The Prime Minister dismissed yesterday the significance of Alastair Campbell’s account of life inside Downing Street. Insisting that “the past is the past”, Gordon Brown said that he would not be reading the diaries — and would be too busy running the country to keep a diary.
Dismissing the importance of gossip and rumour, Mr Brown said: “I am not going to get too excited about diaries. I really don’t think that’s the issue.”
Asked if he thought that it was right for someone in Mr Campbell’s position to publish such an account, Mr Brown said that he did not “really know why it’s been done”.
Tony Blair’s former director of communications justified yesterday his decision to publish his memoirs, which include the revelation that the former Prime Minister considered saying that he was quitting in July 2002.
Mr Campbell acknowledged that many of his former colleagues opposed memoirs. He also accepted that he had originally said that his would not be published while Labour were in office. “There is a view that, actually, you shouldn’t keep a diary, and if you do keep a diary you certainly shouldn’t write a book,” he said. “That’s a perfectly legitimate view.”
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He said that it would be a different matter “if I was coming along having had a decade working for Tony Blair and saying, ‘Right, there was me, that was my job saying what a great guy he is and I am now producing a book saying actually I don’t think that at all, I thought it was all terrible’. It’s not that sort of book. It is an attempt to say to people: forget all the stuff you have read and you hear and the rest of it — some of it is accurate and some of it is not; this is my perspective.”
Mr Blair eventually disclosed his intention to stand down in September 2004. But extracts from Mr Campbell’s memoirs, released before today’s publication, show that he was considering quitting two years earlier.
But it is what is being left out that has caused the most controversy. Interviewed yesterday, Mr Campbell said that he had chosen to remove entries that dealt with Mr Brown. “I’m not going to deny there were times when relations were pretty tense and some pretty harsh things were said; they were,” he said. “What I’m not going to do is publish a book that leads David Cameron to think that he’s got a goldmine to use against the new Prime Minister.”
Mr Blair’s plan to announce his departure in 2002 is revealed in the July 11 entry from that year. Mr Campbell wrote: “Philip [Gould] had briefed him on how his trust ratings had really dipped. It was pretty clear to me that he had just about settled his view . . . that he was going to stay for the full term, but not go into the election as leader. The big question was the same as before — does it give him an authority of sorts, or does it erode that authority, and do people just move . . . towards GB [Gordon Brown]?”
It also emerges in the memoirs that Mr Blair was guided by his faith and spoke to “his Maker” before sending troops to war. According to a source who has seen the book, Mr Campbell documents his repeated clashes with Mr Blair over religion. The source told The Sun: “After visiting Dunblane, Campbell confronts Blair over his religious beliefs. Blair replies, ‘Just because the killer is bad does not mean that God is not good’.”
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Other details include accounts of Mr Blair’s conversations with George Bush and Bill Clinton. Mr Clinton telephoned the former Prime Minister in a “total rage” when he suspected that the British Government was briefing against him over Kosovo in 1999. Mr Bush is said to have joked about his reputation as a “crazed unilateralist”.
Mr Brown might not read the diaries but they will be devoured elsewhere in Westminster. Sir Menzies Campbell, the Liberal Democrat leader, who recently stopped the new Prime Minister appointing Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon to his Cabinet, will appreciate Mr Campbell’s account of the first attempt to recruit the former Lib Dem leader.
In an entry from the weeks before Labour secured its 1997 return to power, Mr Campbell wrote: “He stunned me straight out with the boldest plan yet. ‘How would people feel if I gave Paddy a place in the Cabinet and started merger talks?’ F*** me. I loved the boldness of it, but doubted he could get it through the key players. He was making a cup of tea, and chuckling, ‘We could put the Tories out of business for a generation’.”
Mr Campbell also covers the Northern Ireland peace process, noting how Mr Blair asked Sinn Fein leaders at Downing Street “whether they would be able to sign up to a settlement that did not explicitly commit to a united Ireland”. “[Gerry] Adams was OK, but [Martin] McGuinness was not. Adams said the prize of a lasting peace justifies the risks,” he wrote.