The Burden of Power: Countdown to Iraq - The Alastair Campbell Diaries (57 page)

Conference was really looming now. I had a long session with Philip to go over our difficulties, ended with me saying I wanted out and him saying I would never have such a great job and that maybe if I needed a new challenge, I needed to grip the party stuff as I had the government. JP was on the rampage, he had clearly been wound up by GB over foundation hospitals. TB was clear it was the right thing to do but GB was almost ideological about it.

Stayed in all day with Peter H to work on the speech, namely re optimism/boldness and the forward vision section. Sent a vile letter to Dacre, and got one back, re their continuing to suggest that we were involved in the leaking of the Charles letters. Philip called, urging me to get involved in stopping Britain in Europe [pro-European pressure group] from publishing a pamphlet that was going to be ‘Labour’s case for the euro’. Also pulled an idea from the party that we get Clinton sticks of rock made.
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TB was at Chequers, called a couple of times to say he was struggling with the argument for the [conference] speech. He also felt a dark cloud of GB over him the whole time. He said GB was getting desperate and now was acting as a destructive force much of the time.

Later Andrew Adonis called to say GB had sent a 44-page letter to all Cabinet ministers attacking foundation hospitals, under-delivery by the Department of Health, as well as some of the proposals [on NHS funding and structures] coming from Adair Turner [former CBI director general] and Simon Stevens [health policy adviser]. Earlier, Alan Milburn had said to me that GB was positioning himself as reforming re PFI [Private Finance Initiative] but totally against anything that looked like private sector provision of public services. Not surprisingly, Alan was pretty ballistic about the letter, and said what it showed was GB’s determination to kill any real progress. When I told TB about it, he paused for a long time and then said ‘He’s brilliant and ambitious but he’s also bonkers and I just can’t be bothered with it.’ I spoke to Balls and asked him what plans they had to ensure this letter, written
for leaking, didn’t leak. JP was also of the view that if Cabinet ministers suddenly found themselves hit with fifty-page letters about another department’s work, when he had not even gone through it with the minister, they would think he was mad. But JP also felt TB had brought this upon himself by hitting the reform buttons so hard and by not having proper discussions. I said he avoids it because he has GB sitting there absorbing anything he can use to do him in. He said that debilitates all of them. He was friendly, basically sympathetic but did repeatedly make the point that a lot of it was TB’s making.

The GB situation was really serious now. On close reading, GB’s letter to ministers was, as both Jonathan and Sally said, a declaration of war. TB spoke to him when he got up in the States [Washington DC, where Brown was meeting fellow governors of the International Monetary Fund]. TB said I view this as really very serious, to which GB said ‘It is very serious,’ and he made clear it was deliberate too. Alan [Milburn] was on the
Today
programme, and when asked re GB’s opposition to foundation hospitals, said that TB backed it in the Fabian pamphlet [
The Courage of Our Convictions: Why Reform of Public Services is the Route to Social Justice
] today. It was a bad scene. TB felt GB had reached the point where he felt TB was not going to move over so he had to do what he could to bring it about. JP came to see me, and said he felt this could end with GB going, that TB could not back down on foundation hospitals. Alan said that TB had to establish command, that GB was looking for a fight and we needed to understand this was a fight with TB, using him as a surrogate.

TB was still working on the speech at Chequers and felt it was kind of getting there. The QCA [Qualifications and Curriculum Authority] report on A-level results came out, which cleared everyone, but then Estelle sacked [Sir William] Stubbs. Conference was going to be tricky and tomorrow we had the massive march against the war in Iraq. I had a series of exchanges with Ian Austin [Brown’s spokesman] to establish an agreed line to take on the policy issues in GB’s letter, in which he just sent back the Treasury line. I sent back some changes and he said the line said nothing about the NHS being free at the point of use. They were now being puerile about the whole thing.

