The Burden of Power: Countdown to Iraq - The Alastair Campbell Diaries (48 page)

TB in Seville, going OK but he was a bit bored and in any event the media was wall-to-wall World Cup. I watched a lot of soccer, slept, then we went out with Philip G and Gail to Chequers for dinner to raise money for a Roald Dahl museum. I had an interesting chat with Jackie Stewart [former world champion racing driver] on how useless the civil servant he had dealt with re Formula One had been.

DB called Fiona for what turned out to be a very difficult chat. She had said to Tessa she was really angry about a line in the
Mail
that Blunkett didn’t rate me. He was adamant he had never said it, and
I was perfectly prepared to believe him, but it was clear Fiona didn’t believe him at all, and made sure he knew. She said whenever ministers were in trouble, they came to me for help, so it would be nice if it was reciprocated. I spent most of the day at various sporting events with the kids, which is what I like doing most at the moment.

Coverage of Seville crap. Lots more GB-ery around the place. At his morning meeting, TB was tired, vacant, had nothing to say. At one point he asked Charles [Clarke] if he had anything to say and Charles said ‘Yes, cheer up a bit.’ It was mainly a discussion about G8 [forthcoming summit in Canada], but with no real focus. Peter H and I left pretty appalled and later had a long session to go over it. We just weren’t professional enough. We had slack in the system. We didn’t prepare him properly. There was no sense of grip. The real problem, as I’d said to JP, was that TB was spooked by GB at the moment. Even when he wasn’t pummelling, there was a part of TB’s mind given over to worrying about him. Bad start to the week. Calum came down to the office and I took him to Wimbledon [tennis championship] and we had a great time. Bush’s speech on the Middle East was going big. It was taken as ‘Arafat must go’ and it was going to be quite hard to work out a proper response.

The Bush Middle East speech was making big waves right round the world but it didn’t seem terribly thought through. It seemed the White House was too consumed with the squabbles and struggles within the government, particularly Powell vs Cheney/Rumsfeld, than in really thinking through a plan on the Middle East. Also, truth be told, Bush had a surer touch on domestic than international. I pointed out that Bush calling for the Palestinians to reject Arafat was the surest way to ensure a boost for Arafat. TB didn’t really want to end up in a US–UK rift situation, but we said it was up to the Palestinian people to elect their leaders, which was taken as an attack on Bush so we were heading for the rift headlines, even though TB was really in agreement that Arafat was weak, and that there had to be more sympathy for the Israelis.

We had an office planning meeting re September, at which Fiona said they were thinking about going to the Strozzis [Prince Girolamo and his wife Irina] again and also going to Aznar’s daughter’s wedding. He knew my views on holiday with the Strozzis, but I thought the wedding was equally ridiculous given he didn’t know
the daughter. Aznar really wanted him to go, but this was behaving like royal families. If I raised it with him he said, OK but I do need to have some kind of life as well. Going to a politician’s daughter’s wedding in Spain did not strike me as being life.

GB called, said he wanted to come over and go over the Mansion House speech which was a very sceptical speech, lots and lots of focus on the tests, the combined weight of which would ensure very sceptical headlines. He came over and was also trying to go back on the idea of the £1 billion commitment for Africa which we had agreed yesterday and which had been leaked to the
Guardian
. TB wanted it changed to tone down the scepticism, a discussion that continued in the car on the way to the airport [en route to Canada]. GB said he thought it was quite positive. TB said it most certainly was not. Godric did a briefing on the Middle East but it was hard to answer the direct question: if Arafat was re-elected did we expect the US to deal with him? The answer was yes, but what we didn’t know was if they would. We landed, got taken by helicopter to Kananaskis, up in the mountains where you could feel the thinness of the air as soon as you arrived. It was perhaps an indication of how unfocused I currently was that my immediate thought was to call Brendan Foster [former Olympic runner and friend of AC] and get some tips on altitude training. We went straight to the [Jean] Chrétien bilateral where he was clear he wanted to make sure Africa remained the main focus. He had seen Bush and said he would need pressure putting on him. He wasn’t keen on the extent of commitment we were trying to get. He was good on the detail both of what was happening in Africa but also realistically what we could expect from the other countries. But it was clear his worry was that the Middle East stuff would just keep raging away. I went out for a run along a mountain road through some fantastic scenery, but it was pretty tough going because of the air.

