Blair Will Not Quit Until His Place in History Is Secure, Donald Macintyre

Aljazeerah Info Center needs your support

Send donations by check to: Al-Jazeerah Info Center, P.O. Box 724, Dalton, GA 30722-0724, USA.

LONDON, 26 December 2003 — If you think there is something new in the chronic tensions between UK Chncellor of Exchequer Gordon Brown and Prime Minister Tony Blair, then “Democracy”, Michael Frayn’s enthralling play about Willy Brandt’s chancellorship of Germany cannot fail to make you think again. It isn’t just the telling complaint by Brandt’s ambitious finance minister — and successor — Helmut Schmidt that he is watching his boss, the German chancellor, let everything the two men had fought for “slip through his fingers.” It’s also the more mundane moment when an exasperated Schmidt asks: “What’s happening to this government? We casually launch into wild schemes without any proper consultation. We take on new commitments without any idea of how they’re going to be funded...”

The latter complaints fuse almost perfectly with both Brown’s persistent criticism that the policy on top-up fees was entered into wholly without adequate preparation, and his famous first-term gibe that Blair wanted both increased public spending and tax cuts. Just as Blair’s past frustration with Brown’s silence at moments of crisis finds an echo in the moment when Brandt, facing a confrontation with the public sector unions urged on him by Schmidt himself, exclaims: “No support from Helmut because — no Helmut.” Told that Schmidt is away in Washington and asking whether there is any word from him, Brandt is told: “He says — just do whatever you think is best.” Frayn is much too preoccupied in his play with the postwar Germany, which rightly fascinates him, to have intended a parallel with the more mundane circumstances of here and now. Frayn’s outstanding play, laying bare a sense of drift in a government of the center left, is partly an essay in political mortality. Isolation from colleagues, a sense of disappointment about what has been achieved, the presence of a capable and ambitious rival candidate, even anger on the left, have their echoes in some of the problems of the Blair premiership. How dangerous are they? On the crudest and most extreme reading, a haggard and aging Blair was drifting toward a possibly terminal crisis in the first half — if not the first month — of next year.

Then, lo and behold! Not only is Saddam seized, but Libya’s own dictator comes in from the cold and opens up his own Weapons of Mass Destruction to international inspection and destruction. Meanwhile, there are tentative signs that Gordon Brown may, after all, use his considerable influence to ensure that the policy on top-up fees-however hedged with concessions — goes through next month. So Blair could be alright after all.

The fact is that whether Blair goes through to the next election and beyond depends greatly, as it always has, on his own political will to do so. Brandt was finally brought down by the unmasking of one of his closest aides as an East German spy — not the kind of problem likely to afflict the British prime minister. True, Hutton could in theory be bad enough for Blair for him to go. True, his position could be terminally weakened by a defeat on top-up fees. It’s even possible that he might even pack his bags after a victory on top-up fees, on the grounds that he could then quit while he’s ahead.

And yet the Frayn play prompts one other reflection. For all Brandt’s travails, his Ostpolitik — and the outreach to East Germany particularly — was a lasting monument to his chancellorship even if it was not until 1989 that the Berlin Wall fell. Whatever his other achievements,

Blair cannot yet claim such a monument in his own country. Even if Iraq finally becomes the peaceful democracy everyone sane wants it to be, this will have been, in the end, Bush’s war. Britain’s relationship with Europe — among several other things — will not have been consummated in the way Blair sought when he came into office. Anyone who says he knows for certain whether Blair will still be prime minister come the election has more courage than sense.

But if he isn’t, he will have left a good deal more unfinished business behind than anyone — Blair included — could have guessed six long years ago. He, above all, must know this. Voluntary departure, in such circumstances, cannot fail to be an uninviting prospect.