Why Blair quit and how he will be remembered
At noon today at a meeting at the Trimdon Labour Club in his constituency, Tony Blair told a group of his friends and political supporters (link requires Real Player) that he has tendered his resignation as leader of the Labour Party and will be stepping down as Prime Minister on 27 June after ten years and eight weeks in the job. The much-trailed announcement is all-but-certain to result in a smooth handover of power to Chancellor Gordon Brown who will lead the Labour Party into the next General Election slated for 2009.
Nominations for the leadership of the Labour Party end next Thursday, at which point there will either be a ‘coronation’ of Prime Minister Brown, or a challenge from one of the two left-wing hardliners who have thrown their hats into the ring. To trigger a challenge, Brown’s adversaries need to get at least 44 nominations from the 354 Labour Members of Parliament, which is by no means assured. Brown’s supporters have indicated that their man has already secured more than 200 nomination promises. On 27 June, once the new Labour leader has been confirmed, Blair will go to the Queen to tender his resignation as Prime Minister.
Readers outside the UK might wonder at why Tony Blair has resigned at all. The reality is that despite his stature on the world stage, and particularly in the US, over the past few years he has become very unpopular domestically, to the point of being an electoral liability for Labour. Blair has always said that he did not want to go ‘on and on and on’ as Margaret Thatcher once promised to do and that the moment he became a liability to Labour he would step aside. In the speech announcing his resignation, Prime Minister Blair acknowledged there may have been times when he fell short of expectations but stressed that he had always acted in his view of the British public interest.
It is chiefly his policy on Iraq, and in particular the ‘breach of trust’ over supposed Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, that has seen his poll ratings fall, but other issues have also marred the latter years of his tenure in Downing Street. These include the ongoing police investigation into allegations that he was complicit in a campaign finance scandal in which it is alleged that 10 Downing Street ’sold’ seats in the House of Lords to high-value party donors. Labour is also facing a challenge from a resurgent Conservative Party led by its youthful leader David Cameron, who has done much to cast off the reputation of the Tories as ‘the nasty party’ as well as connecting with new issue agendas such as the environment and climate change.
As well as all this, a festering sore at the heart of the Labour government has been the steadily deteriorating relationship between Blair and the other architect of New Labour’s unprecedented successes, Chancellor Gordon Brown. Back in 1994, when in opposition, Blair and Brown were rivals for the vacant Labour leadership and in the interest of party unity (and perhaps realizing that the Blair band-waggon was unstoppable) Brown stepped aside and backed his political ally for the top job. The private deal made between the two has never been revealed in any detail (some say it never existed) but an agreement is thought to have centered upon a carve up of the policy agenda to give Brown control of economic policy in its widest sense within a Blair government and an understanding that power would be transfered to Brown at some point down the line. As time passed, relations soured between the two former friends, although they were often to come out smiling together for the cameras. Shortly after the 2005 general election victory, Blair announced he would not serve the full term of his five year mandate and a climax was reached in the summer of 2006, when a group of junior Labour MPs launched a putsch that failed to unseat the Prime Minister but did enough damage that it became just a matter of time before he would step down. In October Blair told the Party conference that he would be gone within a year.
The intervening months have seen domestic policy development run into the sand as everyone waited for a new leader to take office, and a climate of uncertainty and fractiousness within the Labour Party prevailed while various candidatures as alternatives to Brown were proposed and debated. Ultimately no serious contender has come forward. In the meantime, Blair has also been consciously seeking out ‘closure’ on several key policy areas in a process that some unfriendly commentators have termed ‘legacy shopping’. With the situations in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Arab-Israeli conflict going from bad to worse, and with no end in sight in the long process of reforming British health care and education services, Blair has turned his attention to Europe, Northern Ireland and the fight against global poverty.
Consistently outmaneuvered by French President Jacques Chirac in talks over the EU budget and by Gordon Brown over the decision on whether the UK should join the Euro currency area and with the draft EU constitution barely exhibiting any signs of life after the French and Dutch ‘no’ votes , Blair has failed to seal his term of office by recasting the terms of European Union politics. Having said that, the UK is more engaged in the European integration project than at any time in its history, and much of this is the result of Blair’s instinctive pro-European mindset. While the Gleneagles Summit during the British G8 Presidency brought fanfares of approval from development NGOs and their celebrity backers, and a sense of renewed momentum on the three global development pillars of aid, trade and debt, recent revelations about how little real progress has followed have soured the story somewhat.
In Northern Ireland, however, the achievements are momentous, real, hopefully permanent, and Blair can legitimately claim a great deal of the credit. The scenes in recent months and weeks of former sworn enemies putting down their arms entering into power-sharing governments will live on as a legacy of Blair and also his predecessor John Major, who got the ball rolling during the 1990s.
If journalism is the first draft of history, then reporters, columnists (and bloggers) are already working hard to set the tone for how Blair will be remembered. But it is too early to tell. He will certainly be remembered for the success of liberal intervention in Kosovo and Sierra Leone and for his part in the Northern Ireland peace process. He will also be remembered for manifest failings of the US-British response to the attacks of 9/11, in particular in Iraq. His future career on the highly lucrative international lecture circuit will keep us reminded of what a great gift he has for oratory and how he uses it to making the case for progressive politics and pragmatic internationalism. Always taken by the ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis, there are rumors he will launch a foundation to promote inter-faith understanding.
Blair led Labour to an unprecedented three landslide general election victories, ending 18 years in opposition and going a long way towards making Labour for the first time in its hundred year history, ‘the natural party of government’. This last legacy is the still-smouldering torch he now hands to Gordon Brown who will have to work hard if he is to rekindle the flames, move on from Iraq and secure a fourth decisive election victory in two years time. More will follow from GMF bloggers on the implications of Blair’s departure…