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30 Days: A Month at the Heart of Blair’s War
Peter Stothard
A unique, unprecedented eyewitness account of the thirty most critical days of Tony Blair’s political career as Prime Minister, from 10 March 2003 to the end of the second Gulf War, written by the former editor of The Times.For thirty extraordinary days, in March and April 2003, Tony Blair defied street protests, party revolts, allied anger and government resignations in order to send British troops to Iraq to oust Saddam Hussein.What was it like inside Downing Street during that time? What was it like while the Prime Minister risked his job for such an unpopular cause? Why did he do it? Peter Stothard, who for a month was given unprecedented access to shadow almost every move the Prime Minister made, gives a unique view from the inside.From the 'den' of Ten Downing Street to the back corridors of the House of Commons, through councils of war in the Azores, recriminations in Brussels, personal diplomacy in Belfast and Camp David, this book takes us backstage. 30 Days throws an intimate – and frequently humorous – light on the domestic and political life of Number Ten at a time of crisis; it shows the Prime Minister's relationships not only with the President of the United States but with the writers, strategists, make-up artists and other members of the close-knit Number Ten team. It illuminates his frankest dealings with the world leaders who both backed and opposed him.The result is a groundbreaking record of history in the making, and a gripping day-to-day chronicle of four tense and tempestuous weeks.Note that it has not been possible to include the same picture content that appeared in the original print version.Note that it has not been possible to include the same picture content that appeared in the original print version.
30 DAYS
A Month at the Heart of Blair’s War
PETER STOTHARD
Dedication (#ulink_6cc135d4-d925-5cdb-9130-0e54e026e8c2)
For Sally
Contents
Cover (#u88ebb52b-9d4d-515a-a771-fa8af6825ef2)
Title Page (#uae50b8ec-6f78-5d28-8680-1a7edc891334)
Dedication (#u600ba621-95b1-543a-8e84-e3315aefac6f)
Before (#u8ffa692a-9d9e-52b6-b871-956086b392e3)
Monday, 10 March (#ubb7cc5b1-4fa8-54ea-9be1-61e9cbe8f713)
Tuesday, 11 March (#u0e9a0eb2-a48b-577a-a1b6-1ceacc80f534)
Wednesday, 12 March (#u4d513e02-b4ad-5a71-9076-c8c3cdbd1d53)
Thursday, 13 March (#u931d6321-711d-553e-bb88-da619fb7e792)
Friday, 14 March (#u1112a76b-1d58-5447-9ecc-529e127951e6)
Saturday, 15 March (#ubb4be0ce-02b7-5d83-af9e-dab14322a8a7)
Sunday, 16 March (#litres_trial_promo)
Monday, 17 March (#litres_trial_promo)
Tuesday, 18 March (#litres_trial_promo)
Wednesday, 19 March (#litres_trial_promo)
Thursday, 20 March (#litres_trial_promo)
Friday, 21 March (#litres_trial_promo)
Saturday, 22 March (#litres_trial_promo)
Sunday, 23 March (#litres_trial_promo)
Monday, 24 March (#litres_trial_promo)
Tuesday, 25 March (#litres_trial_promo)
Wednesday, 26 March (#litres_trial_promo)
Thursday, 27 March (#litres_trial_promo)
Friday, 28 March (#litres_trial_promo)
Saturday, 29 March (#litres_trial_promo)
Sunday, 30 March (#litres_trial_promo)
Monday, 31 March (#litres_trial_promo)
Tuesday, 1 April (#litres_trial_promo)
Wednesday, 2 April (#litres_trial_promo)
Thursday, 3 April (#litres_trial_promo)
Friday, 4 April (#litres_trial_promo)
Saturday, 5 April (#litres_trial_promo)
Sunday, 6 April (#litres_trial_promo)
Monday, 7 April (#litres_trial_promo)
Tuesday, 8 April (#litres_trial_promo)
Wednesday, 9 April (#litres_trial_promo)
Index (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Before (#ulink_27cebd3f-65b4-5cef-b62b-d952386e26a0)
‘This is your fiftieth birthday present, Prime Minister,’ ‘ says Strategy Director Alastair Campbell as Tony Blair comes in through the Downing Street front door. ‘Peter Stothard is going to follow you everywhere you go for fifty days.’
