A Journey_ My Political Life Part 30

As with any such issue, what happens is that the spotlight suddenly s.h.i.+nes in a corner that has lain dark for ages. That's fair enough; but what then occurs is that a complete ex post facto ex post facto att.i.tude is imposed on it, so that you end up with a ludicrously exaggerated sense of wrongdoing. So when the foreign offenders 'scandal' is uncovered, it leads the news and this is perfectly sensible; but then because the media focus is so intense, every detail becomes another headline as if the politician in charge, in this case Charles, has literally been doing nothing else for months on end and is therefore incompetent in not having sorted it all. Then, for sure, someone pops up and says: Ooh, I warned them all about this (usually an oblique reference in paragraph 193 of some memo), and then the frenzy develops into hysteria. att.i.tude is imposed on it, so that you end up with a ludicrously exaggerated sense of wrongdoing. So when the foreign offenders 'scandal' is uncovered, it leads the news and this is perfectly sensible; but then because the media focus is so intense, every detail becomes another headline as if the politician in charge, in this case Charles, has literally been doing nothing else for months on end and is therefore incompetent in not having sorted it all. Then, for sure, someone pops up and says: Ooh, I warned them all about this (usually an oblique reference in paragraph 193 of some memo), and then the frenzy develops into hysteria.

Anyway, you have to go through it, and by the end I became quite deft at dealing with these types of furore. Basically you have to get on top of the detail quick, and then grind people down with fact, context, reb.u.t.tal, explanation and the art of blinding with science.

And if all that wasn't enough, then came John Prescott and news of an affair with his diary secretary, Tracey Temple.

It's a strange thing, politics and s.e.x. People have often said to me that power is a kind of aphrodisiac, and so women politics still being male-dominated would come on to politicians in a way they would never dream of with anyone else. I suppose it must be true since, let's face it, most politicians are definitely on the debit side of the good-looks ledger. You could say the same about ugly billionaires with gorgeous women. What do they see in them? It's pretty obvious.

What is interesting is why politicians take the risk. My theory is that it's precisely because of the supreme self-control you have to exercise to be at the top. Politicians live with pressure. They have to be immensely controlled to get anywhere, watch what they say and do; and behave. And your free-bird instincts want to spring you from that prison of self-control. Then there is the moment of encounter, so exciting, so naughty, so lacking in self-control. Suddenly you are transported out of your world of intrigue and issues and endless machinations and the serious piled on the serious, and just put on a remote desert island of pleasure, out of it all, released, carefree. You become a different person, if only for an instant, until returned back to reality.

Which is not by way of an excuse, incidentally. It's very stupid to put yourself in that position; and irresponsible; and on discovery it can cause immense hurt to those around you. Here is where the politician becomes extraordinarily, incomprehensibly naive. He could choose a range of safe options. No, hang on, there are no safe options. But he could choose safer options. He doesn't. He is open to the first person who appears to take an interest, to fancy him genuinely (vanity), to like him as a human being, and to anyone who, above all, doesn't think, act or talk like a fellow politician.

The thing about politics is that it is at a certain level very, very boring. The issues are self-evidently not they are huge and are usually the reason for entering the political world but somehow the hugeness can get so easily lost in the habitat in which those issues live. Day by day, meeting by meeting, it can be tedious. Occasionally you meet quite exceptional and inspirational people and I was lucky beyond any reasonable expectation in the people I had working near me, who were on the whole really fun people, as well as being good at what they did. Relations in my office and my close a.s.sociations among MPs and ministers were always marked with laughter, a certain amused disdain for the absurdities of political life and a definite joie de vivre joie de vivre. To the extent I could choose, I would choose the optimistic and upbeat variety of our species to be around me.

But out in the jungle, quite apart from the man-eating beasts, there was the prospect of the swamp, of frustrating bureaucracy, weird and argumentative types, manic media and groundhog-day meetings.

For lots of my fellow politicians, the joie de vivre joie de vivre part was distinctly lacking, and the swamp was mostly what they experienced. I totally understood the desire to escape. And it's nothing really to do with how happy or otherwise your marriage is. It's an explosion of irresponsibility in an otherwise responsible life. Unfortunately, like all such explosions, it has consequences. part was distinctly lacking, and the swamp was mostly what they experienced. I totally understood the desire to escape. And it's nothing really to do with how happy or otherwise your marriage is. It's an explosion of irresponsibility in an otherwise responsible life. Unfortunately, like all such explosions, it has consequences.

I was in a meeting with a foreign visitor when Gus O'Donnell, who had taken over from Andrew Turnbull as Cabinet Secretary, asked to see me urgently with Jonathan Powell. This was never going to be good news. I must say, however, I antic.i.p.ated something more run-of-the-mill than to be told about John Prescott and Tracey.

At first, and I fear this was an error, I was inclined to treat it less gravely than I should. I was princ.i.p.ally sorry for him, for his wife Pauline above all, and also for Tracey. What those who are the 'telling' party in any such scandal never realise is that they are about to define themselves forever. The politician can recover, at least partially; the telling party can't. They are a one-story footnote. Their only choice is either to make a living from it or to perish with it. The first is demeaning and transient; the second is at least quieter, but nonetheless the fact remains it's all anyone ever recognises them for. No amount of money can adequately compensate for that. In any event, it was clear Tracey didn't do it for money and the story had emerged as much by mishap as malice.

