The Burden of Power: Countdown to Iraq - The Alastair Campbell Diaries (105 page)

I went in for TB’s meeting with John Sawers. TB wanted a note of all the things he would need to get Bush to deliver on. He popped round to my office later and said that on Europe, it would be a total disaster if we turned our backs, that he was glad the right wing was out there campaigning on the referendum and the IGC because he felt we were going to have to take on the whole argument. Alistair Darling called me about a piece in the
FT
saying that Number 10 were not impressed with him. ‘If it’s what Tony thinks, I’d rather know and I can go and do something else.’ He said he had seen this happen to other ministers and it wasn’t going to happen to him. I said I could honestly say that neither TB nor I had ever expressed such a view. I told TB who said he would speak to him. It was pretty clear they were all getting a bit jittery pre-reshuffle.

Geoffrey Levy and Gordon Rayner had a big piece in the
Mail
, ‘Carole the Conqueror’, saying that Fiona was going to leave and it was a victory for Carole [Caplin]. Fiona called Cherie and said to her she was worried that CB was ‘sleepwalking to disaster’. I told TB it was perfectly clear she had a link into the
Mail
and the paper was just toying with her, building her up, in the hope of using her to create a huge splash later. TB called ostensibly re Europe – again – and his continuing worries on education funding, and then raised Carole. She does Cherie’s clothes and personal training. So what? He said he had seen her five times since Christmas. I said the problem was that he didn’t think there was a problem, and I did. Relations between CB and Fiona had effectively broken down and it was too late to sort it out. He said it was vital that we do not let this kind of stuff take over the agenda. I said we haven’t, they had. I had been warning about Carole for years and neither of you have listened. The whole thing was demeaning and belittling.

He called me again later, said he hadn’t been able to speak freely
because he had been in a car, but I had to understand Carole was barely involved at all any more. I said I just didn’t believe it, and nor did Fiona. He said if we left now, people would think it was about this, which was belittling for everyone. Fiona spoke to Cherie a couple of times during the day but the lack of trust was pretty obvious. She asked Cherie outright if she had told Carole about her leaving. ‘She said no, but I didn’t believe her.’ I took Rory to the South of England Championships up at Watford, and got in an hour-long run myself.

Big pieces in the Sundays on Fiona to quit. TB called and said we had to put a lid on this. He said it was becoming dreadful for Cherie because the coverage was making her look crazy. I said it was bad for all of us. He said we had to make clear it was nonsense. I said there was no way we could deny Fiona was leaving, because she is. He was now very irritated by the whole thing, and when he was irritated with this kind of issue, he could become very irritating. It was as if this was all terrible for him when in fact they had created this madness by allowing her in so close. I gave the press office a line that Fiona had not left and that it was absurd to see this as some kind of power struggle with Carole, the usual flimflam. The problem was a number of journalists now already knew she was leaving. Philip was in the States and Georgia [Gould] needed a lift to the QPR vs Cardiff play-off finals at the Millennium Stadium, so I went down with her and Calum. She was a bit upset when they [QPR] lost, and we could see [Cardiff supporter] Neil [Kinnock] going crazy in the directors’ box. The Israeli Cabinet endorsed the road map, which dominated the news. TB said he found that even at weekends now, he was working pretty much all the time, and it never stopped.

The latest Giscard [d’Estaing] draft [European constitution] appeared to the usual insane cacophony from the sceptic press. Work-wise, it was a fairly typical quiet bank holiday. I made a few phone calls whilst watching Calum play tennis, trying to get some of them off the ceiling about Giscard. We went out for dinner with David and Louise Miliband who had decided to adopt a baby and had us down as referees. David felt we were drifting politically. I agreed but somehow I lacked the energy to respond to it in a way that I would have done a while back. Meanwhile, the situation re Fiona was being made to look like the end of the Camelot show, and she was starting to get hit in the press unfairly.

Peter M called me later and said that he felt I would know for sure when I wanted to go. So did I, and it wasn’t quite yet but it wasn’t far off. Fiona felt TB and I worked so closely, and ninety-five per cent of the time in a pretty good spirit, so that by now I was in many ways TB’s closest friend and he mine, and she understood why that made it harder to leave, because I felt I was letting him down. There was something in that, but I also felt I was letting him and myself down in not being up for the job in the way that I used to be. I had a dreadful cold but went out for a run in the afternoon and got a phone call to say that Mark Gault [close friend from university] had dropped down dead. I was pole-axed. I tried to call Susie [his wife], eventually got hold of her and she was pretty much inconsolable. He had literally just conked out sitting in a chair.