Woke up to one of those rare and totally gobsmacking revelations that newspapers very occasionally produce, namely that John Major
had a four-year affair with Edwina Currie [former Conservative minister]. It was one of those ‘cor, fuck me’ jaw-dropping moments. How on earth did he get away with it? I had never heard so much as a whisper. I went in to discuss the
Observer
interview with TB. We had worked up a pretty good message note, but he wasn’t on form. We wanted the story to be a mix of confidence plus reform but it didn’t really work. Bill Morris [general secretary, Transport and General Workers’ Union] had done a big attack on foundation hospitals in the
Observer
. The anti-war march was big and the coverage enormous. TB was in no doubt what we were up against. He was still exercised re GB. ‘My worry is that he is so ambitious, and so keen to bring me down, that he might bring the whole show down.’

In recent weeks, he had found him impossible to deal with. He was sure GB had effectively decided to stop us doing the euro, even if it was the right thing. He felt he had nobody close in giving sensible advice. He said he had said to GB after the election that he was happy to help him become leader but he had to work with him. But TB stopped short of thinking he had to strike against him. What works, we have to keep it working. What doesn’t, we have to manage it. He had told GB that if the foundation hospitals memo leaked he would hold him personally responsible. He said he had tried all reason with GB, but it was hopeless.

He’d seen Prince Charles who was raising concerns about the equalities legislation for the disabled and what it meant for the armed forces. Later we flew north to Blackpool and TB went off to do a visit in Manchester while Peter Hyman and I went to the hotel to work on the speech.

The papers were quoting Prince Charles re a letter of apology to TB over the leaked letters but we hadn’t got one and they told Jeremy that none were sent. TB was pretty supportive of Charles though, and said it was really important we should not let them think they fazed us.

I stayed in the hotel all day apart from a run out on the beach. Speech meetings on and off all day, honing lines with Bruce [Grocott], David Miliband, Peter H. At 10pm, I said I felt the structure had gone backwards and TB went into a major rewrite mode, working for a couple of hours on his own. He had said after the holiday he wanted to be more his own man, and of all of the speeches, this had the most of him in it, on Iraq – worried but clear – on EMU – keen to get out there – and on public services – resolute and determined on reform. There was a narrow dividing line between confidence and arrogance and I think we
were just about on the right side. He wrote a very clear and passionate attack on anti-Americanism. GB was on his way back from the States and we didn’t even see a copy of his speech through the day. Foundation hospitals wasn’t really taking off, and I was amazed the letter from GB hadn’t leaked. TB did a Q&A in Blackpool, and was on really good form, though he nearly let out a couple of the best lines from the speech.

We were pretty much there now, though TB still wanted better lines, more colour and texture, and we also needed to take out about 1,000 words. It was a bit meandering in places, and the public services section wasn’t hanging together. But he was determined to do it his way, much more than usual, was far more resistant to making changes, unless the case was absolutely overwhelming. GB’s speech was OK without being great. It played too much to the party, wasn’t modernising or challenging enough. It was GB’s attempt to cover the waterfront but it lacked boldness and was not memorable. TB read it after the event, said it wasn’t a great speech. Lots of people were noticing that GB just looked a little diminished at the moment.

Clinton called me from Number 10, having gone there with Magi [Cleaver, press officer], having flown in early, and was clearly enjoying himself. He read me a very funny spoof draft, said he was going to do a ‘never give in to Tony’ speech. He said the US press were giving the Bush people an easy ride. ‘Our press is either right wing or Establishment so they don’t care too much about the economy, jobs, health care, because they are all OK. They know that the Democrats want to be on the economy and Bush wants to be on the war.’ A Karl Rove [senior adviser to Bush] memo was leaked saying that ‘war is the only issue that excites our base’. He said if Labour or the Democrats had ever done something like that, there would have been a total outcry. He was worried that TB was being used. I told him what TB had said a while back about ‘really believing this’. He said a lot of Democrats were up there asking ‘Why is Blair helping Bush so much?’ We talked over how his speech might fit into the general pattern of conference, and help lift the mood. He was clear about how he could help, and looking forward to it. I told TB later what he had said about the view of Democrats. ‘But what do I do about it?’ He believed we were doing the right thing, and also that Britain basically had to be with America at these really difficult moments.

