If the Secretaries of State want to make a visible entrance (which mostly they do) they are driven up to the front door, get out of their car with just a slight turn of the head to see if a TV reporter might ask them a question, and go in past the policeman. It then takes just a few seconds to walk straight ahead, past the Henry Moore and three small paintings of rural scenes, and into the back hall where the early arrivals will already be drinking coffee.
Most of the decoration in this corridor is exactly what you would expect in a prosperous house inhabited by people who do not care too much for art. But there is one stark picture, of a cottage freshly blasted as though by some clean, bright light. The roof is off and the walls are smashed, but none of the wood is charred. It is dated 1940, but there is no name-plate for its artist. Sometimes visitors give this painting more than a single look.
The shy, the about-to-be sacked or anyone who happens to be in the neighbouring office on Whitehall can enter from a side door, past the office of Jonathan Powell and the Duty Clerks. Gordon Brown, the second most powerful man in the country, comes to Cabinet from the other side, along the corridor from Number Eleven that he shares with Alastair Campbell, into the front hall, left turn and down to his colleagues.
The Chancellor of the Exchequer seems cheerful, almost jolly this morning. But no one here would make much of that. His relationship with Tony Blair is one of Downing Street’s greatest mysteries. The team knows that today he will go out and talk to TV and radio and support the Prime Minister. How this was agreed they do not know.
Every day or so there is time blocked out in Tony Blair’s detailed appointments diary with simply the initials ‘GB’. What happens in these meetings, no one else knows. No one else is there when the Lord of the House and his disinherited brother plan what needs to be done on the estate.
The stability of the British government since 1997 has depended on a pact whose terms have never been revealed. Even its existence is not always admitted.
Before Labour’s previous leader, John Smith, died in May 1994 there were two rising stars in the slowly changing party, two friends, Gordon Brown and Tony Blair. Brown was the senior, the more intellectual, the more passionate speaker; but he was a Scot, and had a narrower appeal to the English Conservative voters whom Labour needed to attract.
Brown was persuaded not to stand for the leadership. But he did not give up his hopes of attaining it one day. He felt he had a deal whereby he would take the Treasury and run British domestic policy, which for the most part he has, and would succeed Tony Blair at some point in the future, not too far in the future – which so far he has not.
Every time there is political trouble, it is whispered by someone that Gordon Brown is behind it. It is whispered today that ‘Gordon is behind what Clare is doing,’ that ‘Gordon did not exactly incite Clare to call Tony reckless, but hopes to benefit from it.’ Even the team members most charitable to the ambitions of the Chancellor say only that ‘He is biding his time.’
What is clear to everyone is that Clare Short, in penitent white scarf but not looking otherwise apologetic, is taking her coffee with her friend, the Chancellor of the Exchequer. There are eyes too on Brown’s long-standing rival, the Leader of the House of Commons and former Foreign Secretary Robin Cook; the two have a mutual distrust stretching back to power struggles for territory in Scotland decades ago.
Brown is like a large planetary mass, attractive to satellites. Cook is a small, bare rock, sparking huge energy at high speeds but leaving less that is permanent behind. ‘Robin looks shifty today, but then Robin always looks a bit shifty,’ says a rare close friend of them both.
If Tony Blair falls, there will be winners and losers here. Gordon Brown still has the best chance of taking over the house which he thinks he has already in his grasp. But no Chancellor can escape blame when the voters begin to feel more taxed and less prosperous, as at the moment they do.
If Brown is careless, or is seen too clearly to have wielded the dagger, there are others. Alan Milburn, the smooth-faced, smoothtongued Health Secretary, has been assiduous in condemning Clare Short.
What if Tony Blair wins the vote but the war is a catastrophe? Might a resignation from Robin Cook now win him power later?
Some of the Cabinet Ministers most fiercely in support of Tony Blair are those originally from the farthest left of the party. John Reid, Party Chairman, lapsed Glasgow Catholic and Communist, stumps around the hall as though looking for a head to stamp on. He sees Saddam Hussein through a prism of Scottish politics and Scottish football. He lets his leader concentrate on Iraq. His concentration is on the bad guys and back-alley chancers who are trying to chop his leader down. This wary teetotaller and gum-chewing giver-up of cigarettes is Tony Blair’s top enforcer. He talks freely this morning to the only other claimant for that title, John Prescott, Deputy Prime Minister, long-time trade unionist and famous square-faced strangler of the English language.
Prescott found new fame during the 2001 election campaign by punching a protester in the face. Like a boxer who has proved himself and is gracefully approaching retirement, he looks a little less the pugilist now. He makes no claims to know whether the policy on Iraq will work, but every claim, quietly but forcefully expressed, that his Cabinet comrades should support it.
After an initial display of coffee-sipping amity, entertaining only for onlookers and junior family members, the Cabinet assembles around its traditional long table, each in an allotted place. Both inner and outer doors are shut. A messenger sits guard to ensure that none of the team outside, the people who really run this heart of government, makes too much noise.
In the waiting room to the left of the front door of Number Ten is a sallow, elderly man with a long lock of hair twisting down over his left eye. He has heavy gold rings on his fingers and is pointing at a report in the Daily Mail of the new ‘final tests’ which Britain and America have set Saddam. If the Iraqi leader is serious about obeying UN calls to disarm, let him show it by meeting these ‘benchmarks’, destroying his weapons and telling the world personally that he has done so.
The visitor does not seem impressed. He smiles, sits back, strokes his thigh, pushes back his skein of hair and waits. His eyes circle around the orchids on the table, the loud-ticking clock, a child’s picture of food parcels falling by parachute and a set of large framed photographs illustrating the shipping forecast. ‘Southwesterly veering Northwesterly 4 or 5’: some Asian women are playing cricket on a beach. The man looks mildly mystified until he is rescued from his reverie by Sir David Manning, jacketless in pink shirt and light maroon tie.
‘How nice to see you again,’ says the diplomatic knight, recognising the Indonesian envoy from past encounters.
‘The President sends you her best regards,’ replies his visitor.
‘Let’s go up and talk,’ says Tony Blair’s man. It was Manning, writing at his round table under the maple-leaf window last Sunday, who devised the new ‘benchmark tests’ in order to keep the dying flame of diplomacy alive.
‘Thank you,’ says the representative of one of the many Muslim countries which are sceptical of British and American motives,
When the Cabinet Room doors open there is the sound of brittle laughter. Clare Short’s presence, after she has broken the laws of collective responsibility, has unnerved them all. Tony Blair has taken a risk in keeping her here. If she can criticise his policies and keep her job, why should not others be emboldened to do the same?
The mood is one of nervous mockery.
‘It was good of Clare to offer Tony that advice on getting the second UN resolution. He would never have thought of such a clever idea himself.’
‘What is Robin suggesting? That the whole war would be illegal?’
‘The French must not be forgiven for this.’
‘When