From then on, it was a torrid time, complicated by the fact that since she was an employee, there was a further genuine point of criticism other than the obvious. I was determined not to have John go, however. He was a stalwart in the party, and had, on the whole, been loyal and supportive and at times very brave. I knew that for him to have become deputy prime minister was an achievement of which he was inordinately and rightly proud. To have dismissed him over what was, in the end, a silly s.e.x scandal would have been to have finished his career in a manner that was brutally ungrateful for all the service he had given.

The media finally had him full square within their sights, sat on the wall like a watermelon in target practice. John had never hidden his loathing for them. They had never hidden their contempt for him. Now, and pretty much until the day he left, they kept up a barrage, sometimes with the bazooka of outrage, sometimes with the blowpipe of ridicule, but always with a merciless delight in destruction.

The battering had one other unfortunate consequence for me. In purely selfish terms it would have been better to fire him, I knew that. It would have given the media their scalp. It would have allowed some change at the top, and even if that had turned into a TB/GB contest, it would have served to flush people out. But I just couldn't bring myself to do it. Pauline was determined that he stay, in my view rightly (she always had far more about her than anyone ever thought). She wasn't going to have him defined by the affair, if you can call it that. Also, sensible as she was, she knew what it meant and what it didn't. She felt betrayed but not abandoned; and therefore angry rather than distraught. I felt that I should do right by her as well. So he stayed.

But the unpleasantness of the onslaught got to John. From that moment on, there was no pleasure in staying. There was defiance; but no joy. He wanted out; but it was hard for him to go without me going too. Slowly, and then more insistently, his desire to leave became his belief it was time to change leaders.h.i.+p. There were many other factors of course. This one was not insignificant.

It was the oddest of periods. The reform programme was buzzing along, I felt on top form on the issues, but around me was a kind of sustained mayhem of scandal and controversy. In my eyrie high in the trees, with my soulmates, we could replenish mind and body before venturing back out into the undergrowth below; and we cleared our way through it with as good a temper and will as we could muster. But if it felt like we were under siege, that's because we were.

It tripped me into error at times as well. Following the local elections of May 2006, which were bad but frankly could have been much worse, I decided to reshuffle the Cabinet. There's a kind of convention that it should be done every year. It's clear that governments need refres.h.i.+ng and there is a need to let new blood through. Also, a prime minister or president is always engaged in a kind of negotiation over the state of their party that requires people's ambitions to be a.s.suaged. Some ambitions are reasonable, some are not, but they are wholly reasonable to those who have them. If you don't promote someone, after a time they resent you. If you promote them, you put someone else out, and then that person resents you. You look for an elaborate index of methods to keep the offloaded onside, but let me tell you from experience: it never works. The only thing that determines their loyalty from that moment on is their character. The good behave; the bad don't. Unless you give them something that really is spectacular as an alternative to being a minister, then they aren't fooled; and, naturally, it's all played out in the media, and the impression is they've been sacked. The good characters in these circ.u.mstances tend to be a small and distinguished minority.

So, you have to reshuffle. But here's some advice: you should always promote or demote for a purpose, not for effect. With this one, I determined that we should make a splash, show we still had vigour, show I was still governing for the future. I had thought of making Charles Clarke Foreign Secretary. He would have done a great job, and probably in retrospect I should have done it, but he was mired in the wretched 'foreign offenders' business. There was also a case for keeping Jack Straw. He had done really well and was admired by his fellow foreign ministers. There was no compelling reason to move him, other than that he had been doing it for five years; but when I think about it, moving him for that reason was plain stupid. I even toyed with the idea of David Miliband, but thought that for his own sake he should remain domesticated, since that allowed him a better profile in the party.

In the end, I made a sort of 'worst of all worlds' set of decisions. Having put David in Environment, I moved Margaret Beckett from there to be Foreign Secretary. She was stunned rather than elated with the promotion. Unsurprisingly, Jack was upset at being replaced. I offered Charles Defence, which he refused foolishly, in my view and he returned to the back benches. All in all, a mess at the wrong time and with the wrong people, who I needed onside. The rest of it in fact allowed some good promotions of younger people like Douglas Alexander, James Purnell, Andy Burnham and Jim Murphy. But overall, it did little for the government and harm to me.

As if that wasn't enough, in the summer of 2006 came the Israel/Lebanon war. That event, and my reaction to it, probably did me more damage than anything since Iraq. It showed how far I had swung from the mainstream of conventional Western media wisdom and from my own people; but also how set (stuck?) in my own mode of thinking I had become.

The whole episode demonstrated the difficulty in fighting the modern, asymmetrical struggle in which we are engaged. Hezbollah launched an attack on Israel, low-level but killing several Israeli soldiers. Gaza was by this time locked down, following the Hamas takeover and expulsion of the Palestinian Authority. As the Israelis stepped up their siege of Gaza and the peace process went nowhere, Hamas fired rockets into Israeli towns. Then Hezbollah opened up a new front.

