Exposing the secrets of New Labour under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown was not for the faint-hearted, journalist and author Andrew Rawnsley tells MARK HENNESSY, London Editor
FOLLOWING HIS FIRST book on the Labour years in power, Servants of the People, journalist and author Andrew Rawnsley was subjected to a torrent of abuse from those left furious by the exposure. So far, though, Servants of the People has stood the test of time and its narrative tends to be confirmed each time retiring Labour figures put pen to paper to record their own versions of history.
Now, with his second book on the subject, The End of the Party, Rawnsley has met with an even more hysterical reaction, including, notably, former deputy leader John Prescott's incandescent display on Newsnight recently.
“The reaction from Number 10 was ferocious,” says Rawnsley as his latest book – the product of 20 years of study and 14 months of writing – steadily climbs the bestseller lists.
In summary, The End of the Partyclaims to reveal much about the persistent efforts of Gordon Brown to remove Tony Blair as prime minister, and about the dysfunctionality at the heart of New Labour. Labour's reaction, says Rawnsley, has been "additionally ferocious because we are in the run-up to an election and they are very jumpy", particularly about allegations that Brown has bullied staff and colleagues. The bullying allegations were fuelled by the brief arrival in the spotlight of the National Bullying Helpline's Christine Pratt, who claimed that some Number 10 staff had contacted her organisation in need of support.
“I deliberately went nowhere near that. She came out of nowhere. I had never heard of her. The lesson I took from that was that she was spat out in one 24-hour news cycle,” says Rawnsley.
Within a day, Pratt was in full-scale retreat, and she went in search of help from celebrity PR guru Max Clifford. Since then, little has been heard from her.
“It reminds you that is still a formidable machine when it gets going, even after all these years in office, quite formidable,” says Rawnsley, who is chief political commentator of the Observer. “If you are going to confront it, as I had to, you have to be extremely sure of your ground because they will eat you up. But if you are sure of your ground, then you are okay. Mrs Pratt had been and gone within 24 hours, poor thing. As this was happening, I was getting lots of private messages from ministers and civil servants, including members of the Cabinet, saying: ‘We all know you are right, you need to stand firm on this. And I am sure that you will.’ ”
In truth, one of the core elements of the book – that Brown can be a difficult man to work for, occasionally vicious and liable to let close allies be even more vicious on his behalf – is not news. However, the scale of the paranoia displayed by the prime minister in Rawnsley’s account is startling.
For example, he believed for years, according to Rawnsley, that the Blairs had deliberately left their baby Leo’s pram visible on the stairs of 11 Downing Street in order to goad him about the death of his daughter, Jennifer, in 2001.
Rawnsley is blessed with superb sources, but it must be said that he was regarded as a supporter of Blair during his time in office in a Westminster that was often broken up into “Blairite” and “Brownite” camps.
However, Rawnsley does not spare Blair over Iraq, even if he is understanding in his belief that Blair’s core motivation was “noble”, to remove Saddam Hussein as a vicious dictator who posed a threat to the world.
“On the question of Blair’s sincerity, my conclusion is that he did not lie about what he believed,” Rawnsley says. “He was sincere in his belief that Saddam was a threat, but where he did lie was in the strength of the evidence for that belief. It was presented to the public and to parliament as absolutely rock-solid intelligence that this guy was such a threat that we had to take military action against him.”
In fact, as we now know, Blair had virtually no solid evidence. The British had six intelligence sources on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD), of which only two were subsequently found to be reliable, both of whom reported that Saddam was not an imminent threat. However, the Russians and the French – who did not support the war – had also believed that the Iraqi president had WMD and the ambition to develop more if he could get the chance.
“ Stephen Wall said to me that Blair didn’t probe the intelligence because he didn’t want to find out how flaky it was,” says Rawnsley. “He had already arrived at his conclusion about Saddam and was working backwards to support his case.”
The legacy of New Labour’s first term, when Blair and Brown would “wrestle themselves into a compromise” over months on key issues, with scarcely a nod in the direction of the cabinet, cost the UK dear when collective judgments about Iraq might have been more sober.
“Tony Blair was always petrified about exposing just how bad his relationship with Brown was to the cabinet,” says Rawnsley. “There were other talented people in that cabinet, but, partly, after 18 years in opposition, at least initially, a lot of these members of the cabinet were just so pleased to be in government after so long that they did not assert themselves. They just sort of took it for granted that you didn’t have cabinet in the old way, that cabinet wasn’t the forum where you made the decisions, that cabinet was about deciding the presentation of issues, rather than the issues themselves.”
