A Fortunate Life (52 page)

One thing was becoming increasingly clear to me, however, even in these early days of the new Government. Blair’s heart was never really in the constitutional reform agenda. Before the election he had told me many times that it was his aim to change Britain permanently, as Mrs Thatcher had done. It is ironic, therefore, that it was arguably only in the field of constitutional reform that he really succeeded in achieving
this, because constitutional change was a subject that evidently bored him, and which I think he saw as a distraction from the business of ‘real’ government. He went along with the Cook/MacLennan reform agenda, I suspect, not because he really believed in it, but because it was a legacy from John Smith that he felt duty-bound to honour and a framework within which to build a closer relationship with us. It was, if you like, the entry ticket he knew he had to offer to get us to enter his ‘big tent’. A few days after the election I had concluded that the best time for me to step down as Leader would be the end of the year. But now, after meeting Blair, I realised that I would have to stay until as much of the constitutional reform agenda was delivered as possible; for, if the relationship ended before then, there would be much less chance that the elements of the constitutional reform agenda which were important to us Liberal Democrats would be incorporated in the Government’s programme, in the way Blair and I had agreed.

Our meeting of 15 May 1997 was, I suspect, one of the first to be held on the famous sofa in his little office off the Cabinet Room in No. 10, which was destined to become the nerve centre of his later style of ‘sofa government’. What neither of us realised at the time, however, was that this was merely the start of a complicated gavotte that we would dance over the next two years. Ultimately, it would deliver most of the Cook/MacLennan agenda, including a Parliament for Scotland and an Assembly for Wales, the incorporation of the European Convention on Human Rights into British Law, a Freedom of Information Act and, for the first time, the introduction of PR into British elections at the European, Scottish and Welsh levels. But when the dance ended, with it would also end the chance for voting reform for Westminster, the opportunity to break the mould by creating Britain’s first peacetime partnership Government, and my leadership of the Lib Dems.

Mercifully, the end of May brought the Parliamentary Whitsun holidays. Jane and I spent them in glorious spring sunshine at our house in Burgundy, where we ate too many of the local cherries, drank too much of the local wine with our French friends and slept a lot. But none of this could stop my brain churning as I pondered what to do next. By the end of our holiday I had concluded that the Cabinet Committee could only, at best, be a stop-gap. Its effectiveness would be bound to erode over time as a result of the inevitable temptations of opposition
for the Lib Dems, and the inevitable mistakes which were bound to be made by the Government. Before I left I wrote a letter to Blair telling him this and saying that, if he was serious about creating a partnership Government, as he had claimed to both Roy Jenkins and I, then it had better be done soon, or he would lose the opportunity.

Shortly after my return from holiday Roy Jenkins and I joined the Blairs and Peter Mandelson for a private dinner in the Blairs’ new apartments in Downing Street to discuss the situation and, especially, how to handle the issue of PR. When we arrived, Blair explained that they had taken over the apartments normally used by the Chancellor, because these were larger, and the Blairs needed the extra accommodation for their family, while Gordon (then still single) could do with the rather smaller Prime Ministerial flat upstairs. The rabbit-warren passageways of Nos 10 and 11 had caused some confusion amongst his new ministers, Blair told me. He said that the new Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, couldn’t find his way out of No. 10 after a meeting in the Blair’s new flat and had to be shown out by Euan, the Prime Minister’s eldest son.

We had dinner in their dining room, which was still decorated in the most garish red-flock wallpaper, making it look like an Indian restaurant. This caused some mirth as we speculated which past Chancellor was responsible. We concluded that it could have been John Major, but was probably Norman Lamont.

At this dinner, we agreed on four outline ‘decisions in principle’. First, that we would go ahead with the joint Cabinet Committee, probably in July. Next, the Government would agree proportional representation for the European Elections, and then Blair would set up a Commission on Electoral Reform for Westminster. Lastly, all this would be treated as a process which would lead to the Liberal Democrats taking up ministerial posts in what would then become a coalition government, probably by the autumn, when Blair said he was anyway planning a reshuffle of his Ministers.

On 30 June I flew to Hong Kong for the ceremony handing over the Colony to the Chinese. Blair asked me to fly back with him in the Prime Ministerial aircraft, so that we could have a chance to talk. There was also a posse of journalists and a Tory MP (Alastair Goodlad) on the plane, so, to be able to speak in privacy, we went off to the Prime Ministerial sleeping space. There we sat cross-legged on his bed, with our backs on opposite aircraft bulkheads and a bottle of claret precariously balanced between us, as the aircraft bumped through a rather violent
thunderstorm. At one stage, Cherie, in night attire, put her head round the curtain and instructed me not to keep him up too late. A few moments later Alastair Campbell did the same, shook his head and said, with a smile, ‘VERY cosy’. The discussion was chiefly about the timetable of events which would be needed if we were to make the announcement of our intention to move to a formal coalition on the basis of a commitment to electoral reform for Westminster and an agreed programme of policy. This would happen in October or November, leaving me time to take this to my party and seek its approval (I knew it would be far from easy to convince my fellow Lib Dems, and, if I failed, it would mean the end of my Leadership). The conversation ended when the bottle was finished at about 3.30 a.m., and I went off, dog tired, to find a seat to sleep in.

