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              Blair wanted to quit before Iraq war
Sunday, July 8th, 2007
TONY BLAIR wanted to quit as prime minister a year before the Iraq war, according to Alastair Campbell, his former communications director. He told Campbell that he was not going to seek a third term of office and wanted to be free to act without worrying what the Labour party or public thought of him for the remainder of his second term. Campbell reveals the former prime minister’s plans in an exclusive interview with The Sunday Times today on the eve of publication of his long awaited diaries, The Blair Years. His revelations, from the man who was at Blair’s side for a decade and dubbed the real deputy prime minister, are the first to come from a figure at the centre of power in Downing Street. In the summer of 2002, a year after winning his second general election and nine months before the start of the Iraq war, Blair decided to tell the Labour party conference in the autumn that he would not fight a third election. He told Campbell: “Two terms is all you get in the modern world.” Blair asked his inner circle – Campbell, his political adviser Sally Morgan, and his chief of staff Jonathan Powell – whether the announcement would liberate him to pursue sometimes unpopular reforms without focusing on the next election. “I wasn’t totally opposed, but I advised him that it would make him a lame duck,” says Campbell. There had been mounting tension over the potential military action in Iraq and there have been claims that Blair and President George W Bush had already decided in principle to invade Iraq, although this has always been denied by Downing Street. Blair was also under pressure over a variety of issues, some of them personal, but others included wrangles over tuition fees and hospital reforms. “We had been going through a lot of crap,” says Campbell. As the diaries record, Blair’s departure plan was shelved under pressure of events. But the motive remained – “What you get as the book goes on is Tony caring less about what people say about him,” Campbell says. Campbell also reveals that Princess Diana held secret dinners with Blair and his inner circle – including one at an “ordinary house” in east London – in the mid1990s when he was leader of the opposition and inventing new Labour. “It was just extraordinary to see her in this ordinary house. We had an amazing dinner. She made me a cup of tea,” Campbell says. The princess had earlier met Blair at an “Establishment” dinner party in Belgravia, where she had made a beeline for Campbell when he arrived at the end of the meal. “I rang the bell and told them Mr Blair’s car was there. And the next thing is she’s there, at the car. I’ve ribbed Tony about this ever since, because she basically said she’d really like to meet Alastair Campbell. “We’re standing there, in the middle of the road with cars whizzing by . . . And she said, ‘Wouldn’t it be hilarious if there were a photographer around now?’ She was so gorgeous. “She said, ‘I mustn’t hold you back any longer,’ and there was I wanting to be held back for a very long time.” A few weeks later Diana accepted an invitation to the modest Hackney home of Mag-gie Rae, a Labour activist and friend of the Blairs. This time Campbell was a guest with his boss at the relaxed and informal dinner. “I think she really felt she was part of the whole new Britain. I think she thought Tony would support her causes, Aids and child poverty. We talked to her about how she was seen and how she handled the media . . . She’d talk about pictures all the time. She said to me, ‘They can take a lot away from you, but they can’t take away your pictures.’ She said, ‘You can really touch people in pictures.’ “I think she was interested in Tony and what we wanted to do. He described her as very political, not in the party sense but instinctively. “At the dinner she would physically withdraw from the conversation if she thought it was getting too political. I honestly don’t know what would have happened if she’d lived. And whether she would have had a role.” A source close to Campbell said yesterday that Blair thought Diana could do “a brilliant job as a kind of ambassador abroad for his vision of a modernised Britain. The princess was intrigued by the idea. She liked the image of the country Blair wanted to project and thought she could make a contribution. She was very excited about it”. The sources said Blair and Diana continued to meet secretly until her death in August 1997, three months after new Labour came to power. In his diary Campbell denies that he put the words “the people’s princess” into Blair’s eulogy for her. The former prime minister came up with it himself, he says. Similarly the phrase “bog-standard comprehensive”, for which Campbell was widely criticised by Labour traditionalists, was coined by Blair, he says. The former Downing Street communications chief talks about the ideological gulf between himself and Blair. They fell out over the decision to send Blair’s sons to a selective school. Blair said he was not going to do “the wrong thing for my kids for the sake of political correctness”. On another occasion Blair told him: “I’m not as Labour as you.” Campbell comments: “He truly wasn’t.” The Iraq war overshadows the diaries. Campbell says he warned Blair about its likely political repercussions. “I had doubts about the impact of military action on Tony’s future. I said to him, ‘Look, if, when all this is done, you are history before your time, is it really worth it?’ And he said, ‘It’s always worth doing what you think is right. America has been attacked. It’s important they don’t think they’re going to stand up to this on their own.’ “He knew from the word go that there would be some who would want to portray him as Bush’s poodle. He was just prepared to live with that.” He says Bush joked about his relationship with Blair when they visited Wash-ington in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks on America. “After the first meeting before we flew home, Bush said to me, ‘There you go – you’ll be able to paint a picture of how Tony flew in and pulled the crazed unilateralist back from the brink’.” As for Bush’s predecessor, Bill Clinton, Blair was sympathetic during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. “He said every leader’s got to be able to let go a bit, and Bill – that was his way of letting go of it.” Clinton was equally supportive of Blair, giving Campbell a pep talk. “I was a bit down on Tony at the time – I was pissed off with everything probably – Bill said I should mix very frank advice with an understanding that we’re all human in the end. He was saying don’t beat up on him.” Clinton also asked Campbell to consider whether he was “hurting” Blair through his antagonistic relationship with the British news media, which Campbell says he now regrets. There was less empathy in Blair’s relationship with President Vladimir Putin of Russia. A lunch in Moscow became particularly heated. “There were tough exchanges. It was at the time of Iraq. Putin felt that Britain was constantly taking the American side on different issues. There was a point at which he was talking to Tony in a very personal, emotional way, and I noted that it reminded me of Fiona [Millar, his girlfriend] when she was having a go at me.” Boris Yeltsin, Putin’s predecessor, was sober when he first met Blair, but “there were other times when he might have had a few. There was a phone call when Tony had no idea what he was saying at all”. Campbell writes at length about the row with the BBC in 2003 over claims that the government’s dossier on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction [WMD] had been “sexed up”, which led to the suicide of the former weapons inspector Dr David Kelly. When Campbell heard Kelly had gone missing: “I felt absolutely sick. I felt like a juggernaut was coming my way. When they said a body had been found, I came home just before the press started arriving and I wanted to quit there and then. I knew what was coming. Then Tony phoned me . . . and I said, ‘Look Tony, I just want to go’.” Campbell says Millar had long wanted him to leave, and his resignation had already been agreed with Blair before the WMD row. It was put on hold for three months, but he then left. “Fiona didn’t want me to do the job in the first place. At times she felt I was off, gallivanting round the world, being feted as a political superstar. . . To me,I was working my arse off. I had to go, not just for the family, I had to go politically as well.” Have Your Say: Blair wanted to quit before Iraq war Please read our posting guidelines before posting. Alternatively you can discuss this report here. Related News
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