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When a leader like Tony Blair is on his way out, vultures gather above, pundits chatter and prognosticate below, and each failure produces the claim that things can’t get any worse. The end is nigh. So it was with the Great Helmsman last week. Our self-proclaimed "honest bloke" was enmired in the biggest fiddle in British political history and one all of his own making, as the rest of the Party scrambled out from under. The once impregnable Leader was forced into massive changes to an Education Bill he’d proclaimed as his final offer.
"Pride comes before a fall, Tony", as my mum used to say. Yet disastrous as the fall has been no one should assume that it’s the prelude to departure or that there’s not worse to come as the long farewell drags on.
The Slush Scandal and the Education Bill mess are both the products of Britain’s new political system. Harold Wilson was a mere Prime Minister. Tony is a President, largely untrammelled by a Cabinet which has none of the powerful figures who held Harold in check. Our great Yorkshireman worked hard to keep his party together. Tony is contemptuous of his and doesn’t bother to consult or even listen to it. His is the Power and the Glory. We’re there only to bask in this reflected glory. The flow of policies used to be upwards from the party and the public. Now all comes down from the top: Tony and his keen teams of child genius policy advisers get a bright idea. Tony proclaims it as party policy. Whoever stands in its way has to be killed, clobbered or briefed against like Thomas a Beckett. As for backbenchers, it’s our job to tramp through the lobbies for whatever Tony’s enthusiasm of the moment is, with dissenters abused as splitting the Party.
This is bungee jumping as a system of government. Tony puts on his shining armour. He climbs a high cliff called Clause 4, Endowment Hospitals, Top Up Fees, Privatisation of Probation Services, Trust Schools or whatever and chucks himself off, forcing the poor hapless Minister and the reluctant backbenchers to catch him. Which of course we always do - some for promotion, some because they love Tony or the policy, some because they have got concessions on it, most because anything else will leave a nasty mess on the floor.
It worked with last week’s monstrosities. Tony was nervous about the last election and affronted that the people didn’t love him as much as they should have. So he was desperate to spend to buy a little more love. In Education he wanted to occupy ground the Tories would fight on. So he proposed a Tory Education Bill, a re-run of the Kenneth Baker Education Reform Act of 1988. Believing, as he always does, that he was right and the rest of us wrong, Tony did what he wanted on both issues and as usual with no consultation. He’s always got away with it in the past so why not now?
Sadly this time he’d miscalculated. The loans scandal got out and has deeply shocked what is, and always has been, a very moralistic party. The Education Bill, too, goes directly against Labour instincts on local authorities, fairness and comprehensives, while Trusts (or cut price academies) won’t work. More importantly this is a new era. The Party has always caught him in past jumps. Now a new and better class of catcher offers. The Tories are keen to catch him too, which frees Labour rebels up from catching duty.
Tony will win both battles because the Tories are borrowing more, and talk the same rubbish about parent power and keeping local authorities out of education. That will embolden him to try to get away with more. But the price will be greater hostility in his own Party now transformed from a Labour Government to a Lab-Con one governing under licence from the Tories.
Tony won’t mind this. He doesn’t like his own Party too much so he’ll assume that if Labour doesn’t like his proposals then so much the worse for them. If the Tories want to help, as they will because most of the decisions which still have to be taken to top off the Blair Monument, such as nuclear power, meaner pensions, cuts in Invalidity, or new nuclear missiles, are all more acceptable to them than to Labour, then so much the worse for them too because the more ground they surrender to us next time.
So far from being the end, last week could be the beginning. It boosts Tony’s certainty in his own rightness and his feeling that he can get away with anything he wants. It shows he’s still the master. It demonstrates that both Gordon and the Labour Party will have to follow wherever he leads because to rock the boat endangers Labour next time: nothing weakens a Party more than disunity. Finally, it adds another stage to the Blair Mausoleum he’s so keen to leave as his legacy.
So those who assume that Tony will now go early unto that goodnight are wrong. Only one Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, has had the decency to go early this century. All the rest stay on well beyond their sell by date because the time’s never ripe. If they’re down they won’t go on a note of failure. If they’re up they don’t want to. So they linger on. As Tony will. He’s impregnable. Labour has no machinery for getting rid of an unwanted Leader and we won’t use the traditional method of a knife in the back, a body in the river the Tories are so good at. The MPs don’t dare do anything because disunity damages. Gordon is firmly tied to the chariot and can be dragged along behind. As for the opposition, the Tories have now found a new vocation as Tony’s willing dupes, his sherpas in the long journey to the middle ground. Only the Liberals remain and no-one listens to them.
So everything tells me it will be a long farewell with as many final appearances as Dame Nelly Melba and a Parliament running right to the end rather than an early departure. My guess is that that’s Tony’s view too. Battered and damaged as he’s been he’s still, as Rab Butler will have put it, the best PM we’ve got. He is, however, wrong. Gordon Brown wants to move the Party to the left having developed over nine years a common compassion and a preference for the public service. Tony, on the other hand, lacks confidence in Labour so his purpose in politics has been to build a middle ground middle class consensus.
These are very different view points and in my view the public are growing tired of Tonyland and more sympathetic to Gordon’s, while the Labour Party, both in Parliament and what remains of it outside, want a concentrated effort to build a fairer, more equal, society. The big money boys who’ve been prepared to finance Tony’s vision will now melt away while the public will lapse into boredom. So however long Tony now lingers on (and it’s entirely up to him) the sooner he gives up on the Monument Project and goes the better the prospects for Labour and healthy politics. And, of course, vice-versa. |
