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The spell is broken, but don't bank on Blair to go quietly
Yorkshire Post - 4 January
2006
Tony’s travails for YP from David Curry
If the Prime Minister’s ringing New Year message was greeted with a certain weary scepticism he has only himself to blame. Tony Blair has made a bit of a speciality of issuing brilliant calls to arms only to lapse into inactivity – witness his manifesto for a new Europe delivered in messianic terms to the European Parliament six months ago.
So his promise of a year of decisions critical to Britain’s future is unlikely to bring Labour MPs flocking back to Westminster with their eyes ablaze with enthusiasm for the coming conflict. Indeed, many will see the message that he is determined to see through his bitterly challenged public services reforms as calling the bluff of their threat to revolt. Give me my legacy of modernised public services or pull the temple down around our ears, Blair appears to be saying.
It is worth remembering that this is the Prime Minister who told the Labour Party conference that his greatest regret was being too cautious in his reform agenda. Labour MPs and activists may want him to go; his Chancellor wants him to go; his mesmerizing talent to identify with the public mood may have worn thin. But Blair has work in progress and he is not going to bail out.
Of course Blair’s spell over the Labour Party is broken. It never felt an emotional bond to him- he did not emerge from that great gene pool of Labour history and sentiment that produced, for example, Gordon Brown. Indeed, if Blair fell under the proverbial double-decker bus (in fact it would now be under one of Ken Livingstone’s massively cumbersome “bendy buses”) half the Parliamentary Party would attend the funeral to verify the death!)
But Blair won elections. He brought into the Commons men and women who never dreamed of winning a Parliamentary seat. In the intoxication of holding power at last and with Blair and Brown still apparently wedded to a common purpose the absence of ideological anchor did not matter.
Besides which Government policy was not cutting into the core beliefs of the party. The early years of relative austerity (sticking to Tory spending plans) were necessary to establish the Government’s economic credibility. The subsequent huge expansion in public expenditure gladdened Labour hearts and was the fuel which kept the British economy alive and kicking.
But the combination of Iraq and the demand to loosen the state’s grip on public services to deliver value for the increase in spending has changed the chemistry within the party, made worse by the increasingly aggressive posture of Gordon Brown in appearing to disassociate himself from the Prime Minister.
The bad news for the Prime Minister is not that the “usual suspects” are in revolt- they can be discounted. It is not even that usually loyal moderate MPs are signing up to the dissidents’ agenda. It is that revolt now carries no penalty so far as Labour constituency activists are concerned.
One recent ex-minister, a right wing loyalist by any standards, recently told me that when he announced to his local executive that he could not support the government on certain issues he received its enthusiastic support.
Yet we should be cautious about penning the obituaries. The truth is that rumours of Blair’s death, like those of Mark Twain’s, are greatly exaggerated. For one thing a Prime Minister’s powers are huge, including those of patronage. It is very difficult to drag a Prime Minister kicking and screaming out of the front door of No 10 unless the party including the Cabinet go on strike. The day Dr John Reid tells the Prime Minister to go will be the one that matters, not the constant surly mutterings from Gordon Brown.
This is still a very different situation from when John Major was accused (by Norman Lamont, one of his own colleagues) of being “in office but not in power.”
For another Gordon Brown needs to consider where his own interests lie. His best chance of serving in his own right as Prime Minster lie in a smooth transition within a successful government, not the forced eviction of Tony Blair from a third-term administration in obvious disarray.
Brown’s own place in history will be best secured by helping to deliver the Blair legacy.
The interesting question is just how determined Blair is to go for broke with his reform programme. He has never brought to his domestic agenda the sense of moral force which he has deployed on the issue of the invasion of Iraq or, indeed, Northern Ireland, however controversial the policies themselves.
If the visionary tone of the New Year message really does mean that the Prime Minister is not for turning real politics may be about to return to Parliament with a bang.
© Yorkshire Post
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