The Burden of Power: Countdown to Iraq - The Alastair Campbell Diaries (125 page)

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The tests demanded: a statement from Saddam admitting the concealment of WMD and undertaking not to retain or produce WMD in the future; that at least thirty scientists and their families should be delivered for interview outside Iraq; the surrender of anthrax, or evidence of its destruction to be provided; all al-Samoud missiles to be destroyed; all unmanned vehicles to be accounted for, including details of any aerial devices for spraying chemical and biological weapons; all mobile chemical and biological production facilities to be surrendered.

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A special summit would be held at the Lajes airbase on Portugal’s Azores islands, attended by Bush, Blair, Aznar of Spain and Barroso of Portugal.

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This was the interview from which would emerge one of Campbell’s most oft-quoted statements. When, at the end of a long interview, Margolick asked Blair about his religious faith, an impatient Campbell interjected, ‘We don’t do God.’

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Blair told MPs ‘This is the time for this House, not just this government or indeed this prime minister, but for this House to give a lead, to show that we will stand up for what we know to be right, to show that we will confront the tyrannies and dictatorships and terrorists who put our way of life at risk, to show at the moment of decision that we have the courage to do the right thing.’

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Saddam had urged Iraqis to attack the US and British enemy: ‘O Iraqis, fight with the strength of the spirit of jihad . . . strike them, and strike evil so that evil will be defeated.’

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Ali Hassan al-Majid, military commander and chief of the Iraqi Intelligence Service, who had deployed chemical weapons in attacks on the Kurds. Later convicted of war crimes and hanged.

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The UN Oil for Food programme had been set up in 1995 to enable Iraq, despite economic sanctions aimed at demilitarisation, to sell oil on the international market in exchange for food, medicine and humanitarian supplies. The programme was suspended by Kofi Annan prior to the invasion, and eventually terminated in November 2003.

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Treasury official then leading work on the assessment of the five economic tests.

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Chalabi and his organisation the Iraqi National Congress provided the US government with intelligence material about weapons of mass destruction and links to al-Qaeda, the majority of which was used in good faith in making the case for military intervention. It later turned out to have been fabricated by an Iraqi defector codenamed ‘Curveball’. Chalabi would be appointed president of the interim governing council of Iraq in September 2003. He would later dismiss the fabricated intelligence, saying ‘We are heroes in error. As far as we’re concerned, we’ve been entirely successful. That tyrant Saddam is gone and the Americans are in Baghdad.’

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Blair became the only head of government to guest star in the animated comedy series, welcoming the Simpson family to London in the episode ‘The Regina Monologues’.

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Romantic comedy film starring Jennifer Lopez.

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Zelig, the mysterious title character in Allen’s 1983 mockumentary, who sidles into camera shot for most of the major events of the twentieth century.

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Ali Ismaeel Abbas, a twelve-year-old Baghdad boy, had lost both arms when an American rocket fell near the family home, killing most of his family. His case became a symbol for media and other commentators of the suffering of ordinary Iraqis during the invasion. He would later be flown to Britain for treatment.

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Syria’s President, Bashar al-Assad, had urged non-Iraqi volunteers to take up arms in support of the Saddam Hussein regime.

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In a BBC radio interview, Short had been asked if she thought Blair had acted recklessly. She replied ‘I’m afraid that I think the whole atmosphere of the current situation is deeply reckless; reckless for the world, reckless for the undermining of the UN in this disorderly world, which is wider than Iraq . . . reckless with our government, reckless with his own future, position and place in history.’

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Three people were killed and sixty injured in the blast at a bar in Tel Aviv. Asif Muhammad Hanif, the suicide bomber, and Omar Khan Sharif, his accomplice, were both British citizens. Hamas and the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades of the Tanzim Fatah declared joint responsibility.

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Short suggested that, by failing to prevent looting at the National Museum, US troops had violated the 1907 Hague and 1949 Geneva conventions, which required occupiers of countries to maintain civil order.

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Labour lost 833 council seats, the Conservatives gained 566, taking control of Birmingham and Coventry, and the Liberal Democrats gained 193. The far-right British National Party gained eleven nationally, giving them a total of thirteen.

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Blair warned the audience of newspaper executives that Labour rebels voting against NHS reform and foundation hospitals would be ‘a collective mistake of historic proportions’, and that reforms would give more freedom to bring ‘new providers into elective surgery to reduce waiting times for NHS patients, whether those providers are from the NHS, the private sector or abroad. For the first time giving patients real choice to go elsewhere for treatment, paid for by the NHS, if they are waiting too long.’

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In 1969 Harold Wilson’s Labour government issued a White Paper,
In Place of Strife
, that proposed the reform of industrial relations. Divisions in Cabinet and the Parliamentary Labour Party over the proposals led to them being dropped.

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Cherie had agreed to give a speech to the Bermuda Bar Association and intended taking her mother and children.

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Baroness Amos, FCO minister, became the first black woman in the Cabinet.

