The Burden of Power: Countdown to Iraq - The Alastair Campbell Diaries (117 page)

I spoke to Godric on the flight from Korea to China to tell him I wanted to make clear publicly that I was going to go very soon, say that it was agreed with TB ages ago, and the family had had enough. I said to GS that I would quite like to do it tomorrow, with the BBC on the back foot. TB called from Shanghai on the way from the airport to the hotel, and said it was a mad idea. I said it was not. It was a good thing for me and a good thing for him. He said don’t do it. I know what you’re worried about, you’re worried that it’s not going to happen, that you’ll go at a time not of your choosing, with them hounding you out. But it’s a big moment this, and if you don’t do it properly, it will be a real problem. It’s just mad. They’re on the defensive, let the stuff about the BBC sink in and then do it when I get back. If you do it when I’m out of the country it will be even worse. It will look like I was not involved and you bounced me. If you want to do it, fine, but I promise you it’s not a good idea. I said I really had to know I was getting out on my terms. I said I was confident about the inquiries but I was also confident about FAC and a fat lot of good that did me. He said don’t forget that in the end we’re all in this together and we have to help each other. He said ‘When you leave I want to be able to say that there are two ACs, the one parts of the media portray and the one I know who is a great person.’ He said it was better we do that at the end of the week or after you go on holiday. I said OK but I wanted a guarantee. Sky was really going for the BBC though Boulton was still being a total cunt, e.g. in saying I was not totally exonerated because I was chairing intelligence meetings, etc. ITN was OK, but the BBC was like a house magazine. Geoff H called, said he was determined to go to the [British] Grand Prix because he was not having his life dictated by the worst excesses
of the British media. Quite right. Once the dust settled I would have to deal with the BBC etc. and I would have no stomach for it all. I hated these people. The BBC/
Mail
link was now beyond the pale.

We went for dinner at the Goulds’, joined by Charlie and Marianna [Falconer] and Peter M. Charlie felt I now had a window to go. Marianna was not sure I really wanted to go and said I should just take a holiday to think about it. Peter felt I was the one person in Number 10 who gave TB muscular advice which he listened to. I still felt I could do a fair bit from the outside. Peter M was unconvinced. He said three things will happen: 1. the media will rejoice; 2. champagne will flow in Number 11; 3. there will be panic in the PLP and ministers will become even more useless. I found it hard to see how I could stay in a position related to the media when I had such total contempt not just for a few of them, but for most of them, and certainly for the media culture and prevailing style. Charlie was clear that once I went, though I would still be able to help, I would not be able to pull the levers and that was a problem for TB, though he completely understood why I wanted to go. What was important was that we gave TB good replacements quickly.

The papers were finally turning to the BBC, but the
Mail
was vile and Robert Harris [author, former journalist] had a vicious piece in the
Telegraph
. I had to fight my way through a [media] scrum to get into the cab. I was feeling shit and keen to go. I had a nice cabbie who was basically onside, and felt the thing was moving towards the Beeb. Bruce, who had been persuaded that my leaving was the right thing to do, came back and said don’t do it because 1. you are TB’s last line of defence, and 2. they’d say it was an admission of guilt. [David] Bradshaw, Peter H were saying much the same thing. Jonathan came back from the States and he, Sally and I met discuss how to do it and what I would say. Jonathan said he probably agreed it was the right thing, but we needed a replacement sorted first.

The day was largely taken up with going through the Clare Sumner/Catherine Rimmer file. [Lord] Hutton was announcing his plans at 10.30 and it was clear he would go as wide as he wanted and do most of it in public.
⁶⁹
He looked far too Tory for me, though as Fiona said, that might mean he was pro war whereas a left-wing
judge almost certainly would not be. Peter M was terrific on
Today
, skewering Humphrys on what he said on May 29 about the Gilligan story and Humphrys was very defensive. Clare Short came on with her usual whine. Geoff Hoon was page 1 of the
Mail
for being at the Grand Prix. He said to me last night he didn’t really want to do the job if his family had to live life according to the morals of the immoral
Daily Mail
.

