How are the Red Princes and Princesses also rising?

It was almost two years ago that a post appeared here about the Red Princes and Princesses – the children of prominent Labour politicians who were thought likely to follow in their parental footsteps ("the son also rises"). A good article on the subject, What Labour’s Red Princes tell us about Britain, by Sophie McBain appeared in the New Statesman in June. She concluded:

… if you felt like being kind, you could say that Labour’s Red Princes have benefited from “high social capital”, but perhaps you would prefer the term “nepotism”. The children of MPs enter politics with an understanding of the Westminster system, as well as ready-made political connections and influential backers, which all help if you are looking for a parachute into a winnable seat. In this way, at least, Labour reflects the society it aspires to represent: the UK has the lowest level of social mobility in the developed world. 

… How does a party of political princelings and Westminster insiders convince anyone it can represent the working classes? …

With just over seven months to go before the election on 7 May 2015*, I thought it would be interesting to find out how they (and some other notables’ offspring) are getting on in the constituencies reported to be of interest to them. I expect that now that the Scottish referendum is over and an influx of Scottish Labour MPs seeking English seats has been averted, more will be learnt.

I will add/amend as information becomes available, but so far, and in alphabetical order:

EMILY BENN 
Child of: Benn dynasty
Age*: 25
Constituency: Croydon South - Majority in 2010: 5818 (Con, 28%)
Status: PPC (Prospective Parliamentary Candidate, ie will be Labour candidate in 2015)

STEPHEN BENN 
Child of: late Tony Benn
Age*: 63
Constituency: Lords hereditary member
Source: Daily Mail 8 April 2014

EUAN BLAIR

Child of: Tony Blair

Age*: 31

Constituency:    Coventry North West - Majority in 2010: 6288 (Lab, 13%)

and                   Bootle (Merseyside) - Majority in 2010: 21181 (Lab, 51%)

Status: ?

JOE DROMEY

Child of: Jack Dromey and Harriet Harman

Age*: 31/32

Constituency: Lewisham Deptford - Majority in 2010: 12499 (Lab, 30%)

Status: interest denied
Source: Daily Telegraph blogs 3 September 2013

GEORGIA GOULD

Child of: Late Philip Gould and Lady Gould (Gail Rebuck)

Age*: 27

Constituency: Erith & Thamesmead - Majority in 2010: 5703 (Lab, 13%)

Status: Failed to become PPC in 2010

STEPHEN KINNOCK

Child of: Neil and Gladys Kinnock (Lord Kinnock and Baroness Kinnock)

Age*: 45

Constituency: Aberavon - Majority in 2010: 11039 (Lab, 36%)

Status: PPC

SUSAN MITCHELL

Child of: Austin Mitchell

Age*: 50s?

Constituency: Dulwich & W Norwood - Majority in 2010: 9365 (Lab, 19%)

Status: Withdrew from PPC

Source: London Evening Standard 24 February2014

DAVID PRESCOTT

Child of: Lord Prescott (John Prescott)

Age*: 44

Constituency: Hull East - Majority in 2010: 8597 (Lab, 25%)

Status: Failed to become PPC

Constituency: Greenwich & Woolwich - Majority in 2010: 10153 (Lab, 25%)

Status: Failed to become PPC

Source: Parliament Street 15 April2014 

WILL STRAW

Child of: Jack Straw

Age*: 34

Constituency: Rossendale & Darwen - Majority in 2010: 4493 (Con, 9%)

Status: PPC

* Age on 7 May 2015

Robert Lewis's 'Dark Actors'

After Dr David Kelly, the government scientist, died in 2003, Lord Hutton was asked to investigate the surrounding circumstances, his report appearing in January 2004. Hutton concluded that Dr Kelly took his own life. In 2007, Liberal Democrat MP Norman Baker, who has since become Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Transport in the coalition government, published The Strange Death of David Kelly and concluded that Kelly’s death was due to hands other than his own. David Aaronovitch in his 2009 book, Voodoo Histories: How Conspiracy Theory Has Shaped Modern History, devoted a chapter to debunking Baker, Mr Pooter Forms a Theory, which ends:

In conclusion, it is worth referring to the preface to the English edition of Fritz Tobias’s book on the Reichstag fire, in which one great British historian, A.J.P. Taylor, quotes another, Sir Lewis Namier: ‘There would be little to say on this subject, were it not for the nonsense that has been talked about it’.

Now, 10 years after the tragedy, Dark Actors, The Life and Death of Dr David Kelly by Robert Lewis has appeared. Is it worth reading? The opening chapter describes the events of the day of Kelly's death. The choice of its title, An Inspector Falls*, sets the tone. To establish the reader's enthusiasm for ploughing through what follows, or even to induce the book’s purchase in the first place, Lewis sets about raising expectations, eg on page 5:

And then the official account turns abruptly hysterical.  

If there was anything more substantial than her husband’s suddenly stricken visage that caused her to become ill with worry, she has never revealed what it was.  

So some nameless, unspoken crisis appears to have quickly descended.

but gives the impression that his heart isn’t in it:

So the scene of death was demonstrably disturbed by individuals that [sic] had nothing to do with Thames Valley Police, for reasons that remain unclear, one of whom was very likely an unaccountable intelligence officer whose very existence has been denied – to the extent that several witnesses claimed he was a uniformed police officer, while his Special Branch liaison, DC Coe, maintained for seven years he was never there at all. (page 14)

The next eight chapters are chronological, most of them concerned with Kelly’s professional life after joining the Ministry of Defence at Porton Down. Then, despite the attempt to pick loose ends at the start, in the final chapter Lewis concludes that his subject did indeed commit suicide. Any value that the book may possess therefore largely depends on the quality of its account of Kelly’s life. To be fair, the reader has to recognise the problem presented to Lewis by the confidentiality surrounding much of Kelly’s government work. But remembering that it was said of Kelly that “he had such an eye for detail that nothing got past him” (page 39), at least one can try to assess how Lewis dealt with those matters of detail which he could be expected to get right. With a far from expert eye, I came across the following:

Page 37: Terence Taylor is described as “… a former weapons inspector who went on to direct the Institute of Strategic Studies” – he was an Assistant Director at the International Institute of Strategic Studies.  

Page 184: The same individual is referred to as Lantos, Santos and Lantos within seven lines of text.  

Page 249: “The new UNSCOM … with its own (foot high) communications mast …”.  

Page 379: “Harris, Robert and Jeremy, Paxman, A Higher Form of Killing London 1982”.

which could all be dismissed as trivia. But more disconcertingly from a writer who expects to be taken seriously:

Page 282: “Bill Clinton f****d a 22-year-old White House intern …” [the asterisks are mine].

and there are digressions like the one on page 189 about the controversial book Bravo Two Zero by Chris Ryan (aka Colin Armstrong) from which Lewis has to return to topic with a crashing non sequitur:

Desperate to extricate himself from Iraq, Colin Armstrong would cross one hundred and eighty miles of hostile terrain. And years later David Kelly would walk three thousand yards of Oxfordshire countryside.

not to mention his proneness to off-the-point platitudinising:

All the members of the household have gone their separate ways, as modern families generally must, if they are to live the life that is due to them. (page 338)

Rather more worrying is the way Lewis uses notes and references. It can be argued that a non-academic work has no need for them, or that they should be kept to a bare minimum. In the case of this book, it’s their unevenness which is the problem. The second chapter, Dai, which takes Kelly from birth to the age of 40, is supported by just three notes whereas Chapter 8 has 120, nearly two per page. To see why this matters, take the following example from Chapter 2:

Another contemporary of Kelly’s at Leeds was Jack Straw [**], who was elected chair of the university’s Labour Society in 1966, whereupon he rebranded it the Socialist Society and then withdrew its support for Labour because the party was insufficiently left-wing. Straw gained further notoriety on campus when the British Council selected him to go on a student trip to Chile, where, instead of building a youth club, he spent his time quarrelling with his colleagues, posturing as an insurgent communist, and demanding an audience with the opposition leader Salvador Allende. All of which he made up for in later life, when as Foreign Secretary of the Thatcherite New Labour party he helped ensure safe passage home for Allende's murderer Augusto Pinochet at a time when Spanish relatives of the Chilean 'disappeared' were demanding he be tried in the Hague for crimes against humanity.  

To his credit, Kelly had as little to do with Straw as possible.  

‘He won't remember me; he later told his half-sister, 'because I wasn't a political animal, but I remember him.'  

And so it proved. Kelly and Straw met professionally for the first time in 2002, when the former supported the latter in a hearing before the Foreign Affairs Select Committee about UK foreign policy in the wake of 9/11. The Foreign Secretary made a point of complaining to his department that they had sent a nobody along to accompany him. The following year, when Kelly became drawn into the farrago over the government's claims of an Iraqi WMD arsenal, Straw was a part of the Downing Street cabal that secretly exposed him to the press and then belittled him in public.

