The Burden of Power: Countdown to Iraq - The Alastair Campbell Diaries (21 page)

He obviously got straight on to Balls who came on ten minutes later, and we went round the same block. As ever, he was blaming others – notably Peter M [Mandelson, former Cabinet minister] of course, who they always put close to the root of all evil, Milburn, Clarke, Blunkett – for trying to split TB and GB, and we had to close it down. I said they hadn’t done enough to get colleagues in the right place, and to get the politics in the right place. He claimed he tried to call me five times on the day of the
Sun
interview but I was too busy. I said that was bollocks, that I was assiduous in returning phone calls. The problem was GB was in a different place, and actively wanted to be. And his anger was so great that it did have an impact on direction and policy. The TB/GB fault line had hurt us recently on the euro, on the NHS and the tax and spend argument. He realised
that, he also said, ‘To lose your Chancellor is like putting two balls in the back of your own net.’

I had sent JP a digest of some of the press and he was pretty appalled. I filled him in on GB on
Frost
and said I really felt at the moment it wasn’t TB vs GB but very much GB vs TB, that though Tony was pretty fed up with him, he was adamant we did nothing to undermine him and was trying the whole time to get things on a better keel. JP said it was one man’s guilt meeting another man’s betrayal and they had to sort it out themselves. He agreed he would speak to GB on his return and tell him to get his act together, and speak to Alan to tell him to keep his cool. JP said he knew I had my ups and downs with GB but accepted my main interest was the same as his, which was ensuring the third term and if we didn’t stop this nonsense pretty soon, there would be a risk it never happened.

I used the day to take stock re Pakistan [CIC]. It just wasn’t working in the way it should. I felt the structures were right but we were weak on output. At the morning meeting, I skipped over TB/GB and health and instead suggested in briefings we just bulldozed through it. The coverage of
Frost
was predictable enough but we just had to play it down, say GB was just refusing to get into all the personality stuff. We also had a problem re TB’s stuff on the EU average [pledging to raise NHS spending to the EU average by 2005], though as TB said to GB ‘Look, I made a mistake, now let’s talk about how we can get it right.’ I think sometimes GB and his people totally underestimated how many issues TB had to be on top of at any one time, and how infrequently we actually screwed up. But whenever we did, he went on about it as though it had all been planned. Things were looking pretty poor and confused. We needed greater unity and focus on the domestic front, greater unity, purpose and imagination on the international. Alan Milburn was still really pissed off with GB and needed to calm down a bit.

I was feeling tired, feeling that life was yet another problem, yet another meeting, yet another plan to deal with the problem, then on to the next one. I felt like I had been doing it too long. Iraq was still featuring too much in American thinking, they were still going on about December 11 [marking three months since 9/11] and the idea of a major event with national anthems and the full works. I know it affected them more deeply than anyone, but they were in a different place to everyone else on this, and we couldn’t keep having memorial after memorial.

People as varied as Fiona, Pat [McFadden], Sally [Morgan] and [David] Bradshaw were all pointing out that I was bored and looking for something new and different to do. Although I didn’t miss the grind of the briefings at all, and certainly didn’t miss the press, I probably had lost something of my edge by not having that actual need to be on top of everything all the time. The conference call was all about December 11 memorials again and the idea of every country in the world playing national anthems, which I felt was all a bit much, but they were very keen. I went up to see TB in the flat and he said maybe we just had to resign ourselves to GB putting himself in a slightly different place, and operating differently.

