Lord Levy: Blair said – “Liar (Brown) … can’t beat Cameron”

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• Death of Glueless, Clueless Labour & Wiki entry 2050
• Bush – Shuns PC to Tell it Like it Is

Comment at end

[Key: "ppm" = present prime minister]

UPDATE – 11th May, 2008

WHY SHOOT BROWN DOWN NOW – ALL YOU LABOUR AUTHORS?

Lord Levy, in a follow-up interview to his own book, has been on the airwaves dishing the dirt on both Brown and Blair today – but mainly on Brown. WHY? And why now?

This BBC article asks the same question. (Watch full Andrew Marr interview with Lord Levy). Coming on top of Cherie Blair’s surprise early release of her book, and John Prescott’s (Deputy PM) disparaging of Brown as “frustrating, annoying, bewildering and prickly”, and that he “sulked so often during meetings that they had to be abandoned, and on other occasions he could “go off like a bloody volcano”, you have to wonder WHY are they kicking him when he’s already down?

As you will know, I am not exactly averse to a bit of Brown kicking. I’ve been doing it here since September 2006 when his little people forced Blair to announce his retirement. BUT I have also said here, that they are stuck with their mistake, and should support their leader. Losing one leader is carelessness. Losing two would be folly indeed.

And as for Levy’s claim that it would be “inconceivable” that Brown (and party treasurer Jack Dromey) would not have known about the “cash/loans-for-honours” – WELL, there are two, possibly three people who will know the truth of that. And one of them hasn’t said anything at all about domestic politics since June 2007.

28th April, 2008

[Pic: 'Lord Cashpoint' congratulates Blair, 1997]

MEMOIR SELLING Unlimited

Lord Levy, Tony Blair’s former fundraiser, says in an extract from his memoirs, “A Question of Honour”:

Tony Blair believes Gordon Brown “could never beat” Tory leader David Cameron in a General Election and is “disappointed” by Labour’s slide under his successor.

Despite the denial below, the damage is done. And Mr Brown’s insistence that Mr Blair did NOT say this, will cut little ice.

Mr Blair’s spokesman said: “Tony Blair doesn’t agree with the views attributed to him by Lord Levy and fully believes Labour with Gordon Brown’s leadership can win the next election.

“Tony Blair said when he stood down that he would be 100-per cent loyal to Gordon Brown and that continues to be the case.”

And it seems, Mr Blair also thought that he could have won a fourth general election. So much for him ‘running from office’ before the political/financial situation got worse. See here:

The book has all the hallmarks of a good read – power, rivalry, love, hatred, jealousy, friendship, criminal investigation, loyalty, deception, duplicity, disappointment, disenchantment and some possible sexual interest thrown in for good measure. All it needs is a juicy murder.

But wait – a virtual assassination might just have been at the root of it all. Unfortunately for some, the body politic, though cooling, abandoned and seemingly forgotten still has some life left in it. Revenge is best served cold, or at least coolish.

Lord Levy’s book serialisation is not exactly helpful to Labour’s cause right now, so I have a few questions to ask:

Question 1: WHY – THE ‘DAILY TORY’ RAG?

WHY ARE THESE LABOUR PEOPLE SELLING THEIR STORIES TO THIS RAG – THE DAILY MAIL?

It is fervently anti-Labour and never prints any pro-Blair or pro-Labour comment on its pages. It is the Daily Censor - and always has been. Much as I dislike the Guardian too for its bias, at least it publishes all comments sent in to ‘Comment is Free’. But if you think that the Mail’s comments are a fair reflection of the comments it receives you are very wrong. It hardly ever prints anything supportive of Blair; I know that from personal experience. It has an ongoing battle to prove that IT was right about all the battles it has already fought and lost against Blair. It relishes in publishing such comments as “Blair – look out – we’ll have you in the dock yet”.

So, whatever else Lord Levy is up to, and he seems not to be averse to damning Blair, his best political friend in the process, his main aim is selling his book. So I suppose we need to keep that in mind as we peruse his memoirs. And, I understand the Daily [Tory] Mail pays well.

Question 2: DID BLAIR KNOW OR APPROVE OF LEVY’S BOOK’S CONTENTS?

Perhaps he did, perhaps he didn’t. If he did, is there some deeper plot going on here? Is there a double-bluff afoot?

WHAT’S THE STORY, MOURNING GLORY?

Now this is going to get a bit fanciful, so indulge me, if you will.The deeper plot may, at a stretch of the imagination, include a kind of double bluff. A bluff meant to SAVE Labour from itself.

