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

As so often in the past few days, I am reminded of the description of Thatcher’s fall in Alan Clark’s Diaries. Two days before her resignation, Tristan Garel-Jones invited Clark to a meeting at his house ‘to talk through the next steps’. What does that mean, inquired Clark. ‘Ways of supporting the Prime Minister,’ was Garel-Jones’s chilling reply. This week, there are plenty of impatient young Labour MPs plotting ways of ‘supporting the Prime Minister’.

Could he have lasted longer? Undoubtedly. But it was Donald Rumsfeld who really did for Mr Blair. Had the Pentagon not thwarted Colin Powell’s plan to flood Iraq with troops and implement a detailed reconstruction plan after the fall of Saddam, there is a chance that the liberated country might not have descended into turmoil. But the relentless daily images of chaos and bloodshed in Baghdad — much worse than the failure to unearth weapons of mass destruction — fed the belief in the Labour party that Mr Blair had finally lost the plot, putting his alliance with a loathed Republican President before loyalty to his party. His decision to stand shoulder to shoulder with George W. Bush once more over the conflict in southern Lebanon merely strengthened these fears. Even those who had supported Mr Blair over Iraq felt that his support of US policy in the Middle East marked not only a betrayal of Labour principle but a detachment from reality.

If the Prime Minister failed utterly to persuade Labour that the Iraq war was just, he succeeded all too well in convincing a new generation of Conservatives that change was necessary in their own party. From the moment that Mr Cameron presented himself at last year’s Conservative conference — albeit privately — as ‘Blair’s heir’, he was hastening the fall of the very man upon whom he claimed to be modelling himself. The Tories’ poll lead is firm rather than insuperable, but its resilience over the summer has dismayed Labour strategists. Worst of all was the YouGov survey in last Monday’s Evening Standard that showed the Conservatives eight points ahead of Labour in London — seven points up since the general election.