There are various assertions about Straw here, none of them ascribed to a source. This, in itself, doesn’t mean that they aren’t true, but they present a problem for the reader, particularly when Lewis could have made reference to Straw’s autobiography, Last Man Standing, published (and posted about here) last year. One has to accept that Straw, a lawyer turned politician, may well have been economical with the truth about his student days, and he wouldn’t have been the first person to have moved to the political centre after graduating. Straw makes no mention of rebranding Leeds University’s Labour Society as the Socialist Society, but does state:

The Labour left at Leeds University worked as part of a broad front with the CP [Communist Party] and we spent much of our time fighting the destructive politics of the various active Trotskyist groups.*  

*These included the Socialist Labour League, led locally by lecturer Cliff Slaughter, and Tory Cliff of the International Socialists (later the Socialist Workers' Party). (LMS, page 65)

Straw also provides an account of the NUS delegation to Chile which is somewhat at odds with Lewis’s (LMS page 69). He devotes a whole chapter to the Pinochet affair during his Home Secretaryship (A Dictator Calls – Straw, too, could have done better) and reveals that he:

might have met Allende at a reception in Santiago de Chile, perhaps even shaken his hand, but I’d had no other dealings with him whatever. (LMS, page 255-6).

But these are not particularly significant issues, unlike the following:

If I was asked which single individual most influenced my view that Saddam did pose a serious threat to international peace and security, my answer would be unambiguous: Dr David Kelly, who tragically died in July 2003.  

Dr Kelly was a microbiologist who started his career at the UK’s Biological Weapons Establishment at Porton Down, and later became a weapons inspector. As a member of UNSCOM's staff, he made thirty-seven trips to Iraq during the nineties. I met him just once, in September 2002, when he accompanied me to give evidence to the Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee. At the hour long 'pre-brief' I was struck both by Dr Kelly's depth of knowledge and understanding, and by the clarity of his belief that, if diplomacy failed, then military action would have to follow. (LMS, page 368)

The reader with sight of both accounts is forced to conclude that either Straw is breathtakingly hypocritical or that Lewis’s unsourced version (‘The Foreign Secretary made a point of complaining to his department that they had sent a nobody along to accompany him’) is wrong. I’m afraid that I’m inclined to the latter view. Lewis never goes on to mention Kelly’s appearance at the Select Committee in 2002, a fairly important and public event. But then he makes no reference to Kelly’s being awarded the CMG in 1996. He also informs us that:

The debate over why we invaded and occupied Iraq has rumbled on for over ten years. Unless Tony Blair can deliver a plausible answer, which would require him to experience an actual spiritual [sic] journey, unlike the pathological levels of self-justification that comprise his autobiography, it will be argued over for the rest of my life.

but omits any mention of the Sir John Chilcot’s Iraq Inquiry (report forthcoming) or Lord Butler ‘s 2004 Review of Intelligence on Weapons of Mass Destruction. There are no links (ie URLs), by the way, in Dark Actors, to Lord Hutton’s Inquiry (as in the opening sentence of this post) or to anything else. This seems rather old-fashioned given the age of its author. Blair’s A Journey is not in the Bibliography.

Given that Lewis doesn’t challenge Lord Hutton’s conclusion that David Kelly committed suicide, it is legitimate to ask what his book has to offer - “Is it worth reading?” If someone is looking for an insight into the lives of weapons inspectors operating inside a hostile Middle Eastern regime, it may be. As a source of information about the career of Dr David Kelly in particular, I’m doubtful. The errors and weaknesses in Dark Actors, apparent even to a casual reader, undermine its authority. Judged by Kelly’s own standards it isn’t the book he deserved but, perhaps more than anything else, he and his family deserve to be left in peace.

*Kelly was a weapons inspector who committed suicide. In JB Priestley’s play, An Inspector Calls, a mysterious ‘inspector’ interrogates a wealthy English family about their responsibility for the suicide of a young working class factory girl. An Inspector Falls seems a facile and misleading title for the content of the chapter concerned.

** Straw, born in August 1946, was an undergraduate at Leeds from 1964 to 1967 (LMS, pages 9, 62 and 69). Kelly, born in May 1944, was an undergraduate from 1963 to 1967 (DA, pages 26, 33 and 35). That Kelly’s degree took four years and that he entered Leeds a year later than might be expected from his birthdate, are points not addressed in Dark Actors.

A record to be broken

Following some helpful pointers in the form of the Comments below from David Martin (aka Anonymous, who I suspect knows far more about the history of the Labour Party than I do), I have re-written the original post - twice!  Pleasingly, the possibility of the record being broken has not changed.

Britain (the English element anyway) is mildly obsessed with Eton College and its alumni, some of whom could hardly be better-known. These include the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, David Cameron and now the new Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby. Slightly less well-known as Old Etonians (OEs) are the actors Tom Hiddleston, Damian Lewis and Dominic West. There are also numerous fictional OEs like James Bond, Lord Grantham of ITV’s Downton Abbey, and Peter Pan’s Captain Hook.

Surprisingly, when nearly half the current coalition Cabinet were privately educated, there are only two other OEs with Cameron: Oliver Letwin and Sir George Young, all three being Conservatives. It isn’t just a matter of the fees, about £30,000 a year. The Labour party has had senior members who went to top private schools: Attlee to Haileybury, Gaitskell and Crossman to Winchester and recently Blair to Fettes. The only prominent recent Labour Etonians appear to have been Tam Dalyell and Mark Fisher, neither of whom were Cabinet ministers. Nowadays if people associate Eton with the left at all, it is probably through the works of one Eric Blair (George Orwell).

But when the Tories are in office, Old Etonians are, it seems, always in the Cabinet, and their school’s tenancy around the famous table must, one would have thought, be longer than that of any other institution. When government alternated between the Tories and Liberals, before the rise of the Labour party, I can well believe that OEs were never absent from the Cabinet, but it would seem surprising if this had been the case for the last 100 years. So what has the modern political record been?

The original version of this post naively assumed that there were no OEs in Attlee’s Cabinets between 1945 and 1951. However, as the Comments below indicate, it was subsequently pointed out that Hugh Dalton and Lords Pakenham (later Lord Longford) and Pethick-Lawrence and the Earl of Listowel were members of the post-war Labour Cabinets, so their service has now been incorporated into the revised Table showing the alternating administrations since the end of the World War 1 coalition.

Looking at the Table, clearly the longest period of Conservative government unpunctuated by a Labour government was that of the Thatcher/Major period, 6573 days (D). Of course, if the Etonians in Attlee’s ministry had given unbroken (or overlapping) service, the Thatcher/Major period would have been dwarfed by an continuous Etonian presence from 1931 to 1964.  Adding their service (B) up to that point to the duration of the pre-war and wartime cabinets, which contained various Etonians (A), gives a total unbroken tenure of 5904 days from August 1931 to January 1948. Again, if Dalton’s service after returning to the Cabinet (accompanied by Pakenham) is added to the subsequent “13 years of Tory misrule” (C) the result is 5982 days.

When reviewing Jack Straw’s Last Man Standing I came across a curiosity. He attended Brentwood School in Essex when it was a direct-grant grammar school. But a few years later so did the current Leader of the House of Commons, Andrew Lansley, formerly Cameron’s Health Secretary. The Table reveals an interesting possibility, but one that depends on two conditions. The first is that Lansley remains in the Cabinet for the duration of the coalition, and the second is that the date of the next election is 7 May 2015. Should these both be the case, then Brentwood School (left), rather than Eton College, will have had its alumni around the Cabinet table for the longest continuous period in modern political history – by all of six days!

Of course, there is a snag - after all, Etonians usually come out on top. 7 May 2015 is a Bank Holiday and the start of a holiday week, a factor which might be expected to have an impact on voter turnout, probably not to the coalition parties’ advantage. Holding the election even a week earlier would more than negate the six days and would leave the record with Eton. However, the Fixed-term Parliaments Act of 2011 appears to allow the Prime Minister to delay the election by up to two months, but not to bring it forward.

Alternatively, if Labour were to win the next election, which could turn out to be before May 2015 if the Act were repealed, would Jack Straw MP (or possibly Baron Straw of Somewhere-in-Essex) be a member of Miliband’s Cabinet? In this case Brentwood School could keep its position ahead of Eton College for years - which would be a fitting memorial to the post-war educational experiment of the direct-grant grammar schools. Their entry was, of course, based on intellectual ability (in the admittedly flawed 11+ exams) rather than on parental ability to pay. So not so startling that one of them, in the decades after their abolition, should have educated top politicians in both main parties. And splendidly ironic if the record stands because of an indiscretion by a Labour OE who happened to be Chancellor of the Exchequer at the time the direct-grant system came into being!

