The Burden of Power: Countdown to Iraq - The Alastair Campbell Diaries (23 page)

I managed to avoid going back to the summit, and stayed in touch by phone with Godric. TB did the press conference early and it was all a bit of a non-event, though he was doing well on the substance. He had settled on the view that Giscard was best for the convention because we would be able to influence it more. I got a very different take from Glenys and Helle [Thorning-Schmidt, Stephen Kinnock’s wife, Danish MEP] who were really steamed up about it.

Rory and I went for a run then down to the Grand-Place. Carole Walker [BBC] was there filming and couldn’t believe her luck at bumping into us there. She interviewed both Neil and Glenys before we had lunch. We went for a wander and I was sad to discover that the Stock Exchange pub where I based myself when I was a busker here had gone. Godric was calling pretty regularly to keep me abreast of the endless rubbish from the summit. They had meant to agree the sites of the planned new agencies, but had to defer it to the Barcelona summit. Berlusconi was arguing that the food agency should go to Parma because of the cuisine there. TB said he really did seem to believe that it was a food agency, like a kind of glorified restaurant. The favourite was in Finland and Chirac had asked TB ‘Why do we want to send the food agency to a country that only eats reindeer?’ TB said somehow Europe seems to work, but if we are being frank, a lot of it is haggling, deals and people missing the point.

Someone was at it in the
Sunday Times
, with a headline ‘Generals warn glory-hunting Blair’. There were clearly people at the MoD briefing against us the whole time. TB wasn’t happy about it at all. We travelled back on Eurostar after what had turned out to be a really nice weekend. I went for dinner with the Goulds and David Triesman. We had a lot of problems in the party, but I felt David was a genuinely nice man who would make a difference.

Yesterday’s
Mail on Sunday
had some crap about a so-called bugging scandal involving Lord [Nazir] Ahmed [the Labour peer, opposed to the Afghanistan war, alleged that his phone had been tapped during conversations with Foreign Office minister Denis MacShane]. I called Denis MacShane to say I thought he should go up and deal with it. By the time I got to the office Jack Straw was on in a real fury. They are my ministers, not yours, and I’m not having it. He said he was ‘fucking angry’. I said he knew I directed ministerial traffic in the media, this was a situation when we had to move fast to kill it. And when I heard the
Today
programme was still doing it, I knew it had to be dealt with. He said they had agreed at the FCO last night to put nobody up and I should have called him. He said the first he knew Denis was going on was listening to it on the news. I apologised to him, though it would have been avoided if they had communicated yesterday on their decision not to go up.

TB was working on the [Laeken] statement for the Commons. He was very pissed off with the briefing against him [in the
Sunday Times
] from the MoD, which was clearly born out of their being in a slightly different place. Friday had been very difficult for David M [re CENTCOM], and later for TB with Geoff Hoon. As a result of their calls, the MoD agreed to speak direct to the DoD [Department of Defense] to try to agree what was going to happen. TB had negotiated the words direct with Chirac but every time the MoD came back with a new objection, their line was CENTCOM would not put up with it. TB was suspicious that our own people were winding up [General Tommy] Franks. Also, at the end of the morning war meeting, CDS said to me that if Laeken was as bad as everyone said ‘That’s the end of ESDI’ [European Strategic Defence Initiative]. Another revealing statement. TB said he was giving us the impression that troops would not want to do this ‘and I just don’t accept that’. He felt it would be wrong if the UK was not properly involved in this. The Franco-German problem was a real one though.

Russia was also wanting to be involved, and winding up [General Mohammed] Fahim Khan [leader of the Tajik Jamiat-e-Islami party within the Northern Alliance] to say not many troops should go in. CDS took delight in saying he had witnessed a video conference in which Bush briefed Franks on the force and said ‘I’ve spoken to the PM and I’ve made no promises at all.’ CDS was really doing nothing but give TB headaches at the moment. He defended Franks by saying that Chris Meyer spotted immediately that the US would not buy the language TB agreed with Chirac. I suggested to TB that he had a private word with Boyce. After the Laeken statement he got him in with Geoff Hoon and ‘cleared the air’ and said we needed more questions to be answered than we were asking.