A deal was being struck today in Bonn which would be a pretty amazing achievement. We were also getting reports of defections from the Taliban which we agreed on the conference call we should try to push. I had a meeting with [BBC] Radio 5 bosses, feeling we should be doing more with them, rather than everyone thinking the world listens to the wretched
Today
programme and the other Radio 4 news programmes. Fiona and Sally were seeing Yelland but I don’t think either of them really had their hearts in humouring the commentators from the right-wing papers as Anji did. TB did fine at PMQs though IDS was a bit better. TB’s preparations were certainly easier. We got a new poll in showing pretty good figures on the parties, but not great on public services. Paul Marsden [Labour MP] attacked ‘Labour thugs’.
³⁴

There was more and more intelligence suggesting pretty high-level defections around Mullah Omar, including some of his closest people, and also an account of three al-Qaeda advance scouts killed trying to work out an escape route from Afghanistan. GB was in a rage early on because Milburn was going further than agreed on the ‘choice’ argument with his proposals on patients being promised a choice of going to another hospital. Alan was doing a GB-style bounce and then trying to row it back a bit, and probably enjoying giving GB some of his own treatment. I had a session with TB pre Cabinet to make sure he was OK with the general thrust of what I was trying to get sorted re health. Cabinet was mainly a discussion on health
which broadened to the public services more generally, and an update on Afghanistan.

At the War Cabinet, Scarlett was excellent, really clear exposition of what was going on, without being over-optimistic or over-pessimistic. Lander was warning in a rather less relaxed way of real fears of more attacks, including here. Boyce was almost becalmed and though he was nice to him, TB had become a pretty fierce opponent of the service rotating ‘Buggins’ turn’ system of appointment. TB asked him about how something had gone and CDS gave all the reasons why it had been a bad idea and difficult, and a soldier had had his leg blown off yesterday. His worry, not unreasonably, was the idea that you had Brits in one part of Afghanistan killing Taliban, whilst in another we were like a police force. He said it was dangerous, not at all benign. Clare said the Americans didn’t really want troops involved in the humanitarian effort at all. There was a difficult issue looming quickly, re whether Mullah Omar could get amnesty [on condition of renunciation of terrorism and disassociation with al-Qaeda]. The Americans were saying no, whilst we were a bit more equivocal. A difficult one. I had fallen behind with paperwork, hoovered through it. Philip [Gould] and Stan [Greenberg, US pollster] had a new poll. TB doing OK, the Tories absolutely nowhere, public services not as bad as we feared, apart from transport which was a total disaster.

I spoke to TB re counter-terrorism and agreed that we needed to get more political. I got Blunkett to do a letter to IDS asking how he could square his claim that they were shoulder to shoulder with us with the fact that they let their troops go through the lobbies in the Lords to do us in. The general sense re Afghanistan was that it was going pretty well for us, what with the fall of Kandahar, but the press were now looking for us to ‘lose the peace’. The continuing hunt for OBL and confusion over what we would do with Mullah Omar were getting just as much attention.

The conference call was partly how to counter that, also about December 11, whilst I was now pushing for a big hit out of the football match in Kabul, trying to get some names out there to really make it fly.
³⁵
I also made sure the Yanks knew, and that it got through to Bush, of the political problems the Tories were trying to give us.
I was pushing for publication of another al-Qaeda tape that was doing the rounds, which had yet more admissions re September 11. They said it was going to be discussed at a meeting with the president on Monday. I was amazed that something like that went to him. I would have thought it was a middle-ranking handling issue. [Paul] Marsden [anti-war Labour MP] was on an inexorable path to the Lib Dems, which was obviously the best place for him. We had a session with TB and Hilary Armstrong [chief whip] earlier in the week trying to get to a position where there was no fuss when he finally went.

