The rush of hacks fighting to kill of Blair
The government of Tony Blair, having suffered last week the resignation of one of its most loyal ministers, yesterday suffered it’s first parliamentary defeat. The proposal to allow police to extend the detention of suspects without trial from 14 days to 90 days was defeated by 31 votes, with some 49 Labour MPs – eleven of them former ministers – eschewing the frantic government whips and inflicting the most significant setback of the Prime Minister’s eight-year reign.
With some predictability, the Government sought to play down the vote’s significance. Earlier in the day, Gordon Brown and Jack Straw had been hastily withdrawn from overseas trips to vote. Blair himself admitted that it is “sometimes better to lose and do the right thing than to win and do the wrong thing”, a candid admission that he foresaw defeat and a canny attempt to win the moral high ground nonetheless. After the unexpectedly large margin of the vote, senior Labour apparatchiks immediately denied that the Prime Minister had in any way been compromised by the result, and claimed that it was never a referendum on Blair’s occupancy of 10 Downing Street. Well, quite. By the morning, scapegoats had been bullied into position: the ever-reliable Charles Clark blamed himself and suggested that the whole project was his idea from the outset, convincing precisely no-one. Yet the sense of a badly wounded government will take more than trite actions like this to dispell.
Equally predictably, the media has largely overreacted, with some of Blair’s more trenchant critics moving in for the kill and claiming that the end of Blairism is nigh. More than one newspaper starkly described it as the “Beginning of the end”, while the Mirror questioned whether or not they shouldn’t “start packing”. The Sun, meanwhile, found itself in the familiar position of governmental cheerleader, denouncing MPs for jeapordising the country while failing – much like the cabinet itself, not to mention the police – to justify why and how exactly the magical ‘ninety days’ figure would make as any safer.
Yet for those crouched in Westminster expecting the white flag to be raised outside the Prime Minister’s residence any time soon, the chances are that they will be hanging around for a while yet. As Polly Toynbee argues in the Guardian, for Labour to sweep Tony under the carpet right now, or in the coming weeks, would set in stone the image of a panicked government that is jumping at the first sign of trouble. It would effectively offer the new Tory leader a perfect start.
Moreover, there is the chance that this defeat will force the Prime Minister to face up to the new reality facing his government. This May’s election was a brutal slap in the face: a huge majority slashed to just 66 seats means that contentious issues – such as the motion defeated yesterday – are nowhere near as likely to be railroaded into being. The months between May and November saw two near-simultaneous events – London’s winning the 2012 Olympics, and the July 7th terror attacks – that offered a convenient smokescreen for Blair's predicament. July's occurrences boosted his popularity, and there was a temporary sense that – far from being a lame-duck prime minister who was merely keeping the seat warm for his successor – Blair would in fact seize be able to seize the moment to mould the ‘radical’ agenda that he promised in the election’s immediate aftermath.
We can see now that this feted resurgence was a false dawn. The beating he took yesterday has returned the sense of ultimate futility in his final term to the forefront. The only way he can overcome this is to recognise that the rules have changed irrevocably. Policies that are unpopular with ministers, law officers, and the Home Office – despite unreliable polls suggesting that they are popular with voters – can no longer be whipped into shape. It is a victory for the parliamentary system over a prime minister who was becoming demagogic in his zealot-like disregard for Parliament itself.
Will he have learnt these lessons? The immediate indication is that he has not; on Thursday he ominously warned MPs that they are out of touch with the populace, once again scrabbling for the higher moral ground. But it is only by recognising the ultimate authority that rests within Parliament that Blair will be able to resurrect the tattered remains of his final term.
With some predictability, the Government sought to play down the vote’s significance. Earlier in the day, Gordon Brown and Jack Straw had been hastily withdrawn from overseas trips to vote. Blair himself admitted that it is “sometimes better to lose and do the right thing than to win and do the wrong thing”, a candid admission that he foresaw defeat and a canny attempt to win the moral high ground nonetheless. After the unexpectedly large margin of the vote, senior Labour apparatchiks immediately denied that the Prime Minister had in any way been compromised by the result, and claimed that it was never a referendum on Blair’s occupancy of 10 Downing Street. Well, quite. By the morning, scapegoats had been bullied into position: the ever-reliable Charles Clark blamed himself and suggested that the whole project was his idea from the outset, convincing precisely no-one. Yet the sense of a badly wounded government will take more than trite actions like this to dispell.
Equally predictably, the media has largely overreacted, with some of Blair’s more trenchant critics moving in for the kill and claiming that the end of Blairism is nigh. More than one newspaper starkly described it as the “Beginning of the end”, while the Mirror questioned whether or not they shouldn’t “start packing”. The Sun, meanwhile, found itself in the familiar position of governmental cheerleader, denouncing MPs for jeapordising the country while failing – much like the cabinet itself, not to mention the police – to justify why and how exactly the magical ‘ninety days’ figure would make as any safer.
Yet for those crouched in Westminster expecting the white flag to be raised outside the Prime Minister’s residence any time soon, the chances are that they will be hanging around for a while yet. As Polly Toynbee argues in the Guardian, for Labour to sweep Tony under the carpet right now, or in the coming weeks, would set in stone the image of a panicked government that is jumping at the first sign of trouble. It would effectively offer the new Tory leader a perfect start.
Moreover, there is the chance that this defeat will force the Prime Minister to face up to the new reality facing his government. This May’s election was a brutal slap in the face: a huge majority slashed to just 66 seats means that contentious issues – such as the motion defeated yesterday – are nowhere near as likely to be railroaded into being. The months between May and November saw two near-simultaneous events – London’s winning the 2012 Olympics, and the July 7th terror attacks – that offered a convenient smokescreen for Blair's predicament. July's occurrences boosted his popularity, and there was a temporary sense that – far from being a lame-duck prime minister who was merely keeping the seat warm for his successor – Blair would in fact seize be able to seize the moment to mould the ‘radical’ agenda that he promised in the election’s immediate aftermath.
We can see now that this feted resurgence was a false dawn. The beating he took yesterday has returned the sense of ultimate futility in his final term to the forefront. The only way he can overcome this is to recognise that the rules have changed irrevocably. Policies that are unpopular with ministers, law officers, and the Home Office – despite unreliable polls suggesting that they are popular with voters – can no longer be whipped into shape. It is a victory for the parliamentary system over a prime minister who was becoming demagogic in his zealot-like disregard for Parliament itself.
Will he have learnt these lessons? The immediate indication is that he has not; on Thursday he ominously warned MPs that they are out of touch with the populace, once again scrabbling for the higher moral ground. But it is only by recognising the ultimate authority that rests within Parliament that Blair will be able to resurrect the tattered remains of his final term.
posted by DN at 4:21 PM
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