The Burden of Power: Countdown to Iraq - The Alastair Campbell Diaries (30 page)

I had a visit from one of Crown Prince Abdullah’s right-hand men, wanting advice on how to improve the Saudi image in the West (not knowing at this stage the
Guardian
were on to a story of Brits being tortured there). I was as frank as I could be within the confines, even at a meeting like this, of diplomacy. But I said they would need more than a few ad campaigns to win people over. They needed the reality to change. The look in his eye suggested that was not certain. I had a stack of meetings planning the Africa trip, then Peter Hill and Hugh Whittow [editor and deputy editor of the
Daily Star
] came in to see TB. They were very straightforward, said they didn’t want much politics in the paper, but they were up for stories if we thought of them once in a while. As to what kind of story, Peter said what people really wanted was fame and if they couldn’t have fame they wanted to feel close to it. He suggested we try to get the spirit of
Pop Idol
[TV talent contest] into politics. TB asked me afterwards if they were for real. I said they were. I had been trying to persuade them to draw
Mirror
readers over by starting to be more pro Labour.

I was also working on my speech on public diplomacy for tomorrow, which I had been getting ideas and comments on from around the place. On the conference call, I told them the Powell/Rumsfeld splits were bad for everyone, and asked if they couldn’t do more to contain them. I also felt they should be getting a lot more out of the [Hamid] Karzai visit [to Washington]. I felt the calls were becoming a bit vague and waffly, not least because the top Americans were not always on them. Jim Poston [FCO] was doing a good job progress-chasing in the London CIC though, was really making a difference.

The
Mail
splashed on Enron, totally overlooking the fact that the Tories took money from them.
¹⁰
This was clearly the latest smear zone for the scummy end of the media. When I went up to see TB, he said maybe there is a case for resurrecting ‘Mailwatch’. He really hated them, he said. It didn’t feel like a scandal to me and I was confident the public would see through it but you couldn’t be sure. DB was struggling to get up his ASBOs [antisocial behaviour orders]. I went over to Lancaster House [government building] to speak to the conference of all our ambassadors from Arab and Muslim countries. I was arguing for a deeper engagement and urging them to badger us for more, not just leave it to Gerard Russell [Islamic Media Unit, FCO] and Co. I said TB took this seriously. I argued that we should stop thinking purely in country-to-country terms but see the need to put the case pan Arab. There was actually a case for some of these guys becoming spokesmen across the piece, not just in their own posts. Some of them had gone totally native, others felt we were wasting our time, but some of them seemed to get it and wanted to engage more. Julian said as we left, the problem is the clever ones realise you are taking over a chunk of their jobs, and the really clever ones realise that might help them take a chunk of their colleagues’ jobs.

I was trying to get on top of Bush’s State of the Union address and eventually Peter Reid got hold of an advance copy. It named Iran, Iraq and North Korea in the context, or so it would be taken, as possible targets of attack.
¹¹
Karzai was doing well out there. I got hold of his draft itinerary for his visit here and it was ludicrous – forty minutes with TB and lunch with Robert Cooper [UK special representative in Afghanistan] for heaven’s sake. I put a note round saying it was being revised and we went for Karzai coming to the end of Cabinet, proper meeting with TB, joint Al Jazeera interview kind of thing. Also we should get Afghan exiles in to see them.

GB was back in action again and TB said they had one or two nice conversations, almost like the old days, but that he was currently totally paranoid re Milburn, Clarke and Hain, felt they were all positioning as rivals. I asked TB if he felt he had come back a changed
man. He shook his head. Ed Richards [senior policy adviser on media business issues] came to see me re the media ownership policy discussions. He said in the end it boiled down to a decision about whether we were prepared to see Murdoch become more powerful. He felt that we shouldn’t. I got a crazy letter from [Piers] Morgan in response to mine, saying I had misquoted him on saying the
Mirror
was no longer a Labour paper, but I could always rely on [Neil] Wallis to ‘squeeze in Blair press releases in between Jordan’s tits and kinky sex spreads’.

