The Burden of Power: Countdown to Iraq - The Alastair Campbell Diaries (43 page)

Newsnight
getting lots of coverage, euro the lead in several papers, big coverage in the Middle East for what he said about that. There
was a bit of a flurry when the BBC put out the transcript of the stuff being broadcast tonight which seemed to show he was saying he would stay for a full third term, which he actually hadn’t meant that way. Cabinet, without JP, and also without Clare, which in her case made a big difference for the better. Nepal, Dutch elections, rail, bits and bobs. The
New Statesman
had a line claiming Charles C and David Triesman wanted an inquiry into the Desmond donation.

Guy Black called through the morning and said there was a snag. He came to see me at 1.30. He had been to see Black Rod and asked him for a draft of what he would say. He said he would prefer it if nobody knew that he had been to see me, and he showed me the draft statement. It was dreadful. It backed the
Mail on Sunday
story. Guy said ‘We have to stop that letter going to the PCC.’ I think Guy was trying to be helpful. I said all I wanted was acknowledgement that TB had done nothing wrong or disrespectful. Then came news Byers had done a lunch with the women’s lobby [of parliamentary journalists] and talked about a paving bill [allowing for further reforms in the next parliament] on the euro being planned and saying fifty-one per cent was enough in a referendum. He was wrong on the paving bill and I’m afraid we had to say he was plain wrong. What a prattish thing to do, as if he didn’t have enough problems. Phil Webster [
Times
] called to say the Tories were putting it around that Byers was about to be sacked, so we had to deal with that, say it wasn’t the case.

Up very early, in to meet Robert Thomson [
Times
editor] and Bronwen Maddox [
Times
foreign editor] who were coming to Spain with us to do a TB interview. Re Byers, in the car out to the plane, TB said Steve was becoming accident-prone and would probably have to go. I said what about splitting the department, as we had discussed before, and leaving him with one part of it. TB shook his head. The
Newsnight
interview was still producing positive coverage elsewhere, though the Beeb had ‘accidentally’ sent the full tape to the
Telegraph
, including at the start where I interrupted TB and got them to refilm which unleashed the latest storm of bollocks. It was interesting spending the day with Robert Thomson, who was not really immersed in the UK media culture. The interview was serious and fair, whereas most interviews these days are purely designed to get a story. He struck me as being a quirky but decent character. We were in Spain purely as a favour to Aznar who had really wanted TB to go to the EU–Latin America summit. While he went off to that, I went with Robert and Bronwen to a cafe in Madrid. I don’t think he was clear yet what he
wanted to do for the paper, but he was definitely an interesting addition to the media scene.

Very depressed. One of my major glooms. Went for a run but lost the will after half an hour and came back. Work-wise, trying to get Aznar meeting on Monday focused on asylum rather than Gibraltar [sovereignty]. I never felt less like working.

The
Sunday Telegraph
splash said GB was supporting TB’s push for an early [euro] referendum, which they went into overdrive to rubbish, prompting me to wonder if they had set the whole thing up. Some of the papers got hold of John Birt’s [former BBC director general, now Blair’s ‘blue skies thinking’ adviser] report suggesting massive new toll roads which ran. I took Rory to Basildon where he was racing and had a long run myself round the town centre and some of the estates. I went into a shop to buy some water and the guy behind the counter said he couldn’t believe I was in there, at which point TB rang and I got him to speak to the shopkeeper, who practically fainted. I said you now have to promise me you’ll vote Labour for the rest of your life. He said he would. Rory ran well, won the 800 metres, second in the 1,500. The news was dominated by Afghanistan and another suicide bomb in Israel. The Sundays had loads of
Newsnight
follow-through and though they were contaminated by the thing about me interrupting TB, the overall impression was good. JP called from China to agree a statement confirming he had diabetes, which the
Mail on Sunday
had run.