Two final points. Firstly, it’s just as well that not many people read this blog, or I might have consigned Andrew Lansley to the backbenches at the next reshuffle! Secondly, examination of the educational backgrounds of Labour Cabinet members up to 1945 revealed that more than might be expected had been to Winchester and Rugby. The absence of alumni of the former in particular from the top of current politics is intriguing.


18 JULY 2014

Oh, dear!  On 14 July Andrew Lansley left the coalition Cabinet as part of Cameron's removal of the "male, stale and pale" from the front rank of Tory ministers in the months remaining before the election. Floreat Etona, of course.

Climbing the éminence grise pole

Jack Straw, born in 1946, became a Labour MP in 1979. In 1997, after 18 years representing Blackburn in NW England as an opposition MP, he became Home Secretary, then successively Foreign Secretary, Leader of the House of Commons and Lord Chancellor and Justice Secretary. He was one of only three MPs, all men, who served throughout the Blair and Brown cabinets but he never reached the very top of Disraeli’s ‘greasy pole’, the Prime Ministership. He returned to the backbenches in 2010.

The initial impression that Jack Straw’s recently published autobiography, Last Man Standing – Memoirs of a Political Survivor, makes is discouraging. Not only is it later on the scene than other reminiscences from New Labour (eg Blair, Mandelson, Darling), but also longer, at well over 500 pages.  The table below may be useful in explaining the organisation and emphasis of the book.  The chapters are broadly chronological in that Straw deals in turn with his occupancy of the Great Offices of State (once-great offices of a once-great state might be more realistic) and the one not-so-great one. However, within both his Home Office and Foreign Office periods, successive chapters deal with major themes. Each chapter has its own chronology but inevitably these overlap, an arrangement which sometimes takes the reader forwards and then back in time, and also leaves occasional references to Straw’s personal and family life out of sequence.

For many readers the first group of chapters (A), which explain how Straw arrived in the corridors of power just 10 years after leaving school and became an MP five years later, will be among the least familiar and most interesting. He gives the impression of having been hard done by at the direct grant school, Brentwood (a town in Essex near London), which he attended as a boarder and anyone would sympathise with the situation which led to his disappointing A level results.

Brentwood not having delivered him to Oxbridge, Straw studied law at Leeds, which probably turned out to be a better base for his rapid rise through student politics and return to London. He acquired a national position of sorts as president of the NUS (National Union of Students, an organisation probably being taken far too seriously at the time). After this his rise seems irresistible in hindsight, but it must have required considerable personal effort. Within a few years he took on a councillorship in inner north London, as now an incubator for aspiring Labour politicians, then deputy chairmanship of the long-departed Inner London Education Authority and also passed his Bar finals with high distinction. 

Anyone who has read Ian McEwan’s latest novel, Sweet Tooth, will be struck by the authenticity which Straw provides, no doubt unintentionally, to the author’s account of working life in MI5 in the early 1970s as seen through the eyes of a young woman graduate, Serena Frome.  they quote. (page 83)
In his NUS days, Straw found himself calling on the Education Minister, possibly passing real Serenas on the way in:

Bizarrely the headquarters of the Department of Education, which we occasionally had reason to visit, was on the upper floors of a Mayfair building whose main occupant was the Security Service (MI5). Aside from the careful security at the front entrance, the ministers' doors were always open - including that of the Secretary of State, Ted Short. (page 76)

Unsurprisingly the authorities seem to have sucked their teeth when they had to vet Straw as a SPAD to a cabinet minister. Ironically, MI5 would become one of his responsibilities as Home Secretary 23 years later.

Soon after, aged only 28, he was to be offered the post of political adviser to Barbara Castle at the Department of Social Services, years before the term SPAD (special political adviser) was to acquire its current notoriety.  From this point, the story becomes more familiar to anyone who read the profiles of Straw which appeared during New Labour’s heyday. He inherited Castle’s Blackburn seat and spent 18 years in opposition (B) before joining Blair’s cabinet and surviving until Brown’s departure in 2010 (C, D, E, F). Most of the subjects which he covers are the ones to be expected like Iraq and Iran, the latter comes with a helpful primer. Others may have been forgotten: the Pinochet extradition; or failed to enter public consciousness at all: the 2002 India-Pakistan crisis. He points quite rightly to his successes like the Human Rights Act and the Lawrence Inquiry and accepts his share of responsibility for things that seemed right at the outset if not subsequently, like EU immigration, Iraq, and the Freedom of Information Act.

But what is missing? Quite a bit. For example, there is no mention of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales in 1997 when Straw was Home Secretary. Anyone seeking Straw’s opinion on big issues like climate change, Huntington’s ‘The Clash of Civilisations’, India’s becoming a permanent member of the UN Security Council, how China may choose to exercise its global power, the value of the UK’s nuclear deterrent, and the continuation of our EU membership (though Straw is clear about the desirability of Turkey joining) is likely to feel disappointed – but, to paraphrase Alistair Campbell, he doesn’t do “world view”. There is little indication as to what he wants to do next, either. His opinions about the current Labour leadership are as anodyne as you would expect from an expert political survivalist, and his assessments of Blair and Brown are distinctly more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger, although he is sharp enough about some figures from his past like Denis Healey and John Smith. 

Is Straw an éminence grise, or grey eminence, as he is sometimes described?   Not literally: since his early career he has not been a ‘power behind the scenes’, but on the contrary very clearly on the front bench of politics. Perhaps such a title may become apposite eventually, but he is yet to join the Lords or become the principal of an Oxford college (or both or whatever) and assume the role of occasional honoured adviser, like, say, Lord Heseltine. For now, it’s more appropriate to see Straw through the eyes of the artist Emma Wesley who painted him as Lord Chancellor (below right):

Jack Straw is also a portrait of a man doing his job. Here, however, the subject looks off into the middle distance and the reference to Holbein’s portrait of Thomas More raises questions about the role of Lord Chancellor. I have long been fascinated by the folded piece of paper that More holds in the portrait and, when I was commissioned to paint the present Lord Chancellor, realised it was the perfect symbol of the power such men hold over pieces of paper which translates, of course, into direct power over our lives. This power is represented in the portrait by the lock and the portcullises on the chairbacks.

Lord Chancellors by Hans Holbein (1527) and Emma Wesley (2009)

 
So who should read this book? Anyone who wants an objective overview of the period of Labour government from 1997 to 2010 could do a lot worse than read Andrew Rawnsley’s Servants of the People and The End of the Party. But at the next level of detail, among the personal memoirs, as opposed to diaries like those of Alistair Campbell and Chris Mullin, Last Man Standing is more agreeable to read than Blair’s A Journey or Mandelson’s The Third Man, not least because Straw comes across as more down to earth and approachable. Inevitably, there are the limitations which stem from autobiographical self-selection as opposed to a third party’s more objective choice when given the run of the same archives. Where Straw’s records and papers will finish up – Leeds, perhaps – and whether he will, by then, be a figure seen to merit a serious independent biography, only time will tell.

ADDENDUM 15 NOVEMBER

In a post not long after this one appeared in its original form, I did a 'stocktake' of the first two years of this blog.  One issue which I identified was that of some of the posts being far too long - originally this one was about 4000 words, a lot more than the 500 recommended in a recent article on blogging!  The version above, after substantial pruning is nearly 1300 words - probably still more than enough.
 

Red Princes and Princesses

The strange death in China last year of a British businessman, Neil Heywood, the arrest and trial of Gu Kailai for his murder, and now the disgrace of her husband Bo Xilai, have probably made people in the UK more aware of the dynastic nature of the Chinese Communist Party. In the US, China is analysed closely, and anyone looking to learn more about the ‘princelings’ should find Jeremy Page’s 2011 article in the Wall Street Journal informative. The WSJ interactive graphic shows Bo Xilai’s antecedents and also the elite positions now occupied by other children of Mao Zedong’s comrades.

Once a concept like princelings is established it travels and then gets transferred. The UK political blogger Guido Fawkes ran stories last month about Will Straw (son of Jack) “spending time in the Lancashire seat of Rossendale and Darwen” and Euan Blair (son of Tony and Cherie) apparently being interested in selection for the Labour seat of Coventry North West. But he was able to cap this shortly afterwards with news that Joe Dromey (son of Jack and Harriet née Harman) was “devoting a lot of time to work in the safe Labour seat of Lewisham Deptford”. This story was run under the headline The Red Princes: Third Dromey Trying to Get on the Gravy Train (left).

The Labour Party’s annual conference began at the end of September , so good timing for Guido and not surprising that Toby Young in the Sun on Sunday on 30 September came out with:

In case you’re in any doubt that Labour is the true party of inherited privilege, I give you the Wedgwood Benn dynasty. Tony Benn, that old socialist warhorse, was the son of Viscount Stansgate, a Labour Secretary of State, and his son, Hilary Benn, went on to serve in Tony Blair and Gordon Brown’s Cabinet. The latest addition to this fine, aristocratic line is Emily Benn, Tony’s granddaughter, who was selected to stand as the Labour candidate in East Worthing and Shoreham in 2007. To cap it all, this was when she was 17, before she was old enough to vote!

