Robin Cook, the former foreign secretary, is publishing the diary he kept as a cabinet minister while Tony Blair prepared to lead Britain to war in Iraq. In a devastating revelation, the prime minister's real views on Saddam's weapons are exposed.
Wednesday December 19, 2001: Tony has asked me to call for reasons unknown. I pause to polish my shoes — one of the public school traits he retains is compulsive shoe polishing. However, when I arrive I am intercepted by Jonathan Powell, Tony's chief of staff, who explains that the Master is still in his flat. I find Tony sitting with his feet up on the sofa in a tracksuit and barefoot. I try to soften the inappropriate glare from my reflective footwear behind the fabric on the easy chair.
He comes to the point. He will be out of the country from January 2 to 8 and so will John Prescott. Would I take over the shop and be the duty cabinet minister for the period? What is interesting is not that I've been asked but those who have not been asked. The logical person to ask would be Gordon Brown, and it is a weakness of this government that the prime minister would not dream of inviting his chancellor to stand in and wonder what policy announcement may be made in his absence.
Friday January 11, 2002: John Duncan, my constituency assistant, produces an oleaginous letter from The Mail on Sunday You Magazine. For more than two years they have been sending such letters to Gaynor begging for an interview. Gaynor has stuck to a firm rule ever since the first dark days that she does not speak to the press. At first I thought she was mistaken, but now I regard it as immense wisdom on her part. She has preserved her dignity and her privacy throughout all these turbulent years.
Wednesday February 27: I scrambled to catch the Eurostar to a meeting of the Party of European Socialists praesidium and steamed into growing storm clouds for Britain over the Channel. There is particular concern tonight about the possibility that George Bush will take military action against Iraq.
Thursday February 28: I walk over Green Park to the cabinet, troubled by my discussion in Brussels. Before I can raise it, David Blunkett asks if we can have a discussion at an early meeting on Iraq.
I back him up by explaining that military action against Iraq will not be supported in Europe. Nor throughout the Arab world: "In present circumstances Arab governments would not comprehend such obsession with Iraq. They see Sharon, not Saddam, as the problem for the Middle East." Somewhat to my surprise this line provokes a round of "hear hearing" from colleagues, which is the nearest I've heard to a mutiny in the cabinet.
Thursday March 7: A real discussion at cabinet. Tony permitted us to have the debate on Iraq which David and I had asked for. For the first time I can recall in five years, Tony was out on a limb.
David was first over the top. Being now home secretary he cunningly camped on the need for a proper legal authority for any action: "What has changed that suddenly gives us the legal right to take military action that we didn't have a few months ago? Has anybody asked the legal opinion of the attorney-general, and what is he saying?"
Pat Hewitt lamented that we were expected to listen to US worries about Iraq when we could not get them to listen to us before slapping higher tariffs on our steel exports. "We are in danger of being seen as close to President Bush, but without any influence over President Bush."
I am told that in the old days prime ministers would sum up the balance of view in the discussion. This would be simple in the present case as all contributions pointed in one direction. However, Tony does not regard the cabinet as a place for decisions. Normally he avoids having discussions in cabinet until decisions are taken and announced to it.
Tony appeared totally unfazed at the fact that on this occasion the balance of discussion pointed strongly in the reverse direction of his intentions. Rather than attempt to sum up the discussion of this supreme body of collective government, he responded as if he was replying to a question-and-answer session from a party branch.
He was patient with us, but he was firm where he saw Britain's national interests lie: "I tell you that we must steer close to America. If we don't we will lose our influence to shape what they do."
This was the last cabinet meeting at which a large number of ministers spoke up against the war. I have little sympathy with the criticism of Tony that he sidelined the cabinet over Iraq. On the contrary, over the next six months we were to discuss Iraq more than any other topic, but only Clare Short and I ever expressed frank doubts about the trajectory in which we were being driven.
Monday March 25: Among my old contacts in the Foreign Office I cannot find any who can convincingly demonstrate that something dramatic has changed in Iraq in recent months which would produce a justification for military action that was not there a year ago.
Wednesday April 3: Tony came in a few minutes before he had to address the house and sat down beside me. He was about to fly over to the States to see Bush at his private ranch. I took the opportunity to say to him, "I hope you're going to avoid getting boxed in to any commitments to action on Iraq." He looked a bit taken aback and asked me to come and see him after the proceedings.
