Blair will have to face down his backbenchers
Daily Telegraph 09/05/2006
Tony Blair has clearly learnt the lesson of 1990, when Margaret Thatcher fell because she lost the support of her Cabinet. Last week's appointments were made without reference to the fitness of the candidate for the job, but solely according to the degree of their loyalty to the Prime Minister.
The promotion of Margaret Beckett from Defra to the Foreign Office is a perverse reward for her devastation of British farming; it can be understood only in the light of Jack Straw's "tarting" himself (Mr Blair's word) to Gordon Brown in recent months.
The same goes for Ruth Kelly, who has been banished from education to "communities and local government". The hapless Patricia Hewitt, meanwhile, has survived at health purely because she is loyal; and Mr Blair has in the new Defra secretary, David Miliband, a loyalist of the first stamp.
Add Alan Johnson and John Reid as captains of the guard, and the Prime Minister has collected about him a phalanx of men and women who will keep him safe.
But Mr Blair must go sometime, and the current surviving and promoted ministers must be looking askance at their good fortune. For this was such a nakedly political reshuffle that its beneficiaries are identified automatically as the ancien régime. Charles Clarke, perhaps, will be the biggest gainer in the long term: he was sacked by Mr Blair, and already Mr Brown has hinted that he will bring him back.
When will that be? MPs are said to be collecting signatures for a letter to the Prime Minister calling for a "timetable" for his departure. Although we share the wish to see the back of Mr Blair, this is an absurd suggestion, and he is surely right to refuse it. He will go, when he goes, suddenly - either at the moment of his own choosing or because he is forced out.
Mr Brown, the one man Mr Blair could not sack from his Cabinet, could, if he wished, precipitate a leadership contest at any moment by the simple expedient of resigning.
His curious reluctance to launch an assassination attempt owes a little, no doubt, to common decency; a lot more to his fear that such aggressive and selfish behaviour would alienate moderate opinion in the country; and most of all to the wish not to inherit a divided and embittered party.
But, in the end, events may be decided without Mr Brown having to lift a finger. The Parliamentary Labour Party rightly feels the reshuffle was an insult to them. Many hold to the belief that Mr Blair's departure will cause a boost to Labour's poll rating.
A direct confrontation between the back benches and Number 10, sometime before the party conference in October, is now more likely than not. Mr Blair's sweaty and tetchy performance at his press conference yesterday morning suggests he knows it.