Transcript: Alastair Campbell interview

The government agreed to support the invasion almost unquestioningly….Why was the decision on Iraq so easy?
It was not unquestioning or easy. It was the most difficult decision Tony Blair had to make in his entire time during his time as PM. The reason it was the most difficult decision was there were very serious consequences and ramifications either way. The reason in the end he and the government decided to supported military action to depose Saddam, was that the prime minister had been growing over a period of time more not less concerned that Saddam was a genuine threat.

It is true that a lot of the cause for that concern was intelligence-based and it is equally true that there is now an on-going and difficult debate about the nature of some of that intelligence. If you are the Prime Minister, you are not doing the job based on hindsight you are doing the job based on what you know, based on what your instincts are.

There is a line in the Blair Years, during the build up to the invasion, when I asked Tony, 'If you are history before your time because of Iraq, is it really worth it?'

He said 'it is always worth doing what you think is the right thing, and Iraq and Saddam have been a problem for far too long, we have ignored it for far too long, and that includes Britain'.

This is not just a British point, but from a British perspective, Because of the subsequent furore over weapons of mass destruction, WMD, driven by the report in the BBC and all that followed from that, that issue has had far greater saliency than it did during the build up itself.

At the time of the WMD dossier being published, many of the journalists who later would claim that we were hammering the 45 minutes point, actually said that there was nothing much new in the dossier and there was nothing much that we did not know. That was their line at the time. It only took on this mythical status because of subsequent events.

It is equally true that there has always been a constituency in world and British public opinion, that of all the bad guys in the world, Saddam was the worst, and why have the major powers of the world not done more to remove him.

The argument that comes out in the build up to the invasion is a combination of that and of the specific issue of WMD, and the specific was very very important, of the fact that lead the PM to make the decision, that he was getting more and more concerned in the context of September 11.

Right there and then, on September 9, in his mind, was this concern that terrorists capable of an act of terrorism as great as this might be capable of getting WMD through rogue states.

After 9/11 TB focused on terror as well as supporting the US…
Supporting the US. There things are never straightforward and there are all sort of interlocking issues. The other point is what is are the most important things of your job as prime minister, I think that he would say that maintaining a very strong relationship with the only superpower in the world was one of them.

The other side of the argument is that you have to have very good reasons to go against the US on a fundamental strategic interest.

The simple answer to the question why did we support the invasion was that Prime Minister and the government thought that it was in Britain's strategic national interest to remove Saddam and to ease the threat.

The plan for post invasion reconstruction was not considered…
That is a fair criticism, which can be directed in two parts.

Most directly at the Americans for the state of aftermath preparations. David Manning our ambassador in Washington and at the time of the build up TB's main foreign affairs advisor, said recently that while No 10 was dealing with the White House, the Foreign Office was dealing with the State Department, and everyone else was dealing their opposite numbers.

And in London, during the 10 years of Tony's government we had improved some of the intra-government systems of coordination and communication.

In the build up there was a sense that we were dealing with the State Department plan for the aftermath. It became perfectly clear that once the aftermath began, that Rumsfeld and the Defence Department were very much in charge of it.

What people acknowledge is that the military campaign was very effective and quick. There were parts of the US and UK administration that believed that the troops were going to be greeted as conquering heroes, and everything was going to flow from that. While there may have been some of that. But the lesson to be drawn from the aftermath planning is that you should prepare for worst case scenarios rather than best case scenarios.

Did the British government do enough to insist on planning?
Britain contributed what it could, to the planning. On one visit with Paul Bremmer in Iraq, the whole nature of the visit was the PM and the team trying to inject some new thinking into the whole aftermath planning. The British government did a lot to prepare for the post-invasion, particularly in the areas for which it was responsible.

But no ME peace plan came out of this?
TB did not feel let down by this. He really passionately wanted that to happen. As you will know from his public statements many times, he does believe that a lot of the foreign policy issues that world faces and some of the implications for terrorism, can be found in the failure to find a solution to that basic problem, which is the Middle East peace process.

That is why he taken on the job that he has taken. It is true that GB said that he would put as much energy into the ME, that TB put into NI. I think that even George Bush's friends would say that that has not happened.

There are parallels with NI, but in NI for their own different reasons the parties and different constituencies in Northern Ireland within the process wanted the peace process to happen at the time that it happened.

You cannot say that about the Middle East. And if you are the Americans, you have to pick your moment. There have been so many failed efforts.

I do not think that Tony felt betrayed in that way. He was disappointed that the pieces of the jigsaw did not come together sufficiently for a proper drive on it.

On Northern Ireland the amount of time surprised me…
In the Blair Years, I felt that Northern Ireland (NI) was such an important part of the Blair premiership that we had to have a lot on NI. The Good Friday Agreement is the one part of the book that I literally do an hour by hour record, that is because I was conscious of genuinely recording moments in history. But the real uncut version of the book has far more of it. Ireland was very important to Tony Blair and it was also very difficult. What I wanted to do in the book was to capture how much work it took.