We went along to his room in the corridor behind the Speaker's chair where he asked me bluntly, "How serious is it?" I replied, "It could be terminal for you if it goes wrong."
Thursday April 11: At cabinet Tony reported in full on his visit. Pat Hewitt spoke up bravely on the importance of UN cover for any military action on Iraq. "There will be a lot of tension among the Muslim communities in Britain if an attack on Iraq is seen as a unilateralist action. They would find it much easier to understand, and we would find it much easier to sell, if there was a specific agreement at the UN on the need for military action."
Tony characteristically refused to be boxed in. He regards the UN process as important but "we should not tie ourselves down to doing nothing unless the UN authorised it". Rather more alarmingly he said, "The time to debate the legal base for our action should be when we take that action."
Thursday April 18: Cabinet was preoccupied with the aftermath of the budget, which Tony described as "a brilliant budget, brilliantly delivered". The press are full of speculation about the tension between Tony and Gordon. Undoubtedly the tension is there, and Tony has reluctantly come to grasp Gordon's undimmed ambition to replace him. But it would be a big mistake to regard their relationship as only one of tension. Tony's admiration of Gordon's political skills is genuine, and there's a strong bond between them which in any other circumstances would border on a mutual psychological dependency.
Wednesday June 26: I am to play substitute at prime minister's questions as Tony is out of the country. I walk across the park to get in training at No 10. The only perk about standing in for the prime minister at question time is that you are allowed the use of his empty office. My preparations are interrupted by the sight of Euan and a friend kicking a ball in the back garden, a charming reminder that the heart of the British government doubles up as a family home.
Contrary to popular myth, Tony is actually very indifferent to what the press say about him and his government, so long as the public say the right things about us.
There is no television in his room and it takes the press office three-quarters of an hour to come up with a transistor radio so that I can hear the news. I am, though, willed to concentrate by an astonishing array of photographs on his desk, of Tony with Cherie, of Tony with his teenagers, of Tony with baby Leo, of Tony with Clinton and assorted other global celebrities. It leaves me feeling rather inadequate at the memory of the modest pair of photographs on my desk — of Gaynor hugging Tasker, one of our dogs, and of Red Rum on the beach where he trained.
Thursday August 15: I stopped off at the local newsagent, and was intrigued to find that the Spectator front page was a cartoon of myself and Clare Short trying to stop Blair in a tank going to war on Iraq. When I buy it, the proprietor looks distastefully at the cartoon and asks, "Do you not mind, Sir, being drawn this way? In some countries they would be sent to gaol for such a cartoon." I explained to him that in this country we don't take journalists that seriously.
Tuesday September 3: Tony gave the second of his new monthly press conferences to the press gallery. He promises "the fullest possible debate" in parliament and emphasises the importance of building broad international support for action at the UN. I am, though, haunted by the fear that Tony still sees this as an issue of manipulating press and public opinion, and has not grasped that on the substance of the issue the public and he are so far apart that he cannot win this one. Over the years, those employed to support him at No 10 have become accustomed to the Blair magic working, and I fear that there are none left among them prepared bluntly to tell him that this time it cannot work.
Wednesday September 4: It is a glorious day and I walk across the park for my meeting at No 10 with Tony. I open up with the recall of parliament. "Recall is inevitable, and the longer we put it off the more grudging we appear and the less credit we will get for it when it happens." To my surprise, Tony readily agrees.
He attaches great importance to the forthcoming dossier, although I fear that the main response will be one of disappointed expectations. He is enthusiastic at Saddam Hussein's being reported as saying that Iraq must get nuclear weapons to pose a threat to the West. Tony added, "Given the poor state of his conventional forces, it is not surprising that he wants to get his hands on nuclear weapons."
This is a curious aside. If Tony himself recognises that Saddam's conventional forces are much weaker than they were before, it is going to be difficult for him to be convincing that Saddam is now a greater threat to his region.
A rational interpretation of the events of the summer of 2002 would be that Tony Blair succeeded in convincing President Bush that they would secure more international and domestic support for an attack on Iraq if the president put the issue before the UN. The gain from this approach was that the US submitted to a UN process. The downside was the implicit guarantee that Britain was committed to join the US military action.
