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

Friday, 14 March

Morning headlines … it is inappropriate for Her Majesty the Queen to be out of the country … London and Washington attack Chirac veto threat … Israeli and Jordanian airspace available for war on Iraq …

People who are never seen running are running now. Aides whose memories of political nightmares go back to the darkest years of far-left Labour leadership are running. Young assistants for whom this is the first drama of Downing Street survival are running.

Everyone is running hard after something. Sally Morgan is running. Campbell himself is running – and not like a man training for the marathon, more like a mugger escaping down a street of wrecked cars.

This morning in the Daily Telegraph he has spoken of the alcoholism and breakdown which marred his first career in journalism. He was doing newspaper jobs which hardly seem very demanding to him now, but which then he could not do. He cracked – and only gradually came back.

He still remembers the place where he was driving on 12 May 1994 when he heard the news that the Labour leader, John Smith, was dead. He says he knew then, on that junction of spirals where Paddington Station meets the peace of the Little Venice canal and the roar of the road to Oxford, that Tony Blair would be leader. He also knew that he would work for Tony Blair.

Nine years later, he is the man to whom Tony Blair still speaks the most. It is when the two are alone together that the Prime Minister’s face is most the face of a friend at a party, an actor offstage, a person who is not Prime Minister. Campbell has a well-founded reputation for low stratagems on his master’s behalf, but he is the one who dares speak most fiercely and directly to Tony Blair. He speaks directly too about himself, more than he has before; more about his mental and physical preparation for the marathon, more about his past mental and physical collapse.

Campbell’s own confidant in Downing Street is also running now. Pat MacFadden is a thin-faced, vulpine political strategist who looks like an ‘enforcer’s enforcer’, the sort of assistant who might clean out the nastier places where Glasgow Celtic football fans meet Glasgow City Councillors. In the striped Regency corridors of Number Ten he is recognised as one of the most thoughtful men in the building.

When he and Campbell sit together it is like watching two copper wires before the electricity crackles across the air. No reputation is safe from being scorched. But now they are running together, Campbell first, MacFadden behind, like a couple of greyhounds.

There are suddenly shouts from the green-shirted builders in the basement. The ‘Sainsbury’s To You’ van has arrived and is strewing the hall with Coca-Cola and frozen meals. There is a faint sense of an emergency ward where the patient is puffing his way out.

Only Gordon Brown and John Prescott are still the stately galleons of the corridors. Whatever is happening does not seem to be any business of theirs.

The patient is fine. But Tony Blair’s travel plans, it seems, are being made, unmade and made again – even as his groceries arrive. There was a possibility that George Bush might come to Downing Street for a pre-war summit. But there were snags. Security was a problem. Protesters were a huge problem. Politics was an even bigger problem; nothing would make Labour MPs more likely to oppose Tony Blair than the presence of his friend from America.

Barbados was a possibility too. But the summit is to be in the Azores, the Portuguese islands in the middle of the Atlantic. As long as war is not formally declared from their soil, the Portuguese are apparently happy to be host.

The Spanish Prime Minister, José Maria Aznar, who has become one of the most frequent and trusted telephone-callers to the den, will be there too. Tony Blair says the name ‘José Maria’ with almost the same affection as he says ‘Sally’ or ‘Alastair’. Some of his friends find this attraction to a man of the European right as hard to endure as the closeness to George Bush. The two men have grown used to swapping stories of how weak their domestic support is. Aznar’s was once at 4 per cent. ‘Crikey, that’s even less than the number who think Elvis Presley is still alive,’ Tony Blair told his friend. ‘Crikey’ is a typical Blair expletive, a bit dated, a bit comic, designed to avoid trouble.

The Azores announcement brings the added bonus of angering the French. Jacques Chirac loves summits and is known to place Spaniards and Portuguese among the lower zones of European life, at least until the ‘old EU’ is augmented by Baltics and Poles, whom the French esteem even less. There is general satisfaction, as the various arrangements are made for Prime Minister, team members and press, at how the news will be received in Paris.

The policeman at the door asks the Sainsbury’s man whether ‘all this stuff has to be signed for’. The white plastic bags stretch now in a double row from the front window almost up to the portrait of Sir Robert Walpole on the opposite wall. ‘No,’ says the driver. ‘We know where you are. You’re not going anywhere.’ That is one vote of confidence.

