The Burden of Power: Countdown to Iraq - The Alastair Campbell Diaries (106 page)

I was keen to get to Mark’s [Gault] funeral in New York, and mentioned it to TB, who said he would prefer it if I stayed for the whole trip but would understand if I didn’t. Over dinner on the plane TB, AC, DM, Tom Kelly. Serious stuff on Iraq. TB said it reminded him of FMD [foot and mouth disease] before we gripped it and the military sorted it. People knew what problems needed to be solved, but nobody was gripping it. Paul Bremer was impressive but looked like he was overwhelmed. David and I explained to him that the problem was the US. His critics looked at Bush, said he’d won his war and now seemed less interested. Rumsfeld fired off orders the whole time. The State Department was marginalised. Bremer spoke to Rumsfeld and the Security Council were out of the loop. There was not much we could do to make it better.

Alarmingly, TB said what he felt it needed was for me to go out there and be his person totally gripping it, alongside someone who was GWB’s person. I said I was not keen, but he clearly was. He said he would speak to GWB, Russia and France and make them realise it could go belly up. I felt that the US had an electoral strategy that meant they just kept moving on to the next bold thing. He said we shouldn’t see it as a conspiracy, it’s just that they had a bigger and more difficult bureaucracy.

Overnight we had a telegram about the US warning that there could be two Brits among those at Guantanamo Bay that could end up being executed. I said to TB it would be dreadful and it couldn’t be allowed to happen. He said he didn’t think they would go through with some of this tribunal stuff, but I wasn’t so sure. He then turned to Chirac. Giscard [d’Estaing] had said to him that Chirac was a man of strong but changing emotions. TB said he only really understood strength. Since we turned on him over Iraq he had become much
nicer and treated TB with much more respect. TB believed Chirac would try hard to get back onside with Bush, but another telegram was saying that Bush was only in the mood to tolerate, not to forgive. David M suggested we try to get Jeremy Greenstock to go to Baghdad.

TB was worried about [visiting] St Petersburg [EU–Russia Summit]. He wanted to be low-profile and felt it would be a disaster for Putin if the whole thing was over the top because people would think he was suffering real
folie de grandeur
and possibly becoming corrupt. We had a nice enough dinner on the plane and I was in a reasonably good mood, which ended as we approached Warsaw [tour taking in Warsaw, St Petersburg and the G8 summit in Evian, France]. I gave him the note I had done setting out a plan for my departure. He read it, gave me a quizzical look and then said ‘Keep it, don’t put it in my box, don’t copy it round.’ Meanwhile Fiona had told her staff she was going, so it was all going to be a bit messy. Part of me felt I couldn’t let Fiona down but part of me felt I would be a real loss to him. I had grown very friendly with David Manning, who I liked, for his seriousness and commitment. He said he felt TB would be bereft and I should probably fix on the general election and make clear I would be going then. We arrived at the hotel in Warsaw and TB was pretty much doing the speech himself now. I went for a run then tried to work out how I could get to Mark’s funeral.

WMD firestorm was getting worse. I told TB the papers were really pretty grim as he woke up, and he was worried that the spooks would be pissed off with us. He felt that in part the attacks coming now were about Europe. ‘It’s another attack to go to the heart of my integrity,’ he said. We decided we would have to hit back at the press conference even though it would take away from the Europe speech. He said he was happy with the speech. He was a bit jumpy about the spooks [September dossier] stuff and said we had to get him all the facts on it. I said the facts were that it was the work of the agencies and the idea that we would make these things up was absurd. I spoke to Julian Miller [Cabinet Office intelligence and security official] in the car, and then to John Scarlett during TB’s meeting with the Polish PM [Leszek Miller].

John S said he was emphatic in saying to people that it was not true that we pressured them, and they were saying that. But he stopped short of agreeing to do a letter about it. He was very much up for helping us but only so far. As TB’s meeting went on, I did a very strong line of rebuttal and when the press conference came up, he hit
back hard on it. The meeting with the Poles was excellent. Though the prime minister and the president [Aleksander Kwasniewski] were different sorts of people from different parties, they were on the same agenda. They were pro NATO, anti Chirac, determined to protect the transatlantic alliance. The president was really concerned about the neocons in the States and TB didn’t go that far to placate, though he did say he sometimes felt the analysis was right but the way they secured their objectives was all wrong.

