Blair Unbound by Anthony Seldon

Author:Anthony Seldon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon and Schuster

13

General Election, 2005

Blair had pulled himself back from the brink, and now had to put himself at the head of the radical reforming government he had always wanted to lead. For the third term to be more successful than the first two, he believed he needed to win the General Election in his own right. He alone had to triumph. A victory in league with Brown, as in 1997 and 2001, would not suffice. The ‘dual premiership’, in so far as it had ever existed, had to be in the past. He needed a manifesto based on his own ideas, and he needed a post-election reshuffle lodging Blairite reformers in all the key Cabinet posts and with a remodelled government structure. Encouraged by the Number 10 ‘ultras’, Blair pushed forward, but was still not overly confident of success.

The manifesto

‘Tony Blair likes a competition over ideas. It helps him to choose the best,’ said one involved in creating Labour’s manifesto. 1 Blair had charged Alan Milburn with preparing the document, and he set to work to weld Number 10 into an efficient policy operation while ensuring that the Labour Party was in a fit state to fight the election. ‘I was very concerned by the dysfunctionality of the relationship between Number 10, the government and the Labour Party, and I saw my job as binding them in,’ Milburn remarked. 2 A series of meetings were organised between Secretaries of State and Blair, as well as arranging special Cabinets, ensuring that the ideas flowed and that ministers were all onside. Based in the Cabinet Office, Milburn also set up an office within Number 10, at the top of the back stairs, 3 keen to be within close proximity to the centre of power.

Milburn was more than disconcerted, however, when he discovered that Blair had asked John Birt to organise his own policy operation. Birt believed that his own task was to work alongside Turnbull to develop the third-term agenda, in league with the strategy and policy units, and that Milburn had been brought in to work solely on election planning. 4 It soon became evident that these two forceful characters were not going to work harmoniously together. Their spats became common knowledge throughout the building. 5 ‘From their very first meeting that autumn it was obvious that they couldn’t stand each other: it was even more about alpha-male behaviour than disagreements over policy,’ said one official. 6 By Christmas 2004, it reached crisis point. Birt was in despair, believing that the manifesto was thin, and that Blair ran the risk of repeating the errors of the second term, which he characterised as reactive, short-termist and Treasury-driven. ‘We’re going to get ourselves in exactly the same mess in the third term if we don’t get this sorted out now,’ he would say regularly. 7 Milburn wanted a ‘rich’ manifesto that chimed with what Blair really wanted. What we need is new policy, new policy, new policy,’ he declared. 8 He was particularly concerned

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