A Journey (105 page)

If I ever came close to resentment, it was over the so-called ‘cash for honours’ business. The resentment was less over the fact of it as over the time it took, its totally destabilising nature, and most of all the truly and horribly unfair manner in which members of my staff were targeted. It was an attempt to end my premiership in a way that would have been reputationally ghastly.

Funnily enough, I never criticised the police over it. I had got to know and really like the police who worked with me as protection, and I had an innate respect for the officers as a group and the job they did. I got on well with those who helped fashion the law and order policy. I could see their flaws, as with any profession, but I felt they were on the same agenda most of the time, and I thought their frustrations with the courts and the bureaucracy were more or less justified. And I had been at enough memorials to fallen officers – organised so well by the Police Memorial Trust, founded by Michael Winner, one of the lesser-known things he does – to appreciate they really did put their lives on the line.

In this instance, I could see their problem. They were going to be beaten up badly by the media if they didn’t pursue it; and the longer it went on, the more they were in a ‘lose–lose’ situation. Close it down and they would be accused of a whitewash; continue it and they would be under intense pressure to get something (or more accurately, someone). The consequence of it all was that the government was rocked more or less monthly by a scandal which could lead the news with the twitch of an eyebrow, but to which there was always very much less than met the eye.

By then I was tough enough for anything, but for those who worked for me, especially Ruth Turner and Jonathan Powell, it was mind-bogglingly awful. Weaker characters frankly would have collapsed. Fortunately they were strong, but by the close of it they had needed every ounce of their strength.

The story was broken by the
Sunday Times
on 15 March 2006. Essentially, they alleged that Michael Levy, as party fund-raiser, had offered peerages to those nominated for the House of Lords in our 2006 list, in return for donations which were disguised as loans. I didn’t believe this, by the way. For one thing, as a result of the setting up of the new Appointments Committee to vet peerages, no such expectation could ever have been given. But what had happened was that, since we had taken out loans – and loans did not require the identities of lenders to be made known – there could be perceived an obvious, if mistaken, implication that these loans might then be turned into donations if the peerage was granted.

Part of the problem arose from the fact that donors were now, especially prior to an election, stuck out there, huge and easy meat for the media to tear apart. For some reason, giving to a political party was considered prima facie evidence of corruption. So a donation meant the donor’s name was declared. Not so for a loan.

Now it is true that there were many large donors from both Tories and Labour (and Lib Dems I might add) who were subsequently put in the House of Lords as ‘working peers’. But as I used to say, there is no reason why they shouldn’t be put there, provided there isn’t a sale or trade and there are other good reasons for their appointment. There are lots of folk who give to charity and may anticipate that they will get an honour of some sort, and they probably will. But you can’t stipulate it; and they cannot then donate on a promise they will get it.

Anyway, it is a murky business, but it is the system as it has operated for a long, long time. The only difference was that we had introduced rules of transparency and insisted on declarations for political donations. In times gone by, no one had any idea who gave to the Tory Party, not even all the way through the 1970s, 80s and 90s, and no one ever asked. But with us, it was always going to be different. And, of course, we had now changed the law. So once more, ironically, a move to greater transparency ended up backfiring spectacularly.

I was quite sure the individual donors or lenders were not under any such promise. There were very good reasons for all of them being on the list, and each would have made an important contribution to the Lords. People also overlooked the fact that party leaders had within their gift certain party nominations. In other words, there was an assumption on the part of the public – unsurprising really – that there was an objective judgement on a non-party basis for nomination to the Lords. But this was not the way the system worked for working peers. In fact, I was the first prime minister to give away what had, up to then, been the absolute power of nomination over all appointments, although we had retained party nominations for a limited number of party-reserved slots. So, in a way, what was odd was that a trade union leader whose union had donated generously could go in the Lords and no one would bat an eyelid, but private sector entrepreneurs, who might be (and in these cases were) highly successful businessmen, were somehow regarded as illegitimate.

When the
Sunday Times
broke the story, it was a medium-size scandal that got the party all het up (conveniently forgetting where the money to fight the election had come from) and the media excited. But what shifted it from the containable to the eruptive and uncontainable was the party treasurer Jack Dromey’s statement on 15 March that he had never been told about any of it and that there should be an inquiry. The next day a Scottish National Party MP called for a police inquiry, and the police felt they had no option but to launch one. From 21 March 2006 to the day I left, it was a running sore of the most poisonous and debilitating kind. A few weeks after my departure, the file was closed without any charges being brought, but it had been nearly eighteen months of absolute hell for all concerned.

Gordon’s involvement came about in this way. I have considered at length whether or not to include this episode. It is in the book written by Andrew Rawnsley about the two of us, and written there in certain respects inaccurately. So I have decided to put the record straight. We had been having a huge set-to about Adair Turner’s pension proposals. The Pensions Secretary John Hutton and I both thought them right, but Gordon disagreed. We had fixed the crucial meeting to decide it on 15 March. It was going to be a very tough meeting, I was in no doubt about that. I agreed to meet Gordon in the morning, before the trilateral with John Hutton later at 4 p.m. When Gordon came in, he was in venomous mood. I can truthfully say it was the ugliest meeting we ever had. To be fair to him, for some reason he thought this whole donations business had been a way of my leaving him with some frightful scandal, a sort of ticking bomb that would then wreck his leadership in the same way, as he put it to me, Jean Chrétien had done to Paul Martin in Canada (there had been a funding row in the Liberal Party that Paul Martin had inherited from the time Jean was prime minister).