On the Polish referendum [on entry into the EU], the president said the Pope [John Paul II, a Pole] had helped in saying vote yes, but a lot of the priests were saying vote no. He said turnout was a problem and they really wanted TB to do a big vote-yes pitch, which he did. They also asked him to offer support to Ukraine and to get Russia to be nicer to former satellites. The press conference was a bit of a shambles and I rather childishly enjoyed the sight of two burly Polish women manhandling Trevor Kavanagh and others out of sight. We went for a break at [UK ambassador] Michael Pakenham’s residence and sat out in the blazing sunshine. TB’s speech [at the Royal Castle] had gone down well.
⁵⁷

I eventually decided to go to the funeral, and arranged to meet Jeremy Greenstock while I was out there to put the idea of him going to Baghdad. Cherie joined us on the plane for the flight to St Petersburg, which whizzed by with lunch and a bit of work. They had the papers from the last couple of days. TB had a rare look at the
Mail
and said it’s not just vile, it’s evil. On my future, he said don’t do anything yet, you must distance it from all the Carole stuff. I said fine, so long as he understands we are serious about leaving. He said he understood that but it required careful handling.

We arrived and were driven to a specially built complex of so-called cottages for the leaders attending the anniversary celebrations [300 years since the foundation of St Petersburg]. The cottages were grand, ornate identical homes built for the purpose of this event. It underlined TB’s worries about
folie de grandeur
. Marble of dubious quality all over the place. Huge en suite bathrooms, lavish but rather tacky furniture, gyms and pools. Yet the overall effect was pretty horrible and the people working there were not much less surly than during the Communist days. TB went off for a ceremony and then we went to the Mariinsky Theatre concert to join the leaders. I had been
dreading it but actually quite enjoyed it. Chirac, TB and wives were seated together. The body language was OK. By the time I got back to the cottage, I was trying to work out what I had really added today. I had sorted our response on the [September] dossier, helped out re the funeral, done a note on forward strategy, talked to Fiona a few times but that was about it.

TB away at a stack of different events and ceremonies. I met up with him at the EU–Russia summit. He said they were all wondering why they were there. Lots of the other leaders had been rolling their eyes around at the nature of the event. He said Chirac had been very warm to him and had sent him a note thanking him for what he said about France in the Warsaw speech. He was being very fulsome with TB in front of all the others. Chirac asked me if I enjoyed the concert. He said it was too long, and that music events should never be longer than forty-five minutes.

At the summit, TB was taken into the leaders’ room while the rest of us were taken to what must once have been a dungeon. I had a long chat with Bela Anda [Schroeder’s spokesman]. He said Schroeder was getting fed up with all the stuff coming out of Condi Rice’s mouth and might fight back at some point. TB came back to the cottage after what he said was the most extraordinary fireworks spectacle he had ever seen. Both he and Bush said neither of them could have got away with something like it. He had obviously been talking to some of them about the nature of opinion in Britain. He said we had to do something about the press on Europe, and we may have to take them on properly. I said I have been saying that for years. He said I know, but you have to pick your moment and your issue, and you may be right, but this is it. He said it may be that we have to do it even if we lose because ultimately we should do the right thing.

He was also musing on the ‘prophet in his own land’ phenomenon. You didn’t have to be at an event like this for long to see how the other leaders, particularly those from the accession countries, saw the UK as perhaps the best place imaginable, and TB in the very top league. Even the French and the Germans were clear that Bush would not be moving in the way he was on the Middle East without TB’s influence, but all we got from our media was total shit. GB sent through a forward strategy note for TB that happily was similar to mine in the way he saw the dividing lines. I did a long run with Rod Lyne [UK ambassador] out on a trail near the sea. We had a bilateral with [Atal Bihari] Vajpayee [Indian Prime Minister]. Kashmir, Iraq,
MEPP, Nepal, Peter Bleach.
⁵⁸
He was more fluid and talkative than usual, but very frail. He walked very slowly now and his hearing aids were clearly very powerful. We were still being hit hard on WMD and the Sundays were going to be doing it even bigger with a lot of the focus on me.

