Six years into the Thatcher government, and there was no question about who the Prime Minister was, what she stood for and where she was going. There was already a substantial body of achievement. Not so Tony Blair. Halfway through his second term he remains a rudderless and curiously negligible figure. If he vanished one morning in a puff of smoke, an outcome that can by no means be ruled out, he would leave very little behind. This week’s warning from Jack Straw that Britain is ready to veto the new European constitution admirably demonstrates the fleeting, insubstantial quality of so many of the Prime Minister’s political enthusiasms.
The Foreign Secretary’s defiant briefing contradicts everything Tony Blair has said. Back in May the Prime Minister informed Iain Duncan Smith that the constitution was ‘necessary’ for the accession of new member states. Now Jack Straw suggests it could be dropped. Till this week the government has insisted that the constitution was a ‘tidying- up exercise’.
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