It was a quite deliberate provocation. Israel had withdrawn from Lebanon. True, the Shebaa Farms issue land taken by Israel in the 1980s and still occupied, and the theoretical reason why Hezbollah said they had to remain armed was unresolved, but the amount of land was tiny. The issue wasn't really troubling anyone and the real challenges inside Lebanon were to do with the slow and steady accretion of control by Hezbollah over the political and military structures of the country. Lebanon was a democracy. Beirut had been rebuilt since the disasters of the early 1980s. But, as all over the region, the essential underlying tensions, born of the much wider struggle, remained extant, not extinct. The country was at peace, but it was fragile, its democratic politicians under threat, several of them like Rafiq Hariri a.s.sa.s.sinated, and the influence of Syria pervasive. Such a land of beauty, history and promise; but a land that attracted to itself all the poisonous gases of a region that at its core was decaying.

Israel reacted to the provocation in the way it does. Israelis believe one thing and they believe it from their perception of experience: if provoked, do not turn the other cheek; strike back and hard. You take one eye; we will take out both. They believe any sign of weakness and their short history of nationhood, sixty years, will end.

There was no doubt who started the war. There is a familiar pattern to its unfolding. Israel is attacked. Israel strikes back. Here lies the problem. At the outset, people are with them. Behind the scenes, many even in the Middle East, anxious about Hezbollah's links to Iran and seeing them like Hamas as proxies of Iranian power, urged privately that Israel destroy Hezbollah. Western leaders who could see the same thing queued up, at the beginning, to advise Israel to stand firm and hit hard.

As the conflict began, the G8 summit at St Petersburg got under way. It was memorable for two things. There was a great 'George' moment when, not knowing the microphones were on in the meeting room, he greeted me in George-like fas.h.i.+on with 'Yo, Blair'. We proceeded to have a conversation that was recorded for posterity until I realised we were being listened to, but it was all light-hearted stuff and could have been a thousand times worse. People went nuts back home, for some reason finding it an insult to Britain. We have become something we really never used to be: chippy. Personally I didn't have the chip, so I thought the 'Yo, Blair' greeting funny. In fact, it indicated total intimacy. Of anyone I ever met at a high level in politics, he was the person least likely to be rude or offensive. He would talk to Alastair or Jonathan in a way and with an informality that most presidents of most countries would never have begun to tolerate. Alastair in particular used to josh him in a manner that probably n.o.body did, not even those in his inner circle, and I think George kind of liked it. After I left office, a group of my friends visited the White House with Leo in tow, but without me or Cherie. George happened to be there at his desk and heard they were there. He came out, showed them round, took each one into the Oval Office, had a picture and was thoroughly and completely charming. Didn't need to do it. Wasn't pushed to do it. Just did it.

So 'Yo, Blair' was a joke; but unfortunately only I got it!

Anyway, that was a pinp.r.i.c.k. The other thing was the discussion of Lebanon. What was interesting was that, behind all the usual statements and resolutions and press conferences, there was a common belief that Hezbollah had it coming, and if Israel took them out, so much the better.

Of course, what then happened is also familiar. After Israel retaliated with force, Hezbollah hit back with rockets. The inevitable visual paradigm of such a battle is: superior 'Western' force, with superior weaponry, causes devastation. Within days, the international angst transfers from the provocation to the retaliation. Suddenly Israel is the aggressor. The damage done is truly shocking. But then force employed in that way always is. The alternative is not clear. Do too little and the provokers are emboldened. In Israel, the worry was that it was all too little. In Britain, as elsewhere with the exception of the US, the reaction was: it's far too much.

By its nature, such action is not effective, if by 'effective' one means the enemy is defeated. That's the point about this modern warfare. Hezbollah were and are an urban guerrilla movement. They target civilians deliberately. Their weapons are poorer, so they kill relatively few. They a.s.sume the posture of the plucky underdogs. Israel is a government with a well-armed and well-trained army and air force. They do not target civilians. But their only ultimate weapon, in a civilian setting where the guerrilla movement is located, is deterrence. Therefore they use their force to try to deter further attacks. Inevitably, large numbers of civilians are killed. They quickly a.s.sume the mantle of oppressors.

International opinion, at first understanding the provocation, rapidly became dismayed at the nightly scenes of carnage of innocent Lebanese casualties. Dismay pretty sharply then turned to condemnation.

There then came about a choice in politics which did me real and lasting damage. European opinion quickly solidified around the demand that the Israelis should stop. Unilaterally. Even if Hezbollah continued with their rockets. US opinion was in a totally different place, with over 60 per cent of Americans supporting the Israeli action.

I felt it was wrong that there should be a unilateral cessation. It should be on both sides, and we couldn't expect Israel to stop unless the rockets stopped. But that was not how it seemed to most people. They felt we were simply indifferent to the bloodshed. I thought the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, was in a really tricky position. I knew if I were him I would regard it as impossible to stop unless Hezbollah did too; or unless they were beaten; or, which is what finally occurred, Lebanon took enough pain that Hezbollah would not feel they could do it again. It was a ghastly method of deterrence and horrible for Lebanon. But I could see it from his and Israel's position.

Underneath it all, of course, was the state of the Israel/Palestine peace process. With that stalled, all manner of bad things were going to happen. With that moving, each tunnel in a region full of dark tunnels suddenly acquired some light at the end of it. In my mind, it all came back to the same problem, of which the Israel/Arab conflict was the manifestation, not the cause. Israel/Palestine is used as a potent source of friction and war because of religious difference.