I do not know whether Tony ever made that deal explicit rather than simply implicit. But it would have been consistent with his previous conduct towards Iraq if he had given the US president a private assurance. I have seen a minute of January 1998 to Tony Blair from John Holmes, his then international private secretary, written during the confrontation with Iraq over weapons inspections, which reminded the prime minister that he had already assured President Clinton: "If a resolution were unachievable, there would certainly be support here for further action."
On that occasion Saddam's subsequent refusal to co-operate with the weapons inspectors provoked unanimous condemnation by the security council. Tony Blair may have bargained on history repeating itself five years later, and it certainly would have been in line with his own previous practice if he had given President Bush a private assurance of British support. The subsequent refusal of the UN to provide cover for military action came as a very unwelcome surprise.
Monday September 16: When I was getting ready for bed, I listened to the midnight news and was startled to hear that Kofi Annan had just received a letter from the Iraqis accepting the return of UN weapons inspectors without any conditions. This is quite a climbdown by Saddam. We cannot credibly proceed with a military strike now he has met our key demand.
Tuesday September 17: When I got into the office the first thing I did was to ring Jonathan Powell to express my strong view that we could not simply bat away the latest offer from Saddam. I found Jonathan very receptive to my argument, but there was a catch: "We have to be careful of how our statements will play in Washington, and we therefore should not get too far in front of the Americans."
Later in the day, passing through No 10 on my way to the Cabinet Office, I bumped into Alastair Campbell and again expressed the view that we should not be too grudging in our response. Alastair, as always, was no-nonsense in his reply: "I cannot agree with you. We are playing a long game." Presumably the long game is to contrive an assault on Iraq whatever Saddam does.
Monday September 23: The day of the much-heralded cabinet meeting on the eve of recall. Personally I found it grim. Much of the two hours was taken up with a succession of loyalty oaths for Tony's line. Estelle Morris, though, was frank, even pained in her contribution. She bravely reported that in the opinion of the people she had spoken to, what has changed in the past year to make war imminent is not what has happened in Iraq but the election of George Bush in the United States: "The question we have to answer is, 'Why us?' "
Tuesday September 24: The house was packed for the recall debate, even the front bench. I got a glimpse of the irritation of the war party with my public doubts when Hilary Armstrong, the chief whip, expressed her appreciation that I had lost a stone in weight as we otherwise would not have squeezed in. Adam Ingram, a defence minister, asked how I had done it. "Basically, by starvation," I replied. To which he cheerily responded, "I'm sure many of our colleagues would be only too happy to help you with that."
Jack Straw's speech was refreshing for its extended and powerful emphasis on working through the UN. Afterwards I told him: "You do realise now you are thoroughly impaled on the UN route?" To which he responded with a twinkle: "Yes, I'm glad you noticed that." I suspected that there is some tension behind the scenes between the Foreign Office and Downing Street about the extent to which the UN can be the only route.
This was the parliamentary debate in which the prime minister presented the now notorious dossier on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. I had been familiar with previous secret reporting on Iraq, and when I came to read the dossier I was surprised that there was so little new material in it. There was no new evidence that I could find of a dramatic increase in threat requiring urgent invasion.
Intelligence is supposed to be the evidence on which ministers reach decisions on foreign and defence policy. It is not meant to be the propaganda by which ministers sell a policy to a sceptical public. Nor are intelligence reports suited for the purpose. At the Foreign Office I regularly saw the assessments of the joint intelligence committee (JIC). They would normally arrive in the red box for the weekend and were readily identifiable by their distinctive green covers.
I grew to respect the caution of the Secret Intelligence Service and I would regard it as monstrously unfair to the men and women who serve in the agency if they were now made the fall guys because of the way their work was abused to produce the September dossier.
The dossier did violence to their craft in two ways. First, it painted only a one-sided picture, whereas every JIC assessment I saw would honestly present any contrary evidence that might be inconsistent with the final conclusion. Second, it definitely proclaimed a certitude for its claims that was at odds with the nuanced tone of every JIC assessment I read.
Personally I never doubted that No 10 believed in the threads of intelligence which were woven into the dossier. But that does not alter the awkward fact that the intelligence was wrong and ministers who had applied a sceptical mind could have seen that it was too thin to be a reliable basis for war.
