The Burden of Power: Countdown to Iraq - The Alastair Campbell Diaries (18 page)

I bumped into the [House of Commons] Foreign Affairs Select Committee who were on an official visit and chatted to some of them. Then back to the White House and over to meet TB. He, Jonathan, DM, Meyer and I went in to see Bush. They did most of the meeting one-on-one. [Retired US general] Wayne Downing [Deputy National Security Advisor for combating terrorism] said to me ‘Ah, you are the infamous Alastair whose name I now see on everything.’ I couldn’t quite work out if he was being friendly or not. Jonathan and I were both talking to Powell to suggest he upped his profile a bit. He didn’t do much to dispel the idea of pretty considerable divisions.

TB and Bush had pretty much done most of the heavy stuff by the time they called us in. They ran through things but in a fairly prosaic way. Bush cracked a joke about not being intelligent enough to meet the head of Pakistani intelligence, but apart from that there was not much of note beyond them both preparing lines for the media event. It went OK but Bush gave a really poor answer on the Middle East. TB by contrast was on form, as Powell told him as he came off. Over dinner, TB came close to being very irritating because he was in his full-on statesman mode, almost lecturing on the lessons from Northern Ireland, the advice he had given to Putin etc. Bush at one point was going on about going after OBL to kill him – ‘I mean bring him to justice.’ On the plane back, TB said he felt Bush had been a lot more focused, had thought more about the future of Afghanistan, relations with Russia. He had not been much impressed by his dealings so far with Europe.

As we landed, Robert Hill called to say Henry McLeish [Scottish First Minister] was about to resign. This was what Peter MacMahon
[McLeish’s spokesman] had called about last night when we were waiting to leave the White House, to say they believed the
Herald
had another story that was about to be a killer blow, which indeed it was.
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I got TB to speak to him and he was very warm. We got in to Number 10. TB was a bit angst-ridden re Anji going. Cabinet was all Afghanistan and with GB at Treasury questions, the mood was a lot better than usual. The CIC was much more into its stride now. King Abdullah [of Jordan] was in for lunch and was pretty sound, privately and in the doorstep afterwards.

As during Kosovo, I was getting annoyed at the sense of moral equivalence [in the media] between what we said, in systems of democracy founded on the duty of politicians to tell the truth, and regimes like Milosevic and the Taliban who felt no such obligations, and yet whose word, even when proven to be false, was often given exactly the same weight. Musharraf came in and while he was talking to TB one-on-one, I had a long session with his finance minister [Shaukat Aziz] and press secretary [General Rashid Qureshi] who said they were supportive of the CIC in Islamabad and would help. The press guy and I were called in to see TB and Musharraf to go over basic arguments to push at the press event, again focusing on moderate vs extreme, and talking up the basic decency of the vast bulk of the Pakistani community in Britain. I was feeling the workload very heavy at the moment, because I was now more plugged into the American side, and had these three centres of operation, all of them producing their own paper flows, bad ideas amid the good, and personnel issues, some of them a screaming pain.

I felt bad at not having gone to Anji’s farewell last night, but it would have been a step too far to have come back from yet another trip and then gone out, to Anji’s farewell in particular. Kate [Garvey, events and visits team] came on in tears, said I was the only one of the old team who hadn’t been there and it was terrible when people fell out. TB’s big media event of the day would be a press conference with [José María] Aznar [Spanish Prime Minister], which would coincide with the news that Mazar-e-Sharif finally was about to fall after what sounded like some pretty heroic stuff from some of our guys out there. I was due to do a foreign press briefing at 12 and wanted to focus again on the unbroadcast Al Jazeera [Bin Laden] video. I got TB, DM and Scarlett
to agree to it and say we would use it to do a revised evidence document. I called Jim Wilkinson just before the briefing, said I was going to do it and he said hold on so he could speak to Karen H. The president had been against it before and that was a real reason not to do it. I said try to get clearance and let me know during the briefing. I left Julian [Braithwaite] outside to wait for the call while I started the briefing, largely on the MEPP discussions and TB’s visits. Julian came in and said go with it provided I don’t mention Al Jazeera, just that it’s a video circulating, so that was fine. But because I did it in the middle of the briefing, it didn’t fly as I hoped.