More accurately, although selected at 17, Emily Benn was old enough to vote by the time of the 2010 election in which she came third, behind the LibDems, and the Tory, Tim Loughton, who increased his majority.

Although Guido has, so far, only picked on our ‘Red Princes’, their Chinese analogues include Princesses, as Damien Ma reported in the Atlantic last year in Meet the Red Princesses and Princes: The Chinese Elite's Globe-Trotting Kids. No doubt some Red Princesses will be surfacing here before long – the Blairs have a daughter as well as another son, Nicky. And before the last election, Georgia Gould, daughter of the late Philip Gould, was reported to be interested in the Labour selection for Erith and Thamesmead shortly after graduation. According to the Daily Mail she had taken over as Chair of the Oxford University Labour Club from none other than Nicky Blair!

Of course, political dynasties are not uncommon among the Conservatives either, perhaps not quite so intertwined, but we can expect the Daily Mail and Guido to give them a miss. Damien Ma put his finger on something relevant though, when he concluded:

It is far from clear whether any of them [the Red Princesses and Princes] will have political aspirations in the future, and if they do, whether their experiences will decisively shape their world views. The average Chinese -- actually, average anybody -- would struggle to identify with what they represent or to determine whether they will be forces for change or stasis in China over the next decades.

Our political class certainly isn’t short of people from the PPE/researcher/adviser mould now.  Their clone-like offspring are likely to be at two removes from reality rather than one. In the 2020s, when they are all at each other’s throats as were their parents in the last decade, it should make for lively political reporting, if not good government. Let’s hope Leveson doesn’t stifle the Guidos before then. I would put my money on Straw Jr, who was accepted into the civil service fast-stream, no mean feat, and is at least prepared to take on a currently Tory-held seat rather than a safe Labour one, and also bet on Nicky Blair of whom we hear little - but remember the significance in British politics of birth order!

Of course, a reasonable conclusion is that there can’t be that many good graduate jobs around, if all that these wealthy and well-connected kids can aspire to is Parliament. Also, perhaps being an MP with a safe seat is far more congenial, by comparison with most paid work, than many of us plebs realise or the current incumbents care to let on. But the princes in particular should take heed of ‘famous father syndrome’ which can easily afflict those who follow in parental footsteps. One of the best-known sufferers was Randolph Churchill. When it became known that his surgically-excised growth was benign, Evelyn Waugh famously remarked that "It was a typical triumph of modern science to find the one part of Randolph which was not malignant and to remove it."

ADDENDUM 2 OCTOBER

In his Guardian Labour Conference Diary Michael White reported for 1 October:

Tony Blair's former press chief Alastair Campbell is "thinking about" standing for election at the next general election, he revealed yesterday. Asked on LBC radio whether he had ambitions to become an MP, he said: "All I'll say to you is I get a lot of people asking me, particularly when I'm up here, and I do think about it and I am thinking about it and I don't think there's a fantastic rush. We sort of know when the next election is."

Which constituency Campbell has in mind has not been reported yet.  He has two potential princes and one princess, and a partner, Fiona Millar, who was rumoured to be interested in taking over Glenda Jackson's seat. 

Is Blair reaping as he sowed?

A biblical quotation seems appropriate for a man of faith like Tony Blair:

Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap. Galatians 6:7

but if you are one of those people who think Blair should be indicted as an Iraq war criminal, this post is probably not what you are looking for.

On 2 May 1997, a few days before his 44th birthday, Tony Blair became the youngest Prime Minister since the 42 year old Lord Liverpool in 1812 (a record which passed to David Cameron in 2010). Another record of sorts was also set that day and is still held by Blair’s immediate predecessor, John Major, who had lost the election at the age of 54. Before Major the only Prime Ministers in the 20th century to have left office for good below the age of 60 were Anthony Eden, in 1956 in poor health, and Lloyd George in 1922, both 59. Those of us who were part of Britain’s post-war bulge (ie born between 1946 and 1948 as explained in a previous post) could only look on bewildered in 1997 as power passed from a man older than us (much older in his outlook) to a younger man, born in 1953. In fact the only ‘one of us’ to feature significantly in politics since 1997 has been that great survivor Jack Straw, who was born in August 1946 and was present in all the Blair and Brown cabinets until 2010.

In 1995 Blair famously told his party conference that Britain was “a young country” and on 19 September 1996 published the seemingly now-forgotten New Britain: My Vision of a Young Country. The book certainly doesn’t get a mention in Alastair Campbell’s diaries, but a part of the entry for that exact date is worth noting. Campbell had sat in on an interview in which the subject of Blair’s mother’s sudden death when he was 22 had come up:

I said to him afterwards I’d never realised he was so close to his mum because he had never really opened up like that before, even in private. He said she was a wonderful woman and he still felt guided by her. … He said the thing his mother’s death had given him above all was a sense of urgency, the feeling that life is short, it can be cut even shorter, and you can pack in as much as you can while you’re here, and try to make a difference.

Last week there was a surge of media coverage for Blair, possibly carefully co-ordinated, ostensibly to mark the fifth anniversary of his leaving Downing Street. I’ve already mentioned his 24 June appearance on BBC1’s mid-market The Andrew Marr Show and this was followed three days later by guest editorship of the London Evening Standard (given away free but directed at white collar Londoners) and then on 30 June by a lengthy interview in the up-market FT magazine. The changes in style are quite amusing, from globally-concerned rock star semi-inarticulacy on Marr:

No it's absolutely not true - and, by the way, they did have their point of view. I mean this is why … The notion that cabinet never discussed this issue is absurd. I understand why people disagree over it, but it‟s not a matter of … There is no great … You know they’ve gone over this so many times. There is no great hidden conspiracy about this. It was a decision. Now some people agree with it, some people disagree with it. I think when you look at the Middle East today, I think again in the broad sweep of history people will take rather a different view of it.

to measured senior global statesman-speak for Lionel Barber in the FT:

“The rationale for Europe today is not peace; it is power. The rationale for Europe today is that [we are] in a geopolitical landscape that is rapidly changing, in which even a country the size of Germany, let alone France or the UK or Italy, is a fraction of the size of what are going to be the main geopolitical players. We can’t afford to be left on our own. We need the collective strength to advance individual interests.”

But the message from all three sessions was that Blair wants a big job:

ANDREW MARR: (over) Yes. But in domestic/European terms, another big job in it for you?  

TONY BLAIR: Well you know I‟ve always said I'm a public service person first, so I‟d have been happy carrying on as Prime Minister, I‟d have been happy taking the European job as President of the European Union. But you know if I'm not doing that, I'm going to make a difference in a different way. I think here you know where I can contribute, I will. If people want to listen, that's fine. If they don't, that's also fine.

Sarah Sands (editor of the Evening Standard) wrote:

Blair has said that he would like to do a big job in public life again, but when I try him on a job description, he looks wry, and reminds me that he was prime minister for 10 years: “What I can do is contribute to the debate, whether it is Europe or the Arab Spring or areas to do with economy and public service reform here.”  

Okay, I say. Let’s go for the obvious one. If you were offered another term as prime minister would you take it? “Yes, sure, but it’s not likely to happen is it, so…”

And with the FT's editor in the magazine:

Barber: “So what’s your route back?”  

Blair: “I don’t know exactly.”  

Barber: “But you want it. It’s clearly something that you feel ready [for].”  

Blair: “Yes, I feel I’ve got something to say. If people want to listen, that’s great, and if they don’t, that’s their choice … I would want to emphasise how fast the world around us is changing and how incredibly dangerous it is for us to think we can stand still.”

Well, we’ll see what turns up for him. One suggestion came from Jane Merrick in the Independent on Sunday the next day:

However The IoS understands that one job Mr Blair may be offered is director general of the World Trade Organisation, a post that comes up next year. The current holder, Pascal Lamy, is French and has served two four-year terms, and diplomatic sources have hinted that a British candidate would be in a good position to get the job. Even David Cameron is understood not to be opposed to Mr Blair's possible candidature.

The last sentence probably says it all, and anyway back in March the Guardian thought this was a job for Peter Mandelson.

Sands and Blair at the Evening Standard

Why all this exposure now? As a first guess Blair will be 60 next May and perhaps he takes such milestones seriously. After all, in 2007 he made sure that he stayed PM until 27 June – if he’d gone before 10 June he would have left office younger than Major. Also, there must come a point when the goldmine of prestigious and lucrative appearances as a speaker approaches exhaustion. It’s even possible that his JP Morgan advisory role (£2.5million a year the FT reckons) will come to an end eventually – surely not a contract which expired at 60?

