A Journey (55 page)

Wednesday came. PMQs day. Nightmare. Alastair’s and Derry’s view was that it was irretrievable. Jack Straw felt the same and was worried because there was a note of the Peter call, and it was therefore bound to come out. I called Peter in before PMQs and told him he had to go. He felt Alastair was pushing me. He wasn’t; it was my decision. I agreed to an inquiry into the affair, headed by the former Treasury solicitor, Sir Anthony Hammond, whose report five weeks later cleared Peter of any wrongdoing. It was a miserable though redeeming finale to a sorry episode.

Peter fought his seat bravely at the election and won it, and then clawed his way back with his usual genius, but I missed him desperately in Cabinet between 2001 and 2005. He would have been such a strength.

Back then, however, election fever started to incubate in the Westminster hothouse. I set out in a note the campaign structure, the key dividing lines, the future vision of the nuts and bolts of how we would fight the campaign. It wasn’t going to be easy, managing conflicting egos and personalities, letting everyone think they were directing it while making sure I was.

We aimed for a May 2001 election, but an event took place that meant a complete upheaval of all previously laid plans. I was in Canada to address the Parliament and meet my friend Jean Chrétien, the Canadian prime minister. He was a very wise, wily and experienced old bird, great at international meetings, where he could be counted on to talk sense, and, as Canadians often are, firm and dependable without being pushy. All in all, a good guy and a very tough political operator not to be underestimated.

While we were there, we were told that the Ministry of Agriculture had been informed of a case of foot-and-mouth disease at an abattoir in Essex. You’re given a piece of information like that and your first reaction is: is that a big deal? The answer was yes. A very big deal. Two days after the disease had been found, the European Commission imposed a complete ban on all British meat, milk and livestock exports. Was that not an overreaction? I asked. No. OK, so this is really serious. Jean Chrétien immediately identified it as a crisis. ‘Watch that, young Tony, watch it very carefully. That’s trouble.’ We put movement restrictions on all livestock. I asked anxiously from Canada whether we could be sure of lifting the ban within a week. If only I had known.

For the next few days, I remained abroad but was also living on UK time, trying to get some order into the response. Nick Brown, the Minister of Agriculture, appeared to be doing well, and for once the ministry was fully apprised of the gravity of the situation.

Four days after the first case, another outbreak was confirmed, this time at the other end of the country in Tyne and Wear. There then followed near enough three months of almost constant focus on what was the worst ever outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in Europe, and one of the worst in world history.

Foot-and-mouth affects all hooved animals, but doesn’t necessarily kill them, and nor does it make their meat unfit to eat. Some countries – Argentina, for example – have areas where the disease has existed for decades. But of course it isn’t great for the export market, and the average consumer isn’t exactly going to be rushing out to buy infected meat. It has never migrated to humans, although the fear is there that it could. It’s a disease that is at one level not serious in terms of life and death, even of the animal, but its practical consequences on the livestock industry are devastating; if it is not eradicated, then, to all intents and purposes, the effect is terminal.

What had happened was that infected meat had somehow got into the country, possibly illegally, and had contaminated a farm. Animals are transported around the whole country, and as the incubation period can be up to ten days, the disease was only discovered – and livestock movements halted – several days after it began to spread. The result, as we quickly appreciated, is that we didn’t have the foggiest notion how many animals were affected, or where they were.

What’s more, the disease is airborne and can be carried on the soles of shoes. Footpaths, walking trails and other elements of rural tourism were all potential sources of it spreading. Within days, we were having to shut down the British countryside. The only way to deal with it is to slaughter the infected herd. There is a huge debate about whether to vaccinate, a debate that ricocheted around the public discussion during the course of the crisis. The blunt truth was that EU requirements meant that even vaccinated animals had to be slaughtered eventually, and in any event vaccination couldn’t be guaranteed effective in sheep; and sheep could spread the disease to cattle.

Animals were having to be taken away to slaughter but not, of course, in the abattoir, so burning funeral pyres started to spring up. One was situated near the Heathrow flight path, to delight the passengers hoping to spend a few days in rural idyllic Britain. The pictures of the pyres went round the world. Rumours abounded; so-called human cases were detected (it didn’t matter they were all later found to be false). When we shut down the tourist sites, it was assumed it was because of the risk to people. The Americans are great tourists, but they are hopeless when it comes to these types of things. The American tourist influx virtually ceased, on the basis that if they came to Britain they would all go back with two heads.

By the time I had got back home from my transatlantic trip, there was a palpable sense of crisis. I had thought the ministry and Nick were pretty much on top of it. They were somewhat jealously guarding their patch on it and were happy to consult, but I sensed that Nick was feeling pressurised by me and didn’t want to yield up control. Jonathan alarmed me by describing how the Number 10 switchboard had accidentally put him in on a call between Gordon and Nick, with Gordon telling Nick not to give in to my ‘presidential style’ – interference which was not greatly helpful.

As the cases grew, and the bitter facts of the shutdown started to affect jobs, livelihoods, export orders, businesses, tourist attractions, hotels, B & Bs – i.e. the whole infrastructure of rural Britain – I was feeling distinctly queasy and, yes, frightened by it. I let it go for a few more days of the ordinary meetings, queries, debates and instructions and then I thought, No, this isn’t going to work.

The National Farmers’ Union leader was Ben Gill. Both he and his deputy, Richard Macdonald, seemed to me eminently sensible and sane citizens. They were representing a community that was literally seeing their entire past, present and future go up in smoke. There was pain, panic and real grief out there. Ben and Richard were forthright: the only answer was slaughter and the only way to do it was fast.

