A Journey (96 page)

Personal relationships matter – this is obvious, of course, but is also completely ignored by people who think it’s florid stratagems and mathematical calculations that drive negotiations and compromise. At all levels, but especially at the top, politics is about people. If you like a leader, you try to help them, even if it stretches your own interests. If you don’t, you don’t. And if you distance yourself on political grounds – for example because, like Silvio, there’s controversy around them – then fine, but don’t kid yourself: your own country’s the loser. That leader is not a fool, and knows you are not prepared to pay a price to have a relationship. You think they don’t harbour a grudge about it? I have no idea how the Italians voted, but . . .

We left Singapore not daring to hope and yet still hoping, which I put down to the exhilaration of it all and the fact that people are always nice to your face. But somehow it didn’t feel like a done deal for France any more.

We landed at Edinburgh airport after flying overnight, and drove up to the grand Gleneagles hotel. I’d chosen Gleneagles not because it was grand, but because we needed somewhere that could be secured. The 1998 G8 in Birmingham – my first – had been right in the city centre, but the world of summitry had changed in the seven years since then, even before September 11 and certainly after it. We live in an era of publicity through protest. Because the modern media works essentially through impact, protesters know that if they protest in a sufficiently disruptive way, they lift the agenda from the democratically elected politicians. Hordes can descend on a summit and wreck it, dominate the news coverage, diminish its salience; in short, devalue it. In turn, this forces politicians to try to insulate themselves from the protest, and after the Genoa summit in 2001 they tended to be held in faraway or remote places not so susceptible to disruption: Evian in France, Heiligendamm in Germany and Sea Island in the US.

As we drove into Gleneagles we could hear the shouts of the anti-globalisation protesters who were against us meeting, who were against the G8, who were against the whole system. My thoughts towards them were not charitable. Why shouldn’t we meet and talk? After all, it is about Africa and climate change. What is your problem? In other words, I felt about them roughly what they felt about me.

I then had to meet Jack McConnell, the Scottish First Minister. It was important for him to be seen as part of the ‘happening’ as the security arrangements had all been really tough to carry out. He had had to meet local residents, sort out the policing of the huge pre-G8 rally held a few days before in Edinburgh and, as usual, everyone wanted the G8 but at the same time wanted to complain about the disruption.

Amazingly I had slept on the way back from Singapore, thanks in part to my pill. Once I had bathed and sorted myself out I felt fine, except of course for the sick feeling waiting for the Olympic result. Clearly there was nothing else I could do about that now, so I concentrated on the G8.

I had decided to do it differently this year. I was in a weaker position internally following the election. Gordon and his folk were agitating. The media were kicking my backside more or less incessantly. I had been forced into talking about the transition to a new leader when doing so was both a little humiliating and weakening.

By then, however, I had reached a new stage of development within myself. I was not happy – the pressure was really tough – but I was mentally very strong. I would give it two years minimum. That was at least the most consistent I could be with my pledge to serve a full term – not a fulfilment of it, obviously, but not so flagrant a breach as to be a real betrayal of trust. If Gordon and I had been working in tandem on an agreed agenda, I might have gone before that, as I have said; but on the assumption it was still difficult, I would continue at least two years.

If those in the party or the media were to go for me and get me out forcibly before then, there would be a bloodbath. And prior to that point, I was going to do what I thought was right. I had been operating on that principle for the past few years and it was going to continue like that. I wasn’t going to back down. Simple as that. I was going to take the risks of failure rather than let fear of failure diminish the scale of ambition. And I wasn’t going to waste a moment or set my sights low. Hence the different G8 agenda.

Usually, the G8 focused on the issue of the day and, traditionally, was always about the world economy. Its membership represented historical rather than present economic and political power. Gradually we started to involve others informally, something we began at the G8 in Birmingham in 1998.

This time I took it on to a whole new level. First, I invited five nations – China, India, Brazil, South Africa and Mexico – for more or less the whole summit, supplemented by various African and Arab leaders. G8+5 became a new format that enabled the largest global players – or most of them – to gather, albeit informally, at the only non-regional global political meeting outside a formal UN or WTO structure.

Second, I decided to go for an ambitious set of outcomes. I defined the objectives as twofold: get a comprehensive package of support and partnership agreed for Africa; and at least establish the principle of a new global deal on climate change – to include the US and China – to follow the expiration of the Kyoto Protocol in 2012. The Africa package was based on the Commission for Africa that I had set up back in 2004 at the instigation of Bob Geldof.

Bob. What can I say about Bob? He can drive you completely nuts. He can talk forever. He can speak to world leaders like they were errant schoolkids. Personally I didn’t mind that – but I was the exception, believe me. Bob can be rather unreasonable in his persistence, actually manic about it. However, he has two enormous saving graces: he is smart, and he is brave. He is smart enough to know when to stop short of provoking catastrophe or making an unreasonable demand non-negotiable. He is brave because he isn’t one of your fair-weather, ‘don’t sully me with compromise’, ‘now you’re not popular I don’t want to associate with you’ types of which the arts world is inordinately full. He and Bono are both genuinely committed, properly knowledgeable and ultimately care more about getting things done than about protecting their egos.

The Africa Commission was staffed by high-quality people. The make-up was balanced but serious, the African members in particular being savvy, clear-minded and determined to demonstrate the central thesis of the report: in the end Africa should sort out Africa. They were in the classic ‘hand up, not handout’ mode. Yes, we needed increased aid, but the purpose was to help get Africa on its own feet, with no rubbish about not being able to govern because of the wicked colonial past. My view on Africa had always been essential third-way stuff: we need a partnership between the developed and undeveloped world, not a donor–recipient relationship. Governance and corruption were as big a problem as debt and aid. Conflict resolution was central. In other words, the hard and the soft. Though the Western citizen felt genuinely sorry for the plight of the Africans, they had also somewhat come to fear it was a hopeless situation. Giving money was a moral imperative, but there was little real belief in it delivering the outcome, which in turn led to ‘donor fatigue’. This was something Bob and Bono knew instinctively, and if they hadn’t, their first meeting with George Bush would have put them right.

