When Tony Blair campaigned for the rewriting of Clause 4, his mantra was that Labour ‘must mean what we say, and say what we mean’. The symbol of this supposed new transparency was the ‘pledge card’: my word is my bond, Mr Blair declared to anyone who would listen.
It is worth remembering such claims when considering the widespread briefing to the press last week that the Prime Minister is preparing a deal with Gordon Brown to settle the so-called ‘handover’ — a deal which could see Mr Blair departing No. 10 next spring. The principal objective of the two men is, according to the Guardian, to ‘get through [Labour] conference week without damaging each other’.
This was a textbook Blairite operation. Above the radar, the Prime Minister’s official spokesmen were making light of Charles Clarke’s intervention — dismissing the former Home Secretary’s attack on Mr Blair as a symptom of ‘disappointment’, the bitter outburst of a hapless political Falstaff. Mr Blair himself brushed aside as ‘surface noise’ Mr Clarke’s claim that the Prime Minister had lost his ‘sense of direction, leadership and purpose’.
Below the radar, however, ‘senior Blairite MPs’ were sending precisely the opposite signal to the media, effectively acknowledging that Mr Clarke’s attack had changed the terms of trade, and that it was time to expedite the Prime Minister’s departure date. To those unversed in the byzantine rituals and codes of Westminster, these contradictory messages must be utterly baffling.
In the past nine years The Spectator has been consistently critical of Mr Blair, his many failures and his unforgivable squandering of golden economic and parliamentary opportunities. We warmly applaud the return of serious two-party politics with the Conservative revival. But the departure of a prime minister is a matter of the deepest seriousness in the political life of a nation: it has a significance that rises above narrowly partisan considerations.
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