The Burden of Power: Countdown to Iraq - The Alastair Campbell Diaries

Contents

Title Page

About the Book

About the Author

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Who’s Who

The Diaries

Picture Section

Index

Copyright

The Burden of Power
is the fourth volume of Alastair Campbell’s diaries, and perhaps the most eagerly awaited given the ground it covers.

It begins on September 11, 2001, a day which immediately wrote itself into the history books, and it ends on the day Campbell leaves Downing Street. In between there are two wars: first Afghanistan, and then, even more controversially, Iraq. It was the most difficult decision of Tony Blair’s premiership, and almost certainly the most unpopular. Campbell describes in detail the discussions with President Bush and other world leaders as the steps to war are taken, and delivers a unique account of Blair as war leader. He records the enormous political difficulties at home, and the sense of crisis that engulfed the government after the suicide of weapons inspector David Kelly.

And all the while, Blair continues to struggle with two issues that ran throughout his time in government – fighting for peace in Northern Ireland, and trying to make peace with Gordon Brown. And Campbell continues to struggle balancing the needs of his family with one of the most pressurised roles in politics.

Riveting and revelatory,
The Burden of Power
is as raw and intimate a portrayal of political life as you are ever likely to read.

Alastair Campbell
was born in Keighley, Yorkshire in 1957, the son of a vet. Having graduated from Cambridge University in modern languages, he went into journalism, principally with the Mirror Group. When Tony Blair became leader of the Labour Party, Campbell worked for him first as press secretary, then as official spokesman and director of communications and strategy from 1994 to 2003. He continued to act as an adviser to Mr Blair and the Labour Party, including during the 2005 and 2010 election campaigns. He is now engaged mainly in writing, public speaking, consultancy, and working for mental health charities and Leukaemia and Lymphoma Research, where he is chairman of fundraising. He lives in North London with his partner, Fiona Millar, and their children, Rory, Calum and Grace. His interests include running, cycling, playing the bagpipes and following the varying fortunes of Burnley Football Club.

Bill Hagerty
, a former colleague of Campbell’s, was deputy editor of the
Daily Mirror
and edited both
Sunday Today
and
The People
newspapers. He is now a writer and broadcaster and edits the
British Journalism Review
.

To Philip Gould (1950–2011),
because friendship matters in politics,
and team players are the best players of all.

Many thanks once more to Bill Hagerty, who took over the task of editing these diaries after the sad death of our friend and colleague Richard Stott, and to Mark Bennett, who was with me in Downing Street and has also been with me on the long and sometimes tortuous road to publication.

Both through my diaries, and the two novels and ebook I have published, I have come to appreciate the professionalism and kindness of many people at Random House. I would like to thank Gail Rebuck, Susan Sandon, Caroline Gascoigne, Joanna Taylor, Charlotte Bush, Emma Mitchell and the team of ‘spin doctors’, Martin Soames for his legal advice, David Milner, Mark Handsley, Vicki Robinson, Helen Judd, Sue Cavanagh, and Jeanette Slinger in reception for always ensuring one of my books is at the front of the display cabinet downstairs – at least when I am visiting the building. My thanks, as ever, to my literary agent Ed Victor, to his PA Linda Van and to his excellent team.

I want to thank Tony Blair for giving me the opportunity he did, and thank the many friends and colleagues who have helped me in good times and bad.

Finally, thanks to my family. As these diaries show, the pressures of the job I did also fell on Fiona and the children, and I thank them for their love and support. I know that they too will be happy to acknowledge our debt to Philip Gould, to whom I dedicated this volume shortly before his death, and who was an enormous support to all of us.

At the risk of offending purists, pedants and history scholars, I have taken the liberty of beginning this volume with the same diary entry with which I ended the last one: September 11. Though this volume is the fourth in a series of the full diaries of my time working for Labour in opposition and in government, it also stands alone as a record of the most difficult and controversial period of Tony Blair’s premiership. It is an intimate portrayal of Blair the war leader, with conflict in both Afghanistan and Iraq taking place during the two years covered, and September 11 is the most suitable place to begin that account.

