Jackie Ashley - Comment, Guardian, 8 September 2006
But he (Blair) has been forced to shift not because of a revolting chancellor, or cross groups of fat men in suits brooding over their bitter, but because of utterly obvious, plain-as-a-pikestaff facts in the real world: first, the continuing world-scale disaster of Iraq, which is now dragging George Bush down into the mire of public anger too; second, the crumbling of his real parliamentary majority as MPs refuse to back him on key reforms; third, the inevitable sense of boredom and disaffection that accompanies any leader who has been as omnipresent for as long as him; fourth, the effect of all this on the polls, which are now terrible for Labour; fifth, and finally, the feedback effect of the polls on the mood on the Labour benches.
The prime minister has delayed and fudged and struggled to stay on despite it all - not, I think, merely to pass some abstract hurdle, such as spending more time in office than Margaret Thatcher, but rather because he has hoped that something would turn up. There would be an upsurge of good news - Osama captured, perhaps, or a great international crisis to be dealt with, after which, he dreamed, his stock would rise again and he could leave on an "up". As the weeks have continued to deliver downer after downer, his amazing resilience has kept him going, to the increasing despair of ordinary mainstream MPs around him.
To blame this week's events on (Gordon Brown plus supporters') treachery, therefore, is just like blaming the Tories for getting rid of Thatcher in 1990, or the Liberal Democrats for hounding out Charles Kennedy last year. Thatcher went after her cabinet and many Tory MPs demanded that she go, true. She wasn't happy about it. But her ministers acted not because they were innately treacherous but because Europe was ripping the Conservatives in two and because - after the political disaster of the poll tax - the party was crashing in the polls. A sane reading of events and an instinct for self-preservation were behind that "coup", just as they are behind yesterday's drama.
Similarly, as Greg Hurst's new biography demonstrates, the moves against Charles Kennedy (ex leader, Lib Dems) were the reluctant acts of men and women driven to despair by his drink problem. Elected politicians act in their own interest: they want to keep their seats and they want their party to win. If, in some parallel universe, Gordon Brown did not exist, then this would still be happening.