The trouble is Blair wants ‘ample time’, too.
So let’s see how the education vote goes
Tony Blair has long had a private ‘timetable’ for his departure. The trouble is that it is much more complicated, conditional and flexible than his enemies would wish. It is not a single linear timeline, but a series of intertwined chronologies that he hopes will converge towards an agreeable exit date. What he refuses to do is to set that date arbitrarily to satisfy the bailiffs of the Labour party who lurk moodily outside No. 10.
Here is an example of the problem: the Prime Minister has long been planning to make a keynote speech in America on geopolitical issues, to continue his valedictory series of ex cathedra pronouncements on international affairs that began in Oxford in February.
Part of Mr Blair’s purpose on this occasion is to persuade the world that President Bush’s true position on the environment, global terrorism and the need for multilateral action has been misunderstood. He has urged Mr Bush to say as much ‘in English, not in Texan’. The Prime Minister’s visit is intended to nudge the President, as well as to help him. But — crucially — Mr Blair will not make his speech in the US until a unity government is established in Iraq by prime minister-designate Nuri al-Maliki. In other words: the prospects for transition in Westminster are intimately linked with the prospects for transition in Baghdad.
Much was made — quite rightly — of Mr Blair’s remarks at his monthly press conference last Monday about the succession and his promise to give the new Labour leader ‘the time properly needed to bed himself in’ (apparently women need not apply). Asked if Gordon Brown was his chosen successor, the Prime Minister adopted his special puzzled expression and said, ‘Of course he is. When have I ever said anything different?’ Well, 1 October 2004, for starters. In an interview with the BBC on that evening, Mr Blair stopped far short of a full endorsement. ‘You know, there’s lots of people who want to do the job,’ he said. He also remarked that ‘there have been all these stories rolling around that maybe I might stand for election but then stand down — in year one, year two — I’m not going to do that. I think if you put yourself forward you’ve got to put yourself forward for the full term. Now at some point shortly before that election, there’s then a change and the leadership procedures of the Labour party are clear and can be done reasonably quickly.’ That is very different indeed from the formula he presented to Labour MPs last Monday: one that would give Mr Brown ‘ample time’ to get his feet under the desk and establish himself in the mind of the public as Prime Minister rather than Chancellor. Why then, the Brownites ask, can Mr Blair not define what ‘ample’ means? There are Cromwells and Amerys everywhere: ‘Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!’ Why does he refuse to? Cussedness, partly. Mr Blair is a very stubborn politician, a character trait that was obscured by his early deference to focus groups. His politics is often Newtonian, in that each action against him produces an equal and opposite reaction: press him to resign and he will dig in his heels. I think he means it, too, when he says that a formally announced countdown only 265 days to go till we say ‘bye bye, Blair!’ — would demean his office and paralyse government.
But there is another reason. At the same press conference, Mr Blair reeled off those areas of policy that will absorb him in the months to come: pensions, nuclear energy, health, transport funding, the modernisation of the criminal justice system. It sounded as if he was going through the motions, reading out a list of Cabinet portfolios, many of them newly reallocated, before getting to the questions that we all really wanted to hear about.
That list was no accident, however. Mr Blair was warning that he needs ‘ample time’ no less than Mr Brown: that there is a symmetry to all this. As friendly as Mr Blair tried to be to his Chancellor at the press conference, he was visibly irritated, too, at the suggestion that he is a spent force, yesterday’s tomorrow man. You will get no ‘timetable’ out of me, he said, until this shopping list is dealt with.
In this respect, the two key appointments in the reshuffle were of John Reid to the Home Office and Alan Johnson to Education. Mr Blair believes that the modern world is breeding new criminal phenomena with which governments have failed to keep pace. You can be sure that Mr Reid will be a much more aggressive Home Secretary than Charles Clarke. Indeed, I am told that when Mr Blair appointed Mr Clarke to the job in December 2004, his parting shot as the appointee left his office was, ‘I am not even sure you really are a reformer, Charles’ (a remark which reflects poorly upon the PM rather than Mr Clarke).
In this context, the promotion of Liam Byrne — one of New Labour’s brightest talents — to become Minister of State at the Home Office is no less significant an appointment than Mr Reid’s. Last September Mr Byrne published a Fabian Society analysis of Labour’s general election victory that caught the Prime Minister’s eye. The report’s conclusion was, ‘Don’t swing left; the Tories, not the Lib Dems, are the real threat to Labour in 2009.’ At the time, I remember a senior Brownite minister telling me that Mr Byrne’s unbendingly Blairite analysis was ‘simplistic rubbish’. But the local election results show that Mr Byrne was right and my Brownite acquaintance was wrong. Expect a furious turf war and an equally ill-tempered strategic battle between the Home Office and the Treasury in the months ahead: these two mighty ministries, as much as No. 10, are the power centres to watch.
Meanwhile Mr Blair faces a more immediate challenge in the imminent return to the Commons of the hugely contentious Education and Inspections Bill. In March the Bill establishing new ‘trust’ schools secured the backing of MPs only with Conservative support: 52 Labour backbenchers voted against the measure and 25 did not vote. The legislation’s new helmsman is Mr Johnson who, as higher education minister in 2004, was widely credited with saving the government from disaster in the Commons over tuition fees. The Prime Minister has also installed the unambiguously Blairite Jacqui Smith as his new chief whip. Will her factional allegiance help or hinder the herding of rebel Labour cats into the ‘aye lobby’?
We shall soon find out. Much more than the email petitions doing the rounds, the briefing and the counter-briefing, and the coded messages exchanged between Messrs Brown and Blair in public remarks, this forthcoming vote will be an eloquent guide to how much time the Prime Minister really has left.
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