It was all nonsense, of course, but I think Gordon may have genuinely believed it. Or it may have been an elaborate excuse. I can’t tell. But what he proceeded to say in the meeting stunned me. He began the conversation not by talking of pensions, but by saying how damaging the loans thing was; that there might have to be an NEC inquiry; and he might have to call for one. I naturally said that would be incredibly damaging and inflammatory and on no account must he do it.

The temperature, already well below freezing point, went arctic when he then said: Well, it depends on this afternoon’s meeting. If I would agree to shelve the Turner proposals, he would not do it. But if I persisted, he would.

I remember there was a piece of paper on my desk which bizarrely was a translation of the Royal Irish Regiment’s motto ‘
Faugh a ballagh
’, which means ‘Clear the way’. I had seen them in Downing Street as they prepared to amalgamate and leave duty in Northern Ireland following the peace process. We had had a joke about whether I would use their motto at PMQs. In the event, I had not had the opportunity.

Suddenly seeing it, Gordon poked at it with his finger. ‘That’s what you should do – clear the way!’

Anyway, it was not pleasant and there were things said that should remain in the privacy of that room and our recollection. Suffice to say, he felt I was ruining his inheritance and I felt he was ruining my legacy. He believed the policy was wrong; I thought it was right. He made a threat; I disdained it.

We then had the pensions meeting with John Hutton at four, in which I insisted the Turner proposals proceed. It ended around five. At six Jack Dromey made his statement calling for an inquiry. I really don’t know for a fact that Gordon put Jack up to it. Gordon denied ever speaking to him. And, as I say, I really don’t believe he would have wanted the dire consequences that it unleashed. It did the party immense damage. It pulled our ratings down and mine personally every time it was reactivated. The irony was that the policy agenda was moving forward, so each moment we started to come up for air and get going again, we would be dragged back below the waterline.

Following that event, our relations were on a different footing: formal, at points even friendly, but I couldn’t forget it and found it hard to forgive. I was also sad about it; not simply for the obvious reasons, but because it showed the truly nasty side of politics. Somehow it can make people do things that really shouldn’t be done, like dirt that won’t wash off. Also, he was, and is, a far better man than that.

So, by September 2006, when this had gone on for some months, erupting every few weeks with some fresh ‘revelation’ or leak from the inquiry, combined with Lebanon, combined with rebelliousness over the reform programme, combined with nine years in office, it was not astonishing that the PLP mood had hardened. They could be pardoned for thinking their leader was not exactly their number-one asset.

Although during the investigation we had fallen behind in the polls for only the second time since 1997 (the first being during the fuel crisis) – itself pretty remarkable – the polls were not that bad. We were a few points adrift but I was beginning to get the measure of David Cameron. I could sense he was uncertain not only of how much he could change his own party, but also of how much he wanted to. I thought their policy positions were vulnerable, especially on law and order and Europe, and therefore my strategy was to drive forward fast, constantly challenging them to keep up or fall behind, or divert to a different route. David Cameron was clever and people-friendly, and I thought he had some real steel to him, but he had not gone through the arduous but ultimately highly educative apprenticeship I had gone through in the 1980s and early 90s. I had honed my leadership skills and instincts. His were still pretty unhoned. They existed, but with rough edges.

However, my party could just see one thing: problems if we stick with Blair; comfort if we don’t.

After I had come back from the summer holiday, I went to Balmoral for the usual weekend with the Queen. During the weekend, there was a dreadful Nimrod crash in Afghanistan in which fourteen military personnel died. The operation in which the plane crashed – Operation Medusa – had been a blow to the Taliban leadership, giving us a strong psychological victory. They had suffered a lot of casualties.

There had been renewed attention given to Afghanistan during 2005 and 2006. When it is said that people took their eye off Afghanistan because of Iraq, it isn’t so, at least not for the British. During the toughest time in Iraq, we were still resolutely set on making Afghanistan work. The elections in 2004 had been successful. As the security situation got tougher, so in the summer of 2005 we started to prepare for taking on the leadership in the south of the country, where the Taliban were still strong and where narcotics formed the main basis of Afghan income. Indeed the military chiefs, dismayed at the limits of what we could do in Iraq, were increasingly wanting to switch emphasis from Iraq to Afghanistan.

In September 2005, John Reid had sent me a note giving a nine-month preparation time for the deployment of British troops to Helmand province. The exchange of notes and correspondence, meetings and conferences continued throughout the latter part of 2005 into 2006. It was agreed that in principle we should deploy. But as John made very clear, it would be a tough and dangerous mission. The Taliban would fight hard to keep hold of the territory that we had never been able satisfactorily to wrest from them. There would be suicide attacks on our forces.

We held a conference on Afghanistan in London in February, which Kofi Annan co-chaired with me. At the conference, the scale of the challenge was plain, in terms of civilian and military capacity, in nation-building and giving Afghans solid hope they would have a stable functioning democracy for the future.

What was apparent in both Iraq and Afghanistan was that the enemy had a very stark picture in their mind of the importance of the struggle we were engaged in. It was, naturally, all masked as their fight against occupying forces of the West, but this ignored the facts that a) there was a UN resolution authorising the presence of such forces, b) there had been elections in both countries resulting in governments who wanted the presence of such forces, and c) above all, the only reason for our presence was their terrorist campaign. If they had stopped that, we would have gone instantly.

Of course, they knew this perfectly well. Their real fear was precisely that of leaving the people to determine the outcome, since it was obvious that outcome, freely determined, would have stood against fanaticism and for modernisation. When Zahir Shah, the last king of Afghanistan (who had made a state visit to the UK in 1971), died at the ripe old age of ninety-two in July 2007, we were reminded of the fact that back in the 1960s and 70s, Afghanistan had been a nation on its way up, with a GDP per head equal to that of South Korea.