30 DAYS
A Month at the Heart of Blair’s War
PETER STOTHARD

Dedication

For Sally

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Before

Monday, 10 March

Tuesday, 11 March

Wednesday, 12 March

Thursday, 13 March

Friday, 14 March

Saturday, 15 March

Sunday, 16 March

Monday, 17 March

Tuesday, 18 March

Wednesday, 19 March

Thursday, 20 March

Friday, 21 March

Saturday, 22 March

Sunday, 23 March

Monday, 24 March

Tuesday, 25 March

Wednesday, 26 March

Thursday, 27 March

Friday, 28 March

Saturday, 29 March

Sunday, 30 March

Monday, 31 March

Tuesday, 1 April

Wednesday, 2 April

Thursday, 3 April

Friday, 4 April

Saturday, 5 April

Sunday, 6 April

Monday, 7 April

Tuesday, 8 April

Wednesday, 9 April

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Before

‘This is your fiftieth birthday present, Prime Minister,’ ‘ says Strategy Director Alastair Campbell as Tony Blair comes in through the Downing Street front door. ‘Peter Stothard is going to follow you everywhere you go for fifty days.’

The recipient of this gift looks as though almost anything would be better than having a writer at his side as he enters the most difficult days of his political life.

Campbell concedes with a wolfish grin, ‘Well, a month then. Thirty days.’

Tony Blair sighs. He had agreed a few weeks ago for a writer from The Times Magazine to be with him on the path to war with Iraq. These were extraordinary days. His fiftieth birthday was coming up soon. It had seemed like a good idea.

Like many good resolutions it does not seem so attractive now that it is time to put it into practice. Little is going right. He does not even know that he has thirty days left behind the black door of Number Ten.

Politicians do sometimes take the risk of inviting a journalist in ‘to see them as they really are’. This is only either when they need the publicity or when they have a high degree of control. But no Prime Minister, however confident, has ever before taken that risk.

Tony Blair decides to stick with his decision. He will have a closely observed record of his leadership in the war against Saddam Hussein. He does not know what the record will be. His ‘fly on the wall’ will be a former editor of The Times who supported his programme to become leader of the Labour Party in 1994 but did not support him in the 1997 election which brought him to power.

To have me with him for thirty days will not be like having a total stranger in the corner of the room. But neither will he have a lifelong political supporter with him, or even one who shares many of his views.

6 March 2003, the day Tony Blair invited his chronicler through the door, was no better than any other day at this time. Britain had become an angry country. Millions of voters, particularly young voters who five years before had hailed his ‘Cool Britannia’, were enraged that a Labour Prime Minister, a New Labour Prime Minister, the first Labour Prime Minister since 1979, seemed about to send bombers to the civilians of Baghdad.

Worse even than bombing Iraqis who had ‘never done the British any harm’ was bombing them at the behest of a ‘Daddy’s Boy’ American President. Britain, they shouted, should just let George Bush get on with fighting his father’s old enemy, Saddam Hussein.

Those who knew a bit of history recalled that another Labour Prime Minister, Harold Wilson in the 1960s, kept Britain out of America’ s Vietnam nightmare. Why couldn’t Tony Blair do the same?

The protesters knew that they had allies at the highest levels of the Labour government. Clare Short was a respected figure of the old Labour left. She had an official position in the Cabinet as International Development Secretary, and an unofficial position as the ‘conscience of the party’. She was said to be enraged at what was about to be done ‘in her name’.

The ‘Not in my Name’ slogan was on banners and T-shirts from Bristol to Dundee. A million people had marched in London. The Italians and the Spanish were marching. They too had leaders who backed George Bush when their voters did not.

Tony Blair’s first words in the Number Ten front hall were a complaint about how he could not get his message across. I doubt if I sounded very sympath etic. Politicians forever complain to editors that they are prevented by unseen powers, never themselves, from ‘getting their message across’.

Inside the building there was a rush of people on the move. We were about to go to Chile, whose President was suddenly a pivotal player in the attempts to swing the United Nations squarely behind the war.

I went back home for my passport, told the magazine that I would take the ‘fiftieth birthday’ assignment, and barely left Tony Blair’s home, office, advisers, officials and political life for the next month. In those thirty days he faced the most hostile attacks from his voters, his supporters and his party. He faced fierce opposition in Europe and he forged a controversial partnership with a President of the United States who seemed at first so unlike him in so many ways. He saw a personal and a political challenge ahead, and seized them both. A man who was once known as consensual, accommodating, even insecure at times, behaved as a man possessed of certainty. He used occasionally to talk about history with journalists. Now he had just given a newspaper interview in which he said that history would be his judge.

Events fell one upon the other with tumultuous speed. The fiftieth birthday was scarcely mentioned ever again. We never went to Chile. We did sit together while the Prime Minister ‘worked the phones’ with other leaders, spoke to envoys from around the world, was taken for buggy rides by George Bush at Camp David and repaid the hospitality, according to the strange ways of modern diplomacy, at a castle in Belfast.

We were together in Parliament as he prepared for the debate which nearly cost him his job – and also when he weighed his responsibility for those who, as a result, had lost their lives. For thirty days I was close by him at historic events – in the places where writers never are.

Monday, 10 March

Morning headlines … Minister threatens resignation from Blair Cabinet … Iraq attacks ‘fascist’ USA … French Foreign Minister flies to woo African Security Council members …

‘So they are all against me, is that it?’ Tony Blair is sitting back on a swivel chair in his ‘den’ with his finger on a list of names. Around him is his ‘team’, squashed on the sofas, leaning against the table, hungry-eyed on the silver fruit bowl, perching uncomfortably against a window into the Downing Street garden. An honest answer would be: ‘Yes, Prime Minister.’ Alastair Campbell does not say anything. The Director of Communications and Strategy does not need to.

Tony Blair knows already. He has asked Independent Television for an opportunity to counter the fears of women opposed to war, women like those who are today shouting outside his house that he is a traitor to the Labour cause, a killer of children and about to be a war criminal. He calls it his ‘masochism strategy’.

The ‘all against me’ question is no sign of paranoia. Virtually everyone who wants to speak to him this week is against him. The leaders of France and Germany, the leader of the House of Commons, the leading figures in the trade unions, about half his own MPs, including Cabinet Minister Clare Short, all oppose a war on Saddam Hussein.

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.’

After Tony Blair’s forehead has been powdered for the cameras and the most analysed facial lines in Britain have been hidden beneath kindly ‘concealer’, he clarifies a few last points. ‘Shall I say anything about the UN timetable?’ The den is suddenly filled with overlapping cries of ‘wiggle room’, ‘full and immediate compliance’ and ‘dramatic change of mind by Saddam’.

‘Am I frustrated by Clare Short’s action, or distracted?’ he asks. This is just to fill time till the three-minute stage call. The coming ordeal may be in the Foreign Office Map Room, a hundred yards across the street. But this is theatre now. Campbell and Co. are the producers, wishing they had a better audience, cursing modern television for seeing ranters and emoters as the only ‘real people’ but helpless to do much about it. The bums are already on the seats. The star has to perform.

The ‘three minutes’ extends longer than would be allowed in the West End, almost up to rock-star levels of lateness. The Prime Minister is still at his desk, not so much ‘working the phones’ as being worked by them. There are anxious calls now not just from the White House but from Labour politicians, all of a seniority requiring a Prime Ministerial chat, all wanting to know ‘what Clare (and he) are bloody well up to’.