The occupation of Palestinian land may be an injustice, depending on your viewpoint, but this is a region with plenty of injustices. What transformed it into a threat to global security was that Jerusalem is sacred for Islam, the third most holy site because according to Islam the Prophet was transported there in a dream; the occupation of that land by Jews was an affront, an indignity and most of all a symbol of Islamic weakness. It invoked every dimension of Muslim victimhood from the Crusades onwards. It spoke of a religion disrespected and people oppressed because of it.

Gradually, but too gradually, with tentative steps when strong strides were required, there came to be the outline of a solution, which was really a compromise. Israel has its state; the state of Palestine comes into being. Jerusalem is divided, at least territorially. The holy sites are shared.

It would do as a solution there isn't another but getting to it has begotten all sorts of other obstacles. So a really quite simple answer has come to have a quite horrendously complex process to achieve it. The result is occasional breakthroughs, punctuated by long periods of regression or drift. When it moves forward, everything else looks better; when it doesn't, as I say, bad things happen. The conflict in Lebanon was just another example.

The war went on longer than it should. The alienation of Israel from the international community and this time international opinion, not governments became worse. As one of the few people ready to understand their point of view, I suffered accordingly.

In September 2006 I visited Beirut. I had talked constantly to the Lebanese prime minister, Fouad Siniora, throughout. He was a thoroughly decent man, but absolutely caught between dislike of Hezbollah and the impossibility of doing anything other than verbally lacerating the Israeli action. I landed at the airport in a military plane and drove in from the airport with as heavy a security detail as I had ever had. Unsurprisingly, I was not popular with many Lebanese people. But, as ever, the key political leaders understood the complexity of the situation and understood, above all, that for Hezbollah to have emerged victorious would have been disastrous for Lebanon's future. We met in his office in the old part of town and, even being preoccupied as I was with the politics, I thought how beautiful it was, how rich in the history of the region, of its religions, art and culture.

He was dignified and friendly. He had one straightforward message: there will never be peace unless Israel/Palestine is resolved. 'With it, everything is possible; without it, nothing is,' he said. I pledged again to do what I could to get the US president to refocus our efforts on it.

I met several members of the government, some Muslim, some Christian, some Druze. All were grateful that someone had come to see them. Their message was extraordinarily poignant: their country was on the brink, it had to be saved; but its fate depended on resolving the power struggle of the region as a whole. A couple of them said that their colleagues had been a.s.sa.s.sinated over the past years, almost picked off one by one, and they said, without a hint of self-pity, that this might be their fate too, but nonetheless the spirit of the people was good and would prevail in time. At our press conference there was an organised disruption, and as always, of course, that took the news.

As I sat with Siniora, I realised that my own political problem was now very acute; terminal, in fact. At points I had wondered why I didn't just cave in and condemn Israel and call for them to stop unilaterally. The Israelis would have understood it, and it would have been the proverbial safety valve for the fierce political criticism.

But I had by now come to see the entire conventional approach in dealing with this problem as itself part of the problem. And by the way, what was the problem? That was a good first question. To most people, in July 2006, looking at the news it was the Israel/Lebanon conflict. I didn't see it like that. I defined the problem as the wider struggle between the strain of religious extremism in Islam and the rest of us. To me, Lebanon was embroiled in something far bigger and more portentous than a temporary fight with Israel. Indeed, I thought the whole issue of Israel part of the broader picture.

Of course, I could see that Israel's action was at one level disproportionate. I could see the unreasonableness of certain Israeli positions. I could see the manifest injustice suffered by the Palestinians. But I had concluded that none of this got to the root of the matter, which was in this deeper, wider struggle that affected the whole of the Middle East and the religion of Islam. So what was holding peace back? The Shebaa Farms? Not seriously. A dispute about the 1967 borders or land swaps between Israelis and Palestinians? Come off it. Halfway reasonable people could find a way through these issues in a day if they wanted to if the elements operating on this wider struggle permitted them to.

To me, you can't understand Hezbollah unless you understand the role of Iran; or understand Lebanon unless you understand Syria; or understand Hamas unless you understand the role of both; or understand either country in its present state unless you understand the history not just of the region but of the religion, how it saw itself, how it had developed its own narrative, how it saw its own predicament. And here, just as in Iraq or Afghanistan, there were competing strains of modernity and atavism. As a result, the solution to me lay in neither the sole use of hard power nor the sole use of soft power but in the combination of the two.

As I explained earlier, this had been my recurrent theme from September 2001 onwards. I supported the tough military stance of the US: what else could we have done after thousands of innocent people died on September 11? When terror became the weapon of choice of al-Qaeda and Iranian-backed elements in Iraq, or of the Taliban in Afghanistan, I believed strongly we had to fight it, not yield to it.

However, I always argued that force alone could not win the struggle for us. Alongside it, there had to be an equally vigorous and determined push for peace, notably between Israel and Palestine and, for reconciliation, a reaching out across the religious and cultural divide to unite people of goodwill, whatever their faith, in an embrace of a modern, coexistent world.

The harshness of the military struggle, its inevitable mistakes and mishaps, had driven a wedge in world opinion. There were those who basically believed Bush himself was the problem, and those who thought soft power a naive distraction. Over time, the latter became distinctly overtaken by the former. An entire school of thought with consequences that reverberate, and in my view in a damaging way evolved a position that essentially said: to succeed, be the 'not Bush'. Do the opposite to him and we'll do fine. It's a dangerous and diverting myth.

