The Burden of Power: Countdown to Iraq - The Alastair Campbell Diaries (34 page)

The speech was just about finished. Felt a bit flat and uninspiring, though it was OK for the job of getting up investment and reform again. We signed it off on the flight up to Perth. Nice hotel, but he was in real witter mode re what the line was, and did we have the argument right? The
Record
ran a quote from TB saying ‘If the unions want a fight, they can have one’, which he never said. I asked for, and got, a correction and apology. They said it was a ‘production error’! TB finally spoke to GB who was livid at what we had done re NHS Day. He argued that it was totally counter to HIS strategy. Even by their standards, it was a grim conversation. Basically, so far as GB was concerned, TB was only the PM and he should not be talking about tax, NHS spending, any spending really.

We did a visit to a science company and then to the conference. TB tried to ad lib but it didn’t really work. In his peroration he talked about winning a third term and how we should dominate the next hundred years like the Tories did the last hundred, so most of them had a headline out of that. It was probably a mistake. We flew back, I did a box in the car then out to Rachel’s [Kinnock] for dinner. My lot were late but Neil and Glenys were there, and I had a chat with Neil re TB/GB. TB had been down on GB today, said he was currently impossible; that the way he tried to present the [EU] Stability Pact as a public spending defence of our schools and hospitals was ‘pathetic’. Neil agreed, also said he noticed how TB always talked up GB but it was never reciprocated. Both he and Glenys were also incredulous that [Paul] Dacre had been at the funeral of the baby.

We went to see
The Lion King
[Disney stage musical]. Halfway through the play Anne Shevas texted me to say the
Sunday Times
were splashing on ‘Sixsmith not resigned’ and they had a massive write-through, clearly well briefed from the Sixsmith perspective. I went out at the interval, spoke to Anne then to Mottram, said there had to be a statement out from him making clear Sixsmith resigned TO HIM on the Friday. It was ridiculous that so much time and energy was going into this. He couldn’t possibly stay as a departmental spokesman after all this. It was clearly going to be the start of another great blah but we just had to get through it.

TB called, said the Sixsmith stuff looked like a spin doctor using spin to complain about spin. He felt we should stay out of it. I called RW
to say he should get Mottram to deal with it. Mittal was still running too. We had lost the agenda again to a heap of crap. I briefed Helen Liddell [Scottish Secretary] who was on the media rounds, to be totally dismissive of the lot of it. I spoke to Byers before his [Jonathan]
Dimbleby
[ITV] interview to make sure we were saying the same thing. During it he appeared to suggest he had no role in personnel issues and denied he had blocked a deal to allow Sixsmith to get another job. That wasn’t a hundred per cent true and would cause us real problems. Godric and Tom were dealing with the lobby on it, but the media were determined to see Sixsmith as a creature of probity and honesty and anyone who disagreed with him was a liar. Godric was in a total rage about it. Byers called me a couple of times for reassurance. It was difficult now, he having suggested he had no say in whether a deal could be done to move Sixsmith to another department.

TB called me early re Byers’ statement he had nothing to do with personnel, and Sixsmith’s position. ‘Isn’t this a bit of a problem?’ Both he and RW said it was simply untrue. TB felt the only person who could put this right was Mottram and he would speak to RW to get Mottram to put out a statement. Mottram was reluctant but agreed and set to work on a draft. TB had now reached a judgement there was a problem at the top of the department, ministerial and civil servant. He was clearly moving to the view Byers would have to go. I still felt he had been victim not villain. He had been done in by civil servants operating from within, and screwed up his handling of it.

At the morning meeting I just skipped through the Sixsmith situation, didn’t allow discussion, though Ian Austin couldn’t resist a dig at [Ian] Jones over Mottram’s ‘We’re all fucked’ line in the
Sunday Times
.
¹⁶
Phil Bassett [Number 10 Research and Information Unit] made a crack about Sixsmith’s homes, and within hours something was running on PA, friends of Sixsmith saying he was being smeared over his ‘property portfolio’. Sixsmith was meanwhile doing little photocalls with ‘Liar Byers’ headlines draped over his arm as he went home carrying a pack of bacon.

