (we had a slightly unreal exchange over the next days as he kept telling me it can’t be seen as a tax issue and I kept telling him that unfortunately it was seen as a tax issue and nothing was going to change that). Stephen Byers, the Trade and Industry Secretary, was calm.

But no one seemed to have much of an answer. Fuel supplies had literally stopped, and the country was at a standstill. I called in the oil companies and the police. The military were already being activated, but all they had were a few very old tankers, nothing like what was necessary. Hopeless!

At times like those, you know what the phrase ‘the buck stops here’ means. The oil guys were very polite, but they sort of didn’t regard it as their problem. The police seemed to have been getting mixed signals. One officer said they were doing their best to try to make sure the protests were peaceful and that there was proper dialogue with the protesters. As I looked at him, I realised what the problem was: they were all very reasonable people, and they wanted to be very reasonable.

Oh Lord, I thought. I could feel my heart starting to bounce, the anger in my gorge, my jaw tightening. I was about to blow my top when I decided to use icy calm instead. More prime ministerial.

I looked at the police officer. ‘Tell me what you are going to do to stop the protests.’

‘Stop the protests?’ he said, his eyes narrowing slightly. ‘You mean you want us to prevent them taking place?’

‘Yes,’ I said, very calm. ‘And I want you the oil companies to instruct your drivers to cross the picket lines, and if they don’t, for reasons anything other than fear of violence to their person, I want you to sack them. And I would like the army to come in and if necessary drive your tankers, and if they meet with any violence from protesters, I want you the police to deal with them very firmly, and if not, to let the army take care of them. They’re very good at it.’

The police officers brightened. They understood. No more nice cuddly neighbourhood policing, but go after them hard. The army, as ever, couldn’t wait to get started. The oil guys looked a little nonplussed, but I threw in some vague remarks on public anxiety about their excessive profits from the rising oil price and they at least understood they had to become active, rather than reactive.

I summed up a list of action points, arranged for a Cabinet Office Briefing Room (COBR) crisis-response meeting for me to chair the next day, and ended the meeting satisfied we were at least gripping it and beginning the process of turning things around.

I then went off for a press conference. The only thing to do at a time like this is to show you are on top of it and give a general appearance of being in charge, whatever the panic underneath. I did well, though foolishly said that within twenty-four hours we would have the situation ‘on the way back to normal’. I choose words carefully – it’s part of my very useful training as a lawyer – but these words were foolish because subtlety doesn’t often translate into clear communication. It was taken as saying that within twenty-four hours everything would be back to normal. Impossible, of course. But apart from that, it was OK and served its purpose.

The next thing was to take away some of the moral high ground from the protesters. Alan Milburn said we should focus on the impact on the NHS, and Alastair agreed. They were running short of supplies. The fuel protesters – and this was how ludicrous the whole thing became – were allowing tankers through for ‘emergencies’ based on their assessment of ‘emergency’. Depending on the negotiation between them and a hospital, fuel would be allowed through or not. It was intolerable, but gave us a chance to exploit their weakness; in the end, who were they to decide life or death?

So we sent nurses out to the picket lines to argue with the protesters. Alan gave a very strong statement and we could feel support for them beginning to ebb. It was the first successful PR blow. It also shows the invaluable assistance good teamwork in politics can give. It’s not usually thought of as a team game, but it is, especially in a crisis. Everyone around me put their hands to the pump, as it were. Instead of fretting – or worse, sitting around moaning – people like Alan actually tried to think of ways of solving it.

The Tories also messed up. I write about William Hague elsewhere, but I doubt if the Hague of today would have made the mistake of the Hague then. He more or less backed the protest; not quite, but more or less. Opportunity always knocks for an Opposition leader, but sometimes it’s best not to answer and leave it knocking. The public start with one mood, and when the mood changes, if you’re not careful and you have tried to exploit it, you’re high and dry.

The public were angry at the price of petrol; and in large numbers they backed the protesters’ case. But the country grinding to a halt is not a great idea, and the public know it. The consequences come home of what is really, as they know in their heart of hearts, grossly irresponsible action. After about four days of standstill, the sentiment that ‘enough is enough’ started to percolate through the national consciousness. Slowly but surely we got back to normal.

I have had many harsh things to say about the unions over the years, but I have to say on this crisis they reacted magnificently. They were fulsome in condemning the protesters, making the valid point that unions doing the same were regarded as acting like wildcat strikers. For the first time in memory, I was praising John Edmonds of the GMB (Britain’s General Union) and Bill Morris of the TGWU (Transport and General Workers’ Union), and was actually really grateful to the TUC.