We were hoping to get the Aznar focus on asylum, along the lines of the letter Stephen Wall had done for TB on the need for the Seville summit to address the issues. But Gibraltar was running pretty hard. Charles C seemed very het up at the office meeting. He tended to go from being superconfident, quite strategic and clear one day, to being a bit hyper and all over the place the next. TB was emphasising that all that mattered was policy, making the right decisions for the longer term. Aznar arrived for lunch, first just re Gibraltar, which was really difficult and on which zero progress was made. Jack S had said on the radio that if the Gibraltarians rejected a deal that would be the end of it, which the Spaniards felt was a shift. They were very suspicious, a bit paranoid, and so didn’t really accept the truth, which was that it was a bit of a cock-up. Aznar was fine at the lunch, said
he was over for a speech at Oxford and said he intended to say that there should be a president of the European Council, elected by the members of the council, who should be a former PM. ‘That’s why I’m putting you forward,’ he said to TB, who replied ‘I’m putting you forward as well.’ A short press conference, half Gibraltar, half asylum and off they went. Meeting with Mark Bennett [Labour press officer], trying to get him in for a while to help out.

The CBI speech was in OK shape but he wanted to do a lot of it from notes, so all I did was draft a few clips and put together a release based on extracts. The best line was probably the straight passionate defence of the Budget, especially as we heard Iain Vallance [CBI president] was intending to go for the Budget tax rises and say we were on a yellow card re the economy. Stupidly, despite having an enormous blister on my foot, I ran in and later in the day was unable to walk. IDS was making a speech on equality and opportunity and how he would stand up for the poor and vulnerable so I got Fraser Kemp [Labour MP] out motoring re his kids going to Eton.

I spoke to Guy Black and then sent over the latest letters on the case. Charlie Falconer’s view was that if Black Rod was being this difficult we should just get out of it. We now just have to get shot of the whole thing. I went to the Gay Hussar [Soho restaurant favoured by politicians and journalists] with Fiona and Fraser Kemp and had a very nice lunch at which I was being drawn for a cartoon to go in a book of cartoons of regular Gay Hussar customers. Martin Rowson’s cartoon was pretty good, though I looked alarmingly like Jeremy Paxman. He had Fraser peeping out of the corner of the page. I got back for a series of meetings, including the main TB/GB strategy meeting. GB and the two Eds arrived late, walked in surly and it was as bad as it gets.

They seemed genuinely to think that the more we talked about crime, the worse it was politically. TB was convinced, and I was sure he was right, that we had to be seen to address crime, antisocial behaviour, respect, order, the basic-values issues that flowed from them. He said to GB that he had a point but he was totally exaggerating it. Of course we shouldn’t be going on about crime the whole time but it was ridiculous to say that we shouldn’t talk about it. People have to know that we get it. GB said it was far better to do things first, do them properly, then say they had been done, rather than announce what we were going to do, then do it, then have everyone say it wasn’t working. He was obviously referring to the child benefit situation. But it was a totally unrealistic approach.

The combination of TB’s lack of focus, GB’s combination of sulking and aggression, Ed Balls’ near contempt for TB, my and Philip’s near exasperation at the whole thing made it a particularly bad meeting. You would also have thought we were in an election campaign. GB said why are we fighting the election on crime? Sally M pointed out we weren’t fighting an election at all. TB said don’t see it as crime, see it as respect, community, values. I asked GB to explain what he meant by doing things without getting coverage for them. He gave me the death stare, said nothing. I said you got up a big message on the economy by making difficult decisions, announcing them, arguing for them, then seeing the benefits through. We had to do the same in every other area. He said the economy was different. I said we had a big agenda on public services and on the state of society, and they required a similar political strategy. TB was pretty gloomy as the meeting ended and he set off for the CBI. The speech was strong and went down fine.
³³

Not much out of the CBI speech, mainly TB vs Vallance et al. The
Mail
really getting stuck in re Carole [Caplin] as personal trainer to CB, TB etc. Party funding went as well as it could, though [David] Triesman wasn’t too great when asked about [Richard] Desmond, who would now get a bit jumpy. My foot was now in a really bad way. Alison [Blackshaw, AC’s PA] suggested the NHS walk-in centre at Soho which was absolutely brilliant. Another Labour success. They drained off some pretty ghastly looking liquid inside the blister, patched it up and I could walk pretty well straight away. I had a nice chat with the nurses who showed me round. Fantastic facility. Back for a PMQs meeting, not clear what IDS would do but we were set for possibly TB’s worst ever with a real cock-up when he got a factual answer wrong re which department was responsible for elections and referenda. Fall-about time for the Tories, though it wouldn’t get through to the public much.
³⁴