I was, therefore, in a word, squeezed. But by then I felt truly uneasy compromising on it. If I had condemned Israel, it would have been more than dishonest; it would have undermined the world view I had come to hold pa.s.sionately. So I didn't, but I could feel the PLP move more or less en ma.s.se to a querulous position. People were getting it in the ear on the doorstep and were feeling they should be agreeing with the complainant, not the leader. But I had my determination to comfort me, and by and large it did (which is, I suppose, what always happens to leaders when the final hubris overwhelms them).

Once Parliament stopped sitting, there were usually a few days before we were due to begin the summer holiday. Normally I spent them down at Chequers, enjoying some thinking time and being with the family. I would sit out in my jeans and T-s.h.i.+rt, doing papers, strumming my guitar, sloping off for a run in the woods, taking my wine outside after dinner and breathing in the night air. The staff down there were friendly, and I know it sounds a bit pathetic also unchallenging, there just to help. Of course prime ministers should be challenged, but sometimes you just feel that for one evening n.o.body is going to bend your ear, n.o.body is strategising with you, n.o.body is making you rise to the occasion; n.o.body is doing anything very much, except asking what you'd like for dinner.

Somehow the human spirit always finds ways to adapt. I don't mean that having a tough time as prime minister ever remotely compares with the truly tough times many people suffer, and suffer heroically. I just mean that in a position of leaders.h.i.+p, normal human being though you are, you discover under pressure that extraordinary inner instinct to survive. It may be unpleasant, but you still have to get up in the morning, dress, eat, drink, breathe. You have to go on living. You have to find meaning in doing so. To me, by then, the only meaning was in being true to myself. I might be in a minority of one, but it would be a one I believed in.

That summer, just before we were due to go abroad, with Lebanon still in full nightmarish violence, I realised I should delay the holiday. I was mainly in Downing Street as we tried to put together the UN resolution that would end the conflict. I had been in two minds as to whether to delay. I was very reluctant ever to do so, knowing that if you weren't careful the holiday just didn't happen, and after all there were modern means of communication. In the end, I stayed in London until it was clear the resolution was going through.

By the time I boarded the plane for St Lucia I was exhausted, and looking forward to being out on a boat in the middle of a warm sea, with a warm wind at my back. It was my last summer holiday as prime minister.

TWENTY.

ENDGAME.

On the flight I reflected deeply on the politics of what happened in Lebanon and on my own reaction to it. Ruth Turner, head of government relations, had been seeing members of the PLP. These were not necessarily the uber-loyalists but the people it would be risky to lose, people like Peter Hain, John Denham and Karen Buck. They were mainstream PLP people with links to the left as well as the right of the party, and they certainly had their finger on the party pulse.

They were more frank with her than they would have been with me. They disagreed with the position on Lebanon, but that wasn't their real point. They thought my reaction indicated a profound loss of touch, a failure of instinct, a decoupling of me and public opinion that they thought dangerous, and more than that, out of character.

I had always been known as the politician with the sure touch, the one who could express the public's thoughts and therefore shape them, the one who would sniff the scent of popular opinion and follow it with a certain intuition. They felt I had lost this ability; and with it, what made me who I was. At one level, they considered the loss a disaster politically. At another level, they just couldn't comprehend it.

The difficulty I had in response gave me much pause for thought as I settled into the eight-hour flight. It wasn't that I didn't get public opinion on Lebanon, nor that I couldn't have articulated it. My difficulty was I didn't agree with it. I agreed totally that the deaths of so many innocent civilians, especially children, were completely wrong and unacceptable. The human tragedy of such action appalled me. I thought of how many families would mourn, how much bitterness would be generated, and how if you were an ordinary Lebanese caught up in this nightmare, you would just want to rage against the world.

But I also worried about the risk of a Hezbollah 'victory', of a situation where they could calculate the provocation, pull Israel into retaliation and emerge as winners. I felt a unilateral cessation gave them that. I felt anything which left them in any doubt as to the calculation of risk next time round was a real and possible future threat. They had to understand that if they tried doing it again, there was a price to be paid that the people of Lebanon would not allow them to pay, at least not with the lives of their civilians.

For me, the a.n.a.lysis could not be confined to the conflict itself, but it had to encompa.s.s the potential for future conflict. Ending the conflict on terms that deterred Hezbollah in the future could save lives. It only gave us some political time and s.p.a.ce, and here again I wanted to step in with a major soft-power initiative to resolve the Shebaa Farms question, and of course to revive the Israel/Palestine peace process. My isolated 'third-way' position had few buyers, but I believed strongly that just because we were shocked at the TV footage of the consequences of war, this could not blind us to the consequences of peace on the wrong terms.

So it wasn't that I couldn't guess which way the wind was blowing; it was that I distrusted a policy of following the prevailing wind. Ten years before, new to office, alive as if wired up to every current of popular imagination, I would have made a different choice. Now, seized as I was of an a.n.a.lysis born not of Opposition's need to connect, but of government's duty to govern, I had evolved. I was not a changed person, but I was a changed leader. I could see as plain as a pikestaff the problem this gave me, but I had come to a view that, above all on this issue of security, I should do what I intuitively thought right, not what I intuitively guessed was popular.