No 10 believed in the intelligence because they desperately wanted it to be true. Their sin was not one of bad faith but of evangelical certainty. They selected for inclusion only the scraps of intelligence that fitted the government's case and gave them an edge that was justifiable. The net result was a gross distortion.
Thursday October 31: At cabinet there was much discussion on the row with France at the European summit, which has prompted Chirac to cancel the forthcoming Franco-British summit. Jack was at his most ironic: "It was an interesting summit and a privilege to be in the room." As he fairly said, "Tony does not do rude."
One reason I rejected the war hysteria that gathered pace in 2002 was that I had seen no credible evidence up to the time I left office as foreign secretary in June 2001 that there was any increase in the threat from Saddam, nor any need for urgent military action to disarm him. When I left the Foreign Office neither I, nor, as far as I am aware, anyone else in the government, imagined that Iraq posed a clear and present danger to Britain's interests. Yet, less than two years later, the same government had concluded that we must immediately invade Iraq to remove just such a danger.
Tuesday December 10: In the evening I called at No 10 to see Tony, who had asked me round for drinks before Christmas. Curiously for a man who is setting out on the Christmas drinks season, Tony had no whisky in his drinks cabinet, but he did produce a good cognac of 1975 vintage. If this is a present from Paris, I can only assume that relations have improved since his rift with Chirac.
I asked him if we will have a referendum on the euro next year, and he replied: "If it is up to me, yes. It is not a decision we can keep putting off. The longer we delay, the greater will be the penalty we will pay."
I offered to make a speech attacking the euro if he thought that would help to bring Gordon round to being more enthusiastic. Tony laughed, "Even the Treasury officials can't find out what's going on over the economic assessment, never mind us here at No 10."
I asked if he had yet seen the ministerial floor of the new Treasury building, and he said he hadn't. "You really ought to go there. It is terribly symbolic. The permanent secretary has a moderate-size desk at one end of the open-plan space, and towering above it is a great enclosed glass bunker which has three times his space and 10 times more privacy from where Ed Balls can keep an eye on the permanent secretary through the glass."
Before I left, I put down a marker on Iraq. Whenever I mentioned military action, he held up a hand with two fingers crossed and interjected: "It may not come to that."
Friday December 20: Both my sons came round to stay with us over the weekend. They are punctilious in making sure that they have two Christmas family experiences, one shared with their father and another with their mother. They have even negotiated a brotherly compact that they give each other two gifts, one placed under the tree of their father and the other under the tree of their mother. They function so well as a family unit that they are a standing rebuke to their dysfunctional parents.
Sunday February 2, 2003: Gaynor's birthday. We spend it driving up and back to Kenilworth for a celebration lunch with her parents. Sally Morgan, Tony's aide, had rung to say that he would like to speak to me in the evening. He wants to brief me on how he got on at Camp David with Bush.
The call comes through when we are stopped at a service station on the M40. Disconcertingly, I find myself talking to the prime minister of Great Britain about the prospects for world peace or war staring through the windscreen at an overflowing litter bin.
He has obviously not had an easy time. He found Bush "hard over" on the problems of getting a second resolution through the UN: "They are afraid of disappearing down the swamps and marshes of the security council process."
Thursday February 6: At cabinet, Jack is beaming with satisfaction about the relative success of Colin Powell's presentation yesterday to the security council, which he attended. However, in a comment which revealed the thin ice on which we are skating, he began with the admission that "Powell's presentation went better than I or Powell expected".
One issue on which we may have already fallen through the ice is on the rather laboured attempts to prove that Saddam and Al-Qaeda are in the same camp despite the mountain of evidence that they heartily loathe each other. Tony, who has made much of trying to merge Saddam and world terrorism in the public mind, half-acknowledged the poverty of evidence when he described it as "a changing picture" with the two thrown together on the principle that "my enemy's enemy is my friend".
There never was a shred of evidence found linking Saddam to Al-Qaeda, despite a desperate hunt for it by the intelligence services of three continents. Foreign Office contacts with Iraqis discovered that they were indignant to be compared with Al-Qaeda whom they regarded as an enemy rather than an ally. These feelings were heartily reciprocated by Al-Qaeda.