Clare Short today represents the fear and rage of many in the Prime Minister’s party who oppose war. She has also found new friends among marching voters who would not normally have the slightest sympathy with the Labour Party’s ‘conscience’ at all.

When Tony Blair has dealt with his last panicking colleague, his ‘security column’ eventually assembles in the hall behind the Number Ten Downing Street door. The decoration at this end is dull, almost domestic, by comparison with Cabinet Room and den. The black-and-white tiled floor is piled with refills for the fruit bowl, boxes of oranges, apples and bananas. This was originally the back entrance to the office, and it is still where the ‘Salisbury’s To You’ van comes.

The team goes ahead of its leader, ignoring shouts from reporters about his future. The Prime Minister is told to wait twenty seconds to let everyone else get out of his camera shot. The small patch of sky above is grey and cold. But by this stage he is reminded of the rising heat and sweat of his interrogators. He catches up quickly. ‘The boss didn’t want to wait,’ says the detective apologetically as together they all stride up to the room.

The Prime Minister steps gingerly over clumps of black cable. The ‘warm-up act’, the studio manager, who has used up all her usual jokes for entertaining guests, retreats in relief. The star of the afternoon apologises and is immediately assailed from all sides by women who do not believe him, do not trust him, and will never vote for him again. He hears the sound dreaded by any performer anywhere, violent volleys of slow handclapping. Portraits of Wellington and Nelson look down for an hour on a sight that neither of those great British heroes would have seen as very pretty.

‘No, it wasn’t very pretty,’ the inquest back in Downing Street agrees. The slow handclappers were a disgrace. Maybe ITV wouldn’t broadcast that bit.

OK, so probably they would. But there were only four slow-handers. And they were about as representative as a Socialist Workers’ circus. The presenter couldn’t control them. One woman was suspiciously expert on Yemen. Not even Nelson in his hero-of-the-Nile days could have handled the humidity. Had Blair thought when he first joined the Labour Party that he would end up sending B52s over Baghdad? What sort of question is that? And as for ‘I married a human shield,’ God help us.

Tony Blair seems the least bothered of anyone by the fiasco. At least no one will ever be able to say that he slunk in his bunker. He had to begin almost every answer with the phrase ‘I know I am not going to change your mind, but …’ He had a fresh powdering at each commercial break and would have benefited from more.

Why does he do it? That is what very few yet understand. This is not a place he would have been in five years ago. He would have hated the mockery and ridicule.

Ten years ago few of even his closest friends could imagine him in the place he is now. Tony Blair was not always the most certain of men. He had decent modern ideas for an almost dead party in Britain. He was persuasive and popular. He liked to persuade. He liked to be liked.

What has happened?

There are simple answers. He is taking the heat because he knows that he can. He has grown used to winning arguments, to winning elections, to defeating opposition in his party, to almost destroying his official Opposition in Parliament. He has discovered that he can absorb attack after attack and still be standing.

There are awkward answers. He is restless. He is realistic about how long political success ever lasts. He wants to get things done and get out. He does not want to look back later on missed chances to make his view of the world count. He is less patient than he was. A young fifty-year-old in a hurry? Rash? Reckless?

There are also the Christian beliefs that he shares not only with his family but with George Bush. These beliefs are powerfully held, sometimes publicly expressed, and appear to be an ever more important part of his life. They include a moral revulsion at how Saddam Hussein treats his own people. Religion in a British political leader makes everyone nervous. The team prefers not to talk about it.

Supporters and friends who remember the more diffident Tony Blair see a different Tony Blair today. Some love the ‘Mark 2’ version. Some hate it. Some have not yet noticed just how different it is.

Tony Blair won influence over George Bush with a gamble. He promised that British forces would be ready to fight alongside Americans against Saddam Hussein. He asked in return that the United States seek the maximum United Nations authority. It is not clear how precise the bargain was. But the gamble was made. Today it seems to be failing.

Limited United Nations support has been won. There has not been full support. The man who is accustomed to be a winner stands about to lose. He will be asked to make good on his pledge of troops without the UN backing he thought he could secure. He knows that George Bush will not wait long enough for the diplomats and persuaders to do everything that they want to do. This part of the battle is coming to an end.

He himself has recognised that reality but not yet fully faced it. He has not stopped being a persuader on TV and a diplomat on the telephone. He sees those arts as virtues in themselves. He may look like a long-distance runner, winding down in slow laps when the race is long over. He may seem like a once-famous actor, still working on a seaside pier. He will still keep arguing. He does not mind the rejection as much as he did. The ‘masochism strategy’ was well named.

Soon, however, he has to tear his mind away from unpersuadable voters and foreign leaders who have failed to live up to his hopes. He must move single-mindedly on to his own Members of Parliament. If he cannot persuade a majority of his own party, his promise of British troops will fall. He will be a young fifty-year-old looking for a new career earlier than he intended.

Back at the door to Number Ten, Campbell shrugs the TV mess away. The rest of the team returns to answer ‘slow handclap’ questions from the press and ‘no UN support, no support from me’ threats from Westminster. Tony Blair walks back to his den.

By the time he is ‘on the phones’ again, battering the ears of diplomats for signs of hope, the final bad news is filtering in from Paris. President Chirac, it is said, will commit himself on TV tonight to vetoing any Second Resolution that permits an automatic attack on Iraq. The UN game is as good as over.

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.’

Tuesday, 11 March

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.

Wednesday, 12 March

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.

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.

Walk through the door marked ‘Number Ten’, go straight ahead down the yellow-wallpapered corridor, avoid the recumbent Henry Moore statue, and you are in the red hall that leads to the Cabinet Room and the den. To the left is Sally Morgan’s political office, decorated with the work of women artists in memory of the one time that Tony Blair freed her to do a job, as Minister for Women, that was not directly in his line of sight.

Morgan is a plain-speaking, plain-dressing, no-nonsense Liverpudlian whom the Prime Minister relies on heavily both for political intelligence and the personal kind. The experiment of setting her free did not last long.

To the right is the passage to the ‘outer office’, which has desks for the private secretaries and Duty Clerks. There is the TV and the three clocks, unchanged since the Cold War, set to Washington, London and Moscow times. Here sit the key-keepers for the red boxes, the men who make the phone-working work, and Jonathan Powell, the Chief of Staff who listens out and listens in.

If you are an Ambassador, if you are seeking diplomacy more than politics, you will go right immediately from the front hall, down a more institutional corridor to rooms behind a combination lock where Tony Blair’s ‘diplomatic knights’ do their work.

In a fine half-circular Georgian room, one knight looks after Chirac and the Europeans. In another, with a huge maple-leaf window out towards Whitehall, sits the chief knight of this current battle, Sir David Manning, who has a slight figure and a fierce stare and cares for what is known here as ‘the real world’: reality includes America, North and South, the Middle East and Iraq.

Political advisers and press officers, party veterans and trusted young civil servants turn left after entering Number Ten, past the staircase to the Blair family’s flat, past the dark lower rooms of the Chancellor of the Exchequer and on to Alastair Campbell’s zone. Here, in a set of large, dark-panelled rooms, the largest hung about with drying marathon kit, steaming trainers and posters of past campaigns, the business of public opinion is done.

There is much to do.

