The Day of Judgement
Evening Standard, 16th January 2004

In one terrifying 24-hour period later this month, Tony Blair's fate will be sealed. A Prime Minister who for years has been master of all he surveyed is now at the mercy of others. On the evening of January 27 parliament will vote on his plans to impose "top up fees" on students and to allow universities more freedom to charge undergraduates what they like. With parts of his party in open revolt, he will use every opportunity between now and the vote to win over as many Labour MPs as he can. The arithmetic will be tight. If he loses, his authority over his party and his mission to reform public services will be wrecked.

Then, on the following day, he will face an even more perilous test when Lord Hutton publishes his report into the death of the weapons scientist Dr David Kelly. The judge has spent four months poring over the testimony and written evidence to determine whether Mr Blair was culpable in releasing the identity of Dr Kelly and whether Downing Street "sexed up" the evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. The timing could not be more dramatic. These two events have now merged into one. In their different ways, they encapsulate all the strengths and weaknesses of Blair. For the moment all he can do is prepare and hope. He and his inner team privately concede that has already been deeply damaged by the whole process - by the botched diplomacy that led to war, by the failure to find WMD and by the panicked reaction to the report on the BBC by Andrew Gilligan that called into question his integrity.

Lord Hutton is being encouraged by the Conservatives to hone in on the specific question: did the Prime Minister authorise the naming of Dr Kelly and did he lie to try to get himself out of the mess? Others want the judge to declare on the bigger issue: did Blair exaggerate the case for war? Did Britain go to war on the basis of a false threat? But both these questions come down to one thing: the Prime Minister's trustworthiness.

Blair's problem is that trust has long been a commodity in short supply. His supporters blame the media's assaults. His detractors put it down to the Prime Minister and his style of government. Only a man as driven as he has always been by the need to manage the news, and only a government as dominated as this by one man, could have ultimately ended up this way.

So determined was Blair to support President George W Bush, come what may, that he committed himself to war - his fifth in his premiership - as early as April 2002. His task over the following year was to win over a sceptical British public. Everything possible was done to convince people, including publication of the now infamous dossiers on Iraq's weapons' capability. "Trust me", he kept telling voters. I can't tell you everything, but I can tell you some things. Read these documents, and then you will have to believe me. His intelligence chief had brought him assessments on WMD - by their nature hedged and qualified. He needed the evidence to be presented more persuasively. Eventually it was. That "evidence" helped convince wavering Labour MPs to give Blair the benefit of the doubt on the eve of war last March. Many of those MPs now sorely regret doing so, and are committed to exacting revenge on whatever issue they can find.

As with war, as with peace, Blair has seen himself as an evangelist. When he is not ridding the world of evil regimes, he has been trying to transform Britain's malfunctioning public services. Modernisation has been the mantra, and his reform of universities became the new totem. He began to argue, with his customary zeal, that unless Britain's elite institutions were given huge injections of cash they, and the economy, would go into terminal decline. The plea skated over the fact that Labour's 2001 general election manifesto had promised the exact opposite. Today, Blair believes that tuition fees are progressive. Taxation is old fashioned. His opponents remain what they always were – opponent of modernisation. Underlying all his battles at home and abroad is an uncommon self-belief.

Now that vote on education will form the first part of the Blair verdict. The feeling at Westminster is that the tide is turning in his favour. He may yet win, but this will have been by far the biggest challenge yet to his leadership. And then within hours of the votes being counted, he will once again be fighting for his political life.

For all the rights and wrongs of the war, for all the claims about the non-existent WMD, Blair’s future may rest on the one particular question. Will Lord Hutton conclude that he lied about the circumstances surrounding the naming of Dr Kelly? Certainly Blair chaired the crucial meetings on Dr Kelly. Matters of utmost gravity were decided with undue informality. Minutes were often not taken. Civil servants, spin doctors, spy chiefs, prime ministers, all sat around on sofas. They were, as Alastair Campbell said famously of the spy chief John Scarlett, "mates" in a common cause. So did Blair in these meetings sign off a strategy to prompt journalists to identify the scientist, or merely to confirm his name when asked? Immediately after Dr Kelly’s death, Blair said he had “emphatically” not leaked his name. He now says he stands by the “totality” of his original claim, but has struggled to explain what he means. It is an issue of apparent semantics on which so much now rests. Blair’s people know he is vulnerable on it. The Tories, cheerleaders of the war until expediency intervened, have already found him guilty. But now only one verdict matters, that of Lord Hutton.

If the judge, after his exhaustive enquiry, stops short of implicating the Prime Minister in the actual naming of Dr Kelly, he would struggle on in office. If, however, Lord Hutton does declare Blair culpable on this point, he would, as he has already conceded, have to resign. For a man who promised so much, it would be a humiliating and tragic end.


This article first appeared in the Evening Standard and may not be reproduced without permission.