• Home
• UK Politics
• World Politics
• Policy
• Media
• Lifestyle
• Sport
• Contributors
• Topics

Being With Tony Blair on 9/11

Darren Murphy gives a gripping account of 9/11 and what it was like being with Tony Blair on such an historic day.

By Darren Murphy

11 Sep 2011, 21:00

"....oh, and a small plane has hit one of the twin towers of the World Trade Centre in New York." That was the first I heard, from a government press officer, about the September 11 attacks.

I was with Tony Blair on 9/11 (as I would be four years later on 7/7). I had travelled down to Brighton to the Trade Union Congress with Alan Milburn, with whom I was working at the time. A whole host of Cabinet ministers with responsibility for public service reform had travelled down too, because the Prime Minister was to make a speech about the necessity of ensuring the new investment in health and education, which the unions liked, had to be matched by radical reform which then, as now, they despised. Their hostility towards TB was only matched by their conservatism on reform, as though trade union members don't benefit from the higher standards in schools and shorter waiting times in hospitals which the reforms were already beginning to bring. So, TB's speech was going to be showdown time.

Just before we were due to walk across from the Grand Hotel to the Brighton Conference Centre (I think Alan and I were having a cup of tea with Charles Clarke) I put in that call to the Department of Health press office to see how badly the 'showdown' was playing on the news. It wasn't the top story, I relayed to Milburn and those government and party people enjoying the Grand Hotel's hospitality with us, "and, a light aircraft has crashed the World Trade Centre."

We settled ourselves into the visitors' seats at the Brighton Conference Centre, exactly opposite the platform where TB would speak. There was an air of expectation in the large aircraft hangar-style hall. People were nervous. The Labour Movement is a funny thing. It loves to love losers and loves to hate winners and yet, it hates to lose. So, whilst 'The Brothers' didn't like TB they at least knew they had to respect him as a winner. He had just delivered another landslide election victory. They just didn't know how much of a kicking he was about to give them on reform.

Behind me sat Deputy Prime Minister Prescott's people and around us some other civil servants, ministers and special advisers. Some strange rumours began to be whispered behind us as the civil service machine began to crank up and the protection officers quite literally, got the word in their ear. Slowly at first and in hushed tones and then quicker and more urgent: it wasn't a light aircraft but a passenger jet...two passenger jets...US airspace closing...dozens of planes in the sky still unaccounted for...attacks on the Pentagon...President Bush taken off in Airforce One...America had gone to DefCon 3!

Christ, I thought, it will be the Brighton Conference Centre next. Everyone knew TB was due to speak, when and where. How easy would it be to attack it with a hijacked aeroplane out of Gatwick? And I would be killed - at the bloody TUC!

I thought about leaving that para out of this piece but, a decade later, I remember it is exactly what I felt. I was scared, to be honest. Scared by the horror of it all even before I had seen it unfold for myself on TV. Scared by the new uncertainties.

Throughout my youth, during the Cold War, America had been there as a comfort blanket for Europe against attack, with their nuclear umbrella and US army bases in Germany and beyond. And yet, the most powerful nation on Earth had been unable to stop an attack on their own soil; on global symbols of their own wealth and power. Who could protect any of us now?

The Conference hall remained unaware of the attacks. The iPhone, with its instant news apps, that soon would allow live news pictures in your hand and, with digital still and video cameras, create millions of citizen journalists who would in the future so powerfully capture images of other terrorist incidents like 7/7, was not yet even Apple blossom.

The delegates were beginning to become restless. All they knew was that TB was late. It wasn't just that he was going to have a go about their opposition to driving up performance by developing a mix of public and private service providers in health and education, but he was keeping them stewing in their own juices before he did so.

And then, Bill Morris, who I think was chairing the session, called it to order. 'Congress, before the Prime Minister speaks I have an announcement.' The hall fell silent and he began to tell them what we then knew. About the terrible attacks on the twin towers. About other attacks (he didn't say the Pentagon by name and later people speculated that that was because he was worried one of the anti-American ultra leftists in the hall might cheer). About other planes in the sky. About how our thoughts and prayers were with the American people as they suffered this terrible and ongoing attack. In the circumstances, he told them, the Prime Minister was only going to speak for a short time and return to London.

Tony Blair has an amazing ability to combine power and anger, control and compassion and to communicate all of it, apparently effortlessly. He spoke, as so often he did at times of crisis, with a natural authority, leadership and determination. He has a clarity of thought and phrase which both comforts and challenges in equal measure. I saw it on 9/11 and, sadly, close up on 7/7 when the same twisted ideology of Islamic fundamentalism brought terror and tragedy to London. It appears to me today, too many politicians have forgotten the prime importance of protecting the population from this threat as they pander to their own so-called 'civil libertarian' activists. Tony Blair never has.

