Blair’s Chief of Staff on the Shakespearean tragedy of Gordon Brown

Just four weeks ago there was a powerful view at Westminster that it would be all up for Tony Blair after next week’s elections. This opinion was most widely expressed within the Labour party itself, where the Prime Minister was candidly seen as a liability.

Labour’s campaign literature reflects this. Photographs of the Prime Minister are hard to find; it used to be impossible to escape from his grinning visage at election time. Labour’s opponents have been only too happy to remedy this oversight. Liberal Democrat pamphlets, almost without fail, give pride of place to photographs of the Prime Minister, often standing shoulder to shoulder with President Bush.

This Liberal Democrat strategy has been viewed with quiet pleasure among the growing number of Labour party factions that wish nothing but ill to Tony Blair — above all the Brownite machine. ‘We will strike after the June elections,’ one Brownite told me six weeks ago.