Category Archives: Tony Blair

Readers will recall that Bernie Ecclestone, the boss of F1, was a major Labour donor, who had given £1 million to the party in January, 1997. During the summer months after Labour’s election win in May, 1997, Labour fundraisers held talks with Mr Ecclestone over a possible second donation.

The ban on tobacco advertising had been announced by the then health Secretary, Frank Dobson, on 19 May, 1997. On 16 October, Tony Blair met Mr Ecclestone and other F1 leaders at Downing Street. The newly-released papers reveal that, within hours of the meeting, Mr Blair instructed his chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, to tell the junior health minister, Tessa Jowell, to exempt F1 from the ban.

The exemption stirred up a massive hornet’s nest for Labour in its very earliest days in power. Blair and the Government repeatedly played down the link between the donation from Mr Ecclestone and the decision to exempt F1. The furore led to Blair’s famous appearance on the BBC1 On the Record programme, when he protested that he was a “pretty straight sort of guy”.

The Telegraph contends that the papers:

show beyond all reasonable doubt that Mr Blair decided on his preferred course of action on the same day he met Mr Ecclestone, railroading the F1 exemption through and brushing aside any alternative plans put forward by ministers and officials at the Department of Health.

They throw a new light, too, on Mr Blair’s assertion, at Prime Minister’s Questions on 12 November, that “no decisions” were taken at the 16 October meeting and that “it was only at the beginning of last week that the specific exemption for F1 was decided upon”. In addition, the documents show how civil servants were forced to dissemble massively to find a form of words to answer a parliamentary question by John Maples, then the Tory health spokesman, asking when Mr Blair first informed Mr Dobson of the exemption. The original “suggested reply”, that the decision was conveyed in the 29 October letter, came close to being an outright lie, given what we reveal today.

A spokesman for Tony Blair is quoted as saying: “There is nothing new here. All these issues were debated at the time.” However, given the contents of the documents, further questions are bound to be asked.

Questions are also likely to be raised, once again, over Gordon Brown’s role in the affair. In his book Servants of the People, the Observer journalist Andrew Rawnsley records an appearance by Brown on the Today programme on 10 November 1997, when he was “ambushed” with a question about the Ecclestone affair:

Asked directly whether Bernie Ecclestone had given money to the Labour party, Brown replied: “You’ll have to wait and see, like I’ll have to wait and see when the list is published. I’ve not been told and I certainly don’t know what the truth is.”

The Chancellor did know the truth and he had not told it. He returned to the Treasury that morning in a red mist which staggered even those who had long endured his titanic tempers. “Gordon went mental,” says one witness. Brown raged at his staff: “I lied. I lied. My credibility will be in shreds. I lied. If this gets out, I’ll be destroyed.” Charlie Whelan endeavoured to douse down his troubled master. Thinking Brown to be overreacting, Whelan secured a transcript of the interview hoping to prove that he had been evasive rather than mendacious. He could not really do that: Brown had denied what he had known. To his credit, it can be said that the Chancellor evidently hated being trapped in a lie.

Hated it, perhaps, but, according to the Telegraph, Brown still denies lying to cover up details of the Ecclestone donation.

Andrew Rawnsley, however, has never, so far as I am aware, withdrawn the allegations contained in his book

I was woken about an hour ago by the loudest clap of thunder I have ever heard and now can’t get back to sleep.

The Times is leading with an article about Cherie Blair. It has published advanced extracts from her autobiography, Speaking for Myself. According to the Times, this is “catching the political and publishing worlds unawares, as it was originally intended to appear in October.”

Mrs Blair tells the Times that:

“I know that Tony thinks Gordon could win the election and I know that he has spoken to Gordon about how he could do that. Tony has given Gordon advice. He and Gordon talk to each other even now.”

Given the present state of the polls, I am absolutely sure that Mr Blair is indeed advising Mr Brown as to how to win the next election.

No doubt the felicitous early publication of Mrs Blair’s memoirs is part of the same helpful process.

The message was very much the same as yesterday’s on the Andrew Marr Show: the government should be judged on its long term performance; there would be choppy waters, but the course was steady. Events were a distraction, nothing more,

This, of course, goes against the received Macmillan wisdom that a government’s course usually is deflected by “events, dear boy, events”. Certainly, in the case of the Northern Rock, we have witnessed a whopper of an event that may yet cause the ship to founder.

Most interestingly, Gordon was at pains to assure Stourton that he would be more than happy to come on the Today programme whenever he was wanted. This is in contrast to Tony Blair, who for years would have little or nothing to do with Today, particularly when John Humphrys was doing the interviewing. It will be interesting to see how willing Gordon really is to submit himself to a savaging from Humphrys, whose confrontational approach is a far cry from Stourton’s velvet touch.

Stourton, nevertheless, did ask Gordon why he looked so miserable as PM. Gordon replied that he “enjoyed all the difficult issues and trying to make the best of it”.

In other words, the premiership is a chore that Gordon feels he has to endure, not something to revel in. How very different from Tony Blair.