The Burden of Power: Countdown to Iraq - The Alastair Campbell Diaries (40 page)

The Budget was reasonably well set up but the dominant story was clearly going to be tax for a better health service. TB was clearly a bit nervous, said we were doing something very few people in politics ever did successfully, openly advocating tax rises. I felt it could be the thing that gave us the definition we needed. At Cabinet, GB did a very good presentation. TB looked really tired and a bit out of it. Jack slipped me a note saying he thought TB looked ghastly and we needed to get him in better shape before this afternoon. GB did his usual mix of big message and factual rat-tat-tat. On the big message, what I liked about it was it was all the same arguments coming through, and the spending figures were fine.

TB said it was a crucial moment for the government. There were three things to get across. Strong economy the basis of everything we do. Continuing determination to get people off benefit and into work. Strong economy plus more people in work means more investment in public services. He said that there should now be a critical argument on the NHS. The issue is not whether we spend more but how. We have to win the argument that our system is better and more efficient than the French or German social insurance systems or the
Americans’ way of doing things. This issue about whether more money in this way delivers better services will dominate this parliament. There was an odd moment in GB’s summing-up when he referred to the NHS campaign and said ‘I think’ it’s called ‘Yes to the NHS’, as though it had nothing to do with him. But he did a good job, and it went down well with colleagues.

TB was on great form at PMQs, GB did well, IDS was crap. The immediate business reaction wasn’t great. The PLP was fine. A lot of the vox pops of families were positive, though there was quite a lot of ‘broken promises’ re tax. I did a ring-round and certainly they saw it as pretty epoch-making that we were openly going for a tax rise as the top line. We had a strategy meeting, TB plus the internal team. He agreed finally to appear at select committees and agreed also that we should move to cut down on briefings. I was arguing for a real shake-up in the way we communicated. Peter M felt we needed to change things gradually, both in terms of policy substance and presentation, a lot of it just do unannounced and build towards people realising that there was such a thing as New New Labour developing.

Press as expected. The
Mail
a total parody. The
Sun
grim,
Guardian
OK,
Mirror
not great. GB came over at 9.15 to leave for a visit with TB, complaining that there was not enough reform in Milburn’s follow-through statement. TB said that the thing to watch was people thinking this is a return to Old Labour. GB up in arms. ‘God almighty, you can’t say we didn’t deliver on the message yesterday.’ ‘No, but . . . ?’ The line was running a bit that it was an own goal because as the NHS was such a huge employer, the NICs [National Insurance contributions] rise would have a disproportionate impact there. The press were pretty determined to make the general Budget story a problem for us, but the Tories were hopeless. TB told Cabinet that as he saw it, the two big areas for us in the next phase were health and dealing with antisocial behaviour. Reform was every bit as important as money. He said if we can’t feel confident about these arguments, we don’t deserve to be in business.

As GB arrived, TB said it was a brilliant Budget, brilliantly delivered and these arguments would dominate politics for some time. DB said we again had the opportunity to emphasise values, our belief in mutuality, the belief that we have obligations to others. TB felt the media could have been worse and on the TB/GB stuff, building up GB at his expense, he said to us it didn’t matter, they are going to do that. He felt the public took the view that GB was good at what he
did but they also wanted me here checking him. He also felt it was good to have a range of big figures around the place.

Sally [Morgan] and I went to see TB to say we were worried, that he looked ill, wan and grey. He said he was tired, feeling stressed and more than usually discombobulated re GB. I was working on a letter to the PCC, Clare Sumner having worked out what happened. It was clear that in her dealings with Black Rod
²⁸
[Lieutenant General Sir Michael Willcocks] she had set out what she thought the guidance for the PM and the government was, and Black Rod had taken that as us complaining about it, which was then passed on in distorted form. Black Rod was clearly tricky. Both Clare and Simon Virley were adamant they had done nothing more than get clarification on what TB was meant to do.
²⁹

