The Burden of Power: Countdown to Iraq - The Alastair Campbell Diaries (2 page)

For some of his enemies, Iraq defines TB. The three election wins, a peace agreement in Ireland, record investment in schools and hospitals, Bank of England independence, devolution to Scotland, Wales and London, Sure Start, the minimum wage, civic partnerships, the New Deal, Kosovo, Sierra Leone, debt relief, securing the Olympics for London, all these and many more get parked and forgotten by those who wish only to see that when it came to Iraq, he did the wrong thing and for the wrong reasons. They see it as nothing short of a disaster, regardless of the fact that one of the most brutal dictators in history was felled after his years of defiance of the UN and brutality against his own people. It was about oil. It was about Israel. It was because TB was craven in his relationship with George Bush in particular and the US in general. It was because he had been in power too long and it had all gone to his head. For some these are unshifting and unshiftable views which, if anything, harden with time. And though TB led Labour to a comfortable third election victory even after the war in Iraq, and all the controversy that involved, I know there are people who deserted Labour on the back of it. But I hope a fair reading of my diaries shows that he took real care over all of the decisions which faced him at this time. I don’t object to people disagreeing with the decisions he took. As so often in politics, things were never black and white. There was always another course that could have been taken, and I have never considered it dishonourable to hold a different view. Indeed Robin Cook expressed such a view brilliantly when he resigned from the government over Iraq. But as someone who was alongside TB as much as anyone, I know the care he took over the decisions, and the sincerity of his view that he was doing what he believed to be the right thing for Britain, British people and their security. He wasn’t elected to hold views, but to take decisions based upon them, and whilst people may disagree with the conclusions he reached, they should not doubt his sincerity in the beliefs that drove him to them, not least his long-standing concerns about the threat of Islamic extremism, nor his conviction that not to have taken those decisions would have been wrong. Very little is heard in the UK media of the Iraqis who supported what we did, and who at least now have the beginnings of democracy. Those who opposed the war must at least reflect, surely, that had their position held sway, Saddam and his sons would have prospered for even longer. That was a danger TB believed the world should not countenance. It is why, despite the controversy, despite the opprobrium he has faced over Iraq, he nonetheless believes world leaders have a duty to face up to the threat of Islamic extremism, and why the conduct of Iran will at some stage have to be properly addressed too.

There was a point at which, in the run-up to the war in Iraq, I asked him if the war was really worth it if – as I feared it would – it led to him being driven out of office before his time. He said it was always worth doing what you thought was the right thing, and that Saddam was a threat the world had ignored for too long, and that included Britain. Those two insights were never far from his thinking throughout. As was clear from his evidence to the Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq War, he accepts mistakes were made, but he does not accept that the decision to remove Saddam was the wrong one, or that all the chaos which ensued was alone the responsibility of those who took the action to remove him. He thinks it was right, too, to be supportive of the US, not just because they came under attack on September 11, or even because we share so much in terms of values and history, but because he believed the only way to have any influence on President Bush privately – for example in getting him to take the issue of Iraq down the route of the UN, or get fresh US engagement in the Middle East Peace Process – was via maximum public support. It was to some extent a trade-off, for which he was willing to take the ‘Bush’s poodle’ jibes.

Back in late 2001, with the memories of September 11 fresh in people’s minds, and with the Taliban clearly not facing up to the challenge of helping to deliver up Osama Bin Laden and other perpetrators of the attacks, public and political support for action was stronger than it was for action in Iraq, though it is worth remembering that from some on the right in Britain, we faced the charge of being too cautious, and public support was greater at the time than it was after the event. I should make clear at this juncture that I am not linking Iraq to the September 11 attacks, in the sense of claiming Iraq played a role in them, and it was unhelpful of some in the US system to seek to do so. But where the link exists is here: until September 11, the threat posed by Iraq and WMD was one that the US and its closest allies were willing to tolerate. After September 11, the mindset shifted. To quote the phrase used often at the Chilcot Inquiry, the calculus of threat changed.

