POLITICS
PETER OBORNE
It wasn’t the booze: Cameron did for Kennedy, and now Blair is the target
Amyth is beginning to be constructed around the events of the last week at Westminster. It needs to be challenged at once before it gains ground and becomes acknowledged fact. It goes as follows: Charles Kennedy was sacked as leader of the Liberal Democrats because he was a heavy drinker. This is open to challenge — both the claim that Kennedy was a heavy drinker, and the associated proposition that he was driven from office on account of his drinking.
Kennedy’s consumption of alcohol was at most moderate — and negligible compared with an earlier generation of politicians: Denis Healey, Roy Jenkins, Harold Wilson, Ken Clarke. All of them were the better for it. Melodramatic accounts of Kennedy’s reckless drinking which appeared in the press over the weekend should be treated with a certain amount of suspicion. Readers should bear in mind that these stories have been carefully placed in the public prints by Kennedy’s assassins, desperate to justify their treachery and to cover their tracks.
Kennedy went for a different reason: he had lost the confidence of Liberal Democrat MPs at Westminster. Drink had nothing much to do with it. Kennedy has been ‘boozing’ (i.e., enjoying the odd glass of beer or whisky, and occasionally letting his hair down in private) for years. He would have been allowed to carry on in the same merry vein into the next general election except for just one thing: the sudden emergence of a popular Conservative leader who threatened to reverse the Lib Dem gains of the last decade. David Cameron was Kennedy’s undoing, not secret bingeing.
Now that the new Tory leader has one scalp under his belt, and has left the Lib Dems in disarray, he can turn his full attention to an altogether more formidable target: Tony Blair and New Labour. Here Cameron has adopted two strategies, interconnected though by no means the same. First, he is seeking to bring about fresh discord, never a difficult thing to do, between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Second, he is trying to stretch the gap between the Prime Minister and the Labour party into an abyss.
That is what the announcement of a new Conservative party education policy was about. David Cameron and Tony Blair both know that the Education Bill, due to be debated in the Commons this March, will be a lethal event. If Tony Blair suffers the same kind of defeat as he did over the Terrorism Bill last year, he will be destroyed. If he wins, but by courtesy of Conservative party support, his authority within the Labour party will still be catastrophically undermined.
The Prime Minister, as one would expect from such an accomplished politician, worked out a strategy to head off this danger. He claimed that the real dividing line (to use the vogue phrase preferred by Downing Street strategists) over education concerned admissions policy. Blair and the Labour party were against selective education. Cameron’s Tories were for it. Admissions policy is such a neuralgic issue in the Labour party — a huge number of party members are teachers — that Blair’s ploy might well have been enough to get him off the hook.
Blair discomforted Cameron, who had a choice. He could stick with the Conservative policy on grammar schools and gratify traditional Tory supporters. Or he could stick with his strategy of harassing the Prime Minister. Faced with this conflict between policy and strategy, he chose strategy. This decision means that the dividing line in education policy is once again where Cameron wants it to be: Tony Blair and the Tories on the one side, with their joint support for greater freedom for schools; the bulk of the Labour party, mutinous and disgruntled, on the other.
But Blair has made Cameron pay a price. In order to secure a strategic gain, Cameron has been forced to set aside a valuable article of Conservative belief, laying himself open to attack from the Right. His education spokesman David Willetts has ingeniously come to the rescue by producing a plausible alternative: a renewed emphasis on setting, i.e., academic selection within schools. The Prime Minister might respond by attacking this proposal too. But such a strategy would hold risks. If Tony Blair gives away too much of his modernising, reforming package, he abandons the centre ground of politics and becomes open to the charge that he is merely the creature of the Labour Left.
This cat-and-mouse battle, with Cameron sticking like glue to the Prime Minister, will continue for weeks. At the same time, Cameron and his shadow chancellor George Osborne are pursuing a yet more promising objective: the separation of Gordon Brown from Tony Blair. Very revealing in this context was the Prime Minister’s interview with Andrew Marr last Sunday morning. All political editors wrote this up the following day as Tony Blair’s strongest endorsement yet of a Gordon Brown succession. It is comparatively rare, though by no means unknown, for the parliamentary lobby to completely misinterpret events, and I think they did so this time.
The interview contained two lethal ingredients as far as the Chancellor was concerned. The first was the very deliberate attempt to build up a successor generation of New Labour politicians, perhaps led by the local government minister David Miliband. Gordon Brown already displays palpable discomfort at Tory claims that he is yesterday’s man. This glance at the future was not designed to make the Chancellor feel any better. More disturbing still, at any rate from the Chancellor’s point of view, was Tony Blair’s very clear statement that he intends to remain in No. 10 Downing Street right till the end of this Parliament. ‘I made it clear that I’m here to serve the term,’ he told Marr, ‘and that is what I want to do.’ This ambition creates a problem, which was well analysed by Michael Howard in a Guardian article before Christmas. On the face of things Howard was justifying his own decision, heavily criticised at the time, to step down as Tory leader immediately after the general election. He argued that any other course of action would have been intolerable for his successor. Howard would be making decisions, and developing policies, for which he would not be answerable at a general election.
The identical problem exists now inside New Labour. Tony Blair does not have to account to the electorate for the decisions he makes between now and the election. He is like a man who orders a meal at a restaurant, but is not obliged to stay to pay the bill. That is why it was so easy at the weekend for Tony Blair to be so relaxed and debonair about the new menace posed by Cameron. He will never have to face him at a general election.
That will be Gordon Brown’s job — unless one of the bright young things named by the Prime Minister in his weekend interview gets there first. The Chancellor and his supporters have a new nightmare: just a few months in office, then a general election, in which he goes to the country defending Tony Blair’s legacy. Tony Blair has landed the Chancellor in a most unhappy predicament.
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