Not all (Blair)right

Two articles today prove that no matter what the Comic Strip do tonight, Tony Blair defies satire in many ways. He was just a dickhead of the first order.
In this, Peter Oborne reaffirms that he is one of the most astute and even-handed commentators writing at the moment:
No, Prime Minister, Jeremy Heywood is not the man to lead our great Civil Service
It is notoriously the case that the dying days of governments, of whatever persuasion, are marked by scandals involving lax morals and the abuse of power. John Major at the end of 18 years of Tory rule in the 1990s, Harold Macmillan at the start of the 1960s, and more recently Gordon Brown: all of them had to cope with the consequence of having been too long in government.
This makes the situation confronting David Cameron unusual. Though only 18 months old, his Coalition government is already beset by the kind of problems that normally emerge at the very end of a premiership. During the past week alone we have seen Liam Fox, the Defence Secretary, fighting for his career after a series of breaches of the ministerial code, and Justice Minister Jonathan Djanogly accused of serious conflicts of interest involving his family’s business connections. Meanwhile Chris Huhne, the Environment Secretary, already facing embarrassing claims that he misled the police over a traffic offence, remains unpunished after being caught red-handed feeding journalists damaging material about his Cabinet colleague Theresa May.
Yet none of these stories – not even the Fox debacle – is as worrying as this week’s huge shake-up in Whitehall, and the emergence of Jeremy Heywood as the replacement for Sir Gus O’Donnell as cabinet secretary. Just 50 years old, there is every chance that Heywood will remain in post, at the beating heart of British government, for a full 10 years.
To understand why Heywood’s appointment is so alarming, and why it sends out such bewildering messages about the future trajectory of the Cameron administration, it is necessary to cast a glance backwards.
There have only been 10 cabinet secretaries since the post was invented in 1916 by Sir Maurice Hankey, secretary to the Lloyd George war cabinet. Indeed, the constitutional historian Lord Hennessy dates the start of modern British government to 11.30am on Saturday, September 9, 1916, when Hankey took down the first ever cabinet minute. Once circulated round Whitehall, these minutes became what Hankey called “operative decisions” and established the power of the cabinet secretary throughout Whitehall.
In the years that followed, Hankey – and his great mid-century successors Bridges, Brook and Trend – established a massive moral and intellectual authority. Not only did they oversee the superb Civil Service machine that ran the domestic war effort from 1939-45 and thereafter established the modern welfare state – they were also formidable guardians of public integrity during the period of our history when the British state was at its most admired and powerful.
It was not until the very end of the 20th century that this system came under threat. From 1997 onwards, Tony Blair’s New Labour government keenly resented the power, as well as the delicate sense of propriety, of the established Civil Service.
Blair had little or no use for his first cabinet secretary, Robin Butler, who feebly and unsuccessfully sought to insist on the impartiality and discretion of the Civil Service, as well as the importance of maintaining boundaries between public duty and private interest.
The small coterie who surrounded Blair were just as dismissive of Butler’s successor, Richard Wilson. They ignored his advice and imposed instead a system of crony government in which due process was ignored, with integrity being lost as a consequence. It was a miserable time in the history of British public administration.
The Blairites needed allies inside the system, and fortunately there was one to hand. They were always hostile to outsiders, and at first the prime minister’s private secretary, the young and ambitious Jeremy Heywood, was regarded with suspicion. But with the passage of time Heywood was accepted as a vital member of the group of allies around Blair. Indeed, he was to play a central role as the disciplines of government collapsed and the “sofa culture” of Downing Street reached its peak.
Ordinary procedures, such as minute taking, appear to have partly ceased. This became embarrassingly apparent when the Hutton inquiry into the death of Dr David Kelly sought to reconstruct the process which had led to the Ministry of Defence scientist’s name appearing in a national newspaper. Lord Hutton heard how some four meetings, each involving senior officials and cabinet ministers, had taken place in the 48 hours before Dr Kelly’s name was released. In an extraordinary breach of traditional Whitehall procedure, it emerged that not one of these meetings was minuted. This was Heywood’s job, and it was not carried out.
But it was not just basic procedures that failed with Heywood in Downing Street. Standards of integrity stalled too, as The Daily Telegraph discovered when we ran a well-sourced story revealing that Downing Street had pressed for Tony Blair to be given a bigger public role in the Queen Mother’s funeral of early 2002. Heywood wrote a letter to this newspaper, in his capacity as private secretary to the prime minister, insisting that the report was “without foundation”. To say the least, this was being economical with the truth. Fundamentally, he had crossed the key dividing line between unbiased, public-spirited official and careerist political adviser.
