The Telegraph’s publication of all those documents today has got everyone talking about that feud
again. Here is what The Spectator’s former editor Matthew d’Ancona had to say about the Blair-Brown wars when things were hotting up in the autumn of 2006:
The great New Labour civil war, Matthew d’Ancona, 6 September 2006
Two days before David Cameron was elected Conservative leader, I asked one of his closest allies what the founding principle of Cameronism would be. He pondered the question. Would it, I wondered, be something to do with quality of life, the public services, the environment, social justice, nationhood? ‘Our starting point,’ he finally replied, ‘is that the Tory party can never beat Tony Blair.’
This First Law of Cameronism, he explained, had an important subclause: Blair himself could beat Blair, by contaminating his own brand to the point where he could no longer plausibly hold office. All the same, the fundamental concession offered by this shadow Cabinet member was a huge one: after 12 years, the Conservatives themselves have still not found a way of defeating the Labour party’s most electorally successful leader, a politician whose record of parliamentary majorities exceeds even Margaret Thatcher’s.
The Prime Minister may yet go into political remission, survive a little longer, pull off his usual party conference trick of buying time. His aides say he would like to wait until 31 May to announce his departure. But even if he lingers that long, he will be a political wraith, barely in office and certainly not in power.
The game is definitely up — less than 18 months after he was re-elected with a comfortable parliamentary majority on the basis of an explicit promise to serve a full third term. ‘There have been all these stories rolling round that maybe I might stand for election but stand down in year one, year two,’ he said in October 2004. ‘I’m not going to do that.’ Oh yes you are, Prime Minister.
The political scale of the Blair phenomenon is worth recalling even as it reaches this ugly, broken-backed conclusion. To an astonishing extent, Labour has forgotten how far it travelled under his leadership: on 10 April 1992, many in the party thought it could never win again. On the morning of 2 May 1997, many wondered if Blair’s Labour could ever lose. On that sunlit day, the horrors of 9/11, the controversies over the Iraq war and the seething recriminations that have followed were still an age away. The kaleidoscope had not yet been shaken.
The first week of September 2006 will be remembered as the moment when the Blair premiership ended — irrespective of the date of its formal termination — and the days in which the Great New Labour Civil War began. True, the party has been mired in faction and division ever since Gordon Brown was passed over for the leadership in 1994: the end of the Blair era was indeed defined by the form of its beginning. That battle has been constant and enervating: after the May local elections, the Prime Minister told his allies furiously that the calls for him to go were nothing less than ‘an attempted coup d’état’.
But the conflict that is now unfolding dwarfs the tensions that have previously bedevilled the 12-year Blair–Brown duumvirate. This is about much more than the personal rivalry and tension over policy between two men. It is a battle for the very soul of the party, a conflagration of petty animosities and ideological traumas. It stretches from the newly emboldened trade union movement — paymaster once more to the impoverished Labour party — to the ultra-Blairite ‘outriders’, Stephen Byers and Alan Milburn (who, according to one frustrated Cabinet minister, ‘need Asbos slapped on them — they are New Labour’s hoodies’).
In such a feverish context, there was something vaguely pathetic about the Downing Street memo leaked last week proposing a grand Blair-well tour, taking in Blue Peter, Songs of Praise and Chris Evans’s Radio 2 show, as well as the nation’s great cities and ‘iconic locations’. The plan declares that ‘he should be the star who won’t even play that last encore’. Thus, the PM who arrived as Bambi leaves as Norma Desmond.
In truth, such political showbusiness is the stuff of fantasy, a feeble echo of ‘Cool Britannia’. The only thing uniting the party now is the certain knowledge that there will be no ‘smooth transition’, that the end will be ignominious, and that nothing will be safe as the political looters topple the grinning statues of Blair and storm New Labour’s citadel.
You could tell it was all up for Mr Blair on Monday when the plain-speaking Education Secretary, Alan Johnson, proved uncharacteristically evasive on the BBC’s Today programme. In June Mr Johnson expressed an explicit interest in the Labour deputy leadership but compared his chances of winning the top job to ‘putting the Beagle on to Mars: a nice idea but doomed to failure’. But last week the Education Secretary was much less jovial, repeatedly declining to rule himself out of the race. It was the change of tone, not the content, that mattered. One could hear in Mr Johnson’s voice the quiet calculation of a politician steeling himself to take the decision of a lifetime — and very soon.
Day-to-day political life depends upon collective decisions to respect a range of necessary fictions. The fiction that Mr Blair can last till next summer crumbled on Tuesday when it emerged that 17 MPs had written to the Prime Minister, urging him to sling his hook. It could have been seven or 170: the number is not what counts. What counts is that the crust of deference has now been smashed. What counts no less is that the two most prominent signatories — Sîon Simon and Chris Bryant — were previously prominent for a loyalty to the Prime Minister so passionate that it was sometimes parodied. Now their message is Oliver Cromwell’s to the Rump Parliament and Leo Amery’s to Neville Chamberlain: ‘In the name of God, go.’
As so often in the past few days, I am reminded of the description of Thatcher’s fall in Alan Clark’s Diaries. Two days before her resignation, Tristan Garel-Jones invited Clark to a meeting at his house ‘to talk through the next steps’. What does that mean, inquired Clark. ‘Ways of supporting the Prime Minister,’ was Garel-Jones’s chilling reply. This week, there are plenty of impatient young Labour MPs plotting ways of ‘supporting the Prime Minister’.