Before the press conference, TB said to Aznar ‘What do you want me to say on Gibraltar?’ to which I said ‘Don’t answer that.’ Aznar was pretty strong on the war. Also the Dutch were preparing to send troops so I tried to organise the newly arrived Tucker [Eskew] to get some positive US reaction. The [
Evening
]
Standard
splashed on a picture of TB looking a bit tired under the headline ‘Shattered’, which at least communicated how much he had been doing. Geoff H was on the rampage because the
Mirror
had changed the words of an article he had done and totally misrepresented it. I gave the
News of the World
material on the Taliban running out of money and teed up the
Sunday Telegraph
to use the OBL video material to incriminate him more and highlight the stuff about him being genocidal vs the Jews and other races.

By the end of the day, [the capture of] Mazar-e-Sharif was a big story but I went ballistic about [BBC correspondent] Rageh Omaar’s piece, called [Richard] Sambrook saying it was a fucking disgrace, really lost it with him.
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TB was off to Chequers with Aznar. Cheney did his interview with Yelland which they planned to do over five pages. I was home by 8, tired, but feeling things were moving our way a bit.

The main story was Mazar and an interview from OBL claiming he had nukes, but the best line from our perspective, which we got running in the US and Pakistan straight away, was the line that it was OK to kill thirteen-year-olds, and also that Afghanistan was the only truly Islamic country. One of the lines we had been trying to get up was that their basic desire was to ‘Talibanise’ every country, and this allowed us to do that. TB was due at the [Labour Party] National
Policy Forum and we agreed he should do a clip on that part of the interview, try to isolate OBL from more reasonable governments and opinions. I did a [Foreign Office] telegram to all posts saying they should generate reaction. TB said he felt for the first time things moving our way a bit, and the Americans deploying a strategy.

The White House/State problems had flared up a bit in the open, Karen Hughes reacting very angrily to an interview by Charlotte Beers in which she had spoken about Bush as a ‘product’. We were still having trouble getting things off the ground in Pakistan. The Pakistanis were still asking for delay. I wasn’t feeling terribly focused today, but a combination of Mazar, military momentum, and OBL’s own remarks being used against him had us in a far better place. I managed a few hours off whereas TB, as well as the NPF, also had an Armistice event.

The
Sunday Telegraph
splashed on the OBL [Al Jazeera interview] words ‘Yes I did it’ which helped push it on into Sunday. I also had to get involved with the
Mail on Sunday
chasing Alastair Irvine.
²⁴
Derry [Irvine, Lord Chancellor] had spoken to the paper and they were splashing on his words and that was that. I said to Derry, why didn’t you phone me? He sounded very down. ‘Don’t persecute me, this is bad enough already.’ Alison [Derry Irvine’s wife] was very low, obviously because of Alastair and also because of all the coverage about them around the time of Donald’s death [Donald Dewar, First Minister of Scotland and former husband of Alison Irvine]. ‘I think we pay a heavy price for being in power. I sometimes wonder what is the point of being in power when we are powerless to do anything about the evil that the press bring into the lives of our families. When I say evil, I mean evil. They are Satan’s people on earth, no compassion, no decency at all.’ We agreed a tough line about this being despicable and their attempts to pretend it was a story about drugs policy as being utterly transparent. We had done an article for the
Mail on Sunday
by TB and I called them to pull it, saying I didn’t want to see his name on an article that they would use to give credibility to a rag I viewed as being total scum.

There appeared to be a bit of difference opening up. Bush saying to the Northern Alliance not to take Kabul, Hoon in the
Sunday Times
saying we were moving on to Kabul. I spent a lot of the day helping Derry
deal with the press trying to do stuff on Alastair. He called me at 8 to go over the letter he wanted to send to [Lord John] Wakeham [Press Complaints Commission chairman], who coincidentally was on
Frost
attacking a judge’s decision to gag the
People
about a footballer’s sex life. TB’s basic take was that they were scum, but we had to deal with them, and he wasn’t convinced that meant through legislation. Derry said he strongly believed there should be a privacy law and the requirement in law to strive for accuracy. He believed, and I shared his view, that they now actually do damage to the standing and reputation of the country, because serious people think there is something odd and a bit disturbing about a country with a press like ours. GH did
The World this Weekend
[BBC Radio 4] and said we had UK forces on the ground, which was bound to go big and would raise questions about why they were only mentioned now. I spent some time working on a letter to Sambrook. Catherine Rimmer and Chris McShane [Number 10 Research and Information Unit] had done some excellent work showing where specific reports broke their own guidelines. TB called after the Cenotaph, said he was surprised to see IDS wearing his medals. The Royals had been very friendly, especially the Queen Mum.

