At the risk of offending purists, pedants and history scholars, I have taken the liberty of beginning this volume with the same diary entry with which I ended the last one: September 11. Though this volume is the fourth in a series of the full diaries of my time working for Labour in opposition and in government, it also stands alone as a record of the most difficult and controversial period of Tony Blair’s premiership. It is an intimate portrayal of Blair the war leader, with conflict in both Afghanistan and Iraq taking place during the two years covered, and September 11 is the most suitable place to begin that account.
The Taliban in Afghanistan, Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and the fear of terrorist organisations getting hold of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) with the help of rogue states, had been on TB’s agenda well before September 11. Indeed, subsequently Mike White of the Guardian reminded me that TB had raised the issue as ‘a coming challenge’ at a meeting at the newspaper’s head office the day before the Twin Towers fell. But without the events of that day, it is at least plausible to imagine that neither war would have taken place, certainly in the way they did. As the ten-year anniversary showed, it is a date so much now part of the public consciousness, and so central to many strategic, religious and geopolitical debates around the world, that it seems almost otiose to add the year: September 11, 2001. More than a decade on, we say ‘September 11’, or its American variant, ‘9/11’, and there are very few people who don’t immediately know where, when and what you mean, and summon up images of planes hitting buildings, people fleeing in terror, families grieving in all parts of the world, politicians struggling to catch up. There have been terror attacks since, but none which has made such a powerful impact, which is still felt today.
World leaders are fond of stating, in the immediate aftermath of terrorist outrages, that we must and will not let the terrorists deflect us or change our way of life. But they can, and they do. It is something I reflect on every time I go through an airport security check. But September 11 did more than see increased bag checks, belt and shoe removals and toothpaste confiscation at airports. It recast the foreign policy of major powers. It tested relationships between them. It tested the UN. It brought to a head debates which had been simmering within and about Islam. Most importantly for this book, it came to be a defining moment in Tony Blair’s premiership, George Bush’s presidency, the relationship between the two, the reputation of both.
The day began with TB worrying about a speech he was due to make to the Trades Union Congress in Brighton about public service reform. It was being set up as something of a ’lion’s den’ moment. The speech was never delivered: the first attack on the Twin Towers in New York took place as we put the finishing touches to it in a hotel suite overlooking a calm and beautiful sea. The day ended with TB back in London directing the UK end of a global crisis management response, which would subsequently see the domestic side of his job dwarfed by the consequences of the attacks.
The Burden of Power charts in sometimes minute detail what happened around TB on September 11, and every day thereafter: the initial response, the globetrotting diplomacy as the case for action was built, the decision to use military force to remove the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, a war still going on in somewhat different form today. Then not long afterwards the war in Iraq, undoubtedly the most difficult and the most controversial decision of the Blair government. In military terms, the wars were successful and, in terms of meeting the initial objectives, relatively swift. The Taliban fell. Saddam fell. But we all know that is only part of the story. The Taliban were toppled, but never really went away. Afghanistan remains far from secure, with perilous consequences for the region. Saddam was toppled, but after the initial celebrations, chaos ensued, and the controversy over the decision to commit troops to action did not disappear with the dictator those troops brought down. The stated purpose of the action was to remove what the government believed to be a growing threat from Saddam’s WMD programme. Of course Saddam’s long and wretched history of rule, his brutality, the wars he started, his defiance of the UN, these were all factors. But the answer to the specific question ‘Why Iraq, why now?’ was his continued development of a WMD programme, and the post-9/11 threat the US, the UK and others believed this posed. The fact that the weapons did not materialise in Iraq after Allied troops entered the country merely fuelled the controversy, unsurprisingly, over the original decision.
The Burden of Power seems a fitting title for a book dominated by Tony Blair’s handling of these events. See the front covers of the four volumes and you see first a young and vibrant Opposition leader, then a young and jubilant prime minister taking the reins of power with an enormous landslide and huge goodwill, then a prime minister beginning to age as always they do – but still smiling – and finally, on the front of this volume, the Burden of Power. These were momentous decisions, taken amid enormous pressure and often with much else going on. It is why, though I disagree with his politics and oppose many of the things he has done, I have respect for the fact that the current prime minister, David Cameron, does the job he does. The pressures are unique to that post. Only five people alive today know what they are.