We assumed IDS would do health at PMQs but without an individual case, though the
Sun
had a story about a baby that got lost in the laundry. IDS majored on rail and was a lot better. He had definitely improved, and TB didn’t really think on his feet. I was working on the speech for [the Labour Party spring] conference, trying to turn the strategy paper into a speech that could be used to disseminate strategy. After PMQs I went with Geoff Hoon to the MoD to meet the air commodore and his deputy in charge of the team responsible for the Mull of Kintyre Chinook [helicopter] crash [in 1994].
¹²
They realised this would come our way and they wanted to persuade me of their case that the two pilots, whatever their supporters said, had been guilty of gross negligence. There was a Lords committee report coming up so it was going to be back up in lights and they felt they had to make their case better than before. GH let them do pretty much all the talking. I listened, asking questions as we went, for about ninety minutes, at the end of which I was pretty well convinced, though the unanswered question remained why they made the error they did. Their theory was that the pilots believed they were in a different place, above water, and also that they realised too late that they should not have been flying in those conditions [too low, in heavy fog]. I got back to work on the speech, then up to see TB to tell him I thought he had been poor at PMQs, and we had a bit of a post-mortem.

Before Cabinet I went round to see TB who was in with GB. It was the first time I had really seen Gordon since he came back. I said
hello. He kind of grunted. Not ‘Thanks for your letter’, but a grunt. Fiona had also sent them a present which I know must be really difficult for them now, having all these kids’ clothes and other presents, but I found it odd he couldn’t be civil at a time like this. TB said at the earlier ministerial meeting, he had sat there scribbling notes, refusing to engage even though the others were trying to bring him in. At Cabinet itself, his presence transformed the mood from Cabinets where he had been absent. There just wasn’t the engagement from others when he was in this kind of mood, and TB looked disengaged and distant. They were going through the motions, and then at 11.15 TB had to leave early to meet Karzai.

As we walked down the corridor to the front door, TB said ‘I’m afraid he hasn’t changed. If anything, he has changed for the worse.’ He said people were feeling sorry for GB, and trying to express it, but he was just pushing back the whole time. Karzai was in one of his long capes, and when I told him he was getting as much coverage for his fashionability as his politics, he said he had started wearing it one day because it was cold, and he just kept wearing it. Now it was part of his make-up. In Afghanistan, he said it was a very conservative form of dress. TB had a tête-à-tête with Karzai. I was chatting to [Ahmad] Wali Massoud [Afghan ambassador] who was very shrewd, pushing the line we needed more ISAF forces there. As they met Afghan exiles, Tom warned me the big talking point was Karzai saying Sharia law had a place in Afghanistan. I raised it with him and he said he had said no such thing. Welcome to our press, said TB.

They both did fine at the press conference, though the story was Karzai asking for more troops and TB saying there had to be a limit. They did a joint [BBC] World Service interview, where they were asked about GWB’s axis of evil. At the lunch, you could see them trying hard to adapt to this new way of life. Karzai had his wits about him, and looked and sounded the part, if a bit forced at times. But [General Mohammed] Fahim Khan [new leader of the Northern Alliance], a real brute with enormous hands and a big growly face, could barely hold a knife and fork. It was an interesting lunch, Karzai now moving on to drugs, and explaining the help they would need to change crop production patterns. They were virtually rebuilding a country and its infrastructure from scratch, as when he said they would be grateful for advice on how to establish a new central bank. Khan was even more straightforward, said we had been giving a lot of help to the regional warlords but now we had to start giving more help to the centre – i.e. him.

On the conference call with the White House, I told them there
had been an overwhelmingly negative reaction round Europe to the GWB [’axis of evil’] speech. They seemed surprised. It wasn’t a good call. TB and I had another session re the press. I said I was convinced we needed to make them part of the debate much more than they were. He said he was in two minds but in the end he would decide. I said fine but there may come a point where I can’t do it this way. He said we had to be clear that if we were effectively declaring war on them, that was a big decision to take. I said three-quarters of them had declared war on us and too much of the time we just took it. TB said remember Machiavelli, kill or hug, but don’t wound.
¹³
He felt I was landing the odd blow and leaving a few wounds. I said maybe I wanted to kill and I could no longer pretend with papers like the
Mail
, and some of the chatterati, that that is exactly how I felt. He said when we were at media dinners together, e.g. with Murdoch recently, it was clear to everyone how I felt and I needed to be cautious. I said I hated having to pander to these people, and that they took it as weakness not strength. I had said the same to Blunkett re his greasing up to Dacre. TB gave me a look that suggested he was fed up hearing the same old song. I said it is no good just being fed up. I’m fed up too, fed up with the fact we are in power and doing nothing to change the poisonous media culture which is actually damaging the country now. I said I couldn’t stand the
Mail
, most of the
Telegraph
, a fair few of the broadcasters, most of the Sundays, and now Piers [Morgan] was on my list of barely worth talking to. Fiona was back on at me to quit if I felt strongly, and disagreed on a fundamental strategic point. Fiona and Sally [Morgan] both felt he was still talking to Anji the whole time and she was winding him up re us not doing enough with the right-wing media. Fiona said she just could not do what Anji did, grease up to all these people and pretend we liked them. In Kabul, they were talking of tens of thousands for the football match, which cheered me up a bit.

