The Burden of Power: Countdown to Iraq - The Alastair Campbell Diaries (36 page)

TB called re the [Dick] Cheney [US Vice President] visit, not sure what we were meant to get out of it. On the domestic front, he was worried we were losing the tough-on-crime bit. We went out for dinner with Tucker [Eskew], Lisa [his wife] and their son Thompson. He said basically we had been responsible for his new lease of life.

We had a meeting with Julian Miller [Cabinet Office intelligence and security official] on the idea of a WMD document. Cheney arrived for talks with JP, then a tête-à-tête with TB during which they went
over Iraq. So far as Cheney’s mood music was concerned, he was when not if, and though they hoped for a lot of support, he didn’t consider it to be essential. The Americans claimed to be conscious of the importance of the MEPP but we were not sure they really got it. At the lunch, Cheney had a quiet manner, was pretty calm and although he had gravitas, somehow the whole wasn’t as impressive as it ought to be. They started on Afghanistan. It was clear the Americans wanted out as soon as possible. He said if we were still there in a year then questions would be asked. The aim was try to help the Afghans get themselves a proper army and security force. TB was clear we had to be in it for the long term. Cheney felt building the new regime could be tougher than taking down the old one and that the poppy crop remained a real problem. He was worried about Saudi and its fundamentalists and felt the regime’s deal with the fundamentalists made it harder for them than for Pakistan to keep control. On the MEPP, TB went through the similarities with Northern Ireland. Cheney was very down on [Yasser] Arafat [Palestinian leader]

They discussed NATO expansion and TB said re Putin that the key to understanding him is that he is a Russian patriot. At least Communism got them noticed. He’s not a Communist, far from it, but that colours his thinking. He wants to be at the top table. He raised steel tariffs and got very little response. Cheney was one of those politicians not embarrassed to say nothing. After lunch we took Cheney over to the CIC where he said a few words. After he left, I went for a run but had bad asthma and cut it short.

Up to the flat for dinner – TB, Peter M, PG, Sally, Jonathan, Robert Hill [Blair’s political secretary] and I. Peter M was on better form and we had constant references to his own demise, and my/TB’s roles in it. His analysis was that we came in after a pretty unedifying election, had a bad start, lacked clarity on the agenda, then Afghanistan drowned out domestic issues. Now there was a different mood where anything we did was being turned against us. TB insisted the problems were perception not real. Peter, Philip and I argued that some of the problems had been real. We had lacked clarity. We had lost the clearer sense of purpose we had before. Jo Moore staying was a mistake. So was the Mittal letter but TB always defended our basic position. I said there was a real problem, not just one of perception, even if it was a succession of different perceptions that created the problem. He said no, this is dangerous thinking which has to be resisted because what they want is to stop us being effective.

Peter felt TB had certain blind spots. He should do more in Parliament. He should do more in Cabinet. We should try to generate
an intelligent debate within the media about the media and its relations with politics. Philip felt that in some ways perception had become reality, but it was reality that had to be dealt with. I said just because our opponents said we had lost direction or that we were out of touch, didn’t automatically mean it was untrue. And then there was GB. I said the reason TB was so confident and commanding on foreign policy was that he didn’t have GB getting in the way the whole time as he did on public services and Europe. Philip asked him direct whether he enjoyed dealing with foreign policy more than domestic, because that’s what he felt. TB felt, particularly post September 11, they couldn’t be separated in the same way as before, but his main focus was always domestic and at the moment specifically crime. He agreed on the need to do more in Parliament and develop a better media strategy. TB no longer really bothered to hide the way GB was affecting his thinking, e.g. when Philip said it had to be a Budget for crime, TB said he won’t get that because GB won’t want Blunkett to come out well. Jonathan’s view was that the media were just bored with us. Mine was that we lacked clarity and conviction. Peter’s that we lacked the bigger narrative, so the drip-drip had to some extent worked and people no longer believed us in the same way as before or respected us in the same way.