When I was asked by a newspaper to choose a defining photograph, as part of the enormous ‘a decade on’ coverage of September 11, I opted not for the obvious ones, but for a photo of TB sitting alongside John Monks, the general secretary of the TUC. Minutes earlier, John had said to me that it was on days like this that you realised the enormity of the responsibility that goes with the prime minister’s job. The picture was used in The Blair Years, the extracts of my diaries published in 2007, and I have used it again in the first plate section of this volume too. TB looks focused and distracted at the same time. I know him well enough to see that his mind is whirring, thinking through the many things he will need to deal with once he has announced to the Congress that he must head back to London – his brief statement on events in the US, his expression of solidarity, his warning that the extremism behind the attacks had to be confronted, and his announcement that he would not be making the speech led to his first and last full standing ovation from a TUC event. John Monks meanwhile, also someone in a leadership position, is looking empathetically at TB, sensing the additional burdens falling on the shoulders of the man sitting next to him.
For some of his enemies, Iraq defines TB. The three election wins, a peace agreement in Ireland, record investment in schools and hospitals, Bank of England independence, devolution to Scotland, Wales and London, Sure Start, the minimum wage, civic partnerships, the New Deal, Kosovo, Sierra Leone, debt relief, securing the Olympics for London, all these and many more get parked and forgotten by those who wish only to see that when it came to Iraq, he did the wrong thing and for the wrong reasons. They see it as nothing short of a disaster, regardless of the fact that one of the most brutal dictators in history was felled after his years of defiance of the UN and brutality against his own people. It was about oil. It was about Israel. It was because TB was craven in his relationship with George Bush in particular and the US in general. It was because he had been in power too long and it had all gone to his head. For some these are unshifting and unshiftable views which, if anything, harden with time. And though TB led Labour to a comfortable third election victory even after the war in Iraq, and all the controversy that involved, I know there are people who deserted Labour on the back of it. But I hope a fair reading of my diaries shows that he took real care over all of the decisions which faced him at this time. I don’t object to people disagreeing with the decisions he took. As so often in politics, things were never black and white. There was always another course that could have been taken, and I have never considered it dishonourable to hold a different view. Indeed Robin Cook expressed such a view brilliantly when he resigned from the government over Iraq. But as someone who was alongside TB as much as anyone, I know the care he took over the decisions, and the sincerity of his view that he was doing what he believed to be the right thing for Britain, British people and their security. He wasn’t elected to hold views, but to take decisions based upon them, and whilst people may disagree with the conclusions he reached, they should not doubt his sincerity in the beliefs that drove him to them, not least his long-standing concerns about the threat of Islamic extremism, nor his conviction that not to have taken those decisions would have been wrong. Very little is heard in the UK media of the Iraqis who supported what we did, and who at least now have the beginnings of democracy. Those who opposed the war must at least reflect, surely, that had their position held sway, Saddam and his sons would have prospered for even longer. That was a danger TB believed the world should not countenance. It is why, despite the controversy, despite the opprobrium he has faced over Iraq, he nonetheless believes world leaders have a duty to face up to the threat of Islamic extremism, and why the conduct of Iran will at some stage have to be properly addressed too.
There was a point at which, in the run-up to the war in Iraq, I asked him if the war was really worth it if – as I feared it would – it led to him being driven out of office before his time. He said it was always worth doing what you thought was the right thing, and that Saddam was a threat the world had ignored for too long, and that included Britain. Those two insights were never far from his thinking throughout. As was clear from his evidence to the Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq War, he accepts mistakes were made, but he does not accept that the decision to remove Saddam was the wrong one, or that all the chaos which ensued was alone the responsibility of those who took the action to remove him. He thinks it was right, too, to be supportive of the US, not just because they came under attack on September 11, or even because we share so much in terms of values and history, but because he believed the only way to have any influence on President Bush privately – for example in getting him to take the issue of Iraq down the route of the UN, or get fresh US engagement in the Middle East Peace Process – was via maximum public support. It was to some extent a trade-off, for which he was willing to take the ‘Bush’s poodle’ jibes.