Tony Blair, naturally, adored his private secretary and, in another blatant abuse of Civil Service rules, sought to rocket him to permanent secretary level. When this move was resisted, Heywood just vanished. Granted “unpaid leave” from the Civil Service, he suddenly emerged as co-head of the Morgan Stanley investment banking division, only returning four years later to help sort out Gordon Brown’s chaotic Downing Street machine – a job where he gained universal admiration.
It is easy to understand why David Cameron – who personally chose Heywood – wanted him so much. Heywood knows his way all around Whitehall, and is expert at delivering what a prime minister wants.
But that brief stint at Morgan Stanley aside, he has never worked outside Downing Street and the Treasury. Indeed, Heywood has no experience of the wider Civil Service, which makes his first big decision especially troubling. Sir Gus O’Donnell (and nearly all his predecessors) combined the job of cabinet secretary with that of head of the home Civil Service. There have been very solid reasons for this, not least because it has meant that the Civil Service has a proper voice inside 10 Downing Street. Heywood has turned his back on this arrangement. Precedent suggests this decision will open the way to a long, unnecessary period of attrition between Downing Street and the outlying parts of government. It is a recipe for division and chaos.
David Cameron once boasted that he was the “heir to Blair” and his choice of Heywood suggests the comparison is all too apt. Heywood is a perfect manifestation of everything that has gone so very wrong with the British Civil Service over the past 15 years – too cosy a relationship between public and private, too much dominance at the centre, contempt for tradition and the collapse of due process.
In his foreword to the new ministerial code, published last year, David Cameron wrote that “after the scandals of recent years, people have lost faith in politics and politicians. It is our duty to restore their trust. It is not enough simply to make a difference. We must be different.” These are empty words, with Jeremy Heywood at the heart of government and guardian of British public standards.


The second is an obituary for Sir Hilary Synott:
In Bad Days in Basra (2008), his memoir of the six months he spent in Iraq, Synnott recorded, in devastating detail, the chaotic reality behind the CPA’s attempts to establish civic governance; the dysfunctional relationship between the two occupying powers, Britain and America; and lack of planning and support from the government back home.
The phone call offering Synnott the post as “King of the South” of Iraq came three months after the fall of Saddam Hussein. The situation was not promising. His predecessor — a Danish diplomat — had resigned early after protesting publicly about the lack of support from his American superiors in Baghdad. “It’s a bloody mess”, the head of the Foreign Office’s Iraq unit admitted. Yet Synnott could not resist the challenge.
The reality turned out to be much worse than even he had imagined. Arriving in Basra in July 2003, he found his team camped in the squalid offices of the city’s electricity company, sleeping four or five people to a room in sweltering temperatures of up to 49C (120F). Hygiene arrangements were “unspeakable” and staff had not been informed that they were expected to provide their own soap, towels and bedding. Some even had to sleep on the floor.
Worse still, it was unclear what Synnott’s job involved. Armed with instructions covering “half a side of A4” and a general injunction to “play things by ear” and provide “leadership and direction”, Synnott struggled to establish any sort of administrative routine. He had no phone and no computer until the Americans helped him out, though he could only send reports to London by public email services.
“Everything had to be created from nothing but against a background where it was not clear what the task was,” Synnott recalled. No one in Whitehall had expected that Britain would suddenly have to take the civilian lead in the South: “Instead there had been some vague expectation that the Americans would sort things out.” Ministers “simply wanted someone in Iraq on the ground at once and were less concerned about what I should do when I got there.”
His instructions were to report to both Paul Bremer, American head of the CPA, and to Tony Blair, who had told Synnott that his job was “a challenge of prime national importance” and invited him to phone him personally if he needed anything. In fact, as Synnott struggled to establish a civilian presence alongside the British military effort in southern Iraq, he found himself frustrated at every turn by American indifference and the indecisiveness of his masters in London.
Ensconced in the Green Zone in Baghdad, Bremer made little attempt to disguise his contempt for the British. Synnott recalled that entering Bremer’s office for the first time “felt a bit like entering the headmaster’s study. I was kept waiting; then once I went in, I was kept waiting further until he’d finished reading. Then we sat down, he put his feet on the coffee-table and he delivered a reprimand to me about the behaviour of the British military.”
The CPA itself, he found, was mainly staffed by American policy wonks — “young, naive, pushy people” fired with a messianic zeal rapidly to replace centuries of tribal and religious rivalries and state control with democracy and free markets, and displaying a dogmatism that, as Synnott drily noted, “cut no ice” with the Iraqis.
By the time Synnott arrived in Basra, Bremer had already made two of his most notorious blunders: disbanding the Iraqi army and ordering a de-Ba’athification programme that, in effect, eliminated the entire Iraqi administrative elite. In Basra, Synnott’s staff were instructed to sack school headmasters on the basis that they had been party members, one American CPA official declaring that she would rather have “chaos in the classrooms than Ba’athists in the classrooms”. The British quietly ignored the instruction.