There were various points were he had his bit between the teeth and there are various points where we all thought it was finished, including after the Good Friday agreement. People now think loosely that there was the election, Blair came along, and then we had the Good Friday agreement, and then a bit of a gap and then you had Paisley and McGuiness [sharing power together]. But between the two there were phenomenal ups and downs, and lots of points that we really thought the whole thing had finished. It was something where his will and his determination kept the whole thing going.

On Blair's legacy, many people talk about Iraq, but I am afraid that is the nature of the modern world, and partly a media thing.

On the day that he announced his resignation and when he left office, the coverage of that was far more rounded than just talking of Iraq. The general line was on his amazing achievements (winning three elections, an amazing PM) with a large 'but' on Iraq, which was counted a disaster. Over time people may make a much more rounded judgment.

Even on Iraq, if you make the analogy with NI, if you had said a decade ago that Ian Paisley and Martin McGuiness would be sharing power in a devolved assembly, people would have taken you off to the funny farm.

So likewise, Iraq does not look good if you turn on the news at night, but you have the beginnings of democracy, you have progress happening in parts of the country, and provided people stay the course you do not know that history might look back and say that was the moment when Iraq started to become a stable democracy.

Brown and Blair…
It is true that I took out material from the Blair Years that if I thought the Conservatives might have successfully used it to inflict political damage, I thought best not to have it there. If you read the book carefully, you do get a sense of the tensions. What I have done is not make a meal of them Creative tension was probably the right way to put it. There were times at which it was not good at all, that other points there were creative tensions that helped define arguments and shape policy and at other times it was a phenomenally successful political partnership.

That is what we have to remember. Politics is about what people believe, about principle, about policy it is also about personality and you are talking about the New Labour government with some very strong personalities at the top, and they have good days and bad days. But on the big picture we turned a loosing party into a winning party, won three general elections, ran the economy sufficient well to have the longest period of growth and prosperity that any of us can remember, and lots of other things as well. You have to see things in the round.

Brown was right not to call election
Gordon Brown was right not to call an election this week. At the party conference I said that I was very unpursuaded. Elections are a very big moment in the national life. There is a parliamentary timetable and people completely understand that you have to have an election very four or five years, because you have to. But to have a snap election you have to have a very good reason to have it.

Seeking a new mandate could have been enough of a reason, but he should have done that as soon as he became Prime Minister. The other thing is never to make really important decisions at a party conference, because the atmosphere is a bit detached from reality sometimes. You are in a bubble.

The Conservatives and Cameron may think he has a stick to beat him with, but his basic problems have still not gone away. He has to have come up with some decent policy proposals. This is not even a crisis, this is a frenzy that will pass and fade away.

How do you manage out of power?
What I do miss are two things: the big moments, and having that overall driving sense of mission and purpose. But you have to adapt, You accept that you had a long time doing it. You made a difference. You had some amazing moments You had some bad moments

I never saw it as myself being in a position of power because in the end the power was his. I was always working for TB, doing things that he expected me to do. I felt that I was an instrument of that power, one of many that he had at his disposal.

On going back over the Blair Years, I was surprised myself, at how much I wrote about leaving. Partly that was domestic pressure, and partly it was fact that because of my nature and personality that if I do something like that I have to do it full on, and I have to be able to do it full on, if I do not I feel that I am not doing it properly. And the work load was pretty immense.

Now I have a very mixed and quite nice life. I know that it sounds corny but I do spend more time at home. I can pick and chose the event that I go to. I am not under the same media and political scrutiny I can do what I chose to do every day.

Blair goes to Middle East…
I was not surprised that when TB resigned as prime minister, he also left the House of Commons. There is something very interesting about this. It seems to me that Conservative leaders really like to hang around and make life difficult for their successors, and ours tend not to. He knew that the Middle East envoy position was in the offing. It did not surprise me at all

He was brilliant in parliament, but he was not a traditional House of Commons man. He was not the sort of man who was going to spend the rest of his life sitting around in the bars talking about the old days.

The Middle East Envoy job puts him in a position to have a genuine locus within all the Middle East debates. Part of that depends on how he manages to work with American President and American Secretary of State, and with the current incumbents he has very good relations. So his position is one from which he will be able to contribute something, but it will be very hard.

Switch from Clinton to Bush
In the book there is quite a lot of it when we sit around talking about other leaders and what have you. It is part of his nature. With other leaders it is very rare that he focused on the bad side. He would look for the good side. He would see it as part of the professional challenge of the job of being prime minister that he had good relations with the American President.

With Clinton there was the politics there, there was the natural empathy there, and it was really square peg in square hole. It fitted very naturally.

At the first meeting with Bush, we really thought about it, thought about what was the best way to deal with him and to bring him out. Once that had happened and the first few meetings were out of the way, they found that they were able to talk to each other and get on.

Liberal Democrats
During the first election campaign which brought us to power we did not remotely think that we were going to have that size of majority.

Tony Blair has always focused on the long term and the Labour Party had bobbed in and out of power and never had a period of sustained power, and he thought that it was possible that a more formal relationship with the Liberal Democrats would have sustained us in power even longer.

He felt that this kind of realignment of British was important, but now the moment has gone. The chances are very slim for it to work. Tony Blair had a lot of time for Ashdown and he also thought Ashdown was serious enough to go for it in a way that Charles Kennedy would not.