Back in late 2001, with the memories of September 11 fresh in people’s minds, and with the Taliban clearly not facing up to the challenge of helping to deliver up Osama Bin Laden and other perpetrators of the attacks, public and political support for action was stronger than it was for action in Iraq, though it is worth remembering that from some on the right in Britain, we faced the charge of being too cautious, and public support was greater at the time than it was after the event. I should make clear at this juncture that I am not linking Iraq to the September 11 attacks, in the sense of claiming Iraq played a role in them, and it was unhelpful of some in the US system to seek to do so. But where the link exists is here: until September 11, the threat posed by Iraq and WMD was one that the US and its closest allies were willing to tolerate. After September 11, the mindset shifted. To quote the phrase used often at the Chilcot Inquiry, the calculus of threat changed.
For those who think the government did the wrong thing, so much has been said and written, the arguments have been played out so volubly, that it is unlikely anything I say here, or which I wrote at the time and publish now, will persuade them otherwise. But when TB was being briefed at the Ministry of Defence on military preparedness in the event of our forces coming under attack from biological or chemical weapons, there was not a person in that room who did not consider the threat to be real. I can remember feeling a sense of fear which was matched by the looks on some of the faces in the room. I can remember TB pressing until he was as assured as he could be that our troops were as prepared as possible to face this threat if and when it came. No prime minister would commit troops to any action, let alone to the potential horror being described in that room, without thinking through the consequences, and unless they were sure there was no other way. Also, I know it is not the done thing in polite circles to speak well of George W. Bush, but I thought he made a very good observation in his book, Decision Points, when he said, ‘If I wanted to mislead the country into war why would I pick an allegation that was certain to be disproven publicly shortly after we invaded the country?’ Both he and TB, and the people working for them, believed the WMD threat was real. People are entitled to disagree with the decisions. But there was no lying, there was no conspiracy. There was a set of difficult decisions that had to be taken.
Of course the portrait of Tony Blair is the most intimate here. But I saw a good deal of Bush, of Vladimir Putin, of Jacques Chirac and other world leaders during this time. Bill Clinton still figures large, a good and sometimes critical friend to TB and his team. The night out with him and actor Kevin Spacey in a McDonald’s restaurant in Blackpool was one of the more memorable meals of my life. Unforgettable too was the meeting at which he gave fellow Labour strategist Philip Gould and me a masterclass in political strategy, complete with very personal advice about my own by then difficult situation. Many on both sides of the Atlantic find it odd that TB could be close both to Clinton and to Bush, two very different leaders from different sides of the political divide. I think TB would argue that with the US the only superpower at the time, he had a duty to have good relations with its leader. Also, he genuinely got on with Bush. The Texan certainly had a cowboy touch about him, at times right down to the boots on his feet. But he has more intelligence, more charm and greater political skills than most are prepared to credit him with. It has also been interesting to note, as the Republicans have lurched through the process of trying to find a candidate to take on President Obama at the next election, that by the standards of most of the contenders, Bush is something of a moderate. Many modern politicians are more impressive in public than in private. The media age has forced politicians as a breed to communicate more and to think about how they do so. They can turn a switch and go into public mode. David Cameron is a good example of this. George Bush’s switch seemed sometimes to go the other way. He would express himself less well in public than he did in private. At least he was aware that his image gave other leaders in other countries problems. I don’t think the same could always be said for his vice president Dick Cheney or defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
Just as Iraq will always be one of the issues most associated with TB, so the issues of communication surrounding the war will always be with me, as someone somewhere reminds me online most days. As I said to the Chilcot Inquiry, I stand by everything I said and did in relation to the September 2002 dossier on WMD presented to Parliament by the Prime Minister. Being asked to give my diaries to Lord Hutton’s inquiry into David Kelly’s death, as this volume shows, was something of a terrifying moment. As anyone who has read my diaries now knows, I can be very frank, I can say very harsh things, I can be hard on myself and on others. I confess to being so worried about what I might have written that when I drove from our holiday home in Provence to Marseilles airport to collect my diaries so that I could transcribe them and send them to Lord Hutton in advance of my first evidence session, I had one of those momentary reflections that life might be easier all round if I just careered off the motorway. Yet as it turned out, I think the diaries may have helped our case. They showed that we took rather more care over that dossier than the BBC journalist took over his report which led to my being called to select committee inquiries, ultimately to Kelly’s death, and the inquiry into that.
