The Burden of Power: Countdown to Iraq - The Alastair Campbell Diaries (25 page)

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Goldman Sachs economist, unofficial policy adviser to Blair, and husband of Sue Nye, personal aide to Gordon Brown.

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The coalition of disparate opponents of the Taliban.

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Sawers, Blair’s foreign affairs adviser, had been appointed UK ambassador to Egypt.

⁷
The intended target of the hijacked plane remains unclear. It has been assumed that the four terrorists intended to crash into Washington’s Capitol building, or perhaps the White House. The most likely nuclear power plant would have been Three Mile Island, south of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. However, passengers, aware of attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, overwhelmed the hijackers. The Boeing 757 crashed in a field at Stonycreek, Pennsylvania, killing all forty-four people on board.

⁸
Railtrack plc, the company operating much of Britain’s rail infrastructure, had been bailed out by the government after reporting a huge loss following extensive repairs to the network – a result of the Hatfield rail crash in 2000. It was about to be placed in administration by Transport Secretary Stephen Byers.

⁹
Blair read a passage from
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
, a 1927 novel by American author Thornton Wilder. Prefacing the reading, Blair said ‘We wanted to be here today, to offer our support and sympathy to the families of the lost ones. Many are British. Amid the enormity of what has happened to America, nobody will forget that this was the worst terrorist attack on British citizens in my country’s history.’

¹⁰
Rentoul, author of
Tony Blair: Prime Minister
, wrote in the
Independent
that while Blair was successful and feted abroad ‘at home his style is cramped by his psychologically flawed relationship with Gordon Brown’.

¹¹
Blair told the House of Commons ‘Our findings have been shared and co-ordinated with those of our allies, and are clear. They are: first, it was Osama Bin Laden and al-Qaeda, the terrorist network which he heads, that planned and carried out the atrocities on September 11; second, that Osama Bin Laden and al-Qaeda were able to commit these atrocities because of their close alliance with the Taliban regime in Afghanistan which allows them to operate with impunity in pursuing their terrorist activity.’

¹²
Musharraf, as a general, had led a military coup in 1999, deposing elected prime minister Nawaz Sharif.

¹³
On October 1, Pakistani terrorist group Jaish-e-Mohammed had killed thirty-eight people in a suicide and car bombing attack on the Jammu and Kashmir State Legislative Assembly in Srinagar.

¹⁴
Abortive site of a National Athletics Stadium. Cost and inadequate transport links made the site, in North-East London, unviable.

¹⁵
FBI list of twenty-two terrorist hijackers and bombers, including Bin Laden. Bush said ‘Eventually, no corner of the world will be dark enough to hide in.’

¹⁶
An outbreak of anthrax in the United States, intentionally spread via the postal system, caused five deaths and a total of twenty-two infections between September and November 2001.

¹⁷
Argentine Navy light cruiser, controversially sunk in 1982 by a British nuclear submarine whilst outside the 200 nautical mile exclusion zone around the Falkland Islands. 323 Argentine sailors died.

¹⁸
Boyce had said that fighting the Taliban was not like fighting an army, but fighting an idea like communism, and may take fifty years.

¹⁹
Named after an Elizabethan occupant of the house, William Hawtrey, whose family had owned the Chequers estate from the thirteenth century.

²⁰
After repeating Syrian condemnation of the September 11 attacks, Assad defended ‘resistance fighters’, saying ‘Resistance to occupation is an international right. Nobody can deny we have many organisations, many people who support the resistance fighters who seek to liberate their land.’

²¹
The funeral of King Hussein, February 1999. See
Power and the People
, pp 652–6.

²²
McLeish resigned later the some day, saying he accepted full responsibility for mistakes in the subletting of his constituency office.

²³
Campbell would fax a lengthy letter to Sambrook asking if he was satisfied that his reporters had not fallen ‘foul of . . . [BBC] guidelines on scepticism, terrorist claims, speculation, staged events or the guideline which says reporters should make it clear when they have not been able to witness events themselves?’ Sambrook defended their reporting.

²⁴
The 24-year-old son of Lord Chancellor Derry Irvine had been exposed by the
Mail on Sunday
as a crack-cocaine addict seeking treatment in the US.