On the hall table to the left is a mosaic of mobile phones. The rules of the house say that no alien phone can pass this point. Each has to be switched off, named with a yellow sticker and left on this table. There are always a few of these modern-world electronic pets here, waiting patiently for their owners to return. Today there is a major exhibition, a dog-show of phones.

By early afternoon, calm has returned. In the Campbell zone there are calls to journalists who may want to join the Azores day-trip.

MacFadden, still powered as though by wires beneath the skin of his neck, is pressing buttons within the Labour machine that might make an MP think twice before voting against the leader. He is preparing moral arguments, political arguments, and identifying those who are beyond argument. These may soon need the attention of the ‘big boys’, a serious call from one of ‘the Johns’, Reid and Prescott.

The best news for persuaders today is that President Bush has agreed to publish the so-called ‘road map’ to Middle East peace. Labour MPs want to know that the President’s concern for regional stability and the upholding of UN resolutions extends to Israel as well as Iraq. To adapt a Blair catchphrase, if he is to be ‘tough on terrorism’, they also want him to be ‘tough on the causes of terrorism’.

The most important phone-call today is about to be put through to the den. The Prime Minister is at his desk, a large, hopeful picture of Nelson Mandela to his left, a white mug marked ‘Daddy’ straight ahead and, next to it, one of Whitehall’s most overworked handsets.

The ringing does not come from the place where it is expected. An unused, finger-marked extension pushed into the far corner of the room beneath Leo’s birthday plate begins to beep instead. It is as though a small animal has escaped. There is cursing and scrabbling until the right phone is ready for use.

‘Hello, Mr Chairman. It’s Tony Blair here.’

The Prime Minister leans forward in front of the backdrop of high blue leather doors. It is a bad line from the West Bank for such a conversation.

‘It’s good to speak to you. And how are you?’ Tony Blair nods as though neck movement might force the words through the noise.

He looks much stronger today. If the Palestinian leader were to ask in return ‘How are you, Mr Blair?’ he could receive an honest ‘Better, thank you’ in reply. The cold has subsided. Any last traces of his panda look are hidden under full make-up for his next event, a televised press conference to promote the ‘road map’ announcement to journalists from the Middle East.

‘We’ve got to take this forward, Mr Chairman.’ There is a gentle pleading in the Prime Minister’s voice.

The ‘this’ is the map, the direction s to a hypothetical place in 2005 where there will be two peaceful states. The lines have been drawn in Washington, Moscow, Brussels and at the UN. In Jerusalem it is not much liked. In the West Bank it is not much trusted. President Bush has announced a few minutes ago that he will publish it as soon as Yasser Arafat has handed effective power to Abu Mazen, the new Palestinian Prime Minister.

Whatever Arafat says is overheard by an intent Jonathan Powell through his earpiece outside. This is a short call, but one which could easily go wrong.

George Bush will not talk to Arafat. The man with his elbows hard against the Downing Street desk has to do reassurance for two. After a few minutes the receiver at the other end is handed to Abu Mazen, the symbolic shift, as Tony Blair hopes it will be.

‘Congratulations,’ he says to Abu Mazen, relaxing visibly now that he is working the phone with a man he can do business with instead of an awkward legend. He looks out of the window. There is sun on the lawn, and a gardener pushing idly at a moss-covered trampoline.

Tony Blair’s aim is to ensure that the road map is not torn up on the Gaza Strip before it is even seen. ‘You have heard what Mr Bush has said. We will do all we can to bring this to a successful conclusion.’

There is a pause, and unwanted sounds.

‘I know, I know,’ he says impatiently when Arafat returns to the line. He sighs and looks hard ahead. ‘What President Bush has said is that he will send it to Abu Mazen. The sooner the better.’

‘Yes, Mr Chairman, this is precisely to end the suffering of the Palestinian people.’

He rubs the side of his face, where the make-up is irritating him. He listens for several minutes more. ‘We will do what we can. Thank you, Mr Chairman.’ He puts the phone back on its cradle and notices a stain on his tie.

‘Get Alastair,’ he calls to the office outside. ‘And get some more ties from the flat.’

