The Burden of Power: Countdown to Iraq - The Alastair Campbell Diaries (28 page)

To the Goulds’ for dinner. Gail [Rebuck, publisher and wife of Philip Gould] asked whether Philip and I had ever had a discussion that did not cover TB, GB, Peter M and their varying relationships. The answer is probably not, at least none that lasted more than a minute or two.

In for the
Frost
interview, chatting to TB on the way, but we lacked a real hard story and I felt we were tired in our communications. Partly it was because [Sir] David Frost [interviewer] didn’t really push him hard, but also both of us lacked the energy that we used to put into this sort of thing automatically. I felt that I was playing the old tunes but to a lesser effect. TB felt it was just that the press were in the mood to give no quarter.

The papers were dire and TB wanted to go on a blitz. I said I was not so sure, felt they would just say it looked like panic and this was maybe one of those periods we just had to take. What was clear was we needed to fight back better on public services. I called Piers Morgan who said to me that the
Mirror
was ‘no longer a Labour paper’, which not long ago would have been a big statement that would have made real waves. He also argued that we ought to raise income tax. I pointed out that we had made clear in the manifesto that we wouldn’t. ‘Nobody will mind if you break a promise like that.’

I had dinner with Blunkett at Simply Nico [Westminster restaurant]. He made pretty clear he felt he should be the next Chancellor. He said TB should stay as long as possible, and he should stay at home more. He felt both TB and I should do more to talk up the rest of the Cabinet. He understood why we had to keep GB sweet, but he doubted he was ever going to change, whereas the rest of them by and large responded well to being treated well. He was very down on his department. Something had to be done, he said, about the quality of people going into the Civil Service, because a lot of them were absolutely useless. He was very onside with TB but worried about the
impact of the clear decision made by most of the media to turn against him. Someone in his constituency had said that if TB found a cure for cancer, the press would all ask why has Blair done nothing for meningitis? I put to him TB’s notion that what the press were reflecting was that the public wanted to see us tested and survive, but he shared my view that public opinion was bound to be affected by the incessant media denigration.

David also said Jack was totally obsessed with the idea that he was dumping on him when in fact he was just putting through necessary policy changes. We had a nice evening, and David was reasonably relaxed for him, but it was sometimes worrying how much of the talk focused on the personal divisions. I had also noticed this morning that Charles [Clarke] had gone from being very engaged to being really pissed off quite quickly. TB had noticed the same thing and took him aside afterwards. Charles was feeling he just had a party management job without a real say in the politics. We clearly needed to involve him more.

There was growing disquiet about the Americans’ treatment of al-Qaeda/Taliban ‘prisoners’ and Tom’s eleven o’clock was pretty grim on the subject. I chatted to a number of commentators like Polly Toynbee, David Aaronovitch [
Independent
], Alice Miles [
Times
] trying to engage them in argument about defending the NHS. We were lacking strategy at the moment but we were also lacking freshness. The same people were coming up with the same solutions to the same old problems. Milburn was doing well today on his NHS reform stuff, and how to deal with failing hospitals. Dobbo [Frank Dobson, Milburn’s predecessor] looked pretty bitter in his attack. TB felt basic message and policies were right but the media mood had changed again and we had to just think through how to deal with that.

The Rumsfeld interview last night was giving us problems because he basically made clear he couldn’t care less about the condition of al-Qaeda/Taliban people in Cuba [Guantanamo Bay].
³
I wasn’t sure whether this was a problem or not as a general issue, but I was pretty sure talking about it the way Rumsfeld did was not sensible. On the
conference call, I was asking whether it wasn’t possible to give a proper explanation of real conditions there, but Torie Clarke pointed out the questions they were getting were why any money was being wasted on these people at all. The story out of the PLP meeting was lots of critics rounding on TB and it was also clear the media were desperate to give IDS a lift to even things up a bit. I also felt, e.g. at PMQs meetings, that we lacked the obvious themes that tended to be clear when we were strategically strong. TB did OK on Guantanamo, but IDS had enough good lines for the press to give him the write-up they wanted to.

