The Burden of Power: Countdown to Iraq - The Alastair Campbell Diaries (63 page)

On the Queen’s Speech, the focus on crime, rights and responsibilities was strong. We then discussed the politics of tuition fees, which seemed to be getting worse not better. It was almost without doubt the right thing to do, and there was a perfectly good argument for it in terms of the long-term benefit to the country, but it was not easy to persuade people that education was anything other than a right that should come free. I felt we needed a much bigger communications strategy around the bigger arguments. We also had to ensure there was not a diminution of access, and we were not yet convinced the work on that had been done either.

After I got home, JP called re a visit on Thursday, and also to go over the Fire Service situation. I asked how things were with GB. He said he was at a crossroads. He didn’t much like some of what TB wanted for health and education. He felt he had been bounced to some extent on foundation hospitals. Also he was not going to get himself into a position where because he was being used to shift GB on the euro, that was used to say he was anti GB on big domestic issues too. I sensed JP was back to a ‘plague on both houses’ mood and he sounded a bit more menacing than usual, though we did end with a laugh when he heard the doorbell going in the background and he said ‘Go on, that’ll be Tony popping round for a nightcap.’ Catherine Colonna called late, said she was trying to calm things but suggesting there were ‘
d’autres dans la forêt
’ [others in the forest] who were still stirring things.

TB called at 7, said though the French row was calming a bit part of him felt it had been good to have it. He had been trying to get into a proper position with the French for five years and maybe this was the only way to have done it, now we can work out what we really agree on and what we don’t. He felt he understood Chirac’s position on most things but Chirac did not understand his, or really try to. He wanted to fix a proper summit meeting for February now and work through a really substantial joint programme. He felt there was
a lot more we could do on defence. He felt even on Iraq it was possible to get to a closer position. He was growing a bit disappointed with Schroeder and saw Anglo-French relations as important in part because the Germans were a bit flaky. I spoke to Catherine a couple of times to try to pin down a date for a proper meeting but we didn’t get there in the end. Things won’t have been helped by [Labour MP] Tony Wright’s question at PMQs.
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Because we pretty much all felt now IDS was a goner, and because we all would prefer he stayed, the PMQs meeting was full of black humour about how good he was, but TB was finding it harder to get up for these encounters because he just didn’t feel IDS had it. The papers were full of stories that there were now enough people up for a challenge. In the end IDS and [Charles] Kennedy both went on tuition fees trying to pin TB on the manifesto commitment not to introduce them. This was going to be difficult, because TB had pretty much decided this was the right thing for the country, and the right thing for the universities, but politically it could be as difficult as anything we had yet done, especially as GB had now pretty much admitted he was putting together a slightly-to-the-left platform and this would be part of it. At PMQs TB effectively had to stand by the manifesto whilst making the case for a different position.

After PMQs I told TB and Sally M re my conversation with JP last night, his general offsideness. ‘This is all pressure from GB,’ TB said. Yesterday’s GB meeting had been dreadful. ‘I said to him at one point, sorry but I’m not listening to this any more. You’ve lost it.’ In the pensions meeting, GB did the old trick of identifying the position of others, misrepresenting it and then having a non-argument so that the real positions were not addressed. I said to TB he had a limited period of maximum strength and he had to use it. He knew what I meant but said ‘If he walks, or if I push him, we have to be very careful because the party will not like it and blame will not just fall to one side.’ GB was making mistakes though, because he was growing desperate his time would never come. TB said he had no idea if it was all going to end in divorce but we had to be on the right side of the arguments if it did.