The room is suddenly full of identical shirts all bent over the text of the press conference statement. The backs of Jonathan Powell, Peter Hyman, a speechwriter with a livid bruise on his neck, and Matthew Rycroft, the permanently amused Private Secretary from the zone of the diplomatic knights, make up a waving flag of mid-blue.

Campbell arrives, and a fevered argument ensues about the order of paragraphs and the time that is required for them to be printed out in big enough type. The Prime Minister needs reading glasses, but does not like to wear them on television.

Campbell leaves. There is then a more muted discussion about whether there is anything genuinely new in the Bush statement on the road map. ‘It’s the fact that he’s said it that is new,’ says a voice from one part of the blue wave. ‘The President is there. He has spoken. We know from Northern Ireland that the momentum of progress, whatever the size of the moves, is everything.’

Campbell returns with a memo in his hand and a thin smile. ‘Sorry,’ he says, ‘President Bush doesn’t like your script. He’s rewriting it now.’

Tony Blair scowls. ‘One day your sense of humour will get you into big trouble. Or, more important, me into big trouble. Now, where was I?

‘This is not a one-off gesture,’ says another voice from the mêlée.

‘That’s right,’ says the Prime Minister. ‘That’s what I’ll say. Where are the ties?’

A great skein of pink and blue silk neckwear is brought into the den. Tony Blair selects one, checks himself in the mirror and goes to face the cameras.

Thirty minutes later he is walking by the flat-screen in front of Powell’s desk. The press conference is over. He has managed to turn most questions to the Middle East and away from Iraq. The road to a Palestinian state may be long. But, more than ever now, he sees it as the necessary route to reassuring his own MPs in the war vote which will be held next Tuesday.

Tony Blair is keen to know whether the Azores or the road map is going to be the main story on the evening bulletins. His aides, like all political aides, like to give their boss good news. But a ‘War Council’ in the middle of the Atlantic will have stronger appeal, says Hyman bluntly, his purple bruise almost glowing now above his collar.

The Prime Minister looks disappointed. He looks up at the television, on which a Palestinian representative is damning Bush’s motives.

‘They’ve got to be told, Jonathan,’ he says. ‘This is their chance. If they don’t use it, they’ll lose it.’ He turns into the den by himself and closes the door.

Saturday, 15 March

Morning headlines … emergency summit in Azores … Bush to publish Middle East ‘road map’… Washington rejects Chilean compromise … US commanders say Iraqi forces in civilian area will be targets …

When the Prime Minister spends the weekend in Downing Street there is not much ‘weekend’ in Downing Street. There is blue sky over St James’s Park and a sense of bright weather ahead. Upstairs in the flat two teenage Blairs, seventeen-year-old Nicholas and fifteen-year-old Kathryn, are preparing for a London day.

Inside the dark front hall of Number Ten there are four dead orchids, ready to be collected by the garbage-men, and the first signs of a conference for political ‘enforcers’.

Hilary Armstrong, Labour Chief Whip since Tony Blair’s second election victory two years ago, has abandoned her grandmotherly office grey for a soft cream leather jacket. John Reid is in leather too, harder and black. Gordon Brown is wearing a black-and-white rugby shirt. Sally Morgan is in a blue sweater. Only two are dressed for work as they would be on a weekday morning: Alastair Campbell is in his tracksuit and marathon trainers, and John Prescott in his regular stiff suit.

‘The next few days will be very twittery,’ says Armstrong, leaning on the burgundy Chesterfield where the Campbell corridor meets the hall. She wants to put ‘weekend pressure’ on dissident Members of Parliament when they are meeting their constituents.

Here at Westminster political revolts are likely to gain momentum. Each new meeting in committee room or bar gives rebels the confidence that they are not alone. Once ‘wobblers’ are back at home, local Labour leaders, chairmen of constituency parties, may remind them why they were elected in the first place, why, without Tony Blair, there would not be a Labour government. ‘So, if John Reid were to call some of these Constituency Chairmen, he could make that point …’

Armstrong is expressing the conventional Whips’ Office wisdom. ‘In the bad old days,’ she says chattily, ‘when a “Big Boy” phoned your Chairman it made a big difference. We have to fix that up now.’

