The role of Downing Street Chief of Staff was created for him, and he was the only senior advisor to last the whole period of Tony Blair's premiership - but who is the real Jonathan Powell, and how did he do it? 
Rory and Alastair are joined by Jonathan Powell to discuss the New Labour years, the Northern Ireland peace process, how he negotiates with terrorists, and more. 
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Welcome to the rest is politics leading with me Rory Stewart,

and welcome Jonathan Powell to the episode.

I have, no I vividly remember Jonathan because you had been in Washington as a diplomat, you'd met Tony when he was out, you I think introduced him to the Clinton campaign for the first time.

I arranged him and Gordon Brown together to meet all the Clinton people

And then once Tony Blair had become leader you were kind of on his radar and I think you first of all said no?

No no no that's not true no he called me after he became leader during the summer late summer I think it was and said would I come over and talk to him and be interviewed for the job of Chief of Staff.

So I said yes okay and I flew over and then I had to fly back but I was going to host Gordon Brown when I got back.

When I got to Heathrow I discovered Ed Balls and Gordon Brown waiting for the plane.

I couldn't run into them because then I'd have to tell them I'd be meeting Tony Blair.

So I hid and then got on the plane at the last moment.

Your whole life has been since then dictated by avoiding Gordon Brown.

But anyway, I can remember when you, when you accepted the job and the thing about Jonathan Rory, he's incredibly efficient and incredibly straight and I think his very, very first words were something like, you're Alistair and Tony tells me you're very important to him and we should sit down and have a proper chat and that was the first conversation and I was saying to Rory earlier I don't recall ever having a crossword with you.

No I don't recall you ever having a crossword with me, but then I never gave you any reason to, so.

Well, Jonathan, let's get a bit of a sense of you.

So you, well, give a sense of your childhood and how you grew up and how you describe your social background and how you got into the Foreign Office?

I was a very conventional middle-class kid.

I grew up on Air Force bases in Singapore and around the world and then back in the UK.

I went to boarding school, was hoping to go to LSE and do economics, but instead went to Oxford and did history.

And then I went into journalism briefly when I left, well, first I went on a scholarship to America, went to Washington, to Pennsylvania, University of Pennsylvania.

And then I got a job working for Radio 4, and then I went to work for Granada with the days of Tony Wilson and got to meet the Sex Pistols and...

Was that as big in your life as Alastair meeting Britney?

It was much more important than meeting Britney because I was much younger and much more impressionable and Tony Wilson was God at that stage in charge of Manchester and the whole Manchester music scene.

But my parents didn't think that was a proper job, it didn't have a pension, and so I applied to join the Foreign Office and got a job in the Foreign Office.

And so you then served in the Foreign Office from the late 1970s and had found yourself in the Embassy in Washington when you first came across Tony Black.

And actually the interesting thing about going to Washington in 1991 was my job was to follow the opposition candidates around in the election campaign.

There's been a job doing that since the Second World War.

And when I came in, George Bush was at 75%.

The candidates running were called the 7 Doors because everyone was waiting for Mario Cuomo to come in on the Democrat side.

And I had to choose who I was going to follow, and I decided to follow Bill Clinton because he'd been at my college at Oxford.

And this later led to me having a reputation for being a brilliant political prognosticator.

No exactly but I was able to predict his future but it's simply because he was easiest person to get on the campaign bus with and so I went on his first campaign visit to New Hampshire in 91 and minibus we went around he kept stopping at McDonald's and then stayed with him campaigning basically for a year.

And the very odd thing about all this is when you were serving in the Foreign Office during the 1980s, your brother Charles was Mrs.

Was there the whole way through and then stayed with the first year of first year of major when he took over from Thatcher.

So there you are as a permanent civil servant increasingly drawn to the Labour Party and your brother is absolutely the power behind the throne sitting in 10 Downing Street under Conservative Prime Ministers.

He was but he was a civil servant he was a diplomat he never became political so but he was very very close to Thatcher And I don't think he probably could have stayed in government after Thatcher left.

I remember going for an interview for a job with Douglas Hurd to be his private secretary.

And he interviewed me and said, I don't think we can do this.

Because my brother called himself Charles Pole.

And he couldn't have the idea of- Why did he call himself Pole?

He calls himself Pole because actually that's nearer to the correct Welsh pronunciation.

He called himself Powell because he wanted to get it spelt properly.

And then another brother, Chris, was probably involved in Labour Party before you.

He did the shadow agency for Neil Kinnock all the way through.

That's why I wanted to go to LSE and do economics because Chris was there.

And he was probably the most political of the family, would you say?

Because you're not the most political person in the world, are you?

Well, it depends what you're measuring it by, Alastair.

