by Chris Mullin
‘Let’s have a straw poll,’ said Jack. ‘What do you think, Chris?’ Oh dear, I hadn’t given the subject a moment’s thought one way or the other, but I couldn’t admit that so I said, ‘I agree with Mike and Liz,’ and regretted the words as soon as they were out of my mouth. Denis said a referendum would split the party. Ed Owen, one of Jack Straw’s special advisers, said we would look hopelessly weak if we reversed our position. Jim Murphy said backing down would get us nowhere; we must stand firm and take our medicine in the Euro elections. Jack then explained the practicalities and it became clear in a blinding flash that a referendum wasn’t a serious option. By my reckoning Jack used the f-word at least half a dozen times during the course of our lunchtime discussion. I remarked on this to Mike O’Brien as we walked back across the park. He replied, ‘Blair swears a lot in private, too. Or at least he did when I was in his Home Affairs team.’
Tuesday, 30 March
A terrible moment at this morning’s briefing. HM Consul in Bucharest has been suspended following the discovery that he has been leaking official documents to David Davis and a huge feeding frenzy has broken out following the publication of extracts in the press. Out of the blue Jack asked, ‘Would Chris like to take us through the sequence of events?’ Once again I was caught completely off balance. I had been informed about the suspension on the train coming back from Cheltenham last Thursday and immediately asked Tom to inform Jack’s office, which he did. I also asked for the leaked papers, but as of first thing this morning they hadn’t arrived. Jack, seeing my discomfort, took up the story himself. He, needless to say, had obtained the papers. Or some of them. He produced a memorandum dated April 2002 in which the suspended consul had complained at length about the visa scams being worked by migrant Romanians. The consul has apparently been complaining for two years, to no effect. Fortunately it is a Home Office document. There is no sign that he complained to us. Nor is there (thus far) evidence that his complaint reached Home Office ministers. Certainly he never received a response to that or many other complaints that he claims to have registered. It is a shocking story. A big row is brewing and I have failed to rise to the occasion.
Wednesday, 7 April
To St Margaret’s, Westminster, for the memorial service for Rwanda. I sat in the front row, next to Linda Chalker and the Ambassador; a sprinkling of bigwigs attended, including Betty Boothroyd and Geoffrey Howe. A moving service – poems, songs, a parade of Rwandan children with lighted candles; the number of dead were read out province by province. There was a lot of ‘never again’ talk, but (I thought to myself) it is happening again. In Darfur. Now. At this very moment. And what are we doing? What can we do? There is not a hope in hell of sending troops. They are tied up in Iraq, Afghanistan, Kosovo and in any case the Sudanese are never going to allow in foreigners, even aid agencies are being denied access. I keep trying to be optimistic about Africa, but even where progress has been made – Sierra Leone, Liberia, Burundi, the Congo – it is fragile. And even the good guys – Kagame, Meles, Museveni – have their down side.
Good Friday, 9 April
Sunderland
With the family to Mount Grace Priory. We picnicked among the daffodils and then walked up through the woods to Osmotherley.
In Iraq the Lords of Chaos reign. Every night our television screens are filled with images of hooded gunmen rampaging at will; dancing, screaming, hysterical, arm-waving youths celebrating some
new atrocity, columns of thick black smoke rising from ambushed oil tankers. Can there be anybody left – up to and including The Man himself – who doesn’t recognise the Iraqi enterprise for what it is: a catastrophic misjudgement?
Easter Sunday, 11 April
With Mum to see the children swimming. Gently, I am trying to persuade her that she needs to consider moving to sheltered accommodation. Thus far I have been firmly rebuffed. Today’s exchanges included the following: ‘Sooner or later you will have another accident.’
‘Someone will find me.’
‘They may not.’
‘There comes a time when you have to make room for others.’
