The Alastair Campbell Diaries Volume One: Prelude to Power 1994-1997 by Alastair Campbell

Author:Alastair Campbell [Campbell, Alastair]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781409006657
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Saturday, March 16

Peter’s interview on A Week in Politics was flammed up in the Mail as him saying that we might regulate the press if they didn’t behave. The Tories ran with it. TB bollocked him later, saying we needed more results and less swanning around.

Monday, March 18

Dunblane was still enormous, and the sense of grief around the place, even in London, was palpable. The Queen had gone yesterday and pictures that looked like she had been crying were big everywhere. The community was now making calls to scale down the coverage and let them grieve in peace. TB was getting worried about the SE Staffs by-election. He said he got the feeling that the Tory candidate was strong and ours was not and he felt we needed another strategic mind up there. He gave JP a mild bullet, saying it was vital that we won it. GB was in Washington, so the regular strategy meeting was calmer than usual but not very productive. Peter went through where we were on next week’s economic campaign. The trouble was that TB did not come to conclusions and knew he couldn’t on this, because GB was not there. [David] Miliband complained we had effectively given him a veto on policy and it was now the same on campaigns. I said that I did not like the title Partnership with the People. It was weak. We agreed instead on Contract for a New Britain, and it transpired that GB didn’t like that either, surprise, surprise. The meeting was incredibly frustrating given how much we were having to put into it. I was in a way playing devil’s advocate to Peter, both re the title and over the policy content of the documents we were beginning to assemble for launch. Nick Pecorelli [party official] used the phrase ‘downwardly mobile’ in relation to Tory policy, and I felt we could make that stick. David Mellor was doing a big number on gun law. I thought we were terribly weak. I felt we should be calling for a ban on guns. It was the right thing to do anyway but after Dunblane even more so. I was pointing people to George Robertson’s remarks at the weekend that it should be necessary to prove the need to own a gun, rather than the police prove unfitness to hold one. Otherwise Mellor was making the running on this.

Tuesday, March 19

There were more bad stories about the by-election in The Times and on the Today programme, and TB was pressing the panic-stations button. We agreed we would launch our offensive campaign on the economy on Monday, and got working on figures for it. We were going on guns at PMQs. Mellor had been running away with things yesterday. TB did fine, lined us up against the gun lobby. Meanwhile I was working on a briefing on small businesses for Mike Brunson, not least to try to take away from the big-licks briefing the government were doing on Major’s speech tomorrow.

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