In his report on the run-up to the war, released in London last week, Lord Butler discovered that there was not a single meeting of the Defense and Overseas Policy Committee of ministers in the whole year before the invasion. “Excellent quality papers” were prepared by officials but never circulated to cabinet ministers, presumably on the instructions of Downing Street. Lord Butler records his concern that “the informality and circumscribed character” of the Blair style of management reduced the scope for “informed collective political judgment.”
I was a member of Blair’s cabinet for six years, until I left it over my disagreement with the war, and I recognize Lord Butler’s description of Blair’s style. The prime minister has a distaste for open, frank disagreement and likes his decisions well cooked in advance of meetings. His preferred method is to have colleagues come round to square an agreement in an informal exchange. These meetings take place in The Den, the prime minister’s private office next to the Cabinet Room, which is so modest in size that it could fit into the Oval Office 10 times over.
Much of its space is taken up with the two famous sofas on which Tony Blair and his visitor face each other over a coffee table. The approach works partly because one of Blair’s great assets is his immense charm, which makes disagreement with him appear positively rude. Even those of us who have fallen out with him on policy find it almost impossible to dislike him as a person.
The agreement reached on the sofas is then reported round the cabinet table by means of an oral presentation. There is hardly ever a background paper circulated in advance, as this would positively incite private offices across Whitehall to feed in reservations through their cabinet minister. There is never a paper offering different options for the cabinet to choose between. The result is that the British cabinet is no longer a forum in which decisions are taken, but in which decisions are endorsed.
Iraq is a good example of the cabinet’s failing to exert itself. To be fair, Blair gave members every opportunity to question the drift to war. Lord Butler has counted 24 occasions when Iraq featured on the weekly agenda of the cabinet in the year before invasion. But in practice only my-self and the then Secretary of State for International Development Clare Short raised doubts about the wisdom of an invasion without wider support at the United Nations or in Europe.
Cabinet ministers were informed of the background intelligence, but it was always on the basis of an oral presentation by John Scarlett, the head of the Joint Intelligence Committee. There were no briefing papers spelling out the caveats about the thinness of the intelligence. Perhaps the balance of views might have shifted if we had been allowed to see the “excellent quality papers” that Lord Butler discovered, but I doubt it. The real problem was that Blair made it only too clear that his mind was made up–and his cabinet had no collective experience of trying to make the prime minister change his mind.
Blair is not alone in limiting the role of the cabinet. Margaret Thatcher also was impatient of what she saw as time wasted on argument. The two longest-serving Conservative and Labor prime ministers of the past century are both driven personalities who share the view that the job of government is to get on with pushing through change and not to let it be delayed by debate. Both sought to construct cabinets that would agree with them rather than question them, though ultimately Thatcher’s ruin was that she was not as successful as Blair in doing so.
There are benefits from a system that makes it easy to get agreement. The pace of reform under his government has been so breathtakingly dramatic precisely because he has streamlined decision-making and concentrated power in his own office. The problem is that changes that make it quicker to reach a decision also make it easier to commit a mistake. Strip away the checks and balances in the system, and you are left with a process of government dangerously dependent on the man at the top getting it right, and hopelessly incapable of halting him when he gets it wrong. In any event, Blair’s style of government was as culpable as bad intelligence in committing his country to the Iraq war–a war that is proving to be among the most controversial blunders in British foreign and security policy since the invasion of Suez.
