The Burden of Power: Countdown to Iraq - The Alastair Campbell Diaries (20 page)

I took Rory to do his cross-country race. TB called and said we were still discovering things they [Brown’s Treasury team] were trying to sneak by us in the Pre-Budget Report. It really was unacceptable the way they operated on these big Treasury moments. He was fine about the way the Europe speech panned out, worried about the PBR, and not sure where the war stuff was all going. He was also still anxious about the briefing going on re Anji. I was really fed up with all the soap-opera stuff. The conference call was all about the difficult questions re the siege [of Kunduz in northern Afghanistan, where the Taliban were besieged by the
Northern Alliance] and whether we were responsible for prisoners. We agreed we must not make ourselves so in anything we said, whilst it was legally checked out.

The war coverage in the Sundays wasn’t so bad. Stewart Steven [
Mail on Sunday
] was apparently saying I should go. Crap stuff on public services clearly coming down the rails. Charles Clarke did the
Westminster Hour
and said some parts of the NHS were worse than before, which would go a bit.

Pat [McFadden] and Tanya [Joseph] both called me to say the briefing in Pakistan had been poor, because Kenton had been unable to say anything much about the Marines and Kandahar.
³¹
We were clearly going to have a problem getting all bits of the American machine to see the CIC operations, particularly the one in Islamabad, as a place where anything and everything could be briefed. I spoke to Jim Wilkinson [in Washington], and we agreed we had to be more punchy about the message, faster in prising information out of the military, and more disciplined in the deployment of lines to take. I took up the same theme in the conference call, said that the point of these was to set communications strategy, not just discuss the issues of the day. The other theme coming up, as well as the division in troop deployment, was ‘where next?’ I wasn’t on good form. I felt that after a good start, we were no longer making the weather. The processes were the right ones but not being followed rigorously enough, and the calls were too unstructured and meandering. We went to the launch of the book on Neil [
Kinnock
, by Martin Westlake and Ian St John] with Calum and Grace. Neil got very emotional in his speech, and it was a nice enough do.

It was the start of the Bonn [inter-Afghanistan] talks under [Lakhdar] Brahimi, and also the battle of the Mazar-e-Sharif fort [Qala-i-Jangi prison] was still going on.
³²
The main focus of the day was the PBR.
TB came down from the flat, having finally got GB to deliver more for health. It was ridiculous that we had to go through this rigmarole the whole time. We probably ended up pretty much where GB expected us to in the first place, maybe with a bit more on top, but surely we could have got there without what had been a very difficult process. It had been crazy. What’s more, there was only one story that was going to dominate, namely that taxes would have to rise to pay for a better NHS. Possibly the biggest strategic decision we would take this parliament, and though we had all known it was coming, we were catching up late in terms of the strategic discussions that we should have had ages ago. But again, it was a result of having conceded too much to him early on. After the PBR Cabinet, I had a meeting with Ed Balls, who came in with all the published documents. I asked him when they went to the printers, and he said he didn’t know. I said one thing’s for sure, that GB was still getting his ear bent by TB about what was in it after it had gone.

At Cabinet, GB did his usual stuff, plenty of big message, plenty of figures and it went down OK, though this was an easier audience than the public would be. Taxes up for a better NHS was a pretty strong Labour line, and most Labour people would like it, but we were going to have to engage in a pretty big argument, not least around value for money, to win it with the public. If we did though, it would be a significant shift and an important win. Pat seemed to be making a difference in Pakistan and was pretty much in charge of Kenton’s words. I had been hoping that once we got the CICs up and running, they would go on autopilot, but I was having to do a lot of hours every day re all three.

The PBR went OK, albeit surrounded by too much tax and spend. TB said GB’s problem was that he sometimes lacked subtlety and everything was so obviously political. He had announced [Sir Derek] Wanless [banker] to conduct a review of future NHS funding but most people would see him as a stooge there to do what GB wanted done. I quite liked that, but there was a danger the only message was tax and spend.