However, leaders in both the US and the UK did not let the facts on the ground get in the way of their allegations on the airwaves. Tony Blair, addressing the nation on the eve of the war, warned, "Dictators like Saddam, terrorist groups like Al-Qaeda, threaten the very existence of such a world. That is why I have asked our troops to go into action tonight."
Tony was far too clever to allege that there was a real link between Saddam and Al-Qaeda. But he deliberately crafted a suggestive phrasing which in the minds of many viewers must have created an impression, and was designed to create the impression, that British troops were going to Iraq to fight a threat from Al-Qaeda.
In a powerful speech to the Commons before it voted on war, Tony majored on the risk that weapons of mass destruction in the hands of rogue states and fundamentalist terrorist organisations might come together to pose a unique threat to western security.
What none of us knew at the time was that, only a month before, the prime minister had received an assessment that "there was no intelligence that Iraq had transferred CB materials to Al-Qaida". Even more startlingly the JIC had warned that, "in the event of imminent regime collapse there would be a risk of transfer of such material". We had to wait until the report of the Intelligence and Security Committee six months later before we learnt of these warnings.
Thursday February 13: On the way into cabinet I find David Blunkett seething at the over-the-top reaction of the forces of law and order to the latest security alert at Heathrow. Helen Liddle complains that Pringle's annual fashion launch on Monday is up the spout because every US buyer, including Bloomingdale's, has cancelled after seeing the tanks at Heathrow.
Friday February 14: The news from New York is electrifying. The latest report by Hans Blix registers a lot of progress in co-operation from Iraq, fails to identify any evidence of weapons of mass destruction and expresses confidence that, with time, more progress can be made. Far from being welcome news to Tony, this will be his nightmare come true. The truth is that he does not want the UN inspections to work. He needs them in order to prove that Saddam will not co-operate and that he is therefore justified in going to war as Sancho Panza to George Bush's Don Quixote.
Saturday February 15: Nash designed our residence at Carlton Gardens with a big, sweeping, bold frontage and from its projecting windows we have a commanding view of the Mall. All afternoon I watched thousands walk back and forth to the demonstration against the war in Hyde Park, the biggest demonstration in British history.
Most of them were ordinary people from every walk of life and every age group. Large numbers of them, I suspect, had not voted Labour until Tony Blair became leader and may not now vote Labour again as long as he remains leader. The great irony of his current position is that he is destroying the new base that he almost single-
handedly built for Labour among the new middle classes.
Thursday February 20: I spent the afternoon in private meetings at our flat. An old friend from the Foreign Office called first. He observed that since the Blix report, Jack has been talking even faster than usual, always a sign with him that he knows he is under pressure. I shepherded my friend down the lift, while I myself used the stairs in order that John Scarlett, chairman of the JIC, who had come to brief me, would not see my visitor.
The presentation was impressive in its integrity and shorn of the political slant with which No 10 encumbers any intelligence assessment. My conclusion at the end of an hour is that Saddam probably does not have weapons of mass destruction in the sense of weapons that could be used against large-scale civilian targets.
Friday February 28 – Monday March 3: The weekend was absorbed in moving my mum into a nursing home. The logistical arrangements were frequently interrupted by calls on my mobile from Gordon and Hilary about the date on which we would hold the budget. In the end I finalised the date from the car park of a nursing home. It is to be April 9.
Gordon has helpfully dug up figures to prove that there have been more than 20 April budgets in the past 50 years. This is fine until you discover that this will be only the second one in the past 20 years.
The truth is that Gordon does not want to compete for publicity for his budget with a shooting war in Iraq. I don't blame him at all for what is an entirely rational decision. The problem is that we can't offer that explanation which would only confirm that the chancellor now believes that war is inevitable.
Wednesday March 5: Prime minister's questions was notable for the confidence Tony expressed about getting a second UN resolution. I don't know whether this is calculated bravado to keep Saddam wary, or whether he is in a state of denial.
I saw Tony privately shortly after we left the chamber. I started by observing that he'd gone out on a limb and the first piece of advice that I would offer is that he had to stop climbing further out on it, especially on Friday when Hans Blix presents his next report to the UN. "Britain has got to be seen on-side with Blix." If he needed months, we should be prepared to give him until autumn.
Tony was quite frank that he could not deliver that: "I don't know if I could do that. Left to himself, Bush would have gone to war in January. No, not January, but back in September."
