The Burden of Power: Countdown to Iraq - The Alastair Campbell Diaries (49 page)

JP on
Frost
, followed by a conference call, but with the World Cup final on [Germany 0, Brazil 2], I wasn’t keen on working too hard today. The Byers story didn’t really run so I think we had handled it reasonably well. TB sent over a note on forward strategy. He emphasised yet again that getting the policy right was what mattered above all. On political positioning, he was worried that the ‘Nobody left behind’ slogan was too exclusive, not New Labour enough. It suggested we were only concerned with the people at the bottom of the pile, not everyone else.

TB used his Monday morning meeting to hammer home his determination to keep the focus on policy. He felt there was a danger that because of all the noises off the whole time we became a bit timid. He had a meeting with Charles C, David Triesman and Hilary Armstrong about the trade unions. TB felt they were becoming an even bigger nightmare than ever. Hilary felt the problem was that GB was running a counter-strategy with them. TB agreed reluctantly to do another dinner for them but felt we needed to divide and rule a
bit. The leaders of the big unions were indulged by the media because they attacked us, and they were capable of talking the most meaningless drivel. Simon Heffer [
Daily Mail
columnist] came in to see me for lunch. It was the usual jolly chat but he also said that ‘as a friend’ he would advise me to leave fairly soon because the
Mail
was really going to go for me personally from now on in. I told him to ‘take a message back to your leader [editor Paul Dacre] that I gave up long ago worrying where his bile was poured’. We were still trying to find a venue for the press briefings out of Number 10. The QE2 [conference centre] was the best option but it would cost four grand a day. Ten-mile run.

Ran in. TB called me up as soon as I arrived, in a stew. GB had done an interview in
The Times
suggesting massive investment in EMAs [education maintenance allowances], on the day that we were pushing the antisocial behaviour strategy. He said it was complete news to him, and typical of the way GB did his own thing without regard to others. GB was complaining the whole time that we didn’t have a strategy. But the problem was we did have a strategy but he had a counter-strategy as a counterpoint to TB’s profile. TB was now of the view that GB was just doing him in the whole time. What would it do to the country if he took over? He felt that the tragedy for GB was that they were both actually in the right jobs for them. TB was now going through the CSR bids from different departments, then saw GB who complained we were operating on a different set of figures. In fact the figures had been agreed between Jeremy, Ed Balls and ‘Mr Adonis’ as GB called Andrew. But GB said these were different figures to the ones they had been working on. The EMA move was a classic exercise to get up a big GB story to counter TB doing something different. TB then did the
TES
[
Times Educational Supplement
], for which he was pretty good, much better than Channel 4 later.

With the
Sunday Telegraph
in for lunch, he was back on pander mode, and I felt a bit queasy at some of the things he was saying, particularly about public services. I also felt he talked too much about focus groups and what they said. Later off to Channel 4, which we had agreed to do on the basis of real interchange with viewers but it wasn’t great. He didn’t really drive the message about this being a CSR for schools as he had done with the
TES
.

PG called, said that for the first time there was polling, bad for TB, that had the idea in there that GB would be better. I felt this had been
a media thing but clearly it had got through, because GB was fortunate that people didn’t focus on him in the same way. Philip was worried about it. Yet when I had a meeting with Jim Naughtie [BBC
Today
programme] I was quite taken aback by just how negative he was about GB, felt he wasn’t a serious option, that he was ‘so strange, humourless, simmering with such resentment that I couldn’t see him being a good leader’. He said he found it incredible that the second most powerful person in the country felt such a compelling need to have people think he was able to duff up Estelle Morris. Jim was on good form, very lively, said that he felt our recent problems were partly because people felt we, particularly TB and I, were too big for our boots, a bit arrogant, always thought we knew best. He felt, and funnily enough it was one of the points I made in the notes done last weekend, that we needed to take the lead in generating more honest and realistic debates, because the media wouldn’t do it for us.

