A Journey (86 page)

After a bit of toing and froing, the Tories came out against it, once more, in my view, mistakenly.

Gordon had multiple good arguments against ID cards, since practicality and cost were genuine issues. His argument against antisocial behaviour legislation was one which once again he was given by the people advising him. He had his own pollsters and unfortunately they used to give him unbelievably duff advice on occasions. Their argument here was that immigration and law and order issues were only of great salience because we insisted on talking about them. David, in particular, was accused of inciting the issues rather than responding to them.

I treated this with some wonderment. You only had to travel the country for half an hour to realise these issues were very real and very live, and the idea that they would melt away if we only stopped focusing on them was utterly crazy. On the contrary, the only thing that prevented them from capsizing us was that we were talking and acting on them. Of course, nothing we did was enough; but doing nothing as a response was plainly a thousand times worse.

In this area, though, there was less of a Treasury locus and so the opposition was, if not muted, unable to obstruct much.

But I’m afraid you get the general picture: I was pressing forward; Gordon was resisting. The whole thing was enervating and depressing. So not for the first or last time, I came back to the central dilemma: how to deal with it?

By then, even more so than 2001, removing Gordon would have brought the entire building tumbling down around our ears. He had massive support in the party and had backing among powerful people in the media. As I fell out with Paul Dacre of the
Daily Mail
, he had fallen in with him. Rupert Murdoch liked Gordon. As Iraq divided me from the left papers, his own relationship with them blossomed. Serious people rated him, and for perfectly good reasons: he was an excellent Chancellor, he had a towering intellect, he had immense, even incredible energy and drive. He was a problem for me; but he wasn’t a significant problem to anyone else – well, some of the other Cabinet ministers maybe, but none were at that point powerful enough to take him on, even with me. He was also careful enough, as always, to put resistance on a Treasury and not an anti-reform footing.

Besides, for all the resistance, the effect was to slow down and sometimes water down the process, but not to stop it. Each reform – painful though it was – got through. Manifestly it would have been easier and less painful if it had been done with his support; but he was a brake, not a brick wall.

The alternative to removing him was the one I chose: to try to reach one last understanding with him; to try to reassure him that if he and I cooperated, if we truly shared the same agenda, I would go before the election and hand over to him.

It was unwise because it was never going to work. It was almost certainly unwise also to use John Prescott as the go-between. I say this not because John was badly intentioned – on the contrary, he was only motivated by what he believed was good for the Labour Party – but the trouble was he thought the policy differences between us were immaterial. He thought it was essentially personal. Because John had his own deep reservations about New Labour, they blinded him to the fact that the differences went to the heart of what New Labour was about.

To me, at least, though I was of course at points angry and dismayed at Gordon’s behaviour, it really wasn’t personal. The thing that mattered most was getting the New Labour programme through, proving that the Labour Party was indeed the party that could, because it had changed, change the public services and welfare state it had helped create; change them radically, make them secure because we had made them modern, right for the twenty-first century, right for a world that was an era away from 1945 in its thinking. I saw this as the supreme fulfilment of my mission: to show how progressive politics, itself modernised, could modernise the nation; to escape from Labour’s hide-bound and time-bound fixation with its past, and in doing so help the country escape from theirs. I thought I could see where Thatcherism was right and where it was severely and dangerously limited. I also believed – and this belief increased over time – that a new politics was opening up in which traditional distinctions between left and right were not so much blurred as often profoundly unhelpful in analysing either the past or the future.

Was it reasonable for him to block measures simply because I would not yield to him the position of prime minister? Of course not. But then look at it from his point of view: constantly waiting; constantly fretting that I might sacrifice all political goodwill before the crown was his; constantly fearing the passage of time.

Look at it from my point of view: by late 2004, I would have done more than seven years. The job had taken its toll. Iraq and September 11 had taken their toll. The fight with him had taken its toll. Peter gone, Alastair gone, Anji gone. The shadows had grown larger and darker.

Suppose I am the block to his assumption not just of the position but also of his destiny? Suppose once he gets it, he changes, he relaxes, he breaks open the shell and takes wing? Surely what matters is the programme. Surely if he completes it after I have begun it, that is to the credit of us both. So if he will only agree to carry it through, why not put the burden down, get out, escape? Imagine the relief. Imagine the freedom. Contemplate a new life without that strain, stress and struggle. One that allows me to think; allows me to build; to study the religious philosophy that fascinates me, and then perhaps to build something even more important than what I was able to build in politics.

It was a delusion, of course. Worse, it was an act of cowardice. I was worn down. Simple as that. Prosaic as that. Nothing grand about it. Nothing elevated. Not really to do with destiny, his or mine. Just born of the normal weakness of a normal person.

In November 2003 we had agreed to meet at John’s flat in Admiralty House. A previous meeting down at Dorneywood had been pretty stormy and inconclusive. The vote on tuition fees was only weeks away and it remained very tight. My office were adamantly opposed to me having the dinner with John and Gordon. They guessed where it would lead. It wasn’t so much that they didn’t trust John or thought he was against me; they just thought that he thought we were interchangeable when we weren’t, and therefore they didn’t trust his instincts.

I walked across Horse Guards Parade in Whitehall. It was a cold evening and the square was just about empty. I went in the side door and made my way up to the flat in the lift. It was a good-size apartment and well furnished, but as with all these grace-and-favour places, always to my mind a little anaemic. John and Pauline’s home in Hull – the old Salvation Army hostel – had much more character. But the flat was comfortable and convenient.

