”When he has to go I will tell him.” These extraordinary words, spoken by one of Tony Blair’s closest political friends, suggest to me that the Prime Minister is no longer the master of his own destiny.
The former minister and self-professed radical moderniser said that if the Prime Minister became so isolated from his party that further reform was impossible, there would be no hesitation from Blair loyalists. “The Labour Party must not be allowed to do to him what the Tories did to Thatcher,” he said. If necessary, the Blairite ultras who begged him last year not to stand down in favour of Gordon Brown will step in to save him from Thatcher’s fate.
There is no suggestion that the Blairite inner circle is likely to hand the PM the revolver any time soon. During a BBC radio discussion I took part in with Blair’s Sedgefield agent, John Burton, he let slip that he believes the Prime Minister intends to serve another two years. Others in his sanctum insist he wants to stay at least until the end of 2007. But it is an indication of Blair’s fast-draining power that those who know him best believe he himself may no longer be the person best placed to make the decision about the timing of his departure.
In the aftershock of his first Commons defeat, Blair held a series of meetings with allies inside and outside the cabinet who told him, in no uncertain terms, that he must immediately rebuild trust among Labour MPs and the wider party if he is to push through his “legacy” reforms on education, health and welfare.
As a result, the PM has been advised to draw up a list of core Labour pledges, from the manifesto, to balance his radical plans for public sector reform. Downing Street now knows there is serious work ahead to persuade large sections of the party that the government is working for “our people” (traditional Labour voters on the council estates). “Part of the problem is that in 1997 and 2001, alongside the modernisation, we could fly the flag for policies such as the national minimum wage and the New Deal that made people feel good about us being a Labour government doing Labour things,” says one Blairite source.
So listen out for much talk in the coming weeks about the pledge in this year’s manifesto to raise a million children out of poverty by 2010. But it is not certain that this would be enough to win back the waverers and halt the fragmentation of the parliamentary party. Nor is it clear that the desire to listen to dissident grievances is genuine.
All organisations reflect the authority of their leaders and none more so than the Labour Party. It is no coincidence that as the Prime Minister has been seen to lose his touch, the new Labour coalition he has built up over more than a decade has begun to dissolve. Leaving aside the hard-left Campaign group and former cabinet ministers such as Frank Dobson, whose concerns Downing Street has no intention of hearing, it is now possible to identify several distinct – and mainstream – groups capable of voting against the government over the next year. Recently on these pages, I described John Denham and Angela Eagle as the beginnings of a “real new Labour” movement. Both have since become articulate critics of Blair’s reform programme. At the same time, Charles Clarke has identified a “civil libertarian tendency”, represented by the former Foreign Office minister Chris Mullin and David Winnick, the MP who proposed the amendment that defeated the Prime Minister on the 90 days.
Labour MPs who came up through local government comprise another group. They resent the perceived attack on local authorities represented by Ruth Kelly’s education white paper. Backbenchers such as the former teacher and Barnsley councillor Jeff Ennis and David Clelland, who cut his political teeth as leader of Gateshead Council, are already being targeted. Downing Street has been told that there are potentially dozens like them, who have always voted with the government but whose support can no longer be guaranteed on education and health reform.
One cabinet minister told me that the situation in the Parliamentary Labour Party was much worse than No 10 realises. “When we were deputed to twist colleagues’ arms for Wednesday’s [Terrorism Bill] vote, we discovered genuine anger,” he said, adding that policy concerns raised by respected figures such as Denham and Mullin point to “a wider malaise” in the party. For him, a central question remains unanswered: “Is Downing Street capable of renewing its relationship with the party? I’m not so sure.” If not, Tony Blair’s friends may feel obliged to ask him to step into a side room and do the honourable thing sooner rather than later.
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