The Burden of Power: Countdown to Iraq - The Alastair Campbell Diaries by Campbell Alastair Page A

come to their senses. He thought Patten was absolutely top drawer, and if we had a few like him, we would be in much better shape. Back at Chequers, he, Peter H and I went through the speech line by line. At one point he admitted that part of the purpose of constantly challenging the party was to remind the public that he was not a traditional Labour leader, and that was in many ways his main selling point. He wanted a more forward section on the euro, including the prospect of it happening in this parliament. He had done a good section about the notion of solidarity as an international doctrine. The speech was a lot better for the fact that we didn’t feel the need to touch every policy base going. Later we left for Brighton.
Monday, October 1
    Most of the day stuck in the hotel, working on the speech, and also on a briefing script which I wanted to push out as interdependence/power of community. We had fallen back on the speech and having spent the weekend thinking we wouldn’t have the usual last-minute bollocks, that’s exactly what we did. I got Hilary [Coffman, special adviser] to do the briefing and by the time the press had finished with it, it was taken as a declaration of war. The main arguments we were still having were just how close to be to the US, and how to frame the public services section. TB wanted to hit the reform message, whereas I was arguing for a greater focus on the values underpinning the reform. It was very much his speech though, much more than any other conference speech we had done. He was comfortable in the argument and confident about the way he was putting it. Most ofthe speech team went over for [the speech by] GB. I carried on working and had it on in the background. It would be seen as a pretty good and wide-ranging domestic speech and because he allied himself to the main domestic ministers, it was likely he would get written up as the domestic PM to TB’s foreign affairs PM.
    We had the usual toing and froing, writing and rewriting, but TB only wanted polishing and honing from us now. It was his speech, and it was pretty well done. I had a semi-altercation with JP just before midnight when he popped in. Cherie and Sally were also there and I made a crack about GB being the domestic PM and JP snapped that even in these circles, we shouldn’t be slagging him off. It was a bit much on one level, as he and I had had a session in the afternoon where he had been raging about him every bit as much as I did, but he had a point. He was worried that the tensions and the frustrations both between the principals and their teams meant that the divisions just became a given. [Gerhard] Schroeder was the main international speaker and got terrific applause for his reference to Old Labour. He went down pretty well and I think enjoyed coming over.
    TB and Bush agreed TB should go to see Putin to try to secure bases and then to Pakistan to try to get a proper fix on Musharraf. It was a perfectly friendly conversation with the usual joshing and laughter amid the heavy stuff, but TB admitted he was worried they didn’t seem to have a grip on things. Schroeder had felt Putin would help if we really pushed and if there was a gain in it for him. The pre-speech briefing led ITN ahead of GB which was likely to have pissed him off big time. The big message of the speech was coming together fine, international solidarity, the power of community at home. I didn’t leave the hotel all day. We got to bed just after 2, which was early by comparison with most of these conference speeches.
Tuesday, October 2
    TB was up at 6 and I went in to find him with the usual mass of paper all over the place, but he seemed OK with things. He had reordered things, cut down a lot of the middle section on domestic policy. There were still one or two bits that read too much like they had been done by committee, which we fixed. It was a very New Labour speech, and authentic for his voice. The overnight briefing had gone very big on