John Reid’s first meeting re party issues, and he was good, if a bit loquacious. The thing I liked about him was his ability to think things through quickly and articulate them clearly. Philip gave the
most positive polling readout for a while, and some of the deeper strategies – e.g. anti spin, focus on long term – were getting through and making a difference. Pat McFadden came in halfway through, having finally decided to take Robert Hill’s job [as Blair’s political secretary, Hill having been appointed special adviser to Charles Clarke]. Pat had to decide if he was going to pursue a serious political career now or meander into middle age. I had an hour with David Wilkinson [Cabinet Office] for his GICS review and was perhaps too frank. I said I felt the GICS was to a large extent a barrier to good communications and that leading people were obstructive to change.

I had a good meeting with Peter M, who was pro John Reid and up for a more political role at some point, and PG. I was working on a fund-raising letter for Leukaemia Research and read through all the old cuttings and speeches re John [Merritt, Campbell’s late best friend who died of the disease]. TB called a couple of times later, really turning over top-up fees in his mind. He knew this was going to set the next phase of the domestic context. He was up for being ‘at our best when at our boldest’ and up for a debate taking off in that direction. He agreed to do a press conference on Monday to get up pre-Queen’s Speech messaging on crime and antisocial behaviour.

The day didn’t start very well, Fiona repeating her view that she didn’t see why people would pay money to talk to me at sponsored events, which was her way of saying she didn’t really want the pressure of the marathon adding to the pressures of the job. But I was sure I wanted to do it, could do it, and needed a new challenge like this. I left in a pretty foul mood though. First meeting re European defence where Jonathan and I both thought TB was kidding himself if he thought we were going to get a decent deal with the French any time soon. Another meeting re top-up fees. Surely, I said, there must be another way of doing this. TB said ultimately not. You could fiddle at the edges, rename and repackage but ultimately it was a top-up fees system we were proposing and it was right. In which case, there was a big job to be done in winning the argument, and we were going to need the universities to carry a lot of the load. If this was genuinely the only way they could keep developing in the way they needed to in order to remain high quality and compete with universities around the world, then they had to be making that case too.

John Reid was at the political strategy meeting and was a bit more focused and less anecdotal than Charles. He had a good line re the Tories playing the man not the ball, going for TB personally because
they were scared of the policy debate. The general view was IDS was a goner and we went over the various [Conservative leadership] contenders and worked out the outlines of a strategy for each. It was an excellent meeting. JR was clear, and very, very political, and Douglas was developing a real grasp of what was needed for the mechanics of the euro campaign. We also agreed to go for a much simpler, clearer Queen’s Speech message so I spent part of the day working on that, as well as TB’s press conference script for Monday.

GB was being pretty difficult re the ASB [antisocial behaviour] agenda, trying to run the line that the more we focused on it, the more people felt we were failing on it. TB tried to explain that he needed to stop seeing it as a political issue. It was a REAL issue, about people’s lives, and they wanted us to GET it. Milburn came in to discuss the [NHS] consultants’ contracts with TB who told him GB was now deliberately winding up JP to see all difficult reform as being essentially driven by Tories in Number 10. AM said JP had been at him the whole time re foundation hospitals, but he was determined we had to press on.

A TB meeting with JS, GH and CDS who said the Americans seemed to be cutting us out of some of the military decision-making because we had gone for Package 2 not Package 3, and also reporting that some inside our army were pissed off not to be more involved. God, he was hard to read, sometimes giving the impression none of them wanted anything to do with this, then at others giving the impression they all wanted to be off to the front line. Cabinet – discussion re Europe and the CAP, with Jack clearer than ever we had to mount and win an argument re CAP.

Clare’s interruptions were even worse and more irritating than usual, because she was doing her serious questioning act rather than the holier-than-thou bit. At least with the holier-than-thou bit, people knew how to deal with it, which was basically ignore. At the end she came over to me, all smarmy, and said ‘Well done for doing in Chirac,’ then added ‘I love him on Iraq but I hate him on Africa . . . We have to think about the world!’ Really? I said we all think about the world and I for one would prefer a world in which Saddam does not have weapons and does not terrorise his own people. To be fair to her, she did a decent presentation to Cabinet on what was happening humanitarian-wise in Afghanistan. GB waded in pretty heavily on Europe. Alan was excellent on the consultants, really on top of it, and political, but I could see GB looking very darkly at him as well as TB.