We decided not to brief the speech in advance. The result was there was nothing in the papers and the result of that was the broadcasters concluded it couldn’t be newsworthy and didn’t do much with it.
²⁰
It was extraordinary the extent to which they let the papers decide the agenda for them. TB was up at 5 to work on the speech. Though he didn’t change it much, he did enough to make it less values-based. He was strangely lacking in confidence at the moment.

Crap press for the speech. Not trailing it hadn’t worked at all. Up to see TB early. We had a cup of tea in the kitchen and as he made it, he said he was alarmed at the damage GB had been doing recently. Tube, Post Office and Railtrack were all ‘disasters waiting to happen’ and he felt they were disasters made in the Treasury. Yet he felt we
should be involving GB more in strategy. This was real groundhog-a-go-go. He felt there was a shape to every parliament and we were just going through a bad patch. We would come out of it. Murdoch was in for breakfast, friendly but still very anti euro. Philip had a session with GB and said he was pretty pro euro at the moment. He felt that we were useless on strategy and that we should stop talking about public service delivery and just do it. Philip pointed out to him that was the opposite of TB’s approach, and that we wanted the two running alongside each other and said ‘Why on earth don’t you talk about it? If you work together properly, we would be unstoppable.’

Stan came in with a polling presentation that showed things shifting towards the euro. But better public services and higher living standards were what people wanted now. Cabinet was nearly all foreign, mainly Zimbabwe
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and MEPP. GB sat there the whole time looking phenomenally pissed off and at one point appearing to be asleep. Jack was a lot more confident than before. I had a meeting on media ownership with Ed Richards. TB was keen for total liberalisation as a way of getting more Europeans into our market but it could lead to Murdoch getting ITV news. TB’s general view was that we got nothing worse out of Murdoch than we did from anyone else. Ed was with me in bemoaning the lack of focus on the cultural impact, the fact that content regulation was virtually non-existent and these people had too much unchecked power. He said that Pat [Hewitt] and Tessa [Jowell] were also opposed to TB’s view. They wanted controls on it. Then to a meeting with TB and DB re the blitz on street crime we had been pressing for. DB was using it to push for more money. TB wanted something that was visible, that worked, and that sent out the right signals. He set off for Barcelona [EU summit] and said he wanted me to focus totally on crime and the Blunkett package.

The riots in Barcelona were taking off as the main story there.
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I was working with the Home Office to get up some decent crime stories
pre DB on
Frost
, but they weren’t motoring. TB was clear he wanted a proper blitz on this but even DB was now irritated by it all, the feeling that Number 10 was intervening the whole time. Natascha McElhone came in for a cup of tea and it was nice to hear her say the kind of thing I said the whole time, so often I was never quite sure whether I believed it or whether it was just a line to get me through, namely that by the time we were gone all the press frenzy would be forgotten and people would see we had delivered real things that mattered. John Monks was leading the news with an interview in
The Times
attacking TB over being too close to [José María] Aznar [Spanish Prime Minister] and [Silvio] Berlusconi. TB, GB and JS all went up and hit back on it. It was the main story out of Barcelona. TB’s basic line was that the press were going through a mad phase and we just had to wait till normal politics could be resumed. He was quite chipper but the mood was bad.

West Ham vs Man U. I saw Alex F beforehand who, a bit like Natascha yesterday, felt things were not nearly as bad as we seemed to think. Astonishing match, 5–3 to United, with a stunning goal by Beckham. I was amazed how many people from overseas there were in the crowd, seemingly just over for the day.

TB had been on several times yesterday and today re Blunkett on
Frost
. He was OK without being brilliant and later did a lobby briefing. I worked on a note to put round the party on the public services argument. Then to Gavin’s [Fiona’s brother] for Burnley vs Preston on TV, with Paul Gascoigne [former top-flight midfielder] having signed for us. We went to the Hodges’ [Margaret, minister for universities and husband Henry] for dinner with DB, who was a bit down. I said he shouldn’t have referred to TB talking about the management losing their marbles re Iraq. Margaret H was pretty down as well, felt that GB had got himself into a much stronger position and TB was slightly losing the plot. I said I could easily see circumstances where GB never became leader. David claimed that he would never work under GB other than as Chancellor and in any event GB would be his own Chancellor. It was a very jolly dinner, as they always are with Margaret and Henry. But the backdrop was TB in a bit of trouble, GB and Co. at it more than ever and DB feeling he was a contender too. TB had said to me earlier that there was too much knicker-wetting going on in the Cabinet. They had to get
tougher. He said he’d had Clare on talking about what her ‘bottom lines’ were on Iraq.