Next month Tony Blair is fifty. How is he planning to spend the day? ‘At the Labour exchange,’ says Campbell with his best four-miles-to-the-finishing-line grimace.

The London Marathon is still a month away. Campbell has never run the twenty-six-mile distance before, and is training as hard as political distractions allow. He has never had his boss in such a bad position before, either.

On the wall is a poster of Number Ten’s last occupant, John Major, in the guise of ‘Mr Weak’, a reminder of one of Campbell’s most vaunted coups. This poster could never have been put on billboards in the 1997 campaign; it was a clear abuse of the copyright owned by the creator of the ‘Mister Men’, children’s bestsellers all over the world. But somehow the image found its way onto newspaper front pages regardless, and it has stayed on this wall ever since.

Tony Blair has not yet reached ‘Mr Weak’ status among his colleagues. But he is beginning to look as grey as John Major did.

The television on the newspaper-strewn table shows a few MPs, some of the more glamorous New Labour kind, cooing with admiration that Tony Blair ‘has put his leadership on the line’. Campbell sighs.

The TV reporter has also found other MPs who want to use the Prime Minister’s support for George Bush to make him greyer and weaker. ‘Leadership isn’t just Tony Blair, it’s us as well,’ says one Old Labour member. Campbell grunts and changes to a sports channel with theatrical contempt.

One group of MPs is rumoured to be planning a bid for a new leader, arguing that a Labour Prime Minister should not be ‘a threat to the institutions of world order’. Is that a real danger, or just a bombastic stunt? Campbell tries to assess the problem and the difference.

The Prime Minister has finished his briefings and has come downstairs. He walks all these corridors restlessly, back and forth along the three ground-floor axes of his home.

It is just after 9 a.m. A large white ‘Délice de France’ food van is parked opposite Horse Guards Parade. A man in a bowler hat, with furled umbrella, yellow carnation and a copy of The Times, swings his arms like a Guardsman as he walks towards the Foreign Office. This archetypal man of Whitehall stops at the sight of the words ‘Délice de France’ and gives them a hard stare, as though to a disobedient dog – or even to ‘a cheap strutting tart’, as another newspaper, not one he is likely to read, describes the President of France this morning. After a moment’s pause, he moves on up past the Cabinet War Rooms of World War II and into Whitehall.

At the same time Tony Blair stops in the Cabinet Room. He looks onto the balcony as though he would much rather be outside than in, and begins the day’s work.

By the front door, a schoolmasterly man in a salt-and-pepper tweed suit and breakfast-stained tie is wondering whether it is safe to go up to the flat. The regular Wednesday routine for the Prime Minister’s team may be Question Time. For this man it is the day for winding the Downing Street clocks.

There is a grandfather in the Entrance Hall which the messengers tell visitors, ‘quite wrongly’, was stripped of its chiming parts by Churchill, who couldn’t stand the noise. There is a ‘nice piece’ in the waiting room. It has an unusually loud tick. But the best one is the ‘Vulliamy’ in the flat, which he likes to wind when the family is out. He also has a good clockwork connoisseur’s interest in the working s of Leo’s train.

‘Set it at five minutes to midnight,’ says another waiting-room visitor, with a confident smile and the current cliché of how close the country is to war. The clock man looks slightly bemused. In five minutes he wants to be away from here, on to the next of the British government’s antique timepieces and then to Buckingham Palace, where there are some ‘Very fine’ examples and he will have ‘elevense s’ with a couple of friends.

At about 11.30 a.m. there is the sound of singing from the cleaners upstairs. The words are ‘Good morning, Tony’, to the tune that fans used to sing outside rock stars’ hotels, and ending ‘Oh, Tony, we love you.’ This noise is accompanied by the sound of mops and brushes and a sharp supervisory retort: ‘You mustn’t call him that. He likes to be called Prime Minister.’

There is a moment’s quiet, and then the ‘Good morning, Tony’ song begins again, just as the man himself almost runs along the corridor, holding a cup and saucer in front of him as though in an egg-and-spoon race. Immediately behind, and in exactly the same posture, is Alastair Campbell.

Tony Blair is not one who seems to mind too much what he is called. Some refer to him as ‘TB’, some as ‘the boss’, many as ‘Tony’. The diplomatic knights call him ‘Prime Minister’, but the phrase ‘Yes, Prime Minister’ has been destroyed by television comedy, and is never used except as a joke.

For the next twenty minutes the Downing Street ‘pagers’ receive blow-by-blow messages from inside the Parliamentary Labour Party meeting about how Jack Straw is faring against the critics. By the time the Prime Ministerial motorcade is ready for the two-hundred-yard ‘dash’ to the Commons, the news is already seen as ‘quite good’. There are ‘lots of dismissals of a Special Conference’, the mechanism necessary to change a Labour leader’, and ‘lots of rudeness about the French’.

At 11.40 a.m. the ‘dash’ has begun. After a blur of journalists’ flashbulbs, protesters’ flashbulbs, gates that are normally kept closed, mirrors in underground tunnels, Tony Blair and his Questions squad reassemble on foot among post-workers and sandwich-makers for the last walk up to the Prime Minister’s Westminster office. Jack Straw is waiting outside, buoyed by the success of his ‘anti-French’ card. He holds out a page of Le Monde as a possible prop for his boss: ‘It’s the Napoleon route – and remember who won.’

Tony Blair checks his tabulated answers for a few minutes under the stern oil-painted eyes of Sir Walter Scott. He rejects the copy of Le Monde. The offending page falls down onto the pink carpet and stays there, propped against the golden gothic dragons on the wall.

Outside in David Hanson’s office, which for these few minutes each week is like ‘feed the animals day’ at a zoo, there is a Junior Whips’ convention. These are the ambitious young MPs whose routine job is to ensure that Labour MPs vote Labour. They want to catch the boss’s eye with their imagination, devotion and skill.

They are swapping names about which doubters are likely to vote for the war (‘He had a meeting with Cherie the other day which was very helpful’) and which will definitely be against them (‘He’s a runner; you can tell it in his face’). There are fashion edicts: ‘Never trust a man in a pinstripe suit if the white stripe is thicker than the blue one.’ There is coded abuse: ‘That man’s a woodentop – and that’s a Whips’ Office technical term.’

The Americans are said to be abandoning their efforts at the UN. Is there a phone for calling the White House? The question is posed by Campbell, but is not answered. These secure phones are called ‘Brents’, and have operators who seem normally to be scrabbling on the floor for the right socket. There is not a ‘Brent’ here.

‘Don’t eat that,’ Morgan tells the horde around her, pointing to a bruised and not very appetising banana. ‘It’s his lunch.’

The Prime Minister and his personal spy sweep out, and into the Chamber. There is just a minute to spare before the Speaker calls for the first Labour MP to question ‘US pressure for precipitate action against Iraq’.

The Conservative leader Iain Duncan Smith asks all his questions about Iraq, but not the one which Tony Blair fears. He does ask about Donald Rumsfeld and Clare Short, as predicted. The noise from the Labour benches is not of loyal hoorahs; but there are no boos either. The big parliamentary day is not yet come. There are questions too about lost jobs in farming and lost education in Leicestershire, each of which gets a neat tabbed reply from the file.