I had a drink with John and we waited for Gordon, who came a little late. We sat down to dinner immediately. It was a rough conversation. After a time I asked John to leave to let us talk. I told Gordon bluntly of my concern: I was prepared to go – as I had often said, I had only wanted to do two terms – but the constant obstruction and wilful blocking of the reform programme had to stop. He denied, as ever, that he was obstructing, only really raising legitimate financial points. I said I needed to know that he would be one hundred per cent committed to the reform programme and would carry it through after I left. He said of course he would. John came back in. I said: I have made it clear I won’t serve a third term and will go before an election, but I need Gordon’s full and unconditional support. John said he thought that was sensible. We parted.

I have put it down baldly. He would say: I received an assurance Tony would go. I would say: I received an assurance Gordon would cooperate and carry through the agenda. You can then debate who kept his word and who didn’t.

Unfortunately, I have come in time to a different view. It was an assurance that should never have been asked or given. It was not our right to apportion power like that. Not our right. Not wise. Not sensible politically, let alone democratically.

But more than that, there was an obvious flaw at the heart of it. To demand I give up the office in order to agree the programme is, if you think about it, a disqualification for the office. Whatever leadership is, that is the opposite of it. Likewise, to yield to the demand is an act of deep expedience. Now, I didn’t know what else to do. But the feelings on his part of entitlement – which should never enter into a discussion of the office of prime minister because no one is ‘entitled’ – burgeoned still further from that moment on. Maybe he would have got there anyway. Maybe he should have. But never through entitlement bestowed on one holder of the office by another.

I don’t mean to make any grandiose point about democracy. There are frequent occasions in which a prime minister has a chosen successor. The point I make is more a political one; it’s just a thoroughly bad method to make the choice.

Of course the obvious question, and one repeatedly put by friends and occasionally even by foes, is why didn’t I sack Gordon. A perfectly legitimate question with no very obvious answer.

Sometimes my close staff would say to me: You don’t owe him what you think you owe him; your past friendship shouldn’t stand in the way.

But it was neither obligation nor friendship that stopped me. It was that I still disagreed with the premise that his absence from government was better than his presence within it. Given the nature of some of his behaviour, especially towards the end, that might seem an extraordinary thing to say. The answer to the question, ‘Would life have been easier if he was removed?’ seems so clear; however, the answer assumes that had he been sacked, everything else would have remained the same: i.e. it would have been the same world, minus Gordon.

That’s not how politics works.

In the end, a political leader has both to manage complex situations and to judge them. Gordon might be said to have been such a complex situation, and he had to be managed. And there is a crucial difference between political management and running, say, a company or a football team. A conversation I used to have with Alex Ferguson pinpointed this. ‘What would you do if you had a really difficult but brilliant player causing you problems?’ I would ask. ‘Get rid of them,’ he would reply. ‘And supposing after you got rid of them they were still in the dressing room, and in the squad?’ I would say. ‘That would be a different matter,’ he would reply, laughing.

Gordon had enormous support within the party and the media. He was regarded by many as a great Chancellor, and by nearly all as a strong one. When it’s said that I should have sacked him, or demoted him, this takes no account of the fact that had I done so, the party and the government would have been severely and immediately destabilised, and his ascent to the office of prime minister would probably have been even faster. By 2004, but possibly well before then, the media – left and right – would have insisted that I had acted spitefully and wrongly. It is easy to say now, in the light of his tenure as prime minister, that I should have stopped it; at the time that would have been well nigh impossible. I would have had barely any support in any influential quarter for doing so; and some of those most critical of Gordon now, were singing a quite different tune then.

However, that is not the reason I didn’t do it. If I had decided he really was unfit to remain as Chancellor I would have dismissed him, even if it had hastened my own dismissal. My failure to do so was not a lack of courage. Nor was it simply about managing a complex situation. It was because I believed, despite it all, despite my own feelings at times, that he was the best Chancellor for the country.

I formed this judgement for two reasons. First, just as during the time when Gordon sheltered beneath my umbrella as prime minister the benign view of him was misguided in his favour, so now it is misguided to underestimate his huge strengths. The truth is that every time I considered who might replace him, I concluded he was still the best for the job. He gave the government ballast, solidity and strength. Many of his interventions were excellent, especially at an international level. At his best, his intellect and energy were vast and beneficial to the country. When, sometime in 2001, I think, there was talk of him taking an international job of some description, I reflected and decided the government would be weaker and not stronger without him.

Later, when I ran through possible replacements, I still bumped up against the same uncomfortable but – I thought – incontrovertible – reality. He was head and shoulders above the others. Only towards the very end did the thoroughgoing New Labour people start to emerge who had sufficient seniority and experience to have taken his place.

The second reason was that, though Gordon resisted many of the reforms and slowed some of them down, he didn’t prevent them. We did them. By the time I left, choice and competition were embedded in the NHS; academies were powering ahead; the crime bills had passed; tuition fees were in place; and welfare and pension reforms were formulated, if not introduced. These weren’t small items. They were major changes. In the final analysis he supported them. He wouldn’t have initiated them; but when it came to the crunch, he went along. They got through. And herein lies a lesson. There is a reason, apart from the principal one of New Labour, why the government I led was the first Labour government to win even two successive full terms, let alone three; and why it governed for more than double the length of the previous longest-serving Labour government. This is the part that even my closest advisers never understood; but as I used to tease them, these judgements are why I’m the leader and you’re not!