Heavy news day. SRA [Strategic Rail Authority] bad figures, hunting
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and an ‘out of the blue’ Geoff Hoon statement on 1,700 fighting troops going to Afghanistan. The DB interview plus briefing led to some pretty grim headlines, e.g. Blunkett saying our streets are not safe. Up to the flat on arrival. He seemed about as up as I was down. He said we came out of the election with the press trying to do us down, they wanted to give the Tories a lift but have given up on IDS so are now trying to build up GB. TB said all that mattered was that we delivered. He was frustrated at lack of delivery, at departmental slowness and the poor quality of cross-cutting work. He wanted to set up Cobra-style groups to tackle pinch points in the public services like bed blocking, Internet crime, weaknesses in the transport system.

The morning meeting was more meandering than ever, tired and lacking in drive. Ian Austin was pissed off that our crime meeting was going to get in the way news-wise of GB’s speech on the NHS. I made little effort to dispel the impression that it had been deliberate. TB also had a difficult meeting with Tessa and Patricia [Hewitt] on media ownership. Their approach was fairly liberalising but he wanted to go the whole hog and said again Murdoch was no better or worse than any of the others, and what the media needed was real competition, takeovers galore. Patricia said this would go down badly with the party, the media and the public. TB said he didn’t think the public obsessed about it. Jack called me to say he was worried about our direction on WMD. If WMD alone was the issue, Iraq was not as bad as Iran and Korea.

The Treasury was still gibbing at the crime meeting tomorrow because it would hit GB’s speech coverage. Hunting was going big and so was the follow-up to military deployment and the growing political row about our failure to brief in advance. We had taken our eyes off the ball and not covered the bases. TB was not feeling great. I went with him to the stocktake on health with Alan. Then a communications meeting with DB and team. DB was clearly pretty beleaguered at the
moment. TB was far too nice about the Home Office being dictated by events. Yes, they had to deal with a lot of stuff that just happened, but it didn’t mean they couldn’t be more strategic.

[David] Yelland was in to see TB. Quite interesting, because Yelland was very down on the press, saying something had to give, the negativity had to stop somewhere. Then out to do Zimbabwe’s suspension by the Commonwealth, at last. [John] Howard [Australian Prime Minister], [Thabo] Mbeki [South African President] and [Olusegun] Obasanjo [Nigerian President] did their thing. TB wanted to do a Cobra-style meeting for tomorrow’s effort on crime, which I thought was a bit silly but there we are. TB had a one-on-one with GB and said afterwards he now felt he was operating the whole time, positioning himself in slightly different places all the time.

A row between GB and DB re who was doing what today. GB’s NHS speech was fine but DB’s crime summit, as planned, was going to get far more coverage. DB agreed not to do the
Today
programme as a sort of peace offering to GB, but he did breakfast telly and it was pretty much leading the news. GB’s ‘tough choices’ message was seen as a hit at other ministers. I had a very frank discussion with TB after the crime meeting. He said GB was operating the whole time. It is nothing new in politics but at the moment it is particularly bad. He was setting himself up as Mr NHS now, trying to divide and rule e.g. between Alan M and the other ministers. The worry too was the idea that education was no longer number one priority. Ian Austin was in a major strop and at the end of the day we had a real row, me saying at the end I couldn’t care less what they thought; that this was payback for years of them treating people like shit, including GB’s Cabinet colleagues. He said it simply wasn’t true that they were ‘at it’ and I had to believe that. I replied then all the journalists who said they were at it were liars?