How Tony Blair kept the Tories divided – but failed to win the argument on Europe

It is that time of year, when the National Archives release a new batch of confidential government papers. This year the ritual is slightly different: a good example of what John Prescott, the former deputy prime minister, called traditional values in a modern setting. A combination of coronavirus and digitisation means that many of the documents are published online, saving journalists and historians the trip to Kew to read them on paper.

Then, instead of the usual year’s worth, we have three years at once, the first three years of the Blair government, 1997 to 2000. This is to try to catch up with the change made when Gordon Brown was prime minister, to reduce the 30-year rule for the retention of confidential government papers to 20 years. The National Archives are nearly there now, bringing the gap down to 21 years.

There is a third difference, though, which is more subtle, namely that government secrecy is not what it used to be. The huge tranche of documents published – journalists and researchers were allowed two weeks’ access in advance to give them a chance to get through it all – contain surprisingly few big stories about what was going on behind the scenes.

This is because government became significantly more open under New Labour. The Freedom of Information Act didn’t come into effect until 2005, but the prospect of it changed attitudes. Email, mobile phones and the internet changed record-keeping.

Much of the sensitive secret stuff about relations with foreign countries was revealed in the Hutton, Butler and Chilcot inquiries into aspects of the Iraq war. Most of the sensitive secret stuff about the personal relations between the main ministers in the government were revealed in a flood of memoirs and diaries, many of which were published while Blair and Brown were still in office. Any reader of the Chilcot report will know, furthermore, that Alastair Campbell’s diaries are a better and fuller record of confidential discussions than the official cabinet minutes.

So there are news stories. We have one on Blair’s nervousness about an “over the top” response to the Macpherson report on police racism published in February 1999. He worried that a new law to require all government departments to prioritise race equality would lead to a “regulation nightmare”. There are some colourful memos about the new government’s self-inflicted problems with “sleaze”, over Derry Irvine’s refurbishment of the Lord Chancellor’s apartments and the £1m donation from Bernie Ecclestone, the Formula One boss.

And the various discussions about the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales, make interesting reading. At one point Jonathan Powell, Blair’s chief of staff, dismissed civil service concerns about the mounting cost of the funeral, saying that it might end up at £5m – “scarcely a deck on the royal yacht”.

Indeed, the main value of these papers is the insight they offer into the inner workings of the team immediately surrounding the prime minister – to the extent that it can be captured in memos, handwritten annotations and the occasional Post-it note. Powell’s sceptical humour is one of the recurring features that must have made the tedium of official papers bearable for Blair. In a note to the prime minister in July 1998, about a meeting with Paddy Ashdown, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, the next day, Powell commented: “I can’t believe he has proposed a hemispherical House of Commons. Are you sure you want to go ahead with this project?” (Indeed, Blair did: trying to keep the Lib Dems in his big tent took up more of his time than Powell thought warranted.) On a later agenda for a cabinet awayday, in March 2000, Powell put “Uncle Tom Cobley” at the end of the list of people it was copied to.

He and David Miliband, head of the policy unit, were often direct with Blair about problems. Miliband wrote a note in September 1997 about “some of the banana skins that are ahead of us”. It ran to 13 points, including: “Are you settled in your view that an elected second chamber should be kicked into the long grass?” (He was.)

Powell, the same day, in a note headed, “Thinking ahead: your priorities,” listed seven of them, including Europe: “We have not yet begun to address the bigger question of how we win round British public opinion on Europe, let alone found a way of taking on the leadership of Europe while opting out of EMU [economic and monetary union, that is, the single currency].”

Many of the documents detail the sustained attempt by Blair to answer those questions: trying to take a leadership role in the EU while staying out of the euro but preparing to join. (In one handwritten annotation Blair said Britain must secure a commitment that it can go on the board of the European Central Bank “when it joins”.)

The European question was entangled in the Lib Dem courtship throughout most of these three years. Ashdown and Roy Jenkins, the grand old man of Lib-Labbery, were pushing Blair to adopt both the single currency and proportional representation. Both issues were also important in keeping the Conservatives divided. One of the most intriguing notes is from Roger Liddle, Blair’s Europe adviser, to the prime minister on 15 September 1998: “Ken Clarke is desperately anxious that we go ahead with PR – but will never say so publicly. (KC told me this directly.) It gives them a bolt hole if they find the Tory party intolerable. It emboldens them to speak up on Europe – and we shall need their vocal support. Gordon should see the point of this, if we are to win the single currency referendum.”

All Blair could see, though, was the impossibility of winning such a referendum, which Labour had promised in its manifesto if it were ever to recommend adopting the euro. Blair had told Liddle the day before in a marginal comment to “carry on negotiating” with the Lib Dems. But, he added, “though we could probably avoid ruling out a ref[erendum] this parliament, they must confront the point that at present we won’t win one”.

Blair also had deep reservations about changing the voting system. Jenkins had been asked by Blair to come up with a PR system that could be put to another referendum (Blair promised many more referendums than he held), but when Jenkins proposed a model similar to that of the Scottish parliament, of constituency MPs topped up proportionally with MPs elected on regional lists, Blair tried and failed to persuade him to reduce the top-up element below 20 per cent. That would in effect have meant putting the alternative vote (voting in order of preference instead of a single X) to a referendum, which is what eventually happened in 2011.

Instead, Blair kicked the Jenkins plan into the long grass, where it joined a directly elected second chamber – and when it came to the referendum in 2011, Ken Clarke campaigned vigorously against changing the voting system, saying it would give a voice to extreme parties.

Clarke didn’t need that “bolt hole” in the end. Blair succeeded in keeping the Tory party divided – but he, Clarke and the other pro-EU voices ultimately failed in the aim set out by Powell in the new dawn of the Labour government, to “win round British public opinion on Europe”.