Back in his room, Tony Blair begins his lunch, feet on the table, eyes on the whisky bottles and birthday cards which he signs for MPs at this time every week. Once every ‘Best wishes, Tony’ is done he turns to the letters to world leaders. The knights of Downing Street think that extra reassurance to large Islamic nations like Pakistan and Indonesia might be wise.

‘Dear Pervez …’ says the Prime Minister, as his pen glides along the top of a letter. ‘I’m never quite sure what name to use to Muslims,’ he says, looking up at his staff and down dubiously at his handiwork so far.

‘“Dear General” normally goes down well,’ says a voice from behind. Tony Blair keeps doggedly signing.

Campbell has some urgent pager messages. ‘Who was the first black footballer to play for England?’ he asks. The name of Viv Anderson is offered from the room outside.

‘John Toshack,’ says Morgan, not prepared to be left behind on a macho quiz afternoon.

‘He wasn’t black; he was Welsh,’ says Campbell with scorn.

‘There are lots of black Welsh people,’ says Morgan, moving onto the safer territory of what is politically correct.

Tony Blair has finished his signings but not the blacker bits of his banana. He is to stay in the Commons till it is time for today’s call from the den to President Bush at 3.15 p.m.

‘Don’t be late,’ says Powell as the team returns to the people-carrier. The driver takes one of the more circuitous security-approved routes back to Downing Street, giving a tourist ride around a selection of London statues that are boarded up to protect them from anti-war protesters. ‘I wonder where we’re going to put the statue of Donald Rumsfeld,’ jokes the cheery Chief of Staff.

In the evening Tony Blair is to have dinner with the German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder. To the relief of the team’s junior members, whose lives are regularly tormented by instructions to find the finest Indian restaurant, the perfect country pub, the best riverside table at which Prime Minister and foreign guest can just ‘drop in’, the meal will be in Downing Street.

Now is not the time for long, relaxing public appearances. Tony Blair does not have his country with him. The German Chancellor, with votes in mind, has declared himself against the British and American stance. But British protesters might not know that.

First the two leaders visit the Royal Academy’s exhibition of ‘Masterpieces from Dresden’, paintings by Canaletto, Dürer and Velasquez which survived both the British firebombing of 1945 and the flooding of the Elbe eight months ago. This gives Schröder a chance to make generalisations about the international message of art, the President of Saxony to praise Saxony, the sponsor to praise himself, and museum curators the opportunity to hope that the art treasures of Baghdad are equally successfully protected.

Tony and Cherie Blair stand together, holding hands, listening to the speeches and looking at Tiepolo’s Vision of St Anne. When it is his turn to speak, he says that this is the best part of his day. No one doubts him.

Thursday, 13 March

Morning headlines … Tony Blair gives six tests for Saddam Hussein … Washington threatens Moscow with consequences of veto … Tony Blair denies that British place in war depends on new UN resolution …

‘It’s Cabinet time,’ says a voice from the diplomatic knights’ zone.

‘Oh, yes,’ comes the unenthusiastic response.

The arrival of some twenty-five men and women from various government departments, however regular on a Thursday morning, is not welcomed with joy at Number Ten. Cabinet days are like Christmas at a great country house, when all the relatives who think they own the place – who do in certain circumstances own the place – descend for their share of the inheritance. The master and his servants greet the guests cheerfully enough; they can hardly turn them away, but they are mightily pleased when they are gone.

If the Secretaries of State want to make a visible entrance (which mostly they do) they are driven up to the front door, get out of their car with just a slight turn of the head to see if a TV reporter might ask them a question, and go in past the policeman. It then takes just a few seconds to walk straight ahead, past the Henry Moore and three small paintings of rural scenes, and into the back hall where the early arrivals will already be drinking coffee.

Most of the decoration in this corridor is exactly what you would expect in a prosperous house inhabited by people who do not care too much for art. But there is one stark picture, of a cottage freshly blasted as though by some clean, bright light. The roof is off and the walls are smashed, but none of the wood is charred. It is dated 1940, but there is no name-plate for its artist. Sometimes visitors give this painting more than a single look.

The shy, the about-to-be sacked or anyone who happens to be in the neighbouring office on Whitehall can enter from a side door, past the office of Jonathan Powell and the Duty Clerks. Gordon Brown, the second most powerful man in the country, comes to Cabinet from the other side, along the corridor from Number Eleven that he shares with Alastair Campbell, into the front hall, left turn and down to his colleagues.

The Chancellor of the Exchequer seems cheerful, almost jolly this morning. But no one here would make much of that. His relationship with Tony Blair is one of Downing Street’s greatest mysteries. The team knows that today he will go out and talk to TV and radio and support the Prime Minister. How this was agreed they do not know.

Every day or so there is time blocked out in Tony Blair’s detailed appointments diary with simply the initials ‘GB’. What happens in these meetings, no one else knows. No one else is there when the Lord of the House and his disinherited brother plan what needs to be done on the estate.

The stability of the British government since 1997 has depended on a pact whose terms have never been revealed. Even its existence is not always admitted.

Before Labour’s previous leader, John Smith, died in May 1994 there were two rising stars in the slowly changing party, two friends, Gordon Brown and Tony Blair. Brown was the senior, the more intellectual, the more passionate speaker; but he was a Scot, and had a narrower appeal to the English Conservative voters whom Labour needed to attract.

Brown was persuaded not to stand for the leadership. But he did not give up his hopes of attaining it one day. He felt he had a deal whereby he would take the Treasury and run British domestic policy, which for the most part he has, and would succeed Tony Blair at some point in the future, not too far in the future – which so far he has not.

Every time there is political trouble, it is whispered by someone that Gordon Brown is behind it. It is whispered today that ‘Gordon is behind what Clare is doing,’ that ‘Gordon did not exactly incite Clare to call Tony reckless, but hopes to benefit from it.’ Even the team members most charitable to the ambitions of the Chancellor say only that ‘He is biding his time.’

What is clear to everyone is that Clare Short, in penitent white scarf but not looking otherwise apologetic, is taking her coffee with her friend, the Chancellor of the Exchequer. There are eyes too on Brown’s long-standing rival, the Leader of the House of Commons and former Foreign Secretary Robin Cook; the two have a mutual distrust stretching back to power struggles for territory in Scotland decades ago.

Brown is like a large planetary mass, attractive to satellites. Cook is a small, bare rock, sparking huge energy at high speeds but leaving less that is permanent behind. ‘Robin looks shifty today, but then Robin always looks a bit shifty,’ says a rare close friend of them both.

If Tony Blair falls, there will be winners and losers here. Gordon Brown still has the best chance of taking over the house which he thinks he has already in his grasp. But no Chancellor can escape blame when the voters begin to feel more taxed and less prosperous, as at the moment they do.

If Brown is careless, or is seen too clearly to have wielded the dagger, there are others. Alan Milburn, the smooth-faced, smoothtongued Health Secretary, has been assiduous in condemning Clare Short.

What if Tony Blair wins the vote but the war is a catastrophe? Might a resignation from Robin Cook now win him power later?

Some of the Cabinet Ministers most fiercely in support of Tony Blair are those originally from the farthest left of the party. John Reid, Party Chairman, lapsed Glasgow Catholic and Communist, stumps around the hall as though looking for a head to stamp on. He sees Saddam Hussein through a prism of Scottish politics and Scottish football. He lets his leader concentrate on Iraq. His concentration is on the bad guys and back-alley chancers who are trying to chop his leader down. This wary teetotaller and gum-chewing giver-up of cigarettes is Tony Blair’s top enforcer. He talks freely this morning to the only other claimant for that title, John Prescott, Deputy Prime Minister, long-time trade unionist and famous square-faced strangler of the English language.

