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John Reid, then Labour Party chairman (second right), has a particularly nasty decision ahead – not in the military theatre, the one where he would most like to be, but in the then much harsher realms of Scottish politics. Who should replace the Prime Minister at what is certain now to be a vicious party conference in Dundee? John Prescott is not enthusiastic that it be he.

On the far right of the picture, the Deputy Prime Minister’s Chief of Staff, Joan Hammell, looks away past her boss. While Prescott and Reid are berating the bumptiousness of the BBC (“They’ve got to be told they can’t always have answers. We have got just to shut down”), this 30-year veteran of the battles within the Labour Party is staring out towards the street. “Strange days” is her description of that moment, four years on. At the time, she sits in on every meeting and, whatever her view of the damage done to Labour by its leader’s decision to back George Bush, silently keeps her counsel.

The Government spokesman, Tom Kelly (third from left), had learnt there “is a war on” from an ITN reporter just before 1am – and “after a couple of quick conference calls” had “gone back to bed”. Others have not been so self-controlled or so lucky. In Kelly’s own recollection, one of his big advantages in understanding the demands of “24/7” media was to recognise “the importance of sleep”. In Danziger’s images of those days and nights almost everyone shows some sign of being tired.

The rest of the conversation over the china cups, on this morning and on every subsequent morning, is what psychologists would call “displacement activity” – talk about Scottish football teams, scabrous Frenchmen, shoe polish, shoddy media manners and “where will we sit now that Robin has gone?”. Anything, in David Blunkett’s words of hindsight, “so that we might make seem normal what was not normal”.

April 4, 2003, 11am The Terracotta Room at No 11

The second photograph was taken two weeks later. American forces have taken Baghdad airport. The diplomatic talk has shifted from the fighting to the aftermath. The political talk has shifted from who gets Robin Cook’s seat to who gets Robin Cook’s job: the answer is John Reid. Tony Blair has decided that this is to be a day for a “major media push” to influence opinion in the Middle East. Waiting on the ground floor is a camera crew from Abu Dhabi. Upstairs in the Terracotta Room, one of the grandest in No 11, are Iraqi victims of Saddam.

The woman speaking on the left is Zara Mohammed, a Kurd, whose words are of cells piled with raped women, descending metal ceilings, bloodstained floors. The man in front of the fireplace is a medical doctor, Ossam Balal, who has just spoken of being hung by his wrists, beaten with electric cables – all as a macabre daily cabaret for friends and relatives who might be tempted to sympathise with his wish for “democratic change”. It is not easy for a Prime Minister to hear about these times of torture – even if he is, on this day at least, telling his listeners what they want to know, that Saddam Hussein will never rule their country again. The air feels cold and dry. Tony Blair’s face at this moment is still taut from facing the doctor’s gaze, his hands still trembling from their touch of wrists deeply cable-scarred.

But the photograph shows something else too. While the Prime Minister’s face is set forwards to Zara Mohammed, his eyes are fixed rightwards to the third figure in the room, Hayfaa Abdul Karim, a Shia scholar in both civil engineering and Islamic culture, a member of an influential family whose cousins have been killed for their beliefs and whose 16-year-old niece was imprisoned for not giving money to the government. Mrs Abdul Karim has already vigorously claimed Iraq’s future for its Shia majority and is about to do so again.

This is one of the pictures that Nick and I most discussed in the days that followed. Nick Danziger is a veteran observer of the Islamic world. His family includes three adopted Afghan children. He has worked on secret assignments for the Red Cross in Middle Eastern gaols – as well as for Newsweek and Paris Match in most of its war zones of the past decades.

We watched and listened while Hayfaa Abdul Karim was told three times by Tony Blair that the Iraqi people needed a mutually tolerant, multi-party, multi-cultural, multi-ethnic government. Three times – and this dialogue of the deaf could have continued for hours – her steely response was that the Shia were the majority and that the power in post-war Iraq would be theirs. The Prime Minister, recognising a problem in need of his solution, held his critic in his “just believe me” gaze even when he was listening to her neighbour on the couch. The white-scarfed prophet never conceded the tiniest point.

Recalling her visit four years later, Hayfaa Abdul Karim is no less certain she was right. We met in the foyer of a Kensington Hotel. “Tony Blair didn’t want a discussion. He didn’t know about Iraq. Even the movements of his body showed he was confused, almost afraid of what I was saying.” She was pleased to have been invited to Downing Street. “I had high hopes for the end of Saddam and we were all grateful for that. But now. No. I am angry. What do Blair and Bush want in Iraq now? Power can’t be shared equally. Shia serves Islam. The stupid and the intelligent can’t be equal.”

That is just a little further than she went when answering the Prime Minister in front of the paintings of Nelson and Wellington on April 4, 2003, but only a little. It was not what Tony Blair wanted to hear then – and a harbinger of much else that he has not wanted to hear since, one of many such moments frozen in Nick Danziger’s extraordinary photographic record of an extraordinary time. n

Blair at War: Photographs by Nick Danziger, in association with The Times, is at the National Portrait Gallery Feb 24-July 15 (020-7306 0055; www.npg.org.uk)

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