At a coffee stall inside Lord’s cricket ground on Monday, two customers bumped into each other with a start. Alastair Campbell and Boris Johnson have not met since No. 10 Downing Street took this magazine to the Press Complaints Commission for exposing Tony Blair’s attempts to interfere with the Queen Mother’s lying-in-state, but that subject was not raised. Mr Johnson offered the usual icebreaker — when will Mr Blair resign? To his surprise, he was given a straight answer: ‘A year and a bit.’ It is now all but official: Mr Blair intends to leave the stage at next year’s Labour party conference.
While a good deal shorter than the ‘full third term’ fraudulently promised to the electorate last May, it remains an ambitious target. The turmoil in the Middle East has eclipsed but not ended the turmoil on the Labour benches. Gordon Brown’s lieutenants have been saying in private that they are now resisting enormous pressure to move this summer and finish off Mr Blair before the party’s annual conference in nine weeks’ time.
The Prime Minister specialises in survival, but this skill now threatens what he cherishes most — his legacy. Had he quit at the last election, the Blair years would have been remembered as a time of prosperity, blemished only by military misadventure in Iraq. Now they are stained by the loans-for-ermine scandal and by ridicule dumped on the government by the tragicomical figure of John Prescott. But another failing is emerging, and one which may yet outstrip all the others.
It is becoming increasingly apparent this week that the Blair years have been a period of jaw-dropping government incompetence, on a par with the most notorious corporate accounting scandals. When John Reid described the Immigration and Nationality Directorate as ‘inadequate in terms of its scope, information technology, leadership, management systems and processes’ he was conducting, with disgust, an audit of the Home Office.
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