Prescott found new fame during the 2001 election campaign by punching a protester in the face. Like a boxer who has proved himself and is gracefully approaching retirement, he looks a little less the pugilist now. He makes no claims to know whether the policy on Iraq will work, but every claim, quietly but forcefully expressed, that his Cabinet comrades should support it.

After an initial display of coffee-sipping amity, entertaining only for onlookers and junior family members, the Cabinet assembles around its traditional long table, each in an allotted place. Both inner and outer doors are shut. A messenger sits guard to ensure that none of the team outside, the people who really run this heart of government, makes too much noise.

In the waiting room to the left of the front door of Number Ten is a sallow, elderly man with a long lock of hair twisting down over his left eye. He has heavy gold rings on his fingers and is pointing at a report in the Daily Mail of the new ‘final tests’ which Britain and America have set Saddam. If the Iraqi leader is serious about obeying UN calls to disarm, let him show it by meeting these ‘benchmarks’, destroying his weapons and telling the world personally that he has done so.

The visitor does not seem impressed. He smiles, sits back, strokes his thigh, pushes back his skein of hair and waits. His eyes circle around the orchids on the table, the loud-ticking clock, a child’s picture of food parcels falling by parachute and a set of large framed photographs illustrating the shipping forecast. ‘Southwesterly veering Northwesterly 4 or 5’: some Asian women are playing cricket on a beach. The man looks mildly mystified until he is rescued from his reverie by Sir David Manning, jacketless in pink shirt and light maroon tie.

‘How nice to see you again,’ says the diplomatic knight, recognising the Indonesian envoy from past encounters.

‘The President sends you her best regards,’ replies his visitor.

‘Let’s go up and talk,’ says Tony Blair’s man. It was Manning, writing at his round table under the maple-leaf window last Sunday, who devised the new ‘benchmark tests’ in order to keep the dying flame of diplomacy alive.

‘Thank you,’ says the representative of one of the many Muslim countries which are sceptical of British and American motives,

When the Cabinet Room doors open there is the sound of brittle laughter. Clare Short’s presence, after she has broken the laws of collective responsibility, has unnerved them all. Tony Blair has taken a risk in keeping her here. If she can criticise his policies and keep her job, why should not others be emboldened to do the same?

The mood is one of nervous mockery.

‘It was good of Clare to offer Tony that advice on getting the second UN resolution. He would never have thought of such a clever idea himself.’

‘What is Robin suggesting? That the whole war would be illegal?’

‘The French must not be forgiven for this.’

‘When the Prime Minister said “Good Morning,” who said “Bonjour“?’

There is general jollity but not much good will.

Clare Short herself, straight-backed, big-bodied, scarf trailing down, is also talking cheerfully. The subject is ‘new jobs’. She suggests that ‘We all soon may need one.’ For the moment, though, the Cabinet is intact. The International Development Secretary has not been sacked and the Leader of the House of Commons has not resigned.

Tony Blair takes the back stairs next to his den, the main staircase in this back-to-front house, and goes up, past the photographs of his predecessors, past the place where his own photograph will one day be (at this point, who knows how soon?) and into the White Drawing Room to see the envoy of the Indonesian President.

The Prime Minister sits facing his guest across a low table, accepts the Indonesian’s thanks for agreeing to see him at a ‘difficult time’, and, as he has been doing all morning, listens to worries.

‘Ours is the largest Muslim country in the world. Now the moderates are in control. If war breaks out and lasts a long time it could be extremely difficult.’

Tony Blair nods.

‘Is there anything that a third party can do? The non-aligned nations have had success before in convincing Baghdad. We have shown results.’

The nods turn to a polite but doubting gaze.

‘Is there any way we moderate Muslim countries can talk to both sides? We agree that Baghdad must stick scrupulously to the first disarmament resolution, 1441.’

Tony Blair thanks him for that final bit of his message and says what he has just told his Cabinet. ‘We are still pursuing every avenue. Everything is made much more difficult by France. It is only by the credible threat of force that Saddam has ever responded at all. We have set new tests. Anything that the Indonesians can do to get them through to Baghdad would be important.’

The envoy has done what he came for. He says he is going to Paris next. He wants to make sure that no signals are being misinterpreted.

The Prime Minister’s tolerance of diplomatic language is reaching its limits. ‘The bottom line has to be that a strong, united message to Baghdad from the rest of the world means peace. A weak message means war.’

Host and guest walk out into the upper hall. On one side of them is a huge painting of an empty cinema which bears an eerie resemblance to the front cover of the Labour-supporting New Statesman magazine this week. The cover, though not the item from the Government Art Collection, bears the slogan ‘Blair Bombs’.

Downstairs in the Campbell zone, the news has arrived of one of Robin Cook’s answers to routine Business Questions from MPs. There is to be a debate on war next week. ‘Would the Cabinet share collective responsibility on a decision to go to war?’ Cook was asked.

‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘Collective responsibility will apply to all those who are in the Cabinet at the time of the debate.’ Those last thirteen words are given careful and fearful thought.

Robin Cook did not like losing his job as Foreign Secretary to Jack Straw, but he bore the demotion to Leader of the House of Commons with dignity. He has always been highly respected in Parliament. If he argues that the result of war will be a weakened UN, a collapse of moderate Muslim states from Indonesia to Saudi Arabia, more extremist places for terrorism to flourish, more dead Iraqis to enrage potential terrorists in Israel and elsewhere, he will be heard with more respect than many others mouthing the same views. The Leader of the House is pointing his way out – and may take others with him.

Tony Blair’s sense of what war will bring is wholly different. He sees a UN which frees itself from helpless torpor, a lesson to extremist nations that terrorism will be met by massive force, a message to Palestinians and Israelis that America will not tolerate conditions of permanent instability.

Neither man knows whether he is right or not. Each knows what he thinks.

The Prime Minister stretches his arms above his head, doing light exercises against the blue leather backdrop of the Cabinet Room doors. ‘It’s all the broad sweep of history now,’ he says to Campbell.

‘The papers say you’re in a lot of trouble,’ his adviser, the one who is in genuine athletic training, replies.

‘It will be tough,’ says his boss, picking up a green apple and wiping it on a napkin. Before he takes a bite he gives the skin two more careful wipes, polishing away every last spot.

History seems to be much on his mind. Two weeks ago he told a newspaper that ‘History will be my judge.’ He was not only drawing comparisons between those who want to appease Saddam Hussein now and those who appeased Hitler in the 1930s. He was also, and rather more usefully for himself, drawing attention away from the many adverse judgements on him at the present time to future verdicts, all of which are unknown and some of which may be better.

Historians will one day consider whether Tony Blair is more like a wise Winston Churchill or a rash Anthony Eden, just as historians are filling pages of newsprint now with argument about whether Saddam Hussein is a Nazi or a Nasser, whether we are in 1939 or 1956. But for the moment, it is better to call on judges who may not yet be born than on those who are waiting for him in the House of Commons.