I never met David Kelly, but I think about him often, and whether I could have done anything differently that might have stopped him from taking his life. With the exception of the deaths of family and close friends, the day his body was found was perhaps the worst of my life, certainly the worst of my time with TB. Had it not been for Fiona, and Philip Gould who came round to the house on hearing the news, I would almost certainly have resigned there and then. I was frankly beyond caring if it meant the blame would come my way. So far as many in the media were concerned, that was going to happen anyway. I just felt the whole thing had become like a horrible, dark novel and I wanted out of it. Ironically, the night before, we were felt to be ‘winning’ the battle with the BBC, its reporter having been strongly criticised by the Foreign Affairs Committee. But by the morning, all that had changed. It was horrific. The feelings I had then are among the reasons why, despite always staying involved, and going back to help out in two general elections, I have never really wanted to return to a full-time position in the front line of politics.
When I gave evidence to the Leveson Inquiry into media practices in 2011, I made the point that much of today’s media like to act as judge and jury on those in public life. The coverage of the Hutton Inquiry, whose deliberations are covered in this volume, but whose conclusions came after I resigned from Downing Street, is a good example. The inquiry shone a microscopic light on both the process of communication in the run-up to war, and the circumstances surrounding Dr Kelly’s death. When Lord Hutton was putting government witnesses through their paces, and ministers and officials from the prime minister down were being questioned and cross-examined, day in and day out, media reporting was largely slanted to show the government in a bad light, and Lord Hutton in a good light because of the rigour of his inquiry. The bits of the evidence that suggested wrongdoing by the government led bulletins and newspapers. Anything that fitted with the government account tended to be relegated. The moment Lord Hutton concluded that the central charges against the government were not borne out by the evidence, he was condemned as Lord Whitewash. Hundreds, thousands of reports have subsequently sought to convey the sense that the BBC report was essentially true. It was not; and as Lord Hutton said at the time, even if it emerged there were no WMD in Iraq, that would not make the reporting true. It is important to remember what the accusations against us – and me in particular – were: that we inserted false intelligence into the WMD dossier, knowing it to be false and against the wishes of the intelligence agencies. To this day, I fail to see how a government can simply ignore claims as serious as that. Indeed, had the inquiry found against us, it would not just have been the end for me, but more importantly for TB. Though no WMD have been found, the BBC report is as untrue today as it was when it was first made, despite the constant attempts by many in the media to rewrite what was broadcast, or to confuse and conflate the WMD dossier with the so-called ‘dodgy dossier’, which was a different paper, which attracted next to no attention at the time, on which someone working for me made an error for which I apologised.
It is fair to say that in this volume, most of the personal satisfaction, even happiness I managed to get from working for TB in the early years has gone. The twin pressures of a 24–7 job of real intensity and scrutiny, and a home life where pressure was mounting on me to leave, at times felt like a living nightmare. I was glad to have discovered a new obsession in running. My sons persuaded me to go for a long run in the summer of 2002. By the end of the holiday I had decided to do the London Marathon, which coincided with a very busy time in relation to Iraq. TB felt the whole thing was a bit of a distraction; to me, it was something of a saviour. At the time I took up running, I could do the job, but I didn’t feel I was doing it as well as before. I was resenting the workload, and resenting those on our own side who so often made life harder than it should have been. TB was convinced that I could and should stay, and he is a very skilful manager when it comes to getting his own way. Also, even when we fell out, as over the role of Australian con man Peter Foster and Carole Caplin when Cherie bought two flats for her son Euan, I always felt a strong sense of loyalty to TB, and I still do. It was that loyalty, in addition to the sense of being involved in such significant events, with the chance to make a difference, which made it so hard to leave. When finally I did, I knew it was the right time, even if I fell into a pretty awful depression not long afterwards.