The rivalry had “a paralysing effect on Whitehall, in two ways. When they were in a row, and these rows could go on for weeks, nothing could be decided, because everything resided with them. Civil servants had to think: ‘Whose side do I take? Do I take Tony’s side, or Gordon’s side?’ The safest thing is to do nothing. Ministers were the same. If they do what Tony wants, Gordon’s people may kill them, and vice-versa. It was very damaging.”
Following the sudden death of the then party leader, John Smith, in 1994, Blair and Brown agreed that Blair would become leader and then prime minister, while Brown would command economic policy from the treasury.Rawnsley believes that Blair, who hates confrontation, conceded too much to the Scot. He could have beaten him in a party election, thus owing him nothing. Instead, he created an ever more angry partner-in-chief.
“One of the things that has come out is just how venomous many of the relationships have been,” says Rawnsley. “It has been soap- operatic and at times the feuding has been pretty hysterical, with this really tortured relationship between Blair, Brown and Peter Mandelson. I described it at one point like a cross between The Simpsons and The Sopranos. It is like a family, and that is why psychology and their relationship matters more, probably, than in any other government that I can think of, certainly in Britain.”
Brown is, Rawnsley believes, a complex individual: “People have always spoken about the two sides to . There is the ‘bad’ Brown who has surrounded himself with thuggish acolytes who carry out ‘hit jobs’ in the newspapers against anybody who has crossed him.
“But there is also the ‘good’ Gordon who has really idealistic ambitions for this country and the world, who stepped up to the plate impressively during the financial crisis. He is passionate about issues like global poverty. Those two people co-exist in the same head.”
Like most families, New Labour fought and made up. Brown brought back Mandelson – whose hand “he saw, wrongly in most cases, behind everything that went wrong for him” – from Brussels when his administration was struggling in 2008. Less than a year later, in June 2009, when it seemed for some hours that James Purnell’s cabinet resignation would spark a coup, Brown turned for rescue to Blair, the man he had wanted out of Number 10.
“Who is one of the first people that Gordon Brown rings?” asks Rawnsley. “It is the self-same Tony Blair. and Brown pleads to him: ‘Will you talk to Blairite ministers and persuade them not to resign?’ And Tony Blair does that for him, even though the irony is not lost on him that Gordon Brown is now coming to him for help.”
Rawnsley, who interviewed hundreds of people for his book, adds that “when their New Labour project is in mortal danger, they somehow find a way of getting on top of all that personal poison and have some sort of reconciliation and pulling together. Although it is hypocritically bogus for them to present to the public that they are all very, very good friends, there is also something politically impressive in the way that they can put aside the personal venom and history between them.”
Sadly, however, the history of New Labour, despite considerable achievements, is one of opportunities missed and of roads that would have been better left untravelled, according to Rawnsley. “In the early period were greater than the sum of their parts. They achieved more together than they could have done individually. Then this perpetual struggle between them, a lot of which was rooted in personal ambition, became so consuming that it did damage the government. Then they were less than their parts.”
The End of the Party: The Rise and Fall of New Labour, by Andrew Rawnsley, is published by Viking, £25
'They're out to get me': Rawnsley's revelations
In November 2003, Tony Blair was so depressed by the chaos in post-invasion Iraq that he told Gordon Brown he would quit the
following summer, a promise he reneged on. Blair, who realised late that the Americans had not planned properly for the aftermath, often tried to get US president George Bush to focus on the crisis, but did not succeed. Furious, Brown railed at Blair in No 10: "Gordon was just losing it. He was behaving like a belligerent teenager. Just standing in the office shouting: When are you going to f**king go? a witness told Rawnsley.
Brown had to be warned by the cabinet secretary, Gus O'Donnell, about his behaviour towards staff – though the civil servant has since said that he simply urged Brown to praise people to get the best from them.
Told by one official that UK revenue and customs had lost computer discs holding confidential details of 20 million people, Brown leapt across the room and grabbed his lapels, shouting: "They're out to get me."
Administration in the early days of Brown in Number 10 was so poor that embassies could not find out if Brown would meet their country's leaders during London visits, or dates got mixed up.
