BLAIR’S BRITAIN, 1997–2007 Read online

  across the main political parties. But he might reflect that he could have

  done more if: (a) his relationship with his Chancellor had been more harmonious or if the latter had been willing to defer to his authority; (b) if he

  (alone among leaders of social democratic parties) had not allied himself

  so closely over the war on terror and Iraq with President Bush and his

  neo-conservative team; and (c) been bolder in his reform of public services much earlier.

  II

  Blair’s ideas about the premiership were shaped more positively by his

  experience as Leader of the Opposition. His leadership as Prime Minister

  was marked by:

  a. a stronger political direction from No. 10, substantially increasing the

  size and influence of the political office, policy unit and press office.

  The number of political appointees in No. 10 grew from 8 to 28.

  b. new units, focusing on policy innovation and implementation, such as

  the delivery unit and strategy unit, and an expanded Cabinet Office.

  The Cabinet Office focused more on driving through No. 10’s agenda

  and less on acting as a broker between departments and overseeing the

  smooth working of the cabinet system. A senior No. 10 figure said to

  the author in 1998: ‘We want the Cabinet Secretary [then Sir Richard

  Wilson] to be our chief whip in Whitehall.’

  c. a larger and much stronger media apparatus, eventually leading to the

  creation of a Strategic Communications Unit and Research and

  Intelligence Unit to complement the Press Office. To cope with the 24/7

  media, the communications team was more political and proactive

  than hitherto. Blair attributed New Labour’s success as a campaigning

  operation in large part to the effectiveness of its communications arm.

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  d. listening to voters rather than the party. As in opposition he relied on

  the views of the median voter (obviously to the political right of

  Labour trade union activists and the annual party conference). He

  used focus groups and opinion polls, rather than party institutions, to

  keep him in touch with the ‘centre ground’.

  As leader Blair in part built on existing trends and in part responded to

  changing circumstances, a mix of pressures and opportunities. Richard

  Rose1 argues that he has fashioned a new-style premiership. The features

  include: working with circles of confidants and advisers in No. 10, regarding cabinet and formal meetings as often unproductive; spending less

  time in the House of Commons; taking more time to manage the media

  and appear live on television. Blair’s scant regard for cabinet in the first

  term was shown by the brevity of meetings. The importance he attached

  to parliament is reflected in how little time he spent there, although that

  continued a trend among prime ministers over recent decades.

  Over time Blair has learnt the limits of prime ministerial leadership.

  Academic analysis now shares with business models less interest in zerosum ideas of power and more in models in which the leader and his team

  share power with other key actors (such as ministers, senior officials, the

  Treasury, the Cabinet Office, etc.) in a core executive; resources are traded

  and the relative power of the Prime Minister and other actors depends on

  the particular issue and circumstances.

  For such a so-called presidential figure Blair was blocked in key areas.

  The Chancellor carved out a measure of autonomy hardly ever achieved

  by a minister. Certain departments were regarded as Brown preserves,

  certain ministers regarded as Brownites, and No. 10 staff complained that

  on occasions there was almost a separate whipping operation. Across

  much domestic policy Blair shared power with Gordon Brown. Brown

  unilaterally took control of entry to the euro (‘our destiny’, according to

  Blair) by announcing that it would be an economic decision. The

  Treasury decided on the five tests that had to be satisfied for entry and

  conducted the studies. Blair found Brown as niggardly in providing

  information on the work as he was in giving advance details of his

  Budgets. According to well-placed sources Blair was so committed to

  entry that he offered to surrender the premiership in return for Brown’s

  support for membership. He failed to achieve entry, a policy central to his

  goal of putting Britain at the heart of EU decision-making.

  11 Richard Rose, The Prime Minister in a Shrinking World (Cambridge: Polity, 2001).

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  In domestic policy the Treasury and No. 10 were often at odds after

  2001. Brown’s opposition to foundation hospitals (involving a letter circulated to the cabinet outlining his disagreement with the Prime

  Minister’s policy) and academy schools meant that the final schemes were

  severely watered down. In both health and education Treasury opposition to Blair’s agenda of diversity of suppliers and choice for consumers

  was supported by a number of Labour MPs. Not until 2006 and 2007 was

  Blair able to curb Brown’s passion for means testing and tax credits and

  effect compromises on pensions and disability benefits.

  Not surprisingly, Blair was pressed by many of his entourage to

  demonstrate his authority and sack or move Brown from the Treasury.

