The End of the Party

by Andrew Rawnsley

  Under the cool consideration of a longer perspective, the separation of the powers of the Lord Chancellorship was right. It was also a good reform to transform the Law Lords into a new supreme court, which finally opened in their new quarters the other side of Parliament Square in the autumn of 2009. There was further merit in creating a commission to make senior judicial appointments. These were long overdue and desirable modernisations of one of the most antiquated elements of the British constitution. But few gave the Government any credit for that at the time. The merits of the changes were drowned out by the chaos which surrounded their announcement and the accusations of cronyism that accompanied the replacement of Blair’s old pupil master by his old flatmate.

  Headlines threw buckets of scorn at his management skills and asked whether the Prime Minister was losing his grip. Gordon Brown looked ever more predatory.

  Tony Blair did have a consolation. It came from across the Atlantic. On 25 June, the House of Representatives voted to award him the most prestigious civilian honour that America can bestow, the Congressional Gold Medal, ‘in recognition of his outstanding and enduring contributions to maintaining the security of all freedom-loving nations’ and his ‘steadfast stand against evil’.90 In America, at least, they still loved him.

  12. A Body in the Woods

  In Basra Palace, one of Saddam Hussein’s old pleasure domes, the Prime Minister addressed British troops. ‘When people look back on this time, I honestly believe they will see this as one of the finest moments of our century. And you did it,’ he declared on his first visit to Iraq since the invasion.1

  He chatted with the soldiers on the palace verandah and enjoyed autographing their khaki kit during a six-hour tour designed to present both them and himself as war heroes. His image handlers were especially pleased by a visit to a primary school rebuilt by British troops. The cameras were there to capture the moment when a young Shia boy kissed Blair on the cheek.

  Many of the media representatives travelling with him were not being so co-operative in this project to boost the Prime Minister. In the heart of the palace, under the gaze of a tacky fresco of a maiden, reporters mobbed Alastair Campbell.2 They wanted to question the scowling Director of Communications about a major accusation against the Government which had just been levelled on the BBC.

  At seven minutes past six in London that morning, Andrew Gilligan, the defence correspondent of the Today programme, laid the gravest allegation yet about the way in which Blair sold the war. ‘What we’ve been told by one of the senior officials in charge of drawing up that dossier was that, actually the Government probably, erm, knew that the 45-minute figure was wrong, even before it decided to put it in,’ said Gilligan. Extraordinarily, his editor allowed him to make this dynamite charge not from a vetted script in the studio. The reporter spoke down an ISDN line from his home in Greenwich in an unscripted conversation with the presenter, John Humphrys. Gilligan, a nocturnal type, had been up all night and his lack of sleep was evident from his thick voice as he went on: ‘Downing Street, our source says, ordered a week before publication, ordered it to be sexed up.’3

  Only a very small audience was listening to Gilligan’s first, stuttering broadcast, but many more would hear his central claim as he repeated it in eighteen further broadcasts that day. It was given additional amplification in many other reports on the BBC’s huge range of output and by the rest of the media.

  The allegation that intelligence was twisted to sell the war applied an electric shock to Number 10’s most sensitive nerve. The day before, they’d been horrified when the ineffable Donald Rumsfeld casually declared that WMD were probably not going to be found and Saddam might never have had any on the eve of the invasion. The growing and grisly chaos in Iraq intensified the potency of the accusation that Blair duped his nation into war. Robin Cook and other opponents of the war rampaged on the airwaves. MPs from all parties pressed for an inquiry. Alastair Campbell was responding in his habitual way, which was to become ever more belligerent towards the media. A sense of siege and an atmosphere of panic combined with self-righteousness inside Number 10. This was a cloud of combustible gases waiting to be ignited. Gilligan struck the spark. Blair reacted angrily as he always did when his integrity was impeached. ‘It wounded his sense of himself,’ remarks one of his staff.4 As was also typical of Blair, he kept his temper within modulated parameters. The next day, speaking at a news conference in Poland, he dismissed the allegations as ‘completely absurd’ and put it down to ‘people who have opposed this action throughout … now trying to find a fresh reason for saying why it wasn’t the right thing to do’.5 The story continued to chase Blair around Europe when he arrived at the Evian Summit later in the week. ‘It just wasn’t going away.’6 Again insisting that the dossier was approved by the intelligence services, Blair evinced no sign of wanting to escalate this into a battle to the death with the BBC.

