The Burden of Power: Countdown to Iraq - The Alastair Campbell Diaries (84 page)

I watched Blix [deliver his report to the UN Security Council] on the TV in my hotel room. He leant this way one minute, the next way the next, but it was obvious he was not going to come down as clearly as he had before. There was not much co-operation, yet he was not saying so. You definitely got the impression that he was deliberately siding with France, attacking us and the US. At one point he picked apart some of Powell’s presentation. And even though he said there were clear issues of breach, for example proscribed weapons, he was signalling that inspections could work. I went through the main points with TB who said he wanted to read a full version, did so, said it was a total disgrace, that he should just have told the truth and the truth was Saddam was not co-operating. We were in a very tough place now. TB felt the Americans had fucked it up by failing to manage relationships properly. But the French would now be cock-a-hoop. TB showed no signs of changing tack though, said we were doing the right thing. But whether we liked it or not, we were moving towards a regime-change argument.

TB felt we had to make more of the moral case but we agreed he could not really set out the forward plan he had devised on the back of this, because it would look like weakness. We were getting very close to the argument, which itself was politically dangerous, that the marchers were pro Saddam, that they plus international community divisions would keep him in power. He, Sally and I had dinner in a private room downstairs at the Caledonian. It was our favourite Scottish hotel, but there was something odd and rather dingy about the room and it was all a bit sad and depressing. Then when we started to work on the [spring conference] speech, he couldn’t find his glasses and was scrabbling around on the floor. We worked pretty late. There was a lot of American reaction to Blix, with Powell very emotional, Bush on much the same line. We were told there would be big protests tomorrow. TB was clear we just had to hold our line and defend ourselves from a moral point of view. But we were already into the black humour, speculating about what he would do in a few weeks when he was out of a job.

The first thing TB said was that he had slept badly. So had I. He knew that he was in a tight spot. ‘Even I am a bit worried about this one,’
he said. The problem was that for the moment it looked every part of the strategy was in tatters – re the EU, re the UN, re the US, re the party, re the country which was about to march against us. We rewrote the speech to get even more focus on the humanitarian side of things. We had had letters from Iraqis urging him to carry on, which we decided to use in a strong passage pushing the moral case for action. One of the people who had written was a Glasgow doctor who we got to come over and see him. We had to involve Iraqi exiles much more. The moral case for peace was being put on the march and that gave us the right backdrop to make the moral case for action. I put in the final bits in the speech about the inhumanity of keeping Saddam in power doing the dreadful things he does. We struggled to get the broadcasters to take the Iraqi exiles and I wrote a letter of complaint to the BBC and Sky that important voices were being ignored unless they opposed the government.

We drove through to Glasgow, went over where we thought weaknesses in the Cabinet were, who we had to win round. The speech was pretty strong and we joked about it being his last as leader. There was massive security around the conference centre. The speech was heard in near silence. He wasn’t playing it for applause but to put over a rounded argument. It was well received, not least because it was so serious.
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Meanwhile TV was wall-to-wall, uncritical coverage of the march and the usual over the top claims about its size.
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What was clear was that it was very big, and I got more and more angry about the claims being made for it, e.g. the
Mirror
front page with a dying Iraqi child and the headline ‘March for him’ as if he was starving because of us.

The speech went down well with the media and we got as many front-page leads as the march, which was a surprise. TB was confident and felt we had the right argument and we now needed a big strategy to put the case properly. I got home, then later down to the canal and did an eighteen-mile run at just over 7 mph. On the route back, I bumped into no end of people coming back from the march, placards under arms, faces full of self-righteousness, occasional loathing when they spotted me.

Carole [Caplin] had done an interview in the
Mail on Sunday
but TB was in so-what mode, said it would only blow up if we responded, that he was absolutely sure she would not set out to harm us. I said the problem was that people would question his judgement over it. Fiona had pretty much lost respect for both of them, and a lot of it because of Carole. He said she wasn’t a bad person and he didn’t accept she was trying to damage him. On Iraq, he felt more confident than he had for some time, because he felt confident in the argument he made yesterday, that it gave us a chance to get back on higher moral ground. The press on the march was not nearly as bad as it might have been. But that was an awful lot of people who took the trouble to go out, which meant that there was a hell of a lot more who thought about it. We really had to push the humanitarian arguments harder.

The media on Iraq was still an uphill battle, but the commentary was a lot better and I think the serious people were thinking the coverage of the march had just been too one-sided. TB was really nagging me about getting out more on the humanitarian side, getting better material out of DFID and the CIC. At TB’s weekly Monday meeting, we went through the usual and continuing irritants – red tape, complexities of the asylum system, lack of drive in departments on public service reform. On Iraq he was keen for a major upgrade of our communications and believed we could win the argument as set out at the weekend. David M reported Condi as saying that we could go for a second resolution, that she had been told by Blix he felt it was unfortunate his report had gone too far the other way. I did TB a long note on the need to get the US to talk in our language. A lot of the antagonism they caused was by the manner of what they said as much as content, Blix was a case in point. I got the very strong impression that he thought we were OK and they were anything but, yet we were pretty much saying the same things.

We left for Brussels [EU summit] at 3 and agreed that TB would do a doorstep setting out the basic line that now was not the time to weaken. It was one of those summits that nobody really wanted but we were there and we had to get a recommitment to 1441. We did so, and then Chirac was doing the usual posturing, saying there could be no second UNSCR. It was interesting how keen some of the other countries were to make clear they were basically on our side – Spain, Italy, the Dutch, the Danes and the Irish. Jack was taking notes of the
discussions which he was getting sent out to me and enabling us to brief as we went. Later more and more people were out on our side. Chirac was slightly losing it, later issued a pretty clear threat to the enlargement countries trying to come in, said they should be careful, they were too pro US and may not be able to come in. Things were going our way much more than we had expected and it was quite a productive day, Jack getting the notes out to me, me turning them into briefings for Godric and Danny [Pruce], who were just working the press centre the whole time. It definitely gave us the feeling that with momentum, we could turn the argument.

