Tony Blair has long had a private ‘timetable’ for his departure.
Tony Blair has long had a private ‘timetable’ for his departure. The trouble is that it is much more complicated, conditional and flexible than his enemies would wish. It is not a single linear timeline, but a series of intertwined chronologies that he hopes will converge towards an agreeable exit date. What he refuses to do is to set that date arbitrarily to satisfy the bailiffs of the Labour party who lurk moodily outside No. 10.
Here is an example of the problem: the Prime Minister has long been planning to make a keynote speech in America on geopolitical issues, to continue his valedictory series of ex cathedra pronouncements on international affairs that began in Oxford in February.
Part of Mr Blair’s purpose on this occasion is to persuade the world that President Bush’s true position on the environment, global terrorism and the need for multilateral action has been misunderstood. He has urged Mr Bush to say as much ‘in English, not in Texan’. The Prime Minister’s visit is intended to nudge the President, as well as to help him. But — crucially — Mr Blair will not make his speech in the US until a unity government is established in Iraq by prime minister-designate Nuri al-Maliki. In other words: the prospects for transition in Westminster are intimately linked with the prospects for transition in Baghdad.
Much was made — quite rightly — of Mr Blair’s remarks at his monthly press conference last Monday about the succession and his promise to give the new Labour leader ‘the time properly needed to bed himself in’ (apparently women need not apply). Asked if Gordon Brown was his chosen successor, the Prime Minister adopted his special puzzled expression and said, ‘Of course he is.
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