By your standard, no, I'm sort of pretty weak to liquor, but I'm definitely not a Tory.

And Jonathan, something that Tony Blair spotted in you brought you in to be Chief of Staff, and you remained all the way through.

I think you're probably the only Chief of Staff who's done a full 10-year Prime Ministerial term I guess.

But you're quite different to the rest of them.

I mean we've, I obviously spent a lot of time with Alistair, spent quite a lot of time with David Miliband, see a little bit of Tony Blair.

They're all sort of slightly sort of overly smooth extroverts.

You seem to be a slightly different personality type.

That's actually why number 10 under us worked and why it doesn't work under quite a lot of other people is that we were very complementary people.

I didn't want to do Alice's job, Alice had no interest in my job, neither of us wanted to do Angie's job.

So we were very different sorts of personalities actually and that's why I think it worked.

And how would you define your own personality?

Well I think what Tony said about me was that I would he liked about me was that I was provincial I wasn't a Londoner I someone who came from the provinces like him and so I didn't have a Londoners natural sort of feeling they should be governing and he called me essence of new labor which I think's probably about right that because Alistair is much more old labor that's why he could do something like work with Gordon Brown afterwards whereas I was all new labor and that's all I just

give it give us it just just to develop that because

I do find this very very strange of city you're telling your day what I think about your skill.

I think Jonathan has incredible calm and has a level personality.

And I also think you don't take things personally, either for yourself or for other people.

So when things were going badly for any of us, but especially if it was for Tony, you always managed to keep kind of very, very level about it.

So within the operation there was very little panic.

Tony used to think I actually relished when I had latest crisis.

He said he could see me coming down the corridor about to tell him some ghastly thing that happened, Peter Mandelson was going to have to resign or whatever it was and he said there's always a grin on my face and he believed that I actually enjoyed having these crises.

You're someone who quite like you run towards crises?

I quite like the adrenaline rush of having at least 5 or 6 things going on at once.

So yes, I think that's probably a personality type.

So instead of stressing you out, you quite sort of relish the whole thing.

The first strange thing happens to your mind actually doing that job.

I think I have the world record of being chief of staff in a democracy, because going through from when I started for 10 years till the end, certainly by comparison with United States, where they really never last over 4 years and rarely over 2 years.

And that is that your mind grows so you can deal with 5 or 6 really big things at once and what you lose is the forward and backward bits so you lose your memory before that.

It's like stretching your muscles in a particular way and I think that's what happened to me.

Give me a concrete example of 5 or 6 crises and losing the back memory.

For example, coming over here to Northern Ireland and trying to negotiate while knowing what's going on in Iraq, trying to get back before the war starts, when the plane being late and I'm not going to get in on time, trying at the same time to do with a minister resigning somewhere else.

So you've got all these things going on at once.

And give us an example of losing the back a bit.

I can't ever remember anyone's name when I meet them even though I've met them 15 times.

So you sort of, you lose the, you lose that sort of memory.

So I used to have a diary because anyone I could actually remember anything as I wrote it down.

Partly because you're so much in the present moment of the crisis you don't actually have the reflection time to to ponder memories, think about the past.

Yeah, I think that's actually also a danger, you correctly point that out, there's always a danger that if you don't have time to really consider things, if you're operating on 5 or 6 things at once.

I always remember I have an ancestor, a very tenuously connected ancestor, who was 1 of the 4 knights who murdered Thomas a Beckett.

And I always thought of my job as don't do that if Tony says go and execute the Bishop of Canterbury, think twice before you

And it sort of went down in family history that was a bad move.

his career, He died in Jerusalem and was buried under the Ark of the Mosque.

Now, I just can bring it out, but my last question is, it does sound pretty horrifying doing 10 years of that degree of crisis management.

Did you ever feel yourself getting close to breakdown, close to collapse and in retrospect looking back?

years, you count the opposition too, because it's all the way through.

In fact, a number of friends of mine, I had a friend who had been Chief of Staff to Vakha of Havel, and he said what you need to do as I approach the end of this period, knowing I was going in 2017, you need to go and see a psychiatrist because the down from this is going to be terrible.

You're going to crash and you're going to be in awful shape.

And I didn't go to a psychiatrist and it didn't happen like that at all.

I woke up the next morning to the news that someone had tried to bomb central London I thought why is no 1 called me and I thought I don't have to worry It's not my problem and it was a blessed relief rather than the other side I didn't have a crash and I didn't have a crash afterwards So I was very lucky from that point of view I

think you were the only 1 of us who stayed the whole way through to the end?

I think Kate Garvey was the whole way through.

She didn't last the whole way through I don't think.

So and and and when you just are always talking about crisis but actually we didn't things were steady a lot of the time we didn't have that many full-blown crises.

