2006 - Blair's last year : From a vantage point in early 2007, Francis Beckett looks back on the PM's freewheeling final drive to create a legacy
It was always likely to be his last year in No 10, the year when he would at last be true to himself and stamp his beliefs on the country. And 2006 started, appropriately, with education. By January it was clear he felt Ruth Kelly's white paper was too timid, and by April he had announced plans to franchise the running of secondary schools to two big companies.
Ten per cent of schools will be High-Level Superior City Conservatoires and Centres of Excellence, franchised to McKinsey & Co, where every student will be expected to get six As at A-level and go to Oxford. The other 90 per cent will be franchised to Tesco and be called Prole Schools. The supermarket giant's curriculum will culminate in a "new, high-quality, high-status" vocational qualification in retail merchandising (shelf stacking).
Rumblings of war began in April, when President Bush started to talk about the new axis of evil - Lula, Chavez and Castro. Several ministers let it be known that they would not under any circumstances vote for war, but when the moment came no one resigned. They had changed their minds, they said, when the Prime Minister told them of intelligence reports that President Chavez ate an embryo for breakfast every morning. By the time it was discovered that "embryo" was a mistranslation of the Spanish word for "egg", Venezuela was a smoking ruin.
A BBC reporter said on air: "I am told that the Prime Minister knew the difference between an egg and a human embryo before the decision to go to war was taken." In the resulting row the director general of the BBC was forced to resign and the job went to Alastair Campbell. He issued a new protocol for interviewing cabinet ministers in what he described as a "respectful, professional" manner. Interviewers were to start with the question "Is there a message you would like to give to a grateful nation, minister?" and end with "Are there any final words you would like to say before returning to your important work of making our lives better?"
None of this was enough to save the Corporation. After a refreshing summer break at one of Rupert Murdoch's far-flung mansions, Blair announced that the "whingeing, feather-bedded" BBC would no longer receive the licence fee. Instead the fee would go to a "modern, entrepreneurial broadcaster". He trus-ted BSkyB to make good use of it.
By now Blair, impatient to see his education reforms enacted, had replaced Ruth Kelly with the newly ennobled Lord Woodhead, who promptly re-pealed the 1944 Education Act - a notorious piece of old Labour legislation that imposed on the nation the absurd, statist, centralist requirement to find a school place for all children of school age, however feckless they or their parents may be. Next Woodhead brought back caning, a measure Blair defended by pointing out that he had been caned at Fettes and "it never did me any harm".
So far so good, but Blair's Back to Basics campaign misfired, partly because of the decision to bring back David Blunkett in the new post of Secretary of State for Families. Part of Blunkett's duty was to explain to single women the importance of marriage. He survived the discovery that many hid their pregnancies lest the Secretary of State should claim the children were his. But he could not survive the revelation that some of them were his.
Health reform was placed in the hands of Lord Birt, who announced his intention to "think outside the box" and took managers on away-days, when they sat in a big room on red beanbags. The result was inspiring: the National Health Service was renamed Innovative Bodywork, and Lord Birt did away with his own job, becoming instead a consultant to the new organisation at a much-increased fee. Attempts to copy Birt's method of decision-making in Downing Street were abandoned after the Prime Minister strained his back trying to get his deputy upright again.
Christmas produced its own drama. On Boxing Day a badly bruised cat was taken to the vet from 11 Downing Street. It is not known how it came by its injuries, but a few minutes earlier, in the house next door, the Prime Minister was heard saying: "No, Gordon, you misunderstood. I meant I'd go after the fourth election."
The Survivor: Tony Blair in peace and war, by Francis Beckett and David Hencke, is published by Aurum Press
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