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The Press Complaints Commission editors’ code calls for respect for private and family life, including health.

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Mandelson was quoted as saying ‘Gordon Brown is a politician right down to his fingerprints, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Tony is not. If he was as obsessed with politics he would not have let himself be outmanoeuvred by [his] Chancellor in the way that he potentially has.’

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Edenham High School in Croydon, South London, had unilaterally decided to send 720 pupils home because wages for temporary staff could not be paid. Changes to schools funding from government had been cited as the reason for sudden budget deficits in some schools.

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Blair described making his maiden speech in the Commons with a single reporter in the gallery. Afterwards, he recalled, ‘I saw her later in the corridor and asked her what she thought of the speech. She said: “I’m a Hansard reporter. I just transcribe speeches. I don’t listen to them.’”

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Andrew Gilligan, had alleged on the
Today
programme that Downing Street ordered the transformation of the September 2002 dossier on WMD in the week before it was published. He claimed it had been ‘sexed up’, including via the insertion of information Downing Street ‘knew to be untrue’ and against the wishes of the intelligence agencies.

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Blair said ‘For Britain and Poland the lesson is the same: accept the European Union as a modern reality, join it wholeheartedly, fight to make it, economically and politically, an instrument of future strength and prosperity for the nations within it.’

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Bleach, a British-born mercenary, was serving a life sentence for involvement in the Purulia arms-drop case. In 1995, a large consignment of unauthorised weapons had been dropped by aircraft in West Bengal. He would be pardoned by the Indian government in 2004.

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Gilligan had written ‘I asked him [Gilligan’s then unidentified source] how this transformation happened. The answer was a single word. “Campbell.” What? Campbell made it up? “No, it was real information. But it was included against our wishes because it wasn’t reliable.”’

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Taylor would chair the Commons Intelligence and Security Committee Inquiry into the published intelligence assessments of Iraqi WMD capacity, including the claim made in the September 2002 dossier that WMD could be launched within forty-five minutes. The committee’s eventual report would describe the 45-minute claim as ‘unhelpful’, lacking context and assessment. Though the ISC would conclude editorial changes had been made within Number 10, Campbell would be exonerated from Gilligan’s charge of having ‘sexed up’ the document.

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Though the two clubs announced a possible deal, Beckham subsequently went to Real Madrid for a transfer fee of £25 million.

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The offices of Secretary of State for Scotland and Wales were combined with other portfolios, Alistair Darling taking Scotland and transport, and Peter Hain taking Wales and Leader of the House of Commons

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The intruder, Aaron Barschak, self-styled ‘comedy terrorist’, had gained easy access to Prince William’s twenty-first birthday party, dressed as Osama Bin Laden in a ball gown.

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At the age of sixteen, Pauline had given birth to a son. The boy, given up for adoption, had been identified as Lieutenant Colonel Timothy Paul Watton OBE.

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In an interview, Blair had told the
Observer
‘The idea that I or anyone else in my position frankly would start altering intelligence evidence or saying to the intelligence services “I am going to insert this”, is absurd. There couldn’t be a more serious charge, that I ordered our troops into conflict on the basis of intelligence evidence that I falsified. You could not make a more serious charge against a prime minister. The charge happens to be wrong. I think everyone now accepts that that charge is wrong.’

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Wills resigned as a junior minister (for information technology in the criminal justice system), vowing to campaign for the abolition of the EU Common Agricultural Policy. He claimed every UK family paid £70 per year to support Europe’s cattle.

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The next Sunday, Gilchrist wrote of the encounter: ‘Campbell, his newly cropped convict haircut – which gives him all the charm of Magwitch – on public display for the first time, thrust his face within an inch of mine and declared: “You’re scum.” I said I wasn’t, but why did he think I was? His response came quickly. “And your paper’s scum, too.”’

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Blair said, ‘Can we be sure that terrorism and weapons of mass destruction will join together? Let us say one thing: if we are wrong, we will have destroyed a threat that at its least is responsible for inhuman carnage and suffering. That is something I am confident history will forgive.’

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Lord Hutton, former Lord Chief Justice of Northern Ireland, would chair what was formally known as the ‘Inquiry into the Circumstances Surrounding the Death of Dr David Kelly CMG’.

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From a 1939 story by James Thurber,
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
, dealing with the imagined adventures of a mild-mannered dreamer.

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Sumption’s vast multi-volume
The Hundred Years War between England and France
would be described by journalist Allan Massie as ‘an enterprise on a truly Victorian scale’.

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Campbell had been sued by Allason for malicious falsehood in 1996. Mr Justice Drake, the judge in the trial, said of Campbell ‘He did not impress me as a witness in whom I could feel one hundred per cent confidence’, had not been ‘wholly convincing or satisfactory’ and had been ‘less than completely open and frank’. The comments were resurrected by the media in advance of Campbell’s Hutton Inquiry appearance.

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Gilligan’s email named David Kelly as Susan Watts’ source for a BBC
Newsnight
story.