There are awkward answers. He is restless. He is realistic about how long political success ever lasts. He wants to get things done and get out. He does not want to look back later on missed chances to make his view of the world count. He is less patient than he was. A young fifty-year-old in a hurry? Rash? Reckless?
There are also the Christian beliefs that he shares not only with his family but with George Bush. These beliefs are powerfully held, sometimes publicly expressed, and appear to be an ever more important part of his life. They include a moral revulsion at how Saddam Hussein treats his own people. Religion in a British political leader makes everyone nervous. The team prefers not to talk about it.
Supporters and friends who remember the more diffident Tony Blair see a different Tony Blair today. Some love the ‘Mark 2’ version. Some hate it. Some have not yet noticed just how different it is.
Tony Blair won influence over George Bush with a gamble. He promised that British forces would be ready to fight alongside Americans against Saddam Hussein. He asked in return that the United States seek the maximum United Nations authority. It is not clear how precise the bargain was. But the gamble was made. Today it seems to be failing.
Limited United Nations support has been won. There has not been full support. The man who is accustomed to be a winner stands about to lose. He will be asked to make good on his pledge of troops without the UN backing he thought he could secure. He knows that George Bush will not wait long enough for the diplomats and persuaders to do everything that they want to do. This part of the battle is coming to an end.
He himself has recognised that reality but not yet fully faced it. He has not stopped being a persuader on TV and a diplomat on the telephone. He sees those arts as virtues in themselves. He may look like a long-distance runner, winding down in slow laps when the race is long over. He may seem like a once-famous actor, still working on a seaside pier. He will still keep arguing. He does not mind the rejection as much as he did. The ‘masochism strategy’ was well named.
Soon, however, he has to tear his mind away from unpersuadable voters and foreign leaders who have failed to live up to his hopes. He must move single-mindedly on to his own Members of Parliament. If he cannot persuade a majority of his own party, his promise of British troops will fall. He will be a young fifty-year-old looking for a new career earlier than he intended.
Back at the door to Number Ten, Campbell shrugs the TV mess away. The rest of the team returns to answer ‘slow handclap’ questions from the press and ‘no UN support, no support from me’ threats from Westminster. Tony Blair walks back to his den.
By the time he is ‘on the phones’ again, battering the ears of diplomats for signs of hope, the final bad news is filtering in from Paris. President Chirac, it is said, will commit himself on TV tonight to vetoing any Second Resolution that permits an automatic attack on Iraq. The UN game is as good as over.
The Prime Minister does not like to be angry, still less to show anger. But he is angry now. ‘This is such a foolish thing to do at this moment in the world’s history. The very people who should be strengthening the international institutions are undermining them and playing around.’
Why should Chileans or Africans take the risk of voting for war at the United Nations if France is going to ensure that their vote is never counted? This is ‘irresponsible’. He goes upstairs to the flat to see Leo.
Having a young son in Number Ten is a help, he says. ‘It keeps everything in proportion.’ At the moment this seems a very heavy burden for a three-year-old to bear.
Other bits of Downing Street life do not stop. This evening the Blairs are hosts to ‘special needs’ teachers. By 6 p.m. the state dining rooms are thronged with educators of the word-blind, the half-deaf and the behaviourally challenged. It is the first reception for them ever held here.
The Prime Minister barely mentions Iraq. ‘Domestic delivery’ must survive foreign demands, he insisted in an NHS reform meeting at breakfast today. He is drumming out the same message now. He denies fiercely that he has embraced the moral complexities of ‘abroad’ because he is bored now by the ‘bog-standard’ battles for better health and education at home.
‘Special needs’ turns out to be a field that is hardly less full of mines and feuding than the borders of Kuwait. Some party-goers want children with ‘learning difficulties’ to be educated separately; some want them to be taught in the same schools as other children; all want more government money; most think that government money would be better spent on their own project than on the project of the woman with the cheese straw across the room.
With his mind split between the fleshy bulk of the French President, broadcasting his veto now somewhere in Paris, and the tiny fragile interpreter for the deaf, to whom he offers the stool from which he has already begun to speak, Tony Blair gives an address which, as a man at the front says to his neighbour, has something for everyone without really giving anyone anything.
This man is a Labour supporter and a connoisseur of the Prime Minister’s style. ‘I don’t know how he does it. If I were him, I’d be on Lomotol by now.’
Lomotol? Is that some new chemical cosh for the classroom?
‘No, it’s the stuff you take for diarrhoea. I’d be shitting myself right now if I were him. God knows how he sleeps at night.’
Morning headlines … Chirac pledges to veto UN war resolution ‘whatever the circumstances’ … Russia ready to back French … UN begins withdrawal from demilitarised zone between Kuwait and Iraq …
Tonight Tony Blair goes to Buckingham Palace to see the Queen. He has to cancel Her Majesty’s trip to Belgium next week. Or rather, to put it in the form preferred by protocol, Her Majesty has to postpone her visit to Belgium. This is considered ‘sad for poor Louis Michel’, President Chirac’s sanctimonious supporter in the Belgian Foreign Ministry, but this is a sadness that the Blair team enjoys.
The Queen has had a good day up until now. She has held her first investiture for new Knights Bachelor, new Companions of the Bath and other Most Excellent Orders since twisting her knee earlier this year. While Blair’s advisers worry that their domestic agenda is swamped by Iraq, the Queen’s equerries are quite pleased that Saddam will take attention away from the imminent report into rape, corruption and general management chaos in the household of the Prince of Wales.
Behind the red ropes of the receiving lines, there are only a few signs of war. The head of armed forces’ dentistry is here. He tells fellow recipients that while the Prime Minister works ‘flat out’ for the Second Resolution, his own units are working flat out to fill soldiers’ teeth before battle begins. Apparently, the urge for a pre-fight check-up is contagious when troops are hanging around with nothing much to do.
The Admiral in charge of naval supply is to be promoted in the Order of the Bath. He has a mildly distracted look.
Her Majesty’s Ambassador to Mexico is here to receive the Most Distinguished Order of St Michael and St George. Mexico is a member of the United Nations Security Council. But the Ambassador, it seems, can be spared for a trip to the Palace.
So, for a few hours, can Britain’s senior RAF man, the Deputy Chief of the Defence Staff Sir Anthony Bagnall, who is to be made a Knight Grand Cross in the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. He is the first to receive his new sash and gong, and then waits while the Queen rewards more than a hundred other assorted policemen, hospital workers, a newspaperman, a pageant-master and a North Yorkshire folk dancer. The war cannot be quite here yet. Only a violin-maker eschews the approved grey ‘morning dress’