With DM to the airport, had a readout of the papers, pretty grim. On the plane I told TB and he was a bit down about it all. Also, he and Cherie seemed to have had a row and she was really lip-quivering. TB went down the plane to see the press, again pushing back on WMD. He was fine but the WMD issue was now digging into us. TB kept saying ‘What are the allegations?’ I said it’s that we made them do something they didn’t want to do. But it’s ridiculous, he said, and so it went on. At Geneva, he left for Evian and I stayed on the plane to come back with Cherie, Alison etc. The Sunday papers were on there, and were even worse than media monitoring had said. The
Sunday Times
had a story about an email showing I’d discussed the dossier with John Scarlett and there was a suggestion that I had tried to get JS to write a conclusion. In fact John had drafted one and I’d said I didn’t think that it worked. There was an account in the
Observer
of meetings with TB, JS, C, Jack Straw and complained it wasn’t right. There would be grains of truth in all this but it was just crap. Indeed I’d bent over backwards not least because I was fearful this kind of thing could happen.

Gilligan had a big piece in the
Mail on Sunday
having a go at me from the alleged source that he had, with descriptions of meetings there had never been and things I was said to have done that I never did.
⁵⁹
But it was grim, and grim for me, and also for TB with huge stuff about trust. It was definitely time to get out. I called John Scarlett when I got back and he remained, at least to me, very supportive, said he’d always been happy to do the dossier, had always insisted it was his work, and would only release it if happy with it. Maybe there were some people lower down who were not happy at the idea
of a dossier because of the need to preserve secrecy and because of the fear it would be politicised, but that was not the case for the people at the top. He was emphatic that the agencies were pushing back and denying all this, but there was precious little sign of that in the Sundays.

He said he was minded to set everything out in a note to ministers, which they could then draw on themselves. He said we were being made to accord to our stereotypes – you are the brutal political hatchet man and I am the dry intelligence officer. It’s not very nice but I can assure you this is not coming from people at the top. He was clear I had never asked him to do anything he was unhappy with. I said before long, once the left was bored with WMD they would be on to the idea that we were victims of what security services have always done to Labour governments. TB didn’t believe in that stuff but he was clear that there was something going on here. John S recalled the various stages of the dossier process; how we said we would present the evidence, then how we retreated last Easter because we feared it would raise the stakes too high and it was not a great document. Then how more and more intelligence came in, then how we agreed to go for it at the time we did. Then on to the production through Julian Miller. I said it was really bad, all this stuff.

In early, WMD still raging and it was going to be the big build-up to Wednesday, PMQs and the G8 statement, then hopefully some kind of catharsis. TB was still in ‘it’s ridiculous’ mode and getting more and more irritated by what was essentially a media-driven thing. The main problem of course was that there were no WMD discoveries beyond the two labs, and no matter how much we said that there were other priorities now, the public were being told as a matter of fact that we had done wrong. We had Clare S, Robin C and a lot of backbenchers on the rampage now. So it was difficult. I did the morning meeting which essentially I used to get together the briefing for Wednesday. Meeting with Jonathan to try to get a sense of where to go on the WMD story. ISC [Commons Intelligence and Security Committee] inquiry or a letter from John S to TB saying there was no improper interference in the process. [Andrew] Marr was back from holiday and decided to peddle the line that AC would be the scalp the Commons was looking for. So here we go again, Black Rod, Cheriegate, all over again.

On the flight out to New York, I did a bit of work and then read [Harold Wilson’s former press secretary] Joe Haines’ book [
Glimmers
of Twilight: Harold Wilson in Decline
]. Pretty grim reading and the problems with Marcia [Falkender, Wilson’s former political secretary] worse than anything we had. His section on the BBC of today was brilliant. I was met by Jeremy Greenstock’s driver Gary and his Bentley and taken to the residence. I did a bit of paperwork, then out to meet friends from university who were over for the funeral. Rebekah Wade [
Sun
editor] was over for a News Corp meeting and I had a drink with her and Sarah Murdoch [wife of Lachlan, Rupert Murdoch’s elder son] at Soho House and gave her a hard time over their coverage of Europe, and made-up stories.