Bremer, Synnott pointed out, was a specialist in dealing with terrorism, but had no wider expertise in developing countries. Seemingly uninterested in the complexities of tribal politics, he “appeared to regard all Iraq as a suburb of Baghdad”.
Dealings with the government back home were equally frustrating. In particular, Synnott found that Tony Blair’s personal assurance that he would have everything he needed was worth little in practice; and he was furious to learn, when Blair paid a visit to Basra in early January 2004, that the prime minister would not be visiting him and his staff, despite assurances that the visit would focus on the civilian effort.
In his memoir, Synnott recalled an “intemperate” phone call with an unnamed “minder from Number 10/Labour Party” who told him via “a string of four letter words” that the press would want stories and photos of soldiers, “not foreign civilians”.
The shortcomings of American and British administration enraged the Iraqis, helping to fuel the insurgency. In Basra, where the coalition forces had initially been welcomed as liberators, the vacuum left by the removal of Ba’athist administration was soon filled by Iranian-backed Shia militias, making the task of rebuilding the country much more difficult. In and around Baghdad, meanwhile, areas that had been quiet immediately after the invasion were soon peppered by explosions and violence; sectarian violence became the norm, and as all security evaporated, al-Qaeda cells established themselves, decapitating locals and foreign workers in executions that were frequently videotaped.
If the occupying powers had succeeded in replacing a stable, if brutal, dictatorship (without weapons of mass destruction) with a fundamentalist insurgency on two fronts, Synnott was clear where he thought the blame lay: “The key decision-makers, and especially Bush and Blair, must inevitably bear ultimate responsibility both for the war itself and for the failures surrounding the process by which success might be achieved,” he told an interviewer.
Synnott was tempted to call his book “Bugger Basra”, and it was to be more than two years after his return to England before he felt calm enough to write it. “I couldn’t have written it before because I was just in such a blind fury,” he confessed. The Synnott who emerged from Basra was a very different individual from the kindly and philosophical man his colleagues recalled from earlier years.
The son of a naval officer, Hilary Nicholas Hugh Synnott was born on March 20 1945 at Burnham-on-Sea, Somerset, and educated at Beaumont College, a Jesuit public school in Windsor, before winning a scholarship to Britannia Royal Naval College, Dartmouth. From there he went up to Peterhouse, Cambridge, to do a Science degree, and then to the Navy’s engineering college.
After spending five years in submarines, Synnott applied to join the Diplomatic Service in 1973, aged 28. After early postings to Britain’s OECD delegation in Paris and then to the embassies in Bonn and Amman, in 1989 he was appointed head of the Foreign Office’s Western European department. In 1991, as head of the FCO’s Security Co-ordination department, he was responsible for negotiating the release of the British hostages held in Lebanon, a difficult but ultimately successful task which won him much acclaim.
After three years as deputy high commissioner in New Delhi, from 1993 to 1996, Synnott returned to London as director of the FCO’s South and South East Asia department. In 2000, after a year spent as a visiting fellow at the University of Sussex, he was appointed High Commissioner in Islamabad.
Though his three years in Pakistan coincided with the invasion of Afghanistan and a deterioration in relations between Pakistan and the West, he won the affection and respect of many Pakistanis. In Transforming Pakistan: Ways Out of Instability (2009), Synnott noted that Pakistan had “paid a heavy price for other countries’ behaviour towards it, notably the West’s accommodation with the country’s military rulers in the 1980s, and its encouragement of a jihad in the service of Cold War strategic goals”.
After his retirement, Synnott became a senior consulting fellow of the International Institute of Strategic Studies, but his experiences in Basra cast a long shadow. In January this year he wrote to the Secretary of the Iraq Inquiry, responding to Tony Blair’s assertion that he (Synnott) had been “on balance optimistic not pessimistic” about the future of Iraq when he left Basra in 2004.
That judgment, Synnott underscored, “referred only to southern Iraq – the region for which I had some responsibility – not to the country as a whole”. His “optimism”, he stressed, had been based on advice he had given the Prime Minister to maintain a multinational development team in the south rather than hand control to the Iraqis. In the event, the team was disbanded and the “vast majority” of its projects failed.
Hilary Synnott was appointed CMG in 1997 and KCMG in 2002.
In 1973 he married Anne Clarke. They had a son, who predeceased him.
Sir Hilary Synnott, born March 20 1945, died September 8 2011.

You may have thought Mrs Thatcher callous, brutal and indifferent and that her policies unneccesarily caused human misery but no-one could question her integrity and so under the rules of the political game, she is worthy of being created a Lady. Tony Blair should never be given a knighthood; nobbled maybe but not ennobled.