Monday, 19 April
At the ministerial lunch in the Map Room the talk was all of The Man’s sudden U-turn over an EU referendum. According to the papers, Jack and Gordon were the main persuaders. Jack ran through the reasons: ‘One, which we are not making in public, is the parliamentary timetable. If the constitution had been ratified we could have got it out of the way before the election but, given that we can’t, discipline on our side would not hold, the Lords would amend the Bill and we would be in for months of attrition, à la the Tories and Maastricht.’
He added, ‘The killer argument is that we’ve made rather an art form over referenda and so we are hoist on our own petard.’
‘Yes,’ said Bill Rammell, ‘but which reason are we to make public?’
‘That we’ve listened and changed our mind,’ replied Jack disarmingly. ‘If you see a bloody great mallet coming down on your head, the best thing to do is get out of the way.’
I said, ‘The other day you made a pretty plausible case for not holding a referendum. When did you change your mind?’
‘I was keeping my cards close to my chest.’
Outside in the corridor he whispered, ‘About 18 months ago. I had to argue it out with Tony, who thought we could get it through.
We had hoped we could talk the Lib Dems round, but we couldn’t.’
Later, to a crowded meeting of the parliamentary party addressed by The Man, who was on sparkling form – fluent, relaxed, amusing, not a piece of paper in sight. Afterwards, supper with Jean Corston. Had she ever heard The Man say anything that might imply regret over Iraq? ‘Not a word.’ She recounted that her hairdresser had this morning remarked that he thought Tony Blair was a very good bloke, but added ominously, ‘His problem is that he is now a war criminal.’
Wednesday, 21 April
This morning’s press is full of The Man’s U-turn, which, it turns out, was not even discussed with the Cabinet. All those who were demanding a referendum are now castigating him for weakness in conceding to their demands. Actually, it’s a masterstroke. It gets us off the hook until both the Euro elections and the general election are out of the way and may never even be necessary if other countries kibosh the constitution before we do. Well worth a couple of days of pain. No wonder the Tories and their friends are apoplectic.
Jack, who makes little effort to conceal his Euro-scepticism, was amusing on the subject regarding the proposed constitution at this morning’s meeting. ‘It’s a fucking conceit. Full of all kinds of crap … As ye sow, so shall ye reap …’ And so on.
Another huge atrocity in Iraq. This time in Basra, our territory. Three car bombs have exploded, outside two police stations and a police academy. Among the dead two bus loads of children on their way to school.
Friday, 23 April
Sunderland
Today I did something worthwhile. I rescued a young woman from southern Sudan, an asylum seeker, due to be deported with her one-year-old son to where she faced a life of destitution, not to mention the fact that the minimum penalty for single motherhood in Sudan is 100 lashes. Now in her early thirties, she had led a life of unspeakable misery. When she was ten Arab bandits had burned her village, killing her parents; to this day she has no idea if any of her four brothers and sister survived. She then spent years slaving for an Arab family from whom she eventually fled, ending up in a refugee camp in Kenya, where again she was brutally mistreated and raped. Somehow or other she found her way to Heathrow wearing only the clothes she stood up in, from where she was dispersed to Sunderland. Her claim for asylum was rejected, as was her appeal (even though the adjudicator accepted that she and her child faced destitution). Two weeks ago she received notice that removal was imminent. I rang, wrote and faxed the Home Office; I put a letter personally into Bev Hughes’s hands; when Bev resigned at the beginning of April, I started again with Des Browne. Today, out
of the blue, a fax arrived saying that Des had granted indefinite leave on compassionate grounds. This afternoon she came to the office and I put it into her hands. From this day on her life, and that of her child, will be changed irrevocably and I have the satisfaction of knowing that, for once, I have made a difference.
Monday, 26 April
Supper in the Tea Room with Alan Milburn, who says, ‘Tony must reassert his authority.’ How? Not by sacking Gordon, surely? ‘No but he can have a cull of Gordon’s friends. A noticeably Blairite manifesto would send the right signal, too.’
