Читать книгу 30 Days: A Month at the Heart of Blair’s War - Peter Stothard - Страница 11

Morning headlines … emergency summit in Azores … Bush to publish Middle East ‘road map’… Washington rejects Chilean compromise … US commanders say Iraqi forces in civilian area will be targets …

When the Prime Minister spends the weekend in Downing Street there is not much ‘weekend’ in Downing Street. There is blue sky over St James’s Park and a sense of bright weather ahead. Upstairs in the flat two teenage Blairs, seventeen-year-old Nicholas and fifteen-year-old Kathryn, are preparing for a London day.

Inside the dark front hall of Number Ten there are four dead orchids, ready to be collected by the garbage-men, and the first signs of a conference for political ‘enforcers’.

Hilary Armstrong, Labour Chief Whip since Tony Blair’s second election victory two years ago, has abandoned her grandmotherly office grey for a soft cream leather jacket. John Reid is in leather too, harder and black. Gordon Brown is wearing a black-and-white rugby shirt. Sally Morgan is in a blue sweater. Only two are dressed for work as they would be on a weekday morning: Alastair Campbell is in his tracksuit and marathon trainers, and John Prescott in his regular stiff suit.

‘The next few days will be very twittery,’ says Armstrong, leaning on the burgundy Chesterfield where the Campbell corridor meets the hall. She wants to put ‘weekend pressure’ on dissident Members of Parliament when they are meeting their constituents.

Here at Westminster political revolts are likely to gain momentum. Each new meeting in committee room or bar gives rebels the confidence that they are not alone. Once ‘wobblers’ are back at home, local Labour leaders, chairmen of constituency parties, may remind them why they were elected in the first place, why, without Tony Blair, there would not be a Labour government. ‘So, if John Reid were to call some of these Constituency Chairmen, he could make that point …’

Armstrong is expressing the conventional Whips’ Office wisdom. ‘In the bad old days,’ she says chattily, ‘when a “Big Boy” phoned your Chairman it made a big difference. We have to fix that up now.’

Reid is not so sure. This is not a conventional case. The Labour activists are more angry with the government than the Members of Parliament are. He worries that the Constituency Chairmen are likely to be the most opposed to the war of all. He does not want to phone a Chairman ‘behind an MP’s back’. He will help, but ‘only if it’s not going to be counterproductive’.

‘Have you seen Jack Straw?’ Armstrong asks coolly. The Foreign Secretary has problems in his own constituency this weekend. Muslim voters are well represented in Blackburn, Lancashire. They dislike the idea of their elected representative helping the American takeover of a Muslim country.

The Whips are not so enthusiastic about Jack Straw either. Much of their political problem arises from the government’s earlier excessive confidence that there would be an unambiguous second United Nations resolution giving an ultimatum to Saddam Hussein. Doubting Labour Members were allowed, even encouraged, to tell their Chairmen and their local press that they would support the Prime Minister’ s policy once that resolution was passed. Now any such clear UN support is a dream.

The meeting begins in a dark Number Eleven reception room with Armstrong’s latest account of ‘wobblers and runners’. She speaks with a flat northern voice which is her main weapon of threat. The friendliness and humour, the weapons of the cajoling Whip, are all in the lines around her eyes.

Tony Blair is seated in a large gilt chair which the Treasury uses to impress foreign bankers. He looks slight, in open-necked blue shirt and chino trousers. On either side of him, like a Praetorian guard, are Prescott, cold and frowning on the left, and Brown, who has now exchanged his rugby kit for a dark suit, on the right.

Morgan is more cheerful about the anguishing MPs. ‘They haven’t seen the abyss yet. When they’ve seen it, they will come back from it.’

There is a quiet moment while they review the latest security reports from Iraq. Some of the Baghdad government is resigned to war; there is a certain amount of ‘summary punishment’ being meted out to dissenters. The Chief Whip concentrates hard.

Gordon Brown, sitting judge-like on his Chancellor’s bench, is the only figure from the war team who can highlight the chief flaw in the policy as it is seen from the streets. ‘What people ask me is, why is there not just a little more delay?’

The Prime Minister knows that this is a legitimate question. This afternoon he must have a last telephone call with the most active of the junior UN Security Council members, Chilean President Ricardo Lagos, who has been making exactly that argument.

The right answer to the Chancellor of the Exchequer and his questioners is that George Bush has had enough of the United Nations, and will begin war within days. Tony Blair snaps impatiently at the meeting, ‘The reason is that you just go back to 1441: time, time and more time.’ It is clear from Gordon Brown’s eyes that better language than that needs to be found if the case is to be won.

The number 1441, shorthand for the resolution against Saddam Hussein which the Security Council agreed but did not want to act upon, is one of many bits of war jargon which are not easily understood by outsiders. If Ministers could say that the war was being fought because of intolerable abuse of human rights, because of torture, mass murder, even some of the casual last-minute mutilation of Iraqis on which the meeting has just been briefed, the case would be much easier.

If Ministers were allowed even to rest their case on the need to remove barbarian tyrants, the strategic interdependence of Europe and America for the common good, their words of persuasion might have a better chance of being heard. But the language demanded by the immediate negotiations is of acronyms, paragraphs and numbered resolutions.

Pat MacFadden, in black T-shirt, black shirt and jeans, looks like an accused man in court making pages of notes for his own defence. He is working on what the better language might be. The veins on his forehead do not suggest that his task is going well.

The Attorney General, the meeting is told, will announce on Monday that war against Iraq is legal on the basis of past UN resolutions. The Sunday newspapers can be told that for tomorrow. There is thus no need for the new Second Resolution upon which so much has been built.

The legal niceties defeat all but the most determined political students. Cherie Blair would be more use on this point than anyone in the room, except that she might well not come to the right conclusion. One of her senior colleagues has already determined that past UN resolutions give no legality for war.

Fortunately the Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, who is not here today, thinks otherwise. If he did not judge the coming war to be legal there would be no British troops fighting it. There will still, however, be a lot of explaining to do. Last week the second UN resolution was a magic chemical formula to clear away all ills. This week it is a bit of herbal medicine, desirable, beneficial, good for the soul, but wholly unnecessary.

Morgan tells her boss that his arrival time back home from the Azores is 2 a.m. on Monday.