If Blair doesn’t go soon, he’ll be remembered for incompetence as well as sleaze and spin

At a coffee stall inside Lord’s cricket ground on Monday, two customers bumped into each other with a start. Alastair Campbell and Boris Johnson have not met since No. 10 Downing Street took this magazine to the Press Complaints Commission for exposing Tony Blair’s attempts to interfere with the Queen Mother’s lying-in-state, but that subject was not raised. Mr Johnson offered the usual icebreaker — when will Mr Blair resign? To his surprise, he was given a straight answer: ‘A year and a bit.’ It is now all but official: Mr Blair intends to leave the stage at next year’s Labour party conference.

While a good deal shorter than the ‘full third term’ fraudulently promised to the electorate last May, it remains an ambitious target. The turmoil in the Middle East has eclipsed but not ended the turmoil on the Labour benches. Gordon Brown’s lieutenants have been saying in private that they are now resisting enormous pressure to move this summer and finish off Mr Blair before the party’s annual conference in nine weeks’ time.