ANOTHER VOICE

Mr Blair could be the next Icarus.

And we all know what happened to him

MATTHEW PARRIS

Icarus, as every schoolchild knows. . . .

Or so I was about to begin this essay, but we embrace the phrase 'as every schoolchild knows' at our peril these days. Let us be realistic and start again.

Icarus, as many readers of The Spectator know, flew too close to the sun. You will remember what befell him then. His makeshift wings disintegrated, and he fell to earth. That was the end of Icarus.

Not every reader will remember why Icarus needed to fly at all, but he did. He was trapped in the Labyrinth, from which no escape was possible, except on wings. The wings were a stroke of his father's genius, but Daedalus warned him on no account to fly too close to the sun. The experience of flight, however, went to the young man's head and he fell, one more victim in the long line of those punished for the sin of hubris.

So far as we can establish, Tony Blair's middle initials do not include an 'I', but still one begins to worry. Michael Portillo has not camouflaged his zealotry by dropping the 'X' for Xavier from his own initials, and it grows day by day more believable that Mr and Mrs Leo Blair christened their son Anthony Charles Lynton Icarus, even if young Tony subsequently suppressed the 'I' lest we tumble to a dangerous quirk in his nature.

Last week we learned that Mr Blair is to put Labour's proposed election manifesto to a referendum in which every member of the Party, nationwide, will be eligible to vote. There will be no opportunity to accept or reject individual items within the referendum: the Party must take or leave the entire package. Once the referendum has endorsed the manifesto (assuming it does) the party's MPs will be regarded as bound by it during the election campaign and (if Labour wins) for the whole of Mr Blair's first term of office.

In a week when if one did not wish to comment on mad cow disease one might as well have shut up altogether, the audacious nature of this proposal went largely unre- marked, although a few commentators like my Times colleague, Peter Riddell, saw and described its significance immediately.

What commentary there was tended to approve, while noting some uncertainties. It is plainly Mr Blair's intention to confront the electorate's fear that, as he and the Labour Party are not the same thing, they might vote for him yet get something differ- ent. The manifesto will have New Labour stamped all over it, the referendum will approve the manifesto, and Mr Blair hopes this assurance that if Old Labour don't like it they will thereafter just have to lump it will calm our fears.

Yet the plan is replete with difficulties, some of them, I believe, massive. It looks on inspection more and more like the sort of undergraduate brainwave which mature reflection finds to be one of those damned good ideas which are best dropped fast, like Esperanto, spelling reform, a world govern- ment, a Scottish Assembly and the reform of the House of Lords.

My purpose here is more to question Mr Blair's overall judgment than to examine this plan in detail; so let me no more than list some of its difficulties. How can what Mr Blair calls 'the road to the manifesto' be mapped and mileposted when the date of the election is not known? What will be the status of commitments made after the man- ifesto is approved, in response to events or to rival manifestos, but too late to rubber- stamp? What will be the status of commit- ments made beforehand, yet excluded from the manifesto itself? What will be the status of commitments (within or without the manifesto) not to do things? If the mani- festo is to be binding on Labour back- benchers, is it to be binding on a Labour Cabinet? If a Labour government ducks a manifesto commitment, are the Party's backbenchers now to be entitled to rebel Early flying saucer. and vote for it anyway? Finally, and most importantly, does Mr Blair imagine the electorate are not going to ask these ques- tions or that, if they do not, the Conserva- tive Party is not going to do so for them?

The moment you seem to create differ- ent 'classes' of commitment within a party with a past as anarchic as Labour's, then far from closing down the public debate about the reliability of promises, you open it up. This referendum and its aftermath will pro- vide a field-day for hostile and sceptical questioners, placing the more independent- minded Labour backbenchers, and trade- union leaders too, in a quandary.

All the Tories have to do is establish that a significant number of Labour's parlia- mentary candidates begin to stammer when asked whether a backbencher has no higher duty to his constituents than to vote the manifesto slate, and the advantage Mr Blair imagines this referendum offers could turn into a liability. It could remind the electorate of a fear it was his intention to dispel.

And all this is supposing that the referen- dum endorsement is achieved without seri- ous difficulty; but what if the referendum campaign itself teases onto the record statements of dissent from substantial fig- ures within Labour? What if (say) only two- thirds of the membership vote for the man- ifesto, allowing the Tory press to say that a third of Mr Blair's party have refused to endorse his plans?

This scheme is plumb stupid. Mr Blair should drop it, but he won't. Labour's con- stitutional plans for the United Kingdom are plumb stupid, but he won't drop them, either. Listening to the barked 'look's and `now's Mr Blair is wont to drop into his debating technique at Prime Minister's Questions, I detect a stiff-necked and head- prefectish quality, an air of someone accus- tomed to getting his own way, which bodes ill. He thinks the tabloid papers will admire this scheme for his becoming, with one bound, free from his party's past. They may end up mocking him.

Icarus, you will recall, fell because the wax by which his feathers were fixed to his arms melted in the sun. The feathers which have enabled Mr Blair to fly out of the labyrinth of Old Labour are Tory policies. The wax by which they are fixed is not strong. Sooner or later, Mr Blair's ambition to fly too close to the Sun will land him in trouble.