Tony Blair: Out in no more than a year

Tony Blair is through as British prime minister; he announced Wednesday that he would resign some time within the next year. This came after eight junior ministers resigned in protest against his refusal to set a date for his resignation and after a petition to the same effect was circulated by longtime Blair loyalists led by members of Parliament Sion Simon (his first name is Welsh and pronounced like Sean) and Chris Bryant. I got to know Simon when he was writing a column for the Telegraph in the first Blair term, from 1997 to 2001-a New Labor advocate in a Conservative paper-and went around campaigning with him in 2001 after he was selected as the Labor candidate in the working-class-safe Labor seat Birmingham Erdington. British candidates, it seems, don't like to ask anyone directly for their vote; they just ask for consideration. Sion and I went to lunch that day; I asked what the best restaurant in his district was, and he said there were no good restaurants in his district. We had fish and chips.

Blair's announcement was, by his own admission, forced on him. It is part of the long story of the tension between him and Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown, which goes back to the agreement they reached after the sudden death of Labor leader John Smith in May 1994 by which Blair became party leader (and thus prime minister after the 1997 election) and Brown was promised-or was he? (there is heated disagreement)-that he would succeed him in good time. Of course, they came to disagree on what good time meant. Here's my discussion of the dinner at Granita, a restaurant in Islington, where they purportedly made the deal. Here's an excellent analysis of the civil war in the Labor Party by Matthew d'Ancona, editor of the Spectator and former deputy editor of the Sunday Telegraph.

Civil war is not too strong a term. Blairites have been savaging Gordon Brown; Brown's former chief staffer, and now M.P. Ed Balls has been savaging the Blairites; most recently Charles Clarke, sacked earlier this year from being home secretary by Blair, has called the statement Brown made after Blair's announcement "absolutely stupid." Readers interested in more juicy details are advised to link to the Telegraph, the Times,or the Guardian and check the links to past stories and opinion articles. The controversy will most likely continue, because some things are not yet clear. When will Blair step down? Most observers are concluding he'll announce that before the May local elections in Scotland and Wales, which are expected to be disastrous for Labor. Will Brown have opposition to be party leader? Speculation centers on John Reid, the home secretary whom Americans saw announcing the arrest of the London bomb plotters, and Alan Johnson, who was by Blair's side when he made his announcement.

Matthew d'Ancona compares the forcing out of Blair with the forcing out of Margaret Thatcher in November 1990. The British parliamentary system ordinarily gives the prime minister powers that seem, on the surface, to be dictatorial. There are no term limits. But party rivals or groups of backbenchers can, in the right circumstances, force a leader out. And it can happen very suddenly. And it can cause great bitterness. The shadow of Thatcher's ouster hung over the Conservative Party for nearly 15 years after her ouster. Intraparty fights were inevitably seen as battles between Thatcherites and those who wanted to loosen the government's spending policy.Thatcher herself intervened in ways that proved unhelpful to the party's standing. D'Ancona raises the possibility that the Labor Party may be preoccupied for many years with battles between Blairites and Brownites. Both may reasonably be described as New Labor, but there are serious differences on policy.

Blair wanted to take Britain into the euro; Brown didn't-and prevailed. Blair has conducted a foreign policy of armed intervention for humanitarian purposes in Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq. It's not clear that Brown would take similar stands. There was much grousing from all political quarters in Britain when Blair supported George W. Bush on Lebanon and refused to call for an early cease-fire. Brown is not unfriendly to America; he vacations here on Cape Cod and is known to prowl around bookstores in Cambridge, Mass. (though not in Plano, Texas). He has supported Blair on Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq. But how he would respond to future issues is unclear.

It's unclear also how the new Conservative leader David Cameron would respond. He has been taking a skeptical-about-America line, partly because it's politically popular, I suppose, but also probably out of conviction. Americans should not assume that the Conservative Party is uniformly pro-American. There's a vein of dislike for vulgar Americans on the British right, and many Conservatives share the disdain of Foreign Office career diplomats for George W. Bush and American policies generally. The British prime ministers least sympathetic to America over the past 70 years were Neville Chamberlain and Edward Heath, both Conservatives. Cameron could become prime minister after the next election, which most observers expect will be called in 2009. I'm inclined to think that Gordon Brown will become prime minister next May, that he will be generally friendly and cooperative with the United States but will not be as close to George W. Bush as Blair has been, and that Britain under a Brown government will continue to be a constructive and useful ally. But it's not clear how the next president will get along with Brown or Cameron.

We complain about our presidential selection system and often with good reason. But the British system has its defects, too. Like lack of term limits. Margaret Thatcher served 11 years as prime minister; Tony Blair will presumably serve 10 years in the post. Both transformed their parties and led them to three general election victories. But they overstayed their time, and the messy process of ending their terms--in Thatcher's case it certainly did, and, in Blair's case it quite likely will--hurt their parties for years.