Blunkett: PM was ready to sack Brown over Iraq

In the latest extract from his serialised diaries, David Blunkett has revealed that Gordon Brown was opposed to the war in Iraq and only came around five days before the conflict began when it became obvious that Tony Blair was going to sack him if he did not give his unequivocal support to the doomed cause.

In today's extracts of his diaries, serialised in the Guardian, Mr Blunkett indicates why he believes the chancellor decided to support the war. In thoughts recorded after the Commons voted in favour of the war on March 18, Mr Blunkett said: "Gordon has made a real effort to bat in this week and I think there's been a realisation by him that Tony isn't going and that he's got a choice. He either bats in and holds on to the chancellor's job or he fails to bat in and Tony will take him out when the military action is finished."

The remarks by Mr Blunkett, who was a member of the Iraq war cabinet, are the first public confirmation that friends of the prime minister believed Mr Brown harboured doubts about the war - and that he may have seen the looming conflict as a chance to unseat Mr Blair.

It's interesting that the Blairites seem to think the release of this information will hurt Gordon Brown, when I am of the impression that it will strengthen his position considerably, proving to those disappointed with the Chancellor's stance that he had no choice other than to conform with Blair's wishes.

Indeed, I continue to be heartened that the discussion's in the cabinet were so "heated" before the invasion, as we have so far been led to believe that all was sweetness and light and that there was full cabinet unity around this dreadful policy.

The diaries confirm that discussions in the war cabinet were often heated, as ministers questioned Mr Blair about the military strategy and the poor plans for postwar reconstruction. Many of these questions "were never satisfactorily answered", says Mr Blunkett, who writes of a tense discussion with the prime minister at the war cabinet on March 24 2003.

"I said I thought we needed to determine what the strategy was going to be. We were fighting a 21st-century technological war but with a medieval strategy - ie surrounding the main urban areas and towns, cutting them off but not entering them, and pounding between but over desert. At that point Tony got really angry ... I said: 'Tony, I am not attacking you. I am trying to work out what we say, what we prepare people for and what they can expect from us, otherwise they only get it from the media.' ... Eventually Tony said that he was sorry."

Then comes the extraordinary moment when Tony confirms, not only Britain's subservient role in all of this - by referring to the US as "the management" - but just how profoundly out of touch he is with American intentions when he states:

At a cabinet meeting on March 7 2002 Mr Blair is quoted telling ministers: "Look, the management hasn't lost its marbles. We do know these things. We are not going to rush in." Mr Blunkett concludes: "But we all fear that they will."

And, as we all now know, the management had lost it's marbles and did, indeed, rush in. And the quagmire that is present day Iraq is the result.

It could all have been so different, if only Tony had listened to his Cabinet:

"If they had put Colin Powell in charge instead of letting [US defence secretary Donald] Rumsfeld loose with some of the dum-dums who are running the show on the ground, including our air marshal, it would have been a lot better," [Blunkett] writes at the end of March 2003 when US troops encountered difficulties in central Iraq.

Mr Blunkett writes that the chancellor privately voiced his unease about the war at cabinet briefings by Admiral Sir Michael Boyce, then chief of the defence staff. "Sir Michael Boyce ... was waffling on as usual," Mr Blunkett writes of a war cabinet meeting on March 24. "Gordon later ... confirmed [to me] that we knew more from the media than we were being given at these morning meetings."

Blair and Bush have always said that history will be their final judges. History tends to be written in the memoirs of it's participants. Both Blunkett's diaries and Woodward's "State of Denial" are the first indications that history will not be as kind to Bush and Blair as either would wish it to be.

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