DOUBLE BLUFFING DOWNING STREET

The script:

Levy attacks Brown, but also Blair. Blair denies that he agrees with Levy’s damning words on his successor. (And as proof, true to his word, Blair has been remarkably silent since leaving office). In support of the status quo, that Blairite of intense loyalty Peter Mandelson, European Trade Minister, rallies Labour troops around the present prime minister. The call is echoed by others including David Miliband, the ‘Young Pretender’ to the throne. And all of this just as the ppm licks his wounds after a humiliating week over his own error on the 10p tax rate fiasco. He is also rumoured to be about to backtrack on the 42 days detention laws, and has local elections across England and Wales this Thursday when he is expected to take “a kicking” from the electorate. The end game of the plot? To hasten a leadership election in order to give the party a chance at the 2009/10 election. And, in the passing, to deliver the ultimate payback to Brown for his disloyalty to Blair, his duplicitous behaviour over cash-for-honours, and his setting back, whether intentional or not, New Labour’s agenda. Brown cohorts will as a useful side-effect, go down with him.

Possible? Maybe, maybe not. Who knows? But if so, its Machiavellian intrigue deserves applause, even before the curtain has risen.

Quite who the prospective leadership candidate could be – the “clunking fist”? We never quite heard from Mr Blair who that was meant to be. I have my suspicions. But that’s for the second half of the production.

QUESTION 3: WHY NOW?

You’d think Levy’s timing could have been better. Just prior to the local elections. Couldn’t he have waited for a week? I assume that his fee from the Tory rag – The Mail – included the agreement that it went out NOW just before the local elections. Selling one’s soul, and one’s party, for a handful of potash, eh Lord Levy?

I supported Lord Levy and the others under arrest and suspicion over the Cash/Loans for Honours fiasco because I truly believed they were being accused of doing what others were also doing, and had always done. I believed, and still believe, that it was a politically motivated move by the Scottish & Welsh nationalists (who went to the Police on the issue). And I truly believed that the MET should have had used better judgement before spending over a year, and over £1M casting aspersions on the Prime Minister and his friends. A quiet word might have been more effective and less destructive.

Understandably, Lord Levy was personally very pained by the whole experience. He implies that he was let down by Mr Blair and was being prepared to be hung out to dry as the “fall guy” if one were needed. If that had happened, and he had been charged, Mr A.C.L Blair would have been first witness on his list. Levy made that very clear. So the Blair name would be unlikely to come out of it unscathed.

WERE BROWN AND COHORTS FULLY ‘IN’ ON THE CASH-FOR-HONOURS BUSINESS ALL ALONG?

On the other hand, and I doubt if Blair will ever reveal all on this, the water might be murkier still. It might have been the case that Dromey, Balls and Brown were the persistent leakers during the investigation (referred to here). And it might even have been that they knew a lot more about the whole cash-for-honours business than any of them let on. According to Levy, it seems that he and Mr Blair believed that Jack Dromey, the Labour party Treasurer and husband of the now Deputy PM Harriet Harman, added fuel to the fire by letting it be known that he, Dromey, knew nothing about these “loan” arrangement despite his position as party treasurer. That is clearly not Lord Levy’s nor Mr Blair’s side of the story.

But how could the then PM have accused Brown and/or others of ‘lack of innocence’ without throwing the government and the party into turmoil?

And then there’s this little bit of mischievous intrigue OK, I know some of you came here just for this -

Lord Levy: ‘I warned Tony Blair about long massages with Carole Caplin’ – He went bright red.

READ IT IF YOU MUST AND GET BACK ASAP!

Right. Is that you back?

Good. Down to the serious stuff, then.

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“Hatred is settled anger.” – Marcus Tullius Cicero, Ancient Roman Statesman 106 BC – 43 BC

THE HATRED THAT KNOWS NO BOUNDS

Certainly, Gordon Brown could have done without Lord Levy’s serialisation in the Mail on Sunday today. After the week the present prime minister has had, and the week to come, what IS Lord Levy thinking?

It’s not as though Tony Blair gets off scotfree, as we can see above. Levy concludes, disappointedly, that in the end Blair is, “a politician … just in it for himself.” The book chronicles how Levy eventually lost faith in Blair, and felt “hollow” when he won a third term in 2005.

Levy: “I had come to recognise that for all his attractive qualities – his talent for friendship, his acts of personal generosity, his genuine religious faith – Tony was at the end of the day a politician… just in it for himself.”

That’s a kind of sad conclusion. In one phrase, he does down ALL politicians, with the usual press refrain that they are all just in it for themselves. OK – here’s Naivity Personified to say – I don’t accept that.

But I also want to say this: if all politicians are in it for themselves, at least make them GOOD at it! I spoke to someone the other night, and when I said that I thought Tony Blair was a brilliant politician”, he agreed sarcastically – “oh yes, a brilliant politician“.

I apologise to no-one for wanting my doctor to a be a brilliant doctor, my bank manager to be a brilliant bank manager and my prime minister to be a brilliant politician. I have no truck with mediocrity.