For those who think the government did the wrong thing, so much has been said and written, the arguments have been played out so volubly, that it is unlikely anything I say here, or which I wrote at the time and publish now, will persuade them otherwise. But when TB was being briefed at the Ministry of Defence on military preparedness in the event of our forces coming under attack from biological or chemical weapons, there was not a person in that room who did not consider the threat to be real. I can remember feeling a sense of fear which was matched by the looks on some of the faces in the room. I can remember TB pressing until he was as assured as he could be that our troops were as prepared as possible to face this threat if and when it came. No prime minister would commit troops to any action, let alone to the potential horror being described in that room, without thinking through the consequences, and unless they were sure there was no other way. Also, I know it is not the done thing in polite circles to speak well of George W. Bush, but I thought he made a very good observation in his book,
Decision Points
, when he said, ‘If I wanted to mislead the country into war why would I pick an allegation that was certain to be disproven publicly shortly after we invaded the country?’ Both he and TB, and the people working for them, believed the WMD threat was real. People are entitled to disagree with the decisions. But there was no lying, there was no conspiracy. There was a set of difficult decisions that had to be taken.

Of course the portrait of Tony Blair is the most intimate here. But I saw a good deal of Bush, of Vladimir Putin, of Jacques Chirac and other world leaders during this time. Bill Clinton still figures large, a good and sometimes critical friend to TB and his team. The night out with him and actor Kevin Spacey in a McDonald’s restaurant in Blackpool was one of the more memorable meals of my life. Unforgettable too was the meeting at which he gave fellow Labour strategist Philip Gould and me a masterclass in political strategy, complete with very personal advice about my own by then difficult situation. Many on both sides of the Atlantic find it odd that TB could be close both to Clinton and to Bush, two very different leaders from different sides of the political divide. I think TB would argue that with the US the only superpower at the time, he had a duty to have good relations with its leader. Also, he genuinely got on with Bush. The Texan certainly had a cowboy touch about him, at times right down to the boots on his feet. But he has more intelligence, more charm and greater political skills than most are prepared to credit him with. It has also been interesting to note, as the Republicans have lurched through the process of trying to find a candidate to take on President Obama at the next election, that by the standards of most of the contenders, Bush is something of a moderate. Many modern politicians are more impressive in public than in private. The media age has forced politicians as a breed to communicate more and to think about how they do so. They can turn a switch and go into public mode. David Cameron is a good example of this. George Bush’s switch seemed sometimes to go the other way. He would express himself less well in public than he did in private. At least he was aware that his image gave other leaders in other countries problems. I don’t think the same could always be said for his vice president Dick Cheney or defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

Just as Iraq will always be one of the issues most associated with TB, so the issues of communication surrounding the war will always be with me, as someone somewhere reminds me online most days. As I said to the Chilcot Inquiry, I stand by everything I said and did in relation to the September 2002 dossier on WMD presented to Parliament by the Prime Minister. Being asked to give my diaries to Lord Hutton’s inquiry into David Kelly’s death, as this volume shows, was something of a terrifying moment. As anyone who has read my diaries now knows, I can be very frank, I can say very harsh things, I can be hard on myself and on others. I confess to being so worried about what I might have written that when I drove from our holiday home in Provence to Marseilles airport to collect my diaries so that I could transcribe them and send them to Lord Hutton in advance of my first evidence session, I had one of those momentary reflections that life might be easier all round if I just careered off the motorway. Yet as it turned out, I think the diaries may have helped our case. They showed that we took rather more care over that dossier than the BBC journalist took over his report which led to my being called to select committee inquiries, ultimately to Kelly’s death, and the inquiry into that.

I never met David Kelly, but I think about him often, and whether I could have done anything differently that might have stopped him from taking his life. With the exception of the deaths of family and close friends, the day his body was found was perhaps the worst of my life, certainly the worst of my time with TB. Had it not been for Fiona, and Philip Gould who came round to the house on hearing the news, I would almost certainly have resigned there and then. I was frankly beyond caring if it meant the blame would come my way. So far as many in the media were concerned, that was going to happen anyway. I just felt the whole thing had become like a horrible, dark novel and I wanted out of it. Ironically, the night before, we were felt to be ‘winning’ the battle with the BBC, its reporter having been strongly criticised by the Foreign Affairs Committee. But by the morning, all that had changed. It was horrific. The feelings I had then are among the reasons why, despite always staying involved, and going back to help out in two general elections, I have never really wanted to return to a full-time position in the front line of politics.