The challenge was how to do it. We could throw resources at it, but throw them where? At the weekend, I got down to Chequers early. It always helped me clear my head. I read all the papers, spoke to a few people. The chief vet Jim Scudamore was a good bloke, but he was overwhelmed. We all were. I got as detailed a briefing as I could. Then I just sat and thought.

Sometimes in a crisis, you have to demonstrate activity to keep spirits up, but the actual machinery is working away effectively. Sometimes the machinery itself is non-existent or inadequate and then you have to think first. Otherwise the activity is useless or, even worse, counterproductive.

The basic challenge was one of logistics. You had to have enough vets to inspect the herds where cases were suspected. You then had to be able to do the slaughter. You then had to have the capacity to dispose of the carcasses. You then had to have a system of compensation that was rational and quick, and a system of welfare for the burgeoning cases of hardship. You then had to have a plan for reopening the countryside and a strategy to entice the tourists out of their funk. And you had to do it all while tracking the disease to make sure you weren’t opening too early or proclaiming victory too soon. On the other hand, restoring confidence to the battered and bruised rural community could not come a moment too soon.

When I got back to Downing Street on Sunday I decided to grip the whole thing, and got my close advisers together. By some masterstroke – not mine, I hasten to add, but Richard Wilson, the Cabinet Secretary’s – our chief scientific adviser, Sir David King, was invited to join the inner circle. If anyone tells you that scientists are impractical boffins, refer them to David. What he told me sounded a trifle wacky, but over the weeks to come it was to be of priceless value in defeating the disease. Essentially, by means of graphs and charts he set out how the disease would spread, how we could contain it if we took the right culling measures, and how over time we would eradicate it.

The officials were extremely sceptical. So was I. How could he predict it like that, with so many unknowns? But, almost
faute de mieux
, I followed his advice – and blow me, with uncanny, almost unnatural accuracy, the disease peaked, declined and went, almost to the week he had predicted. Remarkable, though it was not without my undergoing a deep immersion in every detail. By the time it was under control in the summer, I knew everything there was to know about it: how it started; how it was spread; the methods of containment; the pros and cons of slaughter and vaccination; the different reactions of sheep and cattle; the impact on humans; the workings of farms and abattoirs; the numbers of animals normally slaughtered in a week and the number we eat in a year (a lot, by the way).

But I also learned more about crisis management and the utter incapacity of the normal system to deal with abnormal challenges than I had ever needed to learn before. Though the public naturally thought we mishandled it and no one gave us any thanks for any of it, actually when I look back and reread the papers, reminding myself of the sheer horror, depth and scale of the crisis, it is a total miracle we came through it.

ELEVEN

A MANDATE FOR NEW LABOUR

T
he 2001 election was an odd, disjointed affair. The outcome was never in doubt. It resulted in another landslide majority. Our well-constructed and well-oiled political machine whirred effortlessly – or so it appeared – over the Heath Robinson contraption that was the Tory Party. And perhaps for those very reasons, it was odd and disjointed.

I learned two things from the campaign. The first was that, increasingly, there was simply no media interest in policy at all, unless it was accompanied by visible, high-impact controversy. The second was that the TB/GB story was unlikely to have a happy ending, at least so far as my time as prime minister was concerned.

The foot-and-mouth crisis was in its last stages. The disease wasn’t beaten completely or culled out, but it was waning. We were on top of it, and it was not going to dominate the election. The decision to postpone the election for a month had been right. However, there was now a will, among the electorate as well as politicians, for the mandate of the government to be retested.

I had shaped the 2001 manifesto very carefully and deliberately. I had decided that we had been, understandably, erring on the side of caution; and now was the time to strike out boldly. I had learned much about government and, above all, I had learned that the risk was not some hidden agenda that the system harboured secretly, the risk was inertia. We had seen enough, done enough, experienced enough, to know how to do the whole thing better and more radically.

I was now clear that public service reform needed major structural change, including a much closer relationship with the private sector. I had become convinced that the law and order agenda was the prisoner of a system of criminal law and criminal justice that simply didn’t measure up to the nature of twenty-first-century society and the types of crime and types of criminal. I wanted a new emphasis on science, technology and small businesses to form part of a modern enterprise and industry policy. I had come to the conclusion that on welfare, we had to focus far more particularly on social exclusion and the danger of families becoming isolated outside society’s mainstream. In respect of the euro, I was still wedded to the economic test of convergence, but I wanted to make the political case far more clearly; and if the economics could align, I was prepared to risk all in a referendum on joining the single currency.

So the manifesto was one I was more or less very happy with. The one exception was over university reform and tuition fees, where I backed away from a clear commitment since there were remaining major policy differences in the party and of course with the Treasury. However, all in all, it set out a plain, unadulterated New Labour position.

The campaign got off to a bizarre start and didn’t much depart from the bizarre until it ended. We decided to launch the campaign not in the old, boring, ‘men in suits sitting on a platform in a conference centre’ mode, but at a school, to emphasise the importance of education to the second term. I went to St Saviour’s and St Olave’s Church of England Secondary Girls’ School in Southwark in south London, met some of the students, visited a classroom or two and then we had assembly. Being a church school, some hymns were sung and then I got up to speak. It was one of those moments. I was in front of a stained-glass window, we were praying and singing. Then I was addressing the serried ranks of teenage girls, all of whom were of course under voting age, about how we couldn’t return to the boom and bust era of the Tory years. As I began, I felt an almost irresistible desire to giggle at the utter absurdity of it, but I soldiered on, to their bemusement and my embarrassment, and then got out as quick as I could.

It was, of course, inappropriate, and there were shrieks of self-righteous anger. Anji and Kate Garvey were brilliant at organising such things and indeed were brilliant generally; but apparently our extraordinary machine had, for once, sprung a gasket or whatever gaskets do. The school took it well, especially as the head teacher got roasted for allowing it.