TB was at Chequers and I spent most of the day working on the upcoming speeches. TB asked why I was so low. I said I felt I was doing the same old stuff the whole time, and I was frustrated we were not really changing things as I thought we would. I took Calum
to tennis, and TB called again. He said he knew how frustrating it was, but we had to keep going on the things that really mattered.

TB still felt we were not winning the basic arguments on public services, or shifting the dividing lines to where we needed them. He did not like the mood in Cabinet on Thursday, felt there was a grumpiness and a grunginess that could not be allowed to fester. It wasn’t just about GB, though his mood did not help. I spoke to JP about it too, and he felt there was just a bit of unease around at where we were going, and also people getting used to the media being so much more hostile. He was trying to do a bit of work as a go-between between TB and GB, to get them engaging and working together better, but it wasn’t easy. He too felt GB had come back worse not better after his baby’s death. There is a lot of distrust there and he is not the kind of guy just to get over it. Andy Grice [
Independent
] wrote definitively that Leo had had the MMR jab and there was a strong feeling we must have put it out there deliberately. I certainly hadn’t but I wondered if someone else had done it for TB. It ran as a main broadcast story most of the day, alongside the measles outbreak in a London nursery.

Down to Chequers, TB ranting against the media. We finished the speech and the main line was meant to be this being a fight between wreckers and reformers. There was a political problem though, Jo Moore calling me to say Byers had used the same line and indicated at the time he meant the unions when he referred to wreckers. It meant that despite our efforts, that was where the story was heading. It was clearly going to be tricky. We had an OK line re small-c conservatism but of course that too was likely just to get played straight into the tricky political angle they would all want. We flew down to Cardiff [Labour spring conference] by helicopter and the speech went down really well with the audience.
¹⁴

Halfway through, I always try to find time to pick out half a dozen or so average-looking people and see 1. whether they are really listening, and 2. whether they seem to be going along with it. They were all pretty rapt, and as the argument developed, the head-nodding
became more pronounced. TB went off script towards the end and did a good section on how at every stage of reform – expelling Militant, policy and party changes under Neil [Kinnock], the difficult changes we had made in Opposition and government, there were always voices saying don’t do it and others crying betrayal. But only through change do we advance, etc. But even though it was pretty obvious he had the Tories in his sights when he talked about wreckers, the unions couldn’t resist doing the victim thing and making it seem as though he meant them. I did a quick briefing, reminding myself how glad I was I didn’t do them all the time.

Helicopter back and then home. Later, I was really hacked off with Fiona when TB called to speak to me about something, she answered the phone and was nice as pie to him, said none of the things she was constantly saying to me, and I thought at least I tell him when I’m pissed off and I tell him why. It made me think that actually a lot of the attacks on him made to me were surrogate attacks on me for doing the bloody job in the first place. I was also back in a depressive mode, I was sure of that, which didn’t help. She felt I just didn’t want her to take on a bigger job because it threatened me somehow. I didn’t buy that but I did feel it wasn’t on for both of us to be full-on working the whole time, and that we both should be spending more time at home whenever possible. He called back later and said what was I on about, telling him Fiona was pissed off, she seemed fine! I told him I was totally hacked off. He said I was frustrated because I spent so much time clearing up after other people, but never lose sight of the things we were getting done, and in the end they were the things that were important and would be remembered. TB did the [
Evening
]
Standard
drama awards and was amazed that Natascha McElhone [actor] went up to him and asked him to ask me to give her a call. ‘She is gorgeous,’ he said.