As we came in to land at St Lucia, I reflected: had I changed, or was I just obstinate? Was it leaders.h.i.+p, or just vanity? Having got us into Iraq, was it belief that sustained me, or just the fact I had nowhere else to go? How honest are we ever with ourselves? How hard it is to disentangle our motives from our anxieties, our convictions from our pride.

On the third day of our holiday there was a major security scare when a plot to blow up a number of airliners flying between the UK and the US was foiled at an advanced stage. The plotters had intended to detonate peroxide-based liquid explosives, which is the reason why there are still restrictions on taking liquids on to planes. Naturally it sparked a ma.s.sive tightening of airport security arrangements.

That day and for the next days, there was a series of conference calls between me, Transport Minister Douglas Alexander and John Reid, the Home Secretary. After the initial panic, my strong desire was to minimise disruption. There then followed a routine set of exchanges between us all, with me, as ever, being on the pa.s.senger-convenience side and them very much on the risk-averse side. To be fair, John got it absolutely, but to begin with thought we had to be extremely cautious. Douglas could see awful headlines about us ignoring 'expert' advice. I believed that once the panic died down we would do real damage to Heathrow if we went over the top; and the tendency of the system always was to go over the top. So they insisted that business people couldn't carry suit carriers, everything had to go in the hold, perfume was a risk, everything was a risk. After much expostulating by me and much earache for the others, which they endured patiently, we came to a sort of modus vivendi, though it was months before common sense returned to its proper place.

Despite the continual interruption and the usual calls for me to go back to England, I managed to get a break. The job never leaves you, nor the weight of responsibility. It sits there with you all the time, lighter or heavier depending on mood and news; but somehow, away from it all in a different setting, the weight is easier to bear. I had needed a holiday, and I came back at the end of August feeling reasonably upbeat and well rested.

That feeling lasted about ten minutes. The mood in the PLP had, if anything, hardened. The GB crew were agitating more or less openly for me to set a date for departure. His allies were mainly to the left of my supporters, but he was also picking off a few of the younger, more Blairite ones, who for various reasons were drifting offside and, as I discovered later, were being made rather attractive promises of future promotion should they switch.

I knew I was hemmed in. The PLP was divided, and perhaps for the first time the majority were for change. But change to what? To Gordon, for sure, but in order to do what? That they didn't know, and in what I thought was an extraordinary and weird self-inflicted myopia, most of them didn't appear to want to ask.

Along with Ed b.a.l.l.s, and with Nick Brown doing the numbers, Gordon had constructed a coalition that essentially said to the PLP: we can retain the New Labour support while being a different sort of New Labour, i.e. without, on a.n.a.lysis, the 'New' elements. But it didn't seem like that, and the a.n.a.lysis never went deep enough for most of them to understand it. Some, to be sure, did ask what sort of change, and concluded that it was either to something that wasn't New Labour or to something that was too ambiguous a version of it to be effective; but they were a minority.

I had by then concluded that what we would get if I left would be a kind of uneasy and ultimately muddled compromise, with, basically, Old Labour organisational politics, and bits of New Labour policy, together with trade-offs to the left. The party would go Old Labour and the government would be New-ish Labour. I thought that how much of New Labour survived depended on how much I could get done before I left; and of course whether anyone would step forward to claim the New Labour mantle and, if necessary, challenge Gordon.

My meetings with Gordon and his close team had continued throughout 2006, but they had never grown into sincere or shared attempts to construct a new policy agenda; and in any event our relations.h.i.+p had changed following the police investigation which had begun in March.

You must beware of resentment in politics even more than in life outside it. First, it is a bad and distorting emotion. Second, it is an unhealthy emotion in a leader. Third, you usually have little overall cause for complaint given the overwhelming privileges leaders.h.i.+p bestows. By and large, I never felt resentment during my time in office. Anger in bursts, yes. Despair, very occasionally. But not resentment, which is an ongoing emotion, one that eats away at you rather than breaking out sporadically.

If I ever came close to resentment, it was over the so-called 'cash for honours' business. The resentment was less over the fact of it as over the time it took, its totally destabilising nature, and most of all the truly and horribly unfair manner in which members of my staff were targeted. It was an attempt to end my premiers.h.i.+p in a way that would have been reputationally ghastly.

Funnily enough, I never criticised the police over it. I had got to know and really like the police who worked with me as protection, and I had an innate respect for the officers as a group and the job they did. I got on well with those who helped fas.h.i.+on the law and order policy. I could see their flaws, as with any profession, but I felt they were on the same agenda most of the time, and I thought their frustrations with the courts and the bureaucracy were more or less justified. And I had been at enough memorials to fallen officers organised so well by the Police Memorial Trust, founded by Michael Winner, one of the lesser-known things he does to appreciate they really did put their lives on the line.

In this instance, I could see their problem. They were going to be beaten up badly by the media if they didn't pursue it; and the longer it went on, the more they were in a 'loselose' situation. Close it down and they would be accused of a whitewash; continue it and they would be under intense pressure to get something (or more accurately, someone). The consequence of it all was that the government was rocked more or less monthly by a scandal which could lead the news with the twitch of an eyebrow, but to which there was always very much less than met the eye.

By then I was tough enough for anything, but for those who worked for me, especially Ruth Turner and Jonathan Powell, it was mind-bogglingly awful. Weaker characters frankly would have collapsed. Fortunately they were strong, but by the close of it they had needed every ounce of their strength.

