30 Days: A Month at the Heart of Blair’s War

Tuesday, 11 March

Morning headlines … Chirac pledges to veto UN war resolution ‘whatever the circumstances’ … Russia ready to back French … UN begins withdrawal from demilitarised zone between Kuwait and Iraq …

Tonight Tony Blair goes to Buckingham Palace to see the Queen. He has to cancel Her Majesty’s trip to Belgium next week. Or rather, to put it in the form preferred by protocol, Her Majesty has to postpone her visit to Belgium. This is considered ‘sad for poor Louis Michel’, President Chirac’s sanctimonious supporter in the Belgian Foreign Ministry, but this is a sadness that the Blair team enjoys.

The Queen has had a good day up until now. She has held her first investiture for new Knights Bachelor, new Companions of the Bath and other Most Excellent Orders since twisting her knee earlier this year. While Blair’s advisers worry that their domestic agenda is swamped by Iraq, the Queen’s equerries are quite pleased that Saddam will take attention away from the imminent report into rape, corruption and general management chaos in the household of the Prince of Wales.

Behind the red ropes of the receiving lines, there are only a few signs of war. The head of armed forces’ dentistry is here. He tells fellow recipients that while the Prime Minister works ‘flat out’ for the Second Resolution, his own units are working flat out to fill soldiers’ teeth before battle begins. Apparently, the urge for a pre-fight check-up is contagious when troops are hanging around with nothing much to do.

The Admiral in charge of naval supply is to be promoted in the Order of the Bath. He has a mildly distracted look.

Her Majesty’s Ambassador to Mexico is here to receive the Most Distinguished Order of St Michael and St George. Mexico is a member of the United Nations Security Council. But the Ambassador, it seems, can be spared for a trip to the Palace.

So, for a few hours, can Britain’s senior RAF man, the Deputy Chief of the Defence Staff Sir Anthony Bagnall, who is to be made a Knight Grand Cross in the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. He is the first to receive his new sash and gong, and then waits while the Queen rewards more than a hundred other assorted policemen, hospital workers, a newspaperman, a pageant-master and a North Yorkshire folk dancer. The war cannot be quite here yet. Only a violin-maker eschews the approved grey ‘morning dress’ for the chance to advertise his profession on his tie.

When Tony Blair’s green Daimler passes through the Palace gates tonight, he can tell the Queen all that he knows of when her forces are likely to be in action. She is the only person in the country to whom he can talk of war in the absolute certainty that the words will not be repeated outside, half understood, garbled, given ‘off the record’ to a friendly journalist and end up back at Downing Street in Alastair Campbell’s in-tray.

Wednesday, 12 March

Morning headlines … Tony Blair faces first reports of challenge to his leadership … Washington wants UN vote ‘this week’… thousands protest in Pakistan and Indonesia …

Behind the door with the combination lock that leads to the Blairs’ Downing Street flat, the ‘Questions’ team is slowly assembling. It is 7.45 a.m. Sally Morgan is already upstairs with her boss in the cramped sitting room.

Jonathan Powell comes into the dark hallway, which has certificates of legal qualifications on the walls and Leo Blair’s train set on the floor. The Chief of Staff likes to take precise diplomatic strides around his building, but this is not easy when track and carriages extend across the carpet as though some junior Vanderbilt were plotting his expansion to the American West. Campbell’s loping journalist’s gait is more suited to this terrain.

These are the three closest political advisers to the Prime Minister. There is always a low-level tension between them. Each has a different bit of the battle that demands priority.

Morgan, a Labour activist since her Liverpool schooldays twenty years ago, is now a Blair baroness. She sees the war through party eyes.

Powell, the organiser, learnt his politics watching Bill Clinton win elections. He sees through foreign eyes.

Campbell, former journalist and focused survivor of alcoholism and mental breakdown, is the man Tony Blair depends on the most. He does many things, but he has the eyes of the media.

Others enter the hallway a few minutes later. There is no sign of Leo himself, but his mother, harassed and in a housecoat, calls down at random to the passing crowd, ‘Tell Tony to call Jack McConnell by 8.15.’ No one looks up. It seems an intrusion to be here at this time of the morning.

Cherie Blair says she doesn’t mind living in someone else’s office. Or that, at least, is what she normally says.

Back in 1983, when both wife and husband were struggling to find seats in Parliament, she might easily have won and he might easily have lost. She rarely shows signs of resenting that outcome, although others, on her behalf, often stress that hers is the more powerful brain and the steelier determination.