The news had turned right round because of Mazar-e-Sharif and there was a real impression of there being a strategy unfolding so there was a much better mood around the place. OBL saying Afghanistan was the only truly Islamic nation opened up a whole host of opportunities and we brainstormed on how to make sure it struck right round the Muslim world. At TB’s office meeting, we tried to stay focused on the domestic and public services in particular. He was worrying that departments were slowing and slacking a bit whereas now, with so much media focus on the international, it was the time really to be driving forward. I sometimes wondered whether we weren’t victims of what might be defined as success. For example, TB wanted a more centralised system, or at least one where Number 10 could pull levers more effectively in departments. But did it mean that when we weren’t focusing so much, they were waiting for the levers to be pulled? Don’t know. Also, had we to some extent been responsible for some ministers thinking things only mattered if there was profile attached to them? Again, not sure.

TB was also worried that Anji’s departure would leave gaps – she did give him a particular Middle England kind of view, and she was particularly good at schmoozing those people that Jonathan and I didn’t have much to do with, particularly some of the right-wing
opinion formers. RW came to see me to say he was really angry at the dreadful press he was getting. I said I hadn’t really noticed it. He said it was worse than anything I ever got. I said don’t be ridiculous, I’ve been savaged so many times in the press I’ve given up even noticing. He said beneath the nastiness in the headlines, they sort of acknowledged I was brilliant whereas with him, they just wrote him off. I said this is what they do, try to undermine anyone who is doing a good professional job because they want to render us illegitimate. Papers like the
Mail
felt it was wrong for anyone to serve a Labour government. They had done it to Guthrie, and they will do it to him because he is doing a perfectly good job and he shouldn’t let it get to him. I had to do the eleven o’clock because both Godric and Tom were late in. It went fine, and the main focus was the advance of the Northern Alliance and I got up the idea of Taliban morale crumbling. Vajpayee was in for lunch, mainly the two of them, then a doorstep.

As we began the 2.30 conference call a plane was crashing in Queens, New York, and it appeared to be on our television before theirs.
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I could hear Mary Matalin calling James [Carville] to turn on the TV. But actually, considering, they were pretty calm and we discussed Ramadan and also how to build up the women’s events we were planning. TB spoke to GWB around 4, reviewed military strategy, discussed Ramadan and how to use an evidence document. I called George Robertson and said Mark Laity was maybe too senior and was becoming a bit of a problem for some of the guys over there. I asked for someone more junior. Tucker [Eskew] was making a difference, hard-working, supportive, he seemed to be able to make things happen pretty well. I really wanted us to get up a humanitarian story now though, so it wasn’t just about dropping bombs and fighting. The New York plane crash was pretty huge. Ari Fleischer was doing fine on it, but not a nice thing to have to deal with. The general feeling was that it was an accident but who knows?

I woke to the news that Kabul had fallen, with John Simpson [BBC world affairs editor] seeming to claim that he had liberated it.
²⁶
All
the armchair generals now moved on from saying the military strategy hadn’t worked to saying that we had fucked up the diplomatic channels. And that was what was worrying TB when I got in. He looked tired, had not slept much. I told him that GB was meeting all the church leaders downstairs and he just rolled his eyes. TB called a meeting of the inner War Cabinet. CDS was still pretty gloomy though he did at least have detailed plans for going in. TB wanted ideas on how the military plan should now be taken forward and extended and how we get the diplomatic channels moving faster. He also wanted specific ideas on the humanitarian side of things and he wanted to put forward military, political/diplomatic and the humanitarian plans to Bush by lunchtime. He wasn’t sure they would listen but he said this was the time to build out with a real plan of action. I saw the Scottish group of [Labour] MPs where Tam Dalyell went off on one re TB being presidential and I really got stuck in. There were amazing pictures from Kabul, and now it was on to Kandahar and also get in a better position on the humanitarian front. Burnley beat Watford 1–0.