²⁵
American Airlines Flight 587 crashed shortly after take-off, killing all 260 people on board and five people on the ground. Though al-Qaeda claimed responsibility, a subsequent investigation found that the crash had been accidental, caused by overuse of rudder controls during turbulence.

²⁶
Simpson, one of the first journalists to enter Afghanistan, having disguised himself as a woman in a burqa, declared on entering Kabul ‘It was only BBC people who liberated this city. We got in ahead of Northern Alliance troops.’

²⁷
A BBC poll suggested eighty per cent of UK Muslims were opposed to military action in Afghanistan.

²⁸
Short told the House of Commons International Development Select Committee of communications between aid agencies and the US military ‘not being taken seriously enough at a high level’.

²⁹
After Short told the BBC radio programme of the ‘regrettable’ delay in deploying US troops to protect aid convoys, Downing Street commented ‘Clare Short speaks for herself.’

³⁰
In the speech to the European Research Institute in Birmingham, Blair criticised the ‘embarrassingly long history of Euroscepticism’ in the UK, saying that whilst the economic tests for entry into the euro should first be met, it was time to recognise that Britain’s future was ‘inextricably linked with Europe’.

³¹
The first of a major deployment of US Marines had landed by helicopter south of the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar.

³²
At the end of the prison revolt, eighty-six Taliban prisoners would be alive, out of an original 300–500, after seven days of fierce fighting with Northern Alliance and American and British special forces. The Taliban prisoners had surrendered at Mazar-e-Sharif believing they would be set free.

³³
The government had decided in October to put Railtrack in administration.

³⁴
An opponent of the Afghanistan war and Labour’s anti-terrorism legislation, Marsden claimed several Labour MPs had physically and verbally threatened him.

³⁵
On December 15, the first post-Taliban football match would be played in the Kabul football stadium, once the scene of public executions. Kabul Red Crescent played Pamir, the latter team wearing West Bromwich Albion kit donated by BBC Radio 5 presenter Adrian Chiles. Red Crescent won 2–1.

³⁶
Ronson had served six months of a one-year prison sentence in 1990, for his part in the Guinness share-trading fraud of the 1980s.

³⁷
The Small Business minister had been claiming rent through the House of Commons Fees Office on the Edinburgh South constituency office he owned, without declaration in the Register of Members’ Interests. He insisted that monies paid were used to benefit his autistic sister. A 2002 Standards and Privileges Committee investigation would rule that although Griffiths had made ‘technically defective’ claims, he would face no further action.

³⁸
Child sex offender Roy Whiting was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of eight-year-old Sarah Payne, who had been found dead near Pulborough, West Sussex, in July 2000 after disappearing from a field close to the home of her paternal grandparents. The case prompted a campaign, led by the
News of the World
, for the government to allow controlled access to the sex offenders register, which in 2010 resulted in the adoption of ‘Sarah’s Law’.

³⁹
The investigation and report by consultant David James into the viability of the Wembley Stadium rebuild and the legality of the procurement process.

⁴⁰
Mandelson’s ‘code name’ during the 1994 Labour leadership election, a name often revived by those seeking to paint him as a Machiavellian figure. See
Prelude to Power
, pp 42–3.

⁴¹
In January it had been claimed that Mandelson had helped wealthy businessman Srichand Hinduja’s application for a British passport, and Mandelson resigned as Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills. An inquiry headed by Sir Anthony Hammond QC was asked to establish what approaches were made to the Home Office in 1998 in connection with an application for naturalisation by Hinduja and the full circumstances surrounding the approaches and the later grant of the application. The inquiry found that neither Mandelson nor Home Office minister Mike O’Brien had acted with impropriety of any sort.

⁴²
Richard Reid, a radicalised convert to Islam with links to al-Qaeda, had been discovered on an American Airlines flight from Paris to Miami attempting to detonate explosives hidden in his shoes. Pleading guilty to eight charges, in 2002 he would be given a life sentence without parole.

