THE END IS NIGH

Edward Pearce on why the Prime Minister

can't compete against the wit of Hague or the grace of Livingstone

LET us not be extravagant. Tony Blair will not fall tomorrow. But let us not be timid, either. He has just passed irreversibly on to a downward slope leading to the end of his premiership.

Ken Livingstone's decision to stand as an independent candidate in the London mayoral elections is much more than the big story of the week. It is the means by which Mr Blair finds himself, after months of fiddling, bullying and ludicrous bad judgment, on the brink of a public humilia- tion to end all public humiliations. Ken Livingstone has been a poison to New Labour and, before very long, Tony Blair will die of him.

Nobody outside Millbank Tower minds that Mr Livingstone has reneged on his promise not to stand as an independent. A promise was extracted when Mr Blair was screaming that Mr Livingstone shouldn't even be allowed on the shortlist. Frank Dobson begins his campaign going fee-fi-fo- fum about drugs, police and fleeing investors. Every frantic, incredible insult adds to an unimaginable Livingstone poll lead of 55 points — 55 points! And Mr Dobson is perceived as Father Christmas stuck in his chimney.

What happened on Monday was that we were officially guaranteed a two-month fight in which one side punches and kicks and the other side — graceful, clever wins. The contest begun this week will destroy the dominant press cliché of the last 1,000 or so days — that Tony Blair is for ever and William Hague a passing blip.

The press sees blades whetted on Tory thumbs and speaks incessantly of an assured putsch by Michael Portillo after the next, obviously disastrous, election. It has also long supposed that a sort of per- sonal divinity did hedge King Anthony Charles Lynton. Forget it. William Hague will, as Conservative leader, witness the departure of Tony Blair.

There is, of course, a whole itemised case against Blair as head of government: cow- ardice in the face of difficulty; licking the hereditary icing off the Upper House before putting a nomenclature in its place; diluting open government reform because he doesn't really want open government; grinding meanness over incapacity benefit; priggish contempt for the poor over single- parent benefits; a fatuous war, behind Mrs Albright's skirts and General Clark's target- finders, to bring 850,000 people back to Kosovo after triggering the expulsion of 750,000. All these garland a shoddy, philis- tine, idea-proof ego-trip of a government. But such failures are largely noticed only by aficionados, the people still somehow inter- ested in politics.

For no folly compares with Blair's two home-crafted catastrophes in Wales and London. They have not been got up by the press. They are public judgments. 'Pearls, Girls and Monty Bodkin,' sang Wodehouse. `Polls, Toils and Ken Livingstone' is today's message. Like the Queen Dowager in 1760, some fool — Mr Philip Gould? — whis- pered in our boy's head, 'Tony, be a king', when any sensible mum would have said, `Keep out of local government'. What fol- lowed looked like an attempt by policemen to stop a jolly party, and the calamitous upshot was Monday's declaration by Mr Livingstone that he would stand as an inde- pendent. The Patriot King is left looking like that most pitiful thing, a half-cock authoritarian.

What makes the combined Wales and London blooper so shattering is that it has got through. It has, forgive me, impacted! There is nothing whatever wrong with Alun Surreal killer Michael except that this conscientious, hard- working, pleasant man was, at Blair's per- sonal insistence, made Governor General of Wales. Such heroic thickheadedness is hard to credit, for Rhodri Morgan was and is the most popular man in the devolved princi- pality — a funny, brave, surprisingly expert, fmger-tip politician. Spend a day with him, as I did during the 1992 election, and you'll understand. Why the veto? No reason is more compelling than his quality — an organic talent, not a processed leader. And a man rolling his own popularity is not com- pliant the way Mr Blair likes compliance.

Neither is `Compliance' the middle name of Ken Livingstone. Nor is `Lenin', though to hear the fraught McCarthyism coming from the apparat, one might think so. Mr Livingstone, an old leftist, some of whose views — as on gays and lesbians — are now mainstream in a way they were not in the early Eighties, is not someone to pull up the bedclothes against. He may have more residual socialist principle than other ex- Marxists such as Stephen Byers and Peter Mandelson, but, for heaven's sake, Ken Liv- ingstone is the toast of vicarage teas, acclaimed at ladies' sewing circles, popular with dog-fanciers, estate agents and Conser- vatives. This last is not just a handy way of poking Mr Blair in the eye with a burnt stick, though it is that all right; there is a genuine affection for him across the spec- trum, because he is a mensch — a cheeky, good-humoured upsetter of an order that pious Mr Blair thinks divinely fixed.

Assaulting successively the most popular man in Wales and the most popular man in London was parodic folly. But the rea- son why it is dismantling Mr Blair beyond repair is that it is happening slowly, under lights with everyone watching. Nobody remembers incapacity benefit. Kosovo is a faraway country. But Wales and London have gone on and on. Every flaw in Mr Blair's second-rate, injunctive personality has been anatomised. The private bullying of backbenchers has been replicated up front. The corrupt means, like Sir Kenneth Jackson's wad of votes, are public know- ledge. The hysterical ends — 'Stop this man, I say so' — are as clear.

But Wales will tell you why Mr Blair grows brittle. Alun Michael resigned because of major Labour defections in the assembly, made possible because Labour assembly members had nothing to fear from constituents. Tony Blair enjoys his power because (a) he has a huge majority and (b) in the country he was thought lik- able, fair and straight. There are two struts under the Prime Minister, and at least one of them is crumbling.

Compare and contrast William Hague. Yes, indeed, he is unpopular in the coun- try — too young, too sudden, too right- wing for the likes of me. But Mr Hague has intrinsic strengths denied the Prime Minister — intelligence, wit, a grasp of issues and a high level of competence, of which the little-followed Prime Minister's Question Time is a fair measure. Mr Hague is a value stock, Mr Blair a dot.com starting to flicker. And the assassin Portillo will not strike. There is an intelligent Portillo and an arrogant Portillo, and the one, I reckon, has sussed out the other. Michael Portillo is too sharp not to know after Enfield that the reputation of a conspirator and swag- gerer is death and must be shed at all costs. His future turns upon sailing with Hague, never upon seizing power in a ship which mutiny will sink. And, Europe apart, forget Portillo the right-winger — he will urge Hague to the essential softening and sweetening of Conservatism. Forget the febrile back-bench briefers, quite simply, the breaking of another leader, even after election defeat, is suicidal in a party on probation and working its way back to being half-liked again.

And, anyway, the question about that election is the extent of defeat. Suppose, as many now do, that the message of, for example, the Leeds Central by-election 27 per cent turnout and the implicit alien- ation of core Labour voters — should spill into the general election. Suppose that, and the next verdict, though not easy to mea- sure, will likely be the sort of Labour victory most notable as a slump. Imagine a turnout just above 60 per cent, Labour with 350 seats instead of 419, the Lib Dems picking up in unexpected places as protest, perhaps the Tories near enough to normality for a piece of the rebound — a Labour victory but a soured and diminished victory. And all those put-upon, bossed-about, not-wor- thy-of-notice MPs still with scratchings of their own souls — how will they react? How much like Welsh Assemblymen getting the nod from fed-up Labour voters? Tony Blair is an oversold lightweight, a plastic triton sustained by dodgy dolphins, who once had a factitious magic. With two long-play tantrums he has laboriously dis- pelled it everywhere. The levers and the scurrying Millbank folk remain, as he will for an interim. And an ambitious, abler colleague will know what to do.

Edward Pearce recently published Lines of Most Resistance: the Lords, the Tories, and Ireland — 1886-1914 (Little, Brown).