  Some of his staff in late 2004 and early 2005 argued that this would be

  necessary if he was to rescue or further his domestic reform agenda. Blair

  and his staff held discussions about moving Brown and plans were prepared to split the Treasury after the 2005 general election. Blair did not

  act, regarding both as politically impossible after the 2005 general election: one reason for his feeling deflated for a time after the election result

  was that it had not given him the mandate to move against the

  Chancellor. His unwillingness to move was remarkable testimony to

  Brown’s power. Only the Wilson–Callaghan government (1974–9) and

  Churchill’s administration (1951–5) had a single Chancellor. Margaret

  Thatcher had three and Major two Chancellors. What was sometimes

  called a dual premiership was inherently destabilising; the tensions

  between the rival tribes of No. 10 and No. 11 wasted so much energy. A

  senior official who worked closely for both men reflected sadly; ‘When

  you think of everything they could have done together the conflict preventing them is just the most extraordinary waste.’

  Despite the continued attempts to resource No. 10 so that it could

  drive departments and draw up public service targets, impose reviews of

  policy under Lord Birt, and hold bimonthly bilaterals with ministers in

  key departments to monitor progress, Blair was often frustrated. Senior

  officials sometimes commented that Blair (who had no prior departmental experience) and his staff seemed to have little idea of how departments

  worked. The departments are better resourced in staff, budgets and

  expertise than No. 10 and after the departure of Derek Scott from No. 10

  in 2003 Blair had no economic adviser. He had become aware of the limits

  of central control. Charles Leadbeater and Peter Hyman, both of whom

  had worked for Blair, reported after they left Downing Street on how the

&n
bsp; great expectations of No. 10 are often wrecked on the front line.

  Appearing before the Liaison Committee in 2002 Blair admitted: ‘After

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  five years in government. I know only too well that passing legislation or

  making speeches will not solve vandalism on estates, raise standards in

  secondary schools, look after the elderly at risk. Indeed the state can

  sometimes become part of the problem.’ He could echo Hotspur’s rejoinder to Glendower’s ‘I can call spirits from the very deep’, ‘But will they

  come when you do call for them?’

  Over twenty years ago Sir John Hoskyns, the first head of Margaret

  Thatcher’s Policy Unit, challenged the belief that the gene pool of the

  majority party in the House of Commons was large enough to find the

  staff to run a modern government. Blair may have had less ministerial

  talent at his disposal than Attlee (with Bevin, Bevan, Cripps, Morrison

  and Gaitskell) or Thatcher (with Howe, Hurd, Lawson, Clarke, Patten

  and Heseltine). He had Brown and for a time Blunkett, but after that it is

  hard to make a positive case for the rest.

  The drive for public service reform came almost entirely from No. 10.

  He was aided by a few ministers and relied heavily on his principal private

  secretaries, Jeremy Heywood and Ivan Rodgers, on Policy Unit heads

  Andrew (now Lord) Adonis and David Bennett, and on advisers Simon

  Stevens and Paul Corrigan for health. In forming his new government in

  2001 he was determined to tackle the reform of public services, and he

  promised ministers in four key departments that they would remain in

  post for the duration of the parliament. Within two years three had, for

  various reasons, left and the fourth did not stay the course.

  Blair, the greatest election winner in the party’s history, has been an

  outstanding coalition-builder. Successful electoral leaders bring ‘added

  value’ to the party’s normal vote. Since Margaret Thatcher and John

  Major in 1992 Conservative leaders have been unable to reach beyond the

  party’s core vote. Until 1997 this was also a challenge for Labour, as the

  size of its base in the working class, trade unions and council estates was

  shrinking. Blair and the creators of New Labour knew that the party had

  to attract not only those who had left the party but those who had never

  voted for it. The target voters (those the party needed to win over) were

  female, in the south-east, homeowners, and among the aspirational

  working class who had switched to Margaret Thatcher. Blair has always

  courted the median voter. Even after ten years in office surveys report that

  voters still place Blair at the mid-point of the political spectrum, which is

  where most voters place themselves; they locate Brown and the Labour

  Party to the left of the centre. In the 2005 election Labour’s share of the

  working-class vote was the same as in 1992 but was 11% higher among

  middle-class professionals.

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  Blair broke new ground for the party; his big tent could include everybody. He appealed to business and the City and cultivated the Murdoch

  press. Lance Price, a No. 10 press secretary, claimed that Rupert

  Murdoch’s influence on the government at times seemed to be second

  only to that of Blair and Brown. Blair dispensed with ideology, proudly

  proclaiming that he was in favour of what works. He shamelessly borrowed from the centre-right parties to call Labour the people’s party or a

  one-nation party.

  Like a number of former premiers, he has said that he wished he had

  been bolder. Yet he took risks with his party over top-up tuition fees,

  foundation hospitals, academies, public private partnerships and of

  course allying Britain with such a right-wing US President. He took the

  party beyond its comfort zone and this was reflected in the rise of dissent

  among Labour MPs, as Philip Cowley shows in chapter 2.