  It was Alastair Campbell who decided to do that. In Gilligan’s original broadcast, the reporter did not accuse anyone at Number 10 by name. It was in an article for that weekend’s Mail on Sunday that he pointed the finger. The paper gave the piece a giant headline and published it with an unflattering picture of Campbell looking sinisterly thuggish.7 It was this, according to Blair’s later testimony to the Hutton Inquiry, that fanned a routine blaze between Number 10 and the media into an all-consuming firestorm. On Blair’s account, a ‘small item’ became a vast controversy because that article ‘really put booster rockets on it’.8 This was one of the most extraordinary aspects of the affair. Number 10 responded with categorical denials but relative calm when the Prime Minister’s integrity was challenged by the charge that Blair knowingly inserted false intelligence into the dossier. It was only when Campbell became the issue that it exploded into what Blair would describe as ‘a raging storm’.9

  In the six years since they moved into Number 10, Campbell had become one of the most powerful non-elected officials ever to operate from that building. The Prime Minister did not just lean on his ability to craft a phrase and project a headline. Campbell’s loyalty, drive and commitment were also greatly prized by his friend. Jonathan Powell sometimes called him ‘Tony’s extra battery’.10 There was only one person in Government that Campbell acknowledged as his senior and witnesses to his relationship with Tony Blair occasionally found it difficult to remember who was supposed to be the master and who the servant. He was more famous than most of the Cabinet and so influential that even the eclipsed ministers accepted this as the natural order of New Labour. In Opposition and in the first term, Campbell was both an asset and a liability. In the negative column, his fixation with the daily firefight with the media amplified Blair’s own weakness for chasing short-term headlines at the expense of pursuing long-term goals. Campbell had little direct influence on legislation. He fiercely disagreed with Blair’s approach to education, but his opposition made no difference. The effect he had was on the overall shape of the Governnment’s style and priorities. His huge emphasis on presentation subordinated and crowded out those in Number 10 more concerned with policy. He was an obsessive, a tendency which got worse as time went on, in his battles with the media. The truth was too often a casualty of those venomous struggles. Routinely portrayed in the press as a mendacious bully, for many critics he was emblematic of a lot of what had gone wrong with the Government.

  In the positive column, Campbell greatly helped the first-term Blair, an inexperienced and often insecure Prime Minister, to project himself as a commanding leader. It was to Campbell that Blair turned when he needed to fashion an instant and appropriate response to the death of Diana in the first summer of his premiership. When NATO was losing the propaganda war over Kosovo, Campbell deployed to Brussels and turned it around.11 Campbell was there for the highs and the lows of the tortuous negotiations over Northern Ireland. He was a robust champion of Blair in the gruelling struggles with Brown. He had modernised the hapless communications operation at Number 10 inherited from John Major an
d turned it into an outfit much better equipped to handle a 24/7 media and the most challenging press in the world.

  By the second term, the positives were much more outweighed by the negatives. Campbell had become unstable. His mood swings and negativity were infecting the whole of Number 10. ‘Alastair was on the edge,’ thought Sally Morgan. ‘He was depressed and irrational.’12 He had always been candid, not least with Blair, about his mental illness. In its darkest furlong, he ended up in hospital after a drink-fuelled psychotic breakdown. The diaries written by Campbell during his time in Downing Street often make him sound like a man on the cusp of another episode. Night after night, he would write up his highs, increasingly rare, and his lows, increasingly frequent. After nine years in one of the most stressed and visible jobs in politics, he was burnt out. When Blair asked if he was clinically depressed, Campbell replied yes.13 He had turned into a hater not just of the media, but of almost everything. When Peter Mandelson asked him whether he liked anyone, Campbell replied that the only people he really liked were his partner and their children.