G8 summit at Kananaskis. TB had bumped into GWB at the gym and they had forty minutes in there, mainly just the two of them. TB felt that they could tolerate Arafat as a titular head but not as the man who led the negotiations. They just didn’t trust him. Bush wanted to do media at the start of their bilateral, not least because there was another fraud-related company crash [WorldCom]. But I was worried that if it went to the Middle East, which it would, TB would get put into the poodle position. TB said we must not change the line, and instead should let them move to us a bit. But Bush was basically someone who said what he thought. It’s a quality people always say
they want in a politician but when the politicians are in the really big jobs, I think it’s sometimes the reason they turn against them. In Arafat’s case, he thought the man was a terrorist. Listening to him later, I felt sometimes he imagined he could just say things away, just as he had said to us he thought Bin Laden was dead but he daren’t say it in case Bin Laden popped up again. We worked through and thought we got to the right position, namely the Palestinians should elect their own leaders but they should elect leaders who could be relied upon to negotiate.

Then off to a very dull [Junichiro] Koizumi [Japanese Prime Minister] bilateral, lots of football talk, Koizumi saying everyone in Japan thought England would win. He did a big tribute to TB’s leadership post September 11, said he had read biographies of Churchill and applauded his and TB’s efforts to get the Americans properly involved in world peace. TB was equally flattering about Koizumi’s reform programme. They went over debt, aid, Afghanistan. Then off to see GWB. The little doorstep they did was OK. I got the feeling that Condi was a bit put out that I was there as well as David Manning. She was pretty status-conscious and I don’t think had got the point that I was more to TB than Ari Fleischer [White House press secretary] was to Bush. Bush was on good form, but you did worry whether he had thought things through. He said the problem with Israeli politics is that they tend to unite around the toughest lines. As to why he was so hard on Arafat, he felt he had lied about the money he gave to families organising terrorism. He did seem to have the outlines of a possible step-by-step process, but nobody seemed terribly confident. He felt neither Arafat nor [Ariel] Sharon were capable of delivering peace. TB felt there had to be improved security structures, otherwise they were at the mercy of suicide bombers. GWB said ‘I think I’ve stopped Sharon from killing Arafat – I don’t know if that’s a good thing or not.’

Bush was pretty scathing on some of the Africa stuff. He said he liked the plan, but then through the discussion came out with hard lines on corruption, conflict. He said ‘I’m enthusiastic about Africa. What pisses me off about Africa is that for every good intention there appear to be more bad actions.’ TB felt the issue was leadership. He strongly felt the debt issue wasn’t just moral, but ultimately we had to get these countries on their feet for sound political and economic reasons too. Bush said he was putting up half a billion dollars for AIDS in Africa but he wanted to know there was strategy. GWB was a weird mix, much wittier than people would imagine, quite self-deprecating, very open for someone in his position. At times too, you
felt he had a real grasp of issues, but then he would just go off on one like ‘If Chirac pushes me on trade, I’m going to crawl over his chilli’ – a new one on all of us. He couldn’t pronounce ‘Yemenis’, when he was telling a story about how Yemenis were taking out lots of US thermos flasks filled with honey. Then he’d give a clever and broad-ranging analysis of the dangers to America of reliance on Saudi oil, how to get out of that. TB and GWB went off to the heads-only session and later Putin arrived and scuppered the $20 billion deal to sort the issue of Soviet WMD, because he had decided at the last minute he wanted something different to what we thought was agreed. Inside the summit, there were a couple of massive bust-ups, first Chirac claiming the US didn’t really care about Africa, and Bush hitting back hard. He was being exposed to the kind of anti-Americanism they didn’t really understand. TB played a bit of tennis with Schroeder. I had a drink with Schroeder’s interpreters and got the very strong feeling they thought he was going to lose the election.

