The prospect of British Prime Minister Tony Blair being pushed from office brought back memories of similar events some 15 years earlier, writes David Tresilian in London News that dissatisfaction with the performance of British prime minister Tony Blair was finally giving way to something like open revolt within the ranks of the governing Labour Party filled the British press last weekend, with rumour and counter-rumour flying as to which senior party figure was now best placed to take over from a weakened Blair. While Blair has won three elections in a row as Labour Party leader, becoming prime minister in 1997 following a landslide victory over the opposition Conservatives, he has long indicated that he will eventually "step down" in favour of finance minister Gordon Brown. However, Blair's failure to name a date for the handover is believed to have infuriated Brown and his supporters. When added to the perception that the Blair-led government is drifting, having involved the country in disastrous US-led military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, this has led to protests over Blair's leadership even within the normally docile parliamentary party. Last week eight junior members of the government resigned, some of them signing "round-robin" letters calling for Blair's resignation. Later, Blair and Brown were reported as having engaged in a "ferocious shouting match" at the prime minister's official Downing Street residence, Blair reportedly accusing his finance minister of "blackmail". When another senior Labour Party figure, the former interior minister Charles Clarke, weighed into the developing crisis, accusing Brown of being "stupid, stupid, stupid" and having "psychological issues" in a newspaper interview last weekend, the government's humiliation was complete, with senior figures squaring up to each other in the belief that Blair is now a lame duck, the only question being who will replace him. For members of the British public all this will bring back memories of events in 1990, when the then Conservative Party leader Margaret Thatcher was forced to resign as prime minister following a revolt against her in her own party. Last week's developments are particularly ironic for Blair and for the Labour Party, and not only because it now seems likely that Blair's term in office will end as ingloriously as did that of Thatcher before him. Blair and his original party colleagues had presented themselves as marking a break with the sometimes cynical traditions of British politics when they were first elected in 1997, bringing in a new, more open style of government that would be more attentive to people's needs and less corrupt than government had been under the Conservatives. Yet, ten years on, Blair's premiership seems to be ending in traditional confusion, with the achievements of ten years of Labour Party rule being questioned in the press and Blair himself sometimes being presented as a figure of fun or as "George Bush's poodle" in a reference to the British government's support for US policy in Iraq, Afghanistan and, most recently, in Lebanon. According to the Oxford historian Ross McKibbin, a specialist on the British Labour Party, "there is general agreement that the [Blair] government is a mess: sleazy, corrupt, humiliated and ... despised by many of its natural supporters. It is difficult to remember a cabinet held in such contempt by so many." For McKibbin, the reasons for Blair's failure were not hard to seek, and nor were the reasons for the simmering discontent with Blair's performance as prime minister in Labour Party ranks. Not only had the Blair government failed to narrow "the gap between what... [it] has not done and what it could and should have done" in domestic policy, with the Labour Party apparently committed to a policy of privatisation of public services in education and in health that is largely unwanted by the electorate, but in foreign policy its policies in the Middle East had been "utterly disastrous". These had been "in some respects so bizarre, so divorced from any rational assessment of the country's interests, as to be almost inexplicable," McKibbin wrote in last week's London Review of Books. They have also been notably unpopular in Britain, with some million people demonstrating in London against the US-led invasion of Iraq, supported by the Blair government, in March 2003. There have also been widespread protests in Britain over Blair's refusal to speak out against the Israeli attacks on Lebanon in July and August this year, preferring instead to follow the US lead. Public opinion polls indicate that support for the government now stands at a 20-year low, with Labour Party membership shrinking rapidly. The next major challenge to Blair's leadership is likely to come later this month at the Labour Party's annual conference in Manchester, where other challengers to the Labour leadership, and therefore for the post of prime minister, may emerge, if only to prevent the automatic accession of Gordon Brown to the party's and the government's top job. The British papers have been full of rumours and counter- rumours as to who might run, with what backing and prospect of success, and what kind of backroom deals are being done either to ensure Brown's succession as prime minister or to frustrate it. However, whoever eventually replaces Tony Blair as British prime minister, British commentators seem to agree it is unlikely that such a development will lead to any major change in government policy. For Ross McKibbin, ten years of Labour rule have already wrought their own kind of destruction, "the present regime [having been] slowly destroying the Labour Party" such that even the kind of "reasonable competence at day-to-day management" that Brown is thought to be able to offer will not be able to rescue it. For more mainstream commentators, such as the journalist Andrew Rawnsley writing in last week's London Observer, there is a "fin-de-siècle", or fin de régime, feel about the crisis-ridden Blair government. In such circumstances, the only real answer to Labour's current troubles may be not so much a new prime minister to replace Tony Blair as a Conservative victory at the next British general election, scheduled for some time before June 2010.