The first big meeting of the day was with Jeremy and Jonathan, Sally, Catherine Rimmer – Clare now away – and John S to go through chronology. It was very hard to remember all the comings and goings and toings and froings about the whole thing. CR had dug up all the emails and the ones that caused possible problems, one from Jonathan asking me or Sally to speak to Ann Taylor. Also one from me that the ISC should delve into the source, Gilligan and me. But it was OK really.

Omand came over at 3 for another meeting at which he was much more formal and said Hutton would want us to send a consolidated account but each person would have to give evidence on their own account. There was a real possibility of this going in any direction and of course the BBC were clearly now going to suggest that Kelly did say all these things. Clive Hollick called to say would it be sensible for me to see Greg Dyke for a private chat. I felt probably not. The press was trying to put the focus on who put the name in the public domain and going for the fact that the MoD said they would confirm the name if it was put to them.

Tom Kelly did the eleven o’clock with a fairly straight bat. Meetings for two hours or so. Omand setting up a little team to work full-time on the inquiry while we were on holiday. It was going to be tough. The BBC were trying to maintain that the Susan Watts [BBC
Newsnight
journalist] story was the same as the Gilligan story. It wasn’t. It was a softer version. Ditto Gavin Hewitt [BBC journalist]. I had a long chat with Graeme [AC’s brother] in Poland who said that every time he turned on a TV channel, I seemed to be on it, whatever the country.

Fiona has a real downer on me at the moment. I said surely you can understand the pressure I’m under at the moment. She said a lot of it was of my own making because I went from one obsession to the next and she feared I would never change. She was ducking out of the decision re timing of departure though. Neil, Sally, Charles Clarke, Mum, Godric, lots of others I spoke to, pretty much all felt that if I
went on Friday it would be taken as an admission of guilt of some sort. Neil said I should wait till September, maybe go after the ISC.

Godric called me after TB’s Q&A in Shanghai. TB was not happy with the positioning of the media on the inquiry after Tom’s briefing which was being taken as a hit on GH. TB said we had set up the inquiry and now had to shut down on all this, stop commenting, stop engaging with the media on it. But then, later in the day, he went down the plane to talk to the hacks, despite me warning Godric no good would come of it. And he said he did not authorise the leaking of the name. He had been caught on a classic ‘When did you stop beating your wife?’ type question and rose to it. But it meant more pressure on me and Geoff Hoon. I could not believe he had done that. I was pissed off with him, and with the people with him for letting him talk to the hacks. There was just no point in the current atmosphere. He should do the formal press events and nothing else.

I also felt it would make it much harder for me to leave on Friday. JP called. He said he had been thinking about my situation. It was obviously a case of when not if I was leaving now and he just wanted to say I should make that judgement in my own interests. He said I had given a phenomenal amount to the government and the party and I was owed that at least. I should decide how and when to depart, and he would be around to speak up for me whenever that was. He also called Fiona with the same message. I called GH, said I couldn’t believe TB had dropped us in it like that. I don’t think he meant to, but they were all taking his statement as HE didn’t authorise it but someone else – GH or AC – did. I saw Bob Phillis [chief executive, Guardian Media Group] and told him I would be leaving. His view was that it was good for me, a tragedy for TB.

Later came news that Uday and Qusai [Saddam’s sons] were dead. Charles Clarke called. He said you should not leave. There is a lot of respect for you out there, even among the people who attack you, and I think you will regret going. I set off for King’s Cross then off to Retford. Mum looked really bad. She had lost half a stone in the last few weeks and was clearly worrying herself silly about me. I said I’m not losing sleep or losing weight so there’s no need for anyone else to. But she was finding it tough. She said every time she turned on the telly news or the radio, someone was having a dig. She said she wouldn’t be happy till I was out of it. She wouldn’t have that long to wait. TB called from Hong Kong. ‘Well, you dropped a bollock today,’ I said. He said I know, I should never have gone down the plane. Paul Eastham [
Daily Mail
] had said ‘Why did you authorise the leaking of the name?’ And he got provoked.

