Читать книгу 30 Days: A Month at the Heart of Blair’s War - Peter Stothard - Страница 8

Morning headlines … Tony Blair faces first reports of challenge to his leadership … Washington wants UN vote ‘this week’… thousands protest in Pakistan and Indonesia …

Behind the door with the combination lock that leads to the Blairs’ Downing Street flat, the ‘Questions’ team is slowly assembling. It is 7.45 a.m. Sally Morgan is already upstairs with her boss in the cramped sitting room.

Jonathan Powell comes into the dark hallway, which has certificates of legal qualifications on the walls and Leo Blair’s train set on the floor. The Chief of Staff likes to take precise diplomatic strides around his building, but this is not easy when track and carriages extend across the carpet as though some junior Vanderbilt were plotting his expansion to the American West. Campbell’s loping journalist’s gait is more suited to this terrain.

These are the three closest political advisers to the Prime Minister. There is always a low-level tension between them. Each has a different bit of the battle that demands priority.

Morgan, a Labour activist since her Liverpool schooldays twenty years ago, is now a Blair baroness. She sees the war through party eyes.

Powell, the organiser, learnt his politics watching Bill Clinton win elections. He sees through foreign eyes.

Campbell, former journalist and focused survivor of alcoholism and mental breakdown, is the man Tony Blair depends on the most. He does many things, but he has the eyes of the media.

Others enter the hallway a few minutes later. There is no sign of Leo himself, but his mother, harassed and in a housecoat, calls down at random to the passing crowd, ‘Tell Tony to call Jack McConnell by 8.15.’ No one looks up. It seems an intrusion to be here at this time of the morning.

Cherie Blair says she doesn’t mind living in someone else’s office. Or that, at least, is what she normally says.

Back in 1983, when both wife and husband were struggling to find seats in Parliament, she might easily have won and he might easily have lost. She rarely shows signs of resenting that outcome, although others, on her behalf, often stress that hers is the more powerful brain and the steelier determination.

Both were then Christian socialists of independent mind. But Tony Blair had the more winning way with people and the better luck. Just before the 1983 election he found a refuge in the safe northern constituency of Sedgefield. From that point onwards, he could be a Labour Member of Parliament as long as he wished. His wife had to fight the difficult southern Conservative seat of Thanet North.

It is said that three Tonies gave Cherie Booth comfort when she fought her only election campaign in her own right twenty years ago. The first was her father, the then famous television actor Tony Booth. The second was the even more famous left-wing Labour MP Tony Benn, the man whose influence at that time ensured that a Labour Prime Minister could never take power. The third, both in fame and in effort then, was her husband, who is now in the Downing Street sitting room.

Cherie Booth was heavily beaten in Thanet. Since then she has been a lawyer and mother, and a political wife who has never taken easily to the role of politician’s wife. She resists strongly having to be on show all the time. She had little interest in how she looked until her husband’s success made an interest essential. She has endured rather than enjoyed the demands that no sleeve, collar or cuff be out of place.

She makes no secret of being an evening person, not a morning one. Her first public appearance on the morning after the 1997 election victory was tousle-haired in a dressing-gown going out to collect a delivery of flowers at her Islington front doorstep. It was a bad welcome to the life of a Number Ten wife – though far from its worst moment.

This early-morning procession past her bedroom door has, however, become a custom on ‘Questions to the Prime Minister’ Wednesdays. She says she is simply used to it now. Today there are even more strangers than usual slinking by her, as quietly as they can, so that her husband can take his first briefing of the day before he goes down to his office.

The wife of Sir Anthony Eden, a former occupant of this house whose tenure was curtailed by a Middle East war, used to complain that she had the Suez Canal running through her drawing room. As she shouts her ‘Don’t forget’ message down to anyone who will hear, Cherie Blair could be forgiven for seeing her own room as running fast too – with Washington’s Potomac River, Iraq’s Tigris and Euphrates, all sweeping along more than a dozen of her husband’s staff.

Tony Blair sits stiffly on the end of the sofa nearest to the fireplace. He sips tea from a red mug with a lizard running down its side. He almost always drinks from a mug, even in meetings where others have china cups. It is a sign that he is at home and everyone else is not.

