Here is an old paradox. A prisoner has been sentenced to death, his execution is to be carried out in not less than one week, but the authorities think it would be inhumane to make him go to bed knowing that in the morning he will be shot. Until the firing squad is ready, he must always be allowed to hope that he has at least one more day on this earth. But as the authorities meet to make the final arrangements, they realise they can’t delay the execution until Saturday, when the week will be up, because if they do then, on Friday, the prisoner will know that there’s only one day left and therefore he’ll know that he’s going to die in the morning. There again, they can’t delay until Friday either because, being an intelligent fellow, the prisoner will have worked out he can’t be shot on a Saturday, so if he’s still alive by Thursday evening, he knows he’s going to get it in the morning. By the same logic, they can’t delay it until Thursday either, and so on back through the week. So when do they execute the wretched villain?
This illustrates the bind Tony Blair is now in despite the astute political coup he pulled off with Tuesday’s speech to the Labour party conference, which had the Blairites fanning out to spread the word that when the Prime Minister said he would serve a full Parliament, he meant a very full Parliament, darling. One former MP’s wife even took me aside to tell me that after a speech like that, if Blair wanted to forget his promise and do two more Parliaments, no one could stop him. The more authoritative word is that he will be there for three more years, which is almost as long as the late Jim Callaghan’s entire tenure as prime minister.
There was an echo of this theme in the Blair speech when he talked about his plans to open up more NHS work to market competition. ‘If we stick with it, by 2008 we will, for the first time in the NHS’s history, offer booked appointments at the patient’s convenience and a maximum wait of 18 weeks from the GP to the operating theatre, with an average wait of nine weeks.’ NHS reforms are just now the biggest single source of friction between Prime Minister and Chancellor, and the plain message of these words is that Blair doesn’t intend to surrender office if there’s any danger that his NHS reforms will be stopped in their tracks.
Parts of that Blair speech read like a shopping list of things he wants to do to annoy the sort of people who, in the old days, heckled leaders at the Labour party conference: bringing in ID cards, making it harder for the defendant to get off in the courts, keeping up the special relationship with Washington, building new nuclear power stations. On it went. He was surprisingly untriumphant for a Labour politician who has just thrashed the Tories yet again. The only Tory who merited a mention in the speech by name was Seb Coe, whom he singled out for praise. It’s as if there’s only one opponent Tony Blair thinks it’s worthwhile fighting any more, and that’s the old Labour party.
The speech from Gordon Brown that preceded the Prime Minister’s has been criticised, as Brown speeches often are, for lacking the quality that is sometimes called ‘emotional intelligence’. The Chancellor has a superhuman grasp of policy detail but is not so hot at producing the phrases or the body language that appeal to the people in the world outside. He is like the classical pianist Glenn Gould, who became so wrapped up in his own craftsmanship that you can hear him humming on the recordings. I feel as if Gordon Brown is quietly humming to himself when he brings out another impressive list of statistics on aid delivered to Africa.
This time, at least, he did try to project some of the human being that lurks in there somewhere — not with memorable Blair-style phrases about having ‘a strip of granite running through my being’ but with prosaic items of self-revelation like ‘I learnt from my parents …to tell the truth’. I’m told that when he went through the speech with his advisers, one of them suggested he remove those words in case they were interpreted as a sly attack on Tony Blair. Brown rejected his advice on the grounds that everyone who heard him would know he was only talking about his parents. But I think we can still infer that Brown doesn’t want his term in Downing Street, whenever that may happen, mired in the stories about devious spin doctors that still bedevil Tony Blair, long after all the well-known spin doctors have departed.
There are no noticeable differences between the current Prime Minister and the one who is waiting to take over on the big strategic questions of managing the economy and coping with globalisation. Those union leaders who have deceived themselves by thinking that Gordon Brown would provide them with better job protection or make it easier to organise industrial action have been let down with a bump.
But anyone wondering why the friction persists between the Downing Street neighbours might hunt around in the issues not covered in Gordon Brown’s speech. He said nothing about relations with the US, mentioned Iraq just once in passing, talked about alternative energy sources without uttering the word nuclear, and didn’t stress the importance of consumer choice in the NHS and state education. Even where such silence can be taken to imply agreement, it still annoys the hell out of the Blairites.
Or perhaps the friction really is now about nothing but impatience and jockeying for position by those who expect their political fortunes to improve under a new prime minister and those who fear theirs will worsen. Brown himself dropped a heavy hint about his preferred timetable when he talked about going on a year-long listening tour of the regions, as if, once he got back in late 2006, he’d be expecting Tony to give way and let him put into practice all that he had learnt from his meet-the-people exercise.
But the Chancellor’s position is no stronger now than it was a week ago, and nor will it be for as long as Tony Blair continues to convince people that he is still going to be alive all day tomorrow. When the execution date is finally known, every minister and every government department will have to judge all future plans not by what the outgoing Prime Minister wants but by what the incomer thinks. So, like the guy in the prison cell, Tony Blair can never admit that he knows when the final day is until he is good and ready to give up. Last week he succeeded very cleverly in giving himself more time.
Andy McSmith is political editor of the Independent on Sunday.
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