It means almost nothing to say that history will be Tony Blair’s judge. But that does not make it a stupid thing to say. When Blair is safely retired, his decisions in these days will be analysed closely. Questions will be asked about his influence on George Bush and George Bush’s influence on him. This is familiar territory for students of the transatlantic relationship.

Churchill, it is generally agreed, had many great virtues. But honesty about the ‘perfect understanding’ between him and Franklin Roosevelt was not one of them. He exaggerated it – to others and to himself.

Harold Macmillan had an Ambassador to Washington who was part of the Kennedy family. Macmillan had clear influence on the young President but did not, as he claimed, take part in, and share responsibility for, Kennedy’s ultimatum to Moscow to remove its missile bases from Cuba.

Historians will examine Tony Blair and George Bush and judge them in the same light. Was the policy right? How much was it a British policy?

Tony Blair was both a political and a personal friend of the previous President, Bill Clinton, and had worked with him, publicly and privately, over many shared problems. Central to their understanding of the world and of each other was the task of persuading traditional left-wing activists and voters to support new, less collectivist policies.

These two men talked to each other for hours about the Third Way – and bored others for hours about it too. They shared the same thoughts, and similar student experiences at Oxford University. They both had academic lawyer wives whose lives had not always been made better by their own.

How was it possible that Tony Blair could switch so quickly to a close relationship with George Bush, a Texan conservative with whom he shared almost nothing in his life and barely a single belief about how a country should be taxed and run? The only powerful belief they seemed to share was Christianity – and surely, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, religious beliefs were the most dangerous of all?

Was it true that the two men prayed together? Did George Bush genuinely believe that God guided his hand? Tony Blair did not go that far. He was a more traditional English Christian, High Anglican, almost Catholic. He was knowledgeable about Islam and sympathetic to its adherents. What did he and the President say to each other about their religious beliefs, and what difference did it make?

History will judge Tony Blair, whether he asks it to or not. Today the immediate task is to write a speech for the House of Commons debate. The Prime Minister may need the comfort of history for that. He needs to build the case for a new approach on the success of approaches in the past. He needs to make the most effective historical comparisons just as he needs to give his troops the best weapons. It hardly matters whether those comparisons are justified or not.

He is not calling history to be his judge in any other sense than as a practical preparation for war. Every other judgement is for a future which now seems far away.

Tony Blair continues his stretching exercises and his fruit lunch in the den until a note arrives from the Duty Clerk. The Polish Prime Minister, Leszek Miller, is waiting on the phone. ‘Here is a man with a good sense of history,’ says a jovial voice from the outer office. ‘Poles have not forgotten 1939. This one is a tough guy, a good guy and very anti-French.’

The Prime Minister leans back in his swivel chair. His friend from Warsaw, like his friend in Washington, is worried first about the House of Commons vote.

‘Yes, it will be tough for me,’ he says. ‘I will take the case to Parliament and, hopefully, win it.’

Is the Second Resolution losing its life?

‘It may be, Leszek, but we can’t tell at the moment. There are good reasons why the diplomacy has to continue, not just diplomatic reasons but presentation reasons too. If it wasn’t for the French, we would have the swing-countries behind us.’

What is the support?

‘Militarily, there are the Americans and ourselves and the Australians. And there are your special forces out there. Politically, we have Spain and Bulgaria.’

Miller, Polish Prime Minister for the past eighteen months, former Communist and fierce advocate of his country’s accession to the European Union, is alarmed at threats from Chirac against the ‘new Europeans’ for not backing the foreign policy of Paris and Berlin.

‘He must not do that,’ says Blair, leaning forward onto his desk and raising his voice. ‘He has been very clearly warned by us and the Americans that he can’t do that. He has to be told that in no uncertain terms. You have to mention all this to George, Leszek, when you speak to him.’

There is a long speech from Warsaw which Tony Blair punctuates with ‘Mmm’ and ‘Well’ and ‘Yeah’ while pulling at the side of his face. He still looks pale today. He is spending hours without much chance of a joke or any other distraction.

‘Yes, Leszek. Europe must not be an anti-American alliance. I had dinner with Chancellor Schröder last night, and he does not want to be part of an anti-American alliance. When this is all over we will have to get back together. But if Europe wants to be a rival, count us out. If it wants to be a partner, count us in.’

Telephone diplomacy gives no opportunity for Tony Blair’s warmth or charm. In a crowded room he has accomplished skills in making the person he is talking to feel like the only person. At the end of a telephone line there is usually only one person – plus a few listeners-in, whom it takes a while to learn to ignore.

Tony Blair is now grasping his desk tightly with one hand and the telephone just as tightly with the other. ‘What the French have to realise is that they cannot impose their view of Europe on anyone – basically. That is not just my view but George Bush’s view, Aznar’s view, Berlusconi’s view.’

When the conversation is over, the Prime Minister takes a walk out into the hall and stands, shaking out his limbs, between Sally Morgan’s office door and a dark oil painting of Pitt the Younger, the Prime Minister who steered Britain during the French Revolution. Morgan is away from her desk.

He looks into the empty interior as if the answer to the latest state of the vote-count will emerge from her filing cabinets nonetheless. He comes back out, disappointed, and looks around him.

‘What amazes me is how many people are happy for Saddam to stay. They ask why we don’t get rid of Mugabe, why not the Burmese lot. Yes, let’s get rid of them all. I don’t because I can’t, but when you can, you should.’

Friday, 14 March

Morning headlines … it is inappropriate for Her Majesty the Queen to be out of the country … London and Washington attack Chirac veto threat … Israeli and Jordanian airspace available for war on Iraq …

People who are never seen running are running now. Aides whose memories of political nightmares go back to the darkest years of far-left Labour leadership are running. Young assistants for whom this is the first drama of Downing Street survival are running.

Everyone is running hard after something. Sally Morgan is running. Campbell himself is running – and not like a man training for the marathon, more like a mugger escaping down a street of wrecked cars.

This morning in the Daily Telegraph he has spoken of the alcoholism and breakdown which marred his first career in journalism. He was doing newspaper jobs which hardly seem very demanding to him now, but which then he could not do. He cracked – and only gradually came back.

He still remembers the place where he was driving on 12 May 1994 when he heard the news that the Labour leader, John Smith, was dead. He says he knew then, on that junction of spirals where Paddington Station meets the peace of the Little Venice canal and the roar of the road to Oxford, that Tony Blair would be leader. He also knew that he would work for Tony Blair.

Nine years later, he is the man to whom Tony Blair still speaks the most. It is when the two are alone together that the Prime Minister’s face is most the face of a friend at a party, an actor offstage, a person who is not Prime Minister. Campbell has a well-founded reputation for low stratagems on his master’s behalf, but he is the one who dares speak most fiercely and directly to Tony Blair. He speaks directly too about himself, more than he has before; more about his mental and physical preparation for the marathon, more about his past mental and physical collapse.

Campbell’s own confidant in Downing Street is also running now. Pat MacFadden is a thin-faced, vulpine political strategist who looks like an ‘enforcer’s enforcer’, the sort of assistant who might clean out the nastier places where Glasgow Celtic football fans meet Glasgow City Councillors. In the striped Regency corridors of Number Ten he is recognised as one of the most thoughtful men in the building.

When he and Campbell sit together it is like watching two copper wires before the electricity crackles across the air. No reputation is safe from being scorched. But now they are running together, Campbell first, MacFadden behind, like a couple of greyhounds.

