Pizzas galore!

If true, it is no less shocking for confirming what we already suspected. “I am not just saying this with hindsight,” Meyer insists. “I did say ‘We have leverage’. Iraq is a failure of us all: we should have put at least as much emphasis into planning what would happen after the war.” He even wonders if, with stronger political leadership in Britain, war might have been averted altogether. He hints in the book that, rather as in the first world war when the train times had been set so war became inevitable, the military machine built up a “momentum” for war: “The military people were quite convinced war would take place, before any political decision had been made.”

Even persuading America to embark on its failed attempt to seek United Nations authorisation for the war might not have been down to Britain; Meyer says that at least as influential was Colin Powell, then the US secretary of state, who lobbied Bush. In any event it does not reflect well on Blair that he is reduced to haggling over ownership of a failed policy.

Meyer wonders whether, if the coalition had been more patient and the weapons inspectors had been allowed to complete their job, France might have been persuaded to support the war. French diplomats told him that Paris had not shut any doors. Blair would surely respond that if we had gone down that route we would still be talking.

Would Gordon Brown have done a better job? “He would have been so different. Blair approached it from a highly principled position. Who knows? What I can tell you is Margaret Thatcher and John Major would have demanded absolute clarity because they would have known British forces would be responsible for controlling a large part of the country.”

He pauses: “The strength of Blair is his vision; the other side of the coin is that he doesn’t do detail. Even John Major would have done that.” Another ouch.

I ask if during this period of “leverage” Blair had pushed for British firms to be awarded contracts for Iraq’s reconstruction. “I never heard him mention contracts. I remember being warned by a senior figure from George Bush Sr’s administration, ‘Don’t make the mistake you did in Kuwait of waiting till after the war to talk about it’. I passed this on to the Foreign Office but I don’t know if it was acted upon.” Judging by the success of America’s Halliburton in vacuuming up the business, it would seem not.

The central question is: what turns the most Europhile opposition leader into an unquestioning Atlanticist prime minister — was Blair star-struck, desperate for intelligence or what? “It is all those things. Euro negotiations are pretty unforgiving. Despite what de Gaulle tells us, you don’t have to choose between America and Europe but it is difficult to ride both.” As Blair discovered. “You also must remember Blair had this strange hinterland with Bill Clinton’s people which carried on.”

Meyer makes the entire new Labour project sound little more than a secondhand marketing strategy bought in every detail from the Clinton set. He makes a credible witness. He is generous to Blair about his ability to comfort America after 9/11; Meyer so basked in reflected glory that his name would be announced and cheered at an American football game. His attack on Blair is a subtle one: he thinks Blair was right to declare that after 9/11 the West would have to make pre-emptive strikes. There is a “but”: “He spoilt that powerful argument by later claiming the threat from Iraq was imminent.” That put the onus on America and Britain to find Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction rather than leaving it to the Iraqi dictator to account for what he had done with the stockpiles that we know he once had.

Meyer suggests that one key lesson Blair never learnt is that for all America’s sentimentality about Britain it will always follow its own interests. Again it comes back to Blair’s weakness as a negotiator.

How does he evaluate the prime minister’s current predicament? “There are similarities between Blair’s and Major’s positions: there is a smell about the new Labour administration of Major’s in 1995.” That was just two years before Major went down to one of the biggest defeats in British history. Meyer suggests Blair has less excuse because even now he enjoys a healthy majority: “Blair still has scope for rebound but there was no elastic for Major.”

Meyer’s retirement from the diplomatic service was, he says, “traumatic”. Bush threw a dinner in his honour; by contrast Blair, with bad grace, simply briefed that Meyer had left Washington when he was most needed.

In fact Meyer departed to undergo life-saving heart surgery. That wound has healed. Others, one suspects, never will.