Quotes of the Day
Tony Blair has faced down mutinies before, most recently when Britain — and his own Labour Party — was up in arms about his pro-war stance on Iraq. Yet even in the midst of that bitter, noisy battle, the British Prime Minister's smooth talk and skillful party management brought most of his rebellious backbenchers into line. But last Monday, at a meeting with around 200 angry Labour M.P.s and peers, Blair's magnetism finally proved unequal to the task. This time, the rebellion wasn't triggered by war and geopolitics. It was about a personal feud — but one that could do more to hurt the Labour Party than even Iraq did. The assembly upbraided Blair and his longtime No. 2, Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown, for once again allowing their protracted argument over who should have the top job to explode into public view. Instead of party leaders enforcing discipline in the ranks, the ranks were trying to discipline the leaders.
Someone had to. The conflagration was set off by a new biography of Brown that depicts a relationship so tortured and fractious that the two most powerful men in the country are barely on speaking terms. The book's most incendiary charge: that last summer Blair reneged on a promise to step down as Prime Minister and clear the way for Brown. "There is nothing that you could ever say to me now that I could ever believe," Brown allegedly told Blair. When excerpts from the book — Brown's Britain by Robert Peston, a journalist with close ties to the Chancellor's camp — appeared on Jan. 9, the media erupted. The conflict was undermining party unity, it was said, and endangering the government's support in the run-up to the general election expected in the spring. So last Monday's routine meeting became an emergency damage-control session.
M.P.s and peers delivered a "hallelujah chorus of rebukes" to both men, according to Paul Flynn, a veteran M.P. for Newport West, who was there. "Blair has lectured us again and again that what brought down all previous Labour governments was disunity," he says. "Now the preacher has been caught sinning." Brown sat silent throughout the meeting, his massive head embedded in his meaty shoulders. Blair only glancingly addressed accusations of a rift with Brown; instead, he delivered a eulogy on Labour's achievements in office. He finished to a hostile silence. Blair loyalist Clive Soley got the biggest cheer when he counseled the occupants of numbers 10 and 11 Downing Street to love thy neighbor. But brotherly love is in short supply at the top of the Labour Party, and it now seems clear that there are three men vying to lead Britain: Blair, opposition Conservative Party leader Michael Howard and Gordon Brown.
Labour M.P.s worry that whether or not Brown actually said he couldn't trust Blair — Blair has denied it; Brown hasn't; the Tories are already building an ad campaign around it — the episode will reinforce the public's view of the Prime Minister as too slippery for his own (or anyone else's) good. And Labour backbench M.P.s fear that public support will hemorrhage if voters feel the government is more concerned with personal rivalries than with improving the health care and education systems and consolidating its economic achievements. For the moment, though, the principals have carried on with business as usual: Blair giving a speech promising prosperity for all; Brown heading off for a seven-day tour of Africa to lobby for measures to tackle poverty and aids. "This hasn't been a good few months for us, what with this stuff about Gordon and Tony and the residue of Iraq," says Fraser Kemp, a Labour whip and deputy chairman of election planning. "But none of that comes through to the electorate." At least so far. A poll taken over the second weekend in January by research organization Populus put Labour at 38% and the Tories at 33%; Labour's private polling shows the party's lead growing. The Tories hope to reverse that trend with new billboards showing Blair and Brown scowling at one another under the headline: how can they fight crime when they're fighting each other?
Privately, Blair's acolytes acknowledge that there's some truth to Peston's story, and blame Brown's camp for leaking it to him. There was "clearly some collusion on the book with Gordon's people," says a friend of the Prime Minister. According to Julia Langdon, a political biographer researching her own study of the Chancellor, "Even if Gordon didn't use those exact words, there will have been a showdown. Brown has completely lost patience with Blair." Blair's strategy now seems to be to use the dust-up to force
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The Blair-Brown relationship would be fascinating even if there weren't so much at stake; the Irish rock star Bono wryly compares their creative tensions to those of John Lennon and Paul McCartney. According to one version of their history, Brown's patience was first tested back in 1994 after the unexpected death of Labour leader John Smith. Brown and Blair, rising stars on the modernizing wing of the party, recognized that they risked splitting that vote and ushering in an "old Labour" leader if both went for the top job. Brown, a natural and lifelong party member, was in some ways the more obvious candidate. But he was persuaded that Blair's amiable style might win over middle-class voters more easily than his own brooding substance. Brown is said to believe that a deal was struck with Blair over dinner at Granita, a north London restaurant: Brown would support Blair in return for the promise that Blair would step down as Prime Minister if Labour secured a second term.