After PMQs, I saw TB to agree a line to give to the
Spectator
who had some story about TB and CB using private-school tutors for Euan and Nicky. It was odd how virtually every bad argument we ever had tended to be in the area where public life and private life collide, and often related to education. He said most normal parents would sympathise. I said you are not a normal parent, you are the prime minister, and if you are that you have to think through the politics of everything you do. Out of school lessons, fine, but given how many decent teachers there are what was the point in sticking your chin out to say ‘Hit me, I’m getting private school teachers’? He said if Rory and Calum were struggling, we would get them help. I said I sure as hell wouldn’t go to a private school for it. I had a long meeting with Peter M and Peter H. Peter M felt that the real damage was being done below the surface, that we were not in as good shape as we wanted or needed to be.

Philip had briefed TB on the latest poll which showed the trust problem growing. TB felt the lack of a clear strategy driven through in communications was the central problem. I felt it was more that GB was running a counter-strategy which meant we were being presented negatively from the left and the right. And the party was picking up the idea that on policy substance, we had moved to the right. As John Reid said to me before Cabinet, Number 10 had lost Pat [McFadden, former Number 10 deputy chief of staff], [David] Miliband, Jon Cruddas [Labour MP, Blair’s former deputy political secretary for union liaison], and ‘the only person left who would
bleed a hundred per cent red blood if you cut him is you’. He said TB was losing his networks in government, Parliament and party. He also felt JP was not as powerful as he was, GB basically hostile, RC on his own kick in Parliament, plus he had people like Clare offside anyway, so TB was becoming more and more isolated. TB looked a bit wandering at Cabinet, which was mainly GB going through general state of the economy, said the spending review would be the week after next. He said our underlying position was sound and he was cautiously optimistic about growth, industrial production rising, the job situation pretty good.

I had lunch with Jonathan Dimbleby to discuss TB doing a solo
Any Questions
[BBC Radio 4]. Dimbleby said he was struck by how TB always looked tired. Back for a brainstorm with Philip, Douglas, PH, Michael Barber [head of the Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit], Andrew Adonis and some of the key policy people. How to address specific issues of delivery on the public services in London. Some of the best and worst was in London, but the fact that the national media was based here tended to skew things towards the worst, added to which virtually none of the senior media people used state schools or the NHS and so had a vested interest in running them down to justify their own decisions to themselves. Douglas and I were both a bit worried about the idea of specifically identifying London in terms of its special problems. But we agreed to do a region-by-region report on the public services setting out good and bad.

Phil Bassett [Number 10 special adviser] had been over briefing JP for
Question Time
and he had gone mad at the
Spectator
story on private tutors. He said I ought to call JP to try and calm him down. He was in a total rage, said it wasn’t about tough choices for parents, because we all had tough choices. Pauline was always telling me we should use better schools and I felt we had to use the local school. So does virtually every Labour MP. He said Cherie does all that Liverpool stuff and her poor background, but when it comes to schooling for her own kids, there’s this snobbery about the best schools and now private-school tutors. JP called after the programme and said he hadn’t done well, so I made a point of watching it and he was fine. Called him to say so and he said he just felt tired and jaded at the moment.

Off to the US ambassador’s residence for their July 4th do. Usual mix of politicians, media, great and the good. The best moment of the evening was when I was chatting to [Sir] Roger Bannister [first athlete to run a mile in under four minutes] about Rory’s running, introduced him to Fiona as ‘the former athlete’, and she asked him
what his distance was. ‘Lots really, but I was probably best known as a miler,’ he said without a hint of embarrassment, while she blushed when she realised what a daft question it was.

Another quiet day. Only work-related thing was the
Observer
getting hold of the fact we were selling HUDs [eye-level ‘head-up’ displays for F16 combat aircraft] to the US, knowing they would go on to Israel. Had a series of calls with Jack S to agree what to say in the morning interviews – not a new policy, but addressing a new reality of multinational assembly lines. The vice president of Afghanistan [Haji Abdul Qadir] was assassinated [shot in the head in Kabul], so we were scrabbling around a bit on that too.

Patricia [Hewitt] was on
Frost
. She was fine but was not even asked about arms [sales], which surprisingly didn’t take off. There were a few GB/CSR stories around, but all a bit incoherent. We lacked a strategic theme that was drawing policy together at the moment. Out for dinner with the Goulds. Philip was worried TB didn’t really get what our weaknesses were at the moment.