The story was broken by the Sunday Times Sunday Times on 15 March 2006. Essentially, they alleged that Michael Levy, as party fund-raiser, had offered peerages to those nominated for the House of Lords in our 2006 list, in return for donations which were disguised as loans. I didn't believe this, by the way. For one thing, as a result of the setting up of the new Appointments Committee to vet peerages, no such expectation could ever have been given. But what had happened was that, since we had taken out loans and loans did not require the ident.i.ties of lenders to be made known there could be perceived an obvious, if mistaken, implication that these loans might then be turned into donations if the peerage was granted. on 15 March 2006. Essentially, they alleged that Michael Levy, as party fund-raiser, had offered peerages to those nominated for the House of Lords in our 2006 list, in return for donations which were disguised as loans. I didn't believe this, by the way. For one thing, as a result of the setting up of the new Appointments Committee to vet peerages, no such expectation could ever have been given. But what had happened was that, since we had taken out loans and loans did not require the ident.i.ties of lenders to be made known there could be perceived an obvious, if mistaken, implication that these loans might then be turned into donations if the peerage was granted.

Part of the problem arose from the fact that donors were now, especially prior to an election, stuck out there, huge and easy meat for the media to tear apart. For some reason, giving to a political party was considered prima facie evidence of corruption. So a donation meant the donor's name was declared. Not so for a loan.

Now it is true that there were many large donors from both Tories and Labour (and Lib Dems I might add) who were subsequently put in the House of Lords as 'working peers'. But as I used to say, there is no reason why they shouldn't be put there, provided there isn't a sale or trade and there are other good reasons for their appointment. There are lots of folk who give to charity and may antic.i.p.ate that they will get an honour of some sort, and they probably will. But you can't stipulate it; and they cannot then donate on a promise they will get it.

Anyway, it is a murky business, but it is the system as it has operated for a long, long time. The only difference was that we had introduced rules of transparency and insisted on declarations for political donations. In times gone by, no one had any idea who gave to the Tory Party, not even all the way through the 1970s, 80s and 90s, and no one ever asked. But with us, it was always going to be different. And, of course, we had now changed the law. So once more, ironically, a move to greater transparency ended up backfiring spectacularly.

I was quite sure the individual donors or lenders were not under any such promise. There were very good reasons for all of them being on the list, and each would have made an important contribution to the Lords. People also overlooked the fact that party leaders had within their gift certain party nominations. In other words, there was an a.s.sumption on the part of the public unsurprising really that there was an objective judgement on a non-party basis for nomination to the Lords. But this was not the way the system worked for working peers. In fact, I was the first prime minister to give away what had, up to then, been the absolute power of nomination over all appointments, although we had retained party nominations for a limited number of party-reserved slots. So, in a way, what was odd was that a trade union leader whose union had donated generously could go in the Lords and no one would bat an eyelid, but private sector entrepreneurs, who might be (and in these cases were) highly successful businessmen, were somehow regarded as illegitimate.

When the Sunday Times Sunday Times broke the story, it was a medium-size scandal that got the party all het up (conveniently forgetting where the money to fight the election had come from) and the media excited. But what s.h.i.+fted it from the containable to the eruptive and uncontainable was the party treasurer Jack Dromey's statement on 15 March that he had never been told about any of it and that there should be an inquiry. The next day a Scottish National Party MP called for a police inquiry, and the police felt they had no option but to launch one. From 21 March 2006 to the day I left, it was a running sore of the most poisonous and debilitating kind. A few weeks after my departure, the file was closed without any charges being brought, but it had been nearly eighteen months of absolute h.e.l.l for all concerned. broke the story, it was a medium-size scandal that got the party all het up (conveniently forgetting where the money to fight the election had come from) and the media excited. But what s.h.i.+fted it from the containable to the eruptive and uncontainable was the party treasurer Jack Dromey's statement on 15 March that he had never been told about any of it and that there should be an inquiry. The next day a Scottish National Party MP called for a police inquiry, and the police felt they had no option but to launch one. From 21 March 2006 to the day I left, it was a running sore of the most poisonous and debilitating kind. A few weeks after my departure, the file was closed without any charges being brought, but it had been nearly eighteen months of absolute h.e.l.l for all concerned.

Gordon's involvement came about in this way. I have considered at length whether or not to include this episode. It is in the book written by Andrew Rawnsley about the two of us, and written there in certain respects inaccurately. So I have decided to put the record straight. We had been having a huge set-to about Adair Turner's pension proposals. The Pensions Secretary John Hutton and I both thought them right, but Gordon disagreed. We had fixed the crucial meeting to decide it on 15 March. It was going to be a very tough meeting, I was in no doubt about that. I agreed to meet Gordon in the morning, before the trilateral with John Hutton later at 4 p.m. When Gordon came in, he was in venomous mood. I can truthfully say it was the ugliest meeting we ever had. To be fair to him, for some reason he thought this whole donations business had been a way of my leaving him with some frightful scandal, a sort of ticking bomb that would then wreck his leaders.h.i.+p in the same way, as he put it to me, Jean Chretien had done to Paul Martin in Canada (there had been a funding row in the Liberal Party that Paul Martin had inherited from the time Jean was prime minister).