The summit was going fine and the Africa plan resolved better than expected. TB and Chirac were also getting on better. A number of the African leaders were in for part of the summit and although there was an inevitable feeling of poor men coming to the rich men’s table, the Africans were pretty positive and TB started his own press conference with a quote from Obasanjo [Nigerian President] that it was a historic turning point for Africa. TB’s press event was a bit weird, one camera, one reporter, the pictures being beamed back to the hacks miles away in Calgary. Tom felt it was fine. TB wanted another discussion about his future, or ‘
La Grande Stratégie
’ as he now called it. The only question that mattered was whether it strengthened or weakened him. I veered to the lame-duck side of the argument, putting GB in an even more powerful position on the euro, but TB felt it would allow him to be himself more. I was worried that all that had happened was that GB had effectively worn him down to force him out ahead of his time. It was true that he had always imagined only doing two terms, but I wasn’t convinced it was remotely time for him to go yet. I also shared his worries about the GB temperament question. TB still felt that two terms was about all you get in the modern world. But if it took a couple of years to do the euro, he would be happy to hang around for that. I asked him what Cherie thought. The same, he said. But I have to resolve the question whether it weakens or strengthens me.

The more he talked about it, the more I feared it was one of those
things that had a certain immediate appeal but which would go in the box marked ‘things I wish I hadn’t done’. He said it wasn’t a case of being fed up, but eight years was roughly what you got, and if we couldn’t see the sort of progress we wanted in public services in that time, there was a bit of a problem. We started to talk about the conference speech, and I got the sense he was thinking about using it to indicate departure. I felt the conference speech should be about explaining change and communicating change, answering the question ‘Was the country really changing for the better?’ We believed it was, and if we were right, then we could communicate the vision of a better country out there in the future, nobody left behind.

He talked about Cherie, said she was very hardy, tough, could endure the rough-and-tumble and was certainly not pushing him out. He said nice things about Fiona and what she had been doing, said she was important to the operation and it was important I kept her happy. We spent what seemed like hours driving to the plane because there were demonstrators clogging the motorways which pissed him off. But overall it was a good visit, we got in the right place on the Middle East despite Bush, Africa was OK and in our private conversations we had got back some of the old working relationship and warmth. But I was a bit worried that mentally he was moving towards the exit door with only the euro to hold him back. As we arrived at the airport, he got even more pissed off to hear Oxfam said the deal was peanuts so I got the office working out how many peanuts you could buy with all the millions that had been pledged. The flight home was fairly uneventful apart from when I lost my credit card down the side of the seat and they had to take the thing apart to get it out.

Jackie Stewart came in to see me about the Silverstone Grand Prix situation, genuinely concerned we were going to lose it. It was a long, convoluted story of how the British Racing Drivers Association, of which he was chair, lost the rights to Bernie Ecclestone [Formula One supremo], how Bernie had built and accumulated power. He controlled all the TV, advertising, corporate revenues and he and Max Mosley [President of the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile] just took an aggressive view that in all sorts of ways the BGP [British Grand Prix] wasn’t good enough. Jackie’s big worry was that we would lose the centrality of the UK to the whole motorsports industry if we lost grip of the grand prix. He was an interesting bloke and I enjoyed talking to him about his career. He said he thought TB looked really tired and was losing his sparkle. He said it was really important we
didn’t push him too hard and also he should think about having a personal trainer with a daily regime.

The whole weekend ruined by hay fever. Not much on the work front, the usual Sunday newspaper shite, the
Sunday Times
on some fiction re Number 10 refurbishments,
Mail on Sunday
rather hopelessly trying to link CB’s Palestine charity [Medical Aid for Palestinians] to Hamas [Islamist political party with military wing]. Part of the day taken up dealing with Steve [Byers] in Greece. I tried three or four times to talk Rebekah [Wade,
News of the World
editor] out of doing the Byers story [about a relationship with a woman in a hotel] on the front but in the end she did and it was pretty grim reading, though she said it was a lot worse and tackier before they spoke. I fixed up for Steve to have a chat with her. Rebekah said she felt sorry for him. He sounds really nice and I wish we weren’t doing the story. ‘Well don’t then. Just dump it, bin it.’ She said they couldn’t, but they were taking the woman to France for a week to stop her talking to anyone else so hopefully it would die down fairly quickly. I did a call with JP to go over everything pre
Frost
tomorrow. He was a lot more onside after our dinner.