  In 1997 New Labour transformed British election campaigning. It was

  so successful that the Conservatives have been trying to copy it. William

  Hague gave each member of his shadow cabinet a copy of Philip Gould’s

  The Unfinished Revolution. How The Modernisers Saved the Labour Party,2

  with the inscription, ‘Know Thine Enemy’. The book became a campaign

  manual for the party. But it was soon clear that if Labour’s support was

  wide it was not deep. A consequence of the decline in party loyalty is that

  voting ties are often conditional and held lightly; the electorate is more

  volatile; and more voters are inclined not to vote at all. A downside of the

  big tent approach has been, as his former strategy chief Geoff Mulgan

  points out, that the government was reluctant to tackle a number of

  vested interests in the media, business and the City.

  Tony Blair, like Attlee and Gaitskell, also public school-educated, was

  not born to the Labour Party; he chose it. But his determination not to be

  constrained by it and his impatience with the party’s democratic procedures – again (like Whitehall) he dismissed as ‘process’ – have helped to

  de-energise the party. One needs to be careful here. Mass political parties

  have been in decline for some years across Europe and a spell in government often results in the weakening of the party, as Labour found in 1970

  and 1979 and the Conservatives by 1997. Blair’s approach to election campaigning, fund-raising and policy-making has allowed little influence to

  the party. His tendency to ‘triangulate’ policy positions between Labour

  traditions and the opposition encouraged him to stand apart from his

  12 Philip Gould, The Unfinished Revolution. How The Modernisers Saved the Labour Party

  (London: Little, Brown, 1997).

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  party. The ‘third way’ was a good example of finding a way between state

  socialism and free market conservatism.

  Cabinet government rarely thrived under Blair. Compared with his

  predecessors, his cabinets met less frequently, were shorter and had fewer

  papers before them. Starting with the Bank of England decision (‘They’ll

  back it’, he told the Cabinet Secretary when explaining why there was no

  need to discuss the important change of policy) and the perfunctory

  cabinet discussion to proceed with the Dome (‘Let’s back Tony’, said John

  Prescott, the Deputy Prime Minister), Blair has preferred informal discussion, often un-minuted, in what has been called ‘sofa government’. He

  has been impatient with Whitehall commitment to what he referred dismissively as ‘process’. Lord Butler’s report in 2004 on the quality of the

  intelligence before the Iraq War complained that Blair’s approach suffered

  from ‘a lack of reasoned deliberation’, too much preoccupation with presentation, and ‘too much central control’. The report also noted that

  although there were several cabinet meetings to discuss the decision to go

  to war ministers rarely saw the high-quality papers written by officials.

  Perhaps because he realised that his influence was waning, he did use the

  cabinet more during 2004 for the five-year plans, and again during his
last

  six months in working on six policy commissions.

  The number of policy failures would provide ample material for an

  updated version of Paul Ormerod’s Why Most Things Fail.3 Over the Blair

  decade the Audit Commission and the House of Commons Public

  Accounts Committee have gathered a rich harvest of failed initiatives. Just

  a sample would include: expensive IT disasters; hardship caused for poor

  families by errors in the working families tax credit system; several costly

  reorganisations in the health service, schools and examination systems

  and the Home Office; failure to build more prisons to accommodate the

  rising number of offenders consequent on the scores of offences created

  by over fifty law-and-order measures; and the chaos caused by the introduction of the online schemes of application for training places for junior

  doctors.

  Promising to be purer than pure in the wake of the damage that allegations of sleaze had done for the Major government, Blair made a good

  start with a reform of party finance. But the Ecclestone donation to party

  funds and the exemption of his Formula One from the ban on cigarette

  advertising, down to the Labour loans scandal (and keeping them secret

  from the party treasurer) destroyed Blair’s reputation for transparency.

  13 Paul Ormerod, Why Most Things Fail (London: Faber and Faber, 2005).

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  Of course, Blair’s government was only the latest to reward donors and

  lenders of funds with favours and political honours, but no previous

  prime minister had been so outspoken about transparency and ‘cleaning

  up’ party finance.

  The degeneration of the commitment to good communications to the

  worst types of political ‘spin’ and economy with the truth has often been

  described by journalists and disillusioned Labour colleagues. Promises of

  future action and boasts of achievements were never understated. It is

  embarrassing to recall the double and triple counting of spending, or the

  ‘48 hours to save the NHS’, Britain as ‘a beacon to the world’, and ‘worldclass services’. Ultimately it was self-defeating. The misuse of the intelligence to justify war with Iraq only further dented public confidence in the

  honesty of the Prime Minister. There has been a steady decline in the