There are suddenly shouts from the green-shirted builders in the basement. The ‘Sainsbury’s To You’ van has arrived and is strewing the hall with Coca-Cola and frozen meals. There is a faint sense of an emergency ward where the patient is puffing his way out.

Only Gordon Brown and John Prescott are still the stately galleons of the corridors. Whatever is happening does not seem to be any business of theirs.

The patient is fine. But Tony Blair’s travel plans, it seems, are being made, unmade and made again – even as his groceries arrive. There was a possibility that George Bush might come to Downing Street for a pre-war summit. But there were snags. Security was a problem. Protesters were a huge problem. Politics was an even bigger problem; nothing would make Labour MPs more likely to oppose Tony Blair than the presence of his friend from America.

Barbados was a possibility too. But the summit is to be in the Azores, the Portuguese islands in the middle of the Atlantic. As long as war is not formally declared from their soil, the Portuguese are apparently happy to be host.

The Spanish Prime Minister, José Maria Aznar, who has become one of the most frequent and trusted telephone-callers to the den, will be there too. Tony Blair says the name ‘José Maria’ with almost the same affection as he says ‘Sally’ or ‘Alastair’. Some of his friends find this attraction to a man of the European right as hard to endure as the closeness to George Bush. The two men have grown used to swapping stories of how weak their domestic support is. Aznar’s was once at 4 per cent. ‘Crikey, that’s even less than the number who think Elvis Presley is still alive,’ Tony Blair told his friend. ‘Crikey’ is a typical Blair expletive, a bit dated, a bit comic, designed to avoid trouble.

The Azores announcement brings the added bonus of angering the French. Jacques Chirac loves summits and is known to place Spaniards and Portuguese among the lower zones of European life, at least until the ‘old EU’ is augmented by Baltics and Poles, whom the French esteem even less. There is general satisfaction, as the various arrangements are made for Prime Minister, team members and press, at how the news will be received in Paris.

The policeman at the door asks the Sainsbury’s man whether ‘all this stuff has to be signed for’. The white plastic bags stretch now in a double row from the front window almost up to the portrait of Sir Robert Walpole on the opposite wall. ‘No,’ says the driver. ‘We know where you are. You’re not going anywhere.’ That is one vote of confidence.

On the hall table to the left is a mosaic of mobile phones. The rules of the house say that no alien phone can pass this point. Each has to be switched off, named with a yellow sticker and left on this table. There are always a few of these modern-world electronic pets here, waiting patiently for their owners to return. Today there is a major exhibition, a dog-show of phones.

By early afternoon, calm has returned. In the Campbell zone there are calls to journalists who may want to join the Azores day-trip.

MacFadden, still powered as though by wires beneath the skin of his neck, is pressing buttons within the Labour machine that might make an MP think twice before voting against the leader. He is preparing moral arguments, political arguments, and identifying those who are beyond argument. These may soon need the attention of the ‘big boys’, a serious call from one of ‘the Johns’, Reid and Prescott.

The best news for persuaders today is that President Bush has agreed to publish the so-called ‘road map’ to Middle East peace. Labour MPs want to know that the President’s concern for regional stability and the upholding of UN resolutions extends to Israel as well as Iraq. To adapt a Blair catchphrase, if he is to be ‘tough on terrorism’, they also want him to be ‘tough on the causes of terrorism’.

The most important phone-call today is about to be put through to the den. The Prime Minister is at his desk, a large, hopeful picture of Nelson Mandela to his left, a white mug marked ‘Daddy’ straight ahead and, next to it, one of Whitehall’s most overworked handsets.

The ringing does not come from the place where it is expected. An unused, finger-marked extension pushed into the far corner of the room beneath Leo’s birthday plate begins to beep instead. It is as though a small animal has escaped. There is cursing and scrabbling until the right phone is ready for use.

‘Hello, Mr Chairman. It’s Tony Blair here.’

The Prime Minister leans forward in front of the backdrop of high blue leather doors. It is a bad line from the West Bank for such a conversation.

‘It’s good to speak to you. And how are you?’ Tony Blair nods as though neck movement might force the words through the noise.

He looks much stronger today. If the Palestinian leader were to ask in return ‘How are you, Mr Blair?’ he could receive an honest ‘Better, thank you’ in reply. The cold has subsided. Any last traces of his panda look are hidden under full make-up for his next event, a televised press conference to promote the ‘road map’ announcement to journalists from the Middle East.

‘We’ve got to take this forward, Mr Chairman.’ There is a gentle pleading in the Prime Minister’s voice.

The ‘this’ is the map, the direction s to a hypothetical place in 2005 where there will be two peaceful states. The lines have been drawn in Washington, Moscow, Brussels and at the UN. In Jerusalem it is not much liked. In the West Bank it is not much trusted. President Bush has announced a few minutes ago that he will publish it as soon as Yasser Arafat has handed effective power to Abu Mazen, the new Palestinian Prime Minister.

Whatever Arafat says is overheard by an intent Jonathan Powell through his earpiece outside. This is a short call, but one which could easily go wrong.

George Bush will not talk to Arafat. The man with his elbows hard against the Downing Street desk has to do reassurance for two. After a few minutes the receiver at the other end is handed to Abu Mazen, the symbolic shift, as Tony Blair hopes it will be.

‘Congratulations,’ he says to Abu Mazen, relaxing visibly now that he is working the phone with a man he can do business with instead of an awkward legend. He looks out of the window. There is sun on the lawn, and a gardener pushing idly at a moss-covered trampoline.

Tony Blair’s aim is to ensure that the road map is not torn up on the Gaza Strip before it is even seen. ‘You have heard what Mr Bush has said. We will do all we can to bring this to a successful conclusion.’

There is a pause, and unwanted sounds.

‘I know, I know,’ he says impatiently when Arafat returns to the line. He sighs and looks hard ahead. ‘What President Bush has said is that he will send it to Abu Mazen. The sooner the better.’

‘Yes, Mr Chairman, this is precisely to end the suffering of the Palestinian people.’

He rubs the side of his face, where the make-up is irritating him. He listens for several minutes more. ‘We will do what we can. Thank you, Mr Chairman.’ He puts the phone back on its cradle and notices a stain on his tie.

‘Get Alastair,’ he calls to the office outside. ‘And get some more ties from the flat.’

The room is suddenly full of identical shirts all bent over the text of the press conference statement. The backs of Jonathan Powell, Peter Hyman, a speechwriter with a livid bruise on his neck, and Matthew Rycroft, the permanently amused Private Secretary from the zone of the diplomatic knights, make up a waving flag of mid-blue.

Campbell arrives, and a fevered argument ensues about the order of paragraphs and the time that is required for them to be printed out in big enough type. The Prime Minister needs reading glasses, but does not like to wear them on television.

Campbell leaves. There is then a more muted discussion about whether there is anything genuinely new in the Bush statement on the road map. ‘It’s the fact that he’s said it that is new,’ says a voice from one part of the blue wave. ‘The President is there. He has spoken. We know from Northern Ireland that the momentum of progress, whatever the size of the moves, is everything.’

Campbell returns with a memo in his hand and a thin smile. ‘Sorry,’ he says, ‘President Bush doesn’t like your script. He’s rewriting it now.’

Tony Blair scowls. ‘One day your sense of humour will get you into big trouble. Or, more important, me into big trouble. Now, where was I?

