A Journey (90 page)

At that time, the consequences were still taking shape and it didn’t impact much in 2005. It was only later, far too late in the day, when the full folly of the legislation had become apparent, that I realised we had crossed a series of what should have been red lines, and strayed far beyond what it was sensible to disclose.

Meanwhile, we were busy getting the words right for the election. I decided eventually on the strapline ‘forward not back’. I knew our strength was that, despite it all, we had a future agenda. I knew the Tory weakness was that under Michael Howard they hadn’t really changed. ‘Forward not back’ was prosaic to the point of boring, but it was clear and a good banner under which to congregate the wide array of policy. All the way through, we were on a dual line: Iraq and the domestic agenda. Our opponents would try to focus it all on Iraq. We had to broaden it. I knew Iraq would make the public resentful and begrudging; but I also knew that they would be discomfited by an attempt to exploit Iraq as a reason for changing government. They knew the Tories had supported the war, and for the same reason as me. Michael’s attempt to use Iraq showed that, deep down, he lacked a true political instinct.

We had the usual Gordon problem about the election. I had asked Alan Milburn to come back to help coordinate the election. This had caused a flurry of briefings against him and an attempt to unnerve Ian McCartney, who was doing a valiant job as party chairman. Ian was a great party man, a good organiser and loyal, but he wasn’t a strategist. I tried to create a structure that enabled Alan to put together the right campaign, without undermining Ian. Alastair came back to help. Naturally Philip Gould was central. But it caused no end of bother with GB. Through Alastair and Philip we just about kept the show together, but I emphasise the ‘just about’.

There was one other somewhat difficult and dangerous consequence. Alastair and Philip both thought it should be very much a dual TB/GB campaign. I was unpopular in many quarters; Gordon was a successful Chancellor; it made sense. But Peter Mandelson and Alan were strongly opposed, with Peter repeating to me that I was stronger than I thought and didn’t need this. The disagreement between Peter on the one hand and Alastair and Philip on the other was at times very sharp.

For once, I wasn’t totally sure what I thought. At one level, I knew the agenda was mine and felt really confident on policy. At another, I felt oppressed, and if I’m honest a touch demoralised by the sheer weight of the opposition and its very personal nature. As I said earlier, the term ‘Bliar’ had first been used in the 2001 election, but the saga of WMD had given the concept booster rockets. Despite the conclusions of the Hutton Report, despite the fact that anyone who wanted to could see the intelligence on the government website and judge for themselves, it was too good an opportunity for those who by then hated me; and I think for some ‘hate’ wasn’t too strong a word.

It was partly that they felt angry at their own impotence. Tories in particular could see a third defeat on the horizon – and they had never lost three times in a row before. Of course, just as with Labour in the 1980s, they lost for a reason and that reason was their own fault; but again just as with the Labour Opposition and Thatcher, the frustration boiled over into savagery. (‘She’s a dictator,’ I remember people screaming at me once. ‘No she’s not,’ I rather unwisely replied, ‘she won an election.’) Whereas Mrs Thatcher always had the main papers on board and rooting for her, I had key papers effectively licensing the very personal campaign against me. The
Daily Mail
, in particular, was vicious. As I say, Gordon was close to Paul Dacre, the editor-in-chief of the Mail Group. The combination of the two factors made it fairly toxic.

In the course of the ridiculous so-called ‘Cheriegate’ affair of 2002 – in which Carole Caplin’s partner Peter Foster became involved with Cherie’s purchase of two flats in Bristol – I crossed a threshold with Dacre. Usually, I let what the media said wash over me, irrespective of what it was. Sometimes I met journalists who had written something foul about me or even Cherie and I just said ‘Hello’ cheerily, without being overconcerned. Also, it’s amazing how quickly people can forget the publicity, whether good or bad, that accumulates around a public figure – unless it is sustained and driven by an agenda, in which case it can be an irritation and occasionally it can do lasting damage. But often I would meet someone else in public life and say, ‘How are you?’ and they would look at me as if to say: ‘You mean you don’t know?’ They would still be smarting from some wretched story that put them on the rack, but for me, as a person just watching it disinterestedly as it were, I would perhaps have permitted myself a ‘tut’ or a smile but in any event I would have moved swiftly on. I knew it would be the same when I was attacked, so I was neither paranoid about the media nor did I obsessively follow it. The stories would prick me, but my recovery time was relatively fast.