TB and I had lunch with the
Express
lot. TB was really motoring on crime. [Richard] Desmond was indicating he wanted more favourable coverage of the NHS. TB said to me afterwards I had to do
better in curbing my contempt for the media. He said it was hard to charm them when your main press man sat there radiating a clear desire to wipe them off the face of the earth. I got back to the office to see the Mottram letter which needed strengthening. As drafted, it made matters worse for Byers. He needed to be clear that Sixsmith had agreed to go in the meeting last week, and also something that left open the possibility that Sixsmith was negotiating with Mottram and so Byers could not actually veto a deal any more than he could deliver one. This was clearly the point of vulnerability though. RW got the Mottram letter strengthened, removed some of the earlier ambiguity. TB agreed it could go, but I could tell he was mulling over whether SB could or should survive. He had failed to grip the department. He had failed to pin down events on Friday. True, he was only dealing with a difficult situation because people who were supposed to be working for him had created the difficulties, but TB felt the basic failure to grip the department was the problem. Steve was clearly worried, raised the situation with me several times through the day and all I could say was that his statement yesterday was the most difficult thing. I was now getting anonymous text messages saying things like ‘You’re losing 8–0.’ The press was also in total kill mode and though things seemed relatively calm when I left for home around half seven, I still had very bad vibes. Martin Sheehan had taped my call with Sixsmith but the tape was wiped, so I asked for a note as detailed as possible. TB was the usual mix of exasperation, irritation and determination. He had had dinner with JP and GB last night and said it went well, though I would believe any progress when I saw it.

Papers grim. The
FT
had been briefed that Byers did indeed block the deal and Sixsmith was about to do the rounds playing the victim. TB called at 7.15 and said ‘How difficult is this?’ I said very, but if SB went it would be totally unfair because he had been done in from within. What was also clear was that there would be some who would try to move on to me/Jonathan straight away. The problem was it was not possible to square what Steve said on
Dimbleby
re not being involved. It was a big problem. TB was clearly thinking he should go. Sally, Jonathan and I were pushing hard for SB, and Peter [Hyman] was manic about it, saying he had only been put in the position he was in because he was done in from inside.

TB took a long meeting where everyone, including Jeremy, Tom and Godric, agreed it was unfair for Steve to go but TB kept saying
he could not answer the question about how he came to say something that was not true. Steve called and I suggested the only way round this was for him to apologise for giving the impression he did. RW came in for the end of the meeting pushing for Steve to go. Also both Charlie [Falconer, former Solicitor General, now housing minister] and Derry [Irvine] had been sent the papers and transcripts and both called me to say they thought he would have to go. I still felt if he apologised, possibly in the House, and we went on the offensive against the internal operation against him, we could get through it provided the PLP remained supportive. As Jonathan said, we were going to have to throw him into the gladiators’ ring and see if he survived. It was not the best way to deal with it, but there was a reluctance to toss him overboard given the background.

We watched him do the statement in the Commons and as Peter Kilfoyle, Tam Dalyell [senior Labour backbenchers] and others got up to back him, there was at last the feeling that we could fight back. The main thing was that SB was thought by MPs to have done well. I was impressed by his Zen-like qualities today. He didn’t panic. It could so easily have gone the other way. TB was just about OK with the way things went, but clearly felt there was something odd, which of course there was, about the
Dimbleby
interview. What was clear was that without today’s statement, TB could not have got through PMQs tomorrow defending what Byers said on Sunday. We had to get back on the big picture pretty soon.

TB called and I said though the press were in full cry, the party was fine and the issue was subsiding. TB was still worried about forensic questioning. The key problem remained why Byers said what he did and the extent of his or his office’s involvement. If IDS did a proper forensic six-question job, it would be difficult. In the end he didn’t and he was as hopeless as Theresa May [Shadow Transport Secretary]. Andy Grice got hold of Sixsmith’s 18,000-word dossier but people were bored with it now.
¹⁷
One or two said it would only fly if they could somehow move it towards me. TB had said at PMQs that the hunting [ban] vote would happen shortly, which led the BBC
Ten O’Clock News
. Inevitable suspicion that we put it out because we wanted a diversion. Would that we were that well organised.

