There are also reports about a plot to detonate an al-Qaeda bomb, Bali-style, in a British nightclub. ‘Mmmm,’ is the Prime Minister’s only response.
It is just before 8.15 a.m. now. Cherie Blair’s message about Jack McConnell, Labour’s First Minister in the Scottish Parliament, is passed on, but not immediately acted upon. Coffee arrives in white-and-gold Downing Street cups. ‘Service first for those who have been here longest,’ Morgan says, holding out her hand.
‘What will I be asked about Clare Short?’ the Prime Minister asks.
‘Oh, it will just be stuff about Labour divisions. How the Tories dare talk about divisions, I just don’t know,’ Morgan replies briskly.
Tony Blair thinks that what he ought to be asked is: ‘Why don’t you just go in and get rid of Saddam now?’ It would be harder for him to give that question a fully honest answer. He sees almost no chance of a second UN resolution, but, for the sake of his own party’s support if for no other reason, he has to clutch at the vanishing ideal.
A Private Secretary’s next job is to make the single tabbed briefing file which the Prime Minister will take to the House of Commons just before noon. Tony Blair has suddenly lost an important bit of paper. He apologises. ‘In all my myriad phone calls I must have misplaced it,’ he says, his voice trailing away as the Foreign Secretary comes through the door. This meeting is not so much over as ‘morphing’ into the next.
Jack Straw has become Tony Blair’s closest Cabinet ally. He is the Alastair Campbell of the politicians, more frank sometimes than the Prime Minister wants him to be, rumbustious, irreverent, a sharp-witted left-wing student leader who became a right-wing Home Secretary. As Foreign Secretary, he has just a hint of the ‘Little Englander’.
This morning he has to brief the Prime Minister on the last echoes of the Rumsfeld intervention and the latest attempt to persuade the Chileans about the vanishing resolution. He has then to be briefed by Tony Blair on what to say to calm this morning’s meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party before the midday Questions begins.
The flat gradually empties. Down below, outside the den, the chairs are being put out on the balcony in case the Prime Minister wants to sit outside in the sun. There is shelter here from the sight of the ‘Not in our Name’ protesters, if not from their cries of ‘Tony, Tony, Tony, out, out, out.’ The view from here is over St James’s Park, the one that the planners of the house intended its occupants to have. Downing Street is always one of the coldest, most windblown alleys in London, even on a brightening blue-skied day.
Walk through the door marked ‘Number Ten’, go straight ahead down the yellow-wallpapered corridor, avoid the recumbent Henry Moore statue, and you are in the red hall that leads to the Cabinet Room and the den. To the left is Sally Morgan’s political office, decorated with the work of women artists in memory of the one time that Tony Blair freed her to do a job, as Minister for Women, that was not directly in his line of sight.
Morgan is a plain-speaking, plain-dressing, no-nonsense Liverpudlian whom the Prime Minister relies on heavily both for political intelligence and the personal kind. The experiment of setting her free did not last long.
To the right is the passage to the ‘outer office’, which has desks for the private secretaries and Duty Clerks. There is the TV and the three clocks, unchanged since the Cold War, set to Washington, London and Moscow times. Here sit the key-keepers for the red boxes, the men who make the phone-working work, and Jonathan Powell, the Chief of Staff who listens out and listens in.
If you are an Ambassador, if you are seeking diplomacy more than politics, you will go right immediately from the front hall, down a more institutional corridor to rooms behind a combination lock where Tony Blair’s ‘diplomatic knights’ do their work.
In a fine half-circular Georgian room, one knight looks after Chirac and the Europeans. In another, with a huge maple-leaf window out towards Whitehall, sits the chief knight of this current battle, Sir David Manning, who has a slight figure and a fierce stare and cares for what is known here as ‘the real world’: reality includes America, North and South, the Middle East and Iraq.
Political advisers and press officers, party veterans and trusted young civil servants turn left after entering Number Ten, past the staircase to the Blair family’s flat, past the dark lower rooms of the Chancellor of the Exchequer and on to Alastair Campbell’s zone. Here, in a set of large, dark-panelled rooms, the largest hung about with drying marathon kit, steaming trainers and posters of past campaigns, the business of public opinion is done.
There is much to do.
Next month Tony Blair is fifty. How is he planning to spend the day? ‘At the Labour exchange,’ says Campbell with his best four-miles-to-the-finishing-line grimace.
The London Marathon is still a month away. Campbell has never run the twenty-six-mile distance before, and is training as hard as political distractions allow. He has never had his boss in such a bad position before, either.
On the wall is a poster of Number Ten’s last occupant, John Major, in the guise of ‘Mr Weak’, a reminder of one of Campbell’s most vaunted coups. This poster could never have been put on billboards in the 1997 campaign; it was a clear abuse of the copyright owned by the creator of the ‘Mister Men’, children’s bestsellers all over the world. But somehow the image found its way onto newspaper front pages regardless, and it has stayed on this wall ever since.
Tony Blair has not yet reached ‘Mr Weak’ status among his colleagues. But he is beginning to look as grey as John Major did.
The television on the newspaper-strewn table shows a few MPs, some of the more glamorous New Labour kind, cooing with admiration that Tony Blair ‘has put his leadership on the line’. Campbell sighs.
The TV reporter has also found other MPs who want to use the Prime Minister’s support for George Bush to make him greyer and weaker. ‘Leadership isn’t just Tony Blair, it’s us as well,’ says one Old Labour member. Campbell grunts and changes to a sports channel with theatrical contempt.
One group of MPs is rumoured to be planning a bid for a new leader, arguing that a Labour Prime Minister should not be ‘a threat to the institutions of world order’. Is that a real danger, or just a bombastic stunt? Campbell tries to assess the problem and the difference.
The Prime Minister has finished his briefings and has come downstairs. He walks all these corridors restlessly, back and forth along the three ground-floor axes of his home.
It is just after 9 a.m. A large white ‘Délice de France’ food van is parked opposite Horse Guards Parade. A man in a bowler hat, with furled umbrella, yellow carnation and a copy of The Times, swings his arms like a Guardsman as he walks towards the Foreign Office. This archetypal man of Whitehall stops at the sight of the words ‘Délice de France’ and gives them a hard stare, as though to a disobedient dog – or even to ‘a cheap strutting tart’, as another newspaper, not one he is likely to read, describes the President of France this morning. After a moment’s pause, he moves on up past the Cabinet War Rooms of World War II and into Whitehall.
At the same time Tony Blair stops in the Cabinet Room. He looks onto the balcony as though he would much rather be outside than in, and begins the day’s work.
By the front door, a schoolmasterly man in a salt-and-pepper tweed suit and breakfast-stained tie is wondering whether it is safe to go up to the flat. The regular Wednesday routine for the Prime Minister’s team may be Question Time. For this man it is the day for winding the Downing Street clocks.
There is a grandfather in the Entrance Hall which the messengers tell visitors, ‘quite wrongly’, was stripped of its chiming parts by Churchill, who couldn’t stand the noise. There is a ‘nice piece’ in the waiting room. It has an unusually loud tick. But the best one is the ‘Vulliamy’ in the flat, which he likes to wind when the family is out. He also has a good clockwork connoisseur’s interest in the working s of Leo’s train.
‘Set