If I sound a bit jaundiced about Blair entering his seventh decade, it’s probably because of the effect that his cult of youth had on the public sector’s attitude towards its older employees. Within a few years of New Labour’s taking office many of the 50-and-overs were getting the message that their faces no longer fitted. Any lingering ambitions for promotion were soon replaced by early retirement being a far more likely prospect. At the same time policy and strategy units were being set up in Downing Street and elsewhere setting the tone with staff whose principal qualification seemed to be that of being younger than Blair. And of course some of the SPADs of that period and type are now sitting on the Shadow front bench.

Subsequently the escalating pension bill has led to substantial increases in the pensionable age across the public sector. And although addressing age discrimination certainly wasn’t a New Labour priority, it eventually came under regulation in 2006 and appeared in the Equality Act 2010. But, if Blair is now feeling that his age is, quite unfairly, catching up with him (bus pass and fuel allowances due in 2013 - if they haven’t been abolished) and doesn’t care much for it, some of us might be forgiven for thinking that he might be reaping a little of what he sowed. But Blair, like Campbell, lives in an irony-free zone.

UPDATE 24 JULY

Tony Blair was interviewed for the Daily Telegraph on 24 July by Charles Moore. Moore explains that:

The Westminster Faith Debates, chaired by his former home secretary Charles Clarke, will close with a conversation tonight between Mr Blair, the Archbishop of Canterbury and me. The subject is religion and society.

and most of the interview has a religious theme, although Blair seems readier to talk about religions than his own Roman Catholic beliefs. Moore concluded with:

It has been a lively conversation, but I detect in him something like Britain’s famous problem of having lost an empire, but not yet found a role.  

At 59, he’s still young for a man in his position. He has been out of the game for five years, and now, you can see, he wants to get back in. ''Since I left office, I have learnt a huge amount, especially about what is happening in Europe and the world. Sometimes it’s quite shocking to me: how useful would this knowledge have been!’’  

He thinks, I suspect, that he’d be a better prime minister now than he was before. ''I’d like to find a form of intervening in debates.’’ How? By getting elected again? ''I don’t think that’s possible.’’ A peerage? A wonderful look of amused contempt suffuses his tanned face. Something in Europe, perhaps? ''I would have taken the job [the presidency of the European Council] if they had offered it to me, but they didn’t.’’  

Europe, he says, is ''opening up’’. I thought it was closing down, I say. Tony Blair grins. ''Well, what is happening now is not sustainable.” There are ''big, big questions here, involving the political reconstruction of Europe. The single currency will break up unless we stop it.’’ And on that exciting note, the man who would like the job is gone.

UPDATE 30 JULY

In the Guardian on 27 July Simon Jenkins took a very dim view of the possibility of Tony Blair’s reentry to British political life. He also referenced an interview that Blair gave to CNN's Christiane Amanpour on 17 July which includes the following:

AMANPOUR: Is there more public office in view for Tony Blair? Everybody’s talking about how you’re positioning yourself to make a comeback.
BLAIR: I’m not really. It’s just that people ask you the question in a way that says, you know, rule it out, and I kind of think, well, why should I? But that’s not the same as planning to do it. You know what I mean? So I - I’m a public service person. You know, I would have liked staying as prime minister. I would have taken the European job had it been offered me. So that’s my preference. But I’m also enjoying the life I’ve got and doing lots of things and you know, I kind of let the future take care of itself.
AMANPOUR: You didn’t want to step down?
BLAIR: It was - you know, it became very difficult for me to stay, other than a lot of damage to my party, but also probably to my country. So I decided to go. And I’d done it ten years, you know, it’s a long time.
AMANPOUR: Sounds like you’re keeping the door open, though.
BLAIR: It's literally - I mean, maybe I should just shut it, but I just kind of think, “Why?” I mean, you know, the - so, look, I've still got plenty of ideas and energy. But I can't see anything happening on the horizon. I'm not planning or plotting or scheming.

The Iraq Inquiry and ‘Warning Letters’

After last month’s media firestorm over phone hacking, quite a few people in Fleet Street and in Downing Street must have been pleased to see the headline of 31 July’s Mail On Sunday (MoS) focussing on something quite different: ‘The damning of Tony Blair: Former PM to be held to account on Iraq in Chilcot report on war’. David Cameron had attempted some hosing down of ‘Hackgate’ on 20 July in the Commons when he made a ‘Statement on Public Confidence in the Media and Police’ and took questions at length. During one of his replies he said:

[Interruption.] From a sedentary position, the shadow Chancellor says, “We didn’t hire Andy Coulson.” Look, you hired Damian McBride. You had Alastair Campbell. You had Alastair Campbell falsifying documents in government. You have still got Tom Baldwin working in your office. [Interruption.] Yes. Gotcha!

Whether the remark about Campbell was an unguarded response to Ed Balls, who the PM seems to find very irritating, or whether it was a ‘gobbet’ intended for release in response to any criticism of the PM's having employed Coulson, we may never know. However, as explained on his blog, Campbell immediately emailed the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Gus O’Donnell (GOD):

Dear Gus,
The Prime Minister said in the Commons today that whilst working in Downing Street I falsified government documents. He said this without qualification, and without providing any evidence to substantiate the claim.
As you know, I have appeared before the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, the Intelligence and Security Committee, and the Hutton Inquiry. All three thoroughly probed allegations made against me with regard to inserting false intelligence into government documents in the run-up to war in Iraq, and all three concluded that the allegations were unfounded. Similarly, no evidence has been presented to the Chilcot Inquiry, to which I testified for several hours, that I falsified government documents.
I am writing to ask on what basis the Prime Minister made the claim that he did, under parliamentary privilege, and what evidence he has to justify it.
If he concludes that no such evidence exists, I would hope that he could withdraw the allegation via a letter from you.
Yours, Alastair Campbell

It took over a week, and presumably a fair bit of aller retourner between No 10 and the Cabinet Office, and perhaps others, to produce GOD’s letter in reply on 28 July:

Dear Alastair,
Thank you for your email and apologies for the delayed response.
The Prime Minister is aware that the allegations made against you in relation to the WMD dossier presented to Parliament by his predecessor in September 2002 have been investigated by several inquiries. Let me assure you that, contrary to some of the media reporting of his comments about you in the Commons, that was not what the Prime Minister had in mind.
In what was a very lively Commons debate, the PM was referring to the briefing paper you commissioned on Iraq’s infrastructure of concealment and deception which, because of the failure to attribute material taken from the work of an academic, became known as ‘the dodgy dossier’.
Whilst I know you were unaware of the mistake by a member of your team which led to this controversy, you did take responsibility for it at the time, when you appeared before the Foreign Affairs Committee.
You are well aware of how heated things can get in the Commons and I can assure you the Prime Minister’s statement about you was no more than political knockabout which got a bit carried away.
I hope you will accept my assurances. I understand that No10 have and are continuing to make it clear that the PM was casting no aspersions whatever in relation to this, and it is right that they do so.
Yours,
Gus

Campbell concluded:

Cabinet Secretary Sir Gus O’Donnell today replied to my complaint of a week ago about the allegations made by the Prime Minister in the House of Commons that I falsified government documents. I am very grateful to him for the reply, and to the Prime Minister for the explanation offered; that this was ‘political knockabout which got a bit carried away,’; that contrary to some of the media reporting of his statement last week, he was not referring to the WMD dossier presented to Parliament by Tony Blair in 2002, and that he was ‘casting no aspersions.’ So far as I am concerned, that is a satisfactory conclusion to the matter.

Three days later (or probably the next day, Friday, when the Sundays usually decide on their main stories), the MoS claimed:

The Mail on Sunday has been told that the former Prime Minister will be held to account on four main failings:
* Bogus claims that were made about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction.
* Not telling the British public about his secret pledge with George Bush to go to war.
* Keeping the Cabinet in the dark by his ‘sofa government’ style.
* Failing to plan to avoid the post-war chaos in Iraq.
Well-placed sources say the reputations of Mr Blair and key allies will suffer major damage when the report by Sir John Chilcot’s Iraq War inquiry is published this autumn. Mr Blair, former Foreign Secretary Jack Straw and ex-Downing Street spin doctor Alastair Campbell are all expected to be criticised.
…
The Mail on Sunday understands that the inquiry rounds on Mr Blair for telling Parliament that intelligence suggesting Saddam had WMDs was ‘beyond doubt’.

Most of the MoS’s report was a selection from material published by the Inquiry which supported the main thrust of their story:

The inquiry report is also expected to criticise spin doctor Mr Campbell, whose denial that the dossier on Saddam’s weapons was designed to ‘make the case for war’ was challenged by former spy chief Major-General Michael Laurie, who was head of intelligence collection for the Defence Intelligence Agency.
…
And earlier this month an unnamed MI6 officer said Mr Campbell acted like ‘an unguided missile’ in work on the intelligence dossier. The spin doctor had ‘a propensity to have rushes of blood to the head and pass various stories and information to journalists without appropriate prior consultation’.

