BLAIRTHE UNREADY The PM’s scant attention to detail bemused his ambassador. At the height of the Lewinsky sex scandal, he asked Meyer: ‘ What exactly is Clinton meant to have done?’
MEYER’S book gives many examples of Tony Blair’s preference for ‘vision’ and rhetoric over hard detail. Here, we reveal some remarkable snapshots of the Premier at work — starting in July 2001, when President Bush and his wife Laura came to spend the night at Chequers, Blair’s country retreat in Buckinghamshire .. .
THE BUSHES left for Chequers by helicopter. There were to be talks in the afternoon, followed by a private dinner for the Blairs and Bushes. Rumour has it that Cherie took the opportunity to berate the President over his support for capital punishment. If true, at some later point Bush received the other barrel of Cherie’s shotgun. He told me just before I left Washington that Cherie once had a go at him for the U.S. rejecting the International Criminal Court.
I arrived at Chequers just before the Bushes. I found an anxious Blair with his foreign policy advisers John Sawers and chief of staff Jonathan Powell. He appeared to express relief at my arrival.
‘ Where have the Americans got to on missile defences? And what do I say?’ he asked me urgently.
I was baffled. Missile defences was one of the top issues of the moment.
Twenty-four hours previously, I had sent No10 the latest in a series of reports on just these questions. ‘Why do I bother?’ I thought to myself.
THERE had been a strikingly similar incident in
the autumn of 1998, when Blair had gone to New
York as Bill Clinton’s presidency faced disaster
over the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal. No10,
says Meyer, was ‘ desperately concerned’ about
his fate of their White House ally — yet Blair was
to reveal extraordinary ignorance of what was
happening in America. THE Republican- dominated Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives voted to release the videotape of testimony Clinton had given on the Lewinsky business to a Grand Jury.
It would be broadcast on September 21, the day Tony Blair was coming to New York for the annual opening of the UN General Assembly.
This was a calculated partisan move intended to drive Clinton from office. I told Blair that his visit would coincide with a day of high drama for the United States.
There was much anxiety in the White House. One of my best friends on Capitol Hill phoned to say he had seen the tape. ‘It’s horrible,’ he said.
But then I called my wife Catherine in Washington, who was watching Clinton’s interrogation on television. ‘He’s doing pretty well,’ she said. ‘If it goes on like this, he will be fine.’
She was right. Clinton’s testimony was not the nail in his coffin that the Republicans had hoped it would be. On the contrary, most Americans took a dimmer view of Republican partisan vengefulness than they did of Clinton’s priapism.
By lunch, everybody knew the crisis had passed and that Clinton would survive. At the end of the afternoon, the British and American teams went off for a drink.
The Americans were almost light-headed after surviving another near- death experience. The Blairs and Clintons huddled together in a corner, the two couples intimate and alone.
That evening, I accompanied the Prime Minister to Kennedy Airport in the official limo. To my astonishment, Blair asked: ‘ What exactly is the charge against Clinton? I mean, what is he supposed to have done?’
‘Bloody hell,’ I thought to myself, ‘ have you read nothing of what I’ve sent you?’ (I had been instructed by Downing Street to send as much as possible on Clinton’s fate, because of the Prime Minister’s intense interest.)
So I began once again to explain the dreary litany of charges against Clinton, his rebuttals, the risk of impeachment, when is sex not sex, and so on.
I tried to keep the sordid tale short and simple. But I could see that the Prime Minister had lost interest well before I had finished. AFTER Blair’s first official visit to Washington in February 1998, when he had given such strong public support to a Lewinsky- embattled Clinton, Jim Steinberg, Clinton’s Deputy National Security Adviser, came up to me and said: ‘We owe you big time.’
London asked me how we should cash the cheque. I said we had three priorities: ‘Northern Ireland, Northern Ireland and Northern Ireland.’
Clinton certainly helped us towards the Good Friday agreement, but his debt was never repaid in full, in part because Blair never pressed him hard enough.
As a result, the innate tilt of the White House towards Irish-America, and No10’s inability or unwillingness to match the implacability of the Sinn Fein negotiators, contributed to a peace deal which posed almost as many questions as it was meant to answer.
MEYER reveals another aftereffect of the Lewinsky scandal,
which again exposed Blair’s
shortcomings as a statesman. AT THE end of 1998, Clinton’s annus horribilis, he was like Muhammad Ali in his epic contest with Joe Frazier, bobbing, weaving and ducking, taking terrible punishment on the ropes, but finally administering the knockout blow to his adversaries.
It was not for nothing that he was known as ‘ Slick Willy’ or the ‘ Comeback Kid’. Impeachment proceedings in the following year petered out in a political humiliation to those who had instigated them.
All of this, while paying tribute to Clinton’s phenomenal resilience, in the end knocked much of the stuffing out of him and his administration. Caution became the order of the day, as Blair learnt to his cost. It provoked a major dispute with Clinton.
At the beginning of 1999, the Serb population of what had once been Yugoslavia, led by Slobodan Milosevic, embarked on a policy of ethnically cleansing the Albanian enclave of Kosovo.
The Americans decided that the Serbs would be brought to heel through a Nato bombing campaign. But by the time Blair visited Washington for a Nato summit in April 1999, the bombs did not seem to be working. Albanian Kosovars were still being massacred.
