Diaries Volume One: Prelude to Power (The Alastair Campbell Diaries, 1)

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On a long drive to Scotland a few years ago we happened to hear another unmarried couple, Charles Keidan and Rebecca Steinfeld, being interviewed on the radio about their legal challenge to the UK government about this injustice. Rebecca Steinfeld and Charles Keidan, with their children Ariel and Eden, outside Kensington and Chelsea Register Office, London, after becoming one of the first heterosexual couples to register for a civil partnership. Photograph: Yui Mok/PA

Straw told Blair: “We will obviously need to discuss all this, but I thought it best to put it in your mind as event[s] could move fast. And what I propose is a great deal better than the alternatives. When Bush graciously accepted your offer to be with him all the way, he wanted you alive not dead!” Clare Short Power & the People covers the first two years of the New Labour government, beginning with their landslide victory at the polls in 1997. That question is the inspiration behind this book. It's a question regularly posed to Alastair Campbell, not least in reaction to The Rest is Politics, the chart-topping podcast he presents with former Tory Cabinet minister Rory Stewart. His answer, typically, is forthright and impassioned. We cannot afford to stand on the sidelines. If we think things need to change, then we need to change them, and that means getting involved. The military and the civil service both asked for more clarity on whether force would be legal. Goldsmith did so but failed to provide written advice explaining his decision. Sir John Scarlett Straw contends the options had been exhausted. He also said that he did not take at face value the intelligence claiming there had been weapons of mass destruction.Although Campbell chaired a committee overseeing the dossier, Chilcot makes it clear that it was Scarlett that drew up the dossier and Blair that wrote the foreword.

Perhaps in part because of this new perspective, Blair comes across slightly less likably this time; needier, more self-interested but also more self-doubting, and increasingly preoccupied with the soul-sapping war of attrition with Gordon Brown. Chairman of the joint intelligence committee, the umbrella group for the intelligence agencies, 2001-04The report notes: “The UK failed to plan or prepare for the major reconstruction programme required in Iraq.” Riveting and revelatory, The Burden of Power is as raw and intimate a portrayal of political life as you are ever likely to read. It’s striking, too, that while Iraq naturally casts a long shadow over this period, only once does Campbell record a conversation between himself, Blair and chief of staff Jonathan Powell about whether it was actually right to invade. (For the record it’s Campbell, who describes himself feeling somewhat “used” by the Americans and wonders if they did the “right thing in the wrong way”, whose view perhaps best stands the test of the time.) Scarlett emerges from the Chilcot report with his reputation badly damaged, mainly for failing to rein in some of the wilder conclusions by Blair in claiming that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, the basis for going to war. Chilcot concludes that the circumstances in which it was decided that there was a legal basis for UK military action “were far from satisfactory”.