Blair's War Cabinet

Blair's War Cabinet

With war against Iraq underway, Tony Blair will regularly meet his war cabinet at Downing Street.

The prime minister and key colleagues will be joined by top military and intelligence figures and senior civil servants.

Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott, Chancellor Gordon Brown, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon and Attorney General Lord Goldsmith are likely to be in on these high-level meetings as is International Development Secretary Clare Short.

Chief of the Defence Staff, Admiral Sir Michael Boyce will be there too possibly sitting alongside the head of MI6 Sir Richard Dearlove.

Where domestic security issues are at stake they may also be joined by head of MI5 Eliza Manningham-Buller.

Key Downing Street advisers are likely to be included.

Streamlined

The prime minister's chief media strategist Alastair Campbell and Downing Street chief of staff Jonathan Powell could sit in on any meetings.

The first modern war cabinet was set up in December 1916 by the then new Prime Minister David Lloyd George, who had replaced the ineffectual Herbert Asquith as World War One dragged on.

It was a more streamlined affair than the committee initiated under Asquith.

Every decision it made had to be ratified by the full cabinet.

The set-up devised under Lloyd George was able to assemble more rapidly and make quicker decisions.

That war cabinet was dissolved in November 1919 amid optimism that the Great War was the last war.

The war will be closely watched in London

In May 1938, as Germany threatened Czechoslovakia and war loomed, Neville Chamberlain's government decided to build Cabinet War Rooms in a supposedly bomb-proof basement in Whitehall, close to Downing Street and key ministries.

The complex involved a map room and was wired up by the BBC to enable broadcasting from there in times of war.

Undermined

When war came in September 1939 Churchill was back as First Lord of the Admiralty, alongside Chamberlain, Secretary of State for War Leslie Hore-Belisha and several other key ministers.

Chamberlain, already undermined by his appeasement of Hitler before the war, was finally forced to resign in May 1940.

Churchill replaced him and later recruited Clement Attlee, the Labour leader, Lord Beaverbrook, who became Minister of Aircraft Production, and Ernest Bevin, who became Minister of Labour and National Service.

Churchill, conscious of the mistakes of the Great War, kept the war cabinet size to a manageable eight and combined his job as prime minister with that of minister of defence.

While always keen to listen to hear other's views and change his mind if so persuaded, Churchill's style of leadership was decisive and bold.

He led the war cabinet through the humiliating withdrawal from Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain and the initial reverses in North Africa.

Gradually, and boosted no doubt by the entry of the United States into the war in 1941, the war cabinet was able to turn the tide.

During the Korean War and the Suez crisis, Prime Ministers Clement Attlee and Anthony Eden decided not to set up full war cabinets.

Task force

But when the Falklands conflict broke out in April 1982 Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher decided, on advice from two predecessors, Harold Macmillan and James Callaghan, to form a war cabinet.

The decision to send a task force to win back the islands had been taken by the full cabinet on 2 April and the war cabinet did not meet until four days later.

She chose a small and loyal band - deputy prime minister Willie Whitelaw, Defence Secretary John Nott, Foreign Secretary Francis Pym, and Tory party chairman Cecil Parkinson.

The most glaring omission was Chancellor Sir Geoffrey Howe, largely because she did not want the operation compromised by financial restrictions.

Denys Blakeway, in his book on the Falklands conflict, said the personalities ranged from Pym, a "wet" who was considered an appeaser, to the staunchly Thatcherite Nott, whose "uneven temperament was generally considered unsuited for war".

But Mr Blakeway wrote: "Nevertheless the team worked well together, and their unity of purpose owed much to the presence of Admiral Sir Terence Lewin, the Chief of the Defence Staff."

'We need a clear objective'

It was Sir Terence who demanded, and was given, a clear objective - "to cause the withdrawal of the Argentinean forces from the Falklands and restore the British administration".

By January 1991, when the next war cabinet was required for the Gulf War, Mrs Thatcher and the other Falklands veterans had shuffled off the political coil.

The only survivor was Sir Terence, by then Lord Lewin.

The man in charge was John Major, assisted by the unflappable Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd, and the experienced Defence Secretary Tom King.

Also co-opted was Energy Secretary John Wakeham, because of his reputation as a "fixer" and an expert at handling tricky situations.

He chaired the Gulf War information/propaganda committee, which was responsible for the "spin doctoring" (before the term had even been coined) of the war.