We saw in the New Year at Terry’s [Tavner, friend] and had a perfectly nice time though I was feeling tired a lot of the time. It was also difficult to be open with anyone really. I was taken aback a bit by the bitchiness re GB, and the idea he was deliberately having a baby to soften his profile. It is the kind of thing people say joking, but here were people not centrally involved in politics who seemed actually to believe it. I spent most of today with Calum, football, cinema, just hanging around, and had a nice time. Mentally I was trying to crank up a couple of gears into work mode but was wishing I was somewhere else.

Fiona seemed genuinely happy with all her birthday presents and the way I and the kids were treating her, though I could sense her feeling that I had been more engaged over the holiday but was about to disappear again before the day was over. We had all her family around during the day and I managed to avoid doing too much on the work front. I’d written some half-decent lines for Tom Kelly to brief out re the visit to Bangladesh, India and Pakistan but Jack Straw called to say he was worried we were raising expectations too high and that we would not be able to meet them. Jack was a real team player at the moment, genuinely wanting to help and not making points like this unless he really felt he had to. But I sensed he worried TB was overreaching himself. I encouraged him to do a note to TB, which he did, saying we had to be careful not to let the Pakistanis get away with too much, that they did at times get too close to terrorists, and that we had to be fairly tough with them. We went out for dinner then I headed to Heathrow.

I tried to sleep all the way to Cairo, where it was 3am UK time
when we picked up TB and CB. They were full of their usual post-holiday bonhomie and we were all feeling like shit after a sleepless flight and body clocks a bit screwed. TB seemed to have got a lot of his energy back. He knew not to push too hard on how marvellous a time he had, but clearly they had been looked after well. He read the voluminous briefs, then we did a briefing and afterwards a series of taped interviews. We had agreed that for the first leg we should be aiming news-wise for the agreement of the Bangladeshis to send troops as part of the ISAF. But the press were more interested in the euro and TB/GB and after pushing him several times on whether they had spoken while he had been away, his answers were evasive enough for them to realise they hadn’t and that was good enough for some of them to run away with it.

TB told me afterwards he had tried to speak to GB three times about the euro in recent days. He felt that the baby, contrary to the general feeling, was unlikely to change him at all. I relayed to him Peter M’s view that GB had somehow managed to alienate every single one of the people who might be able to persuade TB to move over at some point. TB felt Gordon just had too much time on his hands, and he had always over-calculated. He relied on calculation not instinct and feel, and he assumed others operated in the same way. On the euro, he did not feel GB was totally opposed as such, but a combination of natural caution and over-calculation took him to the wrong conclusion. It was a pretty grim start to the year though, if even a baby could become a source of tension.

TB said he was very clear where we needed to be focusing in the year ahead – Europe and public service reform, but on both he had ceded too much power to GB already and every step forward was going to be difficult. He said he wasn’t overly worried, but I sensed he was. We then sat down to work out day by day what we were doing and what we were hoping for on the visit. The FCO briefs on the Kashmir background were fascinating. How one issue came to dominate the political and diplomatic relations of two major countries [India and Pakistan], one of them a future superpower, was a great lesson in how not to do diplomacy, but what the solution was heaven knows. TB’s NI experience led him to be tempted to think he could sort it, but if anything it was even more intractable than NI. We finally arrived in Bangladesh around early evening their time.

Bangladesh. The visit got off to a potentially embarrassing start. TB’s suit was badly crumpled after his car journey in Egypt and not nearly
smart enough to wear as he left the plane. But all the other suits were in the hold and it would take a while to find them. So Magi [Cleaver] was despatched off the plane first to find someone wearing a smart suit that would fit TB. We watched her through the windows walking up and down the lines of people eyeing them up and down. None of them were suitable. Then she spotted a young man at the back of the crowd and went over to him. His face was a picture. I think he thought it was some kind of spoof but then Magi was doing her best ‘this is fucking serious’ look and seconds later the two of them were coming up the stairs. ‘Ah, the body double,’ I said. He was a DFID official and gobsmacked to be on the plane with TB, CB and the rest of us. TB said ‘Sorry about this but as you can see my suit is not in good shape.’ So then this poor guy is stripping off so that TB can try on his suit. It wasn’t perfect but it wasn’t far off. The swap was done and then we were ready to disembark.