What's your sense of what Tony brought as a leader to the team that he built and what his principles for building that team were?

What Tony had was a remarkable vision and people sort of play down the vision thing but actually it's crucially important for a politician, as George Bush Senior revealed in the end, not having the vision thing was his downfall.

In other words, he had this vision, but he didn't try and be the day-to-day tactician.

People like Peter would be the strategist.

Gordon Brown, I always thought was the sort of day-to-day tactician and you were the brilliant communicator So he had a team of people who complemented his skills Rather than trying to do everything and you quite often found with prime ministers a nice prime minister like John Major Tried to do everything and that doesn't work You've got to actually work out what your role is as leader and what the role of others is.

So you and I had this ridiculous row that proceeded us into Downing Street because the Queen had to pass some order in council that gave us the right to instruct civil servants.

Do you think that actually made any practical difference at all?

And secondly, what is your assessment looking back of your and our relationship with the civil service?

How that worked, where it worked well, where it didn't work well?

Robin Butler has subsequently admitted, who was the Cabinet Secretary at the time, that this was a mistake.

They never needed to have this order in council.

He blamed it on his civil servants in the ethics part, that they'd been too tidy-minded about it.

And I always pointed out to them there was no need because previous political appointees in John Major's office, Sarah Hogg, for example, had civil servants in her team and managed them and told them what to do.

There was no reason, there was no, nothing had changed.

But it made it into a symbol, which was a real problem, I think.

then led to this notion there were millions of special advisors knocking around Number 10.

But if you think about it now, We had a tiny number of special advisors by comparison with the number in government at the moment.

So it's quite different from that point of view.

I think when we started in government, we had a problem integrating into the civil service properly.

I remember Tony complaining to me that the government machine felt like a Rolls Royce parked just outside Dining Street, and he was never allowed to have the keys and there was some element to that and we I certainly managed to rub up the wrong way with Richard Wilson the second cabinet secretary after Robin left and we had trouble integrating the government machine properly but I think after about 6 months or a year we finally worked out how to do that and on the whole the civil servants enjoyed that.

I think what Robin Butler was very keen to do was to stay on and be the person after that long period of Tory rule to manage transition to a Labour government and he did it very well and so did the civil service as a whole.

They were keen to have people who are going to be activists coming in, a new fresh broom, fresh ideas and they liked that.

I can't remember the process we went through to appoint him now.

He was very keen to help and he had a vision in his mind of what the cabinet secretary should be.

He'd been working in Mrs Thatcher's number 10, he'd booked in the cabinet office in the domestic secretariat and he had a vision that she would pass all the problems over to the cabinet office and they'd sort them out.

Tony Blair had this vision that he was going to be managing the civil service.

What he wanted, you remember the scars on my back, was his particular dig at the civil service, the same as Cameron's dig later and others.

So that's very surprising because of course the sort of general memory, sort of folk memory of Mrs Thatcher is somebody who was relentlessly working till 3 in the morning all over the details, very bossy, telling people what to do, but you're actually saying that her management style from Richard Wilson's point of view was quite different to that of Tony Blair.

That was his vision of it from his time in the Cabinet Office.

It's not the vision I got from my brother working on foreign policy who was nearly all of the work was done inside Downing Street.

That was the problem, was the division between what they were doing in Downing Street, what's happening in the Foreign Office, for example.

So it's not, I'm not sure who was right about a management style but that was his vision.

So Rich Wilson's vision is that she would sort of set rough policy strategy and then it would be left entirely to the civil service to work out the detail of implementation?

Yeah, she would say here's a problem we need to deal with, I mean not the poll tax but something like that, and then pass it over to the cabinet office and they would work on it.

They would produce options and then she would choose an option or something.

it but I mean I agree with you, she was a great detail merchant so it's hard to believe that really ever happened, but that's the decision of how this should work.

I do slightly remember this though as a minister saying to civil servants, I want you to do this.

I remember saying, you know, I want you to spend 40 million pounds doing an analysis of the history of British development programs in Malawi.

And 5 weeks later, they would come back with, here are 4 options, Minister.

And I'd think, what part of, I want you to do this, don't you get?

So I think there is a very strong sense in the civil service that their job is to come up with the policy proposals and give the options to ministers rather than listen to a minister telling them what to do.

Yeah, they would see their job as pointing out the elephant traps to a minister.

They've seen all these problems a million times before and the minister's proposing something that's completely daft and didn't work last time.

So let's give him a chance of talking himself out of the decision he's just made.

Now, the trouble is it then is seen by ministers as people who are not prepared to implement anything.

And ministers want things who can get things done.

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Jonathan Powell: How to negotiate with terrorists