But you really do have to wonder what Levy is up to. In fact what game any of these memoir writers are at. Do they really hate one another SO much?

And consistency isn’t Lord Levy’s strong point here. At the same time as he criticises Brown or his back-peddling on the abolition decision on the 10p tax rate, he criticises the Labour party for not gathering round Brown.

Erm … what? Pots and kettles?

The mention of Jack Dromey, Labour party Treasurer brings back to the surface the complexities of who said what to the police on the cash for honours business. Was it Dromey, as much as it was the two nationalist MPs? Dromey is the husband of Harriet Harman, now the Deputy Leader and close confidante of Brown. And was Brown REALLY as much in the dark over the loans arrangements as his virtual silence implied he was? Levy hints that Brown knew all about it, and says that he is still today using the loans system.

This, as I recall, was during one of Brown’s ‘invisible’ periods, when the police were arresting Levy and others and interviewing Blair. Macavity Brown was nowhere to be seen, again!

Is Levy’s reminder of this episode on purpose to coaxe others to spill thebeans on what Brown knew? Or Dromey? Or Harman?

They’d all be advised to keep mum on this lest they provide the MET with more ammunition. Some of them feel they have unfinished business.

Excerpts from here

‘Yet at no point during the hours of Kelsey’s [the police] and my frustratingly stilted dialogue was it more difficult not to answer back than when he declared: “Jack Dromey [the Labour Party treasurer] says he did not know about the loans.

He hadn’t meant to suggest we had deliberately kept the information from him, he said. It was all a “misunderstanding”. I listened in astonishment.

Although the day-to-day responsibilities of treasurer rested with Matt Carter as Labour’s General Secretary, Dromey did have the responsibility of reporting on financial matters to Labour’s National Executive Committee. And if he hadn’t done so, that was not because the details had been somehow hidden.

The loans were not in some separate, secret cache. They had without exception been paid into Labour’s bank account.

They were included in the party’s regular cashflow reports and other financial documents – all of it material to which Dromey, like his predecessors as treasurer, would have had access.

How he could have taken even a cursory glance at the regular financial reports and failed to have been aware of the loans was extraordinary.

The truth is that Dromey should have been replaced. And he would have been, I am convinced, were it not for the fact that cash-for-peerages seemed increasingly to be about something well beyond “crimes” or “conspiracies”.

It was about politics. And I never assumed – Tony certainly never did – that it was about Jack Dromey. It was about Gordon Brown.

To stave off the “coup”, Blair had finally had to declare publicly that he would retire sometime before the 2007 Labour Party conference.

When I phoned Tony on a Middle East diplomatic mission immediately after the coup, his habitual tone of forbearance and forgiveness towards Gordon seemed finally to have gone.

Brown, typically, had assured Blair that the plot had been nothing to do with him. But Tony, it was clear, simply no longer believed him.

With his aides coming in with reports that the Sunday papers were poised to run stories alleging that Gordon or his acolytes had personally met some of the plotters, Tony got angrier and angrier.

More furious than I had seen him in all the years I had known him, he kept saying that he had never realised how duplicitous Gordon was – and what a “liar”.

In the months ahead, Tony would gradually steel himself to hide any public animosity towards his successor, convinced that he had to do so for the good of the party.

He was also increasingly angry at Gordon’s behaviour as the cash-for-peerages crisis escalated.

I know he was convinced that Gordon saw the issue as a further weapon in getting him out of Downing Street.

Though Tony never said this to me directly, I got the strong impression that he also resented Gordon’s public posture of being somehow above the slightly dirty business of raising money for the party.

To be fair, the decision to accept loans was Tony’s. But I certainly never had any doubt during the 2005 campaign that Gordon – despite his spokesmen’s denials – was absolutely aware that loans were being taken.

Tony’s chosen campaign co-ordinator, Alan Milburn, had been relegated to the junior role. And it simply defies belief, with money so critical an issue in the cash-strapped campaign, that a Chancellor as interested in detail as Gordon would not have known where the money was coming from.

In addition, an email went out early in the campaign telling the leading figures not to attack the Conservatives for taking loans because now we were taking loans, too.

I do not know whether Gordon himself was on the list of recipients but his key representative on campaign issues, Spencer Livermore – who was recently forced out of No10 – certainly was.

Tony didn’t think that a gift or a loan should guarantee an honour but he felt it was ridiculous to suggest that financial support should disqualify someone from consideration.

“Look, I think it’s all going to be OK,” Tony said. Increasingly tense and confused, I asked how he knew: was it “media people”?

The decision by the Crown Prosecution Service not to charge me was an assertion of one of Britain’s longest, proudest traditions: the simple rule of law.

For the fact is, even if I had done the things that police seemed intent on proving that I did, there was always one crucial piece missing in the narrative.

