History in the making
30 DAYS — A Month at the Heart of Blair's War: Peter Stothard, HarperCollins Publishers, London. Distributed by Rupa and Co., 7/16, Ansari Road, Daryaganj, New Delhi-110002. £. 8.99
SIR PETER Stothard was the Editor of The Times when Rupert Murdoch ordered his newspapers to throw their weight behind Tony Blair's New Labour in the 1997 general elections. And later The Sun, the brash tabloid from The Times stable, was to claim credit for the Labour's landslide victory famously declaring that it was "The Sun wot won" the election for Mr. Blair.
Apparently, Sir Peter had his own views and did not back Mr. Blair in the 1997 election though he "supported his programme to become the leader of the Labour Party in 1994."
He does not explain why a leader whose "programme" he supported did not deserve his backing at election time, but one suspects it might have had something to do with his reservations about the party Mr. Blair was leading than with Mr. Blair himself.
Nevertheless, Sir Peter has clearly enjoyed a rather cosy relationship with the Blair administration. He was knighted earlier this year for his contribution to journalism, and Downing Street gladly accepted him as the chronicler of the mood in Blair's innermost circle in the run-up to the Iraq war, as he puts it, "to be with him on the path to war with Iraq".
Originally, it was to be a 50-day affair — a birthday "gift" to Mr. Blair on his 50th birthday, but was whittled down to 30 days. For any journalist, worth his curiosity, to be given a ringside view of the unfolding of a crisis of such proportions is a dream assignment but there is always the danger that after sometime you begin, almost involuntarily, to see things from the perspective of those to whom you owe the privilege.
And Sir Peter is no exception, though he might say that his proximity to the events simply gave him a more rounded better perspective, and helped him understand Mr. Blair's worldview better.
Sir Peter never claimed to be in the anti-war protest camp, but it is hard to resist the guess that had he not shared the high table with Blair during those crucial 30 days he might have taken a more critical view of the war — especially the way the justification for it was presented.
But to be fair to him, he does not allow his own views to colour the narrative, which, for best part, remains neutral to the point that sometime you actually want to know his opinion. Yet, the book's strength is that it is able to achieve precisely what it sets out to do: to be a fly-on-the-wall account of the mood inside No. 10 as Mr. Blair was pushing the boat out for the Bush administration in its determination to remove Saddam Hussein by force.
There are occasions when Sir Peter appears to get carried away by the sheer buzz around him — the comings and goings of powerful men and women, the interminable crisis meetings in Mr. Blair's "den", the constant ringing of telephones — but mostly he does what is so rare in this age of opinionated journalism: he simply reports what he sees. He does not allow himself to intrude into the story, which, in any case, is compelling enough.
His elaborate description of No. 10's layout with details of corridors and stairways; of who sits where in the prime minister's office; and the colour of the wallpaper would make little sense to those who have not been inside Downing Street but, in the end, one does get an overall mood of the place and the powerful people who inhabit this almost parallel universe where normality has an altogether different meaning.
He is able to capture and convey the palpable sense of crisis in Mr. Blair's "kitchen cabinet" as the conflict nears, and we stumble on some hard news, which if it had come out at that time, would have caught the headlines — the fact, for instance, that Mr. Blair was really apprehensive about losing the Iraq vote in the Commons in March and had "asked the Cabinet Secretary and his colleagues to have the resignation papers ready" in case he lost the vote.
Or Gordon Brown, who never publicly questioned Mr. Blair's Iraq policy, expressing reservations at a meeting of the "war team". "What people ask me is, why is there not just a little more delay?" he asks Mr. Blair who "snaps impatiently": "The reason is that you just go back to (the U.N. Security Council resolution) 1441: time, time and more time."
Sir Peter's own take on this is: "It is clear from Gordon Brown's eyes that better language than that needs to be found if the case (for the war) is to be won." It is one of the rare occasions when he offers an opinion before slipping into his "non-judgemental" mode again.
The book starts on March 10, 2003 against the backdrop of mounting hostility to the impending invasion of Iraq and ends on April 9 when Saddam Hussein's statue is toppled in Baghdad — an event endlessly played and replayed by TV networks.
But inside No. 10, the reaction was more muted with Mr. Blair himself remarking dismissively that "it's just one statue... I don't know what the fuss is about." A sentiment with which his critics would have agreed, for once.
Sir Peter does not say how much of his own view of Mr. Blair has altered as a result of the 30 days he spent with him but he finds the Prime Minister a "changed" man after the war. Typically he does not elaborate, but warns that voters do not always favour the "victorious".
HASAN SUROOR
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