I had forgotten until transcribing the diaries just how long I had been trying to get out. Ironically, the controversy over the communications on Iraq kept me in post for longer. TB finally agreed to my departure in May 2003, shortly before the BBC report I describe above, and yet I didn’t leave until August, as the intervening months came to be dominated by the fallout. I suppose it is also something of an irony that TB hired me to take charge of his media relations and yet my own relations with the media became as bad as they did. Partly this was because I often played the role of lightning conductor. But also I was one of the few people able and willing to articulate what I believed to be a set of damaging trends in the way the media and its effect upon democratic debate were developing. I think one of the reasons I became so high profile and so controversial is that I was doing the job at a time the media age was becoming a reality. The media sought to position themselves as the sole purveyors of truth (ironically at a time when standards were falling). In their minds, what they did was truth; what we did was spin. We made mistakes, certainly, not least my colleague Jo Moore’s infamous ‘good day to bury bad news’ email of 9/11. But in general I believe we applied far higher standards to what we said and did than many journalists applied to what they wrote or broadcast.
By the time of this volume we are certainly on the receiving end of the culture of negativity which is powerfully unique to the UK media. I’m not quite sure I would go as far as Derry Irvine’s description of the press as ‘Satan’s people on earth’ – some of them were out for Derry’s son at the time – but I thought David Blunkett summed up the new media mood well when he said if TB had found a cure for cancer they’d report his failure to do anything for victims of meningitis. TB shared my analysis that the media had become a problem not just for politicians but for our culture and therefore our country. But as I said to the Leveson Inquiry, whereas I felt we had to do something about it, he continued to feel that with all the other priorities the government faced, the public simply would not understand if we launched an overhaul of press standards and regulation as another plank of reform. It was a fair point. But there was always going to come a time when the media reformed and hopefully phone-hacking has brought us to that moment. We will see.
Beyond growing disenchantment with the political media, certain other domestic themes recur in this volume: TB’s frustrations at the pace of delivery; something of a culture clash with parts of the Civil Service; continuing difficulties with matters Royal; another media frenzy erupting from false charges that TB sought a bigger role in the Queen Mother’s funeral, clearly being fuelled by members of the establishment, some of whom never quite reconciled themselves to a long-running Labour government; TB and his fashion sense – my determination not to let him wear a coat Cherie wanted him to put on in Russia led to one of my biggest rows with her; and of course the TBGBs. John Holmes, formerly TB’s foreign policy adviser, made an interesting observation: that TB’s problems are caused by his relations with two GBs – George Bush and Gordon Brown. They certainly figure large in his thinking and in any history of this remarkable period. Yet again the two sides of Gordon Brown – the brilliant and the impossible – are on show. But by now TB seems to feel the impossible outweighs the brilliant. Even at the height of international crisis, GB is asking TB for a date of departure (much as Fiona was asking the same of me). The battleground is as much about policy as simply the ambition to be PM. The euro, for example, with TB still keen that Britain should step up preparations to join the single currency, and concerned that GB’s scepticism is a tactic to court the right-wing media, the left already supportive of him because of his approach to poverty. There are some fairly extraordinary scenes resulting from GB’s attempts, often without consultation with the ministers concerned, to direct policy in other departments. Ministers are often unsure of what their instincts are expected to be, always a sign of division at the top.
The policy differences are exacerbated by what became a largely dysfunctional working relationship, the management of which consumed extraordinary amounts of time and energy. TB talks of GB waging a war of attrition. Jonathan Powell at one point says it is like watching a failed marriage disintegrate. John Prescott says it is all about TB’s guilt at becoming leader ahead of GB, and GB’s never forgotten sense of betrayal. At times GB could not even bring himself to look at TB in meetings. It all got so bad that TB, fed up with what he sometimes called GB’s ‘destabilisation strategy’, came back from one holiday determined to sack him. It never happened. At another point a small number of his inner team are asked to reflect on what became known variously as his ‘grande stratégie’ and ‘le grand projet’ (he and I often spoke in French for some reason, particularly when he was nervous) – namely announcing that he would not fight the next election, but would stay on until that point. I think it is possible that had GB been more co-operative and more of a team player, TB might have executed that strategy. But things seemed to get worse not better. More even than in previous volumes, TB, his ministerial colleagues, I and my colleagues in the TB team are worrying about what GB would be like as PM. Yet when it came to it, there was enough of the good amid the bad to have most of us supporting him when he took over. TB says at one point that GB is a ‘malign force but head and shoulders above the rest’. Back to the ‘brilliant and impossible’ prism.
