Broken Vows by Tom Bower

to change thelaw. Sitting in the garden, he asked, ‘Is Bernie thinking of giving more money to Labour? We wondered if he would commit himself to giving Labour £1 million every year for the life of the current parliament.’
    ‘There are problems,’ Ward replied.
    ‘We must arrange another meeting with Tony,’ Levy soothed.
    Soon after, Levy spoke to Powell. ‘The prime minister needs to meet Bernie.’
    ‘OK,’ replied Powell.
    The arrangements were made soon after. Blair’s agreement to meet Ecclestone in Downing Street, Ward reassured Mosley, was directly linked to their conversation in his Islington home before the election: another donation would protect the tobacco companies’ sponsorship of Formula One.
    Seated in a circle in a small ground-floor room in Downing Street with Blair, Powell, Ward and Ecclestone, Mosley addressed the prime minister, as he would later say, ‘lawyer to lawyer’. Eloquent and precise, Mosley said, ‘We don’t oppose the end of tobacco advertising but we just want a gradual elimination so that alternative sponsors can be found.’
    Blair nodded. If phased reduction was denied, Mosley explained, 50,000 British jobs as well as F1 Digital TV could easily be relocated outside the EU. Blair looked over at Ecclestone. The businessman wanted Blair to know that there was no contest between Dobson and himself. With a snap of his fingers Britain could lose its Grand Prix and the lucrative motor-sport industry. Those who ignored his warnings, Ecclestone implied, were always surprised that he did what he said.
    ‘Let’s keep in touch about this,’ said Blair after thirty-five minutes. The three visitors departed convinced that an understanding had been reached.
    Shortly after, Mosley bumped into Mandelson at a reception in Lancaster House. ‘How’s it going?’ he asked.
    ‘The whole of Whitehall is reverberating to the sound of grinding gears,’ said Mandelson, implying that Formula One’s request was being granted.
    The following Monday, Ward heard that Blair had given an order to ‘sort out the Formula One problem’. Powell explained that the government was seeking an exemption in Brussels from the directive. Shortly after, Tessa Jowell called Mosley. Blair, she said, had ordered that Formula One should be given special exemption until October 2006. Ecclestone’s money had forced Dobson to reverse the ban on tobacco sponsorship.
    Although Levy would mischievously write, ‘To my knowledge [Blair] never altered any of his policies because of any of the big-money donations I brought in,’ he did criticise Blair for what followed.
    Ecclestone’s success was leaked to a journalist and, the day after the Sunday newspaper’s report, Ward rushed to Downing Street to confront Powell and Campbell. He discovered ‘total chaos’. ‘They didn’t want to listen to me,’ he told Mosley, adding that Powell and Campbell, anxious to protect the prime minister, would cast Ecclestone as the villain and encourage Blair, if necessary, to lie. At Mosley’s suggestion, Ward telephoned Powell and urged that the government stay silent about the donation. The suggestion of a conspiracy to suppress the truth hardly appealed to Blair or his entourage. On the contrary, ignoring Ecclestone’s interests, Blair had already asked Derry Irvine, the Lord Chancellor, to limit the damage.
    By then, Blair’s confidence in his former pupil master had been shaken by Irvine’s arrogance and misunderstanding of the media. The extravagant manner of Britain’s most senior lawyer would later be compared to Cardinal Wolsey’s behaviour, and in that vein Irvine blamed Blair for the disaster. ‘He could not believe how badly we had fucked it up,’ noted Campbell. Irvine advised that any confession of the truth was ‘utterly absurd’, and suggested that the government should create a smokescreen.
    Acting on Irvine’s advice, Blair and Gordon Brown concocted a ruse. They ordered Tom Sawyer, the party’s