He has not had the easiest of nights. After returning from his ritual with the Queen he found that American Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had written Britain out of America’s war plans. If the British government could not sort out its political problems, Rumsfeld had said, then too bad: Washington would go it alone.

Tony Blair did not see that as an opportunity, however much many of his supporters would like him to have done. He has strategic fears of the isolation of the United States if it ‘goes it alone’. But he had personal objections too. To be stabbed by Britain’s traditional French rival is one thing. To be kicked by his transatlantic ally, to be told that all his efforts to win a Second Resolution at the UN and a parliamentary majority at home is a waste of time: that is something else. It had taken two late calls to President Bush to establish that Secretary Rumsfeld was ‘only trying to help’.

The Questions team has to wrestle, as it often does, with what the Prime Minister would like to say and what it is suitable for him to say. What he might like to tell the House of Commons is that the US President’s Cabinet members are appointed, not elected, are not always skilled at calming American voters, still less British ones, and that Britain’s place at America’s side is solid and secure. But he has to be cautious, making it clear that his policy is unchanged, that the UN route is still being taken and that Parliament will be fully consulted if the time for war comes.

For meetings like this the Prime Minister calls in specialists in anticipating what both Opposition and backbench Labour MPs will ask. Only some of the questions are known in advance. These are on the list in the hands of David Hanson, a Welsh MP who is Tony Blair’s Parliamentary Private Secretary, his official ‘spy’ in his own ranks. Hanson has the look of a young preacher and a shirt stained with leaks from ‘bloody useless Downing Street pens’.

The Prime Minister says little himself. On Iraq he does not need briefing. He wants to know how his Conservative opponent is likely to act. Will he ask only half his permitted questions on Iraq, where he has the temporary disadvantage of agreeing with the government? Or will he make every question about Iraq? What other issues are out there?

There follows a brief discussion of plans to curb anti-social behaviour in Britain. The press, he is told, is concentrating on proposed penalties against homeless beggars, which not everyone approves of, rather than schemes to punish graffiti-writers and car-burners, which are more universally popular. Tony Blair tries hard to seem interested.

At other times this would be the kind of political fine-tuning at which this team excels, sometimes excels too much. Today the ‘spinners’ take their cue from their leader. He takes another sip of tea from his mug and asks what is in the morning newspapers.

There is the report out tomorrow of the inquiry into sodomy and freebies below stairs at St James’s Palace. The Number Ten Press Office is about to be briefed on its contents, but despite the fascination of the subject for all who are interested in the Prince of Wales, there is not expected to be much in it to occupy the political editors, the ‘clients’ of Downing Street.

There are also reports about a plot to detonate an al-Qaeda bomb, Bali-style, in a British nightclub. ‘Mmmm,’ is the Prime Minister’s only response.

It is just before 8.15 a.m. now. Cherie Blair’s message about Jack McConnell, Labour’s First Minister in the Scottish Parliament, is passed on, but not immediately acted upon. Coffee arrives in white-and-gold Downing Street cups. ‘Service first for those who have been here longest,’ Morgan says, holding out her hand.

‘What will I be asked about Clare Short?’ the Prime Minister asks.

‘Oh, it will just be stuff about Labour divisions. How the Tories dare talk about divisions, I just don’t know,’ Morgan replies briskly.

Tony Blair thinks that what he ought to be asked is: ‘Why don’t you just go in and get rid of Saddam now?’ It would be harder for him to give that question a fully honest answer. He sees almost no chance of a second UN resolution, but, for the sake of his own party’s support if for no other reason, he has to clutch at the vanishing ideal.

A Private Secretary’s next job is to make the single tabbed briefing file which the Prime Minister will take to the House of Commons just before noon. Tony Blair has suddenly lost an important bit of paper. He apologises. ‘In all my myriad phone calls I must have misplaced it,’ he says, his voice trailing away as the Foreign Secretary comes through the door. This meeting is not so much over as ‘morphing’ into the next.

Jack Straw has become Tony Blair’s closest Cabinet ally. He is the Alastair Campbell of the politicians, more frank sometimes than the Prime Minister wants him to be, rumbustious, irreverent, a sharp-witted left-wing student leader who became a right-wing Home Secretary. As Foreign Secretary, he has just a hint of the ‘Little Englander’.