TB had Jonathan, Sally and I in for a chat afterwards, said he didn’t really know how to take things forward with GB at the moment. I was now having regular weekly meetings with Peter M, Peter H and Philip, which were useful, proper strategy discussions not always getting sucked down into what was going on day to day. Home via the gym, and TB called, joking about the earlier disaster at PMQs, agreeing that next week if the Tories had any sense, they would turn it into a general knowledge quiz.

He was worried about the way they [the
Mail
] were going for their connections with Carole. He said the problem is you are under such scrutiny that you become a kind of prisoner and you can’t actually do a lot of the things you want to. He said I know there are lifestyle issues that are a problem but I can’t stop Cherie having a life and there are things I ought to be able to do without everything being an issue for the press. I said maybe, but there are plenty of upsides, e.g. running the country, being involved in all the major decisions affecting the country, the kind of people you meet and the places you go to, people at your beck and call. I was trying to persuade him that we needed to be much more forward thinking about new communications, use of the Internet, direct mail, more genuine interaction. He felt it would take a long time before we were in a position where the press was not setting the agenda for the rest of the media.

Asylum took up a lot of the day, and the French so-called deal re Sangatte [refugee camp] and the
Guardian
getting a leak of the paper written by Olivia McLeod [policy adviser] on ‘radical’ asylum measures. Everyone assumed Clare Short had been responsible. The story made clear she was opposed to some of the plans, as indeed she later made clear on
Question Time
[BBC TV programme]. Cabinet was mainly Kashmir with a feeling sometimes that we had five Foreign Secretaries – TB, JS, Geoff H, Robin C and Clare. GB as ever saying nothing unless he had to. Afterwards I had a long chat with [Alan] Milburn who felt we had to move to a different sort of political discussion, get definition less according to events than arguments and values. Philip had been to see him and was pretty down about public opinion, trust.

On the way home I had a row with Michael Levy, who, with Charles C’s and the party’s backing, had decided to do an interview with Rachel Sylvester [
Times
] tomorrow. I said I thought it was a mistake, we had just about managed to park the issue of funding and we
should let it lie down. He got very emotional, said he had been put in a box for eight years, done everything asked of him, yet was treated like a leper. I said the Lords was not a conventional home for lepers. He said he was determined to have his say and defend the line that we had to keep on raising funds. I had pretty much the blue mists both with him and with Charles, who also thought he should do it, and my mood got worse watching Short on
Question Time
making clear she wouldn’t have taken the [Richard] Desmond money and attacking us over asylum.

The SPD [Social Democratic Party] team came in from Germany for a series of meetings with me, Jonathan, PM, PG, SM, RH [Robert Hill], DA. They were similar to us but also very different. They didn’t really have a clear strategy or message. When you asked them what it was, a huge great jumble came out, and when you implored them to get the focus on the economy and less on the cultural issues that they seemed drawn to, they sort of said they agreed but I don’t think they did. TB joined us at the end of the lunch and when we filled him in on the discussion so far, he said it was obviously, keep the focus on the economy, and in relation to the straight Schroeder vs [Edmund] Stoiber [Chancellor candidate] battle, try not to go too head-to-head and do it almost indirectly and through policy. They seemed a bit beleaguered, also said that because Stoiber was successfully ‘hiding’ from some policy areas, they couldn’t really get the political debate going. I said it was always possible to get the debate going, it’s how you frame the debate and then generate the arguments.

Philip got very aggressive, saying it had to be economy first, social second, cultural issues third. It seemed so obvious to us and yet ask them what their strategy was and it was thin, clearly designed for the party, words like innovation and justice, rather than the public. TB was going to have to speak to Schroeder if these were his top campaign people. They wanted TB to go to Germany for two days’ campaigning, which would pretty much kill any relationship with Stoiber at birth if he won.