TB was at Chequers and I was supposed to go down for a meeting but in the end didn’t as I was dealing with the fallout from Mark’s death. Peter Hain gave us a problem by appearing to say that European elections would be seen as a [euro] referendum, so we had to weigh in on that a bit. I got Jack Straw to do a
Times
article on the Tories fighting old battles. GB, unbeknown to us, was doing something in the
Wall Street Journal
. It almost looked co-ordinated, but the truth was that, as so often, we had no idea what GB was up to. His piece was mainly to emphasise his European economic reform credentials for the US audience and Murdoch in particular. TB saw Adams and McGuinness and told them he thought it might be time for him to meet the IRA guys that they kept going back to see. Adams seemed keener than McGuinness. TB felt they had to give something. I took a couple of meetings on Europe. The Europe coverage showed once more the need for better rebuttal and proactive communications. As ever, the press was setting the agenda for the broadcasters.

The car came at 7.15 to take me to the airport, where we waited for TB. We sat down to work on his speech for Poland on Friday. He was up for a big pro-European message. He had not really read the papers so I briefed him on just how mad the
Sun
/
Mail
/
Telegraph
had been. He said they were going to have to be confronted on this. The heavy thing to do would be to say that this was a campaign headed by three people – Murdoch, an Australian living in America, [Conrad] Black, a Canadian [
Telegraph
proprietor], and [Paul] Dacre [
Mail
editor], an extreme right-winger. They thought it was fantastic that he faced
down public opinion over Iraq, but terrible that he could possibly disagree over this. I was worried that we had missed the time at which it might have been possible. But he seemed up for it and was very firm when we went down the plane to see the press. After a good run around the block on Iraq, he engaged with Cabinet on Europe in a pretty robust way.

Rumsfeld had not helped set up the visit to Iraq with a statement that we may never find WMD, or that he may never have had them, which was a pretty dreadful backdrop to the visit. But TB was pretty firm, strong on both Iraq and Europe. We had breakfast together on the plane to Kuwait and as we were just chatting away over his current list of concerns – Europe and the IGC, the assessment, GB, the press, whatever – it was very hard to imagine not being on these kinds of trips, having these kinds of conversations in future. Despite everything, he was still very engaging, very funny and hadn’t fundamentally changed at all. We always had a laugh on these trips, which was good for us, but also I think helped build a sense of team with everyone else, from the cops to the policy wonks.

In Kuwait we were almost in hysterics when the deputy prime minister [Sheikh Sabah al-Ahmed al-Sabah, also foreign minister] started lambasting us over our asylum and immigration policies, saying we were too soft on the Kurds and we gave too many benefits to asylum seekers. It was a pretty bizarre event, a bilateral where none of us could hear the conversation, so we sat muttering amongst ourselves while just looking over at the line of princes sitting playing with their worry beads. TB and I kept exchanging looks and we just stayed on the right side of laughter.

The news was leading on TB and Rumsfeld. What a clot. The cuttings came through to the residence where I once played the bagpipes with my namesake [Colonel Alastair Campbell, defence and military attaché]. Linda Lee-Potter [columnist] had a ghastly piece about me and Fiona in the
Mail
, obviously written to order. While TB had a bath, Kate [Garvey] and I went over what pictures we wanted from the visit to Iraq, then out to a pretty sumptuous dinner at one of the palaces. Chirac’s people came on with an interesting suggestion. He wanted to do a joint article about Africa with TB and Schroeder. Schroeder was less keen than we were. TB was saying again that he found the workload really heavy at the moment.

Up at 5, UK time. The press was dominated by WMD and Rumsfeld’s comments, which was really irritating. When I thought of what we
could do to fuck them up in the same way. We then heard, though we couldn’t get it substantiated, that Paul Wolfowitz had said that WMD had been a bureaucratic convenience to get us into the war. Some of the top British military told us that the American top brass loathed Rumsfeld, found him impulsive, interfering, making the wrong decisions for the wrong reasons. The local Kuwaiti paper had a picture of TB and a group of sheikhs all in traditional headgear, with the caption helpfully pointing out that TB was ‘second right’. I was working on a political strategy paper and planning upcoming events.