I expressed my concern about the hard-line rightwingers around Bush and warned him that many of them would regard it as a bonus in the present crisis if we were driven from office and replaced by a Conservative government. He laughed and said, "Regime change is for Baghdad. It is not for here."
The most revealing exchange came when we talked about Saddam’s arsenal. I told him, "It's clear from the private briefing I have had that Saddam has no weapons of mass destruction in a sense of weapons that could strike at strategic cities. But he probably does have several thousand battlefield chemical munitions. Do you never worry that he might use them against British troops?"
"Yes, but all the effort he has had to put into concealment makes it difficult for him to assemble them quickly for use."
There were two distinct elements to this exchange that sent me away deeply troubled. The first was that the timetable to war was plainly not driven by the progress of the UN weapons inspections. Tony made no attempt to pretend that what Hans Blix might report would make any difference to the countdown to invasion.
The second troubling element to our conversation was that Tony did not try to argue me out of the view that Saddam did not have real weapons of mass destruction that were designed for strategic use against city populations and capable of being delivered with reliability over long distances. I had now expressed that view to both the chairman of the JIC and to the prime minister and both had assented in it.
At the time I did believe it likely that Saddam had retained a quantity of chemical munitions for tactical use on the battlefield. These did not pose "a real and present danger to Britain" as they were not designed for use against city populations and by definition could only threaten British personnel if we were to deploy them on the battlefield within range of Iraqi artillery.
I had now twice been told that even these chemical shells had been put beyond operational use in response to the pressure from intrusive inspections.
I have no reason to doubt that Tony Blair believed in September 2002 that Saddam really had weapons of mass destruction ready for firing within 45 minutes. What was clear from this conversation was that he did not believe it himself in March this year.
This in turn begs another chain of questions. If No 10 accepted that Saddam had no real weapons of mass destruction which he could credibly deliver against city targets and if they themselves believed he could not reassemble his chemical weapons in a credible timescale for use on the battlefield, just how much of a threat did they really think Saddam represented?
I have long been puzzled that the contentious claims in the September dossier were quietly dropped by ministers as war drew nearer. In the crucial debate on March l8, no minister claimed that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction ready to be fired in 45 minutes, or that he had rebuilt chemical weapons plants, or that he had sought uranium from Niger.
Yet in that debate the government had its back to the wall and outside the chamber the whips were deploying every technique of persuasion available in their armoury. Why did ministers not repeat inside the chamber their strongest lines on the threat from Saddam unless they themselves had come to recognise they were disputed?
They had been given plenty of cause to come to doubt their own claims. The scepticism about the September dossier which has surfaced from within UK intelligence is a pale reflection of the raging controversy in the US. Colin Powell invested four whole days, before his presentation to the security council in March, grilling the CIA on the reliability of the intelligence he was going to deploy. By the end of it he had decided not to use the claim about the Niger connection on uranium and he made no mention of weapons of mass destruction ready for firing in 45 minutes.
Given the intimate relationship between State Department and Foreign Office it is implausible that his cautious scepticism did not become known in London.
The public controversy over the September dossier has focused on whether No 10 really believed in its claims at the time of its publication, and whether all of its claims were sourced in reliable intelligence. There is, though, another and even more disturbing question. Did No 10 still believe in its own claims six months later and how many of those claims had been undermined by subsequent intelligence and analysis?
This leads to the gravest of political questions. The rules of the Commons require ministers to correct the record as soon as they are aware that they may have misled parliament. If the government did come to know that the State Department did not trust the claims in the September dossier and that some of even their own top experts did not believe them, should they not have told parliament before asking the Commons to vote for war on a false prospectus?
Thursday March 6: Tony was surprisingly upbeat about the prospects of getting the six swing votes on the security council behind our latest wheeze of producing a new deadline within which Saddam must comply. He even expressed a hope that Russia might abstain and France might not veto. This was manifestly unrealistic. One of the dimensions of the present crisis that worries me most is that Tony believes so much in his case that he has difficulty recognising that others do not agree with him.
Monday March 10: Clare Short announced that she will resign if there is no second resolution. For good measure, she also describes Tony Blair as "reckless", and repeats it five times. It is a sign of Tony's weak political position not that Clare said these things last night, but that this morning he has not dared to remove her from the government. When Hilary came in I could not resist asking if Tony was going to dismiss Clare and got a brisk response: "No, he's far too busy today." She then added, with a hint of a smile, "Reshuffles take so much time."