Could he have lasted longer? Undoubtedly. But it was Donald Rumsfeld who really did for Mr Blair. Had the Pentagon not thwarted Colin Powell’s plan to flood Iraq with troops and implement a detailed reconstruction plan after the fall of Saddam, there is a chance that the liberated country might not have descended into turmoil. But the relentless daily images of chaos and bloodshed in Baghdad — much worse than the failure to unearth weapons of mass destruction — fed the belief in the Labour party that Mr Blair had finally lost the plot, putting his alliance with a loathed Republican President before loyalty to his party. His decision to stand shoulder to shoulder with George W. Bush once more over the conflict in southern Lebanon merely strengthened these fears. Even those who had supported Mr Blair over Iraq felt that his support of US policy in the Middle East marked not only a betrayal of Labour principle but a detachment from reality.
If the Prime Minister failed utterly to persuade Labour that the Iraq war was just, he succeeded all too well in convincing a new generation of Conservatives that change was necessary in their own party. From the moment that Mr Cameron presented himself at last year’s Conservative conference — albeit privately — as ‘Blair’s heir’, he was hastening the fall of the very man upon whom he claimed to be modelling himself. The Tories’ poll lead is firm rather than insuperable, but its resilience over the summer has dismayed Labour strategists. Worst of all was the YouGov survey in last Monday’s Evening Standard that showed the Conservatives eight points ahead of Labour in London — seven points up since the general election.
If Mr Cameron can prevail in the capital, the keys to No. 10 could be his. Gordon Brown may yet thwart that ambition. But the question would not even arise had not the Tory leader emulated Mr Blair so assiduously — just as Mr Blair made Margaret Thatcher his strategic role model. At the GQ Men of the Year Awards last week I heard Jamie Oliver say of Mr Cameron, ‘No, he’s all right, I quite like him.’ When the celebrity chefs start to back the Conservative leader, you know Mr Blair’s reign really is over. If the Prime Minister wonders what his legacy will be, he need only look across the dispatch box.
Orwell’s description of political language — ‘designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind’ — has rarely seemed as apt as in the past week. Suddenly the word ‘debate’ has acquired a ludicrous toxicity. Deployed by the Blairite ‘outriders’, it has come to mean ‘forcing Gordon to sign up to ideas he doesn’t like’ — which is why the Chancellor’s chief lieutenant, Ed Balls, launched a furious attack last week on ‘internal navel-gazing’ and ‘indulgent thinking’.
So stultified has Labour’s political discourse become that the content is no longer what matters. All that we know about Mr Brown’s plans is that nobody is allowed to question them. The next Prime Minister of this country starts from the premise that no ‘debate’ is necessary.
That’s what happens when the heir apparent has been waiting for 12 years. He regards his succession to the leadership as just that: the overdue collection of a loan taken out by Mr Blair in 1994 — the loan of the Labour leadership — rather than a prize to be earned after a normal political contest. It would be idle to claim that Mr Brown lacks the experience and stature to become Labour leader. Still, the manner of his imminent elevation is very odd.
Imagine, by way of comparison, if the Conservative party had tried to decide in 1993 who should become its leader 12 years thence. I very much doubt it would have chosen the bright young Cabinet adviser then at the Home Office, the 26-year-old David Cameron — whom it did indeed elect in 2005. Yet, mutatis mutandis, this is precisely what Labour did in 1994, effectively picking not only Mr Blair but also his successor.
Mr Brown should welcome a contest now, a chance to win a mandate based on more than a 12-year-old sense of grievance and the conviction that the party somehow owes it to him. But, according to one senior Blair ally, ‘A race is what Gordon dreads most because he might lose. That’s why he won’t wait, why he insists on having it now, because he’s terrified that Alan Johnson or John Reid might catch up with a bit more time.’
Yet, without such a race, the scene is set for all that is most truly dangerous to Mr Brown. As one of Mr Blair’s closest aides put it to me, ‘There’s a lot of denial about what it’ll really be like. Imagine that first Cabinet meeting when they realise that TB’s not there and he’s not coming back, and Gordon’s in charge. The rest of the world will be saying we’re bonkers to have got rid of Tony.’
Again, Alan Clark offers a precedent in his diary entry for 22 November 1990: ‘What happens when she [Mrs Thatcher] starts to be “missed”, and the rose-tinted spectacles are found in everyone’s breast pocket?’ Well, indeed. Let us suppose that the letter-writers get their way and Mr Blair goes more or less immediately. How long before he, like the Iron Lady, starts to be ‘missed’? How long before a neo-Blairite rump of MPs starts asking awkward questions, defying the whip, complaining that their idol was deposed too hastily, that the party was denied a contest and a mature moment of reckoning?
It is almost exactly ten years since I first interviewed Tony Blair, in the Imperial Hotel, Blackpool, with Alastair Campbell lurking in the background. ‘It is absolutely obvious that New Labour is a reality,’ the party leader said then. But how real was it then, and how real is it now? The reckless enthusiasm with which Labour is ditching the greatest electoral asset it has ever had answers the question. Mr Blair was deluded when he spoke to me all those years ago. But not as deluded as his party is now.
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