Both were then Christian socialists of independent mind. But Tony Blair had the more winning way with people and the better luck. Just before the 1983 election he found a refuge in the safe northern constituency of Sedgefield. From that point onwards, he could be a Labour Member of Parliament as long as he wished. His wife had to fight the difficult southern Conservative seat of Thanet North.

It is said that three Tonies gave Cherie Booth comfort when she fought her only election campaign in her own right twenty years ago. The first was her father, the then famous television actor Tony Booth. The second was the even more famous left-wing Labour MP Tony Benn, the man whose influence at that time ensured that a Labour Prime Minister could never take power. The third, both in fame and in effort then, was her husband, who is now in the Downing Street sitting room.

Cherie Booth was heavily beaten in Thanet. Since then she has been a lawyer and mother, and a political wife who has never taken easily to the role of politician’s wife. She resists strongly having to be on show all the time. She had little interest in how she looked until her husband’s success made an interest essential. She has endured rather than enjoyed the demands that no sleeve, collar or cuff be out of place.

She makes no secret of being an evening person, not a morning one. Her first public appearance on the morning after the 1997 election victory was tousle-haired in a dressing-gown going out to collect a delivery of flowers at her Islington front doorstep. It was a bad welcome to the life of a Number Ten wife – though far from its worst moment.

This early-morning procession past her bedroom door has, however, become a custom on ‘Questions to the Prime Minister’ Wednesdays. She says she is simply used to it now. Today there are even more strangers than usual slinking by her, as quietly as they can, so that her husband can take his first briefing of the day before he goes down to his office.

The wife of Sir Anthony Eden, a former occupant of this house whose tenure was curtailed by a Middle East war, used to complain that she had the Suez Canal running through her drawing room. As she shouts her ‘Don’t forget’ message down to anyone who will hear, Cherie Blair could be forgiven for seeing her own room as running fast too – with Washington’s Potomac River, Iraq’s Tigris and Euphrates, all sweeping along more than a dozen of her husband’s staff.

Tony Blair sits stiffly on the end of the sofa nearest to the fireplace. He sips tea from a red mug with a lizard running down its side. He almost always drinks from a mug, even in meetings where others have china cups. It is a sign that he is at home and everyone else is not.

He has not had the easiest of nights. After returning from his ritual with the Queen he found that American Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had written Britain out of America’s war plans. If the British government could not sort out its political problems, Rumsfeld had said, then too bad: Washington would go it alone.

Tony Blair did not see that as an opportunity, however much many of his supporters would like him to have done. He has strategic fears of the isolation of the United States if it ‘goes it alone’. But he had personal objections too. To be stabbed by Britain’s traditional French rival is one thing. To be kicked by his transatlantic ally, to be told that all his efforts to win a Second Resolution at the UN and a parliamentary majority at home is a waste of time: that is something else. It had taken two late calls to President Bush to establish that Secretary Rumsfeld was ‘only trying to help’.

The Questions team has to wrestle, as it often does, with what the Prime Minister would like to say and what it is suitable for him to say. What he might like to tell the House of Commons is that the US President’s Cabinet members are appointed, not elected, are not always skilled at calming American voters, still less British ones, and that Britain’s place at America’s side is solid and secure. But he has to be cautious, making it clear that his policy is unchanged, that the UN route is still being taken and that Parliament will be fully consulted if the time for war comes.

For meetings like this the Prime Minister calls in specialists in anticipating what both Opposition and backbench Labour MPs will ask. Only some of the questions are known in advance. These are on the list in the hands of David Hanson, a Welsh MP who is Tony Blair’s Parliamentary Private Secretary, his official ‘spy’ in his own ranks. Hanson has the look of a young preacher and a shirt stained with leaks from ‘bloody useless Downing Street pens’.

The Prime Minister says little himself. On Iraq he does not need briefing. He wants to know how his Conservative opponent is likely to act. Will he ask only half his permitted questions on Iraq, where he has the temporary disadvantage of agreeing with the government? Or will he make every question about Iraq? What other issues are out there?

There follows a brief discussion of plans to curb anti-social behaviour in Britain. The press, he is told, is concentrating on proposed penalties against homeless beggars, which not everyone approves of, rather than schemes to punish graffiti-writers and car-burners, which are more universally popular. Tony Blair tries hard to seem interested.

At other times this would be the kind of political fine-tuning at which this team excels, sometimes excels too much. Today the ‘spinners’ take their cue from their leader. He takes another sip of tea from his mug and asks what is in the morning newspapers.

There is the report out tomorrow of the inquiry into sodomy and freebies below stairs at St James’s Palace. The Number Ten Press Office is about to be briefed on its contents, but despite the fascination of the subject for all who are interested in the Prince of Wales, there is not expected to be much in it to occupy the political editors, the ‘clients’ of Downing Street.

