Ian Katz’s Observer interview with Jonathan Powell – chief of staff to Tony Blair throughout his time at Downing Street – was definitely worth a read, if for no other reason than that this was, incredibly, Powell’s first media interview since 1997. You get the impression that if Powell gave more such interviews, it might be quite fun:
“He would say the most outrageous things in meetings,” recalls one former member of the Blair inner circle. Powell does not contest the charge: “Sometimes I say things which are extremely plonkerish at just the wrong moment… which is one of the reasons they kept me away from the press. It would’ve been a complete disaster if I’d have talked to the papers.”)
You might think he’s just being modest. But try this delicious gem:
When Siobhan O’Hanlon, Gerry Adams’s late assistant, asks for a meeting with Blair during the Good Friday talks, Powell tells her his boss is in a meeting with Bertie Ahern, but “we could get rid of him”. O’Hanlon replies that there is no need and Powell, whose sense of humour frequently falls on the dusty side of dry, chips in that he did not mean “get rid of him in her usual sense”.
But for me the stand-out bit of the interview was the apparent disjunction between Powell’s spirited defence of ‘sofa government’ on the one hand, and his account of how Britain ended up at war in Iraq on the other. Exhibit A:
Coming into government, Blair and Powell were determined to unify the political and civil service hierarchies within Downing Street and to break what they saw as the “feudal” power of the departments. If you wanted coherent government, Powell concluded, looking back on his brother’s experience with the Major government, you had to find a way of driving policy from the centre.
The solution that Blair and Powell would evolve to these problems was frequently criticised as replacing cabinet government with “sofa government”. “I think what it became was a metaphor for decisions people didn’t like. In other words, it was easier to attack the means you got to decisions than decisions themselves. I’m completely unrepentant about sofa government… having a formal meeting of cabinet does not make a decision or a discussion any better than having an informal decision and discussion in a group. The key is to have the right people in the discussion and make sure their views are aired and then the right decision is reached… Criticising us just because we did it in the one office rather than the other office, doing it informally rather than formally, strikes me as not fair.”
And then, just a few paragraphs later, exhibit B:
There were plenty of smaller mistakes in Iraq, he concedes, but the big one was “not understanding quite what we were getting ourselves into… I don’t think we realised quite what a task, or a lengthy task, we were taking on.” But wasn’t it the responsibility of people like him to check that planning for the aftermath was being done, before sending in the troops? “There was planning, but it was planning for completely the wrong thing… there was a plan for water shortages… and humanitarian supplies, and that really wasn’t the issue. And clearly you’re right, in hindsight, there should’ve been a different sort of planning and a different sort of preparation. But it’s very much with hindsight – no one at the time was really saying to us, ‘This is what you need to be prepared for’… Had you known, you would’ve probably had more troops, would probably have been faster to secure the streets from random violence and so on. You wouldn’t let these things happen.”
Um… oh, never mind.
