Blair asked Bush during his first phone call if he could call him by his first name, Tony Blair

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Tony Blair moved quickly to put his relationship with George W. Bush on a personal footing after the Republican’s victory in the 2000 US presidential election, asking him “early on” in his first phone call if he could call him by his first name.

Bush warmly agreed (but stuck to addressing the prime minister as “Sir”), according to their invitation note, which is among government files made public in the National Archives. Blair was the first foreign leader to call to congratulate the president-elect. Michael Tatham, a diplomat, noted Briton, noted that the eight-minute conversation established “as good a rapport as one could hope” from this short call.

However, the documents also reveal concern on the part of Britain’s new Labor government about how Bush will be prosecuted amid concerns about how the new president will view Blair’s close relationship with Bill Clinton.

By March 2001, two months after Bush’s inauguration, Downing Street’s chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, was reporting to Blair about a meeting with Sidney Blumenthal, a senior adviser to Bill Clinton, in which Powell stated that Clinton sought “revenge” for Bush.

All of this has some important consequences for us. “We really don’t want to be associated with Clinton in the run-up to or in the immediate aftermath of the election,” Powell wrote. You contacted him while you were in the United States. And you don’t want to look like you’re drifting away from your ex-boyfriend.”

Handwritten on the note: “Why don’t I call him sooner?”

Other files reveal further evidence of Blair’s keenness to establish links with the Bush team. When it became clear that Donald Rumsfeld would be the new US Secretary of Defense, the Prime Minister said in a handwritten note: “We must quickly cooperate at the ministerial level.”

Previously secret British assessments of the new Republican administration were also revealed in the files, in the form of reports by Powell and Blair’s foreign policy adviser John Sawyers – the future head of MI6 – after they were sent to Washington, D.C. in the run-up to the Bush term. Opening in January 2001.

“All these circles are Anglophiles, and your letter of working closely with the new administration has been well received,” Powell wrote after two days of talks with prominent American figures. “They all said they wanted to keep the relationship private. However, it wouldn’t be as comfortable as with the Clinton administration. Unlike Clinton they wouldn’t do us political favours.”

Blair (left) and Clinton in 1998. Photo: Ben Curtis/Penn

Sawers added, “The Bush team is working to build him up as the new president. They extol his qualities (blunt-minded, good decision-maker, places a premium on loyalty and teamwork, strong at spotting people quickly and well) and they all refer to him with respect. Woe to him who underestimates him.

“They are particularly strong in defense ([Dick] Cheney and Rumsfeld [Colin] Powell) and unequivocally warm to Britain. But they have a mysterious take on Europe. There might be too many large beasts: we can expect some stampede.”

But Blair also showed weariness with his new partner across the Atlantic, handwriting aside: “The real concern is that the hardest edge of Bush’s foreign policy cuts into arrogance, into outward perception, and from there quickly into hostility.”

“It reminds us, a little bit of the Eurosceptic/Thatcherite streak here.”

In other files, Sir Christopher Meyer, Britain’s ambassador to the United States, relayed intelligence from meetings with Bush White House officials before the invasion of Afghanistan. Mayer told Downing Street in 2001 that the US had “learned the lessons” of the Soviet occupation and there would never be “so many muddy boots on the ground”.

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The UK government and White House also agonized over whether there should be a UN special representative on Afghanistan, according to a confidential memo on the humanitarian situation days before the first US airstrikes.

“They worry that a senior UN figure will complicate the overall effort, both by intruding into American/British planning, and perhaps by making him/herself the good guy (feeding the people), while casting the US as the bad guy (bombing the people)” wrote Anna Luchsberg, who was Blair’s private secretary for foreign affairs.

As preparations for the invasion escalated, another file shows how Blair’s “Letter to the Afghan People” before the invasion was changed after consultations with the United States to replace the word “evidence” with “information”.

“They avoid using the word evidence,” wrote Patrick Davies, Private Secretary to the Secretary of State.

There are also details of discussion about the possible use of British bases by the US to launch strikes in Afghanistan. Seventeen days after the 9/11 attacks, Davies wrote in a letter to David Manning, the UK’s then Permanent Representative to NATO, that there was a need to “give the Americans a gentle reminder” of the need for joint decisions on starting operations from, including bases Diego Garcia.

Released files portend later events. Britain was “all in favor of striking” Osama bin Laden, Sawers told him before a meeting with Clinton in December 2000, during which the then US president deliberated over whether to strike back at Al Qaeda after a suicide attack on a US warship.

Briefing Blair before dinner with Clinton, Sawers wrote that the US had no evidence yet that the al Qaeda leader was responsible for the October 2000 attack on the USS Cole in Yemen. “We’re all for hitting the UBL [he was also known as Usama]But we need a bit of notice and a chance to influence the timing.”

The memo was written about a year before the September 11 attacks, which greatly raised bin Laden’s profile and precipitated the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, where the Taliban gave him sanctuary.

In the end, the United States did not launch strikes on bin Laden after the bombing, and Sawers’ memo stated that it would not do so until they had a “strong weapon.”

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