Philip, Liz [Lloyd, policy adviser] and I had been up till 3am going through the speech line by line and trying to get in more colour and
texture. It was in good shape. TB was up around 6, and I went in to see him at 7, and he was pretty happy with it. He felt it was the most rounded intellectual speech of the lot. The overnight briefing had not gone particularly well, it didn’t matter much. We did the read-through and it felt pretty good. We made the right cuts and it was fairly lean. The big argument that we were trying to recast the 1945 welfare state settlement came through clearly. There was the usual last-minute cutting, minor chopping and changing, the running up and down the corridor with last-minute changes for the typists, and also a very annoying last-minute fuss over his shirt, most of us thinking after the sweat pictures [wearing a blue shirt for the conference speech in 2000] he should wear a white shirt. Cherie for some reason was desperate for him to wear blue or purple, and even got Carole [Caplin] to call. Total waste of time. At least ten minutes wasted on it. Then off we went. TB was less nervous than usual going on, and the audience was pretty much with him the whole way.
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GB’s body language was unbelievable. At times his face and his body seemed to contort in pain, and he found it virtually impossible either to laugh or applaud in the same way his colleagues were. The briefing afterwards pretty much took care of itself and people seemed to think it was strong and confident and very much himself. It was a hot day outside, bit too humid but I walked back to the hotel feeling we had done pretty well.

I got Robin C to meet Clinton on arrival, which seemed to chuff him up no end. Bill arrived to a great scrum. He was just what we needed to take us through the next twenty-four hours. I took him up to see TB. On Iraq, he said the Republicans were really hitting the Democrats hard and using TB. He said TB had to keep the US going down the UN route. Clinton was pretty bitter about [Al] Gore, felt he should have won convincingly. He had been a great vice president but ran a poor campaign. In politics, you are dealing with a mix of reality and rhetoric. What we did was speak to our base through our values and have policies that went to the centre. Al did the opposite. He had right-wing policies but left-wing rhetoric and it was a mistake.

Clinton was still at his best when defining the big political sweep, the strategic big picture, and his analysis of our situation was pretty good too. He was also brilliant at talking in big geopolitical themes, but then bringing them down to stories and pictures of people in their lives. We got him down to the gala dinner where he made a good little
off-the-cuff speech, then down to Northern Night [regional reception] with TB. Clinton was loving it now, big crowds gagging to see him and get near him and he was turning on the full charm, really hit the buttons when he spoke about TB, about the UK, how important we were, how the world looked to us, blah blah. TB got a bit carried away, said something in his speech about the world needing the philosophy and leadership of Clinton right now, which could easily be turned into a big hit on Bush. I could tell as soon as he said it that he was worried. On the way out, he asked me if I thought it was a problem. I said it partly depended who was in there, but I would put in a call to the Yanks.

Of all the visitors we had had to conference, Clinton was the one with the most star quality, up there with Mandela. As we were heading back to his suite, BC said he fancied going for a walk. It was windy, a bit cold and it was starting to rain, but he was like a big kid enjoying the lights. ‘I love this place. I love Blackpool.’ The security guys were clearly used to these kinds of eccentric excursions. We passed a big bingo hall, which advertised itself as the biggest amusement arcade in the world. ‘Hey, I wanna go in there. Let’s go play the machines.’ We got to the door and it looked a lot less inviting close up, so we walked on. We were trying to find somewhere to eat. He said he wanted some fast food, nothing fancy, but we walked past two or three places that were closed. By now the rain was getting a bit heavier. Kevin Spacey [actor and friend of Clinton] was with us, having been on a trip with BC. We must have walked on for a couple of miles. Eventually we found a McDonald’s that was open. Bill was now on the phone to Hillary, a mix of heavy politics and small talk, going on with her too about how great this Blackpool seafront was. He made quite an interesting point when he came off the phone. All the delegates and the conference people are inside the security bubble, but more of them should get out here with the real people. The tighter the bubble, the more you should try and get out of it.