There are also reports about a plot to detonate an al-Qaeda bomb, Bali-style, in a British nightclub. ‘Mmmm,’ is the Prime Minister’s only response.

It is just before 8.15 a.m. now. Cherie Blair’s message about Jack McConnell, Labour’s First Minister in the Scottish Parliament, is passed on, but not immediately acted upon. Coffee arrives in white-and-gold Downing Street cups. ‘Service first for those who have been here longest,’ Morgan says, holding out her hand.

‘What will I be asked about Clare Short?’ the Prime Minister asks.

‘Oh, it will just be stuff about Labour divisions. How the Tories dare talk about divisions, I just don’t know,’ Morgan replies briskly.

Tony Blair thinks that what he ought to be asked is: ‘Why don’t you just go in and get rid of Saddam now?’ It would be harder for him to give that question a fully honest answer. He sees almost no chance of a second UN resolution, but, for the sake of his own party’s support if for no other reason, he has to clutch at the vanishing ideal.

A Private Secretary’s next job is to make the single tabbed briefing file which the Prime Minister will take to the House of Commons just before noon. Tony Blair has suddenly lost an important bit of paper. He apologises. ‘In all my myriad phone calls I must have misplaced it,’ he says, his voice trailing away as the Foreign Secretary comes through the door. This meeting is not so much over as ‘morphing’ into the next.

Jack Straw has become Tony Blair’s closest Cabinet ally. He is the Alastair Campbell of the politicians, more frank sometimes than the Prime Minister wants him to be, rumbustious, irreverent, a sharp-witted left-wing student leader who became a right-wing Home Secretary. As Foreign Secretary, he has just a hint of the ‘Little Englander’.

This morning he has to brief the Prime Minister on the last echoes of the Rumsfeld intervention and the latest attempt to persuade the Chileans about the vanishing resolution. He has then to be briefed by Tony Blair on what to say to calm this morning’s meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party before the midday Questions begins.

The flat gradually empties. Down below, outside the den, the chairs are being put out on the balcony in case the Prime Minister wants to sit outside in the sun. There is shelter here from the sight of the ‘Not in our Name’ protesters, if not from their cries of ‘Tony, Tony, Tony, out, out, out.’ The view from here is over St James’s Park, the one that the planners of the house intended its occupants to have. Downing Street is always one of the coldest, most windblown alleys in London, even on a brightening blue-skied day.

Walk through the door marked ‘Number Ten’, go straight ahead down the yellow-wallpapered corridor, avoid the recumbent Henry Moore statue, and you are in the red hall that leads to the Cabinet Room and the den. To the left is Sally Morgan’s political office, decorated with the work of women artists in memory of the one time that Tony Blair freed her to do a job, as Minister for Women, that was not directly in his line of sight.

Morgan is a plain-speaking, plain-dressing, no-nonsense Liverpudlian whom the Prime Minister relies on heavily both for political intelligence and the personal kind. The experiment of setting her free did not last long.

To the right is the passage to the ‘outer office’, which has desks for the private secretaries and Duty Clerks. There is the TV and the three clocks, unchanged since the Cold War, set to Washington, London and Moscow times. Here sit the key-keepers for the red boxes, the men who make the phone-working work, and Jonathan Powell, the Chief of Staff who listens out and listens in.

If you are an Ambassador, if you are seeking diplomacy more than politics, you will go right immediately from the front hall, down a more institutional corridor to rooms behind a combination lock where Tony Blair’s ‘diplomatic knights’ do their work.

In a fine half-circular Georgian room, one knight looks after Chirac and the Europeans. In another, with a huge maple-leaf window out towards Whitehall, sits the chief knight of this current battle, Sir David Manning, who has a slight figure and a fierce stare and cares for what is known here as ‘the real world’: reality includes America, North and South, the Middle East and Iraq.

Political advisers and press officers, party veterans and trusted young civil servants turn left after entering Number Ten, past the staircase to the Blair family’s flat, past the dark lower rooms of the Chancellor of the Exchequer and on to Alastair Campbell’s zone. Here, in a set of large, dark-panelled rooms, the largest hung about with drying marathon kit, steaming trainers and posters of past campaigns, the business of public opinion is done.

There is much to do.

Next month Tony Blair is fifty. How is he planning to spend the day? ‘At the Labour exchange,’ says Campbell with his best four-miles-to-the-finishing-line grimace.

The London Marathon is still a month away. Campbell has never run the twenty-six-mile distance before, and is training as hard as political distractions allow. He has never had his boss in such a bad position before, either.