The recipient of this gift looks as though almost anything would be better than having a writer at his side as he enters the most difficult days of his political life.
Campbell concedes with a wolfish grin, ‘Well, a month then. Thirty days.’
Tony Blair sighs. He had agreed a few weeks ago for a writer from The Times Magazine to be with him on the path to war with Iraq. These were extraordinary days. His fiftieth birthday was coming up soon. It had seemed like a good idea.
Like many good resolutions it does not seem so attractive now that it is time to put it into practice. Little is going right. He does not even know that he has thirty days left behind the black door of Number Ten.
Politicians do sometimes take the risk of inviting a journalist in ‘to see them as they really are’. This is only either when they need the publicity or when they have a high degree of control. But no Prime Minister, however confident, has ever before taken that risk.
Tony Blair decides to stick with his decision. He will have a closely observed record of his leadership in the war against Saddam Hussein. He does not know what the record will be. His ‘fly on the wall’ will be a former editor of The Times who supported his programme to become leader of the Labour Party in 1994 but did not support him in the 1997 election which brought him to power.
To have me with him for thirty days will not be like having a total stranger in the corner of the room. But neither will he have a lifelong political supporter with him, or even one who shares many of his views.
6 March 2003, the day Tony Blair invited his chronicler through the door, was no better than any other day at this time. Britain had become an angry country. Millions of voters, particularly young voters who five years before had hailed his ‘Cool Britannia’, were enraged that a Labour Prime Minister, a New Labour Prime Minister, the first Labour Prime Minister since 1979, seemed about to send bombers to the civilians of Baghdad.
Worse even than bombing Iraqis who had ‘never done the British any harm’ was bombing them at the behest of a ‘Daddy’s Boy’ American President. Britain, they shouted, should just let George Bush get on with fighting his father’s old enemy, Saddam Hussein.
Those who knew a bit of history recalled that another Labour Prime Minister, Harold Wilson in the 1960s, kept Britain out of America’ s Vietnam nightmare. Why couldn’t Tony Blair do the same?
The protesters knew that they had allies at the highest levels of the Labour government. Clare Short was a respected figure of the old Labour left. She had an official position in the Cabinet as International Development Secretary, and an unofficial position as the ‘conscience of the party’. She was said to be enraged at what was about to be done ‘in her name’.
The ‘Not in my Name’ slogan was on banners and T-shirts from Bristol to Dundee. A million people had marched in London. The Italians and the Spanish were marching. They too had leaders who backed George Bush when their voters did not.
Tony Blair’s first words in the Number Ten front hall were a complaint about how he could not get his message across. I doubt if I sounded very sympath etic. Politicians forever complain to editors that they are prevented by unseen powers, never themselves, from ‘getting their message across’.
Inside the building there was a rush of people on the move. We were about to go to Chile, whose President was suddenly a pivotal player in the attempts to swing the United Nations squarely behind the war.
I went back home for my passport, told the magazine that I would take the ‘fiftieth birthday’ assignment, and barely left Tony Blair’s home, office, advisers, officials and political life for the next month. In those thirty days he faced the most hostile attacks from his voters, his supporters and his party. He faced fierce opposition in Europe and he forged a controversial partnership with a President of the United States who seemed at first so unlike him in so many ways. He saw a personal and a political challenge ahead, and seized them both. A man who was once known as consensual, accommodating, even insecure at times, behaved as a man possessed of certainty. He used occasionally to talk about history with journalists. Now he had just given a newspaper interview in which he said that history would be his judge.