Business was attacking the Budget a lot now, and when TB did a round of TV interviews there was a lot of stuff about trust, whether we should have been more up front at the election that we would need to raise taxes. The
Mirror
led on Sven’s [Göran Eriksson] affair with Ulrika [Jonsson], which was truly gobsmacking for all sorts of reasons. I told a few people in the office that I had introduced them [
see December 8, 2001
] and not long after Tom Baldwin [
Times
] called to ask if it was true. I had told only a handful of people so it was extraordinary that he knew. I stalled and spoke to Melanie Cantor [Ulrika’s agent] who confirmed that the [Richard] Desmond party was the first time they met, when I had been talking to Ulrika. She said it was amazing but true. The
News of the World
was going to do something and the
Mirror
was basically a spoiler, her role having been essentially just not denying it. She said she had been amazed when Sven called her for Ulrika’s number. The dreadful thing was that the FA was pressing him to put out a statement, but it seemed Nancy [Dell’Olio, Eriksson’s partner] hadn’t known. I just could not fathom who would have told Baldwin. I tried really hard to work out who told him, but he was giving away nothing. The only
person I had phoned on seeing the
Mirror
was Fiona, so it must have been one of the handful of people in the office.

I spent part of the day finishing the letter to the PCC. I had sensed from the earlier conversations with Clare that maybe Black Rod was playing games here. She called him again and had the exact same feeling. He told Clare he felt we were just keeping it going, that it was a mistake, and he clearly didn’t want it to go to the PCC. As far as TB was concerned, even if someone had said it, it was one hundred per cent wrong and if the PCC couldn’t deal with something like this, what on earth was it for? I also had another chat with TB re Gordon. He felt there was a real problem of temperament. He felt it may just be the case that he’s a great Chancellor but that doesn’t necessarily mean he could do the job of prime minister.

TB had clearly taken to heart our strictures about him needing to do more spontaneous stuff with people. I was talking to Jonathan in the private office. The door opens, TB comes out and says ‘Hey, this guy doing the marathon in a diving suit, he’s about to finish.
³⁰
Shouldn’t I go there, or get him in for a cup of tea or something?’ Peter Hyman fell about at this sudden conversion.

The Times
page 1 and the
Mirror
splash were on me supposedly playing cupid between Sven and Ulrika. Talk about being in a fucking soap. I spent the morning working on a note for TB who was doing
Frost
tomorrow, on the need to get back into big message and the big promises kept, notably stability, jobs, constitutional programme, the specific tax pledges. I wrote it in the car on the way to Stamford Bridge [Chelsea football ground]. Philip had spooked me a bit, saying that after the Budget GB had definitely moved up a few notches at TB’s expense, and we had to get the focus back on TB being the guy leading the big driving agenda. We met Alex before the Chelsea–Man U match [0–3], he and just about everyone passing by mercilessly taking the piss re Sven and Ulrika. Thank God he got us tickets with the fans because then I discovered Sven and Ulrika were both there, separately.

The
Mail on Sunday
ran something about GB being against a full-scale war in Iraq, followed up by the
Mirror
despite GB office denials. [Sir
David] Frost wasn’t on form, TB didn’t really get going but it was OK as a post-Budget message interview.

Sven was massive in the tabloids but thankfully I was fading out of the story. Sunday’s coverage on the Budget wasn’t as bad as I thought it might be, though there was a bit too much ‘GB the Colossus’. Calum and I set off for Burnley vs Coventry [1–0], on the phone most of the time.

As we drove home, Jonathan called. John Holmes [UK ambassador to France, former foreign policy adviser to Blair] had been on, saying it was [Jean-Marie] Le Pen [National Front candidate] second and [Lionel] Jospin third in the French elections [determining a run-off election between Le Pen and Chirac]. Political earthquake time. I chatted to John Holmes about how we should react and then briefed Jon Sopel [BBC] who was covering it, to make sure he got over the message that it was unlikely for the hard right to rise like this here because we did take crime and other issues on the respect agenda seriously. TB felt we should stay out of it as far as possible but there were definitely going to be spillover problems from this.