Tuesday, 27 April
The main subject of discussion at this morning’s ministerial meeting was the news that 52 retired senior diplomats have signed an open letter denouncing the government’s Middle East policy. Denis Mac-Shane was disparaging, insisting that he had never heard of most of them. Michael Williams muttered something about ‘supporters of a Middle East policy which had achieved nothing in 40 years’. Only Liz Symons conceded there was a problem: ‘There is a lot of criticism in the Lords about our subservience to the Americans.’ Jack came down firmly on Liz’s side: ‘We must address their arguments. There are some sacred totems around which we shall have to navigate.’
In the evening, to the Hilton in Park Lane for a huge Labour fundraising do. It was at this event, ten years ago almost to the day, that John Smith made his final speech. Someone on my table who had been there remembered that John had kept glancing at Gordon for reassurance. Cherie and The Man were in attendance. Every mention of His name was greeted by warm applause. The star of the show was Alastair Campbell, who treated us to some hilarious extracts from his road show. On the way out I came across Charlie Falconer and Patricia Hewitt fulminating about The Man’s EU referendum U-turn. Charlie said, ‘I had assumed I was one of about one and a half people who didn’t know, but it turned out that most of us didn’t.’
Wednesday, 28 April
A huge thunderstorm last night washed most of the blossom from the trees. I went to see Dad, who is now in Gay Bowers nursing home. He looks better than he has done for months – calm, cheerful, slightly fuller in the face, generally compos mentis. He lies all day in a bare room, with very little stimulus. No meals, not even a cup of water – the sign behind his bed still says firmly ‘Nil by Mouth’ – to break the monotony.
Tea in the House of Lords with Daphne Park and her nephew, a dispossessed white Zimbabwean farmer who seemed remarkably lacking in bitterness considering the scale of his losses. Daphne, now in her eighties, spent years representing the SIS behind the lines in Hanoi, Ulan Bator, Kinshasa. She told a story about a visit from a member of the Vietnamese politburo who turned up out of the blue early one morning and spent six hours chatting frankly on her verandah. ‘We have agents in every ministry and every village in the south,’ he had boasted.
‘In that case,’ inquired Daphne, ‘why do you find it necessary to hang village headmen?’
‘Because we are Leninists and Lenin believed in revolutionary terror.’
One nice story from Peking in 1970. She was staying at our embassy on R & R from Mongolia. It was in the days, just after the Cultural Revolution, when tipping was absolutely forbidden, but she wanted to offer a token of appreciation to the staff for having looked after her so well so she asked the Ambassador, John Addis, if he thought they might each be persuaded to accept a gift of a miniature flowering tree that she had seen on sale in the market. Addis duly summoned his chief steward, who did not reject the suggestion out of hand, but said gravely that he would need to take soundings. In due course he reported back that the flowering trees would be acceptable, but on one condition. Which was? ‘That the size of each tree reflects the status of the recipient.’ So off she went to the market and bought 13 trees ranging in size from a tall one for the major domo down to one barely a foot high for the lowly garden boy.
Tuesday, 4 May
At the morning ministerial meeting someone remarked that there was a good chance that the Mirror’s photographs purporting to show British soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners were forgeries, in which case Piers Morgan would be in trouble.
‘Keep lighting candles,’ said Jack.
Rang Mum. The experiment in independent living has failed. Liz was helping Mum to pack. ‘I’m going back to Brewster House. For good,’ she said. It was like one of those sad Alan Bennett stories, ‘A Cream Cracker under the Settee’ or ‘Soldiering On’, that she used to like so much. As always, Mum put on a brave face, but I could tell she is deeply upset. She has lived at Manor Drive for 49 years and today is the last day. For the umpteenth time I assured her that if Brewster House doesn’t work out, she can come to live with us, but she keeps saying that she doesn’t want to be a burden.
Monday, 10 May
Jack was absent from the ministerial lunch. Bill Rammell presided. ‘I don’t know what others think, but on the doorsteps I get the impression that it’s alright,’ he said. It rapidly became clear that Bill was the only person present who thought so. Phyllis Starkey said, ‘The Iraq torture allegations are dragging us down. We are being blamed for the behaviour of American troops. We need to put some distance between them and us.’
