The great New Labour civil war

9 September 2006

Matthew d’Ancona says that the Prime Minister’s power has now gone for good, no matter when he stands down formally. The Labour party will descend into a battle to define its future as Gordon Brown struggles to prevent a leadership contest

In such a feverish context, there was something vaguely pathetic about the Downing Street memo leaked last week proposing a grand Blair-well tour, taking in Blue Peter, Songs of Praise and Chris Evans’s Radio 2 show, as well as the nation’s great cities and ‘iconic locations’. The plan declares that ‘he should be the star who won’t even play that last encore’. Thus, the PM who arrived as Bambi leaves as Norma Desmond.

In truth, such political showbusiness is the stuff of fantasy, a feeble echo of ‘Cool Britannia’. The only thing uniting the party now is the certain knowledge that there will be no ‘smooth transition’, that the end will be ignominious, and that nothing will be safe as the political looters topple the grinning statues of Blair and storm New Labour’s citadel.

You could tell it was all up for Mr Blair on Monday when the plain-speaking Education Secretary, Alan Johnson, proved uncharacteristically evasive on the BBC’s Today programme. In June Mr Johnson expressed an explicit interest in the Labour deputy leadership but compared his chances of winning the top job to ‘putting the Beagle on to Mars: a nice idea but doomed to failure’. But last week the Education Secretary was much less jovial, repeatedly declining to rule himself out of the race. It was the change of tone, not the content, that mattered. One could hear in Mr Johnson’s voice the quiet calculation of a politician steeling himself to take the decision of a lifetime — and very soon.

Day-to-day political life depends upon collective decisions to respect a range of necessary fictions. The fiction that Mr Blair can last till next summer crumbled on Tuesday when it emerged that 17 MPs had written to the Prime Minister, urging him to sling his hook. It could have been seven or 170: the number is not what counts. What counts is that the crust of deference has now been smashed. What counts no less is that the two most prominent signatories — Sîon Simon and Chris Bryant — were previously prominent for a loyalty to the Prime Minister so passionate that it was sometimes parodied. Now their message is Oliver Cromwell’s to the Rump Parliament and Leo Amery’s to Neville Chamberlain: ‘In the name of God, go.’