I knew Bono would be an important person to get to see George. Bono could have been a president or prime minister standing on his head. He had an absolutely natural gift for politicking, was great with people, very smart and an inspirational speaker. I spent a long time wondering what made him so good at what he did. I finally decided that, apart from hard work, he had that characteristic I saw in every truly successful person I ever met: he is motivated by an abundant desire to carry on improving, never really content or relaxed. In the right way and under control, that motivation also imparts a certain humility. I knew he would work George well, and with none of the prissy disdain of most of his ilk.

George was, truth be told, anxious about my G8 agenda. He never loved summits, even in fact distrusted them. He felt their pressure, disliked the inevitable focus on America ‘not doing enough’ and resented the hypocrisy that marked and occasionally defined them. I had to use a lot of my capital with him – which was nonetheless considerable – to get him to agree the agenda and go with it.

He was very tough on Africa and governance, rightly, and he had after all doubled aid to Africa, and was sceptical about climate change. George is a real conservative, and has the qualities I admire in conservatives and also those, politically, that make me not one myself. One of these qualities is that if a great public lather is whipped up over something, the first instinct of conservatives is to resist it – and they are often right to do so. They don’t come to a viewpoint because everyone tells them they should.

This attitude is the reason that while people might say they don’t like conservative politicians, they still vote for them. People tend to go with the crowd; but in an odd sort of way, they respect a leader who is prepared to defy the crowd. Indeed, if he or she is not prepared to do so, the public suspect he or she is not a proper leader. It’s weird the way it works, but there it is. Progressive politicians often don’t get this. They prefer to be with the tide of thinking, and get confused when the public say in an opinion poll that they believe X, only to vote Y at the ballot box.

I always remember in the 1983 election fighting on the then Labour policy of withdrawal from the European Economic Community. I didn’t support it myself and had told my selection committee as much; but out on the campaign trail as a new candidate, trying to keep my nose clean, I stood on the party platform. The opinion polls showed big majorities in favour of withdrawal, especially among Labour supporters. In a strong Labour seat, it should have been a sure-fire vote winner. It wasn’t. Much to my consternation, I was advocating a policy that not only was one I did not believe in, but neither did my natural supporters. In the end they accepted the Conservative argument that it was just not practical to get out of Europe. Interestingly, the party positions later reversed; but the public reaction was the same. No party in Britain will win an outright majority on an anti-EU platform today unless the public go daft, and by and large they don’t.

Anyway, that is to digress. The point is that when all the world says climate change threatens the planet, the natural reaction for people like George is to reply: ‘So you say, but I’m not convinced.’ The more strident the claim, the more resistant they become.

At the Genoa G8 in 2001 – his first – we had a discussion on climate change. The Belgians at that time had the EU presidency, and so they were also at the G8 table. The then Belgian prime minister, Guy Verhofstadt, is a nice guy and bright, but very Brussels. Kyoto had been agreed and Bill Clinton had signed it, but the US Senate had voted 98–0 against ratification. On assuming office, George had flatly dissed the whole thing. Later, I think he knew he had made a tactical error. The truth is that whatever he said, at that moment and in those circumstances there was no way Congress was going to pass it. He could have taken a low-key position. Instead, as is his wont, he said what he thought, which was that he wasn’t convinced, either by Kyoto or actually by the basic argument about the changing of the climate. He added that there was no way America could possibly meet the Kyoto targets without doing immense damage to its economy, and he was just not going to do that.

After George had finished, Guy said he understood what George was saying, but really the American problem had a very simple solution, one that would be good for the world, but also immensely beneficial for the inner well-being of the American people: they could cut their emissions significantly if they doubled gasoline prices by raising the taxes on it. Such an action would be bold, it would help wean the American people off their obsession with the motor car, and earn George the high approval of international political opinion, not least in Belgium.

George had arrived bang on time for this first discussion and had not fully said hello to all the participants. He didn’t know or recognise Guy, whose advice he listened to with considerable astonishment.

He then turned to me and whispered, ‘Who is this guy?’

‘He is the prime minister of Belgium,’ I said.

‘Belgium?’ George said, clearly aghast at the possible full extent of his stupidity. ‘Belgium is not part of the G8.’

‘No,’ I said, ‘but he is here as the president of Europe.’

‘You got the Belgians running Europe?’ He shook his head, now aghast at our stupidity.

So to describe George as a sceptic on climate change would be an understatement. As time progressed he shifted his thinking, but did so too slowly – a quality of conservatives I don’t admire – and as much because he could see American dependence on carbon was putting their future into the hands of unstable and treacherous parts of the world. Once he had moved, he spent more on developing clean fuel than any previous administration. Actually, he also trebled aid to Africa. But as ever, because the world had come to have a fixed view of him, he got no credit.

I once asked one of my backbench MPs why he hated George so much. This had been one of those embarrassing occasions that even cropped up with some of my close friends, who would ask in private what I really thought of George Bush. I would say I really liked him. It never failed to produce complete incomprehension. When I asked my backbencher why he hated him so much, he said, ‘Just do. Can’t explain it fully, but just do.’ I then asked if it would make any difference if he turned out to be right. ‘In that case I think I would hate him even more,’ he replied.