Reid is not so sure. This is not a conventional case. The Labour activists are more angry with the government than the Members of Parliament are. He worries that the Constituency Chairmen are likely to be the most opposed to the war of all. He does not want to phone a Chairman ‘behind an MP’s back’. He will help, but ‘only if it’s not going to be counterproductive’.

‘Have you seen Jack Straw?’ Armstrong asks coolly. The Foreign Secretary has problems in his own constituency this weekend. Muslim voters are well represented in Blackburn, Lancashire. They dislike the idea of their elected representative helping the American takeover of a Muslim country.

The Whips are not so enthusiastic about Jack Straw either. Much of their political problem arises from the government’s earlier excessive confidence that there would be an unambiguous second United Nations resolution giving an ultimatum to Saddam Hussein. Doubting Labour Members were allowed, even encouraged, to tell their Chairmen and their local press that they would support the Prime Minister’ s policy once that resolution was passed. Now any such clear UN support is a dream.

The meeting begins in a dark Number Eleven reception room with Armstrong’s latest account of ‘wobblers and runners’. She speaks with a flat northern voice which is her main weapon of threat. The friendliness and humour, the weapons of the cajoling Whip, are all in the lines around her eyes.

Tony Blair is seated in a large gilt chair which the Treasury uses to impress foreign bankers. He looks slight, in open-necked blue shirt and chino trousers. On either side of him, like a Praetorian guard, are Prescott, cold and frowning on the left, and Brown, who has now exchanged his rugby kit for a dark suit, on the right.

Morgan is more cheerful about the anguishing MPs. ‘They haven’t seen the abyss yet. When they’ve seen it, they will come back from it.’

There is a quiet moment while they review the latest security reports from Iraq. Some of the Baghdad government is resigned to war; there is a certain amount of ‘summary punishment’ being meted out to dissenters. The Chief Whip concentrates hard.

Gordon Brown, sitting judge-like on his Chancellor’s bench, is the only figure from the war team who can highlight the chief flaw in the policy as it is seen from the streets. ‘What people ask me is, why is there not just a little more delay?’

The Prime Minister knows that this is a legitimate question. This afternoon he must have a last telephone call with the most active of the junior UN Security Council members, Chilean President Ricardo Lagos, who has been making exactly that argument.

The right answer to the Chancellor of the Exchequer and his questioners is that George Bush has had enough of the United Nations, and will begin war within days. Tony Blair snaps impatiently at the meeting, ‘The reason is that you just go back to 1441: time, time and more time.’ It is clear from Gordon Brown’s eyes that better language than that needs to be found if the case is to be won.

The number 1441, shorthand for the resolution against Saddam Hussein which the Security Council agreed but did not want to act upon, is one of many bits of war jargon which are not easily understood by outsiders. If Ministers could say that the war was being fought because of intolerable abuse of human rights, because of torture, mass murder, even some of the casual last-minute mutilation of Iraqis on which the meeting has just been briefed, the case would be much easier.

If Ministers were allowed even to rest their case on the need to remove barbarian tyrants, the strategic interdependence of Europe and America for the common good, their words of persuasion might have a better chance of being heard. But the language demanded by the immediate negotiations is of acronyms, paragraphs and numbered resolutions.

Pat MacFadden, in black T-shirt, black shirt and jeans, looks like an accused man in court making pages of notes for his own defence. He is working on what the better language might be. The veins on his forehead do not suggest that his task is going well.

The Attorney General, the meeting is told, will announce on Monday that war against Iraq is legal on the basis of past UN resolutions. The Sunday newspapers can be told that for tomorrow. There is thus no need for the new Second Resolution upon which so much has been built.

The legal niceties defeat all but the most determined political students. Cherie Blair would be more use on this point than anyone in the room, except that she might well not come to the right conclusion. One of her senior colleagues has already determined that past UN resolutions give no legality for war.

Fortunately the Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, who is not here today, thinks otherwise. If he did not judge the coming war to be legal there would be no British troops fighting it. There will still, however, be a lot of explaining to do. Last week the second UN resolution was a magic chemical formula to clear away all ills. This week it is a bit of herbal medicine, desirable, beneficial, good for the soul, but wholly unnecessary.

Morgan tells her boss that his arrival time back home from the Azores is 2 a.m. on Monday.

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