If ever we needed evidence of TB not focusing on the domestic, it came in a meeting with Hilary [Armstrong] and Charles [Clarke] when he asked whether we could get a piece of legislation through to be told it went through on Thursday night because our MPs stayed up all night. It was amazing he didn’t know that and I could feel him thinking he was getting out of touch. He also wanted to get out of a dinner on Africa with ministers tonight but we pushed him into it by saying he was in danger of not being taken seriously on it. He agreed reluctantly but when it came to it, it was Bono and Bob Geldof [rock stars campaigning to write off Third World debt] who got the invitation up to the flat. He was happy enough with the outcome of Laeken and Giscard’s appointment and felt he was far less federalist than people imagined.

On the conference call, we discussed plans for a ‘one hundred days on’ paper of some sort. Torie Clarke was on, warning after Rumsfeld’s visit to Kabul that we should be very much in the ‘this is far from over’ territory. I was still having to deal with personality and personnel issues in the various CICs.

TB was back arguing for a big New Labour kick, feeling we had lost a bit of momentum on all the main domestic areas and needed it back. He was quizzing me about whether the operation missed Anji and what to do with Peter M. He said he wanted to bring him back if he could but his fatal weakness was the press and his belief that if his profile was low he would get nothing and nowhere. He was worrying about the Americans, felt that they liked our support but in the end felt they could do what they wanted. He felt Rumsfeld and the right were in the ascendancy. TB was fretting as ever re holiday cover, who would make things happen while he was away.
I went to Grace’s school play and then for a long run on the Heath. Then out for dinner with Tucker Eskew and his wife [Lisa]. He felt that apart from NMD [National Missile Defense] and Kyoto [climate change protocol, 1997], there was a lot shared between the two countries’ agendas and TB had more influence than maybe we thought. He thought our media was mad but that we dealt with it pretty well. I still felt the second-phase questions hadn’t really been dealt with and also that ‘where next?’ was far too prevalent in Americans’ thinking.

TB had dinner last night with GB and said he had been on best behaviour but it was still difficult. TB had given him a pretty frank assessment of why he (TB) was generally thought to be an OK PM – because he had breadth, could deal with a stack of different things at once, and get on with a range of people. He felt GB had breadth but was too narrow in the field of people he related to. He told him he still believed he was easily the best person to follow him but he was not going to support him in circumstances where he felt he was being forced out. They had also discussed the euro, where he felt GB was more open-minded but that Balls was pouring opposition into his head the whole time. TB was looking a bit downcast again, probably worrying that a basically bad set-up with GB was something of a reality.

The US conference call was largely about one hundred days on. I needed to talk to Karen [Hughes] about where the whole CIC operation went now. The
Sun
had a story that Byers was to be sacked so I called Steve to say it was balls. There were continuing problems re ISAF [the UN’s International Security Assistance Force, agreed in Bonn that month] before Geoff’s statement and we were busy getting all the words sorted with the Americans and the French. The Germans seemed to have an even bigger problem than the French with the idea of serving under CENTCOM. There was a lot of briefing against us going on. Meanwhile the Wembley [national stadium] issue was flaring up again. The FA [Football Association] were going to announce that Wembley was their favoured option and they didn’t want to refer to the James report.
³⁹
Called Tessa [Jowell] to warn her to be very careful in her choice of words, that she could end up having to resign if she allied herself to someone else’s version of events that didn’t
turn out to be right. In the event she was even tougher than I would have been. I had both Adam Crozier [FA chief executive] and David Davies [FA executive director] on the phone trying to get me to persuade her to spin the James stuff as dealing with Wembley. Out for dinner with Tessa and family. She was in quite good form considering how badly Wembley was playing out. Earlier I had a pretty tough meeting with the BBC over their plans for their ‘Your NHS’ day [a day of programmes, 20 February 2002], which they said was meant to be a fair, balanced look at the NHS, but everything we heard around the place suggested that they were just looking for the bad the whole time. I left them with a clear impression we were thinking of not co-operating at all.