We boarded the Hercules flight to Basra. TB was up in the jump seat, David Manning and I behind. We flew over Umm Qasr, burnt-out tanks all over the place. It was very hot and arid, and a few oil wells were burning. We landed at Basra airfield to be met by [Paul] Bremer and [John] Sawers. TB afterwards was very clear that we really had to press the US to get better engaged. It was just not moving in the way it should be. I had a meeting with Bremer. He had read my earlier note and said he basically agreed with it, yet was still waiting for a replacement for [Margaret] Tutwiler. He was falling into this classic US thing of waiting for these mythical figures who were never quite delivered. He asked if I could provide someone, and I agreed to provide John Buck [FCO] to help draw up a plan. He also agreed to the idea of more of our people going out there if we got a plan in place. So it was useful but I could sense he was feeling pretty overwhelmed by the whole thing.

John Sawers was as tiggerish and enthusiastic as ever in his light suit and white shirt looking every inch ‘our man in a hot country’ and revelling in the machine gun-toting close protection squad. We then drove off to a visit to a school. Nice kids, lovely reception. He did a little speech in the playground while I talked to General [James] Conway [Marine Expeditionary Force], who said how impressed he was by how light we travelled compared to GWB. I told him about Rumsfeld’s WMD comments and he didn’t seem too surprised.

Our military had accommodated brilliantly to what was going on. The recurring theme though was that the Americans were not quite getting it right. TB had a fairly long briefing on how Basra was won, and then on to the speech to the troops. It was by a river under an awning, hot, but with a breeze, and his words were OK without being brilliant. He was full of praise for the troops, said it was a defining moment for the country, which the press felt was OTT. But he said afterwards he really believed it changed the way people in the region thought about the future, as was clear from the discussion with the
Kuwaitis last night. I hung round talking to the press about a ghastly Gilligan story [aired that morning on the
Today
programme] claiming that the spooks were not happy with the dossier, which was clearly a repeat of the stories at the time.
⁵⁶
We left for the flight to Umm Qasr by Chinook [helicopter], then down to see the army and navy in a very well-organised session. Several soldiers asked me my marathon time. Some of them had been following the
Times
column but hadn’t seen the result. They were a nice crowd. One came over and said he had never been much of a fan of TB or the government but both had grown on him and he felt that went for a lot of them. We went on to the minehunter, [HMS]
Ramsey
, where he did a Forces Radio interview.

TB clearly got a charge from the positive response, though earlier there had been no applause for his speech, which was a surprise, but then it was pointed out to me they had been told to be quiet. On the way back to the chopper, the Number 2 in the base said they had just heard that someone who worked in a photo shop had sent the police pictures of soldiers maltreating Iraqi PoWs. Bad. The reception he got was warm all day but General [Peter] Wall [1st UK Armoured Division, responsible for security in Basra] said that at night there was a lot of criminality. On the dockside, bizarrely, given I was spending so much time thinking about my own future, one of General Wall’s protection team asked me whether I had a lot of pressure. I said yes. You wouldn’t miss it for the world, he said. I’m not sure about that, I said. ‘You just hang in there.’ Odd. He was from Stirling.

We flew back to Kuwait and the relief of a cool, air-conditioned place. TB had to get changed into a suit for the official send-off and called me in for a chat. He said he found our troops really terrific, easily the best, and he was glad that we came. On the plane, we both worked on the Poland speech. He felt he needed a harder political strategy based on public service reform, Europe and the poverty agenda. He felt that post EMU, what we needed most was Number 10 and Number 11 working far more closely together on policy. I said I didn’t think it was possible. He felt GB allowed himself to be influenced too much by his inner circle. He thought Balls was clever but got too many backs up, which would not help him once he entered Parliament. There were two things that might shift GB to be more
co-operative. The first was that he now genuinely believed TB might move him. ‘He’s already said to me if I try to move him to Foreign Secretary, he will go on the back benches.’ Second, he was very worried about being portrayed as anti reform. He said that though DFID offered the most extreme picture of GB influence over minister and department, there were other parts of departments where things only happened if he said so. The Civil Service often talked of ministers being lazy. In truth, often they were just doing what they were told, or not doing what they were told not to do. TB said the real nightmare is that he is head and shoulders above the rest, which is why it is always better to try to work with him. He said he had always been sincere in saying to him that he wanted to hand over to him at some point, but he made it very difficult.