TB said afterwards he knew he hadn’t been brilliant but he said he wasn’t yet ready to go for IDS big time, that he wanted to wait and be sure he was going on the right line of attack. I was probably a bit harsh on him but felt he had been complacent. We weren’t motoring at the moment. I felt I hadn’t yet knitted together the various parts of the communications operation. We had been going through a bad phase and it was bound to show up in the polls soon. People were making comparisons with the Tories in their second term but there were big differences – the Tories basically had a supportive press, their people were less prone to panic and more up for a fight.

The mood in the media was now pretty nasty. TB told Cabinet that while it was difficult, it gave us the opportunity to get up definition for reform. There were a number of interesting contributions, not least JP, who made clear that if we pushed too far on private sector involvement in health, we wouldn’t be able to take the party with us. TB did at least steady nerves a bit. People were asking for a core script and I was clearly going to have to get back to doing the weekly strategy notes.
⁴
Charles Clarke felt he was being blamed for the lack of coherent strategy, but it was largely my fault, because I had been so demotivated. DB raised the need to stage prison pay. TB was emphasising that we were not going to improve public services without real change. We should be pointing to education as the area where reforms had most obviously yielded benefits. But in health now, virtually every indicator was moving in the right direction. So do not be apologetic or defensive.

There was a comic moment when TB started a sentence: ‘If JP had come to me in ’97 and said renationalise the railways, it would have been a short conversation.’ ‘It was a short conversation,’ JP interrupted.
Byers pointed out, and he was right, that since September 11 we had lost political definition on the domestic agenda. But it doesn’t mean we don’t have the right arguments. Jack said we were caught in a spiral of rising expectations. People’s point of reference was not always their own experience but the national media. TB said that post ’97 we were perceived to be on a massive burst of activity but actually to a large extent we were feeling our way. He felt that this term we had a clearer agenda and we just had to stick to it. Ed Balls called and later came to see me. He said GB had been pretty badly affected but was intending to come back to London next Monday.

We were still getting hit on Guantanamo with the ICRC [International Committee of the Red Cross] going today, and a UK team, including spooks, going tomorrow. I was frankly taken aback at the scale of the media opposition there seemed to be. On the conference call, Torie [Clarke] said it was time to get some steel in our spines re Cuba. We won the PCC case re Euan/Oxford, but Neil Wallis [editor, the
People
] told me a lot of key people at the PCC weren’t happy.
⁵
The
Mail
were really gunning for CB at the moment and TB was worried about it, felt they were trying to do her in on a grand scale. I had a meeting with Byers, Jo Moore, Darren Murphy [Milburn’s special adviser] and Sian Jarvis [head of communications, Health Department] re Tuesday’s debate and the idea of a Byers/Milburn briefing for Monday showing the modernisers were still in charge. Byers was taking a hit at the moment but Milburn’s stock was still high. I had a long chat with Mark Malloch-Brown [United Nations Development Programme] to try to co-ordinate Tokyo [Afghanistan reconstruction summit].

[Rupert] Murdoch [head of News Corp] was coming in for dinner, and along with Les Hinton [News International executive chairman] brought James and Lachlan [Murdoch’s sons]. They arrived a bit early, and I took Murdoch upstairs because TB wanted fifteen minutes with him, then entertained the others in my office before we went up. I was interested to see how Murdoch related to his kids. Lachlan seemed a bit shy of expressing his views whereas James was anything but. Murdoch was at one point putting the traditional very right-wing view on Israel and the Middle East peace process and James said that he was ‘talking fucking nonsense’. Murdoch said he didn’t see what the Palestinians’ problem was and James said it was that they were kicked out of their fucking homes and had nowhere to fucking live. Murdoch
was very pro Israel, very pro Reagan. He finally said to James that he didn’t think he should talk like that in the prime minister’s house and James got very apologetic with TB who said not to worry, I hear far worse all the time. Most of the discussion was a run round the main foreign policy blocks, Israel, Saudi, Iran, Indo-Pak, a little bit of why does Britain have to bother so much? We didn’t get into Europe at all, which was a bit of a waste. TB said afterwards he was quite impressed with the way Murdoch let his sons do so much of the talking. Murdoch pointed out that his were the only papers that gave us support when the going got tough. ‘I’ve noticed,’ said TB. I gave them my culture-of-denigration argument and was probably a bit over the top but I felt frustrated that we had to pander so much.

