Sleaze, revolting backbenchers, broken promises – all reasons to say goodbye. Or does the Prime Minister still have the vision and appeal to carry on reforming? A Times jury weighs up the case It seems to me that Tony Blair has lost the capacity to carry out the reforms to which he is committed. There clearly need to be significant reforms in education, health and pensions. He promised these reforms at the height of his power in 1997. He either did not carry them out then or was not able to do so. He now has far less authority than he had at that time and faces far more opposition to reform. There is therefore nothing effective that he can do and his situation can only continue to become weaker. He should go now.
JARVIS COCKER
ROCK SINGER
He should have gone a long time ago. Like a lot of people I am disillusioned with most of the performance since 1997. You thought you were going to get a Labour government but it didn’t transpire, did it?
PETER BROOKES
Yes.
ANATOLE KALETSKY
He shouldn’t go immediately, because he doesn’t want to look as though he has been hounded out of office. I think, instead, he should go some time in the next six to twelve months, but from a position of strength rather than weakness if he can.
That is not just in his interests, but also in that of Gordon Brown, the Labour Party and even the country. So he should be looking for a window of opportunity and, if a chance presents itself, he should grab it.
CAITLIN MORAN
Should Tony Blair go? Speaking for myself, I always have a checklist of factors to take into consideration when deciding whether or not to go.
(1) Am I drunk?
(2) Have I mortally offended someone by asking “When is the baby due?” only to find I am talking to someone who has actually swelled up on the cancer medication Tamoxifen?
(3) Is there something better somewhere else, like a golf sale, or a fair?
(4) Am I starting to rue the day?
(5) Have I left the baby near a knife?
(6) Do I have an unearthly premonition that the ceiling might be about to fall in on my head?
If Tony finds that the answer to one or more of the above is yes, then, in all probability, he should go.
DANIEL FINKELSTEIN
If the Labour Party has learnt nothing in 20 years; if it cannot read polls properly; if it believes that Gordon Brown has some magic formula that has not occurred to anyone else for winning the Centre while keeping the Left; if it wants to cede vital political territory to David Cameron; and if it thinks it is better to have the unions buy influence over policy than it is to sell peerages; then, by all means, Labour should rid itself of Tony Blair.
SWAY
HIP-HOP ARTIST
The king is dying, long live Gordon Brown. I like Tony Blair ’cos he’s the only person in politics that moves his hands like a rapper.
ROBERT CRAMPTON
I think Blair should stay for as long as possible, for three reasons. First and most importantly, the British people re-elected his Government less than a year ago. If the media and a group of backbench Labour MPs do not like this outcome of the democratic process, bad luck. I know far more people who voted Labour because of Blair rather than in spite of him.
Secondly, I support what he is trying to do, however limited and timid, on public sector reform, particularly schools. Having attended a large local authority-controlled bog-standard comprehensive, I am in no doubt that they need to be replaced.
Thirdly, I don’t think Gordon Brown is leadership material. Too sulky, too statist and, I think, too Scottish, post-devolution, to attract enough support from the English electorate. In fact, Blair should renege on his pledge and stay on for a fourth term.
FAY WELDON
NOVELIST
Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t. Stick to Blair. We are all still alive, aren’t we? Life expectancy is rising, there is food on the table — a surprising percentage of it from Tesco, although the Competition Commission says that is fine, so it must be. We learn to live with the thought police, although rather miss the real police. If we are worried sick about how to pay the mortgage, the council tax, the credit card debt and to save towards our vanishing pensions, that seems to be more Brown’s doing than Blair’s. So save us from Brown, whom we’re faced with as an alternative. In other words, children hold on tight to nurse, for fear of finding something worse.
MARTIN SAMUEL
They do not go when they should, so they go when they should not. The most preposterous aspect of the debate over Tony Blair’s departure is the subject at its heart.
Here is the Prime Minister that made the most catastrophic foreign policy decision of the past 50 years and we want him to quit over — what? Sleaze?
Blair was 100 per cent wrong about Iraq and has been holed below the waterline ever since. Sleaze is the side-issue, the fortunate distraction that will get him out of No 10 without being forced to confront or admit his dreadful mistake.
He wants God to be his judge because he knows we will never get to hear the outcome of that one. Down here, the result is in.
ALISON CLARKSON (BETTY BOO)
SINGER-SONGWRITER
No, he should not go. Tony Blair is a remarkable man and people in this country should stop moaning and realise how lucky we are to have him running things. And he’s a dish!