Events fell one upon the other with tumultuous speed. The fiftieth birthday was scarcely mentioned ever again. We never went to Chile. We did sit together while the Prime Minister ‘worked the phones’ with other leaders, spoke to envoys from around the world, was taken for buggy rides by George Bush at Camp David and repaid the hospitality, according to the strange ways of modern diplomacy, at a castle in Belfast.
We were together in Parliament as he prepared for the debate which nearly cost him his job – and also when he weighed his responsibility for those who, as a result, had lost their lives. For thirty days I was close by him at historic events – in the places where writers never are.
Monday, 10 March (#ulink_c71b3ad8-9f9a-5ac9-83c2-b36c4169c272)
Morning headlines … Minister threatens resignation from Blair Cabinet … Iraq attacks ‘fascist’ USA … French Foreign Minister flies to woo African Security Council members …
‘So they are all against me, is that it?’ Tony Blair is sitting back on a swivel chair in his ‘den’ with his finger on a list of names. Around him is his ‘team’, squashed on the sofas, leaning against the table, hungry-eyed on the silver fruit bowl, perching uncomfortably against a window into the Downing Street garden. An honest answer would be: ‘Yes, Prime Minister.’ Alastair Campbell does not say anything. The Director of Communications and Strategy does not need to.
Tony Blair knows already. He has asked Independent Television for an opportunity to counter the fears of women opposed to war, women like those who are today shouting outside his house that he is a traitor to the Labour cause, a killer of children and about to be a war criminal. He calls it his ‘masochism strategy’.
The ‘all against me’ question is no sign of paranoia. Virtually everyone who wants to speak to him this week is against him. The leaders of France and Germany, the leader of the House of Commons, the leading figures in the trade unions, about half his own MPs, including Cabinet Minister Clare Short, all oppose a war on Saddam Hussein.
The paper in front of him now, propped up on his desk between a banana and a picture of his three-year-old son Leo, is part of the challenge he has set himself to change minds. It lists the names and life stories of the women chosen for the television ‘war special’ tonight. If they were not ‘all against’ him, they would not be there.
‘There seems a lot of military?’ he queries.
‘Yeah, some of them lost sons in the last Gulf War; they don’t think we should have to be doing the same job again,’ says Campbell baldly. ‘And some have got husbands in Kuwait now. They’re worried that no one at home thinks the war is justified this time. They think that’s your fault.’
Campbell is a man who dominates a lot of space. He is seated on the arm of the sofa, the seat closest to the Prime Minister, in front of the tall blue leather doors which lead to the Cabinet Room. He speaks slowly, with a slight drawl, looking down at his mobile phone for news.
‘And there’s a girl from Australia who lost her boyfriend in the Bali bomb, and a woman whose husband is a human shield at one of Saddam’s power stations.’
The Prime Minister stares hard at the list, twisting it as though to find its weakest point. There is only the barest chance now that war can be avoided.
The vital need now, he says, is that everyone of good will, at home and abroad, keeps up the pressure on the Iraqi leader. He sounds humourless when he makes remarks like this. But he has a lot to be humourless about.
His International Development Secretary, Clare Short, has already left his ‘good will’ club. She has not only gone on the BBC and denounced his policy as ‘reckless, reckless, reckless’, an act which by normal rules in normal times should have put her out of her job; she even telephoned the BBC herself and asked for a platform from which to make her attack. She was not one of those Ministers tricked by a clever question from an interviewer late at night. She decided what she wanted to say, that she was prepared to be sacked for saying it, and, with only the briefest advance warning to Campbell, had said it.
The advice of the team to its boss was that he should not give her the satisfaction of martyrdom. She expresse d the worries of too many people outside. It would be too big a risk.
But the irritation inside Number Ten is about more than just another bit of ‘Old Labour vs New Labour’ feuding. Dissent on such a scale from the top of his own government is another diplomatic hindrance as well as a new political challenge to Tony Blair.
