Canberra
John Howard is defying political gravity. After nearly ten years as Prime Minister of Australia he has no serious challengers. Tony Blair, by contrast, hobbles along performing an excellent impression of a fellow in the crippled poultry phase of his leadership. At 66, Howard is 14 years older than Blair. He has served a year longer in office, and he has won four elections to Blair’s three. You might think that Howard would be at least as burdened by scandal, disillusion, infighting, ennui and fatigue as the younger man. But you’d be wrong.
Indeed, Howard is being encouraged by many in the Liberal party — Australia’s equivalent of the Conservative party — to soldier onwards and upwards to a fifth campaign in 2007. Like Blair, Howard has an impatient deputy frothing to take his job. But the Australian PM has been way too canny to set himself an exit date.
Peter Costello, Howard’s long-serving, long-suffering Treasurer, wants his boss to resign after his tenth anniversary in office next March. Most of the government backbench, however, hopes that Howard will stay. If Costello were crazy or brave enough to challenge the PM, he’d fall laughably short of support.
Blair must regard Howard with a mixture of bewilderment, envy and awe. They are chums of a sort, drawn together after the September 11 attacks by their unfaltering support for the United States-led invasion of Iraq. Yet while Blair has struggled to justify Britain’s involvement in the messy conflict, Howard suffers no discernible backlash from Australia’s involvement in the war — unpopular though it is. This is in part a consequence of scale and distance. The war is being fought a long way away, and Howard’s troop commitment has been strategically low-key. Once Saddam Hussein was removed, most crack Australian SAS troops were immediately withdrawn from Baghdad and other danger areas.
The bulk of remaining Australians are based in Al Muthanna, a southern province so safe that an Iraqi official declared recently — and rather embarrassingly for Howard, given the woes of his allies — that they were no longer required.
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