However, the MoS statement that:

… Sir John Chilcot's Iraq War inquiry is published this autumn

was contradicted in the London Evening Standard (LES) the next day: ‘Sir John Chilcot Iraq verdict won't be published until January’. This was because:

Under the rules of public inquiries, anyone taken to task must be told in advance and given chance to respond. But the so-called "Salmon letters" have yet to be sent out, and a source said the process would put the report back until the new year.

- not quite the expectation of the MoS. It will be interesting to see which paper is right, and whether the LES ‘source’ turns out to be closer than the MoS’s ‘well-placed sources’.

So what is ‘the process’? According to the Inquiry website’s FAQs:

35. Will you notify witnesses/individuals before you mention or criticise them in the report?
The Inquiry’s Witness Protocol makes it clear that if the Inquiry expects to criticise an individual in the final report, that individual will, in accordance with normal practice, be provided with relevant sections of the draft report in order to make any representations on the proposed criticism prior to publication of the final report.

What might ‘in accordance with normal practice’ involve? For non-lawyers, a helpful explanation is available on law firm Field Fisher Waterhouse’s website in the form of ‘A practical guide to commissioning and conducting investigations and inquiries’ by Ed Marsden and Martin Smith. Among many other things, it explains the “Salmon letter” mentioned by the LES:

For inquiries conducted under the Inquiries Act 2005, the Salmon letter procedure has been codified in to a process of “warning letters” (see section 13 of the Act). This provides that the chairman may not include any explicit or significant criticism of a person in a report unless he has sent a warning letter to a person who:
(a) He considers may be, or who has been, subject to criticism in the inquiry proceedings; or
(b) About whom criticism may be inferred from evidence that has been given during the inquiry proceedings; or
(c) Who may be subject to criticism in any report or interim report.
Section 14 of the Act creates a statutory duty of confidence between the recipient of such a letter, the inquiry team and the recipient’s legal representative. The duty persists until such time as the inquiry’s report is published or the chairman waives the duty.
The contents of warning letters under the Act are set out in section 15. They must:
(a) state what the criticism or proposed criticism is
(b) contain a statement of the facts that the chairman considers substantiate the criticism or proposed criticism
(c) refer to any evidence which supports those facts.

But is the Iraq Inquiry being conducted under the 2005 Act? Presumably it is, but some of the key provisions are not being exercised, eg Section 17(2): Power to take evidence on oath and Section 37: Immunity from suit. The latter is interesting, in that according to Marsden and Smith:

The law provides that where a statement is made by one individual about another which is false and damages that person’s reputation, that person may commence proceedings for damages on grounds of defamation.
Those conducting inquiries, and those giving evidence in such proceedings are as susceptible to an action for libel (in respect of written statements) or slander (oral statements) as anyone else.
However, where “qualified privilege” attaches to an inquiry it serves to protect the statement-maker where they make a false and disparaging statement in the course of the inquiry providing the statement is made in good faith. This is not the case, though, where the statement-maker is motivated by malice.
For inquiries conducted under the Inquiries Act 2005, section 37 codifies the previous common law understanding of the qualified privilege defence to defamation proceedings. Section 37(3) provides as follows:
37(3) for the purposes of the law of defamation, the same privilege attaches to
(a) Any statement made in or for the purposes of proceedings before an inquiry (including the report and any interim report of the inquiry)
(b) Reports of proceedings before an inquiry
As would be the case if those proceedings were proceedings before a court in the relevant part of the United Kingdom.

However, the Iraq Inquiry FAQs state:

27. What protection did [do] witnesses have to speak freely?
The hearings are not covered by Parliamentary or other privilege. The Committee expects all witnesses to provide truthful, fair and accurate evidence. The Inquiry welcomes the fact that the Government and Services have extended an immunity from disciplinary action to serving officials and military personnel who give evidence or otherwise assist the Inquiry, as this will help reassure witnesses that they can provide frank and honest evidence.

Returning to the ‘Salmon letter’, Section 14 of the Act (see above) refers to the ‘recipient’s legal representative’. Witnesses should have been offered the opportunity to bring a friend or legal representative to their interview, though it should have been made clear that the investigators’ questions will be directed to the witness. Of the three whose reputations the MoS expects to see suffering major damage, two, Blair and Straw, were barristers before entering politics. Whether they or Campbell (who met up with a well-known and eminent QC about 25 minutes into Episode 7 of Jamie’s Dream School, as broadcast on Channel 4 earlier this year) have sought, or will be seeking, legal advice on how to deal with any criticisms from the Inquiry, we may never know. But one cannot help wondering if the other witnesses, in making their comments, fully appreciated the possible implications of an absence of privilege, if this is actually the case. Presumably, in the event of a legal action concerning a defamatory statement, the defence costs would be borne by the witness’s employing department. In these circumstances, however, evidence would be under oath and subject to cross-examination by a barrister.

As for the MoS’s ‘four main failings’, I don’t see the latter two (sofa government and post-war planning) being made that much of – the former already addressed by Lord Butler and the latter potentially awkward for the present incumbent of No 10, given the uncertain outcome in Libya. As for the ‘bogus WMD claims’, the Inquiry might feel it should come up with something new. Going back to GOD’s letter above, the ‘dodgy dossier’ was explained, and apologized for, by Campbell at the Foreign Affairs Select Committee (FAC) on 25 June 2003: 

Q1152 Sir John Stanley: I would like to turn to another apology which I think is very seriously outstanding and on which you may wish to correct your evidence. If I heard you correctly you suggested the Government had made an apology to Mr al-Marashi. Mr al-Marashi's work was lifted off the internet without attribution; it was used in a highly political context to help make the Government's policy case for going to war against Iraq which was a matter which concerned him very greatly. His thesis or his article in the Middle East Review in certainly one crucial respect was substantially changed to suggest terrorist linkage between the Saddam Hussein intelligence agency and al-Qaeda which was not what he said in his Review article, and members of his family were endangered. I questioned him on the issue as to whether he had had an apology, "Has the Government made any expression of regret or apology to you for the plagiarisation of your thesis? Mr al-Marashi: I have never been contacted directly, either by phone call nor in writing, since February 2003 up to the present. Me: Do you think you might be owed an apology. Mr al-Marashi: I think the least they can do is owe me an apology." I do not believe he has received an apology, I think Mr Campbell you said earlier he had, I hope he will receive a personal apology from you.
Mr Campbell: As I say, I take responsibility for that paper. I have explained why the mistake was made. I am happy to send an apology to Mr al-Marashi on behalf of the entire communications team at No 10 and the CIC, I am happy to do that. As I said earlier, the moment this mistake was exposed by Channel 4 and subsequently by Mr al-Marashi himself on Newsnight, that next morning the Prime Minister's spokesman has never attempted to avoid it, hands up, it should not have happened, we are going to look at how it happened, we are going to put procedures in place and that has been done. I have no desire here at all to do anything other than deliver that apology and do that sincerely. If it would help to do that in writing to Mr al-Marashi, I am perfectly happy to do that.

Campbell also provided the FAC with a memorandum and a supplementary memorandum. The latter explained the drafting changes he had proposed during the development of the September 2002 WMD dossier referred to by GOD. Unless the papers seen by the Chilcot Inquiry invalidate this explanation, there doesn’t seem to be much justification for the MoS’s expectations of Campbell’s being criticised.

The other Blair failing cited by the MoS was ‘Not telling the British public about his secret pledge with George Bush to go to war’. Ignoring the point that British PMs invariably will have secrets they don’t tell the public, the ‘pledge with George Bush’ was addressed in the second Blair evidence session on 21 January 2011 (page 48 et seq):

[BLAIR] … So in a sense what I was saying to America was "look" -- and by the way I am absolutely sure this is how George Bush took it "Whatever the political heat, if I think this is the right thing to do I am going to be with you. I am not going to back out because the going gets tough. On the other hand, here are the difficulties and this is why I think the UN route is the right way to go".
SIR JOHN CHILCOT: The Andrew Rawnsley book quotes you saying at about the end of July, so it must be the same event, Rawnsley quotes you as saying, having said to President Bush, quoting from Rawnsley, quoting you: "You know, George, whatever you decide to do, I am with you." Is that about right?
THE RT. HON. TONY BLAIR: No, it is not what I said. What I said is what I said in the note, and with the greatest respect to Andrew Rawnsley I don't think he was present at the meeting.
SIR JOHN CHILCOT: No. He was quoting what you said to him.
THE RT. HON. TONY BLAIR: What I said to him.
SIR JOHN CHILCOT: So I understand.
THE RT. HON. TONY BLAIR: I have not heard about that.

A footnote explains: ‘Andrew Rawnsley in his book The End of the Party refers to interviews with officials as the basis for his material.’