It was leading the news, a great frenzy unleashed around it. The atmospherics meant it was terrible if anyone ever suggested the name should have been out there. Truth was there was a case for it being said – what WAS Kelly doing talking to journalists? Did he in fact say more? TB said the whole thing felt Dreyfusian. I felt it was a cross between Kafka and Orwell. He couldn’t work out what the public really made of it. It wasn’t good but he felt they would know there was something wrong about the media reporting of it all. He agreed it was impossible for me to resign on Friday now. He felt at the end of the holiday, or around publication of the ISC report, or maybe announce in August, and go at conference because I was still popular in the party.

He intended to go ahead with the public service delivery press conference on Wednesday. He felt it was important the public saw we were still focused on the business of governing. He had spoken to Charles Powell [former adviser to Margaret Thatcher, brother of Jonathan] recently who told him of the day they told Thatcher the Tories had slipped to third in the polls during the Westland helicopter scandal. You just have to keep going. I put him on to Mum and they had a nice little chat. He said people underestimated the toll on families when someone was going through the media mill. She said she had lost half a stone with worry but he was doing a great job and keep going. It cheered her up a bit and she was telling everyone that he’d been talking to her. It was an odd irony that Paul Eastham had inadvertently postponed my departure. Shame I couldn’t let the silly fucker know.

Had a really bad night because Grace was up with asthma and hay fever. Mum seemed better and Dad was looking stronger too but they were both worried about everything. I read some of the papers and now everything was being recalibrated away from the notion that it was inevitable Kelly’s identity would become public, to the sense that anyone who spoke about him to anyone else was effectively responsible for killing him. It was all part of the new hysteria. I did a note setting out the need to reframe the debate by getting people to see events through the eyes of then not now. I talked to Charlie F who said he felt it was very hard for a judge not to be influenced by the one-sided nature of the media debate. He said that even he, after TB’s ridiculous outburst on the plane, assumed it meant that what he was saying was that HE hadn’t authorised leaking the name, but Geoff or I had via a strategy put together without TB’s knowledge.

I was genuinely shocked. I said ‘Christ, Charlie, don’t tell me you actually believe it?’ He said what he knew was that we were losing the PR battle. That was because the media framed the debate the whole time to suit the BBC line. It was also because we had announced the inquiry and then vacated the field, whereas the BBC were at it the whole time. He felt we should be explaining the broader context – Kelly’s fear it would come out, his worry about a cover-up, suicide not something anyone ever imagined would happen. Jonathan said there was no way Tebbit would do that kind of statement. He felt we just had to trust the judge. He felt there was a chance the judge would be getting irritated because it was so obvious what the media were up to.

I was worrying about whether me having told
The Times
that the other papers had the name would become a problem, whether it would be thought to contribute to the outing. I knew I’d done nothing wrong but in the frenzied atmosphere it could so easily be misinterpreted. The BBC briefed that Susan Watts had Kelly on tape and we were able to say we thought that would be good for us because her story had been very different to Gilligan’s even though the BBC spin machine was trying to make out something different.

It was all getting nasty though. Fiona was getting letters saying what’s it like sleeping with a murderer. Liz [Naish, AC’s sister] was getting abusive phone calls. I was getting letters with fake blood on the envelopes. And they wonder why I get angry. I was working on the overall narrative note Catherine Rimmer was co-ordinating. Geoff Hoon visiting Mrs Kelly was the main story. The media were on autopilot, presenting it as her having a go at him over the way the MoD handled him. He called me later and said they had had a really good chat, she was very friendly and very strong. He said she wanted to get a message to me that the way I was being hounded by the press was an outrage. I was really touched by that. I thought again about writing to her but worried about how she would feel about that now the inquiry was on its way. Geoff said he found the meeting really moving. She was friendly, the family was nice and he left feeling a lot better than when he went in. Not that that would remotely be reflected.

In to finish my various notes to send to the Hutton Inquiry. Catherine R had put together a huge folder and was working away. TB called me up to the flat and said he felt pretty chirpy, that apart from the press they had a good trip. He was in two minds about whether I
should go now or a bit later. He was clear it had to be planned properly, and seen to be as much about the nature of the media as about us. He said what the media had managed to do was define me as the epitome of a political culture that they represent and which I had spent my career fighting – distorting, manipulating, lying, spinning control freaks. He felt they had to be challenged on that basis.