Focus: The trouble and strife

'It's just really hard watching your wife's reputation trashed,' Tony Blair said last week. And trashed it has been. Andy McSmith tells the inside story of a miserable week for the Blairs

Tony Blair's skin has thickened in office. The wide-eyed "I'm a straight sort of guy" response that he gave when questioned about the Ecclestone affair in 1997 belongs to a past when Mr Blair believed that if he turned the charm on hard enough, he could get anybody on his side.

The Prime Minister who wanted to be friends with everybody, from Margaret Thatcher to Ken Livingstone, has now absorbed the difficult lesson that there are a large number of people who will never be reconciled to his government, and the idyllic relationship he enjoyed with the mass media in the dying days of the old Conservative government have gone forever. Having once tried to cultivate the Daily Mail, Mr Blair and his circle have now decided that it will always be their enemy.

When Estelle Morris, the former education secretary, walked into Downing Street feeling emotionally shattered by the attacks on her handling of the A-level fiasco earlier this year, the reaction was not wholly sympathetic.

Alastair Campbell, the Prime Minister's combative director of communications, told her that what she had been through was mild compared with what the Prime Minister had to endure, and warned that other politicians might not think highly of her for quitting.

She replied: "You guys are immune to it, but I'm very worried about becoming immune to it."

Even by these standards, the last fortnight has been exceptionally difficult for the Blair family. Other people have homes they go to where they can forget the cares of their job. At the end of a long day, the Prime Minister goes upstairs to the flat above the shop, where his family are tucked away. Only now the biggest problem arising from his job is also up there with him in the family flat. His wife has been through the worst fortnight of her life and such privacy as the family normally enjoys has been exposed to hostile eyes.

Last week, in a rare reflective moment, the Prime Minister confided to his staff: "It's just really hard watching your wife's reputation being trashed."

He could have added, of course, that his wife would not have been so trashed if she had not allowed a professional conman to work his way into her confidence, give her financial advice, and put her in his debt, and then induced Downing Street in effect to lie on her behalf.

A nagging worry for the Blairs is the effect that this kind of publicity has on their children. They are still friendly with the Kinnock family, and they know from Stephen Kinnock, who is now an adult, how much he hated hearing his father attacked on the news, and the taunts of other schoolchildren – but did not tell his parents at the time.

For the Blairs, there is the permanent anxiety that their children, too, are more affected by public controversy than they let on. This helps explain the savagery with which the Blair circle has turned on Peter Foster, the convicted conman whom Cherie Blair briefly trusted as a member of her personal circle.

There is abundant evidence of Mr Foster's greed for money and contempt for the Blairs, laid out in telephone calls mysteriously taped and published over two days in The Sun. But in addition to that, there was a message sent to Downing Street, which came indirectly from Mr Foster, that Mr Blair's staff have kept secret because of its personal nature. It would appear from the fury it provoked that it must have referred to one of the Blair children. One insider heard an aide describe it as "vicious, evil stuff".

Moreover, if Mr Blair has been shown some of what has been written in the past week, the Prime Minister will have read that much of that trashing has been carried out by two of the people he had most reason to trust. The accusation came from the political editor of The Spectator, Peter Oborne, who was once on good terms with the Blairs and wrote a biography of communications chief Alastair Campbell. Mr Oborne accused Mr Campbell and his partner, Fiona Millar, of conducting a "persistent, lethal, unprecedented and utterly shocking" campaign to denigrate the Prime Minister's wife.

Their alleged motive was to absolve themselves from any blame for the public relations fiasco which has en-gulfed Downing Street by ensuring that everyone knew that it was all Cherie Blair's fault.

That fiasco began when the Daily Mail obtained email traffic between Cherie Blair and the professional conman Peter Foster, which blew apart the impression given by Downing Street that Mr Foster had not been helping the Prime Minister's wife buy a pair of flats in Bristol.

Mr Oborne's case was based principally on a graphic story told in last week's Sunday Telegraph, that the Blairs returned from a visit to the theatre on the evening to be confronted by an angry Ms Millar, brandishing the first edition of the Daily Mail, and that Mrs Blair was humiliatingly compelled to access and download her emails while her bullying advisers looked on.

In fact, at the time when this confrontation is meant to have taken place, the "angry" Ms Millar was at her Hampstead home, asleep in bed. All that greeted the Blairs on their return to Downing Street was an urgent message asking them to ring Alastair Campbell, also at home. He broke the bad news to Tony Blair. Mrs Blair accessed her own emails and handed them over in the morning.

Even if Mr Campbell had been in the office there would have been little point in him standing over the Prime Minister's wife as she logged on, because one of his little known eccentricities is that he has not used a word processor for more than eight years. He does not know how to open an email.

These details aside, the story of a Blair-Campbell feud is obviously false, because Mr Campbell is still acting as a trusted adviser, while Fiona Millar was visibly at Mrs Blair's side when she made her dramatic public statement at the Atrium restaurant in Westminster last week. The Campbell-Millars are not civil servants, and they have no independent power base in the Labour Party; their sometimes exaggerated power derives entirely from the fact that they are people the Blairs know and trust. They are also well-connected professionals who, unlike the Blairs, could clear their desks and walk away from Downing Street any day, if they did not think their employers were treating them properly.

It was Ms Millar who persuaded Mrs Blair to make a personal statement in front of cameras, so that the public could see and judge her for themselves, rather than issue another impersonal press release.

Peter Mandelson, another famous member of the Blair circle, was enlisted to help draft Mrs Blair's statement – although he archly refused to discuss his role after the event. "I would not dreaming of doing so, even if I had been involved," he said. "As a matter of course, I do not discuss the Prime Minister's affairs."

Although Mr Campbell has not deliberately added to Mrs Blair's problems, he probably has done so unintentionally, by his combative behaviour. Unlike his boss, he does not mind being disliked. His well-known breakdown in the 1980s occurred when he was working on a night news desk, and no one was taking any notice of him. When under attack, he reacts rather like those football fans who chant "no one likes us, we don't care".

Recently, Mr Campbell has raised the hackles of political journalists by refusing to talk to them directly, and by moving the morning press briefings which used to be held in Downing House to another venue, where foreign journalists are made welcome.

Much of the anger this provokes has fallen on the head of Mrs Blair, or on the long-suffering civil servants who have had to take over the task of briefing journalists now that Mr Campbell has given it up.

The world-weary acceptance that Downing Street has lost the capacity to manipulate the media is encapsulated in this excerpt from the official transcript of Friday's press briefing: "... the PMOS (Prime Minister's Official Spokesman) said that he had no intention of getting drawn into some process story about yesterday's events.

"Asked if he had been asked this question yesterday, the PMOS said that he couldn't remember quite how many questions had been put to him and whether this particular one had been asked or not. Yesterday was yesterday. Today was today. We were where we were. Asked to confirm that tomorrow was tomorrow, the PMOS confirmed it would indeed be Saturday.

"He took the opportunity to remind journalists that there were only five more briefing days left until Christmas and pondered what on earth we would all do with our lives."

It is perhaps no wonder that people who are not protected by a thick coating of insensitivity are reluctant to go into politics.