On the wall is a poster of Number Ten’s last occupant, John Major, in the guise of ‘Mr Weak’, a reminder of one of Campbell’s most vaunted coups. This poster could never have been put on billboards in the 1997 campaign; it was a clear abuse of the copyright owned by the creator of the ‘Mister Men’, children’s bestsellers all over the world. But somehow the image found its way onto newspaper front pages regardless, and it has stayed on this wall ever since.

Tony Blair has not yet reached ‘Mr Weak’ status among his colleagues. But he is beginning to look as grey as John Major did.

The television on the newspaper-strewn table shows a few MPs, some of the more glamorous New Labour kind, cooing with admiration that Tony Blair ‘has put his leadership on the line’. Campbell sighs.

The TV reporter has also found other MPs who want to use the Prime Minister’s support for George Bush to make him greyer and weaker. ‘Leadership isn’t just Tony Blair, it’s us as well,’ says one Old Labour member. Campbell grunts and changes to a sports channel with theatrical contempt.

One group of MPs is rumoured to be planning a bid for a new leader, arguing that a Labour Prime Minister should not be ‘a threat to the institutions of world order’. Is that a real danger, or just a bombastic stunt? Campbell tries to assess the problem and the difference.

The Prime Minister has finished his briefings and has come downstairs. He walks all these corridors restlessly, back and forth along the three ground-floor axes of his home.

It is just after 9 a.m. A large white ‘Délice de France’ food van is parked opposite Horse Guards Parade. A man in a bowler hat, with furled umbrella, yellow carnation and a copy of The Times, swings his arms like a Guardsman as he walks towards the Foreign Office. This archetypal man of Whitehall stops at the sight of the words ‘Délice de France’ and gives them a hard stare, as though to a disobedient dog – or even to ‘a cheap strutting tart’, as another newspaper, not one he is likely to read, describes the President of France this morning. After a moment’s pause, he moves on up past the Cabinet War Rooms of World War II and into Whitehall.

At the same time Tony Blair stops in the Cabinet Room. He looks onto the balcony as though he would much rather be outside than in, and begins the day’s work.

By the front door, a schoolmasterly man in a salt-and-pepper tweed suit and breakfast-stained tie is wondering whether it is safe to go up to the flat. The regular Wednesday routine for the Prime Minister’s team may be Question Time. For this man it is the day for winding the Downing Street clocks.

There is a grandfather in the Entrance Hall which the messengers tell visitors, ‘quite wrongly’, was stripped of its chiming parts by Churchill, who couldn’t stand the noise. There is a ‘nice piece’ in the waiting room. It has an unusually loud tick. But the best one is the ‘Vulliamy’ in the flat, which he likes to wind when the family is out. He also has a good clockwork connoisseur’s interest in the working s of Leo’s train.

‘Set it at five minutes to midnight,’ says another waiting-room visitor, with a confident smile and the current cliché of how close the country is to war. The clock man looks slightly bemused. In five minutes he wants to be away from here, on to the next of the British government’s antique timepieces and then to Buckingham Palace, where there are some ‘Very fine’ examples and he will have ‘elevense s’ with a couple of friends.

At about 11.30 a.m. there is the sound of singing from the cleaners upstairs. The words are ‘Good morning, Tony’, to the tune that fans used to sing outside rock stars’ hotels, and ending ‘Oh, Tony, we love you.’ This noise is accompanied by the sound of mops and brushes and a sharp supervisory retort: ‘You mustn’t call him that. He likes to be called Prime Minister.’

There is a moment’s quiet, and then the ‘Good morning, Tony’ song begins again, just as the man himself almost runs along the corridor, holding a cup and saucer in front of him as though in an egg-and-spoon race. Immediately behind, and in exactly the same posture, is Alastair Campbell.

Tony Blair is not one who seems to mind too much what he is called. Some refer to him as ‘TB’, some as ‘the boss’, many as ‘Tony’. The diplomatic knights call him ‘Prime Minister’, but the phrase ‘Yes, Prime Minister’ has been destroyed by television comedy, and is never used except as a joke.

For the next twenty minutes the Downing Street ‘pagers’ receive blow-by-blow messages from inside the Parliamentary Labour Party meeting about how Jack Straw is faring against the critics. By the time the Prime Ministerial motorcade is ready for the two-hundred-yard ‘dash’ to the Commons, the news is already seen as ‘quite good’. There are ‘lots of dismissals of a Special Conference’, the mechanism necessary to change a Labour leader’, and ‘lots of rudeness about the French’.