Peter Stothard - 30 Days - A Month at the Heart of Blair’s War

The paper in front of him now, propped up on his desk between a banana and a picture of his three-year-old son Leo, is part of the challenge he has set himself to change minds. It lists the names and life stories of the women chosen for the television ‘war special’ tonight. If they were not ‘all against’ him, they would not be there.

‘There seems a lot of military?’ he queries.

‘Yeah, some of them lost sons in the last Gulf War; they don’t think we should have to be doing the same job again,’ says Campbell baldly. ‘And some have got husbands in Kuwait now. They’re worried that no one at home thinks the war is justified this time. They think that’s your fault.’

Campbell is a man who dominates a lot of space. He is seated on the arm of the sofa, the seat closest to the Prime Minister, in front of the tall blue leather doors which lead to the Cabinet Room. He speaks slowly, with a slight drawl, looking down at his mobile phone for news.

‘And there’s a girl from Australia who lost her boyfriend in the Bali bomb, and a woman whose husband is a human shield at one of Saddam’s power stations.’

The Prime Minister stares hard at the list, twisting it as though to find its weakest point. There is only the barest chance now that war can be avoided.

The vital need now, he says, is that everyone of good will, at home and abroad, keeps up the pressure on the Iraqi leader. He sounds humourless when he makes remarks like this. But he has a lot to be humourless about.

His International Development Secretary, Clare Short, has already left his ‘good will’ club. She has not only gone on the BBC and denounced his policy as ‘reckless, reckless, reckless’, an act which by normal rules in normal times should have put her out of her job; she even telephoned the BBC herself and asked for a platform from which to make her attack. She was not one of those Ministers tricked by a clever question from an interviewer late at night. She decided what she wanted to say, that she was prepared to be sacked for saying it, and, with only the briefest advance warning to Campbell, had said it.

The advice of the team to its boss was that he should not give her the satisfaction of martyrdom. She expresse d the worries of too many people outside. It would be too big a risk.

But the irritation inside Number Ten is about more than just another bit of ‘Old Labour vs New Labour’ feuding. Dissent on such a scale from the top of his own government is another diplomatic hindrance as well as a new political challenge to Tony Blair.

‘And how is the programme going to deal with Clare?’ he asks sharply.

‘They’re going to get her over with first,’ whispers Campbell, as though the very name were a curse. ‘But look at it this way,’ he goes on. ‘The bulletins are only going to want the stuff on her. So you can just keep the rest nice and general.’

Before facing the fray, Tony Blair faces the long mirror that fills the wall between the two windows onto his garden. It is hard to know what he sees. What his team sees is a man who is thinner-faced and darker-eyed than six months ago. What journalists see, and describe almost daily now, is a man under impossible pressure, whose skin colour testifies to sleepless nights and anxious days.

Officially, he has a cold, a virus ‘that won’t go away’. There is a make-up man outside waiting, whatever the cause of his troubles, to disguise their worst effects.

‘It’s all very well being a pacifist,’ the Prime Minister says suddenly, still with his back to his team. ‘But to be a pacifist after September 11, that’s something different. It’s all new now: terrible threat, terrorist weapons, terrorist states. That is what people here have to understand.’

For most of his political life Tony Blair has been trying to persuade believers in old ideas that they should embrace new ones. He has had great success. He has made an unelectable socialist party electable again. Clare Short has accused him not only of being ‘reckless with his own future’, but ‘reckless with his place in history’.

The Prime Minister says that he is not concerned with his own future. Some of those around him believe that. Some worry about it. But his place in history? That is plainly important to him. He is gambling his secure place in the history of British politics for a place in the history of the world.

He returns to the list. ‘How many anti-Americans?’

Campbell punches out a text-message on his phone in a manner suggesting that the answer is bloody obvious.

For the first time Jonathan Powell shows an interest. This boyish former Washing ton diplomat does not always seem as dominant as Campbell or as personally close to the Prime Minister as the blunt Political Director, Sally Morgan, currently propped against the front of the desk. But Powell is the Chief of Staff. Ten Downing Street is his domain. He does not want to talk about television programmes. He has United Nations problems, Chileans and Mexicans and a Security Council member in Africa whose leader is ill, can barely even be spoken to by telephone and may need a visit.

Tony Blair makes most diplomatic calls in this ‘den’. It is a small office full of family photographs, like the consulting room of a successful doctor.

Civil servants do not recall a Prime Minister who has sat at a desk and ‘worked the phones’ so much. He has been obsessive in trying to persuade world leaders that they should back the United Nations’ so-called ‘Second Resolution’ which authorises an automatic invasion of Iraq if Saddam Hussein does not disarm.

Whenever Tony Blair is firmly in control of a call, or is gently keeping a friendship warm, he has his feet up on the desk. If he has his head hunched forward, he is making a case that his hearer does not want to hear. In the past few days he has been more hunched than not.

A Prime Minister is overheard and watched over most of the time. Powell’s characteristic position is to be listening in from his desk outside, earpiece jammed to the side of his head, pushing against his curly black hair. He has to concentrate intently on every ‘Hi, George’ against the murmur of news from a flat-screen TV on the wall.

This is not yet time for an office sandpit and model tanks with flags. The prime and most pressing battlefield is still at the United Nations. The second battle is for public support, particularly from those groups who most hate what seems certain soon to happen. The third is for the support of Labour Members of Parliament.

In the mirror on the wall of the den the Prime Minister can see all the faces in the room. If there is a common feeling among his team apart from fatigue it is impatience. Nothing is going as planned. Tony Blair looks down at the fruit bowl, takes a green apple and chews it very slowly, as though obeying some half-remembered hints for health.

Campbell’s pager buzzes. He glances down and announces that an anti-war Conservative has just resigned over his party’s support for the government.

‘In fact he hasn’t just resigned. He decided to quit last Wednesday, but thought he’d keep back the news till a quieter day.’ Everyone laughs. The tension is relaxed. It may not be the sharpest piece of political irony, but it is a joke that the team can share.

Mocking Conservatives is where most people here began; and opportunities at the moment are scarce. If the French or the Russians frustrate the efforts at the UN, and if Clare Short’s cries inflame more Labour opposition, a victory in Parliament may be possible only with Opposition support. Tony Blair, for seven years the toast of his party, could soon be ‘toast’ – or even ‘history’, as Americans use that word.

The first words from the make-up man confirm every immediate fear. ‘I’ve just come from doing the women,’ he says, putting down his transparent plastic eyeliner case and flapping the sweat off his short-sleeved black shirt. ‘They’re very angry. They’ve been stuck in the room for ages. The camera lights are on and they’re very hot and …’ – he pauses to deliver what is, in his view, by far the worst sign of Prime Ministerial danger – ‘hardly any of them wear make-up.’