In London the British government had taken an aggressive position and sought to occupy the moral high ground. The tone was set by Blair.
The challenge, he said, was to stop genocide. The international community had to rise to the occasion.
British newspapers were briefed belligerently. This fed into the American press.
With a five- hour time difference, British ministers were all over U.S. television screens as Americans were having their breakfast. There were signs of irritation in Washington that Blair was articulating the Nato case better than Clinton.
The worry for Blair and his military planners was what would happen if the air campaign failed to bring Milosevic to heel. They wanted a contingency plan for using ground troops to dislodge the Serbs, and a lot of this thinking started appearing in British newspapers on the eve of the summit.
I had warned London that the administration was setting its face against calls for a ground attack. Blair arrived in Washington out on a limb.
The last thing that the White House wanted was for the issue to hijack the Nato meeting, so putting the spotlight on administration hesitations. It was decided that Blair should meet the President to try to bridge the gap.
The two teams sat down in the small upstairs sitting room in the President’s private White House quarters, and the Prime Minister made his case.
His most telling point was that, to avoid a war on the ground, with possibly heavy casualties, you had to be seen by Milosevic to be preparing for one.
The American team were unmoved. Clinton did not say much. He sat there, chewing an unlit cigar, while his officials deployed the counterarguments: it would undermine the credibility of the air war if it became known that preparations were in hand for a ground assault, and would require calling up U. S. reservists, which would not be good politically.
After a series of sterile exchanges, Clinton took Blair away for a private talk. It cannot have been a reassuring one.
The next morning, Blair and I travelled to Chicago, where he was giving a major speech. All day, he worried ceaselessly whether Clinton would abandon him on the end of his branch.
I had little reassurance to offer. I had warned him.
By the end of the visit, some kind of deal was patched up that was supposed to lead to private and deniable exchanges between No10 and the White House about contingency planning. But nothing came of it.
BRITISH newspapers continued to criticise Clinton for his caution, some of the time on the basis of unattributable briefing from government sources. Jim Steinberg, the Deputy National Security Adviser, called me in high dudgeon. This was followed by Clinton himself in an explosive phone call to Blair, in which he accused Alastair Campbell of briefing against him.
The whole episode fascinated me. Blair should have known before arriving that planning for a ground war in Kosovo was going to be a tough sell. Yet Clinton’s refusal to buy seemed to have come as a shock. Blair’s anxiety was otherwise inexplicable in its intensity.
I began to wonder to what extent his bold, admirable stance on Kosovo and genocide had been thought through. BLAIR had taken something of a gamble in cultivating Vladimir Putin very early on, before he was elected President of Russia. By 2001, Blair had probably had more meetings with Putin than any Western leader. He had become a bit of an expert on him.
At his very first summit with George Bush, Blair told Bush the advent of Putin marked an historic opportunity to bind Russia to the West and bury for good the old Cold War hostilities.
Bush and his National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, an old Soviet expert, were interested. Bush thought Putin ‘one cold dude’. That view would change later in the year.
Today, Blair’s historic opportunity, even if it existed, seems to have slipped through his and everyone else’s fingers. Putin’s priorities after the collapse of communism have been to restore the authority of the state and Russia’s position in the world.
Relations with the West matter to the Kremlin only in so far as they serve these strategic goals. The historic opportunity, as No10 saw it, for implanting democracy and Western values in Russia, was for many Russians a moment of deep national humiliation.
But in any case, other than public exhortation there seemed to be no plan for turning this so- called opportunity into reality. From time to time records of meetings and conversations between Blair and Putin would pass across my desk in Washington.
They were notably thin in content, with Putin apparently doing most of the talking. It had the look of a trophy relationship. CLINTON was in his first year as President, and Blair had come to Washington to talk politics with the victorious Democrats.
It had just been announced that I was to become press secretary to the British Prime Minister, John Major.
I fixed a lunch for Blair with highpowered Democrat consultants and advisers in a private room at the Four Seasons Hotel in Georgetown.
They had played big roles in Clinton’s victory. They were cock-ahoop. They hoped to get insights from Tony Blair into how the Labour Party intended to plot a similar course to election victory.
Blair, however, was hesitant and banal. At the time he was Opposition spokesman on home affairs. This was the first occasion I heard the slogan — the quintessence of New Labour — ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’.
Slogans were about as far as Blair got that day. He kept eyeing me nervously. I have always wondered if his reticence was unformed thinking, or reflected concern that I would spill the beans to John Major.
If the latter, he had not yet grasped that civil servants like me had to be politically neutral, even in the job of Prime Minister’s press secretary. AS THESE Third Way meetings reached out to embrace an everwider circle of political leaders with vague social- democratic leanings, I could not get out of my head that song by the Bonzo Dog Doo- Dah Band, in which Vivian Stanshall recites an endless litany of world figures, dead and alive.
Clinton and Blair were too glib. The rhetoric was fine, but there simply was not enough political ballast.
As I sat there, fighting off sleep in the front row, it became ever clearer that the Third Way was less a coherent philosophy of government, more a tactic for winning elections.
ADAPTED and abridged from DC Confidential by Christopher Meyer, published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson on November 10 at £20. © Christopher Meyer 2005. To order a copy for £16 (inc p&p, please add £1.60 for overseas p&p), call 01903 828503 quoting JA006.