The lead political stories about the Labor Party discontent with Tony Blair in Britain are starting to read like the political stories about the Conservative Party discontent with Margaret Thatcher in late 1990. In the end, Thatcher, though she still had the support of a bare majority of Conservative M.P.'s, had to go. The Labor Party rules are different. But there clearly is a move on the left against Blair.
Here are the lead stories on this from the Telegraph, the Times, and the left-wing Guardian. Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown, Blair's inevitable successor when he steps down (as he has promised to do before the next general election, generally supposed to be in spring 2009), is, as careful readers of these stories can see, taking care not to urge Blair's ouster or even to endorse the move by backbenchers to force him to declare exactly when he would retire. Brown does not want the kind of bloody inheritance John Major got from Thatcher, with Thatcherites angry at her ouster ragging him for all his seven years as prime minister and holding the party's overall popularity down.
But I have to say that my reading of the stories tells me that there is, as I have been told by people much closer to the principals than I am, an unalloyed hatred between Blair and Brown. They have been yoked together by what has been called the Treaty of Granita (here is my 2002 take on that 1994 event, ), with Blair as prime minister delegating an unusually great sway over domestic policy to an unremovable Chancellor Brown. They have reason to like each other: They were office mates in Westminster after being elected in Labor's annus horribilis 1983; they were the two principals in the largely successful New Labor enterprise and, despite some differences, stand in about the same place on public policy, domestic and foreign; they both had their secondary education in Scotland and then went to Oxford. But evidently they have come to loathe each other, as in British history only princes of Wales have loathed their fathers (Prince Frederick versus George II, Prince George the Prince Regent versus George III). And for the same reason: One wants to hold on to the top job, and the other wants to oust him from it.
Tim Hames in the Times picks up on this by noting that Blair by all accounts did not consult Brown on his cabinet reshuffle. Which is quite astonishing, since some time in the reasonably near future Brown will head the Labor Party and the government, and he might reasonably have expected to be consulted on whom he might inherit as heads of the important departments. Blair evidently insists on rubbing it in that Brown is not yet in charge. Yet the reaction makes it likelier that Blair will be forced out and that Brown will be put in charge sooner rather than later. It's sad that these two lavishly talented men with so much in common, partners in what (whatever its current problems) has been mostly a competent, effective, and politically successful government for nine years now, have become such determined enemies. What a price for a dinner at Granita!
Another area of difference between Blair and Brown, it appears, is so-called reform of the House of Lords. Blair has favored that, as he favored other reforms—the establishment of the Welsh Assembly and the Scottish Parliament, the abolition of the ancient office of lord chancellor, and the creation of an explicit Supreme Court rather than having the function performed by the law lords who are, technically, members of the House of Lords, though they are in fact selected to be judges of a final appellate court. One of the least attractive aspects of Blair's New Labor projects, to me, is Blair's utter disregard and evident lack of interest in Britain's and England's historic traditions: History for him seems to start, at the latest, in 1953, the year he was born, one year into the current queen's reign. I have written on how Blair's tepid reform of the House of Lords has made that body actually more powerful in shaping legislation. Now in the Times comes William Rees-Mogg, editor of the Times years ago and now a member of the House of Lords himself, to confirm, amplify, and add to what I said. As I read Rees-Mogg's piece, the thought crossed my mind that if I had the chance, I would trade our Senate for their House of Lords. But New Labor seems to want to make the trade the opposite way.
Our system thankfully spares us the messiness of parties committing something like suicide by ousting long-lasting and mostly successful leaders like Thatcher and Blair. George W. Bush will leave office Jan. 20, 2009, to be succeeded by someone nominated by the Republican or Democratic parties in our (far from entirely satisfactory) nomination processes or, conceivably, by a third-party candidate. Whatever our problems, we don't have to worry about the schedule.
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