The Burden of Power: Countdown to Iraq - The Alastair Campbell Diaries (66 page)

Queen’s Speech was running fine, but drowned out by fire, Iraq and the Royals, particularly after last night’s interview by [Sir] Michael Peat [private secretary to the Prince of Wales] on the so-called ‘St James’s Palace inquiry’.
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Morning meeting largely on the OBL video. Then I met some of the Middle East experts who had been looking for the kind of thing that could be surfaced publicly, for example only one in three actually voted in the recent referendum. Also, the fact that Saddam seemingly listened to Radio Monte Carlo [Arabic service],
so we agreed it was worth trying to fix a TB interview for any direct messages we wanted. We agreed that the Middle East guys should come more regularly to our meetings. In between Queen’s Speech meetings with TB, we had the first fire-strike meeting with JP, Nick Raynsford, Omand and Hoon. JP had done well and the next phase was going to get particularly tough. Omand and Jeremy were both pushing for a programme of training of new people or moving on anti-strike legislation but we were still in a position of saying that we didn’t want to inflame. At the political strategy meeting, we were trying to hone the local elections message to get local parties motoring more on crime and community campaigns. I went over to Derry’s rooms in the Lords for his Queen’s Speech reception, where I came face to face for the first time with Black Rod, all dressed up in his finery, his face too pinkish for my liking, and a rather smug grin. ‘We meet after all this time,’ he said. I said that he had caused us a lot of grief. He said he had only been trying to help. I was pretty short with him. Derry was thoroughly enjoying himself, delighting in introducing me to all the men in tights as ‘the prince of darkness’. He asked me if I had hit Black Rod. It was quite a jolly do, a mix of ministers from the Lords and Commons, officials, ambassadors. I asked Derry if he hated all this flummery and nonsense as much as I did. He made a jokey little speech about how he came into politics so that he could preside over ceremonials, walk backwards in front of the monarch, listen to a Labour legislative programme being delivered to rows of tiaras. David Hanson [Blair’s parliamentary private secretary] was telling me around a hundred MPs would vote demanding a UNSCR second time around. Queen’s Speech was going OK, but Iraq plus fire made sure it was surrounded more with a sense of problems than solutions.

TB really tired. He didn’t get a great press out of the Queen’s Speech debate and in any event fire was getting much more attention. He said if we had a Tory government, they would not be getting attacked in the same way. Also the notion of industrial unrest was being taken to the Tube, with Mick Rix [general secretary of rail union ASLEF] out there. JP was doing a statement which I rewrote during Cabinet, giving him some cover by making clear that if we moved from a two-day to an eight-day strike, we were in a different ball game and some of the issues that had been kept off the table to suit them when we were trying to avert the strike would then be on the table. JP was up for doing the tough stuff if we had to. He was very on board at the moment, just took the changes, including a sound bite that said
we had bent over backwards and been met with a response that was wrong, irresponsible and puts lives at risk.

The morning meeting was mainly Iraq to go over TB’s interview and the response to the Saddam statement. We needed to get out as well the fact that only one in three voted in the ‘election’ for Saddam. I was very pissed off at the GICS FCC [fire co-ordination centre] and the lack of co-ordination in ministerial interviews. I got TB to say at Cabinet that we needed volunteers to go out around the regions. Cabinet was largely about fire, JP making clear that we would shift gear now, especially if they moved their position to an eight-day strike. I was outraged at the way they were using Fire Service buildings to plan the strikes, to protest, but then go inside when it rained. The employers were totally useless, the TUC not much better. Our MPs broadly OK. Cabinet also discussed Iraq, and TB was looking tired and fed up.

He did the Radio Monte Carlo interview, got up a few strong clear lines – not about oil, not going to push in an exiled government, only one in three voted. We had a meeting with Tessa on sports policy. The presentation was too long and TB wasn’t really engaged. I said I had no real sense of a grass roots sports strategy. Then did a visit with other key Number 10 people to PINDAR, the three-storey underground bunker [below the MoD]. Very basic living quarters, internal TV station. A bit alarming in that before these kinds of emergency sites had always seemed a bit fanciful, but at the moment they didn’t.