At TB’s Monday meeting, TB was baulking again at ‘Nobody left behind’ as a theme for conference. He felt reform was the most important focus, that conference should be about the remodelling of the welfare state around the themes of rights and responsibilities. I felt we needed to be bigger than that, that we were going through a bad time and we lacked clarity about how to get through it. TB also wanted to go into another round of persuasion with the right-wing media, and we just disagreed on this. I felt that if we isolated the
Mail
, we would gain leverage with the press on the left, one of whose main angsts was the feeling we had courted the right too much. There was also something so putrid about these papers that culturally it was right to challenge them rather than keep trying to win them round, which in the
Mail
’s case was an utterly lost cause. But the key to everything was to get up a bigger message about where we were going. Thatcher always had a sense of direction, even when the shit was flying. Often we had it, but at the moment we didn’t. Charles C was in very grumpy mood at the meeting and later told me he hated the job.

I listened in to a couple of bad TB/GB calls. First, with lots of
dicking around on the date of the CSR, TB feeling he was trying to bounce us into the 15th. TB made clear he was not signing it all off until he was happy with the Home Office budget. It had not even been taken to Blunkett yet. I pointed out that again, important detail was being held back from him. He said he was so used to being abused and mistreated by him that he had almost stopped caring, and just wanted to make sure the final package was OK. We had all sorts of CSR follow-up planned, e.g. visits, but we still didn’t have a date. I had a meeting with Afghan journalists, which was interesting not least for the way that they saw Britain’s role, namely far more positively than our media did.

TB called an internal meeting to run through the final difficult bits of the CSR. He was playing far tougher with GB than before. TB said he was pressing for yet more for education and we would get it. The Home Office settlement still needed to be improved but he was confident we would get there in the end. The process was crazy. Jeremy [Heywood] and Ed Balls would agree, only for TB and GB then to reopen and disagree. To get where we needed to be on education, we were going to have to take something out of JP’s and Milburn’s budgets. The outstanding issues were becoming small in number but very difficult and the TB/GB bilateral this afternoon was the most difficult yet. Nothing was really agreed. They both had to leave for the Barbara Castle [former Labour Cabinet minister who had died in May] memorial, and even that had its own TB/GB-related problem. The initial suggestion had been that TB and GB do readings but GB had seemingly insisted on doing a big speech and in the current climate, it would look odd for him to do a big number and TB a little reading. So quickly we had to work up a speech for TB who until this point was not even aware he was doing it.

I went to retirement parties for Geoffrey Goodman [
British Journalism Review
] and Michael Jones [
Sunday Times
]. I got TB to come to Geoffrey’s and make a nice little speech about integrity in journalism. Betty Boothroyd was at Michael Jones’ and told me there was quite a lot of disillusion out there now. Charlie F was in to see TB re the Home Office and popped round for a chat. I made the argument that it was possible, and at times I felt probable, and very occasionally felt certain, that GB would never be leader. Charlie was not convinced, felt there was nobody else really emerging. Mike White called to say Stephen Bates [
Guardian
religious affairs correspondent] was doing a story that TB had rejected several names for the new Archbishop [of
Canterbury]. In trying to rebut it, I helped confirm it would be [Dr] Rowan Williams [Archbishop of Wales].

Ran in, up to see TB in the flat, who was hugely seized of the importance of IDS and [Michael] Howard [Shadow Chancellor] making clear they didn’t intend to match our spending plans. It was classic Hague-ism.
³⁹
He [IDS] had tried compassionate conservatism but now he had moved back to where his instincts were, on the right, a hard-line cuts agenda. It was a defining moment for Parliament and we had to pin it on them big time. But the big government story of the day was DB reclassifying cannabis [from Class B to C]. Keith Hellawell [government drugs adviser, or ‘drugs czar’] went on
Today
and ‘announced’ he had resigned in protest. I had always tried hard with Hellawell, tried to boost him re his communication skills, but he had never quite cut it within the government machinery. I had to calm Blunkett down, say the most important thing was getting cops to back us and by and large they did. But I felt a bit uncomfortable both with the policy – but also the clear mixed messages of saying it was OK to take it but dealers could get fourteen years.