I had a get-together with the staff from the media team and I was
pretty heavy with them, said too many of them were operating in the comfort zone and we needed all-round game-raising. I think one of the reasons I was tired and down was because they all kind of felt I would come up with the creative stuff in the end, and they just had to deliver. But I wanted all of them to be thinking more creatively and strategically. Two or three of them looked a bit hurt, but I feel it needed saying. I showed TB my marathon fund-raising letter and he had reservations. He felt it would get me up in lights as a target again and I had to be careful about the donors. He also thought I should not state explicitly I was trying to raise a million, but maybe aim for £100k to start. It was all good advice but I wondered if he was also worrying that I was focusing on this as a substitute for work.

The [Paul] Burrell [former butler to Diana, Princess of Wales] trial was about to collapse, meaning a welcome news sponge for the weekend. Burrell had told the Queen after Diana’s death that he’d taken some of her possessions for safe keeping, so the prosecution case that he never told anyone was debunked by Her Maj. TB had been told on Tuesday and then the Attorney General had to broker a prosecution statement between the CPS [Crown Prosecution Service], the police and the Palace, and which was due to be read in court this morning.
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The AG had had to go to see the Queen yesterday, to alert her to some of the difficult questions that would flow, but in any event to alert her to the fact the case was being dropped. It was going to be seen as a total fiasco, though the Queen had been through far worse.

I was working on TB’s words for Monday re the ASB bill for his press conference, the plan having gone a bit off track yesterday with a consultation paper containing the idea of £50 fines for dropping chewing gum in the street. It was total bollocks, and annoying, though I suppose it did at least get over the kind of issues we were talking about. I took the office through the plan for the Queen’s Speech, then did a session with SpAds. I felt we were strong on message at the moment, and also that the changes re the media operation were beginning to bed down well. We were certainly hearing less about spin than for a while, and TB was finding his voice better.

Fiona was very down on Cherie at the moment, having discovered she had already signed a contract on the book [on Prime Ministers’ spouses], TB having told us she hadn’t. Cherie basically admitted to Fiona that she hadn’t consulted us because she knew we were hostile to the project. Fiona said we were hostile to people coming in and potentially landing her in difficult circumstances through their own ambitions for the ‘project’. I said to TB that I could not see the advantage to HIM of this happening, I could see plenty of possible downsides, and in the end it was him and his reputation we had to be focused on. He just had to accept Cherie was not going to get the same kid-gloves media treatment that Norma [Major] got. TB was at Chequers, pretty unbothered by it all.

The
Telegraph
had the MoD saying GB was blocking cash needed for Iraq. Then I became worried that the government role in the Burrell trial would become an issue so did a conference call with [Lord] Goldsmith and his team to agree the best lines to take if it did, emphasising the AG was the only member of the government with any active role in this. The CPS took the decision to go with the prosecution. The Queen told [princes] Charles and Philip last Friday about her conversation, the prosecution then realised they’d had it, told the AG, who then told us. It had all been a bit classic Establishment for a while, running around rather than sorting quickly.

Goldsmith was very conscious of his position. When I said we should be saying this was in no way a government decision, he said we have to be careful not to imply he is not a member of the government. He is, albeit independent when it comes to legal advice. When I asked why he personally had had to see the Queen, he said ‘Because I am HER Attorney General and HER senior lawyer.’ We were all pretty clear he had done nothing wrong, but it was one of those with plenty of scope for media mischief around the edges and we just had to get the lines cleared. Frank Dobson [former Health Secretary] had a big go in the
Observer
and
Mail on Sunday
re ‘elitist’ policies on health and education, which would run on the broadcasts. There was something sad and a bit bitter about Frank, but in truth we had not done a good job at keeping him on board.