The Prime Minister leans back in his swivel chair. His friend from Warsaw, like his friend in Washington, is worried first about the House of Commons vote.
‘Yes, it will be tough for me,’ he says. ‘I will take the case to Parliament and, hopefully, win it.’
Is the Second Resolution losing its life?
‘It may be, Leszek, but we can’t tell at the moment. There are good reasons why the diplomacy has to continue, not just diplomatic reasons but presentation reasons too. If it wasn’t for the French, we would have the swing-countries behind us.’
What is the support?
‘Militarily, there are the Americans and ourselves and the Australians. And there are your special forces out there. Politically, we have Spain and Bulgaria.’
Miller, Polish Prime Minister for the past eighteen months, former Communist and fierce advocate of his country’s accession to the European Union, is alarmed at threats from Chirac against the ‘new Europeans’ for not backing the foreign policy of Paris and Berlin.
‘He must not do that,’ says Blair, leaning forward onto his desk and raising his voice. ‘He has been very clearly warned by us and the Americans that he can’t do that. He has to be told that in no uncertain terms. You have to mention all this to George, Leszek, when you speak to him.’
There is a long speech from Warsaw which Tony Blair punctuates with ‘Mmm’ and ‘Well’ and ‘Yeah’ while pulling at the side of his face. He still looks pale today. He is spending hours without much chance of a joke or any other distraction.
‘Yes, Leszek. Europe must not be an anti-American alliance. I had dinner with Chancellor Schröder last night, and he does not want to be part of an anti-American alliance. When this is all over we will have to get back together. But if Europe wants to be a rival, count us out. If it wants to be a partner, count us in.’
Telephone diplomacy gives no opportunity for Tony Blair’s warmth or charm. In a crowded room he has accomplished skills in making the person he is talking to feel like the only person. At the end of a telephone line there is usually only one person – plus a few listeners-in, whom it takes a while to learn to ignore.
Tony Blair is now grasping his desk tightly with one hand and the telephone just as tightly with the other. ‘What the French have to realise is that they cannot impose their view of Europe on anyone – basically. That is not just my view but George Bush’s view, Aznar’s view, Berlusconi’s view.’
When the conversation is over, the Prime Minister takes a walk out into the hall and stands, shaking out his limbs, between Sally Morgan’s office door and a dark oil painting of Pitt the Younger, the Prime Minister who steered Britain during the French Revolution. Morgan is away from her desk.
He looks into the empty interior as if the answer to the latest state of the vote-count will emerge from her filing cabinets nonetheless. He comes back out, disappointed, and looks around him.
‘What amazes me is how many people are happy for Saddam to stay. They ask why we don’t get rid of Mugabe, why not the Burmese lot. Yes, let’s get rid of them all. I don’t because I can’t, but when you can, you should.’
Morning headlines … it is inappropriate for Her Majesty the Queen to be out of the country … London and Washington attack Chirac veto threat … Israeli and Jordanian airspace available for war on Iraq …
People who are never seen running are running now. Aides whose memories of political nightmares go back to the darkest years of far-left Labour leadership are running. Young assistants for whom this is the first drama of Downing Street survival are running.
Everyone is running hard after something. Sally Morgan is running. Campbell himself is running – and not like a man training for the marathon, more like a mugger escaping down a street of wrecked cars.
This morning in the Daily Telegraph he has spoken of the alcoholism and breakdown which marred his first career in journalism. He was doing newspaper jobs which hardly seem very demanding to him now, but which then he could not do. He cracked – and only gradually came back.
He still remembers the place where he was driving on 12 May 1994 when he heard the news that the Labour leader, John Smith, was dead. He says he knew then, on that junction of spirals where Paddington Station meets the peace of the Little Venice canal and the roar of the road to Oxford, that Tony Blair would be leader. He also knew that he would work for Tony Blair.
Nine years later, he is the man to whom Tony Blair still speaks the most. It is when the two are alone together that the Prime Minister’s face is most the face of a friend at a party, an actor offstage, a person who is not Prime Minister. Campbell has a well-founded reputation for low stratagems on his master’s behalf, but he is the one who dares speak most fiercely and directly to Tony Blair. He speaks directly too about himself, more than he has before; more about his mental and physical preparation for the marathon, more about his past mental and physical collapse.
Campbell’s own confidant in Downing Street is also running now. Pat MacFadden is a thin-faced, vulpine political strategist who looks like an ‘enforcer’s enforcer’, the sort of assistant who might clean out the nastier places where Glasgow Celtic football fans meet Glasgow City Councillors. In the striped Regency corridors of Number Ten he is recognised as one of the most thoughtful men in the building.
When he and Campbell sit together it is like watching two copper wires before the electricity crackles across the air. No reputation is safe from being scorched. But now they are running together, Campbell first, MacFadden behind, like a couple of greyhounds.
There are suddenly shouts from the green-shirted builders in the basement. The ‘Sainsbury’s To You’ van has arrived and is strewing the hall with Coca-Cola and frozen meals. There is a faint sense of an emergency ward where the patient is puffing his way out.
Only Gordon Brown and John Prescott are still the stately galleons of the corridors. Whatever is happening does not seem to be any business of theirs.
The patient is fine. But Tony Blair’s travel plans, it seems, are being made, unmade and made again – even as his groceries arrive. There was a possibility that George Bush might come to Downing Street for a pre-war summit. But there were snags. Security was a problem. Protesters were a huge problem. Politics was an even bigger problem; nothing would make Labour MPs more likely to oppose Tony Blair than the presence of his friend from America.
Barbados was a possibility too. But the summit is to be in the Azores, the Portuguese islands in the middle of the Atlantic. As long as war is not formally declared from their soil, the Portuguese are apparently happy to be host.
The Spanish Prime Minister, José Maria Aznar, who has become one of the most frequent and trusted telephone-callers to the den, will be there too. Tony Blair says the name ‘José Maria’ with almost the same affection as he says ‘Sally’ or ‘Alastair’. Some of his friends find this attraction to a man of the European right as hard to endure as the closeness to George Bush. The two men have grown used to swapping stories of how weak their domestic support is. Aznar’s was once at 4 per cent. ‘Crikey, that’s even less than the number who think Elvis Presley is still alive,’ Tony Blair told his friend. ‘Crikey’ is a typical Blair expletive, a bit dated, a bit comic, designed to avoid trouble.
The Azores announcement brings the added bonus of angering the French. Jacques Chirac loves summits and is known to place Spaniards and Portuguese among the lower zones of European life, at least until the ‘old EU’ is augmented by Baltics