Is Tony trying to make Gordon fight for the job? From the acres of space devoted to the Labour leadership this morning there has been little on what to me is the key issue – that Tony is not playing ball over Gordon’s plan to get into No. 10 without having to fight a real contest. All the talk of ‘smooth transition’ seems to have been on the assumption that Tony Blair would do what he could to make the…
Does Tony actually want to hold on? You all read the news, but to state the obvious, it’s been a bad couple of days for Tony Blair. The string of resignations, even if all but one were Parliamentary Private Secretaries (not even members of the government, strictly speaking) hasn’t robbed the government of its most respected figures, but gives a pretty good impression of chaos. Blair’s allies plead for “a dignified departure”, which seems to mean setting a date sometime…
Will there be another wheeze to keep the show going? One of my great sayings used to be “Nobody ever got rich betting against Tony Blair”. Certainly he has been in tight corners before and the money has piled in from punters on an early departure. Just three years ago, in the frenzy over the Hutton Inquiry following David Kelly’s death, Blair became odds on for a while to go before the end of September 2003. Then on one famous…
Isn’t this how Michael Howard stopped David Davis? From my holiday apartment near Nice where my sole source of news for nearly a fortnight has been the internet on my pda phone I accept that I might be reading Labour’s leadership developments completely wrongly. But would it really help Gordon if Blair announced a fixed time-table for a July 2007 departure? What that would do, surely, is fire the starting pistol on a ten month leadership campaign which could see…
A guest article by Paul Maggs Two overseas elections take place on 1st October. Brazil holds the first round of its presidential election, and President Lula is virtually assured of victory – indeed he may clear the required 50% share on the first ballot. Closer to home, Austria also goes to the polls, but here the outcome is less clear-cut. A recent poll gives the ruling centre-right People’s Party (ÖVP) a 2-point lead over the Social Democrats (SPÖ) – all…
How much will the result mean? Late September will see the result of the ballot of Conservative members on the party’s “Built To Last” mission statement. The process of a new, reforming leader having the party ratify his vision bears some resemblance to Tony Blair’s reform of the Labour constitution in 1995, exemplified by removing the Clause 4 commitment to state socialism. So is this Cameron’s Clause 4 moment? Not exactly. It’s not so much that “Built To Last” is…
Would Blair prefer a quick exit to a humiliating timetable? After some relatively eclectic topics last week, let’s return to a favourite of this site and to British political coverage as a whole: the succession to Tony Blair. As usual, Blair is being asked to set a timetable for his departure, and refusing to, to the general unhappiness of Brownites and the Labour left; neither the TUC or the Labour conference is likely to give him a smooth ride. The…
Part 2 of a two-part guest series by Harry Hayfield. Part 1 can be found here. Posted by their confidence at predicting Election 1997 to within an inch of the actual result, the pollsters headed into Election 2001 safe in the knowledge that they couldn’t get the result wrong no matter what the British electorate threw at them and so the BBC announced their exit poll for 2001 with it’s customary 2% margin of error. Labour 44%, Conservatives 32%, Liberal…