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

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 Number Ten Press Office is about to be briefed on its contents, but despite the fascination of the subject for all who are interested in the Prince of Wales, there is not expected to be much in it to occupy the political editors, the ‘clients’ of Downing Street.

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.