  To his diaries, he repeatedly groaned about ‘swimming through shit’ and waking up every morning feeling depressed or even suicidal.14 He would come home from waging his ferocious battles with the media to fierce rows with Fiona about his refusal to listen to her and quit. Yet the power was a drug that he could not kick.

  His pathological animosity towards nearly all of the press and most of the broadcasters was a rising concern to Blair. To his friend Barry Cox, Blair would sigh: ‘The trouble with Alastair is that he hates the media.’15 Yet Blair was reluctant to let him go. Whenever Campbell talked about quitting, Blair pressed him to stay. According to Campbell: ‘I had been trying to get out for a while, but Tony was adamant that I couldn’t leave until we were through this.’16 Says a close observer of the relationship: ‘Tony knew he was out of control, but there was a real bond between them and Tony was scared of what life would be like without Alastair.’17 Sally Morgan believed ‘Alastair was desperate to get out at this point, but Tony never liked losing people.’18 Campbell’s character was rarely distinguished by moderation in anything. If he were religious, Blair joked, Campbell would have ended up as an Islamic fundamentalist.19 When he drank, he drank himself into a breakdown. When he stopped drinking, he became a teetotal fitness fanatic. When he took up running, he decided to run the London Marathon and fulfilled his goal of doing it in less than four hours. When he did battle with the BBC, he turned it into a total conflagration between the Government and the nation’s biggest broadcaster, the like of which had not been seen for decades.

  He was fuelled by genuine indignation, an unrestrained hatred for the media, a particular detestation for Gilligan, and a desperation about his own life. ‘It was grim for me and also for TB with huge stuff about trust,’ he told his diary. ‘It was definitely time to get out.’20 He was right about that. But his pride fired a craving to score a definitive victory over the media in the hope that this would provide the means to depart on a high. ‘He was already looking for an exit. Alastair wanted a scalp,’ says one of his closest colleagues at this time.21

  For months, Campbell had been bombarding the BBC with complaints about its reporting of the war and the aftermath. ‘He did it sometimes to intimidate,’ confirms another member of the communications team. ‘That created a mindset at the BBC to ignore anything Alastair said and to aggressively push back.’22

  BBC executives, wearily accustomed to these barrages from Downing Street, had a dismissive attitude towards the latest fusillade of furious letters about the Gilligan broadcast. ‘It’s all drivel,’ scoffed the editor of Today, Kevin Marsh, to a BBC colleague. ‘The man is flapping in the wind.’23

  Downing Street also came to suspect that elements of the intelligence services fed information to the BBC, which encouraged it to stand firm. John Humphrys, introducing Gilligan on the fateful morning, referred on air to the September dossier being ‘cobbled together at the last minute’.24 In Number 10, it was believed that MI6 was endeavouring to dump all the blame for the dossier on them. Sally Morgan asked the others scornfully: ‘Since when did the intelligence services ever support a Labour government?’25 Humphrys had been briefed at a private lunch by Sir Richard Dearlove, the head of MI6. Whether he intended to or not, Dearlove seems to have left the presenter with the impression that the threat had been exaggerated.26 A witness statement prepared by Marsh and BBC lawyers for the Hutton Inquiry said that a ‘senior intelligence source’ had suggested that ‘hard evidence of WMD in Iraq would never be found.’27

  That explained an outburst by John Reid that ‘rogue elements’28 in the intelligence services were stirring things up. This, in turn, further aggravated the spooks. The senior management of the BBC, misjudging the seriousness of what was developing, failed to anticipate where it would lead and did not inquire rigorously into the defensibility of Gilligan’s allegations. The reporter was more correct than not in the thrust of the nineteen broadcasts he made on 29 May and that was more than could be said of the dossier that he was criticising. But, as the reporter and his editor would later concede, his reporting was flawed.29 He was already watering down the allegation about forty-five minutes on the day that he broke the story, calling it ‘questionable’ rather than knowingly false in later broadcasts.

