All prime ministers seem to go through distinctive phases. First there is the optimistic flush of victory, when they believe they are ushering in a new and shiny era. Then, when the going gets tough, a gritty determination is frequently followed by frustration. Finally, there is self-delusion, as in “I’m doing this for the good of the country, so why the hell can’t you see it.”
Tony Blair is now in the delusional phase. In recent weeks the prime minister at first refused to acknowledge that his government was in crisis over a variety of scandals, from the loans for peerages, the tortuous business dealings of Tessa Jowell’s husband, the failure to deport hundreds of foreign criminals and finally John Prescott’s exposure as the office lothario. For a man with acute political antennae, Mr Blair seemed to have been genuinely taken aback by the widespread anger over prisoner releases and at the behaviour of the deputy prime minister.
Mr Blair appealed to voters to ignore these fleeting troubles and concentrate on the “big picture” instead. “Nine days should not obscure nine years of achievement,” he said last week. The problem, as he discovered with his drubbing in the local elections on Thursday, is that it is impossible to separate the nine days from the nine years. Every time Mr Prescott is in the headlines, it is a reminder of the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister’s failed policies and the incompetence at the heart of government. Every time Patricia Hewitt opens her mouth it reminds voters of the government’s failure to extract value from the tens of billions of taxpayers’ money poured into the National Health Service. The foreign prisoner releases were a testimony to the failure of successive ministers to get a grip on the Home Office and control Britain’s borders. And every story about party funding reminds us that Mr Blair has sailed too close to the wind too often.
In the delusional phase, prime ministers are at their most dangerous. This is when, once the bad headlines register, policy becomes a knee-jerk response. How else to explain Friday’s reshuffle? Margaret Beckett, when summoned to Downing Street, could reasonably have expected to have been put out to grass after long service. Instead she came away as foreign secretary, one of the three great offices of state. Who dreamt up the cunning plan to keep Mr Prescott as deputy prime minister, with the many perks of office he has accumulated, while taking away his ministerial duties? Mr Prescott will remain like an albatross around this government’s neck, a living, breathing, two-fingered gesture to voters until somebody has the courage to sack him.
The delusion of the reshuffle was that Mr Blair, by acting decisively, would draw a line under Thursday’s local election results and show people who was boss. If the prime minister thought his speedy reshuffle would make party activists forget about the local results and the succession, he was in dreamland.
As for the reshuffle, was it tough to offer Charles Clarke other cabinet posts, providing him with the opportunity for an honourable resignation? If Mr Clarke was being sacked for incompetence, he should not have been considered for any other role. Was it tough, or just daft, to demote Jack Straw amid important international negotiations on Iran? Was it tough to keep Ruth Kelly as education secretary a few months ago because she pleaded to stay, and then move her now?
Mr Blair no doubt believes this weekend that he can pick himself up, dust himself off and carry on as before. The parallels have been drawn between Friday’s reshuffle and Harold Macmillan’s “night of the long knives” in 1962 and the fact that 15 months later Macmillan himself was gone from Downing Street. People forget, however, that he faced a bigger crisis in 1958 when the entire Treasury team resigned. He carried on for years after that “little local difficulty”. That, it seems, is what Mr Blair is determined to do. It may be delusional, but he means what he says when he talks about serving a full term. Having turned 53 yesterday, he would say that it is too soon to be thinking about retirement.
There are two questions about the prime minister’s determination to soldier on. The first is whether it is feasible. The rumblings within the Labour party are growing, with a letter being circulated to get the signatures of the 71 MPs needed as the first stage to trigger a leadership contest. Two of Gordon Brown’s closest allies, Nick Brown and Andrew Smith, appear to have been licensed to speak out and call for a date for his departure. Even if there is no contest, the prime minister faces a war of attrition with rebels in his party and the chancellor, “in office but not in power”. When Mr Blair’s opponents say he should set a timetable for leaving, they do not mean the autumn of 2008. They want him gone this summer, and at the latest by his 10th anniversary in power in May next year.
The second question is whether it is good for the country for Mr Blair to stay. The difficulty here is not just with the prime minister himself, but with his successor. Mr Blair may have left it too late, but his instincts were right in getting the private sector to help to ease public sector failures. He knows that is the way forward for both education and the NHS, but has dithered for two terms of office. His mania for headline-chasing legislation (which has distracted his home secretaries from the real task of enforcing the law) is counter-productive to good government. His hypocrisy over party funding has fatally undermined his reputation for probity.
Mr Brown’s instincts are different. For all his talk about being reform-minded, he still believes that big government and the public sector hold the answers. The ambition set out in his budget to raise state school spending per pupil to independent school levels spoke volumes.
If it is Mr Brown we are going to get, would the country benefit from delaying the handover until just before the election? Not only would this give us years with a lame duck prime minister, but the risk would be that Mr Brown wins a “honeymoon” election before voters have got the measure of him. We need to know what he stands for. The phoney war between David Cameron and Mr Blair would have served no useful purpose. The risk would be that Mr Brown declares a snap election, but he is not that much of a gambler.
The prime minister must go. The choice is between a dignified exit at a time of his choosing or an undignified one later. Somebody needs to tell him that. He may be too deluded to see it.