In this particular story, Carole made a poor judgement in allowing Peter Foster into her life, as she has both honestly admitted and apologised for. Cherie should probably never have tried to buy the Bristol flats, but Euan was at university there and she thought they might be useful. The trouble is you can’t really do that as the prime minister’s wife, for no better reason than you just can’t. There was nothing the least wrong in the purchase itself, or the manner of it. Peter Foster’s role was pretty minimal. Cherie had met him for five minutes; I never met or talked to him. And by the way, you can’t blame the
Mail
for running the story; it was almost too good to be true. But as a result of one of those classic Saturday-afternoon calls in which a Sunday newspaper phones to get a response to a story at the last moment, so as to give the subject the least time to respond, I, by phone, got the wrong end of the stick from her, said Foster had had nothing to do with the purchase, passed it on to Alastair and days later we were in the perennial media firestorm. Then, as more and more came out about Foster and his history, it turned into something really ugly. The
Mail
was leading the way. That was its modus operandi, so there was no point getting upset about it.

To counter the campaign against me, I decided in the election to deliberately face my critics. It wasn’t easy and had to be carefully calibrated. There is a thin line between ‘brave enough to face the music’ and ‘everyone hates him’, but on balance it worked as a strategy, unpleasant though it was.

During the run-up to the election, we nearly had a vast panic over the approaching ‘flu pandemic’. There is a whole PhD thesis to be written about the ‘pandemics’ that never arise. In this case, the WHO had issued a report claiming there would be 500,000–700,000 deaths across the world. The old First World War flu statistics were rolled out, everyone went into general panic and any particular cases drew astonishing headlines of impending doom. Anyone who caught a cold thought they were part of a worldwide disaster.

I’m afraid I tried to do the minimum we could with the minimum expenditure. I understood the risk, but it just didn’t seem to me that the ‘panpanic’ was quite justified. And in those situations, everyone is so risk-averse that, unless you take care, you end up spending a fortune to thwart a crisis that never actually materialises.

However, the reaction of the system is perfectly understandable. The first time you don’t bother is the time when the wolf is actually in the village, so you have to steer a path, taking precautions, and be ready to ramp it up if it looks like this time it’s really happening. But oh, the endless meetings and hype of it all!

Anyway, we got over that. We were just about to start the campaign when Pope John Paul II died in early April. He had been a remarkable and hugely popular leader of the Catholic Church. We had celebrated Mass with him two years before in his own private chapel. He had been so solicitous, kind and concerned. He didn’t agree with Iraq, but he understood the perils and pressure of leadership, and when he spoke to me about it, he did so not to make a point but to give spiritual counsel. He was, of course, a theological conservative but with the true common touch.

When he died, literally millions took to the streets. World leaders went to St Peter’s in Rome for the funeral. The Vatican is an amazing place. As you drive in, you are suddenly in another world. The Swiss Guards – a tradition there since the early sixteenth century – greet you and usher you in. It is grand beyond grand. The king of Saudi Arabia once told me it was the most palatial building he had ever entered (and he would have known a few). If you visited the Pope, in order to get to the audience room you would go through a series of antechambers, each grander than the last, until you finally greeted His Holiness. If the purpose was to impress, it succeeded. From Pope Gregory in the fifth century onwards, there had always been that curious mixture of the political and spiritual in the Vatican, and the same sense still resides there – it is the headquarters of a religious organisation, yes, but also a power, to be engaged with and certainly not to be trifled with.