TB did OK out of yesterday but though the mood was calmer, you could still feel the anger in the media. Loads more pieces on me, notably a big one in the
Mail
about my so-called army of spin doctors. TB was doing an interview for ABC in the States, very forward on Iraq and pro GWB. He had decided that was the best position to adopt to gain influence. At Cabinet, he said it was important to emphasise that nothing re Iraq was planned and that we were a long way off taking decisions. Blunkett referred to the unsettling speculation and said a lot of people had difficulties with Rumsfeld. TB said Bush was in charge, not Rumsfeld, and David said, to some laughter, ‘That’s mildly reassuring.’ There was a lot of support for Byers. TB said there were two agendas, the policy agenda we were trying to address and a media-only interest in the scandal and sensation, with the Tories preferring that agenda as a way of avoiding questions about policy. They had been on a tour of Europe to look at public services and come back with no great insights.

Byers said he was grateful for the support of colleagues, said the PLP had been superb. Also, we shouldn’t forget there were a lot of dedicated, hard-working civil servants. John Reid said the media will want revenge. What was interesting about most contributions, e.g. Margaret [Beckett, Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs], was that the press and media were as much the Opposition as the Tories. This had been a media-driven frenzy, with the Tories playing shotgun. TB said we were more spinned against than spinning. They cannot find a full frontal policy assault so this is the substitute for it. It makes it all the more important to stay on a proper policy agenda. DB said the role of special advisers had to be properly understood and defended. He said at the Home Office there were serial leakers. Without his SpAds, he wouldn’t have got a White Paper finished. He said he was lucky to have good press secretary who got on with the SpAds but it wasn’t the same story everywhere.

The Peter M situation was also back with us. I ran a line past him re our response to the second Hammond report.
¹⁸
It didn’t go far enough for him. He said why can’t you just be honest and straightforward and say that if we had known everything then that we know
now, he wouldn’t have left his job. I said we couldn’t have a situation where we were saying TB got it wrong. He said we could say we all got into a muddle. He was calm but firm, said he wasn’t prepared to haggle or beg for us to do the decent thing. TB spoke to him later and said that 1. he didn’t believe the new papers necessarily helped him because they showed he had been more involved not less, and 2. he didn’t accept he did the wrong thing because Peter had misled us and therefore allowed us to mislead the public.

We had an office meeting about how to frame this and TB redrafted the statement to take it closer to what Peter M wanted, namely that things, including his resignation, could have been different. The other problem, as Peter Hyman pointed out, was the clear contrast to draw between Peter M being sacked when we were saying he hadn’t lied, and Byers not being sacked when people were saying that he had. I left early for Rory’s parents evening then afterwards to [outgoing
Times
editor] Peter Stothard’s party where GB was pretty much monopolising the new editor [Robert Thomson]. I had a nice chat with Ken Baker [former Conservative Cabinet minister], who advised me to get out at least a year before TB.

The Peter M report, Hammond Mark 2, was the main political story and we bent over backwards to be nice about Peter, to the extent that the story effectively became TB apologising for him being sacked. I felt sorry for him. The reality was if it had been another minister, he or she probably wouldn’t have paid with their job. Also, though we could present it in the way we did, it wasn’t the case that the report fully exonerated him.

TB was phoning fairly regularly from CHOGM [Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Australia] and was pretty fed up – first, because it was raining and second, because they just weren’t serious about dealing with Zimbabwe [impending presidential election]. It was coming over as black vs white. He said he was thinking a lot about the press. No to jihad, yes to a tougher stance. But the note he sent through was the usual mix of pandering and using different groups of people to deal with them. I was a bit alarmed by it. We needed a big message that blasted through to the public. Calum and I set off for Burnley vs Norwich, crap match [1–1]. Home by half nine. The
Sunday Times
had another 4,000 words of Sixsmith, used as ‘evidence’ that Byers had misled the Commons. IDS weighed
in re TB, me and trust. Not good. The
Mail on Sunday
did a big number on pictures of nude women allegedly inside TB’s cuff on his shirt.
¹⁹