I was due to have lunch with Peter M, which had been my suggestion after he emailed me re an article he was doing. I asked Hilary C to find somewhere discreet and she had booked La Trouvaille in Newburgh Street. I arrived first, Peter a few minutes later and we were put in the window. Who should walk by, just seconds after we sat down, but Andrew Marr, but he was so busy window shopping on the other side of the passageway that he didn’t see us. Peter did most of the talking early on, re what he had now taken to calling his ‘defenestration’. He was very calm and friendly, said he wasn’t blaming me directly but described the whole episode leading to his resignation as a ‘road accident’ in which everyone accidentally conspired. I said if it had been anyone else, we would probably have survived but he had baggage that weighed us down. On the whole Geoffrey [Robinson, former Paymaster General] loan episode, he felt it was a case of the circumstances of one period being different to those of another. When he took out the loan, Geoffrey was not
persona non grata
, was not a media bogeyman, was a friend who had always taken an interest in helping Peter. Peter said he had always wanted a nice home and to find someone to live with. He hated [his former flat in] Wilmington Square [Bloomsbury] because it didn’t feel like a home. The themes of his loneliness, and his sexuality making him more lonely, or certainly more secretive, came through. He hated being away from Reinaldo [da Silva, his partner]. His private life was happy, but why because he was a politician should there have to be comment about it at all, why? It was he who was the politician. Nobody ever disputed he was a good minister and he felt he had to get back to top-level politics. I said it was true, he rarely got criticised on ability grounds. He accepted
a return to the Cabinet was difficult, so the options were probably Europe or the UN and he was intending to develop his international profile.

I discussed the lunch with TB in advance. He said he didn’t rule out Peter coming back but he had to lower the personal profile. He was a phenomenal talent but flawed and the heart of the flaw was his relationship with the press. When I relayed that, Peter did the usual thing of saying he hardly ever spoke to the press, only read the
FT
, it was the media that had created the persona, not the other way round. He clearly couldn’t accept he had done much wrong, certainly felt wronged and tried to come to terms with it every day, and said he found it difficult. He said he knew I thought his problem was the profile but it wasn’t. His problem was that others, including me and TB, couldn’t make the shift from seeing him as ‘Bobby’.
⁴⁰
He felt he never recovered from that, that he could never be seen as a legitimate politician, that it was cruel that even as a minister, TB and I often saw him more as a behind-the-scenes person. Add in his worries about the media constantly probing re his sexuality, add in GB ‘always there, as a presence intent on destroying me’, and it wasn’t a happy mix. He felt the rift with GB, contrary to legend, was not when he supported TB. It was at Chewton Glen [country house hotel in the New Forest], when he, TB and GB had had a meeting before the dinner and GB, to everyone’s astonishment, produced a blueprint of everything to be done, including personnel issues in the party. TB was visibly taken aback and asked Peter his view. Peter stalled and said we needed to think about it.

After TB went to bed, Peter asked Gordon ‘Why on earth did you do that?’ GB said between them they could control TB and all the big decisions. Peter said again, why did you try to bounce him like that without warning? GB asked if Peter supported him on the substance of the proposals he had made, which were a mix of policy and personnel. Peter said he needed to think about it and discuss it with TB. GB replied ‘You’ve made your choice,’ and stormed off. He said it was a pretty blatant attempt to use him in undermining TB early on. He felt one of GB’s weaknesses was that he underestimated TB’s steel. He saw me and Peter as the two strong people and had always felt if he could get us over to him, he could deal with TB. He underestimated our loyalty, but also TB’s steel.

By now, there were more guests in the restaurant who had noticed us and we were virtually whispering across the table. Peter told me of a meeting he had had whilst the Hammond Inquiry was going on.
⁴¹
He wanted to explain to GB why he was fighting so hard for his story to be heard. They met in Gordon’s office at the Commons. GB put him at ease straight away, asking with seeming sincerity how he was. Peter said bruised and hurt and really trying to come back. He said he told him the story as dispassionately as he could, his role, Jack’s role, my role, Mike O’Brien, TB, the Civil Service, ‘I was as dispassionate as I could be, tried not to blame, no individual’s fault, just a terrible set of circumstances ending in a road crash.’ GB listened and said the problem was that I had created the context on the Monday by saying that was the only contact between you and the Home Office (via his private office) and it meant an elephant trap was laid. ‘Then you fell into it. The only way out is for Alastair to say he misbriefed and apologise but he won’t do that.’ He said TB had always been a weak personality and he needed strong personalities to support him. First, it had been Peter/GB and then it became Peter/AC. But AC wanted to be the main voice ‘so he conspired to push you out, it’s obvious.’