In, Out, In, Out, Shake It All About
I’m really quite conflicted about this resignation crisis. Do I want Blair to go now or not?
It’s long been a journalistic cliche that Blair and Brown are like an old married couple, familiarity having bred contempt on both sides. Blair and Browns’ emotional death-spiral of competing ambition has been going on for years but has always been publicly denied. Remember Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
That’s the Labour party for you respectable working- and lower-middle-class to the core, a few public-school ringers notwithstanding. All kinds of sordid goings-on, but the facade must be kept up. Mr Taciturn, Gordon Brown, never came out and said anything against Blair publicly, even though it was an open secret there were some right old ding-dongs going on behind the net curtains:
Armando Ianucci’s Time Trumpet
Speaking purely as a Westminster intrigue junkie I love a good political feeding frenzy. I’ve been waiting, lord how I’ve been waiting, to see Mr Tony Blair get get his comeuppance from the backbenches. All these heated speculations, round-robin letters, resignations of obscure PPS’s and off-the-record briefings have been meat and drink to me. I predicted he’d only last till this afternoon – and I was partially right, because Blair is set to make a statement saying when he’s going later today- but I’m half-hoping he holds out, if only to prolong his agony and my own enjoyment.
Part of me wishes Brown and his proxies’d just get on with it, stop riffling through the cutlery drawer and just find the knife and stick the bloody thing in (even twist it a bit) just to see that lying warmonger gone. The part of me that hopes Blair’ll hang on has good reason to though: there’s the TUC and Labour conferences to come shortly and there’s nothing I’d more dearly love to see than a full-on, live-broadcast, public humiliation of Blair by Labour and TUC conference delegates (and that would be only a taste of the shit I’d like to see heaped upon him, just to keep our spirits up going till we can get him to trial in The Hague).
But let’s not forget that while these two over-privileged, entitled white men are squabbling over the ragged bone of the premiership and publicly acting out their own personal pyschodramas on our tab, there’s a country to be run.
Our foreign policy is screwed because we’re tied to the US. We have troops in combat in an illegal war. Our army is broken and soldiers are dying from lack of supplies, while the Ministry Of Defence is sacking 20,000 civil servants. We’re bleeding money away to consultants but the Home Office is fucked. The NHS is being sold off to corporations, as are the schools. Gordon Brown has no plans to change this.This leadership challenge is not about differences in policy.
I’ve been obsessively listening to all the news and commentary on this latest resignation kerfuffle and so far I haven’t heard a single Labour party politician or official once refer to what’s best for the nation – only what’s best for the party. Party and hanging onto power is all that matters. This resignation ‘crisis’ was never about matters of principle; it’s about power. The parliamentary Labour party don’t give a damn about ethical foreign policy or legality or civil liberties. Where were all these backbench letter-writers and resignees when we invaded Iraq? When the illegal attack on Lebanon was happening? In the cash-for-peerages affair? Funny how they popped up when Gordon needed them but where was Gordon himself? As always he was nowhere to be seen.
He may yet have to show his face. Blair has now publicly accused him of plotting a coup and the private acrimony that was once respectably denied has erupted into the street. Like all Labour political brouhahas, national or local, at bottom it’s all about ego and petty personal grudges. Blair will do anything to get back at Brown and deny him the premiership, even so far as to have a knock-down media brawl. If he has to go, he’s prepared to take the party ( and that little irrelevance, the nation) down with him, such is his vanity. “The country? What matters is me, me, me.”
Brown is no different. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss; a Brown premiership would just be more of the same, he was after all the chief architect of economic globalisation’s expression in the UK and has promised to push through reform, ie privatisation, of public services come what may. He has said little if anything about plans to deal with Iraq or Afghanistan.
Other than a change of name post-coronation it’d be business as usual, and that’s not good enough. The narrative demands change, the public needs change. Unfortunately we can’t get it unless and until the party turns on them both.
However there are still lingering Labour loyalists who also want to see an actual contest rather than a coronation. The longer Brown leaves it before sticking the knife in the more the clamour for a real choice grows from the unions, who’re the party’s last remaining funders, and the local branches – a clamour that’s is likely to find its expression at the two upcoming conferences. (I have a bet with Martin that the upshot of all this will be Margaret Beckett as a unity candidate. I’ve been right in all the leadership contests of recent times – I even won a fiver on John Major from my politics tutor in the nineties so I’m quietly confident.)
Although all this current uncertainty is deeply destructive to the nation as a whole I think I’d like Blair to hang on, at least until the conferences – though he may of course chicken out and resign before having to face the party and the unions. I wouldn’t be surprised.
In the meantime I’m just going to sit back and enjoy the show.
UPDATE: Blair announced this afternoon, (s he was being heckled by schoolchildren shouting “Go now!”) that he will leave within 12 months. Uh, didn’t he say that already? I don’t see how this latest announcement changes the situation at all.
Oh well, let’s stock up on popcorn and enjoy the show. There’re local, Scots and Welsh elections coming up and Tony Blair is a proven election liability. Even if Brown doesn’t get Blair out, the Scots MP’s may do it for him .
Read more: UK Government, UK Politics, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, New Labour, Leadership Contest, Resignations