‘This is not a one-off gesture,’ says another voice from the mêlée.

‘That’s right,’ says the Prime Minister. ‘That’s what I’ll say. Where are the ties?’

A great skein of pink and blue silk neckwear is brought into the den. Tony Blair selects one, checks himself in the mirror and goes to face the cameras.

Thirty minutes later he is walking by the flat-screen in front of Powell’s desk. The press conference is over. He has managed to turn most questions to the Middle East and away from Iraq. The road to a Palestinian state may be long. But, more than ever now, he sees it as the necessary route to reassuring his own MPs in the war vote which will be held next Tuesday.

Tony Blair is keen to know whether the Azores or the road map is going to be the main story on the evening bulletins. His aides, like all political aides, like to give their boss good news. But a ‘War Council’ in the middle of the Atlantic will have stronger appeal, says Hyman bluntly, his purple bruise almost glowing now above his collar.

The Prime Minister looks disappointed. He looks up at the television, on which a Palestinian representative is damning Bush’s motives.

‘They’ve got to be told, Jonathan,’ he says. ‘This is their chance. If they don’t use it, they’ll lose it.’ He turns into the den by himself and closes the door.

Saturday, 15 March

Morning headlines … emergency summit in Azores … Bush to publish Middle East ‘road map’… Washington rejects Chilean compromise … US commanders say Iraqi forces in civilian area will be targets …

When the Prime Minister spends the weekend in Downing Street there is not much ‘weekend’ in Downing Street. There is blue sky over St James’s Park and a sense of bright weather ahead. Upstairs in the flat two teenage Blairs, seventeen-year-old Nicholas and fifteen-year-old Kathryn, are preparing for a London day.

Inside the dark front hall of Number Ten there are four dead orchids, ready to be collected by the garbage-men, and the first signs of a conference for political ‘enforcers’.

Hilary Armstrong, Labour Chief Whip since Tony Blair’s second election victory two years ago, has abandoned her grandmotherly office grey for a soft cream leather jacket. John Reid is in leather too, harder and black. Gordon Brown is wearing a black-and-white rugby shirt. Sally Morgan is in a blue sweater. Only two are dressed for work as they would be on a weekday morning: Alastair Campbell is in his tracksuit and marathon trainers, and John Prescott in his regular stiff suit.

‘The next few days will be very twittery,’ says Armstrong, leaning on the burgundy Chesterfield where the Campbell corridor meets the hall. She wants to put ‘weekend pressure’ on dissident Members of Parliament when they are meeting their constituents.

Here at Westminster political revolts are likely to gain momentum. Each new meeting in committee room or bar gives rebels the confidence that they are not alone. Once ‘wobblers’ are back at home, local Labour leaders, chairmen of constituency parties, may remind them why they were elected in the first place, why, without Tony Blair, there would not be a Labour government. ‘So, if John Reid were to call some of these Constituency Chairmen, he could make that point …’

Armstrong is expressing the conventional Whips’ Office wisdom. ‘In the bad old days,’ she says chattily, ‘when a “Big Boy” phoned your Chairman it made a big difference. We have to fix that up now.’

Reid is not so sure. This is not a conventional case. The Labour activists are more angry with the government than the Members of Parliament are. He worries that the Constituency Chairmen are likely to be the most opposed to the war of all. He does not want to phone a Chairman ‘behind an MP’s back’. He will help, but ‘only if it’s not going to be counterproductive’.

‘Have you seen Jack Straw?’ Armstrong asks coolly. The Foreign Secretary has problems in his own constituency this weekend. Muslim voters are well represented in Blackburn, Lancashire. They dislike the idea of their elected representative helping the American takeover of a Muslim country.

The Whips are not so enthusiastic about Jack Straw either. Much of their political problem arises from the government’s earlier excessive confidence that there would be an unambiguous second United Nations resolution giving an ultimatum to Saddam Hussein. Doubting Labour Members were allowed, even encouraged, to tell their Chairmen and their local press that they would support the Prime Minister’ s policy once that resolution was passed. Now any such clear UN support is a dream.

The meeting begins in a dark Number Eleven reception room with Armstrong’s latest account of ‘wobblers and runners’. She speaks with a flat northern voice which is her main weapon of threat. The friendliness and humour, the weapons of the cajoling Whip, are all in the lines around her eyes.

Tony Blair is seated in a large gilt chair which the Treasury uses to impress foreign bankers. He looks slight, in open-necked blue shirt and chino trousers. On either side of him, like a Praetorian guard, are Prescott, cold and frowning on the left, and Brown, who has now exchanged his rugby kit for a dark suit, on the right.

Morgan is more cheerful about the anguishing MPs. ‘They haven’t seen the abyss yet. When they’ve seen it, they will come back from it.’

There is a quiet moment while they review the latest security reports from Iraq. Some of the Baghdad government is resigned to war; there is a certain amount of ‘summary punishment’ being meted out to dissenters. The Chief Whip concentrates hard.

Gordon Brown, sitting judge-like on his Chancellor’s bench, is the only figure from the war team who can highlight the chief flaw in the policy as it is seen from the streets. ‘What people ask me is, why is there not just a little more delay?’

The Prime Minister knows that this is a legitimate question. This afternoon he must have a last telephone call with the most active of the junior UN Security Council members, Chilean President Ricardo Lagos, who has been making exactly that argument.

The right answer to the Chancellor of the Exchequer and his questioners is that George Bush has had enough of the United Nations, and will begin war within days. Tony Blair snaps impatiently at the meeting, ‘The reason is that you just go back to 1441: time, time and more time.’ It is clear from Gordon Brown’s eyes that better language than that needs to be found if the case is to be won.

The number 1441, shorthand for the resolution against Saddam Hussein which the Security Council agreed but did not want to act upon, is one of many bits of war jargon which are not easily understood by outsiders. If Ministers could say that the war was being fought because of intolerable abuse of human rights, because of torture, mass murder, even some of the casual last-minute mutilation of Iraqis on which the meeting has just been briefed, the case would be much easier.

If Ministers were allowed even to rest their case on the need to remove barbarian tyrants, the strategic interdependence of Europe and America for the common good, their words of persuasion might have a better chance of being heard. But the language demanded by the immediate negotiations is of acronyms, paragraphs and numbered resolutions.

Pat MacFadden, in black T-shirt, black shirt and jeans, looks like an accused man in court making pages of notes for his own defence. He is working on what the better language might be. The veins on his forehead do not suggest that his task is going well.

The Attorney General, the meeting is told, will announce on Monday that war against Iraq is legal on the basis of past UN resolutions. The Sunday newspapers can be told that for tomorrow. There is thus no need for the new Second Resolution upon which so much has been built.

The legal niceties defeat all but the most determined political students. Cherie Blair would be more use on this point than anyone in the room, except that she might well not come to the right conclusion. One of her senior colleagues has already determined that past UN resolutions give no legality for war.

Fortunately the Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, who is not here today, thinks otherwise. If he did not judge the coming war to be legal there would be no British troops fighting it. There will still, however, be a lot of explaining to do. Last week the second UN resolution was a magic chemical formula to clear away all ills. This week it is a bit of herbal medicine, desirable, beneficial, good for the soul, but wholly unnecessary.

Morgan tells her boss that his arrival time back home from the Azores is 2 a.m. on Monday.

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