This morning he has to brief the Prime Minister on the last echoes of the Rumsfeld intervention and the latest attempt to persuade the Chileans about the vanishing resolution. He has then to be briefed by Tony Blair on what to say to calm this morning’s meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party before the midday Questions begins.

The flat gradually empties. Down below, outside the den, the chairs are being put out on the balcony in case the Prime Minister wants to sit outside in the sun. There is shelter here from the sight of the ‘Not in our Name’ protesters, if not from their cries of ‘Tony, Tony, Tony, out, out, out.’ The view from here is over St James’s Park, the one that the planners of the house intended its occupants to have. Downing Street is always one of the coldest, most windblown alleys in London, even on a brightening blue-skied day.

Walk through the door marked ‘Number Ten’, go straight ahead down the yellow-wallpapered corridor, avoid the recumbent Henry Moore statue, and you are in the red hall that leads to the Cabinet Room and the den. To the left is Sally Morgan’s political office, decorated with the work of women artists in memory of the one time that Tony Blair freed her to do a job, as Minister for Women, that was not directly in his line of sight.

Morgan is a plain-speaking, plain-dressing, no-nonsense Liverpudlian whom the Prime Minister relies on heavily both for political intelligence and the personal kind. The experiment of setting her free did not last long.

To the right is the passage to the ‘outer office’, which has desks for the private secretaries and Duty Clerks. There is the TV and the three clocks, unchanged since the Cold War, set to Washington, London and Moscow times. Here sit the key-keepers for the red boxes, the men who make the phone-working work, and Jonathan Powell, the Chief of Staff who listens out and listens in.

If you are an Ambassador, if you are seeking diplomacy more than politics, you will go right immediately from the front hall, down a more institutional corridor to rooms behind a combination lock where Tony Blair’s ‘diplomatic knights’ do their work.

In a fine half-circular Georgian room, one knight looks after Chirac and the Europeans. In another, with a huge maple-leaf window out towards Whitehall, sits the chief knight of this current battle, Sir David Manning, who has a slight figure and a fierce stare and cares for what is known here as ‘the real world’: reality includes America, North and South, the Middle East and Iraq.

Political advisers and press officers, party veterans and trusted young civil servants turn left after entering Number Ten, past the staircase to the Blair family’s flat, past the dark lower rooms of the Chancellor of the Exchequer and on to Alastair Campbell’s zone. Here, in a set of large, dark-panelled rooms, the largest hung about with drying marathon kit, steaming trainers and posters of past campaigns, the business of public opinion is done.

There is much to do.

Next month Tony Blair is fifty. How is he planning to spend the day? ‘At the Labour exchange,’ says Campbell with his best four-miles-to-the-finishing-line grimace.

The London Marathon is still a month away. Campbell has never run the twenty-six-mile distance before, and is training as hard as political distractions allow. He has never had his boss in such a bad position before, either.

On the wall is a poster of Number Ten’s last occupant, John Major, in the guise of ‘Mr Weak’, a reminder of one of Campbell’s most vaunted coups. This poster could never have been put on billboards in the 1997 campaign; it was a clear abuse of the copyright owned by the creator of the ‘Mister Men’, children’s bestsellers all over the world. But somehow the image found its way onto newspaper front pages regardless, and it has stayed on this wall ever since.

Tony Blair has not yet reached ‘Mr Weak’ status among his colleagues. But he is beginning to look as grey as John Major did.

The television on the newspaper-strewn table shows a few MPs, some of the more glamorous New Labour kind, cooing with admiration that Tony Blair ‘has put his leadership on the line’. Campbell sighs.

The TV reporter has also found other MPs who want to use the Prime Minister’s support for George Bush to make him greyer and weaker. ‘Leadership isn’t just Tony Blair, it’s us as well,’ says one Old Labour member. Campbell grunts and changes to a sports channel with theatrical contempt.

One group of MPs is rumoured to be planning a bid for a new leader, arguing that a Labour Prime Minister should not be ‘a threat to the institutions of world order’. Is that a real danger, or just a bombastic stunt? Campbell tries to assess the problem and the difference.

