ARE WE approaching the end of Tony Blair’s political career? This question is prompted not only by the threat of a parliamentary vote on the Iraq troop deployment. Mr Blair can no longer be sure of winning, largely because of his own tactical blunder in announcing that he would hang on to his job for another full Parliament. As a result, the many Labour backbenchers who are sick to death of the Prime Minister no longer have any incentive to support him in the hope of an orderly transfer of power after next year’s election. And the chronic weakness of the Tories means that the Labour Party has no need to worry about ditching a leader with proven ability to win votes.

But parliamentary dissidence is only a symptom of Mr Blair’s crumbling leadership. A party revolt is never more than a means of delivering the coup de grâce to a leader who is already losing his grip on power. To understand the aura of political mortality now hanging over Mr Blair, we must consider the deeper forces arraying themselves against him personally and against the entire Blairite “project”. The essence of this project was to present new Labour as a political movement quite different from any of the class-based British parties of the past. New Labour was a party which could “triangulate” between the conflicting ideologies of capitalism and social democracy. It promised to achieve socialist redistribution without harming capitalist prosperity, to improve the lives of the poor and underprivileged, without hurting the rich and powerful.

New Labour’s triangulation of opposing ideologies offered a wonderfully attractive political prospectus, especially in a country exhausted by two decades of ruthlessly adversarial Thatcherism. But sadly for Mr Blair and, even more so for Britain, Labour’s most important triangulations are now on the point of collapsing. This is why Mr Blair’s career seems destined to end in failure and bloody internecine struggle, now that he has excluded the option of quietly leaving office in the next year or two.

Foreign policy is where this Blairite ideological “triangulation” — between conciliation and confrontation, between Europe and America, between internationalism and Atlanticism, between humanitarianism and militarism — is most obviously failing. And after the US election, foreign policy will get even more complicated for Mr Blair. Whatever that election’s outcome, Mr Blair’s unquestioning fealty to Washington will become even more embarrassing, and possibly dangerous, for Britain after November 2.

But even if Mr Blair can survive all the looming diplomatic crises, when we turn to domestic policy his efforts to triangulate all contradictions — to satisfy old Labour socialists while respecting modern capitalist aspirations — now seem completely doomed. Wherever we look — at education, health, pensions, transport, taxes, policing — we see policy failures which have two things in common.

First, they result from the besetting sins of Blairite triangulation: the refusal to recognise conflicting objectives, set clear priorities and then take responsibility for their achievement. The Government initially tries to satisfy everybody by simply ignoring inherent contradictions — for example, between equality and elitism in education, between patient choice in hospitals and centralised cost-control, between investment returns and security in pensions, between gold-plated safety and efficiency on the railways, between the interests of police, criminals and victims of crime.

Secondly, when the possibilities of triangulation are exhausted — as they increasingly have been in key areas of public policy since 1997 — the collapse of Mr Blair’s personal authority means that his ministers tend to follow the line of least resistance. In the present circumstances this means returning to Labour’s old socialist instincts: egalitarianism, centralisation, public spending and state control.

After seven years of failed compromises, Mr Blair is increasingly forced to make choices that he had hoped to avoid. Personally he may want more competition or oppose high taxation. But as his position gets steadily weaker, Mr Blair’s Cabinet colleagues will care more about party activists and trade union leaders, many of whom still dream of a counter-attack against the triumphs of Thatcherism in what they still see as a class war.

“Class war” may seem a hyperbolic description of Labour’s future policies under the fading influence of Mr Blair. So far, there are only two indisputable examples of class warfare — the legislation against hunting and the appointment of a new university regulator, who has announced himself to be “resolutely old Labour”, declaring that his job was explicitly to “tackle class”.

There is a deeper sense, however, in which class seems to be making a comeback across the whole gamut of social and economic policies. Whether in discussing pensions, health or policing, government spokesmen and committees increasingly take for granted that the only sound public policies are those which redistribute income from the rich to the poor.

Any spending which favours the better-off, whether in policing affluent suburbs, supporting universities or granting tax relief for executive pensions, is denounced as a “middle-class subsidy”. Meanwhile, taxes which mainly impinge on the relatively rich, such as stamp duty on housing, are considered ipso facto fair.

As this kind of thinking catches on, the post-Blair Labour Party faces a great danger. If Labour reverts to its traditional role as the champion of the underprivileged, the Tories will eventually succeed in redefining not just Labour, but the whole idea of an activist government, as the enemy and oppressor of the middle class. Labour must remember that the middle class are the people whose taxes finance the entire welfare state.

If the middle class decides that the Government has turned against them, it will not just mean the end of Mr Blair and his new Labour project. It will mean a US-style minimalist government and the end of every last vestige of a welfare state.

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