SIR JOHN CHILCOT: I suppose just to round off on this, because it is very important and central as to how far there was a commitment and what the nature of the commitment was, thinking also about what you said to Donald Rumsfeld on 5th June, you said in your statement to us about that: "I could not and did not offer some kind of blank cheque in how we accomplished our shared objective." But if you used the sort of language that Rawnsley cites or that we have seen in the note you sent to President Bush, are those wholly consistent in terms of the understanding that the Americans formed?
THE RT. HON. TONY BLAIR: Sure. I don't think the Americans were in any doubt at all about what was being said and why it was being said. I can't recall all the precise conversations I had, but by the way, this is entirely also consistent with what I was saying publicly. I don't think it was a great secret that I was right alongside America after September 11th and continued to be, and one of the reasons why when we had the Crawford meeting there was so much international focus is that Britain and America were standing together.
What I was saying to the Americans was this, because I was trying to get them very substantially to amend their position. Their position had been "We are going to do it". Then their position had been because I had asked them "Okay with an ultimatum." Now their position with huge opposition within his system was going to be "We are going to put this back in the lap of the United Nations". Some of the people in his administration were saying "You are crazy. You are going to put it back into the bureaucracy of the UN. They will swallow it up. You will be back to all this playing around. In the meantime you have this guy doing what he is doing, sitting there and nothing happening."
So I was having to persuade him to take a view radically different from any of the people in his administration. So what I was saying to him is "I am going to be with you in handling it this way. I am not going to push you down this path and then back out when it gets too hot politically, because it is going to get hot for me politically, very, very much so."
I did this because I believed in it. I thought it was the right thing to do. I also believe it is consistent with my public statements and, frankly, whatever phrasing I used, I accept entirely I was saying "I am going to be with America in handling this. However, we should handle it this way". That was in the end what he agreed to do. The single thing that is most important over anything else in this whole business about the politics about the decision before we went to war, is that 1441 represented a huge compromise on his part and a huge opportunity for the international community to get its act together.
Once it became clear that Saddam had not changed but was carrying on in the same way, I think it would have been profoundly wrong of us to have gone back to the Americans and said, "I know we said that we would be with you in handling this, but now we are not".

The Chairman then concludes, rather opaquely:

SIR JOHN CHILCOT: Thank you. I'd like to ask Sir Roderic to pick up on Resolution 1441. Just before I do I think I would like to say for the record, because I said to the Cabinet Secretary that we were disappointed that it was not possible to see the statement, which, of course, we have seen, and that disappointment continues, but there it is.

Presumably he is referring to his introduction earlier to this part of Blair’s evidence (page 46)

… In the Inquiry's statement request to you, Mr Blair, we asked about two specific statements, the one you made to President Bush after the meeting of 23rd July 2002, and also to Defence Secretary Rumsfeld in June 2002.
The Cabinet Secretary would not agree to their disclosure. In communicating his decision to us, the Cabinet Secretary wrote and I quote:
"A UK Prime Minister may be less likely to have these exchanges or allow them to be recorded if he is concerned that this information would be disclosed at a later time against his wishes."
Are you content to tell the Inquiry what was in these statements?
THE RT. HON. TONY BLAIR: I am very content to discuss the basis of them. What I do believe and I am not going to hide behind the Cabinet Secretary -- it is not my way -- I think it is extremely important that the British Prime Minister and the American President are able to communicate in confidence, and if something is given in confidence it should be treated like that, but I am very happy to tell you the basis of what I said.

What the Chairman meant by 'it was not possible to see the statement, which, of course, we have seen, and that disappointment continues' is difficult to interpret. However, neither his remark nor Blair’s statement would seem to support the existence of a ‘secret pledge with George Bush to go to war’. Of course the Inquiry may have seen other documents which do. The MoS also states that the ‘inquiry rounds on Mr Blair for telling Parliament that intelligence suggesting Saddam had WMDs was “beyond doubt”’. Blair’s foreword to the September WMD dossier stated:

What I believe the assessed intelligence has established beyond doubt is that Saddam has continued to produce chemical and biological weapons, that he continues in his efforts to develop nuclear weapons, and that he has been able to extend the range of his ballistic missile programme.

Although he later pointed out:

The case I make is that the UN Resolutions demanding he stops his WMD programme are being flouted; that since the inspectors left four years ago he has continued with this programme; that the inspectors must be allowed back in to do their job properly; and that if he refuses, or if he makes it impossible for them to do their job, as he has done in the past, the international community will have to act.
I believe that faced with the information available to me, the UK Government has been right to support the demands that this issue be confronted and dealt with. We must ensure that he does not get to use the weapons he has, or get hold of the weapons he wants.

Subsequently, as we all know, the evidence for Saddam’s WMD programme was not forthcoming. If only minor evidence had surfaced, the ‘beyond doubt’ issue would not have arisen.  Nonetheless, it is worth considering the alternative. If Blair hadn’t been so sure, would it have been in the UK’s interest for him to have gone to Bush and said “… we said that we would be with you in handling this, but now we are not"? Bear in mind that Blair had, with misgivings, supported Clinton a few years earlier over Saddam. Being able to say ‘we told you so about the WMD’ afterwards would hardly have helped restore the UK’s standing with the Bush White House. Waiting for Bush’s successor would hardly have been a practical optioneither, and, as it has turned out, Obama has been criticised by the Tea Party for many things, but not yet for anglophilia.

I quoted in an earlier post from Jim Naughtie’s The Accidental American about the significance of the UK/US relationship as perceived by Blair in 2004. Perhaps in 2011, if the UK is envisaged in some quarters as being on the way to minor power status (eg eventually abandoning its nuclear deterrent, aircraft carriers and a serious intelligence capability), keeping on good terms with the US is not seen as worth the price. However, the UK would need to be confident that it could address the current and future threats to cyber security without close cooperation with the US. London, the City and the services they provide, are fundamental to the UK’s returning to prosperity over the rest of the decade. The National Security Strategy published last year has as one of its key aims their protection, along with the rest of the nation’s infrastructure, against ‘Hostile attacks … by other states and large scale cyber crime’. It also states:

2.11 Our strong defence, security and intelligence relationship with the US is exceptionally close and central to our national interest.

On a more trivial note, is it really likely that the Iraq Inquiry report (assuming it appears in early 2012, a year later than originally envisaged) will, six months before the London Olympics, engage in major criticism of the former Prime Minister who secured them for the UK against French competition in particular?

UPDATE 17 OCTOBER

Yesterday, the Observer reported that:

The official inquiry into the UK's role in the build-up to the Iraq war might not issue its report until next summer at the earliest, more than a year after many expected it to be made public, the Observer has learned.

A source close to the inquiry, chaired by Sir John Chilcot, a former Whitehall mandarin who has advised both MI5 and MI6, suggested that its findings are unlikely to be disclosed until June.

Just before the Olympics then , unless, of course, there's another postponement ...

The Observer  also said:

The inquiry's findings are expected to be critical of a number of senior politicians within the Labour government, their aides, and intelligence chiefs. There is speculation that the former head of MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove, will bear the brunt of the criticism.

While Blair is expected to be criticised, in particular for not consulting sufficiently with his cabinet, there is speculation that he won't be condemned as strongly as some had expected. But his relationship with his chief legal adviser faces acute scrutiny. The inquiry heard that eight months before the invasion, Lord Goldsmith told Blair an attempt to topple Saddam would be a serious breach of international law.

Blair and the Iraq Inquiry

Watching Tony Blair’s second appearance at the Iraq Inquiry on BBC News last month, it didn’t seem surprising that Cameron and Osborne are said to call him “The Master”, the soubriquet of another great performer, Noël Coward. It will be interesting to see how the Inquiry treats Blair in its report. Some of the more fanciful ideas put about by his detractors can be put in perspective by reading the Chairman’s statement of the Inquiry Terms of Reference:

"Our terms of reference are very broad, but the essential points, as set out by the Prime Minister and agreed by the House of Commons, are that this is an Inquiry by a committee of Privy Counsellors. It will consider the period from the summer of 2001 to the end of July 2009, embracing the run-up to the conflict in Iraq, the military action and its aftermath. We will therefore be considering the UK's involvement in Iraq, including the way decisions were made and actions taken, to establish, as accurately as possible, what happened and to identify the lessons that can be learned. Those lessons will help ensure that, if we face similar situations in future, the government of the day is best equipped to respond to those situations in the most effective manner in the best interests of the country."

At a guess, Blair will be told off a second time for not running a tight enough ship (see below for the first). To judge by their style of questioning, it will come naturally to the Inquiry to put any criticisms in an appropriately oblique and circumlocutious way. Of course, various lessons and recommendations as to how to do better will be offered. It would be surprising if these improvements to the machinery of government didn’t require a couple of new posts at Senior Civil Service Pay Band 3 (Deputy Secretary in Sir Humphrey Appleby’s day), and the upgrading of some others.

