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

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’ for the chance to advertise his profession on his tie.

When Tony Blair’s green Daimler passes through the Palace gates tonight, he can tell the Queen all that he knows of when her forces are likely to be in action. She is the only person in the country to whom he can talk of war in the absolute certainty that the words will not be repeated outside, half understood, garbled, given ‘off the record’ to a friendly journalist and end up back at Downing Street in Alastair Campbell’s in-tray.

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.