I took the morning off to go on Grace’s school trip to a museum, which was a real reminder that it’s not just people in jobs like ours that live in permanent stress. God knows how teachers do it. The kids were a handful, albeit very good fun. The teachers at least had a laugh when a teacher from one of the other schools at the museum pointed over to me and said ‘That teacher is the spitting image of Alastair Campbell.’ I did the conference call, after which the news moved on with a number of al-Qaeda related arrests in the UK [eight suspects had been arrested in Leicester].

I took the boys to play football in Regent’s Park, and TB called, emphasising again we just had to keep going because we had the right arguments and the right policies. But media-wise we had the
Mirror
/
Guardian
on one end of the spectrum doing us in from the left and the
Mail
/
Telegraph
doing us in from the right, and we weren’t very good at fighting back. The
Mail on Sunday
had a Pentagon picture from Guantanamo Bay which they put beneath the headline ‘Torture’. The issue had been bubbling up for days now and I suspected this could be the tipping point. Our problem was the Americans didn’t seem to get how bad it was for them. We were in danger of losing the moral high ground, though of course they didn’t seem to see it like that. They only ever looked at the US audience, which was a big mistake.

Dad had another turn, and broke his shoulder falling, so I set off with Grace. I asked Tom Kelly to stay on top of the Guantanamo situation as best he could. Sebastian Wood [UK Embassy, Washington]
and his security service people were only there yesterday and only able to do interviews today, so it was going to be tricky. Tom called me on the train, said Jack S wanted to put out a statement calling on the US to clarify. I said to Tom to get TB to speak to him. They spoke, then Jack called me saying TB had agreed to him putting out a statement. I was a bit dubious but didn’t think it was worth a great fight and instead toned it down a bit, taking out any reference to TB having raised it with GWB.

Jack said that Colin Powell had said to him on an open line from Kathmandu that he was beside himself at the way Rumsfeld and the Department of Defense were handling the issue because it was giving him so many knock-on problems. The statement went out and needless to say within minutes it was US–UK rift. TB denied to me that he had given JS the go-ahead to put it out. Jack said it was important because it was right in principle to push for the basic human rights of any UK citizens to be protected, and we had to watch out for TB being made to look weak by being complicit through neglect in bad things the Americans did. Tom did a ring-round of the lobby and managed to lower the heat on it.

Dad was a lot less sure on his feet than before and Grace a bit taken aback by how much weaker he was, but he was pleased we went up. Grace was playing cards with Mum and when Dad fell asleep in his chair, I sat down and worked through a response to TB’s note re strategy, which I felt was a bit tired and weak. I set out a note based on four phases, Opposition/term one/term two/legacy; taking the same fundamentals to all – economy, society, public services, international – but trying to revive each for the different phases. I also felt TB’s language was becoming a bit distant again.

Guantanamo was running big and bad, and we were not in shape to deal with it. At the TB office meeting, we were discussing his strategy paper and my response to it. It was the first one with Charles C present, one of the responses to his pissed-off mood last week, but he was constantly putting up objections to things being done, saying why things couldn’t happen, e.g. lack of resources, or we didn’t have an agreed core script or strategy, or ministers would not let him perform the cross-cutting role we asked him to do. He was slowly moving into my area too which funnily enough didn’t bother me too much because I was conscious of not doing the job as well as I should be at the moment, and also I’d felt since he got the job that if I raised my game a bit Charles and I could do a good double act on the
media. It was clear TB was talking to Peter M more and not happy with me that we had not filled the post-Anji gap re taking care of the right-wing media.