Tony Blair was tailor- made to negotiate peace in Northern Ireland, Alastair Campbell tells Frank Millar, London Editor
Alastair Campbell is, of course, determined to disappoint. He is a compelling, complex man. The aura of power hangs about him, four years after leaving the service of the Blair government in which many considered him the real deputy prime minister. He knows where all the bodies and skeletons lie. But tribalist and Labour loyalist that he is, the former "Sultan of Spin" just isn't going to talk about the brilliant, successful, competitive, sometimes dysfunctional and destructive relationship between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.
Campbell has extracted 350,000 words from over two million to give a first account of the Blair years that will not damage the new Prime Minister. Yet hasn't he inflicted the greatest damage of all, I venture, by confirming that the truth is so appallingly bad it can never see the light of day? He won't buy that at all, insisting his book is a biography of the Blair years. It also promises that the full diaries will be published some time down the track.
Yet we know the truth, don't we? When we met I went armed with a Daily Telegraph report by former Daily Mirror executive David Seymour, seeming to establish beyond any doubt that might remain that Campbell was the Downing Street source who called Brown "psychologically flawed". Campbell neither confirms nor denies, contenting himself instead with a typically disparaging remark about the reporter.
Trying a different angle, I wonder if we would have had a Belfast Agreement had Brown, not Blair, been prime minister? "Well, we don't know," comes the reasonable reply. "I think what's interesting about Tony is that his kind of mind and style of politics was tailor-made for it in a way. Because he loves big problems, he loves wrestling with really difficult intellectual challenges. Contrary to the perception in some places, he is a detail merchant. He really likes interesting people and he's a natural negotiator. And he understands history, and studies history much more than people think." I take it Campbell doesn't mean to imply these are not also characteristics of Gordon Brown? "I'm not saying that at all. I'm saying I think it was tailor-made for Tony."
Campbell recalls the day, in May 1997, when Blair first confided he thought he had the answer to the Northern Ireland problem. Adviser John Holmes and others thought this just "irrepressible optimism". But the former communications director recalls Blair had "what I call his 'clause four' [ defining 'new Labour' against old Labour's economic mantras] glint in his eye".
I ASKED WHETHER Brown would have brought the same patience and commitment, in part knowing that there were times when Campbell himself thought Blair was wasting his time in Belfast and should have been devoting his energies to more pressing matters on the domestic front. "There were [ such] times even during the negotiation of the Good Friday Agreement," he confirms, before recalling one of the great lines in his book. With Blair, Bertie Ahern et al still locked in the interminable negotiation, president Bill Clinton called at 4.30am on the historic morning and declared: "Hell, I'd rather be on holiday with [ special prosecutor] Kenneth Starr than hanging out with these guys."
However, Campbell resists my suggestion that he must have considered Northern Ireland's political class both self-indulgent and hugely over-indulged. "No, actually. I think the Northern Ireland situation threw up some of the most interesting characters in the book." Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness were "fascinating characters", as was David Trimble, notwithstanding that he could also be "incredibly maddening". I have the impression from the book that he really found Trimble a pain to deal with. But no: "Trimble could be maddening but at critical points he was decisive and showed real leadership." He liked John Hume an enormous amount and thought Seamus Mallon "was an absolute star". Although thinking them Trimble's "enemies" at the beginning, Campbell came to regard John Taylor and Ken Maginnis as "warm, funny, quirky characters who were important at certain points".
Campbell divined at an early stage that the Ulster Unionist leader needed to be wary of Jeffrey Donaldson. As for the Irish side: "Of all the world leaders I met, Clinton and Bertie are my top two." Despite his reputation and image, one of the points that comes across from the book is that Campbell, like Blair, laughed a lot along the way. Another of his favourite quotes is from Paddy Teahon, former adviser to Taoiseach Ahern, raising himself at one point to disagree with Blair: "The trouble with that, prime minister, is that it is impeccable logic, and that has no place in this process."
He also tells me that Blair is a good mimic. Who does he do best? "His Trimble's pretty good. Adams, quite good." Dr Paisley? "Not bad." Humour aside, they were dealing with big issues here. Blair was driven by his Christian faith and a profound sense of moral mission, joining President Bush in a global "war on terror". Were Blair or Campbell ever bothered about the "morality" of the British Government dealing with the IRA? "I think he took a judgment to separate out Sinn Féin from the IRA, that Adams and McGuinness were serious and capable of delivering what they said they would," he replies. But while separating them out in terms of their disposition, the prime minister was presumably in no doubt he was dealing with the IRA? "We always used to say they were two sides of the same coin. He knew it was a risk - the unionists told him that every time they met - but he took that judgment early on." Campbell recalls their first meeting, Blair wanting to "look Adams in the eye" and satisfy himself about the Sinn Féin leader's commitment to exclusively peaceful means - and his later tough warning that if they returned to violence he would see none of them again.
The Sinn Féin leaders, he confirms, were "very, very tough negotiators". But how tough really was Blair? Peter Mandelson certainly thought him "too prone" to taking "the line" from Adams. The PM might have warned them against threatening a resumption of violence, yet the Northern Bank robbery was followed by a period of embarrassment and then the renewal of the process. In the end, of course, the counter argument from Campbell is that Blair got there and secured agreement "by being at times very, very pragmatic . . . He was a risk-taker." It can be argued that Blair took one risk too many with Trimble and ultimately destroyed him. Campbell counters: "Bear in mind that we were accused the whole time of just being pawns to Trimble." The serious charge, however, comes from Mallon, who has described Blair as "amoral", a man willing to "buy" and "sell" people, and who believes it became deliberate British policy to lose the "centre" parties - the SDLP and Ulster Unionists - to facilitate this year's DUP/Sinn Féin agreement. Campbell thinks "it's sad that he should say that", repeating his high regard for Mallon and Hume, while maintaining that Blair's great strength on big issues such as Northern Ireland was, ultimately, that "he had this ability to feel it".
THE BOOK CONFIRMS THAT as early as 2001 Blair felt that unionist support for the Belfast Agreement was slipping away, having been struck by the confidence of the DUP that he had better get used to dealing with them. Unsurprisingly, now, Campbell also offers that the former prime minister always had "a high regard" for the Rev Ian Paisley, because "he was always there, one of the big voices in every sense". Yet these are not parties that this Labour man would actually like. Does he have any sense of guilt about leaving the Paisleyites and Sinn Féin in charge in Northern Ireland? Campbell recalls arriving in Dublin a while back to find a headline saying that Paisley was pondering power-sharing with McGuinness. "Imagine if I'd said that that day back in 1997," he enthuses. "I find it a cause for rejoicing. I think it's a fantastic achievement."
The Blair Years - Extracts from the Alastair Campbell Diaries is published by Hutchinson, £25
'Tony Blair's Irish Peace' by Frank Millar will appear in Blair's Britain, edited by Anthony Seldon, to be published by Cambridge University Press in September