The tougher message on fire strikes was coming through but the press was so desperate for us to fail, that they couldn’t resist trying to turn it into a story about mixed signals. To lunch at MI5. We discussed the US, these guys seeming as frustrated as SIS at the Americans’ inability fully to understand why they needed to motor more on the Middle East. There was clearly a lot going on, much greater threat closer to home, and they said it was sometimes difficult for Western minds to come to terms with the added dimension of terrorists who in many ways didn’t mind if they were disrupted because they didn’t fear dying, but welcomed it. I said we had better relations at the centre of SIS than with them and we needed to keep more closely in touch because I was sure that as they spent so much of their time thinking strategically and thematically, there was a lot of their work that could dovetail with public communications. They were clearly worried that they were having to move resources from organised crime because of the growing need to keep tabs on Islamic
fundamentalism, added to which for all the progress, Northern Ireland still took up a lot of resources, they clearly felt under pressure.

Then did a speech and Q&A for the staff. There were about 400 people there, generally a lot younger than I would have expected, pretty poor on the ethnic mix front, but very welcoming, good atmosphere, good reception. My main theme was the gap between messages being pumped out daily in the media, and the reality of most people’s lives, and how that impacted upon the way governments operated and communicated. Quite a good range of questions, from the obvious – how did I assess the Security Service’s profile, was spin our fault, how do you deal with 24-hour news – to the less obvious, e.g. on hunting. The last speaker had been the Archbishop of Canterbury who had managed to speak for a whole hour without mentioning God. I said I think I would find it impossible to go for an hour without mentioning TB, not that TB is God. TB had gone off to Warsaw and was due to do the
Mirror
. He called afterwards, said it was a crap interview. It had been arranged on an agreement to get the focus on crime, but he said crime was barely mentioned. On fire, he said if e.g. the RMT [rail union] went for secondary action, or the FBU went for eight days, we would have to go for them big time.

TB at Chequers. [Sir George] Bain called to speak to him, to say in his view they [FBU] didn’t deserve much at all, and he was worried JP just saw this as an old-fashioned split-the-middle negotiation. He felt it would be bad all round if we caved in at all. The other thing we had to track all day was the
Sunday Times
story on a plot to attack the Tube.
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I did a conference call later on the Sunday broadcasts with JP, Hain, [Margaret] Hodge [minister for universities] plus the spooks to get lines squared, but it was going to be difficult to keep the press under control, not least because they would want to know if this was the reason we changed the ‘poison gas or dirty bomb’ warning by DB [
see November 7
]. The current game by the media was to get us into confusion stories, mixed messages whether on fire or terror. TB felt that for the next phase, basic competence was going to be the issue – on fire, asylum, PBR – plus of course we had Iraq to deal with. He was still saying that the US did understand the need to move on the Middle East peace process.

The
Sunday Times
story was going big all day and the broadcasters were taking it into mixed-signals territory. JP was OK on
Frost
but I was a bit worried that he said there was no threat to the Tube as reported. The papers as ever were being irresponsible and stupid.

Hans Blix going back to Baghdad. Fire difficult. On fire at least, the media were on to something re mixed signals, e.g. JP saying let’s talk, TB focusing on money for modernisation, GB there’s no more money for anything. TB’s
Mirror
interview was crap, total waste of time. Fire was the most pressing issue. We still didn’t have a grip of it. While the softly, softly approach was right in the early stages when trying to avoid the strike, we definitely needed a change of gear. What we had to watch was a sense of division, and the idea some would willingly put in lights that TB was being urged to take them on and defeat them. He and JP had to be in the same position, focusing on the need for long-term reform, but we weren’t there at the moment.

