In the autumn of 2002, Jack Straw would often receive a call from Downing Street at around 11pm. The switchboard operators would tell him the US secretary of state, Colin Powell, had rang and asked Straw to call him back on a secure line. Powell had his own line because he didn’t want anybody in the State Department to listen to what he had to say. “And then we would sort of download – there was nobody else we could talk to in the world,” Straw, 75, recently told me from his home in Oxfordshire. “My wife – and we actually got on with him extremely well anyway – nicknamed him the other man in her life.”
It was an unlikely friendship – Powell a Republican general from Harlem, New York, and Straw a former Labour home secretary and NUS president who’d grown up in the shadow of Epping Forest in Essex. The calls became more frequent as the negotiations for UN Security Council Resolution 1441, which compelled Iraq to disarm, intensified. Straw got into the habit of calling Powell after church on Sundays. The pair didn’t only become friends: they worked together to counter the more bellicose tendencies of the Bush administration. Indeed, as Simon McDonald, Straw’s principal private secretary at the time, recently told me, they often seemed more aligned with each other than with their bosses.
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