So much for so little? Tony Blair’s vague acknowledgment that, well, you know, by this time next year … had been dragged out of him after the most damaging public revolt in the history of New Labour, which is saying something. It is the political equivalent of losing several regiments of the best and bravest for a few metres of bloody clay in Flanders.
The revolt was emphatically not a ”Brownite plot”, despite the starring role of the MP Tom Watson, who — burly, Scottish and a former engineering union official — is most people’s idea of the archetypal Brownite (supporter of Blair heir apparent, the United Kingdom Finance Minister Gordon Brown). Brown did not initiate, draft or sanction the letter calling on Blair to stand down now. There were plenty of non-Brownites to do that. The letter was, after all, only the latest in a series of such demands.
These have been coming from members of the parliamentary committee, the elected members of the parliamentary Labour party who meet weekly with the prime minister; from younger ministers worried that they were going to spend the best years of their lives writing pamphlets in opposition; from a wide array of MPs in marginal seats; and, yes, from disaffected former ministers too.
No 10 is talking about this being a Brownite plot because it cannot face the truth, which is that this was a growing revolt by the Labour party against its once nation-bestriding leader, not by any single faction. Had it been merely Brownite, Blair would not have moved.
And he has moved, from serving a ”full Parliament” to most of a Parliament, to making ”time for a successor”, then ”ample time”, then going some time in 2007/08, then in 2007, and now before next year’s conference. These have been yanked out of him despite his reluctance, or at least the clear impression that he’d rather have faced a tooth extraction without the benefit of anaesthetic.
But he has been forced to shift not because of a revolting chancellor, or angry groups of fat men in suits brooding over their beer, but because of utterly obvious, plain-as-a-pikestaff facts in the real world: first, the continuing world-scale disaster of Iraq, which is now dragging George Bush down into the mire of public anger too; second, the crumbling of his real parliamentary majority as MPs refuse to back him on key reforms; third, the inevitable sense of boredom and disaffection that accompanies any leader who has been as omnipresent for as long as him; fourth, the effect of all this on the polls, which are now terrible for Labour; fifth, and finally, the feedback effect of the polls on the mood on the Labour benches.
The prime minister has delayed and fudged and struggled to stay on despite it all — not, I think, to pass some abstract hurdle, such as spending more time in office than Margaret Thatcher, but rather because he has hoped that something would turn up. There would be an upsurge of good news — Bin Laden captured, perhaps, or a great international crisis to be dealt with, after which, he dreamed, his stock would rise again and he could leave on an ”up”. As the weeks have continued to deliver downer after downer, his resilience has kept him going, to the increasing despair of ordinary mainstream MPs around him.
To blame last week’s events on treachery, therefore, is just like blaming the Tories for getting rid of Thatcher in 1990, or the Liberal Democrats for hounding out their leader Charles Kennedy last year. Thatcher went after her Cabinet and many Tory MPs demanded that she go, true. She wasn’t happy about it. But her ministers acted not because they were innately treacherous but because Europe was ripping the Conservatives in two and because — after the political disaster of the poll tax — the party was crashing in the polls. A sane reading of events and an instinct for self-preservation were behind that ”coup”, just as they are behind last week’s drama.
Similarly, as Greg Hurst’s new biography demonstrates, the moves against Kennedy were the reluctant acts of men and women driven to despair by his drink problem. Elected politicians act in their own interest: they want to keep their seats and they want their party to win. If, in some parallel universe, Brown did not exist, then this would still be happening.
As with earlier uprisings in other parties, the timing is driven more by the electoral timetable than by personal agendas and private diaries. A wipeout defeat in Scotland, Wales and the English local elections in May would see Labour’s morale and support plummet to depths from which it might never recover.
This is why I believe Blair will have to announce his resignation well before those May elections, however vague he chose to be last week. He could stay and preside over bad results, giving his successor a clean start. But assuming the party will do best with a new leader in place by those elections, and that it can take six to eight weeks for a leadership contest, we are looking at a formal timetable from him in February.
Brown does not have a private deal with Blair about a specific date. He knows that Cabinet colleague Jack Straw’s words this week, essentially making May the last possible date for departure, were sanctioned by No 10. But Brown is also well aware that the party and the public would abhor the idea of a private stitch-up between the two men about the country’s future. So he is still to some extent at the mercy of events, and has to hope that the prime minister bases his final decision on what is best for the Labour party, not just his own reputation.
The danger is now more for Brown and the Labour party than it is for Blair, since we all know the latter is going. A limping premiership, bleeding authority, is hardly going to help all those worried middle-ranking ministers and MPs with small majorities. Things remain incredibly unstable and will continue so, most immediately during the party conference. — Â