There have been plenty of books written about the Blair/Brown era, and the Blair/Brown relationship, and there will doubtless be many more. Most of the memoirs, biographies and autobiographies of our time in government have been written with the benefit of hindsight, and some of them to suit a single view or perspective. I hope that one of the advantages of a diary from the centre, in terms of its potential contribution to historical debate and analysis, is the lack of such hindsight.
This volume brings to an end the detailed daily account of my time working for TB, in opposition and in government. I have kept a diary ever since, continue to do so and one day may publish my post-Number 10 diaries, where from a slightly different perspective I took part in and recorded two more election campaigns, between them the transition from one PM to another, and many of the ups and downs along the way, as I sought to build a different sort of life, but found myself drawn back in again and again. Re-reading this volume now, and gathering the impressions of those who have read it during the editorial process, I do understand why some people ask the question: ‘Why on earth did you go back to help GB?’ I understand too why they point to some passages and say it was obvious he was not temperamentally suited to the job of prime minister, or to leading Labour through a general election campaign. But look elsewhere, and it is not quite so evident. He had huge residual strengths and a political appeal which made him hard to resist when, despite all the differences between the Blair and Brown teams, as Prime Minister he was asking me, Peter Mandelson and Philip Gould to return to the fold to help him out in the run-up to the last election. Peter Mandelson returned full time, and full on, back in the Cabinet. Partly because of my views on the Lords, and partly because I didn’t want to go back full time to the front line, I turned down the offer of a peerage and ministerial post but did go back to help plan the election campaign, and support GB during it. And despite being ill for much of the time, Philip made his usual big contribution on polling and strategy. As Philip wrote in his revised Unfinished Revolution, published shortly before his death last November, I had predicted a hung Parliament from some way out. For much of the campaign, however, I had felt the Tories were on their way towards securing a majority, and I think we surprised ourselves in preventing them from getting one. But when, after several days of post-election wrangling, the time finally came for Gordon to leave Downing Street for Buckingham Palace to offer his resignation to the Queen, I did get the very strong feeling that, politically, we had for the time being run our course. Shortly before, he spoke on the telephone to TB, from the desk in the corner of his office. It was my old office, which he had taken over when he turned 12 Downing Street into what he believed was a more modern set-up for a PM. As he and Tony chatted, Peter Mandelson and I sat and listened. All of the relationships had been tested at times, but there remained a togetherness of sorts, and certainly the sense of a remarkable shared journey that changed Britain, and British politics, for good and, in my view, for the better.
That moment also reminded me of another insight that has deepened with time and experience: that politics, at its best, is a team game. TB once said we were at our best when we were at our boldest. In what was widely seen as a dig at New Labour, by way of response GB said we were at our best when we were Labour. I felt we were always at our best when we were together, united, pulling in the same direction. When it happened, it felt like we were unstoppable. But it didn’t happen all of the time; far from it.
Whenever I was under the cosh, my mother-in-law was fond of reminding me of the old Harry Truman quote, ‘If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.’ But friendship in politics is possible, and can be real. Teamship is vital. It is because Philip Gould was both a great friend and a great team player that I chose to dedicate this volume to him. He more than any of us understood that politics is a team game, and right up to his death was trying to heal some of the wounds that came with the pressures of power. He died proud of the role he had played in helping to get Labour back into power, and in helping TB and his team do the job we did. I publish this full account humble enough to know we didn’t get everything right, but proud of the overall story it tells, and happy to share it.
Alastair Campbell
January 2012