There was always one person in the picture the police seemed intent on painting who knew who every last one of Labour’s lenders and donors were, and who ultimately decided whom to nominate as a peer.

In the event, however unfair and unfaithful to the facts, that I had in the end been charged and brought to trial, the very first name on the witness list for the defence would inevitably have been the man I had helped, supported, believed in and still considered a friend: Anthony Charles Lynton Blair.

I felt, as I had 12 months earlier after a very different phone call in Oxford, the tears welling up in my eyes.

Gilda was crying, too, as we embraced, trembling with relief that the long nightmare was finally ending.

“It’s over! It is finally over!” he said (son Daniel).

My friendship with Tony Blair has been fundamentally changed by politics – by Tony’s move into Downing Street and by all that has happened since, particularly over the past year.

And there was an even more significant, and potentially embarrassing, signal of the importance Gordon attached to fundraising shortly after he became Prime Minister.

One by one, he invited virtually all of Labour’s ’secret lenders’ – who Jack Dromey, and it appeared Gordon too, felt had so tarnished the party under Blair – for long, private chats at No10.

The new Prime Minister was, one of them remarked to me afterwards, ‘absolutely charming’. His message was that he valued them and their financial backing for Labour.

And his hope, it became clear as the charm offensive progressed into the early months of 2008, was that they could be persuaded to extend the term of the loans.

Not just for a month or two, or even a year or two, but on a generous schedule of repayments that would not start immediately and could stretch on for nearly a decade.

I guess that like Tony before him, Gordon knew that Labour – like all the parties – needed the money.’

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And as for Levy’s mention of Blair’s little “relationship” with his masseuse. Well, personally I’ve never been interested in people’s private lives in that way. But I know I am an exception. The British public would lap it up if they thought Blair had become more than just relaxed in the hands of his attractive masseure. I imagine he’s as red-blooded as the rest of us. And she’s not bad looking, let’s be honest!

On the other hand, Cherie would take him for all he had – or was ever likely to have. And if Mr Blair had any power at all over Levy, WHY would he wish this to be trawled up again?

So are they double-bluffing here? I doubt it.

Junk that script!

Back to the drawing board.

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If on Thursday in the local elections Labour lose seats compared to the 2004 locals when they also did badly, the papers and the opposition parties will have no mercy on Brown’s Labour party and his leadership.

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“Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.”

Abraham Lincoln, 16th American President, 1861-1865

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BLAIR THOUGHT HE COULD HAVE WON A FOURTH ELECTION

Lord Levy has written, “Mr Blair told me on a number of occasions that Mr Gordon ‘could never beat Cameron.”’ He also said in the interview that Mr Blair, who resigned as the Prime Minister in June 2007, felt he could have won a fourth term, had he not stood down. “Mr Blair believed Mr Cameron had major strengths, political timing, a winning personality and a natural ability to communicate to Middle England that Mr Gordon would be unable to match,” Lord Levy added.

However, a spokesperson for Mr Blair has denied comments attributed to the former Prime Minister in Lord Levy’s book. “Mr Blair doesn’t agree with the views attributed to him by Lord Levy.”‘

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Other recent thoughts on Brown and Labour:

• Daniel Finkelstein on “Missing in Inaction” Brown
• Labour MPs say – “we’ve lost this election and the next one”
• “A lot of people are saying ‘we have lost the next election and the one after that, but when we come back I’ll only be 43′ or whatever,” an unnamed government source has said.
• Same age as Mr Blair, eh? Ah, but whoever you are, you ain’t Tony Blair!
• Brown: “I’m NOT gay”
• Polls – Labour 10% behind Tories
• Matthew d’Ancona – Labour Losing Will To Govern
• Ben Brogan – To save him from himself Brown needs a Campbell or even a Blair

Lord Levy’s claims heap further pressure on the Prime Minister as he struggles to maintain his authority amid Labour rebellions over taxation and the detention of terrorist suspects.

He said that Mr Blair felt Mr Brown was behind an attempt by Labour MPs in 2006 to oust him from Downing Street and the Labour Treasurer Jack Dromey’s claim that he had been kept in the dark about the secret loans that led to the “cash-for-honours” inquiry.

“He kept saying he had never realised how duplicitous Gordon was – and what a ’liar’,” Lord Levy wrote. “I never assumed – Tony certainly never did – that it was about Jack Dromey. It was about Gordon Brown.”

Lord Levy, who as Mr Blair’s chief fundraiser was at the centre of the cash-for-honours probe, claimed the ex-premier also knew all the Labour lenders and donors and decided who got peerages.

Mr Brown knew about the loans as well, he said, and criticised the Prime Minister’s leadership himself.

“There are people who are great number twos but when thrust into the leadership role they cannot cut the ice,” he said. “Gordon Brown has not cut the ice.”

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