Blair 'felt Chirac out to get him'
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Chirac: Blair believed he wanted to clip Britain's wings, the book says
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LONDON, England (Reuters) -- Tony Blair thought French leader Jacques Chirac was "out to get him" by exploiting acrimony over Iraq to block his rise as the voice of Europe, according to extracts of a new biography of the British prime minister.
"I'm convinced he believed the conflict with Chirac had expanded beyond Iraq to become a contest for the political leadership of Europe," author Philip Stephens told Reuters.
"Chirac hoped that Blair would be toppled."
Stephens' view of the tense Anglo-French relationship was the most revelatory part of sections of his biography: "From Tony Blair," to be launched early next month.
In extracts published by his paper, the Financial Times, Stephens traced the growing feud early last year when Britain's support of the coming U.S.-led war in Iraq was bitterly opposed by Paris.
"During the next few months Blair came to believe -- partly on the basis of reports from British intelligence -- that the dispute over Iraq was in fact a proxy for a much more serious contest," Stephens wrote.
"Chirac, these reports said, had decided that Blair had usurped his own position as the natural leader of Europe. It was time for the French president to reassert himself and to clip the wings of perfidious Albion.
"Unsurprisingly, French officials dismissed this analysis. But Blair came to believe it, telling close aides that Chirac was 'out to get him."'
Relations between London and Paris hit their lowest point days before the war when the British government accused France of scuppering a U.N. resolution authorizing military action.
Their dispute mirrored a damaging Europe-wide split.
Stephens wrote that "snippets of the French president's private conversations reported to Blair suggested that he would like to see him fall" at that time. The pair had previously clashed over EU farm subsidies.
The "exquisite irony" for Blair was that Chirac's tough line then gave him an excuse to go to war without U.N. approval, plus a useful propaganda boost at home in "rekindling the national tradition of hostility towards France," the author added.
"'It would be so much easier if the vote was about war with France,' one Blair loyalist only half joked as the prime minister scrambled for votes," Stephens wrote.
Although tensions remain on Iraq and some EU issues, Paris and London have engaged in plenty of diplomatic fence-mending since last year's low, and Blair and Chirac have gone out of their way in public to demonstrate mutual politeness.
"I think, ironically, the relationship now is OK. It will never be warm," Stephens added in a telephone interview.
"Having gone through this cathartic experience and both survived, there's a certain amount of 'OK, well we're both here and we both have to work with each other."'
In an analysis of Blair's relations with Washington in the extracts from his book, Stephens identified U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney as the main hawk in Washington resisting Britain's pleas for a multilateral approach to military action against Saddam Hussein.
"Cheney had never disguised his impatience for war and his scorn for the suggestion that the U.S. needed the blessing of the U.N. to remove Saddam," he wrote.
"'Once we have victory in Baghdad, all the critics will look like fools' Cheney told one high-ranking British official during the summer of 2002 ... Blair, to them (Cheney and his chief of staff Lewis Libby) was an unwelcome irritant."
Copyright 2004
Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
