The signs are unmistakable. The metropolitan chatterers must have sore elbows and worn-out facial muscles from all their nudging and winking. In the Guardian, Jonathan Freedland, using the implausible excuse that it's the 25th anniversary of Margaret Thatcher's accession, writes the Prime Minister's political obituary, concluding that, alas, "his global adventures . . . are most likely to be remembered". In the same paper, Polly Toynbee reports that "speculation about the coming Brown era is everywhere". In the Times, Peter Riddell, who has inherited some of the papal authority exuded by the late Hugo Young, announces that, following the letter of protest from 52 former diplomats, "Tony Blair has lost the support of the British Establishment . . . he is seen as having lost his way and his grip". A Sun columnist nudges with particular vigour: "He has the wearied air of a man who . . . rather than wake up every morning and face . . . other people's crises, would rather concentrate on his own family's problems."
Is all this merely the result of a few days of hot weather in London? Or could Mr Blair be gone before the autumn? His regime shows every sign of crumbling. Ministers who bore the label "Blairite" - Peter Mandelson, Alan Milburn, Stephen Byers - have left the government under clouds of varying size. Members of Mr Blair's inner circle have mostly fled Downing Street. Little is heard of the Third Way and Anthony Giddens, just as little was heard of dialectical materialism and Marx in the final days of Soviet Russia.
Mr Blair's governing technique makes this situation more serious than it might otherwise be. His habit of steering policy through meetings with individual ministers rather than through the cabinet or its committees leaves Whitehall with a decision-making vacuum if he is politically disabled. In normal times, even this might not be cause for alarm, as the belief that governments always need a sense of "direction" is a fancy of the media age. But British troops are in the front line of worsening unrest in Iraq, America is ruled by a rogue administration, the European Union is at a turning point, terrorists present (or are thought to present) an imminent and serious threat. This is not the time for enfeebled leadership.
Mr Blair has many things to be proud of. Others could have taken Labour to victory in 1997, but it is not clear that they could have made it seem so quickly like the natural governing party. The restoration of full employment, devolution to Scotland and Wales, the national minimum wage, substantial progress in tackling child poverty, a flow of funds to education and health, innovations such as "baby bonds" - without anything comparable to the NHS or the Open University, these achievements may not seem as solid and enduring as those of Attlee or Wilson. But their governments enjoyed a climate that was more sympathetic to collectivism, less sceptical of new state-run institutions. After 18 years of Thatcherism, new Labour was as good as we were likely to get.
Where Mr Blair went most wrong was, first, in his belief that the consumer-market model could revitalise public services and, second, in his belief that liberal imperialism, allied to the US, could put the world to rights. The first is having so destabilising an effect on public sector employees that it threatens to wipe out the benefits of higher funding. The second has lost his government thousands of natural allies and overshadows all its achievements. In the Financial Times, Philip Stephens, having shown why Mr Blair could sensibly leave for the US lecture circuit, then argues that he will not go because it would "tell the world he got it wrong about Iraq". That is exactly why many think he should now leave.
A cotton-picking victory
A small step towards ending one of the world's great scandals was taken on 27 April. The World Trade Organisation ruled that America's subsidies to its cotton farmers - $10bn over seven years - breach global trade rules. The subsidies enable US farmers to sell cotton at artificially low prices and thus undercut farmers from poorer countries, particularly in West Africa and South America. As a result, they have grabbed 40 per cent of the world market and plunged thousands of people in developing countries into poverty and sometimes starvation. The subsidies blatantly flout the free-market principles that America imposes on the rest of the world but ignores when they would hurt its own industries. They are not confined to cotton: maize, rice, wheat, barley and apples are among the other products subsidised. The money does not help America's own (relatively) poor farmers: it goes overwhelmingly to big agribusinesses.
Alas, a small step is all it is. The US will appeal and it could be years before it is actually told to stop the subsidies. Even then, the ruling has to be enforced. The only sanction is for other cotton-producing nations to impose, legitimately under WTO rules, tariffs or quotas on US goods. When the WTO ruled against steel subsidies, President Bush chose to cut them rather than risk sanctions. But the other steel producers were mostly rich nations that could inflict real damage on US exports. The cotton producers are mostly poor nations with less economic muscle. Ominously, the US response to the new ruling is to say that subsidies should be a matter for country-to-country negotiation, not for WTO hearings. The US is learning not to like the WTO because, unlike the IMF and the World Bank, it gives every member, at least technically, equal weight; and developing countries now use their combined clout. Bear this is mind when you next hear a US politician boasting about how his country carries the torch for democracy, human rights and free markets.
