The Burden of Power: Countdown to Iraq - The Alastair Campbell Diaries Read Free Page B

we had to do something about it, he continued to feel that with all the other priorities the government faced, the public simply would not understand if we launched an overhaul of press standards and regulation as another plank of reform. It was a fair point. But there was always going to come a time when the media reformed and hopefully phone-hacking has brought us to that moment. We will see.
    Beyond growing disenchantment with the political media, certain other domestic themes recur in this volume: TB’s frustrations at the pace of delivery; something of a culture clash with parts of the Civil Service; continuing difficulties with matters Royal; another media frenzy erupting from false charges that TB sought a bigger role in the Queen Mother’s funeral, clearly being fuelled by members of the establishment, some of whom never quite reconciled themselves to a long-running Labour government; TB and his fashion sense – my determination not to let him wear a coat Cherie wanted him to put on in Russia led to one of my biggest rows with her; and of course the TBGBs. John Holmes, formerly TB’s foreign policy adviser, made an interesting observation: that TB’s problems are caused by his relations with two GBs – George Bush and Gordon Brown. They certainly figure large in his thinking and in any history of this remarkable period. Yet again the two sides of Gordon Brown – the brilliant and the impossible – are on show. But by now TB seems to feel the impossible outweighs the brilliant. Even at the height of international crisis, GB is asking TB for a date of departure (much as Fiona was asking the same of me). The battleground is as much about policy as simply the ambition to be PM. The euro, for example, with TB still keen that Britain should step up preparations to join the single currency, and concerned that GB’s scepticism is a tactic to court the right-wing media, the left already supportive of him because of his approach to poverty. There are some fairly extraordinary scenes resulting from GB’s attempts, often without consultation with the ministers concerned, to direct policy in other departments. Ministers are often unsure of what their instincts are expected to be, always a sign of division at the top.
    The policy differences are exacerbated by what became a largely dysfunctional working relationship, the management of which consumed extraordinary amounts of time and energy. TB talks of GB waging a war of attrition. Jonathan Powell at one point says it is like watching a failed marriage disintegrate. John Prescott says it is all about TB’s guilt at becoming leader ahead of GB, and GB’s never forgotten sense of betrayal. At times GB could not even bring himself to look at TB in meetings. It all got so bad that TB, fed up with what he sometimes called GB’s ‘destabilisation strategy’, came back from one holiday determined to sack him. It never happened. At another point a small number of his inner team are asked to reflect on what became known variously as his ‘
grande stratégie
’ and ‘
le grand projet
’ (he and I often spoke in French for some reason, particularly when he was nervous) – namely announcing that he would not fight the next election, but would stay on until that point. I think it is possible that had GB been more co-operative and more of a team player, TB might have executed that strategy. But things seemed to get worse not better. More even than in previous volumes, TB, his ministerial colleagues, I and my colleagues in the TB team are worrying about what GB would be like as PM. Yet when it came to it, there was enough of the good amid the bad to have most of us supporting him when he took over. TB says at one point that GB is a ‘malign force but head and shoulders above the rest’. Back to the ‘brilliant and impossible’ prism.
    There have been plenty of books written about the Blair/Brown era, and the Blair/Brown relationship, and there will doubtless be many more.