The Prime Minister has finished his briefings and has come downstairs. He walks all these corridors restlessly, back and forth along the three ground-floor axes of his home.

It is just after 9 a.m. A large white ‘Délice de France’ food van is parked opposite Horse Guards Parade. A man in a bowler hat, with furled umbrella, yellow carnation and a copy of The Times, swings his arms like a Guardsman as he walks towards the Foreign Office. This archetypal man of Whitehall stops at the sight of the words ‘Délice de France’ and gives them a hard stare, as though to a disobedient dog – or even to ‘a cheap strutting tart’, as another newspaper, not one he is likely to read, describes the President of France this morning. After a moment’s pause, he moves on up past the Cabinet War Rooms of World War II and into Whitehall.

At the same time Tony Blair stops in the Cabinet Room. He looks onto the balcony as though he would much rather be outside than in, and begins the day’s work.

By the front door, a schoolmasterly man in a salt-and-pepper tweed suit and breakfast-stained tie is wondering whether it is safe to go up to the flat. The regular Wednesday routine for the Prime Minister’s team may be Question Time. For this man it is the day for winding the Downing Street clocks.

There is a grandfather in the Entrance Hall which the messengers tell visitors, ‘quite wrongly’, was stripped of its chiming parts by Churchill, who couldn’t stand the noise. There is a ‘nice piece’ in the waiting room. It has an unusually loud tick. But the best one is the ‘Vulliamy’ in the flat, which he likes to wind when the family is out. He also has a good clockwork connoisseur’s interest in the working s of Leo’s train.

‘Set it at five minutes to midnight,’ says another waiting-room visitor, with a confident smile and the current cliché of how close the country is to war. The clock man looks slightly bemused. In five minutes he wants to be away from here, on to the next of the British government’s antique timepieces and then to Buckingham Palace, where there are some ‘Very fine’ examples and he will have ‘elevense s’ with a couple of friends.

At about 11.30 a.m. there is the sound of singing from the cleaners upstairs. The words are ‘Good morning, Tony’, to the tune that fans used to sing outside rock stars’ hotels, and ending ‘Oh, Tony, we love you.’ This noise is accompanied by the sound of mops and brushes and a sharp supervisory retort: ‘You mustn’t call him that. He likes to be called Prime Minister.’

There is a moment’s quiet, and then the ‘Good morning, Tony’ song begins again, just as the man himself almost runs along the corridor, holding a cup and saucer in front of him as though in an egg-and-spoon race. Immediately behind, and in exactly the same posture, is Alastair Campbell.

Tony Blair is not one who seems to mind too much what he is called. Some refer to him as ‘TB’, some as ‘the boss’, many as ‘Tony’. The diplomatic knights call him ‘Prime Minister’, but the phrase ‘Yes, Prime Minister’ has been destroyed by television comedy, and is never used except as a joke.

For the next twenty minutes the Downing Street ‘pagers’ receive blow-by-blow messages from inside the Parliamentary Labour Party meeting about how Jack Straw is faring against the critics. By the time the Prime Ministerial motorcade is ready for the two-hundred-yard ‘dash’ to the Commons, the news is already seen as ‘quite good’. There are ‘lots of dismissals of a Special Conference’, the mechanism necessary to change a Labour leader’, and ‘lots of rudeness about the French’.

At 11.40 a.m. the ‘dash’ has begun. After a blur of journalists’ flashbulbs, protesters’ flashbulbs, gates that are normally kept closed, mirrors in underground tunnels, Tony Blair and his Questions squad reassemble on foot among post-workers and sandwich-makers for the last walk up to the Prime Minister’s Westminster office. Jack Straw is waiting outside, buoyed by the success of his ‘anti-French’ card. He holds out a page of Le Monde as a possible prop for his boss: ‘It’s the Napoleon route – and remember who won.’

Tony Blair checks his tabulated answers for a few minutes under the stern oil-painted eyes of Sir Walter Scott. He rejects the copy of Le Monde. The offending page falls down onto the pink carpet and stays there, propped against the golden gothic dragons on the wall.

Outside in David Hanson’s office, which for these few minutes each week is like ‘feed the animals day’ at a zoo, there is a Junior Whips’ convention. These are the ambitious young MPs whose routine job is to ensure that Labour MPs vote Labour. They want to catch the boss’s eye with their imagination, devotion and skill.