Chirac was widely felt to have made a big mistake attacking the ten candidate countries who felt they were being bullied.
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Of course he was getting a great press at home and reviving a sense of Gaullism. Needless to say our press were keen to build him up at TB’s expense. Our plan was to consolidate the actual success of yesterday, restate the basic case and get going re Iraqi exiles. I had a meeting with the Iraq communications group. There was a clear understanding that we were widening to take in the bigger dimension of the moral and humanitarian side, and we had to be clear about whether this was shifting to a regime-change position. We had to be clear that it didn’t, that the basic rationale hadn’t changed, but equally we were entitled to make the case that the world would be better without him in power.

I was worried about the CIC which was not working as well as it had been. Gerard Russell’s Islamic media unit was doing fine but the CIC as a whole was not producing as it should. We were beginning to get good email responses from Iraqi exiles. At the press conference, TB was relaxed and confident, even though the story was building that his own future was on the line. He seemed relatively unconcerned. Then another meeting on Iraq. The US was still giving out the message that it was going to happen and the rest was just giving us cover, e.g. saying that a second resolution wasn’t absolutely necessary but they would try to get it. Maybe they were just getting irritated with us for having taken them down the UN route in the first place.

TB called on the way to Chequers after what he described as a truly dreadful meeting with GB. He said it wasn’t even worth talking about.
He was at a genuine loss to understand why Chirac was prepared to go so far out in damaging his relations with America. It could be Chirac had just decided to go for it as a way of building national identity, but it was a high-risk strategy and he thought it would backfire badly. John Reid was doing a tour of local parties and said he genuinely felt we could persuade people. I spoke to Piers [Morgan] to try to get him to take a piece from John as I knew they were meeting tonight. Of course he wanted TB, but agreed to take JR as a first step. This followed our meeting with Victor Blank [
Trinity Mirror
chairman] yesterday who had suggested JR as a possible link to Piers. TB was pretty frank with Victor, told him he found it very difficult to have a serious conversation with Piers, as the only thing he was really interested in was himself.

TB sent a note through to Bush setting out the basic strategy – that we put down a UNSCR, not push to a vote, instead use it like an ultimatum, give him two weeks or so to take us to the French date of March 14. He spoke to Bush later, said we couldn’t dispute that public opinion was against us but he strongly felt the French and Germans were in the right place for public opinion but in the wrong place for the world. Dan [Bartlett] was clearly feeding in our conversations because Bush referred to the fact that I had said he was giving us real problems because they just didn’t speak our language. TB felt it was a good call, which ended with Bush raging at the churchmen, this on the day that our church leaders were having a go at us too.

TB was getting more and more worried on Iraq, and with good reason. He called from Chequers saying we really had to think through the strategy on the theme of ‘the last push for peace’. He wanted a strong media plan to underpin it. Dan Bartlett was in agreement we had to tone down the war rhetoric and tone up the push for peace. I said we couldn’t emphasise enough how we needed the sense that we were trying to avoid war, not rush towards it. TB called later, asked for a call on the Brent [secure phone], later joined by Jack, to discuss rumours that Blix had been saying he intended to report that Iraq was complying when our evidence pointed in the opposite direction. TB later spoke to him. He felt we needed to get the US, UK and Spain putting out a second resolution. I felt we also needed someone unexpected on it, like Mexico or Chile.

Jack wanted to do a parliamentary debate next week and we went over when to announce it and what kind of motion. We now had to get the second resolution, and put down the ultimatum, that amounted
to Saddam being forced to answer the questions he had not yet answered or even been properly asked about the leftovers, interviews with scientists etc. We had to get the tone straight prior to the Bush/Aznar meeting on Saturday. Andrew Adonis had sparked another flurry with the Treasury. Ed Balls was complaining about a story in the
FT
based on TB’s progressive governance article about co-payment.
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Andrew was adamant it referred to what we were doing on tuition fees, but the Treasury were cranking it up as a threat re the NHS. I explained all that to Ed but he was equally adamant it was a hostile act.

David M’s conversations with Condi were getting more and more scratchy. Condi was keen to be pushing towards conflict whilst we were emphasising the peaceful route still. Dan and I spent quite a while working on an agreed script.

TB called en route to Rome. He really felt everything now had to be set in the context of pushing for peace, that we wanted to resolve it peacefully. He said he really wanted me to work on Dan Bartlett, and get properly agreed message scripts, which I had been doing much of last night and this morning. By the end of it, we had a very strong four-page Sunday briefings script, which if everyone stuck to it, would get us in a far better position. He called me later and I gave him an example of where words that seemed commonplace to them gave us major public opinion problems here. Rumsfeld leading the news here simply by saying ‘We’re ready’, that totally cut across our message that we were trying to avoid war not rush into it. I had the idea of the ultimatum in the briefing note. TB was happy with it and so was Jack until he spoke to Powell who said that the real ultimatum would be made just before action when we tell Saddam to get out of town. I was fine with cutting it, though it weakened it.

Late pm I got a message that the Americans wanted a conference call – Condi, Dan, Steve Hadley [Deputy National Security Advisor] on their side, with David M, Jonathan and me. They clearly had worries. I set out why we wanted to frame it this way, set out the process including a side statement directly challenging Saddam. But Condi feared that setting it out as a final chance – again – or a challenge to Saddam, suggested there was something here beyond 1441. She said 1441 was all that we needed. We tried to use the call
to get over the need for a different sort of language on this, but they really didn’t get it.