It was all nonsense, of course, but I think Gordon may have genuinely believed it. Or it may have been an elaborate excuse. I can't tell. But what he proceeded to say in the meeting stunned me. He began the conversation not by talking of pensions, but by saying how damaging the loans thing was; that there might have to be an NEC inquiry; and he might have to call for one. I naturally said that would be incredibly damaging and inflammatory and on no account must he do it.

The temperature, already well below freezing point, went arctic when he then said: Well, it depends on this afternoon's meeting. If I would agree to shelve the Turner proposals, he would not do it. But if I persisted, he would.

I remember there was a piece of paper on my desk which bizarrely was a translation of the Royal Irish Regiment's motto 'Faugh a ballagh', which means 'Clear the way'. I had seen them in Downing Street as they prepared to amalgamate and leave duty in Northern Ireland following the peace process. We had had a joke about whether I would use their motto at PMQs. In the event, I had not had the opportunity.

Suddenly seeing it, Gordon poked at it with his finger. 'That's what you should do clear the way!'

Anyway, it was not pleasant and there were things said that should remain in the privacy of that room and our recollection. Suffice to say, he felt I was ruining his inheritance and I felt he was ruining my legacy. He believed the policy was wrong; I thought it was right. He made a threat; I disdained it.

We then had the pensions meeting with John Hutton at four, in which I insisted the Turner proposals proceed. It ended around five. At six Jack Dromey made his statement calling for an inquiry. I really don't know for a fact that Gordon put Jack up to it. Gordon denied ever speaking to him. And, as I say, I really don't believe he would have wanted the dire consequences that it unleashed. It did the party immense damage. It pulled our ratings down and mine personally every time it was reactivated. The irony was that the policy agenda was moving forward, so each moment we started to come up for air and get going again, we would be dragged back below the waterline.

Following that event, our relations were on a different footing: formal, at points even friendly, but I couldn't forget it and found it hard to forgive. I was also sad about it; not simply for the obvious reasons, but because it showed the truly nasty side of politics. Somehow it can make people do things that really shouldn't be done, like dirt that won't wash off. Also, he was, and is, a far better man than that.

So, by September 2006, when this had gone on for some months, erupting every few weeks with some fresh 'revelation' or leak from the inquiry, combined with Lebanon, combined with rebelliousness over the reform programme, combined with nine years in office, it was not astonis.h.i.+ng that the PLP mood had hardened. They could be pardoned for thinking their leader was not exactly their number-one a.s.set.

Although during the investigation we had fallen behind in the polls for only the second time since 1997 (the first being during the fuel crisis) itself pretty remarkable the polls were not that bad. We were a few points adrift but I was beginning to get the measure of David Cameron. I could sense he was uncertain not only of how much he could change his own party, but also of how much he wanted to. I thought their policy positions were vulnerable, especially on law and order and Europe, and therefore my strategy was to drive forward fast, constantly challenging them to keep up or fall behind, or divert to a different route. David Cameron was clever and people-friendly, and I thought he had some real steel to him, but he had not gone through the arduous but ultimately highly educative apprentices.h.i.+p I had gone through in the 1980s and early 90s. I had honed my leaders.h.i.+p skills and instincts. His were still pretty unhoned. They existed, but with rough edges.

However, my party could just see one thing: problems if we stick with Blair; comfort if we don't.

After I had come back from the summer holiday, I went to Balmoral for the usual weekend with the Queen. During the weekend, there was a dreadful Nimrod crash in Afghanistan in which fourteen military personnel died. The operation in which the plane crashed Operation Medusa had been a blow to the Taliban leaders.h.i.+p, giving us a strong psychological victory. They had suffered a lot of casualties.

There had been renewed attention given to Afghanistan during 2005 and 2006. When it is said that people took their eye off Afghanistan because of Iraq, it isn't so, at least not for the British. During the toughest time in Iraq, we were still resolutely set on making Afghanistan work. The elections in 2004 had been successful. As the security situation got tougher, so in the summer of 2005 we started to prepare for taking on the leaders.h.i.+p in the south of the country, where the Taliban were still strong and where narcotics formed the main basis of Afghan income. Indeed the military chiefs, dismayed at the limits of what we could do in Iraq, were increasingly wanting to switch emphasis from Iraq to Afghanistan.

In September 2005, John Reid had sent me a note giving a nine-month preparation time for the deployment of British troops to Helmand province. The exchange of notes and correspondence, meetings and conferences continued throughout the latter part of 2005 into 2006. It was agreed that in principle we should deploy. But as John made very clear, it would be a tough and dangerous mission. The Taliban would fight hard to keep hold of the territory that we had never been able satisfactorily to wrest from them. There would be suicide attacks on our forces.

We held a conference on Afghanistan in London in February, which Kofi Annan co-chaired with me. At the conference, the scale of the challenge was plain, in terms of civilian and military capacity, in nation-building and giving Afghans solid hope they would have a stable functioning democracy for the future.

What was apparent in both Iraq and Afghanistan was that the enemy had a very stark picture in their mind of the importance of the struggle we were engaged in. It was, naturally, all masked as their fight against occupying forces of the West, but this ignored the facts that a) there was a UN resolution authorising the presence of such forces, b) there had been elections in both countries resulting in governments who wanted the presence of such forces, and c) above all, the only reason for our presence was their terrorist campaign. If they had stopped that, we would have gone instantly.