Tony Blair's Musical Chairs
BAKER, GERARD
Tony Blair's Musical Chairs The end of the road for New Labour. by GERARD BAKER WHEN A BELEAGUERED British prime minister fired a bunch of his closest cabinet colleagues in the 1960s, the grubby...
...Under its new leader David Cameron, it scored well in the local elections...
...Blair's legacy is a very uncertain one...
...And so the direction of British politics is, in party terms at least, unclear...
...Blair's demise was already in the cards...
...Their ardor, we know, thanks to plentiful photographic evidence supplied to the tabloids, had been consummated on all kinds of government property, while Prescott was supposed to be taking care of his considerable ministerial responsibilities...
...Straw had spent the last few months telling anyone who would listen, in the highest pitched shriek possible, that there was no way anyone was going to attack Iran and anybody who said so (unnamed members of the Bush administration) was "nuts...
...The same cynicism can now be applied by Americans to modern British politics: The Labour party is very much like our Democratic party...
...He came belatedly to a reform program to introduce more private enterprise into Britain's public sector health and education bureaucracies, but only after he had poured billions of extra pounds of taxpayers' money into these bloated beasts in the first place...
...It looked rather like the last desperate throw of a man well past his sell-by date...
...The week before the dismal local election results, Clarke was forced to admit he had been presiding over a shambles in the nation's prison system, in which more than 1,000 foreign prisoners had been released into the community instead of being deported...
...Unofficially they are telling Blair's critics in the Labour party he will serve just one more year...
...In foreign affairs he led Britain in a more assertive global role: He did much good in playing America's loyal ally over Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq— though it was ultimately that last choice that cost him the rest of his prime ministership...
...And the Conservative party is very much like our . . . Democratic party...
...by GERARD BAKER WHEN A BELEAGUERED British prime minister fired a bunch of his closest cabinet colleagues in the 1960s, the grubby desperation of the move was well captured by an opponent's quip: "Greater love hath no man than this," he said —"than to lay down his friends for his life...
...editor of the Times of London, is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...When Brown takes over, he will assume the leadership of a demoralized, cantankerous party whose principal characters are wandering around in an embittered rage of mutual recrimination and ideological strife...
...Even his most ardent supporters now admit the end is near...
...Cameron thinks global warming is the biggest challenge his country and the world face—and in between photo ops in front of melting Norwegian glaciers, he seems committed to maintaining the high taxes, high spending, and nanny-state politics that are steadily driving Britons towards serfdom...
...But, in domestic political and ideological terms, his legacy is much less positive...
...Cameron is young, clever, and rather appealing—three uncommon traits in leading Conservatives in the last ten years...
...Decisions will be made on extending Britain's nuclear power program, for example, and agreeing with Washington on a successor for Trident, the nation's nuclear deterrent...
...The day after his ruling Labour party suffered its worst losses in local elections since coming to power in 1997, the British prime minister quickly dumped his home secretary and one of his few remaining close political allies, Charles Clarke...
...With every new blow to his credibility, the case for Blair staying on one more day gets weaker...
...So the case for moving these three distinctly uncomical stooges from the prime time schedules was not, on its merits, a bad one...
...An old joke from the 1960s had a prime minister explaining to an impressionable young backbencher the ways of American politics...
...It is not at all clear that Brown, never the most diplomatic or courteous of managers, will be able to keep this fractious bunch together...
...Meanwhile the opposition Conservative party looks positively sprightly for the first time in more than a decade...
...But that is not how it looked to a British public bored and frustrated with nine years of Blair government...
...An odd legacy for a prime minister who thought himself a worthy successor to Margaret Thatcher...
...Now, in fairness, there was a very good case for each of these humiliations...
...Still, that is not the most important thing that changed in the last week...
...He stripped John Prescott, his deputy prime minister, of seemingly all but the ceremonial responsibilities of his post, and he demoted another ally, Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, to the menial role of managing the government's legislative business as leader of the House of Commons...
...That very same day, it was Gerard Baker, U.S...
...Ever since Blair announced before last year's general election that he would not seek a fourth term if elected (the current one being his third), he has been like a man in a coma, lying there in nominal control of his mortality but with no real abilities, his friends and family squabbling over whether and when to pull the plug...
...The Republican party is very much like our Conservative party...
...Labour is in much deeper trouble than it has been since the Conservatives disastrously self-destructed in the mid-1990s...
...And the sad, unpalatable, barely utterable truth, acknowledged even by the prime minister's closest friends, is that it was...
...The worse news is that the resurgent Conservatives are unrecognizable as Margaret Thatcher's party of freedom-promoting radicals...
...As so many doomed prime ministers have done before him, Tony Blair has reached for the axe and chopped some of his longest-serving allies in a frenzied bid to extend the tenure of his failing premiership...
...And even his recent, limited reforms will go largely by the wayside under Brown, who will need to curry favor with his party's left...
...Blair's unpopularity spilled over into mistrust of his public sector reform efforts, and the New Conservatives are distinctly wary of challenging the orthodoxies that hold British politics in thrall...
...They make the case, gamely, that much needs to be done in that time...
...now the country has seen the first intimation of the mortality of the whole government...
...revealed that Prescott, 67, a brutish former seaman with a capacity to mangle the English language that makes George W. Bush sound like Wordsworth, had been exposed as having an affair with a jaunty 43-year-old lass who worked in his office...
...Both are determinations which it would be better for Blair to make in his twilight than for his designated successor, the increasingly impatient Gordon Brown, to have to deal with...
...And the Democratic party is very much like our . . . Conservative party...
...He put it this way: "In America there are two political parties...
...His was intended to be a reforming, radical project...
...But no one is confident that he will remain on this political life support even for another year...
...This left Blair's foreign affairs adviser at Downing Street with the tiresome job of having to call around after every such outburst from the Foreign Office to explain to friends and allies that this was not the official government policy, which was to support tough measures against Iran and not rule out any course of action...
Vol. 11 • May 2006 • No. 34