I woke with the dawn and looked out of the window to see the wastes of Siberia slipping by below us. I went forward to chat with the RAF crew, arriving just in time to watch them land for refuelling at the bleak and semi-derelict airport at Novosibirsk. As soon as the Russian ground crew came with the aircraft steps I went out to get a breath of fresh air, blinking in the early-morning Siberian sunlight. Shortly afterwards, Blair appeared, tousle-haired and bleary-eyed, at the top of the aircraft steps. We continued our previous night’s conversation on the tarmac, wandering away from the plane so as to get out of earshot. We had gone no more than thirty yards, however, before a very determined Russian border guard rushed up to us and, waving his weapon, told us that we were illegally trespassing on Russian soil and would be arrested if we didn’t return immediately. Using sign language he pointed to a circle in red paint drawn round the aircraft and said that we could walk around inside this, but must not cross it on pain of arrest for illegal entry into the Russian Federation. We continued our conversation in these somewhat surreal circumstances for the next twenty minutes or so, walking round and round the aircraft. Finally I said, referring to the chronology we had worked out the previous night, ending in a coalition Government in October, ‘I am assuming we have now taken the formal decision to go ahead.’ He nodded and replied: ‘Yes.’ (It was at this stage that the Press finally woke up and, emerging from the aircraft, spotted us deep in conversation. John Hibbs of the
Daily Telegraph
, commented, ‘Ah the Lib/Lab Novosibirsk Pact!’, little knowing just how close he was to the truth.)

Later in July we took the first step in the programme mapped out at Novosibirsk, when Blair announced the formation of a joint Cabinet Committee, tasked, among other things, with co-ordinating the implementation of the constitutional reform agenda. Shortly afterwards Jane and I left on our annual holiday, where, sitting in my daughter’s garden in France, I wrote the first draft of the policy programme for the intended coalition government and sent it to Blair, as promised. He rang me a few days later from Chequers saying that he broadly agreed with the policy document and that, the more he thought about ‘all this’, the more important he believed it was – though he had some doubts about whether he could do it in October or November and thought it might have to be left till later. I replied that the longer he left it, the more difficult it would be – the gloss was already coming off the Government. It was very important to do this during the Government’s honeymoon period, before it made too many mistakes and events started to erode his popularity.

But no one could have predicted the next event, which shook every one of us and came very close to toppling one of the fundamental pillars of the whole British constitutional establishment: the Royal Family.

On 31 August, at 4.30 a.m. the phone by my bed rang, and a bleak voice told me that Princess Diana had been killed in a car crash in Paris.

I met Blair again on the day before Diana’s funeral. His mind was, quite understandably, preoccupied with the nasty public mood which had developed over the fact that the Queen had stayed too long in Balmoral before coming to London and that the flag on Buckingham Palace had not been lowered to half-mast. He told me how uncomfortable it had been to have to explain just how dangerous the public mood was to the Queen and advise her to come to London. I thought he had very skilfully embodied the public mood and done himself a huge amount of good in the process, and told him so. Inevitably, our discussion of the Novosibirsk plans on this occasion was sketchy. But he did reveal that he had spoken to Gordon Brown about them and was now beginning to believe that we had to delay things a little to give him more time to convince his colleagues. I again warned that the longer he left it, the more difficult it would get. If he really wanted to do this, he had to do it soon or risk losing the opportunity.

In the autumn I had to face a rather difficult Lib Dem Party Conference, as rumours and some well-sourced reports began to emerge about my talks with Blair. One of the techniques I had learned from my days in the Royal Marines was to fire off a few rounds in the general direction of an enemy, so they would fire back and reveal their positions (the French call it sending up
un ballon d’essai
, a trial balloon). I decided that I needed to gauge the extent and location of Lib Dem opposition to what Blair and I were planning, so just before the Party Conference I gave an interview to the
New Statesman
in which I deliberately, if rather obliquely, mentioned the word ‘coalition’. It worked all too successfully, producing a furious reaction from many of the new MPs and a lot of our activists. I had quite a struggle to fend off a determined attempt to close the door on any deeper relationship with Labour at the Conference, but in the end concluded that, while there was no doubting how strong the opposition would be in some quarters of the Party, if it came to it I could still (just) win overall support for a coalition, provided there was a firm commitment to PR and a proper policy agreement, including lots of things Lib Dems could support.

It was about this time that I decided that, if we did go ahead with a coalition Government, I would not take a Cabinet position in it, so that I could argue the case with the Lib Dems without being seen to have something personal to gain. I also believed that, in the early days of such an enterprise, it would be better for me to manage the relationship from outside government rather than involving myself in the day-to-day action. This would, in addition, leave me freer to step aside when the relationship between the two parties in government had been properly stabilised.

By October, however, it was clear that Blair wanted to delay again, this time until the spring, because, he said, opposition from within the Cabinet, especially from Brown and Prescott, was too strong. To make matters worse, in mid-October, in a famous leak made in the
Red Lion
pub in Westminster, Charlie Whelan (Gordon Brown’s spokesman) made it clear that his boss was not prepared to let Britain join the Euro ‘in this Parliament’. This effectively undermined one of the key planks of the policy agreement I had drafted in my daughter’s garden in France over the summer holidays. What followed was the establishment of the Brown criteria for entry into the Euro, which in effect passed control of this key element of Blair’s European agenda from No. 10 Downing Street to No. 11, where it remained until Blair left No. 10 and Brown moved in.