When the Prime Minister had finished speaking we went back to his suite in the Grand. It struck me as strangely spooky at the time, as it does now, that as we huddled together around the TV in the Prime Minister's rooms to watch the pictures of the terrorist attack, we were doing so in a building that itself had been the sight of a deadly terror attack on a former Prime Minister. Tony had already made such progress in Northern Ireland to end the terrorism and here we were watching a new, deadlier terrorism suddenly emerging before our very eyes.  

People in the room which, given the horror unfolding on TV had been remarkably quiet as we simply watched in disbelief, were beginning to mutter the words 'Al Qaeda'. The phrase wasn't  entirely strange to me - they had attacked US interests when Bill Clinton was President - but this, the scale, the significance, the shocking audaciousness of it, was  dangerously different. America had been attacked on her own soil with thousands of lives lost but it could have been tens of thousands and more if they could pull it off. Where in the world was safe now?

Tony had to return to London. We watched from the windows of his suite as he went out of the front of the Grand Hotel. I remember a man, who regularly campaigned at party conferences against smoking, running up to him screaming about the dangers of tobacco. He got very close to the Prime Minister. It is a mark of how far we have come since 9/11 that, given the momentous events going on across the Atlantic, of which he no doubt knew nothing, he was allowed to get within striking distance of the Prime Minister during an ongoing terror attack. That wouldn't happen today.

TB returned to London from Brighton by train. Half the Cabinet took the next one. It struck me at the time that the idea of the prime minister travelling into the centre of London on public transport at a moment of such crisis was as dangerous as it was foolhardy. No-one knew then whether London was next and an attack imminent. We had been lucky to live in a country, where, despite decades of Irish terrorism, suicide bombing was largely unheard of. But it was just that: luck. As we were to subsequently find out, Britain, particularly London, had more than our fair share of dangerous Islamic extremists.  We are, thankfully, better prepared today. As we travelled back on the second train, cabinet ministers began getting messages that COBRA would meet late afternoon.

There was an eeriness about Whitehall by the time we got back. The terror was beginning to sink in. Many people had left central London early to be with their families and, I suppose, just in case.  The pictures of the attack on the Twin Towers - which as I write I can still see clearly in my mind's eye - were on a permanent loop on the 24 hour news channels in the press offices and private offices around Whitehall. I watched the twin towers fall to the ground The horror matched only by disbelief shared, I'm sure, in office blocks around the world. For some weeks I noticed people in Whitehall would look up nervously when the sound of a low flying jet aircraft seemed a little too close for comfort.

In the days and weeks to come TB would play a massively significant role in garnering international support for action against AQ and the Taliban who harboured them - and ensuring the US knew the importance of maintaining the international community's support and consent for that action. He would speak for all of us who value democracy and freedom when he committed Britain to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the USA in their darkest hour of the early years of the 21st Century, as they had done for us, twice, during our's in the 20th Century. They'd always been there for Europe when we needed them.  They needed us now.

Back at my desk, as COBRA met in the Cabinet Office, I phoned the people I love and listened to the sound of anger and fear in their voices. I could hear the emotion in my own voice too. I didn't know anyone who'd been murdered that day but I knew I could have done. I knew too, that those who hijacked the planes, indoctrinated and trained the terrorists had attacked the freedom, democracy, modernity and civilisation I believe in. They'd have killed any one of us - every one of us - if they could. The thought is too great to comprehend until you watch those planes smack into the twin towers and see them crash in ashes to the ground.

Whilst he was at COBRA, in the privacy of the empty Secretary of State's office in the Department of Health, the events, images and horror of that dread day - its shocking profundity - suddenly welled up in me and I cried to myself.

When you are involved in politics, in times like these, friends and family ask: so what happens next? There wasn't an answer at that precise moment, I remember thinking. We were lucky to have a Prime Minister with such great leadership strengths, I thought, but I wasn't so sure about President Bush. I suddenly really wished those hanging chads in Florida had gone Al Gore's way. Over the months and years ahead, with the necessary military actions that would follow, I would think that to myself so often but never, ever say it out loud (until now!)

As I went to bed that night, the whole day's events swirled around in my head. It was supposed to have been about the central thrust of TB's agenda for the second term: public service reform. It felt instead like the dawn of a new, more dangerous age, where the certainties of global power were no more and the safety shield of US might was dented and perhaps no longer even useful. In time these thoughts would ease but, as the TV images looped  in my mind, and I began to fall asleep, it was hard not to conclude that the political world in which I had woken up had, in the space of a few hours, been utterly transformed.

I wasn't yet sure how they would change but I knew then nothing about the Blair government, about the certainties of politics, at home and abroad, would ever be the same again. I fell asleep anticipating a very different new dawn.