TB’s interview came out OK but Le Pen was dominant. TB’s worry was that it gave the BNP [far right British National Party] a boost by allowing them to be seen as the British equivalent of Le Pen. Sven/Ulrika was still massive and Sven did a press conference, pretty Zen-like, refusing to say much, did OK, but I guess it all depended what was happening behind closed doors both with him and Nancy, and him and the FA. Melanie told me it was real love as far as Ulrika was concerned. The PCC situation was dragging on. Jeremy sent my letter to Janvrin who was happy to say that the
Mail on Sunday
story as it referred to the Queen was rubbish. TB was due to do an interview with the
Guardian
tomorrow, focused on more personal stuff. He showed we were still able to have a laugh. As when he said he thought he’d say that the people he really related to now after a few years in the job were the Royal Family, that Prince Charles was really his kind of guy, and that both of them were much misunderstood and took great solace from each other. ‘Think that should satisfy the
Guardian
, now what’s next?’

Some of the right wing were trying to present the Le Pen outcome as a sign of the left across Europe under attack. But there was a general understanding that New Labour was different and that we had taken
the right course on crime and immigration. With so much focus on Europe now, because of the French elections, there was also an opportunity in the fact that e.g. the Dutch and the Germans were desperate for a TB-type figure. I finished the PCC draft that Clare [Sumner] took to see Black Rod at 2. She came back and said he had said to her that there had been other calls, suggested there was something to it and he had had no problems with the
Mail on Sunday
story where it referred to him. We were clear that the only calls had been from Clare and Simon and that Jeremy had dealt with Janvrin. Godric was asked about it at the four o’clock so having got the draft statement to Guy Black (who by 4 knew that Black Rod had seen Number 10), put out a line that we were lodging the complaint. There was a line developing that this was the Establishment against us. Yet we had cleared the whole thing with the Palace.

The morning meeting was mainly a discussion of the BNP. I spoke to Charles Clarke who was visiting Burnley and felt they might win one seat on the council and wanted TB to stick to his Blackburn programme. The PCC story took off on the
Ten O’Clock News
. TB watched it, for once, and said we seemed to have lit the blue touchpaper and we had better win this. He still thought it was the right thing to do, but thought Black Rod was going to be a real problem. [Peter] Oborne was moving the goalposts to this being about us and the press rather than the facts of what happened. I had a meeting on Iraq with John Scarlett, Tom McKane [Cabinet Office] and Martin Howard [MoD] to go through what we needed to do communications-wise to set the scene for Iraq, e.g. a WMD paper and other papers about Saddam. Scarlett a very good bloke.

The PCC stuff was running straight. Guy Black called to say he thought my statement was masterful, that he felt we had a strong case anyway but it was even stronger when it was laid out like that. I met with Jeremy, Jonathan and Martin Hurst [Number 10 adviser on agriculture] re the FMD [Foot and Mouth Disease: Lessons Learned] inquiry to get me ready for when I gave evidence. Re PMQs, I was worried about people going for us on David Blunkett talking about schools being swamped with asylum seekers’ children at schools near reception centres. I thought it was a stupid thing to say and called to say we needed to let the heat out of this, but David was very high horse, said he was not going to apologise and he believed in calling a spade a spade. PMQs went fine, TB setting a new cat among pigeons saying that we would get on top of street crime by September.

Guy Black called again to say he had advised Black Rod not to talk to the press now that it was all under investigation. Back for a meeting, me, Peter M, Philip G and Peter H re TB. Peter M thought our problems were 1. sleaze, so-called; 2. the charge he was hollow; 3. the feeling that he wasn’t in charge. I said we had to get back to TB being seen as strong, on people’s side, in charge, delivering, the same TB that they elected. PG felt we had to decide what we would do, almost as if it was a leadership election, what were the things we would emphasise, experience, tested in a crisis, rounded, gets people’s lives, capable of leading a team. GB had his issues and never tired of hounding them. TB had become too managerial again.