The funeral service was held on the steps of the cathedral. On high were the leaders. In the square the people were amassed. Everyone came. There was an amusing moment in the seating of the dignitaries. The Vatican decided to sit us all by alphabetical order. Unfortunately this put me next to Robert Mugabe, the UK being next to Zimbabwe. I was literally just about to take my seat when, in the nick of time, I spotted who was in the next chair, luckily at that moment talking to his neighbour on the other side. He hadn’t seen me. I was on the point of starting the election campaign, and this would not have been the ideal launch picture. It was too ghastly to contemplate.

I capered off to the back steps, where the ambassadors and security people and so on were assembled. This provided consternation among the priests doing the seating, who kept trying to drag me to the front row to take my seat. As the service was about to get under way, to my horror I saw Prince Charles enter and of course get ushered to the UK seat. I rushed forward, but it was too late, and he sat down bang next to Mugabe. At least royalty don’t need to get elected.

A couple of days later, we launched the bid for the historic third term. We started as favourites, the polls showing us with a five-point lead or thereabouts, despite having had a difficult few months. There had been the continued rumblings and fallout from my decision to fight the election. Robert Peston – a close journalist associate of Gordon – had recently published a biography of him which basically put up in lights the ‘victim/betrayal’ thesis, and this had reverberated for weeks. To be fair, I think the book had been supposed to coincide with his assumption of the leadership and it then took on a different context, but it meant that the TB/GB divide was now common currency.

However, I felt very sure of our manifesto, our record and our ability to expose the frailty and thinness of the Tory campaign. The first visit was down to Weymouth, right in the heart of former true-blue Tory country, where we had won Dorset South for the first time in 2001.

The eventual result was actually less remarkable for its outcome or even the size of the majority, as for the lack of uniformity in the swing. In our two most marginal seats, of which Dorset South was one, the majority increased, an extraordinary result. In some places, we had a swing towards us. In others, we lost traditional Labour seats to the Lib Dems who campaigned rigorously against the war and on opposition to tuition fees.

At the core, the New Labour vote held firm. It was intact. But as it became clear that we would indeed be re-elected, so votes were peeled off from people who felt that they could safely vote Lib Dem in the secure knowledge they weren’t going to get a Tory government.

Nonetheless, in what was a serious misreading of the result, the party became convinced that with a different leader, i.e. Gordon, we would have done better. The truth is with a different New Labour leader we may have done, certainly with one who could have made Iraq someone else’s decision. But the real difference between 2001 and 2005 was in the 4 per cent loss to the Lib Dems, not in any significant swing to the Tories. This was, in other words, a classic protest vote, easily recoverable in a third term in time for a fourth-term bid, provided we did not lose the core New Labour support that had stuck with us. The very lack of uniformity in the swing, therefore, was not a quirk – it held, on analysis, a profoundly important political lesson.

So we got under way. The mood was OK, but soured by the decision of some to make Iraq the only issue – which included a disproportionately large part of the media – while for most of the electorate, Iraq played differently.

This was not because people didn’t care about the war or its consequences – they manifestly did, and by then we were losing soldiers with horrible regularity in the terror campaign being waged around Basra. It was rather that most people felt Iraq was a difficult decision. In other words, they had a keener appreciation of how tough it was to decide the issue than the black-and-white predilection of the media. Even if they disagreed, they understood the dilemma. They sympathised with the fact the leader had to take the decision. During the campaign, many people said to me they were glad they did not have to take it themselves. Also, as I said before, they distrusted the way my opponents used it, especially the Tories.

Other issues abounded, such as the Longbridge factory in the Midlands, right in the heart of swing territory, where the owners of the major and historic car plant were on the verge of bankruptcy. It all kicked off just as the campaign got under way. Here Gordon and I worked well and with visible impact, immediately getting up there, speaking to people, trying to sort it, clearly in charge and in gear, as it were.