MARY ANN SIEGHART
There are lots of difficult decisions that the Government has to make over the next year or two: on pensions, nuclear energy, hospital reorganisation and welfare reform, for a start. Tony Blair should stay to take the flak on these, as they are bound to make the Government unpopular, however necessary they are.
If Gordon Brown took over now, he would suffer the damage instead. Why not wait until the tough work has been done by Mr Blair and then come in to make a fresh start, relatively untainted by unpopularity?
PRESTON
POP SINGER
Personally, I would be happy with Gordon Brown stepping in now, it’s time for an overhaul. Public opinion counts for a lot, and Blair’s not been good with that recently, has he? With him saying “God was on my side over Iraq” — that was such a Bushism — and the recent money for peerage scandals. He’s been in power now for ten years, which is too long, like some f***ing banana republic or something.
LIBBY PURVES
Yes. Too late now to achieve the politician’s dream of leaving on a high. He has pledged to go by 2009 and there simply is not time to recover his battered reputation. People who defended him for years now wince at the lies, the concealment, the immature attitude to armed conflict.
Early fans are uneasy about the freebies, the Berlusconi holidays and his wife’s shameless exploitation of his office. The winsome “hey guys” act with which he tries to woo us back is looking desperate. If he goes now for Britain’s sake, we might remember the good bits.
Every day he hangs on is a nail in his reputation’s coffin.
ALASTAIR CAMPBELL
FORMER NO 10 SPOKESMAN
No.
There is a fundamental democratic point overlooked by the homogenised metropolitan media chatterati. A year ago the public elected Tony Blair on a clear promise to serve a full term.
It would be democratically wrong to go now. It would also be politically wrong for Labour. If a successful, winning, by historic standards popular, leader is forced out by a mix of the dejected, rejected and ejected pandering to a media frenzy, the lasting beneficiary would be our vacuous opposition leader. This debate is born of a media with the intellectual depth and attention span of a gnat.
The Jowell frenzy and education vote having come and gone, now we have this. It is bollocks from start to finish, as people out in the real world away from the wretched 24-hour media know.
ANTHONY SELDON
BLAIR’S BIOGRAPHER
Had he been thinking only of his place in history, Tony Blair should have stood down on his tenth anniversary as Labour leader in July 2004, or in the autumn of 2005 after gaining the Olympics and his handling of the July bombings.
All prime ministers want to leave at a moment of their own choosing, and on a high. In practice, none — Peel, Disraeli, Gladstone, Lloyd George, Churchill and Thatcher — have achieved both feats, and barely any of them achieved just one.
Yet all prime ministers labour under the conceit that they can buck the trends of history. They all believe that there will come a moment when a grateful nation will applaud their departing with sadness. Yet this is the stuff of dreams.
From the nation’s standpoint, in contrast, it might well be best for Tony Blair to remain until 2008 or 2009. He discovered his domestic agenda, choice and diversity, only in mid- second term. But his agenda is right for the nation, and promises real improvements in public services far bolder than anything the lacklustre Tories come up with.
So there is a paradox. The longer Blair stays on, the more turbulence he will suffer and the more his reputation will be damaged. Yet, the longer he can cling on, the better for the country.
JIMMY CARR
COMEDIAN
I do not think Tony Blair should step down.
I think he should stay and pull out of Iraq and then the next prime minister might stand a hope in hell.
There are a couple of things he needs to clear up before he goes. Then, I think he would be remembered fondly.
DAVID AARONOVITCH
It has come to this at last: boxy comments telling Tony that it’s time to go. Some, I guess, will do it with savage pleasure, others with ponderous sadness. The intelligentsia, on the whole, have never loved Blair. He reminded them, at almost every step, of what losers they are. It will be fabulous listening to those who claimed, in 1997, not to have illusions, now telling us how their disillusions have been shattered.
No politician has understood as well as Blair has how the world has changed, and few have had as much courage in deciding what to do about it. And had there been just one silo full of weaponised anthrax found in Iraq, the last election would have been a procession. The reality (and he loves realities) is that he lost most of his mandate at the 2005 election, and that trust was the decisive factor.
Blair was far more magnificent over 9/11 and 7/7 than he was disappointing over party funding, and he and Gordon Brown have taken this country towards a new settlement between dynamic capitalism and social solidarity.
But he is no longer the best vehicle for his own project. This autumn he should tell the Labour Party conference that this is his last speech as leader. Then he should write his memoirs. With me, preferably.