  That allegation was the one Campbell seized on. ‘I felt I was being royally set up for a fall,’ he told his diary. ‘The Sundays arrived, ghastly, full of absolute shit about me.’30 That fear made him even more obsessed with discrediting the BBC, not least because he wanted a favourable verdict from an inquiry into the use of intelligence which was now being conducted by the select committee on Foreign Affairs.

  Campbell insisted, despite the misgivings of Blair, that he would appear before the MPs. ‘Tony was so exhausted that he wasn’t managing it properly so Alastair was allowed to charge around in this manic way,’ says Sally Morgan.31 As he marched in to testify in a modern committee room in Portcullis House, Campbell was self-aware enough to realise that he was on a hair trigger. As he sat before the MPs, he had hidden in his hand a paperclip. He had bent it so that he could stick a sharp point into his palm if he feared he was about to go over the edge. After a calm start, he built up to a tirade against the repeated ‘lie’ of the BBC. ‘I will keep banging on, that correspondence file will get thicker and they better issue an apology pretty quick.’32 Blood squirted out of his palm, splattering the papers in front of him. Colleagues at Number 10 looked on with apprehension. He was breaking the first rule of spin doctoring: don’t make yourself the story.

  Two days later, he took his son, keen like him on sport, to watch the tennis at Wimbledon. In the middle of the match, Campbell’s mobile rang. It was one of his staff reporting that Richard Sambrook, the BBC’s Head of News and the executive handling his complaints, had just responded to Campbell’s latest letter with another rejection accompanied by the accusation that he was pursuing ‘a personal vendetta’. He left Wimbledon early, red mist rising as he listened on his car radio to the BBC’s treatment of the story on the six o’clock news. He made an impulsive decision to go to the ITV building in Gray’s Inn Road from where the Channel 4 News would be broadcast at 7 p.m. ‘It’s a real mistake,’ Jonathan Powell warned Campbell. ‘Don’t do it.’33 He did it anyway. Jon Snow, the programme’s presenter, got a surprise guest. Four minutes into the show, his producer spoke down Snow’s earpiece: ‘Alastair Campbell has entered the building.’34 This was a stunner even to a veteran presenter like Snow. ‘What you have to remember is that, in those days, interviews with Alastair Campbell were very rare.’35

  Moments later, Campbell was in the studio, giving an unprecedented live interview, jabbing his finger in fury, thumping the desk, railing that the BBC had to ‘just accept for once they have got it wrong’.36

  Snow was taken aback by the vehemence of the performance: ‘I thought to myself: this man is not long for this world.’37

  Fiona Millar rang Sa
lly Morgan in horror. ‘I’ve just turned on Channel 4 News and he’s on there shouting.’38

  His partner was ‘livid’.39 Even his own staff, who tended to be highly loyal, watched aghast as he displayed an indiscipline that he would never tolerate in anyone else. ‘I was horrified. Alastair was out of control,’ says another member of the communications team.40

  Blair agreed. Campbell’s manic campaign was fuelling the furore over the elusive WMD and the dossier. An endless war with the BBC would simply make the Government more enemies when it had quite enough of them already. ‘Alastair was really angry with the BBC, but Tony had a more considered view,’ says Barry Cox, who made his own living as a television executive. ‘Tony knew, whatever the problem, you couldn’t behave like Campbell was behaving at that point.’41

  In the middle of ‘the raging storm’, the Prime Minister even had BBC executives around to Number 10 for a lunch which was entirely convivial. In Blair’s view, it was ‘not really very sensible for the Government’ to be in a ‘continuing dispute with the BBC … the main broadcasting outlet’.42

  More than once, Blair told Campbell to ‘leave it’, but to no avail. His most powerful aide had lost control of himself and the Prime Minister had lost control of his most powerful aide. ‘That was the almost inevitable consequence of the space that Tony had given him,’ says Cox.43