Former British prime minister Tony Blair overrode Cabinet colleagues who had doubts about going to war against Iraq, his former press chief revealed in diaries published on Monday.
The Blair Years by Alastair Campbell also gives behind-the-scenes insights into Blair’s relations with United States President George Bush and describes strains with France’s Jacques Chirac and Germany’s Gerhard Schroeder among others.
Bush at one point gave Campbell some light-hearted advice about how he could portray the relationship between the two men, to counter the widely held view of Blair as the US leader’s ”poodle”.
”As we left Bush joked to me, ‘I suppose you can tell the story of how Tony flew in and pulled the crazy unilateralist back from the brink.’,” Campbell says, recalling a meeting ahead of the 2003 Iraq war.
Campbell describes the tense atmosphere in London on the eve of the war, telling how Blair allies John Reid and John Prescott looked ”physically sick” when the Cabinet met on the eve of the parliamentary vote on the war.
”All of us, I think, had had pretty severe moments of doubt but he [Blair] hadn’t really, or if he had, he had hidden them even from us,” Campbell writes. ”Now there was no going back at all.”
He recorded that Reid, who was at the time Labour Party chairperson, ”said never underestimate the instincts for unity and understand that we will be judged by the Iraq that replaces Saddam’s Iraq, and by the Middle East”.
Peppered with expletives, the 794-page book may disappoint some: it contains little detail about the reportedly explosive relationship between Blair and his successor, Gordon Brown.
But on others it is more forthcoming: Germany’s Gerhard Schroeder is described telling Blair to ”fuck off” during 1999 European Union budget talks, while Campbell relates an ”extraordinarily rude” anti-US incident involving Chirac.
The French leader reportedly went to sleep during a Group of Eight summit presentation by US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers in July 2000, before waking up ”with a loud snort” and shouting ”Too long, too long”.
Blair ”said it was as impressive an exhibition of rudeness and anti-Americanism as he had ever seen”, writes Campbell.
The ex-press chief also revealed that Blair — who left office last month — thought of resigning in mid-2002, nine months before the US-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003, for domestic policy reasons.
”On July 11 2002, TB [Blair] asked a group of his advisers if we thought he should announce publicly that he would not lead Labour into the next election,” he wrote in his diary.
The idea was eventually shelved after he was warned he would be a ”lame duck” premier and as events accelerated in the run-up to the Iraq war the following year.
During that period US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld notably angered Blair by announcing that, if necessary, the US would go to war without British forces.
”It was not entirely clear whether it was deliberate … i.e. a warning shot that they could and would do it without us … or a fuck-up. We all assumed the latter,” Campbell recalls.
Blair ”went bonkers about it”, he writes.
Away from the political sphere, Campbell also voices his admiration for Princess Diana, citing an incident in 1995 when he met her when picking Blair up from a dinner.
”She’s standing there absolutely, spellbindingly, drop-dead gorgeous, in a way that the millions of photos didn’t quite get,” he writes.
”She said ‘Hello’, held out her hand and said she was really pleased to meet me, so I mumbled something back about being more pleased.”
Campbell stepped down in 2003 with political flak over the Iraq war flying, although he insisted the move was unrelated to that. He has remained close to Blair. — AFP