I took Gaynor and my son Peter to dinner in Portcullis House. Martin Salter leaned across to tell us that the whips had been asking tonight if Labour MPs would be for or against France. To demonstrate where their prejudices lay on the war, they had set up a game of boules in Portcullis corridors and had been talking loudly to each other in French.
Tuesday March 11: I go along to the Speaker's residence, conscious as I take the lift up to the flat that this may be my last visit as leader. I am frank with Michael Martin about my troubled state of mind. Unusually we shake hands, then I go down in the lift with the sense that I am already on my rounds of my leave-taking.
Thursday March 13: I am not out of the house before Jack Straw calls me to urge me not to resign. I got the impression that he clearly wanted me to stay out of concern for me as a friend.
I saw Tony before cabinet. I found him half amused, half furious, with IDS. He had given IDS a briefing in privy councillor terms and to his dismay IDS had walked straight out of the door and disclosed to camera that the prime minister thought a second resolution now "very unlikely". Since the fiction that Tony still hopes to get a second resolution is central to his strategy for keeping the Labour party in check, it is not welcome news that IDS has told the world that not even Tony believes this.
I began by joking: "I'm getting so many regular checks from colleagues that I'm beginning to think I'm on suicide watch."
I was frank with him that my mind was made up and that I would not mislead him into thinking that he could persuade me to change it. However, I was equally clear that I was not running any other agenda or lending myself to an attack on his leadership: "You have been the most successful Labour leader in my lifetime. I want you to go on being leader and to go on being successful."
His body language visibly softened as his muscles relaxed and he leaned back into his sofa chair. After that he was open, almost philosophical. All that he said confirmed my impression that he is mystified as to quite how he got into such a hole and baffled as to whether there is any way out other than persisting in the strategy that has created his present difficulties.
He told me that he was going to call a special cabinet meeting when the process in the UN was complete, and I promised that I would make no public move while he was still working for a result in the UN.
After me he was seeing Clare, which had the effect of delaying cabinet for 15 minutes. When we began, Gordon launched a long and passionate statement of support for Tony's strategy. The contribution was rather marred by an outspoken attack on France: "The message that must go out from this cabinet is that we pin the blame on France for its isolated refusal to agree in the security council."
Friday March 14: The papers are full of prominent reports that I had "put down a marker" on my position at yesterday's cabinet. I take the bull by the horns and ring Alastair (Campbell) to suggest that I come round to discuss a joint strategy for handling the media that minimises the damage to the party.
Alastair occupies a pleasant and airy corner room with windows in two directions to Horse Guards Parade. Sally Morgan is already with him. I explained to them that my mind was made up, but I was willing to discuss how we handle my departure with as civilised a form as we could agree. Alastair suggested that we agree the text of my letter of resignation and Tony's letter of acceptance, and that we negotiate a tone that is regretful but warm rather than bitter and hostile.
He told me that Tony would be travelling to the Azores on Sunday to meet Bush and made no bones about the fact that this was to seal the plans for war next week. When I expressed surprise at the Azores, Alastair told me that "Bush wanted to come to London, but we had to talk him out of that". The idea of Bush arriving in London right now must have appalled No 10.
In the course of the day I pick up from my contacts that the Foreign Office are equally depressed. In some ways they have more right to be frustrated, as they have several times tried to warn No 10 of the dangers of Tony's strategy. Apparently Jack Straw wrote last summer warning the prime minister that we could end up in a diplomatic stalemate.
Monday March 17: I began the day by ringing Michael Martin to warn him that I would want to make a personal statement on my resignation. After that I contacted Frank Dobson and Chris Smith, who have been good friends and allies over the years, and asked them to sit with me when I made my first speech from the back benches for 20 years.
Tony had asked to see me before the special cabinet in the afternoon. It was a very civilised affair. He had given up on trying to talk me out of resignation. Anyway I had come armed with the final edition of my resignation letter signed and sealed. I, in my turn, had given up on trying to talk him out of going to war.
I got the impression that he was a man who was genuinely puzzled as to how he had got into his present dilemma. I suspect he had never expected to find himself ordering British troops into war without UN backing. The root problem of the past year has been that Tony was so convinced of the case against Saddam that he never doubted that the rest of the world would come to see it his way and had therefore left himself no other way out.