DTLR put out minutes of the Byers Railtrack meeting but only four pages.
³³
Crazy. I told Byers I thought it was a bad plan and they should never have hired Martin Sixsmith [DTLR director of communications]. Byers thought I had given my approval. It turned out he had asked his office to check what ‘Alastair’ thought of Sixsmith, and they had
asked Alistair Darling [Work and Pensions Secretary], who seemingly said he thought he was fine.

TB/GB relations were so bad that it was currently almost impossible to get either of them to say anything good about the other. TB felt there was a personal/political motivation to pretty much anything GB did. He was ‘diddling’ the whole time. TB said maybe he had always been like that, but when we did less important jobs, and when so much of what we did was about campaigning, it didn’t seem to matter so much. He said we had to try to harness his ambition with the national interest. A lot of the time, it coincided, but not always. We had a meeting with GB re PMQs and how to handle the PBR fallout. The tax and spend argument was the obvious one for the Tories to go on, but we could take it easily to investment vs cuts. PMQs went fine, and style-wise, TB was getting more relaxed, less reliant on notes, getting the big arguments in his head and then finding ways of pushing them out there. I ran home, first proper run for almost a week.

PBR coverage was going a bit awry. After a pretty low-key War Cabinet, TB saw GB and Alan Milburn, who was livid, said that basically GB was trying to use his position to take over NHS policy [via Brown’s Wanless review], and he wasn’t having it. He was not alone in feeling departments had not been properly involved in the PBR preparations. TB said we had to get an agreed strategy going forward and asked me to do a meeting with the Treasury and Health, which I did, and tried to make a start but there was no doubt Number 10, the Treasury and the Health department were not all in the same place, nothing like it. It did sometimes feel like there were two governments, and when TB had so much of his time and energy focused on foreign affairs, that feeling was maybe stronger. CDS was really steamed up about the arguments they had had to get involved in yesterday re SAS identification [an injunction had been taken out against the
Sun
]. For him, he was quite emotional, really felt that newspapers that couldn’t see why it was important that these principles were adhered to were beyond the pale.

The mood at Cabinet wasn’t good. TB was a bit late, GB was not communicating, the departmental ministers were largely pissed off because of the PBR. Robin [Cook] got rolled over on his paper [White Paper on reform of the House of Lords] and ended up
looking a bit bruised. There was a discussion of sorts on health but it was a bad atmosphere and I was glad when they all trooped out. The
Mirror
came in for lunch, Piers Morgan behaving like a child. TB let it go for a while but then put him down heavily once Morgan started to get on his high horse about the
Sun
and his claims we gave them the election date. He went on and on until eventually TB said that he had better not be calling him a liar. Chirac was in later but I missed a lot of it because I was doing the conference call, which was mainly Bonn [Afghanistan talks]. We were slightly losing our way strategically. I had to motivate myself to get going again.

GB’s latest thing was an interview with the
Sun
yesterday, done to try to show the PBR was not the end of New Labour, but he ended up going contrary to the strategy we had agreed yesterday and playing into their line that we had done nothing and that the NHS was all crap. TB told him it was a direct result of him doing his own thing, seeing everything through his own political prism rather than agreeing a strategy and seeing it through. Milburn, unsurprisingly, was incandescent. He said he knew how he worked, because he had seen him when he had been at the Treasury. He saw it as his right to trample on everyone else’s territory. ‘Can I go out now and make a speech saying that the economy ought to be doing a lot better?’ Yesterday at Cabinet Geoff Hoon had dared to suggest we would have to look at NHS charges and GB had carried on the conversation afterwards and ended up jabbing him in the chest.