Top-up fees was also a bit of a disaster area at the moment. AA said at TB’s Monday meeting that we needed a while to sort it. Philip warned he thought it was a potential tipping-point issue. TB’s weekend note had been largely devoted to a plan for dealing with the French, relations with Chirac still causing him a lot of concern. Media-wise, our main event of the day was the Trevor McDonald [ITN journalist] interview, and though we had managed to get a fair bit of preparation time in the diary, TB wasn’t really fired up, didn’t really engage or have edge, so on balance it was a negative. They had wanted a line on fire and on terror for their news coverage, but the exchanges on crime were pretty average. Planning meeting on the Prague [NATO] summit, then on the euro and Britain in Europe [pressure group], where yet again we agreed they had to do more work independent of us, but it was a pretty hopeless situation. The news coverage out of Trevor McDonald was a lot better than I thought it would be and the reactions to the interview as a whole pretty positive.

Called JP to discuss fire. I felt it was all a bit ragged, that we had GB tough on public spending, TB tough on modernisation, JP basically just wanting a settlement. We also had word through the
Mirror
on the elitism front that GB was against top-up fees. We then got filled in on GB’s breakfast meeting at the
Guardian
where it seems he had
been off-centre on EMU, top-up fees, and Iraq. Peter M called, said he felt the ground was moving somewhat. There was a distancing strategy going on.

JP said his basic approach had been to try to stop the fire dispute whilst preparing for one anyway, then get very tough if it came to an eight-day strike. I drafted him a few sections for his speech in the [Commons] debate, which broadly he was happy with. Later the employers offered sixteen per cent with modernisation. The FBU rejected it, wanting twenty per cent without modernisation. TB had a speech on e-commerce, which was actually quite a good speech, though it was never going to fly and we put in a few lines on fire. I had a meeting with SIS on some of the anti-Saddam activity inside Iraq.

We had the
Express
lot in for lunch, which was a pretty weird event, largely Richard Desmond [proprietor] and Peter Hill [
Daily Star
editor] talking about the business of newspapers, as if we were supposed to find it as endlessly fascinating as they did. TB was OK, good on fire, but as with the Trevor McDonald interview yesterday, he wasn’t really pushing out message in these media encounters. Peter Hyman felt we were a bit complacent and that we had slipped back from the [Labour] conference success on public service reform.

At our 6pm strategy meeting with TB, PG went through the recent groups and said the mood was uncertain, and with the potential to turn sour. We then got to an interesting discussion on TB/GB, Sally M feeling even more strongly than I did that Gordon was effectively running a daily strategy against TB, and we had no counter-strategy. TB said he admitted that he had moved on this, that he now accepted that GB was a largely malign force, but we had to understand that the party would make a judgement about who was responsible if there was a split which led to a schism. Also, he was in ability terms head and shoulders above the rest, and he really didn’t want TB/GB to be THE story of this government. It will always be a story, but we should all do what we can to ensure it is not THE story. Peter M and Pat [McFadden] both said that the crux question was what was his plan for GB? TB said the ideal was to work with him on the programme we have got, but it’s getting more not less difficult. ‘It’s almost like he pours concrete on top of the policy areas.’ It even crossed his mind that he was trying to stop us reforming as a way of setting himself up as the reformer for the future. Peter M said it was absolutely clear from the recent briefings to the
Mirror
and the
Guardian
that he was up to no good.

I was arguing that we should get out there his modus operandi,
the fact that he said different things to different audiences in a way that he wouldn’t be able to if he had the top job. TB looked very down, and also said he still felt we should try to keep managing it. We have managed it successfully for several years and we needed to think very carefully before rushing into anything rash. Peter M said their game was deliberately to put TB into a box marked ‘right wing’ so that where progressive change was made, it was seen as theirs, whereas all the difficulties and controversies had been made to stick to TB. I felt that if TB really believed it was going to end in tears one day, better to get it dealt with now. Peter M sort of agreed, though his worry was whether it would be sufficiently clear that it was GB’s doing that brought us to this, not ours. Jonathan said his concern was that GB was not beyond bringing the whole show down.