Morning headlines … Tony Blair faces first reports of challenge to his leadership … Washington wants UN vote ‘this week’… thousands protest in Pakistan and Indonesia …
Behind the door with the combination lock that leads to the Blairs’ Downing Street flat, the ‘Questions’ team is slowly assembling. It is 7.45 a.m. Sally Morgan is already upstairs with her boss in the cramped sitting room.
Jonathan Powell comes into the dark hallway, which has certificates of legal qualifications on the walls and Leo Blair’s train set on the floor. The Chief of Staff likes to take precise diplomatic strides around his building, but this is not easy when track and carriages extend across the carpet as though some junior Vanderbilt were plotting his expansion to the American West. Campbell’s loping journalist’s gait is more suited to this terrain.
These are the three closest political advisers to the Prime Minister. There is always a low-level tension between them. Each has a different bit of the battle that demands priority.
Morgan, a Labour activist since her Liverpool schooldays twenty years ago, is now a Blair baroness. She sees the war through party eyes.
Powell, the organiser, learnt his politics watching Bill Clinton win elections. He sees through foreign eyes.
Campbell, former journalist and focused survivor of alcoholism and mental breakdown, is the man Tony Blair depends on the most. He does many things, but he has the eyes of the media.
Others enter the hallway a few minutes later. There is no sign of Leo himself, but his mother, harassed and in a housecoat, calls down at random to the passing crowd, ‘Tell Tony to call Jack McConnell by 8.15.’ No one looks up. It seems an intrusion to be here at this time of the morning.
Cherie Blair says she doesn’t mind living in someone else’s office. Or that, at least, is what she normally says.
Back in 1983, when both wife and husband were struggling to find seats in Parliament, she might easily have won and he might easily have lost. She rarely shows signs of resenting that outcome, although others, on her behalf, often stress that hers is the more powerful brain and the steelier determination.
Both were then Christian socialists of independent mind. But Tony Blair had the more winning way with people and the better luck. Just before the 1983 election he found a refuge in the safe northern constituency of Sedgefield. From that point onwards, he could be a Labour Member of Parliament as long as he wished. His wife had to fight the difficult southern Conservative seat of Thanet North.
It is said that three Tonies gave Cherie Booth comfort when she fought her only election campaign in her own right twenty years ago. The first was her father, the then famous television actor Tony Booth. The second was the even more famous left-wing Labour MP Tony Benn, the man whose influence at that time ensured that a Labour Prime Minister could never take power. The third, both in fame and in effort then, was her husband, who is now in the Downing Street sitting room.
Cherie Booth was heavily beaten in Thanet. Since then she has been a lawyer and mother, and a political wife who has never taken easily to the role of politician’s wife. She resists strongly having to be on show all the time. She had little interest in how she looked until her husband’s success made an interest essential. She has endured rather than enjoyed the demands that no sleeve, collar or cuff be out of place.
She makes no secret of being an evening person, not a morning one. Her first public appearance on the morning after the 1997 election victory was tousle-haired in a dressing-gown going out to collect a delivery of flowers at her Islington front doorstep. It was a bad welcome to the life of a Number Ten wife – though far from its worst moment.
This early-morning procession past her bedroom door has, however, become a custom on ‘Questions to the Prime Minister’ Wednesdays. She says she is simply used to it now. Today there are even more strangers than usual slinking by her, as quietly as they can, so that her husband can take his first briefing of the day before he goes down to his office.
The wife of Sir Anthony Eden, a former occupant of this house whose tenure was curtailed by a Middle East war, used to complain that she had the Suez Canal running through her drawing room. As she shouts her ‘Don’t forget’ message down to anyone who will hear, Cherie Blair could be forgiven for seeing her own room as running fast too – with Washington’s Potomac River, Iraq’s Tigris and Euphrates, all sweeping along more than a dozen of her husband’s staff.
Tony Blair sits stiffly on the end of the sofa nearest to the fireplace. He sips tea from a red mug with a lizard running down its side. He almost always drinks from a mug, even in meetings where others have china cups. It is a sign that he is at home and everyone else is not.
He has not had the easiest of nights. After returning from his ritual with the Queen he found that American Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had written Britain out of America’s war plans. If the British government could not sort out its political problems, Rumsfeld had said, then too bad: Washington would go it alone.
Tony Blair did not see that as an opportunity, however much many of his supporters would like him to have done. He has strategic fears of the isolation of the United States if it ‘goes it alone’. But he had personal objections too. To be stabbed by Britain’s traditional French rival is one thing. To be kicked by his transatlantic ally, to be told that all his efforts to win a Second Resolution at the UN and a parliamentary majority at home is a waste of time: that is something else. It had taken two late calls to President Bush to establish that Secretary Rumsfeld was ‘only trying to help’.
The Questions team has to wrestle, as it often does, with what the Prime Minister would like to say and what it is suitable for him to say. What he might like to tell the House of Commons is that the US President’s Cabinet members are appointed, not elected, are not always skilled at calming American voters, still less British ones, and that Britain’s place at America’s side is solid and secure. But he has to be cautious, making it clear that his policy is unchanged, that the UN route is still being taken and that Parliament will be fully consulted if the time for war comes.
For meetings like this the Prime Minister calls in specialists in anticipating what both Opposition and backbench Labour MPs will ask. Only some of the questions are known in advance. These are on the list in the hands of David Hanson, a Welsh MP who is Tony Blair’s Parliamentary Private Secretary, his official ‘spy’ in his own ranks. Hanson has the look of a young preacher and a shirt stained with leaks from ‘bloody useless Downing Street pens’.
The Prime Minister says little himself. On Iraq he does not need briefing. He wants to know how his Conservative opponent is likely to act. Will he ask only half his permitted questions on Iraq, where he has the temporary disadvantage of agreeing with the government? Or will he make every question about Iraq? What other issues are out there?
There follows a brief discussion of plans to curb anti-social behaviour in Britain. The press, he is told, is concentrating on proposed penalties against homeless beggars, which not everyone approves of, rather than schemes to punish graffiti-writers and car-burners, which are more universally popular. Tony Blair tries hard to seem interested.
At other times this would be the kind of political fine-tuning at which this team excels, sometimes excels too much. Today the ‘spinners’ take their cue from their leader. He takes another sip of tea from his mug and asks what is in the morning newspapers.
There is the report out tomorrow of the inquiry into sodomy and freebies below stairs at St James’s Palace. The