The Taliban in Afghanistan, Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and the fear of terrorist organisations getting hold of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) with the help of rogue states, had been on TB’s agenda well before September 11. Indeed, subsequently Mike White of the
Guardian
reminded me that TB had raised the issue as ‘a coming challenge’ at a meeting at the newspaper’s head office the day before the Twin Towers fell. But without the events of that day, it is at least plausible to imagine that neither war would have taken place, certainly in the way they did. As the ten-year anniversary showed, it is a date so much now part of the public consciousness, and so central to many strategic, religious and geopolitical debates around the world, that it seems almost otiose to add the year: September 11, 2001. More than a decade on, we say ‘September 11’, or its American variant, ‘9/11’, and there are very few people who don’t immediately know where, when and what you mean, and summon up images of planes hitting buildings, people fleeing in terror, families grieving in all parts of the world, politicians struggling to catch up. There have been terror attacks since, but none which has made such a powerful impact, which is still felt today.

World leaders are fond of stating, in the immediate aftermath of terrorist outrages, that we must and will not let the terrorists deflect us or change our way of life. But they can, and they do. It is something I reflect on every time I go through an airport security check. But September 11 did more than see increased bag checks, belt and shoe removals and toothpaste confiscation at airports. It recast the foreign policy of major powers. It tested relationships between them. It tested the UN. It brought to a head debates which had been simmering within and about Islam. Most importantly for this book, it came to be a defining moment in Tony Blair’s premiership, George Bush’s presidency, the relationship between the two, the reputation of both.

The day began with TB worrying about a speech he was due to make to the Trades Union Congress in Brighton about public service reform. It was being set up as something of a ’lion’s den’ moment. The speech was never delivered: the first attack on the Twin Towers in New York took place as we put the finishing touches to it in a hotel suite overlooking a calm and beautiful sea. The day ended with TB back in London directing the UK end of a global crisis management response, which would subsequently see the domestic side of his job dwarfed by the consequences of the attacks.

The Burden of Power
charts in sometimes minute detail what happened around TB on September 11, and every day thereafter: the initial response, the globetrotting diplomacy as the case for action was built, the decision to use military force to remove the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, a war still going on in somewhat different form today. Then not long afterwards the war in Iraq, undoubtedly the most difficult and the most controversial decision of the Blair government. In military terms, the wars were successful and, in terms of meeting the initial objectives, relatively swift. The Taliban fell. Saddam fell. But we all know that is only part of the story. The Taliban were toppled, but never really went away. Afghanistan remains far from secure, with perilous consequences for the region. Saddam was toppled, but after the initial celebrations, chaos ensued, and the controversy over the decision to commit troops to action did not disappear with the dictator those troops brought down. The stated purpose of the action was to remove what the government believed to be a growing threat from Saddam’s WMD programme. Of course Saddam’s long and wretched history of rule, his brutality, the wars he started, his defiance of the UN, these were all factors. But the answer to the specific question ‘Why Iraq, why now?’ was his continued development of a WMD programme, and the post-9/11 threat the US, the UK and others believed this posed. The fact that the weapons did not materialise in Iraq after Allied troops entered the country merely fuelled the controversy, unsurprisingly, over the original decision.

The Burden of Power
seems a fitting title for a book dominated by Tony Blair’s handling of these events. See the front covers of the four volumes and you see first a young and vibrant Opposition leader, then a young and jubilant prime minister taking the reins of power with an enormous landslide and huge goodwill, then a prime minister beginning to age as always they do – but still smiling – and finally, on the front of this volume, the Burden of Power. These were momentous decisions, taken amid enormous pressure and often with much else going on. It is why, though I disagree with his politics and oppose many of the things he has done, I have respect for the fact that the current prime minister, David Cameron, does the job he does. The pressures are unique to that post. Only five people alive today know what they are.

When I was asked by a newspaper to choose a defining photograph, as part of the enormous ‘a decade on’ coverage of September 11, I opted not for the obvious ones, but for a photo of TB sitting alongside John Monks, the general secretary of the TUC. Minutes earlier, John had said to me that it was on days like this that you realised the enormity of the responsibility that goes with the prime minister’s job. The picture was used in
The Blair Years
, the extracts of my diaries published in 2007, and I have used it again in the first plate section of this volume too. TB looks focused and distracted at the same time. I know him well enough to see that his mind is whirring, thinking through the many things he will need to deal with once he has announced to the Congress that he must head back to London – his brief statement on events in the US, his expression of solidarity, his warning that the extremism behind the attacks had to be confronted, and his announcement that he would not be making the speech led to his first and last full standing ovation from a TUC event. John Monks meanwhile, also someone in a leadership position, is looking empathetically at TB, sensing the additional burdens falling on the shoulders of the man sitting next to him.