Like the Granita restaurant, Blair's memory of any such arrangement has shut down. "You don't do deals over jobs like this," he insisted last week. Langdon suggests that Blair and Brown came away from the meal with entirely different understandings of what had been agreed. "The key to Blair's success is that people take from him what they want to hear," she says. "Gordon is fantastically literal and he took from Blair what he wanted to hear. Only when it became clear that Blair wasn't going to stand down did the plates start flying through the air." The sound of breaking crockery can be heard well beyond the confines of Westminster. A BBC TV crew, accompanying Brown on his Africa trip, asked a passerby in the Kenyan shantytown of Kibera if he recognized the visiting dignitary. The reply: "He's Tony Blair's biggest rival."
Few members of the Labour Party believe that what now divides their leaders is ideology. "There may be discussions about how quickly you implement change or the way you present change, but their approach is identical," says one former Cabinet Minister. John Denham, who resigned as a Home Office Minister in protest over the Iraq war, agrees: "There is no taste in the party for having to line up behind one man or another. During past conflicts between leading Labour figures, the choices on offer were very marked and this led to different factions. At Monday's meeting, people were not saying, 'We want you to paper over the cracks.' They were saying, 'There's not much difference between the two of you, so stop behaving as if there is.'"
Bob Worcester, chairman of the polling organization MORI, says this perception is not shared by the public, who see Brown as "a socialist wolf in sheep's clothing." But this is not necessarily an electoral disadvantage: Labour's current 5% lead over the Tories under Blair would increase to 13% if Brown were at the helm, according to a survey by pollsters NOP. And a whiff of good, old-fashioned socialism does nothing to harm Brown's high standing with Labour's grassroots or with the unions. Each sector controls one-third of the votes in the electoral college Labour must convene when it chooses its leader. Although there are other ministers who would win the endorsement of parliamentary colleagues — the final bloc in the electoral college — the Chancellor would almost certainly triumph in an election to succeed the Prime Minister, if Blair stood down voluntarily.
Since the Prime Minister first committed British troops to Iraq, that scenario has seemed increasingly likely. The adventure cost him support in the party and trust among voters — nearly 20 percentage points since 2001. The onset of arrhythmia and family pressures contributed to what Westminster insiders diagnosed as a "wobble" in late 2003. Over yet another dinner with Brown, this one given by Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott, Blair is alleged by more than one source to have renewed his offer to resign. He denies this and has vowed to serve a full third term if Labour is re-elected. The Chancellor has declined to comment and Prescott admits only to having mediated between the two, not just on that occasion but over several earlier servings of steak-and-kidney pie.
Evidently, even Prescott's formidable bonhomie wasn't up to the job. Few in Westminster believe any truce will hold beyond the election. Last week, Blair was forced to deny a rumor that he plans to move Brown out of the Treasury if Labour wins big. This scenario envisions a newly emboldened PM fixing his rival by offering him the combined post of Foreign Secretary and International Development Secretary. Brown would be unlikely to accept any move, says a source close to him, unless it gives him the keys to 10
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Blair also knows that Brown might launch a leadership bid and trigger the outcome Labourites fear most: civil war. That would damage Blair at home and abroad, especially in a year when Britain already holds the presidency of the G8, takes over at the E.U. in the summer, and should be preparing for its referendum on the E.U. constitution. But the Prime Minister and his allies may calculate that the biggest casualty would be Brown himself, because the party would blame him for the bloodshed. Brown biographer Langdon concurs. "The one thing that will stop Gordon becoming Prime Minister is Gordon," she says. "He's his own worst enemy in terms of matching ambition to reality." The Labour Party must be hoping that both men opt for humble pie at their next dinner meeting, but nobody expects them to stick to that diet for long.
- CATHERINE MAYER
- Tony Blair and Gordon Brown play nice in public, but a bitter feud divides Britain's leaders