30 DAYS
A Month at the Heart of Blair’s War
PETER STOTHARD
For Sally
Contents
‘This is your fiftieth birthday present, Prime Minister,’ ‘ says Strategy Director Alastair Campbell as Tony Blair comes in through the Downing Street front door. ‘Peter Stothard is going to follow you everywhere you go for fifty days.’
The recipient of this gift looks as though almost anything would be better than having a writer at his side as he enters the most difficult days of his political life.
Campbell concedes with a wolfish grin, ‘Well, a month then. Thirty days.’
Tony Blair sighs. He had agreed a few weeks ago for a writer from The Times Magazine to be with him on the path to war with Iraq. These were extraordinary days. His fiftieth birthday was coming up soon. It had seemed like a good idea.
Like many good resolutions it does not seem so attractive now that it is time to put it into practice. Little is going right. He does not even know that he has thirty days left behind the black door of Number Ten.
Politicians do sometimes take the risk of inviting a journalist in ‘to see them as they really are’. This is only either when they need the publicity or when they have a high degree of control. But no Prime Minister, however confident, has ever before taken that risk.
Tony Blair decides to stick with his decision. He will have a closely observed record of his leadership in the war against Saddam Hussein. He does not know what the record will be. His ‘fly on the wall’ will be a former editor of The Times who supported his programme to become leader of the Labour Party in 1994 but did not support him in the 1997 election which brought him to power.
To have me with him for thirty days will not be like having a total stranger in the corner of the room. But neither will he have a lifelong political supporter with him, or even one who shares many of his views.
6 March 2003, the day Tony Blair invited his chronicler through the door, was no better than any other day at this time. Britain had become an angry country. Millions of voters, particularly young voters who five years before had hailed his ‘Cool Britannia’, were enraged that a Labour Prime Minister, a New Labour Prime Minister, the first Labour Prime Minister since 1979, seemed about to send bombers to the civilians of Baghdad.
Worse even than bombing Iraqis who had ‘never