There may be some consideration of the size of UK forces to be committed to such affairs in the future (they can only be smaller) and improving the planning including the consequences, but how will the Inquiry deal with one key ‘best interests of the country’ issue: what would the US reaction have been if the UK had declined to participate? The evidence in 2009 from Sir Christopher Meyer (UK ambassador in Washington 1997-2003) suggests that it wouldn’t have been the end of the world (p71-5):

SIR RODERIC LYNE: If we had sat out the war, would it have damaged British interests in the United States if that's what they were saying to us?
SIR CHRISTOPHER MEYER: It is impossible to say, it is impossible to say. We had a very high reputation at the time inside the United States. There was no great popular surge, as far as we could tell, in favour of going to war. Polls weren't particularly encouraging for the administration. I was travelling a lot around the United States at the time. I didn't come across anybody except an oil man in Houston who was keen on invading. I doubt it would have done a lot of damage.
...
SIR RODERIC LYNE: Apart from the applause factor that you mentioned earlier, what benefits to British interests did we gain, did we advance, by the role that we took?
SIR CHRISTOPHER MEYER: That's a great question, and it is one that much pre-occupied me. I said to London, "The key thing now, quite apart from Iraq, is to translate this popularity into real achievements which benefit the national interest", and we failed. We failed, and I'll tell you where we failed. We failed on persuading the United States administration to liberalise air services across the Atlantic, a very big British interest. The other thing which was profoundly irritating was that almost on the day that 45 Commando arrived in Afghanistan to help with the war, the Americans slapped tariffs on exports from the UK of what they called speciality steel.
...
SIR RODERIC LYNE: Just to make sure that I have properly understood this. To summarise what you have just said, it wasn't essential for the defence of British interests that we actually played the part that we did choose to play in Iraq. It wasn't essential, for reasons of British/American relations, that we did so. On the one hand, there wouldn't have been necessarily massive damage if we had not done so, and, on the other hand, we failed to secure specific benefits and in some cases areas you have identified, steel and air services, that we should have done.

While writing his book, The Accidental American, Jim Naughtie seems to have had privileged access to Blair, including an exclusive interview in 2004. He reveals just how heavily the relationship with the US seemed to weigh on Blair (p164-5):

Blair also understood the power of the secret network from the moment in the course of his first week in office when he was inculcated into the secrets of the UKUSA Treaty of 1948, which established the intelligence relationship with Washington, and then signed the papers giving him control of the nuclear missiles that were part of the defence arrangement with the United States. For any incoming prime minister, these arrangements become a matter of day-to-day importance that is often unrecognized by the general public. For example, the government's vast listening station in Cheltenham-GCHQ-is not only the hub of electronic intelligence for Whitehall but a vital part of the listening apparatus of the National Security Agency in Washington. That is why more than half the budget for GCHQ is paid for by American taxpayers, a fact about which British governments have been naturally reticent.

As with all their predecessors, the relationship between Bush and Blair was built on this practical foundation. The niceties of a shared language (more or less), the threads of family history that still span the Atlantic, and the memories of World War II are often portrayed as being the essence of the partnership: in practice, the hard facts of intelligence and defence are the links that pull the two governments together. They are bound together by their weapons, their satellites, and the tentacles of their intelligence networks.

The Inquiry didn’t ask Meyer (or Blair for that matter) about this intelligence/ defence relationship, for example whether he thought the Blair-Bush exchange of letters in 2006 on maintaining Trident would have been feasible if the UK had not stood ‘shoulder to shoulder’ with the US in Iraq. The realities of timing (Blair and Bush were aware that their respective departures from office would be in 2007 and 2009) and a different conjunction of personalities might have made securing Brown-Bush or Brown-Obama exchanges at a later date much harder work. Beyond the Inquiry’s remit, of course, it is arguable that Blair’s current ship, The Office of Tony Blair, might not have been such a capable vessel, and in a position to be performing so many good works, if he had been less highly regarded in the US.

Could next time be different? Blair is not alone in thinking that some sort of confrontation with Iran is inevitable. Cameron or Miliband could find themselves in a very similar position to Blair (if Cameron were leading a Conservative government he would find it easier to take his party with him than Blair did, but not the LibDem part of the Coalition). The officials and the politicians, as might be expected, have opposing views as to whether the existence of a more elaborate bureaucratic apparatus would make any significant difference.  Lord Butler in his report in 2004 (Review of Intelligence on Weapons of Mass Destruction) has already gone over some of the Inquiry’s ground:

609. In the year before the war, the Cabinet discussed policy towards Iraq as a specific agenda item 24 times. It also arose in the course of discussions on other business. Cabinet members were offered and many received briefings on the intelligence picture on Iraq. There was therefore no lack of discussion on Iraq; and we have been informed that it was substantive. The Ministerial Committee on Defence and Overseas Policy did not meet. By contrast, over the period from April 2002 to the start of military action, some 25 meetings attended by the small number of key Ministers, officials and military officers most closely involved provided the framework of discussion and decision-making within Government.
610. One inescapable consequence of this was to limit wider collective discussion and consideration by the Cabinet to the frequent but unscripted occasions when the Prime Minister, Foreign Secretary and Defence Secretary briefed the Cabinet orally. Excellent quality papers were written by officials, but these were not discussed in Cabinet or in Cabinet Committee. Without papers circulated in advance, it remains possible but is obviously much more difficult for members of the Cabinet outside the small circle directly involved to bring their political judgement and experience to bear on the major decisions for which the Cabinet as a whole must carry responsibility. The absence of papers on the Cabinet agenda so that Ministers could obtain briefings in advance from the Cabinet Office, their own departments or from the intelligence agencies plainly reduced their ability to prepare properly for such discussions, while the changes to key posts at the head of the Cabinet Secretariat lessened the support of the machinery of government for the collective responsibility of the Cabinet in the vital matter of war and peace.
611. We do not suggest that there is or should be an ideal or unchangeable system of collective Government, still less that procedures are in aggregate any less effective now than in earlier times. However, we are concerned that the informality and circumscribed character of the Government’s procedures which we saw in the context of policy-making towards Iraq risks reducing the scope for informed collective political judgement. Such risks are particularly significant in a field like the subject of our Review, where hard facts are inherently difficult to come by and the quality of judgement is accordingly all the more important.

The second volume of Alastair Campbell’s Diaries, Power and the People 1997-1999, reveals the gulf between Sir Robin Butler (as he was when Cabinet Secretary) and Blair’s team when they arrived in Number 10. Campbell (40 at the time) records on 28 July 1997: “Butler struck me as very amiable but very out of date” – Butler was 59, Blair 44. “Sofa government” had arrived, not that two of the witnesses to the Iraq Inquiry saw much of a problem with it in retrospect. Here the Iraq Inquiry Chairman (Sir John Chilcot) is questioning Jonathan Powell, Blair’s chief of staff (a political post) on 18 January 2010 (p8-9):

THE CHAIRMAN: So turning to another and broader machinery point, much has been written about so-called "sofa government", and I do put that in quotation marks, characterised, perhaps not unfairly, with informality and, indeed, a degree of intimacy with close and trusted advisers and colleagues, and, on the other side, people have asked, "Is there some risk of exclusion of other colleagues still holding and sharing heavy responsibility?", but in particular asking, "Did that mean that action following such discussions characterised to some degree by informality, action points might be lost or lost in translation, as it were, into the government machine?" Would you like to comment on that?
MR JONATHAN POWELL: Yes. We had this criticism of sofa government. I think it is actually misplaced. I don’t think it matters whether a meeting takes place in the Cabinet room, where John Major used to hold meetings, or in the sitting room, where Mrs Thatcher or Tony Blair used to hold their meetings. I think the key thing is that you have the right people there, the people who need to be involved in a decision, that they are properly informed, have the proper material before them, in written or in oral form, and that decisions are taken, then recorded, and then distributed to government to be followed up. As long as that happens, I think it doesn't really matter if someone is sitting on a sofa or sitting round a table.
THE CHAIRMAN: It would be primarily your responsibility to the Prime Minister and the system to ensure that the outcome of such discussions were recorded and were transmitted into the government machinery?
MR JONATHAN POWELL: Inasmuch as it is my responsibility to make sure that everything in Number 10 functioned, yes. Although the notes in such meetings would be taken usually by civil servants who were at the meetings.
THE CHAIRMAN: Right. ...

Over a year later, on 3 February, Jack Straw (Foreign Secretary in the period of interest) was the final witness (his third appearance), and made a closing statement (p151):

[Blair’s] style was less formal than others and certainly less formal than mine but the fact he used soft furnishings rather than hard chairs does not make him a bad person, nor, to make a more serious point, do I believe that a more formal process would have altered either the respect in which he was held by colleagues, the influence he had, nor the outcome of the decisions, but equally the fact the process was, frustratingly for some, less formal than it should have been I don't think necessarily meant the decisions were of a lower quality nor that they lacked the fullest range of opinions in the input.