I had long ago decided against "doing a Heseltine" and walking out of the cabinet to announce my resignation straight to camera. I was a parliamentarian and I wanted the first statement of my resignation to be to the Commons. If I walked out of that door before the cabinet meeting even started I might as well have worn a placard saying that I had resigned.
Instead I walked along to the press wing and called on Alastair for the last time. Together we arranged for one of his assistants to let me out down the back stairs and for my driver to be waiting by the side door.
All that was left now was to get my resignation speech in ready order. But that was not difficult. This was a speech that had been brewing inside me for two months. I was only glad that at last I could speak honestly.
Was Thatcher's Falklands triumph a formative influence?
I believe Tony genuinely expected that delivering victory in Baghdad would wipe the slate clean on the political controversy over whether the war was justified. Perhaps his own political experience had led him to assume that victory would be all.
I met Tony Blair for the first time in 1982 at the Beaconsfield by-election, where he was our candidate. I had been sent down by party headquarters to support him at a press conference on the disastrous state of the economy. What was more obvious on the day was the disastrous state of Labour campaigning. The press conference was a positive parody of Labour before Mandelson.
Tony and I sat behind a trestle table in a largely empty hall. An optimistic party official had laid out neat rows of about 30 plastic chairs which contained two visibly bored local journalists.
Labour was never going to win Beaconsfield in any year of the last century and certainly not in the very month that Margaret Thatcher had liberated the Falklands.
Afterwards I dropped Tony a note consoling him with the thought that in the circumstances Labour could not have won even with Rear Admiral Woodward as our candidate.
I have often wondered in recent years whether that formative experience of being turned over at the polls by a governing party led by a war hero has not left Tony Blair too inclined to associate military victory with political popularity.
Why Blair, the Clinton buddy, gets on so well with Bush
Sometimes old friends in the Democratic party ask me why Tony gets on so well with George Bush. They remember how good was the relationship with Bill Clinton and cannot understand how it is possible to achieve the same kind of rapport with someone like Bush, who has such flatly opposite politics. It is not quite the same as it was with Bill, although Tony does talk with genuine warmth of his new friend. They have religion in common and, as President Bush famously revealed, they share the same brand in toothpaste.
The real mortar in the relationship is power. It would never occur to Tony Blair that there might be more respect for a prime minister who had the courage to say no to someone as powerful as the president of the US. He is programmed to respect power, not to rebel against it. I do not doubt that Tony Blair genuinely believed the world would be better without Saddam. I am certain that the real reason he went to war was that he found it easier to resist the public opinion of Britain than the request of the US president.
When Bush Jr won the election Tony Blair repeatedly expressed his worry to me that the Conservative strategy would be to claim that Labour could not work with a Republican in the White House. And indeed at one point we did have to deploy our Washington embassy to impress on Donald Rumsfeld (newly appointed defence secretary) that he could not receive Iain Duncan Smith, who was then the opposition defence spokesman, before he met Geoff Hoon, who was his official opposite number. In the event Bush was to prove so unpopular with the British public that close association with him ironically has turned out to be a major liability to Tony. In retrospect letting IDS be photographed first with Rumsfeld might have been the smart move.
Brown's tragedy
On a cabinet away-day at Chequers last year I focused on the risk of us being perceived as an elite. "Every time Gordon has to address a conference of businessmen, overweight and in suits, or Tony has to attend an international summit in some five-star luxury resort, we convey the visual image of ourselves as part of an elite, not part of the people."
I then apologised in advance in case what I was about to say would offend Gordon, who looked suitably glowering and ready for a fight. "The truth is Gordon is outstandingly and clearly the most redistributionist Labour chancellor in history. He has taken millions of children and pensioners out of poverty. Yet the paradox is that when I talk proudly of what we've done for the poor, inside I feel vaguely uneasy as if I've somehow gone off message."
When I was finished Gordon gave a beaming smile and said: "Thank you very much." Part of Gordon's tragedy is that he is an old believer in redistribution but stuck within a Blairite ideology which only allows him to do it by stealth.
Extracted from The Point of Departure by Robin Cook to be published by Simon & Schuster on October 20 at £20.
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