Eric Joyce, a former army officer, said, ‘It looks as though the American mistreatment was systematic. It seems to have been agreed at a high level, whereas ours wasn’t.’
I mentioned a report by Richard Norton-Taylor in the Guardian last week about an SAS training centre at Ashford where soldiers were subject to a programme of abuse. It even had a name: R21.
‘But that was teaching them to resist interrogation,’ said Mike O’Brien.
‘Is it possible that someone has got muddled up?’ I inquired. ‘I’ve never understood why it’s necessary to put hoods on prisoners’ heads.’
‘Oh that’s to disorientate,’ said Eric matter-of-factly. ‘It’s within the Geneva Convention.’ Later he added, ‘We do noise, too.’
‘That’s torture,’ I said. Eric just smiled.
‘I wouldn’t let Eric anywhere near my constituents,’ Phyllis said afterwards.
Tuesday, 11 May
‘We have to put some clear blue water between us and the Americans, even if it means embarrassing Himself,’ remarked Liz Symons at this morning’s meeting.
‘Guantanamo is the way to do it,’ said Mike O’Brien.
‘I have written to Colin Powell,’ said Jack, adding that he had taken care to agree the text of his letter with Powell in advance.
Later, at Foreign Office Questions, Jack stuck up for the Americans. ‘I wouldn’t have been quite so effusive,’ whispered Mike O’Brien. ‘It’s going to get a great deal worse yet.’
I entertained the Sudanese Foreign Minister to lunch in the Churchill Room. For some reason he is being given the full treatment – a big limo, police outriders. Richly undeserved, given the horrors in Darfur. If I’d had my way, he’d have been lucky to get a cup of tea. Inevitably, he turned out to be charming. Afterwards I took him on the terrace and, when we were out of earshot of his colleagues, asked about the amputations. He assured me that they were rare and that only one had been carried out under the present regime. In passing, the Sudanese Ambassador whispered that the case I raised with him recently – of a 16-year-old boy facing cross-amputation – was resolved; the boy has been released, his sentence quashed.
Wednesday, 12 May Liz rang at 07.30. ‘Dad died a few minutes ago.’
I reached Danbury at ten o’clock and there he was: emaciated, pale, cold; head back, eyes closed, mouth slightly ajar, a sore on his upper lip. He lay on his back in twilight, the bed sheet up to his middle, hands crossed. Someone had placed a large fragrant pink lily in his hands. I talked to him for a while as though he were still there. Poor old Dad. After all he has been through in the last four months I never had a chance to say goodbye and thank you; he never conceded that he was dying and I lacked the courage to raise the subject.
Later, Liz and Pat arrived with Mum. Although it was obvious to the rest of u
s, I am not sure that Mum ever realised that Dad was dying. Until recently she was talking about taking him home and then, when we pointed out that that was unlikely, about taking him around Danbury Park in a wheelchair. We took her to see Dad; she shed a tear, kissed him on the forehead (something I never saw her do in life) and we left her alone with him for ten minutes. They have been married for 59 years.
On the way Jack rang to say how sorry he was and that I must take off as much time as I needed.
Thursday, 13 May
Speculation is rife about the fate of The Man. Andrew Marr was on the radio this morning saying that his situation was ‘as bad as it has ever been’ and that he was ‘entering a very dangerous period’. The papers are full of calls for The Man to distance himself from the Americans, but, of course, he can’t. As Alan Milburn said at the time, he’s bet the whole shop.
My guess is that he’ll hang on at least until after the local and Euro elections and probably until September. If, by then, it has become clear that he’s a liability, he’ll go.
Monday, 17 May
Among the papers crossing my desk today one which reveals the astonishing fact that between June last year and April this year DFID paid a staggering £606,000 to a company calling itself Meteoric Tactical Solutions to provide protection for one senior official based in Iraq. Silly me. For months I have been proclaiming that nowadays our aid money is firmly targeted on the poorest people in the poorest countries and all the while we are spending increasing amounts on mercenaries.