JP called from [a ministerial visit to] New Zealand to discuss
Frost
and I filled him in on how things were going – not well. He said he had always told GB he would be willing to support him as next leader but only when TB decided to go, never at a challenge. He felt there was an arrogance about him in feeling he could say when TB should go. JP believed that TB and GB effectively did come to some kind of deal way back, but TB denies it now and feels guilty, while GB remembers it only on his terms and feels betrayed. But he said the party will suffer, and will not wear it, if they fall out badly. He also agreed with TB’s analysis that a lot of the time the personality differences didn’t matter but when they affected the policies and the direction of the government, it became very dangerous. I spoke to Byers about Jo [Moore]. She was away with her husband, but [Number 10 Grid co-ordinator] Paul Brown’s email expressing frustration with the department [DTLR] had leaked and it was all a bit of a mess. I
told Godric to shut it down as best he could. I said to Steve he had to get out there and deal with Railtrack, try and close down this other agenda.

Pat McFadden called and said Islamabad CIC reminded him of a 1980s by-election campaign, no real resources, no real drive. We were giving them OK material and decent scripts, e.g. today on Bonn, but then the Americans would worry, think we shouldn’t be straying beyond the region. Pat said the Pakistan-based press were getting a bit fed up with it all. He said we had to be more aggressive, not least in rebuttal and forcing the media to take the agenda. GB’s
Sun
article was running on,
The World at One
doing a big number. It had definitely been a mistake.

George Harrison’s death [the ex-Beatle had died of lung cancer] was massive across the media. Politically though, there was a bad, febrile atmosphere. TB had a long conversation with GB, called me afterwards and said it was very difficult. He said the post-PBR problems were the direct result of lack of proper planning between us, the fact that we weren’t working together well. GB’s argument was that it was a direct result of him being briefed against and of us not having a grip of the government machine. His evidence for the second point was an admittedly silly interview by Charles Clarke in
The Times
giving the impression we should go for a euro referendum even if the economic conditions weren’t met. So the Treasury, never slow to overreact or find out what exactly was said, went off on one on that. What they did, and seemed to believe, was to present themselves as victims, saying they bent over backwards to be helpful to colleagues, but were constantly attacked in return.

Milburn’s rage had not abated with the passage of twenty-four hours. He told TB direct that if he went to the
Sun
and slagged off the work of another department, he would expect to be sacked, so why was GB allowed to slag off his department? I told both Ian Austin and Ed Balls that this arose both because of their propensity for acting in secrecy and also because they overreacted and overcomplicated things. They overdid the tax message, then worried about it, so ran off to the
Sun
but overdid the reform message in a way that allowed the
Sun
to ally GB to their own ‘tax-funded NHS crap’ agenda. Milburn was strongly of the view that we should whack back and at one point said if we didn’t, he would. But TB was adamant that would be a mistake. He said when I make a move, I’ll make a move but it has to be me that decides, nobody else. I went to [Crystal] Palace vs
Burnley with Calum, Gavin [Millar, Fiona’s brother] and [David] Bradshaw [special adviser, Strategic Communications Unit]. 2–1 [to Burnley], and for once hardly any calls.

The papers were full of TB/GB/health. GB was on
Frost
doing OK on health, but then a very odd answer when asked whether they had a deal about when TB would go. ‘I’m not going to talk about a private conversation’ was his basic line. He said it twice, and even though he said good things about TB, it was clearly going to be the story out of it. I was watching with Fiona and both of us felt it was deliberate. TB hadn’t watched it and when I told him, he said ‘What on earth does he want to do that for? Even by his own lights, it’s pointless.’ I could only think that he was trying to take the rather weird moral high ground from TB, give the impression that there was a deal, that TB reneged on it, but he had better things to worry about, like running the economy and helping the poor. TB again said though that it was important we didn’t react, and did what we could to close it down. But I’d be very surprised if ministers weren’t out and about. Milburn was calling regularly, fed up with the whole thing, feeling excluded from decisions with material effect on his department. I was pretty sick of the whole thing, told Ian Austin he could get on and brief what the hell he wanted. He did the usual victim act, how they were always being asked to respond because they were being briefed against the whole time and they were very restrained. I said if GB involved other ministers, and you covered bases properly with departments, you wouldn’t have these problems with people like Milburn and Clarke. They need to be brought in, not kicked out.