They are swapping names about which doubters are likely to vote for the war (‘He had a meeting with Cherie the other day which was very helpful’) and which will definitely be against them (‘He’s a runner; you can tell it in his face’). There are fashion edicts: ‘Never trust a man in a pinstripe suit if the white stripe is thicker than the blue one.’ There is coded abuse: ‘That man’s a woodentop – and that’s a Whips’ Office technical term.’

The Americans are said to be abandoning their efforts at the UN. Is there a phone for calling the White House? The question is posed by Campbell, but is not answered. These secure phones are called ‘Brents’, and have operators who seem normally to be scrabbling on the floor for the right socket. There is not a ‘Brent’ here.

‘Don’t eat that,’ Morgan tells the horde around her, pointing to a bruised and not very appetising banana. ‘It’s his lunch.’

The Prime Minister and his personal spy sweep out, and into the Chamber. There is just a minute to spare before the Speaker calls for the first Labour MP to question ‘US pressure for precipitate action against Iraq’.

The Conservative leader Iain Duncan Smith asks all his questions about Iraq, but not the one which Tony Blair fears. He does ask about Donald Rumsfeld and Clare Short, as predicted. The noise from the Labour benches is not of loyal hoorahs; but there are no boos either. The big parliamentary day is not yet come. There are questions too about lost jobs in farming and lost education in Leicestershire, each of which gets a neat tabbed reply from the file.

Back in his room, Tony Blair begins his lunch, feet on the table, eyes on the whisky bottles and birthday cards which he signs for MPs at this time every week. Once every ‘Best wishes, Tony’ is done he turns to the letters to world leaders. The knights of Downing Street think that extra reassurance to large Islamic nations like Pakistan and Indonesia might be wise.

‘Dear Pervez …’ says the Prime Minister, as his pen glides along the top of a letter. ‘I’m never quite sure what name to use to Muslims,’ he says, looking up at his staff and down dubiously at his handiwork so far.

‘“Dear General” normally goes down well,’ says a voice from behind. Tony Blair keeps doggedly signing.

Campbell has some urgent pager messages. ‘Who was the first black footballer to play for England?’ he asks. The name of Viv Anderson is offered from the room outside.

‘John Toshack,’ says Morgan, not prepared to be left behind on a macho quiz afternoon.

‘He wasn’t black; he was Welsh,’ says Campbell with scorn.

‘There are lots of black Welsh people,’ says Morgan, moving onto the safer territory of what is politically correct.

Tony Blair has finished his signings but not the blacker bits of his banana. He is to stay in the Commons till it is time for today’s call from the den to President Bush at 3.15 p.m.

‘Don’t be late,’ says Powell as the team returns to the people-carrier. The driver takes one of the more circuitous security-approved routes back to Downing Street, giving a tourist ride around a selection of London statues that are boarded up to protect them from anti-war protesters. ‘I wonder where we’re going to put the statue of Donald Rumsfeld,’ jokes the cheery Chief of Staff.

In the evening Tony Blair is to have dinner with the German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder. To the relief of the team’s junior members, whose lives are regularly tormented by instructions to find the finest Indian restaurant, the perfect country pub, the best riverside table at which Prime Minister and foreign guest can just ‘drop in’, the meal will be in Downing Street.

Now is not the time for long, relaxing public appearances. Tony Blair does not have his country with him. The German Chancellor, with votes in mind, has declared himself against the British and American stance. But British protesters might not know that.

First the two leaders visit the Royal Academy’s exhibition of ‘Masterpieces from Dresden’, paintings by Canaletto, Dürer and Velasquez which survived both the British firebombing of 1945 and the flooding of the Elbe eight months ago. This gives Schröder a chance to make generalisations about the international message of art, the President of Saxony to praise Saxony, the sponsor to praise himself, and museum curators the opportunity to hope that the art treasures of Baghdad are equally successfully protected.

Tony and Cherie Blair stand together, holding hands, listening to the speeches and looking at Tiepolo’s Vision of St Anne. When it is his turn to speak, he says that this is the best part of his day. No one doubts him.