‘And how is the programme going to deal with Clare?’ he asks sharply.
‘They’re going to get her over with first,’ whispers Campbell, as though the very name were a curse. ‘But look at it this way,’ he goes on. ‘The bulletins are only going to want the stuff on her. So you can just keep the rest nice and general.’
Before facing the fray, Tony Blair faces the long mirror that fills the wall between the two windows onto his garden. It is hard to know what he sees. What his team sees is a man who is thinner-faced and darker-eyed than six months ago. What journalists see, and describe almost daily now, is a man under impossible pressure, whose skin colour testifies to sleepless nights and anxious days.
Officially, he has a cold, a virus ‘that won’t go away’. There is a make-up man outside waiting, whatever the cause of his troubles, to disguise their worst effects.
‘It’s all very well being a pacifist,’ the Prime Minister says suddenly, still with his back to his team. ‘But to be a pacifist after September 11, that’s something different. It’s all new now: terrible threat, terrorist weapons, terrorist states. That is what people here have to understand.’
For most of his political life Tony Blair has been trying to persuade believers in old ideas that they should embrace new ones. He has had great success. He has made an unelectable socialist party electable again. Clare Short has accused him not only of being ‘reckless with his own future’, but ‘reckless with his place in history’.
The Prime Minister says that he is not concerned with his own future. Some of those around him believe that. Some worry about it. But his place in history? That is plainly important to him. He is gambling his secure place in the history of British politics for a place in the history of the world.
He returns to the list. ‘How many anti-Americans?’
Campbell punches out a text-message on his phone in a manner suggesting that the answer is bloody obvious.
For the first time Jonathan Powell shows an interest. This boyish former Washing ton diplomat does not always seem as dominant as Campbell or as personally close to the Prime Minister as the blunt Political Director, Sally Morgan, currently propped against the front of the desk. But Powell is the Chief of Staff. Ten Downing Street is his domain. He does not want to talk about television programmes. He has United Nations problems, Chileans and Mexicans and a Security Council member in Africa whose leader is ill, can barely even be spoken to by telephone and may need a visit.
Tony Blair makes most diplomatic calls in this ‘den’. It is a small office full of family photographs, like the consulting room of a successful doctor.
Civil servants do not recall a Prime Minister who has sat at a desk and ‘worked the phones’ so much. He has been obsessive in trying to persuade world leaders that they should back the United Nations’ so-called ‘Second Resolution’ which authorises an automatic invasion of Iraq if Saddam Hussein does not disarm.
Whenever Tony Blair is firmly in control of a call, or is gently keeping a friendship warm, he has his feet up on the desk. If he has his head hunched forward, he is making a case that his hearer does not want to hear. In the past few days he has been more hunched than not.
A Prime Minister is overheard and watched over most of the time. Powell’s characteristic position is to be listening in from his desk outside, earpiece jammed to the side of his head, pushing against his curly black hair. He has to concentrate intently on every ‘Hi, George’ against the murmur of news from a flat-screen TV on the wall.
This is not yet time for an office sandpit and model tanks with flags. The prime and most pressing battlefield is still at the United Nations. The second battle is for public support, particularly from those groups who most hate what seems certain soon to happen. The third is for the support of Labour Members of Parliament.
In the mirror on the wall of the den the Prime Minister can see all the faces in the room. If there is a common feeling among his team apart from fatigue it is impatience. Nothing is going as planned. Tony Blair looks down at the fruit bowl, takes a green apple and chews it very slowly, as though obeying some half-remembered hints for health.
Campbell’s pager buzzes. He glances down and announces that an anti-war Conservative has just resigned over his party’s support for the government.
‘In fact he hasn’t just resigned. He decided to quit last Wednesday, but thought he’d keep back the news till a quieter day.’ Everyone laughs. The tension is relaxed. It may not be the sharpest piece of political irony, but it is a joke that the team can share.
