Tony Blair clearly expressed his feelings towards Roy Hattersley before a foreseen attack during an education debate in 1995. “He is a fat pompous bugger,” he told David Blunkett, who replied: “You are very wise.”
Alastair Campbell and George Bush compared notes on their recovery from alcoholism while on President Bush’s ranch in Texas in 2005. Campbell says Bush asked him why he wasn’t drinking. When he replied that he was a recovering alcoholic, Bush revealed that he, too, had given up in 1986. “I asked him how much he drank. He said two or three beers a day, a bit of wine, some bourbon,” recalls Campbell. I went through the kind of quantities I was drinking at the end and said they dwarfed his efforts.”
Alan Clark was invited to the Campbells for dinner. “At one point Fiona [Mr Campbell’s partner] mentioned there was a bit of crab in the starter and he went into major melodrama, rushing to the door shouting, ‘Crab, crab, I can’t eat crab’, then throwing up very loudly in the front garden.
Mr Campbell remembers a war cabinet meeting when Clare Short was “rabbiting on more than ever” about the Iraq invasion. Campbell recalls: “I slipped TB a note about the time Saddam shot his health minister because he was annoying him and did he want me to get a gun.” “Yes,” Blair wrote back.
Just after his election the Oasis leader Noel Gallagher was invited to a party at No 10. Tony Blair didn’t trust he wouldn’t do something “crazy” so Campbell called Gallagher’s record company, who reassured him Gallagher wasn’t going to “mess around”. “He said if we had invited Liam, it might have been different.”
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In the runup to the election Tony Blair wrote a piece on his Christian beliefs in a Sunday paper, which was spun in a displeasing way as allying Labour to God. Campbell spoke to Gordon Brown. “GB called and we agreed God was a disaster area,” recalls Campbell.
In July 1995 Mr Blair spoke at a News Corporation event in Australia. His decision to go upset Neil Kinnock, who was already unhappy at the direction Mr Blair was taking. The Kinnocks visited the Campbells on holiday in France and a furious row broke out, with Kinnock at one point picking up “a kettle of newly boiled water which I feared was heading my way”. He accused Mr Blair of selling out on everything “and all that before you go and take your 30 pieces of silver.” When Mr Campbell asked what that meant Mr Kinnock spat out: “Murdoch.” He added: “You tell me how I’m supposed to feel when I see you set off halfway round the world to grease him up.”
Bill Clinton unburdened himself to Mr Campbell over a lunch in the Ritz in July 2003. Urging Mr Campbell to be more understanding over the Blairs’ attachment to Carole Caplin, he said that his own brother had been a cocaine addict. “Clearly talking now about Monica Lewinsky, he said: ‘I wasn’t hungry but I was angry, lonely and tired.’ ”