When I gave evidence to the Leveson Inquiry into media practices in 2011, I made the point that much of today’s media like to act as judge and jury on those in public life. The coverage of the Hutton Inquiry, whose deliberations are covered in this volume, but whose conclusions came after I resigned from Downing Street, is a good example. The inquiry shone a microscopic light on both the process of communication in the run-up to war, and the circumstances surrounding Dr Kelly’s death. When Lord Hutton was putting government witnesses through their paces, and ministers and officials from the prime minister down were being questioned and cross-examined, day in and day out, media reporting was largely slanted to show the government in a bad light, and Lord Hutton in a good light because of the rigour of his inquiry. The bits of the evidence that suggested wrongdoing by the government led bulletins and newspapers. Anything that fitted with the government account tended to be relegated. The moment Lord Hutton concluded that the central charges against the government were not borne out by the evidence, he was condemned as Lord Whitewash. Hundreds, thousands of reports have subsequently sought to convey the sense that the BBC report was essentially true. It was not; and as Lord Hutton said at the time, even if it emerged there were no WMD in Iraq, that would not make the reporting true. It is important to remember what the accusations against us – and me in particular – were: that we inserted false intelligence into the WMD dossier, knowing it to be false and against the wishes of the intelligence agencies. To this day, I fail to see how a government can simply ignore claims as serious as that. Indeed, had the inquiry found against us, it would not just have been the end for me, but more importantly for TB. Though no WMD have been found, the BBC report is as untrue today as it was when it was first made, despite the constant attempts by many in the media to rewrite what was broadcast, or to confuse and conflate the WMD dossier with the so-called ‘dodgy dossier’, which was a different paper, which attracted next to no attention at the time, on which someone working for me made an error for which I apologised.

It is fair to say that in this volume, most of the personal satisfaction, even happiness I managed to get from working for TB in the early years has gone. The twin pressures of a 24–7 job of real intensity and scrutiny, and a home life where pressure was mounting on me to leave, at times felt like a living nightmare. I was glad to have discovered a new obsession in running. My sons persuaded me to go for a long run in the summer of 2002. By the end of the holiday I had decided to do the London Marathon, which coincided with a very busy time in relation to Iraq. TB felt the whole thing was a bit of a distraction; to me, it was something of a saviour. At the time I took up running, I could do the job, but I didn’t feel I was doing it as well as before. I was resenting the workload, and resenting those on our own side who so often made life harder than it should have been. TB was convinced that I could and should stay, and he is a very skilful manager when it comes to getting his own way. Also, even when we fell out, as over the role of Australian con man Peter Foster and Carole Caplin when Cherie bought two flats for her son Euan, I always felt a strong sense of loyalty to TB, and I still do. It was that loyalty, in addition to the sense of being involved in such significant events, with the chance to make a difference, which made it so hard to leave. When finally I did, I knew it was the right time, even if I fell into a pretty awful depression not long afterwards.

I had forgotten until transcribing the diaries just how long I had been trying to get out. Ironically, the controversy over the communications on Iraq kept me in post for longer. TB finally agreed to my departure in May 2003, shortly before the BBC report I describe above, and yet I didn’t leave until August, as the intervening months came to be dominated by the fallout. I suppose it is also something of an irony that TB hired me to take charge of his media relations and yet my own relations with the media became as bad as they did. Partly this was because I often played the role of lightning conductor. But also I was one of the few people able and willing to articulate what I believed to be a set of damaging trends in the way the media and its effect upon democratic debate were developing. I think one of the reasons I became so high profile and so controversial is that I was doing the job at a time the media age was becoming a reality. The media sought to position themselves as the sole purveyors of truth (ironically at a time when standards were falling). In their minds, what they did was truth; what we did was spin. We made mistakes, certainly, not least my colleague Jo Moore’s infamous ‘good day to bury bad news’ email of 9/11. But in general I believe we applied far higher standards to what we said and did than many journalists applied to what they wrote or broadcast.