TB was worried that Alan Milburn was beginning to brief against GB as a matter of course. And whilst he understood how angry he was, didn’t think it was sensible. I was pushing the Blunkett counter-terrorism attack on the Tories. Out with Fiona to [
Express
proprietor] Richard Desmond’s party at the Roundhouse [North London performing arts venue]. It was handy enough, though neither of us really wanted to go and in truth were only going because TB couldn’t. It was all a bit over the top, everyone photographed with
OK!
magazine photographers and backdrops. I had a long chat with Jonno Coleman [radio presenter], who was totally on board and who I reckoned we could use in the run-up to the campaign. I was chatting to Ulrika Jonsson [TV presenter] and Melanie Cantor [her agent] and Ulrika was all over me like a rash, which was all very well but Fiona was a few yards away and looking a bit askance. Sven [Göran Eriksson, England football manager] walked in, and I assumed she would know him. I asked her if she had met ‘Britain’s other famous Swede’. She said no, and I got him over and introduced them. He was pretty robotic when the four of us were talking in English, but then the two of them got going in real hurdy-gurdy [Swedish] and he was altogether more animated. Fiona and I were next to the Ronsons [Gerald, businessman, and Gail, charity fund-raiser] at dinner, and we were both surprised by how much we liked them. Gail was really lively, clearly big on family but also seemed to have a real heart. Gerald was totally open, quite interesting about his jail experience,
³⁶
but also quite knowledgeable on the political front, very pro Israel, not keen on politicians generally but liked TB. I had an interesting chat with Tony Ball [BSkyB chief executive] and his absolutely gorgeous wife Gabriela.
He was another one who had a good feel for politics, and thought the TB/GB situation would become a problem for us. Desmond got up on stage. Though clearly a bit of a wide boy, he did have a certain charm and there was clearly part of him that just liked having loads of money to spend on his friends. They had Jim Davidson [Conservative-supporting ‘comic’] as the comedian. Really bad choice. He completely, totally bombed, and deserved to. It was pretty vile and once the grave opened, he couldn’t stop digging. It took Tony Blackburn [veteran disc jockey] of all people to rescue things by getting up and being DJ for the night.

I did next to no work all day. Geoff Hoon had ballsed up on
Frost
when he said that if UK forces landed OBL, we would have to have assurances about the death penalty not being used before handing him over. It shouldn’t have been difficult to have danced around it, and was a case of GH thinking legally rather than politically. TB was exercised about it, and made clear he didn’t want it running as a problem. Of course, if we were too heavy it would become a TB/GH bad scene so we did a gentle ring-round trying to calm it without making it a calming story. I called Dan Bartlett to alert him and he told me the
Washington Post
had revealed, via the CIA he thought, the existence of the new OBL video and said that Bush would decide tomorrow whether to release it or not. I called Trevor Kavanagh, knowing the
Sun
were planning to do Hoon quite big, and gave him the story of OBL boasting about September 11 in the video, and the fact that only one hijacker per plane knew what they were going to be doing when they got on those planes. Blunkett called, a bit worried about the way his ‘debate’ on race was going after he told the
Independent on Sunday
that races had to become more integrated by being more British. These were tricky waters, and I wasn’t sure we were sensible diving into them right now.

The OBL hunt was still going big, the DB race row likewise. The
Sun
splashed on the video and there was continuing coverage about the UK to provide troops for a security force etc. The [Paul] Marsden strategy was going OK. It was becoming a given that he would defect [to the Liberal Democrats], and though there was a fair bit of press coverage about our so-called thugs, people didn’t really buy it as the reason. We had been talking over the weekend of defection as a fait accompli, and when it came, we all felt relief and the pretty certain
knowledge that he would be forgotten within a week. I went up to see TB in the flat. He was totally relaxed re DB and race, felt that David had thought through his position. On Afghanistan, he wanted to get the MoD in the same place as us, then agree with the US a force to go there later and hand over to Muslim troops. Nigel Griffiths was the other story in town, another expenses/fees so-called scandal and TB said get the facts before we make a decision.
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Good meeting with Charles Clarke and David Triesman [Labour Party general secretary]. The party was £8 million in debt. David said he was confident he could get the finances sorted but it would be tough. We also had a good session with TB on membership, message, ideology, etc. TB was encouraging Charles to generate more political and ideological debate. Charles and I both felt we should be making more of the way our media culture damaged debate but TB remained resistant. I went briefly to the
Guardian
[Christmas] party but I really couldn’t be bothered with it and left after a few minutes and went for a run. The football match in Kabul had become my latest obsession. I really wanted it to go big. I was also very keen to push on the OBL video. I thought it was unbelievable that Bush himself would take the decision on that. We had put a lot of planning into tomorrow’s ‘We refuse to forget’ [9/11] event which would get a lift with [Colin] Powell coming through.